First Parish of Watertown

Opening Words - from "History" by Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is properly no history, only biography. Every mind must know the whole lesson for itself, -- must go over the whole ground. what it does not see, what it does not live, it will not know . . . History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, -- see how it could and must be. . . A man [or a woman] is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world.

Sermon - "The Devil in Nathaniel"

Narrator:

Two hundred years ago in July Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts. When Nathaniel came into the world, it hadn't quite been 200 years since his family came to America in 1630 on the same fleet of ships that brought settlers to Watertown, with the Arbella as their flagship. the First Parish in Salem had been organized only a few months before our own humble parish, and so this story about one man is in a sense, a story which belongs to all of us who, by our presence here, are inheritors of his breath, his love, his struggles. Several of Hawthorne's ancestors were among the most influential people in the colony, including Judge John Hathorne, who served as a magistrate in Salem, and helped convict innocent women of witchcraft. This legacy haunted Hawthorne, who never forgot the evil that seemingly good people can commit. His early years were difficult. His father, a ship's captain, was lost at sea when Nathaniel was four. This loss also plunged the family into relative poverty. Hawthorne's mother was an incurable recluse, and so, in many ways was her son. Melville called him "the shyest grape." But his reclusiveness won him attention; his smiling, silent demeanor prompted one English writer to say that it was "impossible for anyone to be as wise as he looked." His sister-in-law Mary Peabody Mann, wife of educator Horace Mann, once wrote that he "always put himself into his books, he cannot help it." Let's see if life and fiction merged.

Nathaniel:

As a young boy I would concoct stories for my family. Almost always the narrator would appear at the Salem seashore promising, or more truthfully threatening the audience with these words, "I'm never coming home again." Beginning with my father, It was difficult for me to reveal all my feelings about loss that I felt in my lifetime. I had to veil my feelings about so many things, much as I later wrote in that story, "The Minister's Black Veil." It was a silent visage that I was taught. I had many wounds underneath. I prayed as I wrote that the hour would come when all of us would cast aside our veils, but until then, I wear this piece of crepe. There is so much of us that is like the Rev. Mr. Hooper, sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest." I do believe, as I wrote that his veil allowed him to sympathize all the more with others.

I felt the innocence of my childhood was lost. Captain Hawthorne's log books were given to me when I was almost twenty years of age. I sailed over those pages in waves of grief. I experimented with my own true self as I spelled my name - first Hawthorne and then Hathorne, this and that. Who was I? How to reconcile myself to my history. This quest for my past centered on the grief caused by my ancestors. Perhaps you have heard of my story of that Puritan youth, "Young Goodman Brown" who lost his sense of goodness, his false sense of virtue became but a dream. He succumbed to evil, to dread as his only happiness. He lost his faith in humanity when he learns that his heretofore blameless and famous ancestors are consorters with evil. The devil says that deacons drank the communion wine with him. If only Young Goodman had made other choices on the journey of life. That Hathorne the devil of a judge - this Hawthorne, what would he become?

I became a man of the world, at least so I told my sisters who I left behind when I went to that country college by the rocky sea, Bowdoin. Before this, I had lived for a time in Maine with mother's brother. At college, I found dear friends there in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Mr Franklin Pierce, the lad who later would occupy the large white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. I sometimes dismayed the authorities when I sipped wine in the corner of the local tavern. I was an idle student, who shall we say, learned other modes of culture. I often went astray, but it is true I was always reading. I asked mother, what shall I do? I do not wish to plod along with the multitude. Should I become a clergyman? Hah! The being of a minister is of course out of the question. I should not think that even you could desire me to choose so dull a way of life. Oh no, mother, I was not born to vegetate forever in one place, and to live and die as calm and tranquil as - a puddle of water. And how else might I pursue my life? I thought perhaps as a lawyer, but there are too many of them. What about a physician? Oh, I cannot foresee wanting to live by others diseases. I would like to be real enough to live without a profession. I think of my becoming an author - the illegibility of my hand writing is author like. I tried this with my first Novel Fanshawe, a chronicle of life at Bowdoin, a failed chronicle in some respects. And was I its chief character, Mr. Fanshawe, the isolated artist, the poet who observed the world and all its hidden truths? Perhaps, perhaps.

