The Chief Horror

The Forest

 “The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.”

― Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

Ghosts in Massachusetts

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Tales 

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Nathaniel in his turn would walk the ways of Salem, town and village, and ghosts would keep him company, never quite visible , lurking always just beyond the corner of his eye.  But he would pin them down on paper and when he had them there he would inspect them with a kind of literary credulity.  For it was with him somewhat as it was with Cotton Mather; useless to preach to the artist against the existence of witches; the very breath of the artist is witchery and magic."  (Marion Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts, p 277)



The ghosts of Salem and Nathaniel Hawthorne's past are represented in many of the tales in this collection. None do it as well as in his magnificent short story, "Young Goodman Brown".

In this story Hawthorne describes the titular young man on a journey one evening that would change his life. As the story begins he comes "forth at sunset" after "crossing the threshold" of his house and his life, leaving his wife, Faith, who talks of "dreams" and is, he believes, "a blessed angel". His journey turns into one of his own dreams or visions where one after another of the people in his life are unmasked by the devil. He gradually discovers that his own corruptibility which he fears his embodied in his fellow townspeople, and ultimately in his own wife Faith. Young Goodman starts the evening journey with "excellent resolve", but he also has doubts which are fueled by comments from the stranger he meets. He grows more concerned and conceals himself even as his spectral visions (not unlike the evidence of witches in old Salem) show the deacon and elders of the town laid bare in their consorting with the devil. The evening has led to Young Goodman's loss of moral virginity. It is a loss that will haunt him the rest of his life.

This is the classic American short story of the guilty conscience. The question Brown confronts is whether his heritage of Original Sin incapacitates him for resisting personal sin. In this profoundly ambiguous story, Brown wavers between the desperate cynicism of the corrupt soul and the hopefulness of the believer. Hawthorne mirrors the communion of the church with that of Satan's altar. Contrasts abound with Faith, the angel of Young Goodman, joining the fallen angel in his mind. His tale is a blend of simplicity and seriousness. But more importantly he portrays experiences, fears, and feelings that, at least in part, his readers share in the sense they may experience similar doubts and wonder about the nature of their own morality and mortality. Melville would say of Hawthorne that his writing was "as deep as Dante".

At the beginning of the story, he has already made his bargain with the Devil—hardly a token that he is among God’s elect but not necessarily a sign of damnation, either, if he can reject the consummation in the form of the perverted communion service in the woods. Whether by act of will or by divine grace, Brown appears to have resisted the power of evil at the climactic moment and given evidence of at least the possibility of salvation for his wife and himself. There is abundant evidence in this and the best of his early stories that Hawthorne has much magic in his prose.

Supernatural Words

Hawthorne's Short Stories 
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”  ― Nathaniel Hawthorne

I  Specter and Science:

The tales in this collection include some of the best written by Hawthorne. Among them it is hard to rate one over another, however Rappaccini's Daughter is near the top. A tale of the natural versus the supernatural with overtones of professional jealousy, first love, and the desire for perfection. Perfection as desiderata, but unwillingness to pay the price. There are two scientists in Baglioni and Rappaccini himself. The latter seems to have created a new Eden with his garden that is lovingly overseen by his daughter, Beatrice, who is even more lovely than the flowers that surround her. Enter the young student, Giovanni, who is in Padua to study but is distracted by the view from his window: first, by the beautiful purple blossoms of a shrub in the center of the garden that illuminated it with a light that rivaled the sun; and second, by the entrance of Beatrice who made such an impression on the young student that it was as if "here were another flower . . . more beautiful than the richest of them,". The story develops into a question of whether the poison in the flowers (yes, they are poisonous plants) has overtaken Beatrice as well making her dangerous to other plants, animals, and even Giovanni. The question of whether she is a supernatural being or mere mortal is answered by the end of the story, but Giovanni's life is forever changed - how we may only speculate.  This story only hints at some of the myriad emotions and strange occurrences in these stories of men and women in settings as disparate as Salem Massachusetts and Padua Italy.

II The Collection:

Furthermore this collection of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne is worth reading for several reasons: 1) the collection includes many stories that are not found outside of a complete edition of Hawthorne's stories like the edition from the Library of America; 2) there is an excellent introduction by Newton Arvin who places the stories in the context of Hawthorne's life and art. Arvin notes, "If Hawthorne had lived a generation later, in Europe, he would have counted as a symbolist, though as it was he stopped short, at some point not easy to specify, of being a symboliste in the strictest sense"; (in this he may be compared with Poe who inspired the symbolists in France); 3) the book is one of Vintage Books' small and beautifully styled paperbacks. If you own other collections of Hawthorne's tales, as I do, you may want to consider this one for your library.

Hawthorne's Short Stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Vintage Books, 1946.

Symbolic Journey

The Middle of the Journey

by Lionel Trilling

"Laskell himself was committed to no party, but he nevertheless faced reality in the busy life of committees.  He was what was then known by radicals as a 'sincere liberal'"(p 37)


The Middle of the Journey is a novel of ideology and ideas. Written in 1947 and set in the years just preceding, it details the lives of several characters, including a protagonist, John Laskell, who is conflicted about his life, his friends (radical and otherwise) and the ideology that influences them. His friend Gifford Maxim has left the Communist Party and the book contains dialogues among the characters and him, about this, and about other seemingly more mundane matters, which take up most of the story (in his introduction to the 1975 edition, included here, Trilling comments about the character of Gifford Maxim:
"He might therefore be thought of as having moved for a time in the ambiance of history even though he could scarcely be called a historical figure; for that he clearly was not of sufficient consequence. This person was Whittaker Chambers. . . only a few months after my novel was published. . . the Hiss case broke upon the nation and the world and Chambers became beyond any doubt an historical figure."(pp xv-xvi))
That Chambers was the model for Maxim was intended by Trilling, but he claims that he did not know Alger Hiss and did not use him as a model for another character named Arthur Croom who, in retrospect has an uncanny resemblance to Hiss. This, presumably, was merely fortuitous. Trilling's drama of the educated is a twentieth-century variation on a theme in American literature reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale  Romance and Henry James' The Princess Cassamassima.   All novels of political insight and caution.  Had The Middle of the Journey not been a roman a clef, weirdly prescient of the Hiss case, it would probably have not received the attention it did receive upon publication.  Reading Samuel Tanenhaus' fine and surprisingly objective biography of Whittaker Chambers a year after having read Trilling I was taken aback when I recognized episodes from Chamber's life about which I had previously read in Trillings' novel.
 Exceptionally well-written, with literary references, symbolism (undoubtedly much of which I did not grasp) and slowly-built suspense, this singular novel by the noted essayist, educator and critic Lionel Trilling, is a challenging and interesting book to read. While Trilling, according to the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition, was impressed by the work of Faulkner and Hemingway among American writers, I found his style reminded me more of the early Henry James.


(a GoodReads update)


The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling. NYRB Classics, 2002 (1947)