The Men Who Invented Romance

Ever since I started work on LiteraryGloucester.com I have been trying to get an essay written to put up there. At present there are five of them — all wonderful and worth a visit. Peter Anastas, the consummate gentleman and appreciator of all things artistic, has contributed three essays — one each for his great friends, Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini, and one for Jack Kerouac, who grew up in Lowell. My dear friend Nan Webber, the distinguished actress and artistic director of Theatre in the Pines, has written a lovely piece on T.S. Eliot who spent many a summer on Eastern Point here in Gloucester. Mark chose to write a great little piece on how he, as a beginning writer, found support and validation through the writing of Andre Dubus III of nearby Newburyport.

So it is about time that I get to work and write something, too. I want to write about Nathaniel Hawthorne who lived most of his life down the road apiece in Salem. Hawthorne was an interesting man, a fifth generation American when he was born in 1810. He worked for awhile in the Salem Custom’s House on Derby Street and it was part of my homage to Hawthorne that I made Baptiste in my novel The Old Mermaid’s Tale work part time in the customs house.

But, most significantly, Hawthorne invented the first American novel of the American Romantic tradition. A tradition I much admire and long for. Along with Herman Melville, from New Bedford, and James Fenimore Cooper, from New York state, this unique and wonderful literary form was born. (Slight aside: I found out recently that Cooperstown, New York, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, was founded by one of Cooper’s fore-fathers.) Their novels written in the middle of the nineteenth century were a significant departure from the literary traditions of England, Germany, and France. Rather than stories about people embroiled in society and all its complex hierarchies, bigotries, and rules, the heroes of the American romantics were men standing alone against a mysterious and unknowable world where rules were ambiguous and society was not yet formed.

It is a wonderful thing to imagine the world those men found themselves in — a young country not well-known. Of course by the mid-nineteenth century most of the continent had been explored but outside of cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia, society was pretty loose. Their writing made good use of that by taking characters who had been formed by a particular society and setting them alone in a wild and mysterious landscape where rules were hard to understand. It is not possible to overstate the importance of the landscape in these novels and how it informs and shapes them.

The character of the great American Romantic novel has always enchanted me and is a far cry from the sorry state of what has come to be known as the “romance novel” — terrible things. In the American romantic tradition, love and relationships may or may not be figure into the story, but there is a mythic quality to the characters that is nearly archetypal and owes much of its intrigue to legends of the ancients. Arthur Dimsdale, the tragic hero of Hawthornes’s The Scarlet Letter, could be any man at any time in history who fell in love with the wrong woman. Ahab, the obsessed and despotic captain of the Pequod in Melville’s Moby Dick, could be any tyrant obsessed with a quest and with revenge. And where, in all of literature, is there a more purely romantic figure than Hawkeye, the white man raised by Native Americans, in Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans? All of these characters are men who are in some way alienated from society, filled with intense desires and personal complexities that seem nearly unfathomable and facing worlds that are raw and unformed without the rules and protections their literary cousins in England knew.

So, I have to write about Hawthorne and how his novels shaped my own objectives as a writer. And maybe thank him for teaching me to see more than what is right in front of me.

Thanks for reading.