I reflected for years and years and years on where this journey of living would take me. I returned to Salem, you see, and lived with mother and my sisters in what I referred to as "castle dismal." Then while preparing to marry the lovely Sophia Peabody, I became entranced with an idea of a new way of living. Could I live communally combining my writing with the simple farming life? I chose to hide, or should I say retreat, for a time to Mr. Ripley's Transcendental utopia, perhaps known to you as Brook Farm. I found I had to get away from the Custom House work and all those politicians. they all, it seemed to me had consciences that could stretch like India rubber. I was one of the original subscribers to Brook Farm, and so it was off to this isolated farmhouse on the Dedham-Watertown road. I took up the work of manual labor, and soon designated myself ploughman." There were eight cows there joined by a Transcendental heifer owned by Miss Margaret Fuller. This beast was a bit contentious and well able to kick over the milk pail. I left to others to judge whether these character traits resembled their mistress. One day Mr. Ripley put a four pronged instrument in my hand, known as a pitch fork, all my cohorts became armed with these weapons and we made a gallant attack on a pile of manure. Here was our utopian gold mine. I hope to learn to milk a cow, but Ripley was hesitant to trust them to my hands, or me to their horns. Finally Miss Fuller's cow was ostracized by the others, and attached herself to me.She was not an amiable cow, but was of a good intelligence. I had to give her a few pats with a shovel to rid myself of her, so she would cling to me no more. She really needed to be on good terms with the rest of the sisters. Soon I realized that this was not the life I was intended to live, and became a mere observer. Perhaps you have heard or read of my life in this little corner of the world, it became a novel of mine called The Blithedale Romance.

Brook Farm was beautiful, but I found more and more that every day had no value unless I could share it with my dear Sophia. I wrote to her when I realized that she is my All-the-world forever to be. Telling the family of my intended marriage was another matter. I told my dear love that they had a kind of strange reserve when it came to emotional matters. I cannot take my heart and show it to them. Finally on a lovely July day after the rains broke, we were wed by Mr. James Freeman Clarke in the Peabody parlor in Salem. We moved to an old parsonage in Concord, built by Waldo Emerson's grandfather, and lately occupied by the minister Mr Ripley. Dear Mr's Emerson and Thoreau planted a garden for us there.

I once wrote, in most hearts there is an empty chamber, waiting for a guest. Sophia was indeed my guest, feminine and lovely, she lived in a shadow of a seclusion, not unlike my own. Sophia, My breast is full of thee; thou art throbbing throughout all my veins. Never, it seems to me, did I know what love was before. And yet I am not satisfied to let that sentence pass; for it would do wrong to the blissful and holy time that we have already enjoyed together. But our hearts are now created for one another daily; and they enter upon existence with such up-springing rapture as if nothing had ever existed before - as if, at this very now, physical and spiritual world were but first discovered, and by ourselves only.

I was in love. And she, too :

Voice of Sophia (Narrator)

I recall still our first meeting. I was all love and memory. Can I ever forget when I first looked into the abyss of suns which were his eyes! And how it all grew like a flower, -- our love -- so still, so inevitable, so consummate and never to fade. And now . .. What a divine economy and celestial gift is this idea of marital union. This true marriage absolutely prevents the possibility of aloneness - of being alone. We are not one until we are two, and then we truly understand unity.

Nathaniel :

She understood my hesitancy , my reserve for sharing the heart, and perhaps succumbed to my desires. Once we disagreed over this new thought called mesmerism. She expressed some hope in its claims, but I thought it an intrusion into the sacredness of the soul. I said no one should go there into a person's inner depths, no one enters the holy of holies, except perhaps your own true love. And she, in the end, agreed.

