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Hawthorne's imagination was, to put it simply, both the gift and the burden of his life. He was "deep," and brainy enough to see and explore with detachment the dangers, for one of his heritage, in the life of imagination. For generations that heritage had been profoundly Puritan. After his sea-captain father died of yellow fever in Surinam, his mother lived in Salem as a recluse; his uncle, Robert Manning, took charge of Nathaniel's education and alienated the boy thoroughly. He became evasive and apparently indolent, writing in puns and private language to his sisters, even writing invisibly, in skim milk—a trick that later seemed symbolic of some of his tales. His vivid older sister Elizabeth, who seemed the genius of the family, troubled his imagination. "His early stories," Cantwell observes, "deal often with the rather mortifying masculine experience of encountering women whose sexual experience is greater than his own."
Madeira & Marriage. At Bowdoin College Hawthorne solemnly bet his friend Jonathan Cilley a barrel of Madeira wine that he, Hawthorne, would be unmarried twelve years later. He won the bet. For a modern biographer it is almost superfluous to note the sexual distrust, as well as the calculation, in this resolve. What is more important is the lucid analysis, through fiction, that Hawthorne gave to such matters (and indeed to his whole Puritan background) in the years that followed.
After graduation, at which his classmate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow read a paper on the need for a native American literature, Hawthorne went home to his mother's house in Salem and worked at writing. In nine years he borrowed over 700 books from the Salem Athenaeum, a library whose nucleus men like his father had captured, as privateersmen, from the English. Cantwell has looked up the Hawthornes' library record. He deliberately studied New England, reading among other things the files of Salem newspapers during Hawthorne's lifetime. "The books," Cantwell writes, "provide an almost weekly record of his whereabouts for nine years. The legendary mystery of these years is in itself dissipated by them." His tales kept appearing in magazines, unsigned.
"The most important thing, he thought, was to keep the imagination sane." And he was sane; he was, as Cantwell puts it, hard as nails. His concentrated life made him "a silent, slow-spoken man, his habitual expression one of quietly listening. He dressed carefully and well. He kept a notebook . . ." From his desk and his books he sallied forth regularly with the notebook to see the world—once, in 1830, taking a trip on the Erie Canal. This was during the summer of a scandalous murder trial in Salem; Cantwell construes Hawthorne's journey as a "flight"—perhaps from the ordeal of giving testimony that might have injured people he knew.
"The Freshness of My Heart." Some of the most original and beautiful pages in Cantwell's biography are those devoted to Sophia Peabody, the shy Salem beauty with whom Hawthorne finally fell in love. She was an artist, one of three glowing Peabody girls, and had lived for almost two years on a sugar plantation in Cuba among the gallantries and luxuries of the old Spanish society.