The Snow-Image And Other Twice-Told Tales – Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851 ★★

Hawthorne's Final Grab Bag

There is not enough fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne; life kept getting in his way. But he wrote more tales and sketches than I once thought.

Much better known are two other short-fiction collections. The first is a recognized classic of American literature, Twice-Told Tales. The second, Mosses From An Old Manse, may be his greatest book. Just recently I found this later collection containing some of the last short pieces Hawthorne wrote.

Just how essential is The Snow-Image, anyway?

It has three of his better-known stories. “Ethan Brand,” “The Man Of Adamant,” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux.” Other historical sketches touch upon Hawthorne’s troubled relationship with the past as it concerned both his family and country; while some minor tales alternate between childlike fables and delicate dips into the macabre.

In other words, for those of us who enjoy Hawthorne, here are some engaging glimpses at the man who forged hard truths from deceptively homey matter. Like with the other two collections, this contains both narrative stories and sketches of a non-fictional nature. Unlike those others, The Snow-Image is not a major work.

The early 1850s represent Hawthorne’s peak as a writer, both in terms of output and success. Eighteen-fifty saw The Scarlet Letter; in the next two years came The House Of The Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. Besides those, you also had two well-received story collections for children, A Wonder-Book For Girls And Boys (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), and a campaign biography about Hawthorne’s old college chum Franklin Pierce, elected President in 1852.

A stature of Hawthorne in Salem, Massachusetts, his birthplace. Famously home of the 1692 witch trials, Salem is described in "Main Street" as a place where "in every creature that God has made, they suspected a witch, or dreaded an accuser."
Photo by Alyson Horrocks from https://newengland.com/travel/massachusetts/historic-salem-massachusetts/.

For a man who published so little in the prior two decades, this was an amazing leap of public productivity. In the midst of all that came this collection of stories, some fairly recently written, others dating back as far back as the 1830s but never published in book form. [Hawthorne’s final short story, “Feathertop,” was published in 1852 and added to a revised edition of Mosses From An Old Manse.]

The best of the recent stories, “Ethan Brand” was nearly the last Hawthorne ever wrote, on account of how much he struggled writing it. Subtitled “a chapter from an abortive romance,” it features a gloomy man who travelled the world trying to discover the nature of the Unpardonable Sin. To his eternal misfortune, he finds it. He returns to the old lime kiln where he once toiled to find he is a legend among the villagers, infamous for making a deal with the Devil.

When told of this, he scoffs:

“Man!” sternly replied Ethan Brand, “what need have I of the Devil? I have left him behind me, on my track. It is with such half-way sinners as you that he busies himself.”

What happened to Brand? What is the Unpardonable Sin? In the latter case, Hawthorne suggests a matter between Brand and God, but leaves out details. The story thus begins and ends on a mystery, no one the wiser. That ambiguity is both delicious and unsettling.

Staring into the fiery heart of a lime kiln like this, Ethan Brand began his journey into damnation. Brand's thirst for knowledge "raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer to stand on a star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamor after him."
Image from https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_kiln

The mood of the story is grim yet electric, a captivating sense of dread that pulls the reader in. Yet there is much humor at the margins. Ethan Brand’s old village is full of ne’er-do-wells who enjoy chewing over his miserable plight at the old tavern. One, we are told, “had great fame as a dry joker, though, perhaps, less on account of any intrinsic humor than from a certain flavor of brandy-toddy and tobacco-smoke, which impregnated all his ideas and impressions, as well as his person.”

They are an almost festive cast to put in such a gloomy, existential tale, advancing an allegorical feeling of a dance macabre.

“My Kinsman, Major Molineux” has that same ambiguity about it. Also set in New England, but in a more defined historical era when Massachusetts was a restive British colony, it features a young man named Robin who travels from England to make his fortune under the auspices of his wealthy relative, one Major Molineux. The more he asks around, the more he finds himself mocked and yelled at.

He is even chased away from an inn when he tries to drop the Major’s name to advance himself some credit for food:

“Now, is it not strange,” thought Robin, with his usual shrewdness, “is it not strange that the confession of an empty pocket should outweigh the name of my kinsman, Major Molineux?”

Set in an unnamed town which closely resembles Boston, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" conjures up images of the riots that engulfed that city in the last decades of British rule. "In his train were wild figures in the Indian dress, and many fantastic shapes without a model, giving the whole march a visionary air..."
Image from https://www.hubhistory.com/episodes/the-liberty-riot-episode-224/

Reality dawns on him eventually, along with a lesson that titles and heredity are not all that make a man, at least not in this New World.

“My Kinsman, Major Molineux” carries an ominous mood relieved by touches of waggish charm, and a sense of a town going slowly mad. Both recall Hawthorne’s classic “Young Goodman Brown” from Mosses From An Old Manse. If not a great story, “Molineux” is a good one, with a nicely suspenseful narrative carried from beginning to end.

