Collected Prose

Letter.” Sophia was responsible for finding the place, which was situated on a larger property known as Highwood, currently being rented by the Tappan family. Mrs. Tappan, née Caroline Sturgis, was a friend of Sophia’s, and it was she who offered the house to the Hawthornes—free of charge. Hawthorne, wary of the complications that might arise from living off the generosity of others, struck a bargain with Mr. Tappan to pay a nominal rent of seventy-five dollars for four years.
    One would assume that he was satisfied with the arrangement, but that didn’t stop him from grumbling about any number of petty annoyances. No sooner did the family settle into the house than Hawthorne came down with a bad cold, which confined him to bed for several days, and before long he was complaining in a letter to his sister Louisa that the farmhouse was “the most wretched little hovel that I ever put my head in.” (Even the optimistic Sophia, who tended to see every adversity in the best possible light, admitted in a letter to her mother that is was “the smallest of ten-foot houses”—barely adequate for a family of four, let alone five.) If the house displeased Hawthorne, he had even harsher things to say about the landscape that surrounded it. Sixteen months after moving in, he wrote to his publisher, James T. Fields, that “I have staid here too long and constantly. To tell you a secret, I am sick to death of Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here…. The air and climate do not agree with my health at all; and, for the first time since I was a boy, I have felt languid and dispirited, during almost my whole residence here. Oh that Providence would build me the merest little shanty, and make me out a rood or two of garden-ground, near the sea-coast.” Two years later, long after he had moved away and resettled in Concord, he was still grinding the same axe, as shown in this passage from the introduction to Tanglewood Tales (a second volume of Greek myths for children): “But, to me, there is a peculiar, quiet charm in these broad meadows and gentle eminences. They are better than mountains, because they do not stamp and stereotype thoughts into the brain, and thus grow wearisome with the same strong impression, repeated day after day. A few summer weeks among mountains, a lifetime among green meadows and placid slopes, with outlines forever new, because continually fading out of the memory. Such would be my sober choice.” It is ironic that the area around Lenox should still be referred to as “Tanglewood.” The word was Hawthorne’s invention and is now indelibly associated with the music festival that takes place there every year. For a man who hated the area and ran away from it after just eighteen months, he left his mark on it forever.
    Still, it was the best moment of his life, whether he knew it or not. Solvent, successfully married to an intelligent and famously devoted woman, in the middle of the most prolific writing burst of his career, Hawthorne planted his vegetable garden, fed his chickens, and played with his children in the afternoon. The shyest and most reclusive of men, known for his habit of hiding behind rocks and trees to avoid talking to people he knew, Hawthorne largely kept to himself during his stint in the Berkshires, avoiding the social activities of the local gentry and appearing in town only to collect his mail at the post office and return home. Solitude was his natural element, and considering the circumstances of his life until his early thirties, it was remarkable that he had married at all. When you were a person whose ship-captain father had died in Surinam when you were four, when you had grown up with a remote and elusive mother who had lived in a state of permanent, isolated widowhood, when you had served what is probably the most stringent literary apprenticeship on record—locking yourself up in your room for twelve years in a house you had dubbed “Castle Dismal” and leaving Salem only in the summer to go on solitary rambles through the New England countryside—then perhaps the society of your immediate family was sufficient. Hawthorne had married late to a woman who had likewise married late, and in the twenty-two years they lived together, they were rarely apart. He called her Phoebe, Dove, Beloved, Dearissima, Ownest One. “Sometimes,” he had written to her during their courtship in 1840, “during my solitary life in our old Salem house,