Fanshawe – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1828 ★★

The Debut that Wasn't

If American literature were allowed its own debut novel, it would have been The Scarlet Letter, bursting with quintessential Yankee ingenuity and Puritan wrath. Certainly if Nathaniel Hawthorne had his way, that would have been his debut.

But it’s not. More than 20 years before publishing what he claimed was his first novel, Hawthorne produced a shorter fiction book. So traumatic was its memory that he not only disowned it, but burned every copy he could find. Despite his efforts, Fanshawe still exists to be read today.

Though not in the class of Hawthorne’s best-known works, Fanshawe is hardly worthy of the pyre. A creaky romance overdone in some places, underbaked in others, it does have its charms.

The story takes place at quiet Harley College, where its head Dr. Melmoth takes charge of a young woman named Ellen Langton, the daughter of an old friend and prosperous merchant now abroad. 

Ellen’s beauty soon captivates the men of Harley:

But descriptions of beauty are never satisfactory. It must, therefore, be left to the imagination of the reader to conceive of something not more than mortal, nor, indeed, quite the perfection of mortality, but charming men the more, because they felt, that, lovely as she was, she was of like nature to themselves.

Among the students won over are wealthy and confident Edward Wolcott and frail dreamer Fanshawe. Before they come to an understanding about which should be allowed to woo Ellen exclusively, a third man appears. He informs Ellen her father is in danger and that she must go away with him at once if she cares at all for her papa.

A rare first edition of Fanshawe sold at Christie's for nearly $69,000 in 2016. Hawthorne burned many of his other early attempts at fiction before they even got to the publication stage. Image from https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-hawthorne-nathaniel-1804-1864-fanshawe-a-tale-boston-6052596/?

As the above précis suggests, Fanshawe has holes. Its reliance on what Roger Ebert later famously dubbed “the idiot plot” is foursquare and constant. Its main characters are one-dimensional and its dialogue painfully stilted, even for a more formal time.

Take this address to Ellen from Edward when the mysterious third man first appears:

“The glow of many a hotter sun than ours has darkened his brow; and his step and air have something foreign in them, like what we see in sailors who have lived more in other countries than in their own. Is it not so, Ellen? for your education in a seaport must have given you skill in these matters. But come, let us approach nearer.”

Perhaps Hawthorne wanted Edward to come across as a bit overbearing; if so, this is gilding the lily.

Countering these deficiencies in Fanshawe are some plot twists, amusing secondary characters, and enveloping descriptions of Harley’s pastoral campus and surrounding woods. Hawthorne’s greatness as a nature writer gets lost sometimes in favor of his moral vision and his psychological complexity. But Hawthorne was bathed in the waters of Transcendentalism, and it comes across here:

The road, at all times rough, was now broken into deep gullies, through which streams went murmuring down to mingle with the river. The pale moonlight combined with the gray of the morning to give a ghastly and unsubstantial appearance to every object.

Bowdoin College, Hawthorne's alma mater, was the model for Harley College in this book. Image from https://library.brown.edu/dps/curio/when-digitization-and-ancestry-collide/1_6_60v2-campus-view-2/.

Hawthorne also writes of love in a fonder and gauzier manner than he did later. Of Edward and Ellen, he explains how “Their lips had yet spoken no word of love; but some of love’s rights and privileges had been assumed on the one side, and at least not disallowed on the other.”

Fanshawe drew some positive critical notices but failed to sell many copies when it came out. Later on, rediscovered some years after Hawthorne’s death, its title drew a blank from his widow.

The first thing you notice reading Fanshawe is how light it is. Not just physically – the book is more novella than novel – but in tone. Harley College is a quaint setting marked by modest youthful foibles like visits to the tavern down the road. Dr. Melmoth is a gentle authority figure ruled over by an amusingly brusque wife. Edward and Fanshawe co-exist peacefully, neither imposing on Ellen more than to accompany her on walks. Edward thinks Ellen will be happier with himself and Fanshawe more or less agrees, accepting his own love as unrequitable.

Enter the stranger, often referred to as “the angler,” perhaps with a double meaning. Fishing at a stream, he accosts Ellen while she is in Edward and Fanshawe’s company. She doesn’t recognize the fellow, but he knows her, and gives her a brusque message:

“Your father is a ruined man. Of all his friends, but one remains to him. That friend has traveled far to prove if his daughter has a daughter’s affection.”

Since Ellen has been separated from her father for many years while he got rich in Europe, she has no idea what the man is talking about. Despite this, she believes the fellow when he shows her a letter written in her father’s hand. The angler tells her she must go with him now, and tell no one, if she wants to save her father.

He's just a random fisherman, right? What could be the harm going off with him? Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/215328425913986078/.

How Ellen might accomplish this, and why she must not tell anyone, is not really explained except with the umbrella term “ruined,” which hardly satisfies. Nor do we learn much about the angler himelf, who shrugs off his evil ways by saying: “There is a pass, when evil deeds can add nothing to guilt, nor good ones take anything from it.”

Hawthorne’s best moments come in the margins, like his characterization of the innkeeper, Hugh Crombie, a companion of the angler in younger, wilder days who now wants to enjoy a peaceful life of pretend piety with the rich Christian widow he married, sneaking off to guzzle his booze on the sly.

The angler calls him out on this: “Your good resolutions were always like cobwebs, and your evil habits like five-inch cables.”

Neither hero nor villain, Crombie invests every scene he is in with genuine life. Less genuine but just as enjoyable are Dr. Melmoth and his wife, who offer some welcome comic relief as the main action builds to its crescendo.

The story moves quickly, makes the most of its few set pieces, and culminates on a rocky cliff. It works for what it is, a deeply-felt if second-rate period piece written by someone who could and did move on to greater, more lasting work.

Hawthorne spent $100, hardly a pittance in 1828, to publish Fanshawe independently. Did he spend as much buying back and burning every copy he could find? Image from https://ohiostatepress.org/books/BookPages/HawthorneCentenary.htm. 

In its blend of comedy and desperate drama, Fanshawe seems modeled on lighter, early Dickens. But Dickens didn’t start producing novels until the 1830s. In his biography of Hawthorne, Mark Van Doren cites the influences of Walter Scott and Charles Maturin, though both those early 19^th-century novelists were more given to the fantastic than Hawthorne was here.

Hawthorne uses quotations from Scott and Maturin as chapter epigraphs, along with others like Shakespeare, as if he were a bright pupil eager to show his sources. That may be the biggest knock on Fanshawe, that it isn’t original in its conception or approach.

What you get here is a sense of what American literature was like before Hawthorne and other later masters like Poe and Melville began reinventing it. What’s here is not bad, just pleasant and predictable and very short. I am glad it survives, if not to the point of recommending it.