“The Man Of Adamant” is not quite as good, though it is utterly Hawthorne in its concerns regarding spirituality and social isolation. The title character, Richard Digby, is a New England Puritan so purblind in his piety that he can’t imagine living by a creed comfortable enough to suit anyone else but him:

His plan of salvation was so narrow, that, like a plank in a tempestuous sea, it could avail no sinner but himself, who bestrode it triumphantly, and hurled anathemas against the wretches whom he saw struggling with the billows of eternal death.

When a former lover finds him hidden in a cave, he is deaf to her pleas, content instead to grub sustenance from the cavern floor and drink water trickling down from a stalactite. It is a fine message, delivered with all the subtlety of a piledriver. “The Man Of Adamant” is presented by Hawthorne as “an apologue,” a fancier way of saying “allegory,” and its moralistic tone undercuts an interesting approach to the subject matter.

A mysterious cave in East Thompson, Connecticut. Many such caves, once occupied by hermits like Richard Digby, dot the world. Hawthorne writes: "there he dwelt, for three days more eating herbs and roots, drinking his own destruction, sleeping, as it were, in a tomb, and awaking to the solitude of death, yet esteeming this horrible mode of life as hardly inferior to celestial bliss."
Image from https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/connecticut/hermit-cave-ct/ 

The other stories in this collection are a mixed bag, in quality and type.

Moralistic fiction includes “The Canterbury Pilgrims,” about a young Shaker couple running away from their uptight families. They think they are ready for the real world until a group of disillusioned travelers set them straight. “The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle” pits youthful wonder against adult disbelief, while “Little Daffydowndilly” is about a boy who keeps meeting his fun-hating headmaster everywhere he goes, until he learns responsibility.

“The Great Stone Face” holds a fairly high place among Hawthorne scholars; but it’s the worst of these just-so stories for me. A fellow named Ernest [groan] spends his life seeking greatness in others, not dreaming it lies within himself. Finally, an illustrious poet meets Ernest in his dotage and is overcome by the truths he spouts: “The poet, as he listened, felt that the being and character of Ernest were a nobler train of poetry than he had ever written.”

These pieces may have gone down well in their time, but their shrill messaging is unleavened by any lively creative spark.

The collection's title story features a pair of young siblings who create a human-like figure from snow. Soon it begins to move on its own, delighting the children. "All this while, the mother stood on the threshold, wondering how a little girl could look so much like a flying snow-drift, or how a snow-drift could look so very like a little girl."
Image from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18473007-the-snow-image 

Much more interesting to me are several historical pieces, which mostly eschew fiction for vivid sketches of life gone by. By far the best of them, “Main Street” is a highly creative depiction of Salem, Massachusetts, depicted by a traveling showman who totes a diorama of the town that evolves in time as he moves a crank.

The author has fun with the occasional failings of this contraption, as well as the carping of a self-appointed critic. There is also much stock-taking of Salem’s nasty history, observations in tune with the novel The House Of Seven Gables being written around the same time:

The sons and grandsons of the first settlers were a race of lower and narrower souls than their progenitors had been. The latter were stern, severe, intolerant, but not superstitious, not even fanatical; and endowed, if any men of that age were, with a far-seeing worldly sagacity.

Other historical pieces are slighter but still interesting, including a tour of the ruins of Fort Ticonderoga, a review of yellowing Boston periodicals in three parts, and an account of a bell whose iron tongue Hawthorne extols: “If any of his noisy brethren, in our tongue-governed democracy, be envious of the superiority which I have assigned him, they have my free consent to hang themselves as high as he.”

Present-day Fort Ticonderoga, in upstate New York. Visiting the fort some 70 years after it last saw battle, Hawthorne writes: "I should have been glad of a hoary veteran to totter by my side, and tell me, perhaps, of the French garrisons and their Indian allies."
Image from https://www.fortticonderoga.org/

There are also eerier pieces that feel one draft removed from “Twilight Zone” or Edgar Allan Poe status, arresting ideas with dark twists that hover but never quite land. A deranged author burns his works in “The Devil In Manuscript,” bemoaning his lack of success. In “The Wives Of The Dead,” two sisters learn of their husbands’ deaths at the same time, only to have dream-like figures bring news of otherwise.

More fascinating than the pieces themselves is when they were written. A few were very new (“Main Street” and “The Snow-Image” came after “Ethan Brand”), but most had been written over a decade before. “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” appeared in a periodical back in 1832, which means Hawthorne passed on including it in both Twice-Told Tales and Mosses From An Old Manse!

The official story on Hawthorne is that he didn’t really enjoy writing short fiction after Mosses and had little time for them after “Ethan Brand.” He planned to make “Brand” a novel, and it is tempting to enjoy that story less on its considerable merits and more as a preview of a classic novel we never got to read. A thin recommendation, but the rest of The Snow-Image has a more inconsequential quality.