![]() ![]() There he became a writer, beginning with the anonymous publication of “Fanshawe,” a brief and thoroughly conventional novel, and then contracting his form for the remainder of his time in the dismal chamber. The best way to see what I mean is to begin with the shape of his career up to the time of “The Scarlet Letter.” He began by retiring into his room for twelve years. Having acknowledged so much, I may as well begin by seeing my Hawthorne as a man whose art caused his life- whose art, in other words, was the primary cause of the world he invented. The same Hawthorne, were he to read my version of his art, would surely cast upon it a veiled eye of similar intent-for I too have an interpretation, though the Hawthorne I am seeking is the one before, not behind, his art. If Hawthorne himself could read Crews, were he not too shy to offer a comment, he would welcome the interpretation as a distinct possibility, for he would find in Crews’ peering scrutiny something of the passionate fixation of an Ethan Brand looking for the Unpardonable Sin. Crews has made his interpretation, an interpretation is a choice, and the tangled area of dark prior motive, will, decision, and doubt is precisely the world which Hawthorne invented. I have no intention of complaining about these implications. Thus, for all his illuminating treatment of the fiction, Crews is probing the motives behind the characters’ action, peering through the veil to read the unwritten scroll, and as he fixes on the motives of the characters he is both implying and implicating a shadowy Oedipal figure of Hawthorne behind the tales. ![]() He will have Hawthorne’s life the cause of his art, even though his book is primarily concerned with Hawthorne’s fiction, not his life. It is just this audacity of Hawthorne which Frederick Crews in “The Sins of the Fathers,” an excellent book on Hawthorne, does not fully face. When we think of the life of art we are thinking about what for Hawthorne was primary and causal, not secondary and resultant. The one is the life of the artist the other is the life of art. Yet chronology of composition is not so important as the order of form. In terms of actual composition, “The Scarlet Letter” lies somewhat between the prefaces, for, although Hawthorne did not write all of “The Scarlet Letter” before composing “The Custom House” (as once was thought), he clearly wrote enough of it so that it could be said to lie between the two in the order of writing. ![]() In those prefaces, the one composed by way of introduction to “Mosses from an Old Manse” (1846) and the other as “introductory to The Scarlet Letter” (1850), Hawthorne unforgettably sketched himself as author. I wish to approach Hawthorne’s masterpiece through “The Old Manse” and “The Custom House,” the two great prefaces he wrote. ![]()
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