Hawthorne -  Tales and Sketches    Nathaniel Hawthorne  ( Ed. Roy Harvey Pearce)         

Library Classics of the United States, New York : 1982                Home

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This body of work cannot be read to completion. It can be put down from time to time,  but unless the Grim Reaper shuts off the reading lamp it will, in time, be picked up again.

I numbered Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne among my boyhood tormentors, one of a legion of ghouls called forth from their tombs and set upon me by my custodians, the Teachers Guild. Melville, Dickens, Austen, Cooper -  even then the groundwork was being laid for the Great Deconstruction that has brought us to this day. I was taught to loathe all that had gone before.

High school and university in the 1960's and 1970's were an Earth's Holocaust (my favorite in all of Hawthorne) set as a love-fest. The cultural treasures of the West were chucked into the bonfire by Proto-PC teachers who did not quite dare, at that early date, to explicitly denounce the Patriarchal Blah-Blah Yada-Yada but whose stance and intent were made clear by their astonishing success in making these brilliant works seem dull, irrelevant and generally uncool.  Adolescents are, of course, bloody idiots, so we stoked the blaze and howled with glee.

Say what you like about old Bill Burroughs, but if I hadn't stumbled upon Naked Lunch around that time, I'd probably still not know how to read. It had drugs, perversion and lots of other socially-acceptable stuff, so I supposed it was okay to read it, and did.

In the realm of trashy pop culture, it has become au currant to revive the children's books ( The Cat in The Hat) and television series (Mission Impossible) of the post-war generation's youth as Hollywood feature films. Some of these revivals are an unspeakable insult to the sources, others, by adding a bit of thought, screenwriting sophistication and contemporary cinematography, honor and elevate them.

Okay, pop culture is pretty crappy, but one is encouraged by the inclination of the boomer generation to revisit those years immediately preceding the Cultural  Revolution, and if it begins with television then so be it. The little wheels and cogs will begin to turn, to click and to whir, and the more inquisitive may one day reckon that if Leave it To Beaver was actually pretty good, maybe Moby Dick was, too.

Nathaniel Hawthorne is a great place for the self-rehabilitating survivor of late 20th -century to begin. His work is, as the blurb on the dust jacket remarks, "astonishingly contemporary."  I leapt directly from Russell Kirk's discussion of Hawthorne in The Conservative Mind to Earth's Holocaust, and am here to tell you that there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun.  The Beast of Nathaniel Hawthorne's nightmares is the Beast of mine. His triumph seemed imminent to Hawthorne, and does to us now, but as long as we see him clearly, we can hold him at bay. It is August, 2004, and I am able to sit quietly and read Nathaniel Hawthorne at my leisure. We've done well, and must go on, and must persevere. Keeping the Beast just outside the gates is the best we can hope for.

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