By this time I became known, yes fame was something I desired, and I first achieved it thanks to Longfellow whose idea of fairy tales became my Twice Told Tales. Sales were less than adequate though, and I returned to Salem's Custom House to hold a political office, made terror filled and tentative by new elections. Here I entered a niche in Uncle Sam's brick edifice. Although I have been happier elsewhere there is a feeling of affection in me for Salem, which must at last be severed. You may recall The Scarlet Letter begins with Custom House reflections, where I say, "human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.

All my economic fears were transformed with the appearance of my most famous tale, the saga of the letter A. This is the story of Hester Prynne, a woman caught in an illicit affair, by which she has that most beautiful of children, dear Pearl. Hester is my Anne Hutchinson for today. The brave woman who spoke up for freedom, scorned by her willingness to break with conventions, isolated by banishment, and yet exonerated by those who follow who remember her legacy of truth. Hester, too was a victim of vicious attacks and rejection by a shameless public. And shadowed by Dimmesdale and Chillingworth, the heartless sadistic doctor, and the hypocritical clergyman. She was my redeemer. "The angel and the apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure and beautiful; and wise; moreover, not through dusty grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end! She exemplified my true belief in the
ability of one who has suffered to convey wisdom and counsel to others.

I suspect you might wish that I would say a thing or two about my religion. I attended a few meetings of the Transcendental Club, but their heady talk was not much inducement for association. It is true it was a rare moment when you would find me wandering past the porch door of a meetinghouse. There is a Hawthorne pew in the Salem meetinghouse, and later in England I did darken the doors of a Unitarian chapel. I was never much interested in ideas, or meanderings on the soul, but more so with the family, and the light and shadow of behaviors. I wrote about the heart not the mind, and my heart often felt much pain that could only be expressed on paper. My family settled for a time in the Berkshires, where Mr. Herman Melville befriended me. I believe he found me coy and elusive. He may have believed our souls were meant to be one. I cannot say, but knew I must get away. Later we moved to a place they call The Wayside, back in Concord.

More recently, my friend Mr Pierce, appointed me consul to Liverpool in 1853, All of my family resided there for a time, including our three children, Una, Julian and Rose, who in years gone by, I wrote many stories for. We have hopes before my days end to return to the Wayside. One would never go so far as to call me an Anglophile. From the mean life of the blackened streets of the city to the glittering gold of the lives of the privileged, I bristled. I found the English people to be a most intolerable race. No one could have any opinion except the right one, which of course, was there's. They seem to pull together around issues of honor and loyalty. I shall never love England, their empire has made them insular and superior. I feel like a traitor or a spy. My life is a very public one of speeches and dignified affairs. Sometimes a little refreshment was needed to get up my courage. As always, I shall write about it, in the notebooks, which will appear one day. These were days of toil and hardship, and I longed to find a place for the expression of my heart's true love. I long to turn to dear Sophia and say, At some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. May we remove the veils and speak from the heart, our living words of love.

Narrator:

Nathaniel Hawthorne, for all his depressive personal moods and silent reflecting, was America's first great novelist. D.H. Lawrence once said that there is more no perfect work of the American imagination than The Scarlet Letter. It is a story in which the main participants suffer through terrible rejections and deprivations, but like Hawthorne they expend themselves on searching for roots, love and nurturing, and creating a society where the patriarchal code is humanized by matriarchal values. The search for Nathaniel Hawthorne is what each one of us searches for : to redeem our past, to express the longings of our hearts in deeper, more profound ways, to have the strength and power to live effectively in this world, and not remove ourselves from it. Instead we must build a world redeemed by love and compassion.

Closing Words - from Nathaniel Hawthorne

We are but shadows - we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream - till the heart is touched. That touch creates us, -- then we begin to be -- thereby we are beings of reality, and inheritors of eternity.