Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American Years
by .Rinehart, $6.00.
Back in 1939, the reading of Hawthorne’s Our Old Home launched Robert Cantwell, then Time’s foreign news editor, into several years of Hawthorne research, the first fruits of which are the present enormously detailed biography. It closes with the publication of The Scarlet Letter in Hawthorne’s forty-sixth year. A second volume is to follow.
The conventional portrait of Hawthorne (in the New England years) as a morbid recluse, “obsessed with the Puritan sense of guilt,”impressed Mr. Cantwell as “less and less like Hawthorne the more I learned of him.” In his view, Hawthorne led “an active and vigorous life of considerable excitement and some hazard,” and was a virile, purposeful, thoroughly human character.
The retouched portrait is a warm, spirited, and in general persuasive job. But Mr. Cantwell has been far more zealous than judicial in his inclusion of “colorful” details, piquant trivia, and social history, and betrays a weakness for intriguing but dubious hypotheses. Having set out to rescue Hawthorne from his legend, Cantwell tends to submerge him in his background.