Tales to Be Told and Read Many Times
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a great writer. In The Scarlet Letter he is darkly romanticist, using his remarkable gifts of characterization both of people and of places to show us the darkest side of puritan society and puritanical dictates. But in the book I read yesterday, Twice-Told Tales, he shows a tender and humanist caring for his people and their situations. The stories are perfect, every one, in rendering person and place, emotion and obstacle, and in leading us to the most delightful (or spine-chilling or teary) conclusion.
I wish high school students were given Twice-Told Tales to read instead of The Scarlet Letter, not only because of the redemption Hawthorne offers through his tales — a possible saving of our human goodness — which is not on the table in The Scarlet Letter, and which could lead to great discussions of fate and choice and follow-through. But also because the tales are more available (accessible) to the teen-tossed temperament: instead of just the titillation of adultery, the well-known pain of being dumped, and the obvious vote for abstinence, through the tales students can have discussions of vivid American history, the complexity of human character, the ages of man (youth, middle, seniority), anticipation of destiny and one’s own role in understanding what is important and what should be valued, platonic and physical love, and being both solitary and convivial. Students could also learn the basics of how to write a really great story.
It would be hard to pick a favorite story out of the twenty-four choices in Twice-Told Tales because they are all so good. The four “Legends of Province House” have a charming little story teller and a wizened old loyalist giving accounts of the times surrounding the American Revolution: the stories are both history lesson and a moving portrayal of the fears and anticipation of a changing America. In “Lady Eleanor’s Mantle”, England is portrayed as a suffocating blanket of disease that when burned and buried, can allow a new country to flourish and grow; in “Old Esther Dudley” a crazy old caretaker of the Province House (the seat of English government in the colonies), is treated gently by the new Governor of Massachusetts, John Hancock, for being a remnant of “the decayed past…what had once been a reality was now merely a vision of faded magnificence.”
“The Village Uncle” offers a charming picture of a full and good life lived and now an old age enjoyed: “I recalled no happier portion of my life, than this, my calm old age.”
A perfect story for this time of year is “The Sister Years” which tells the story of a New Year’s Eve. The narrator is so accurate and just perfect in describing the coming year as a young woman, with “so much promise and such an indescribable hopefulness in her aspect that hardly anybody could meet her without anticipating some very desirable thing — some long sought good — from her kind offices. A few dismal characters there may be, here and there about the world, who have so often been trifled with by young maidens as promising as she, that they have now ceased to pin any faith upon the skirts of the new year. But, for my own part, I have great faith in her; and should I live to see fifty more such, still, from each of those successive sisters, I shall reckon upon receiving something that will be worth living for.” Halleluiah.
The story later has the older sister, the old year, meeting up on New Year’s Eve with the new year just coming in. She very astutely advises her younger sister “To expect no gratitude nor good will from this peevish, unreasonable, inconsiderate, ill-intending and worse-behaving world. However, warmly its inhabitants may seem to welcome you, yet, do what you may, and lavish on them what means of happiness you please, they will still be complaining, still craving what is not in your power to give, still looking forward to some other Year for the accomplishment of projects which out never to have been formed, and which, if successful, would only provide new occasions for discontent. If these ridiculous people ever see any thing tolerable inn you, it will be after you are gone forever.” You got that right, Hawthorne, nail on the head, perfect.
“Snowflakes” is a delightful and accurate description of a New England winter. Reading it made me vow never to leave the currently bitterly-cold and white Northeast: Hawthorne makes winter a wonderful opportunity for book-reading and warming fires and walks along lanes banked in glistening white.
“The Seven Vagabonds” is a wonderful homily to joy in life. The vagabonds the narrator meets, all on the way to a camp-meeting to make a bit of money amongst the crowds gathered, whether through puppeteering or book-selling or story-telling and music making or fortune telling or making a display of shooting arrows, have a certain joy in life (well, the fortune teller is a bit dour but he loves traveling). The narrator reveres them for their joy, for how they “preserved the freshness of youth…by the continual excitement of new objects, new pursuits, and new associates.” He resolves to join them as an “itinerant novelist” although he also states “If I ever meddle with literature…it shall be as a traveling bookseller.” Luckily for us, Hawthorne’s meddling took to story-telling and novel writing.
In “The Shaker Bridal”, Hawthorne gives a subtle but damning portrayal of the Shaker ideals. The ending is heartbreaking. We get a good dose of American history in “Endicott and the Red Cross” and a lovely and moving American fairy-tale in “The Three-Fold Destiny”. The “White Old Maid” is a fabulously creepy Ghost story.
Could Hawthorne’s tale “Chipping with a Chisel” (published in 1837 as part of Twice-Told Tales and possibly earlier in a magazine) have influenced Charles Dickens in his writing of “The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain” (reviewed by me on December 19, 2008)? The conclusion of Hawthorne’s story is that “the dark shadowing of this life, the sorrows and regrets, have …as much real comfort in them….as what we term life’s joy” which is the thesis of Dickens’ story. Interesting!
I loved “Footprints on the Sea-shore”, with its fresh and detail-perfect descriptions of the landscape of the seashore. He renders perfectly the birds by the shore, “[t]he sea was each little bird’s playmate. They chased it downward as it swept back, and again ran up swiftly before the impending wave, which sometimes overtook them and bore them off their feet. But they floated as lightly as one of their own feathers on the breaking crest. In their airy flutterings they seemed to rest on the evanescent spray.” There is a spot marked in pencil in my book, an 1890 edition which I picked up at a library book sale, where Hawthorne writes of walking in the sand and then turning to look at the footsteps behind him: “such glances always make us wiser.” I love that line and I love that someone else before me, loved it too. Who was that person? Who had this book before me? That is part of the magic of reading, the sharing across years and decades and even centuries, the joy of reading lines perfectly formed, worlds and people and dreams and realities so beautifully rendered, and put forth for generations and generations of readers.
My edition of Twice-Told Tales was published in 1890 by F.M. Lupton. Different editions have different collections of the stories, and some editions state Volume One or Volume Two alongside the title. I cannot figure out where my edition fits in: some of the stories seem to be in certain Volume Ones and some to be in certain Volume Twos. The Grolier Club, a literary club founded in 1884, mounted a “Most Influential Books Published in America Before 1900” in 1947 and listed Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales as 44th, ranked ahead of The Scarlet Letter. I don’t know which version of the tales they relied upon for their assessment but from the stories that I read, I agree whole-heartedly. Anyone and everyone can read and enjoy the Twice-Told Tales; the language is accessible and the characters and places engaging. Every one who does read these stories will become greater in human understanding and compassion for having read them. Because great good comes from reading great books.
