Volume 32, Number 2 · February 14, 1985
All in the Family
By Leo Marx
Hawthorne's Secret: An Un-Told Tale
by Philip Young
David R. Godine, 183 pp., $15.95
Nathaniel Hawthorne's unusual reticence was remarked upon by almost everyone who knew him well, and it occurred to several of them that he might be concealing an important—possibly an all-important—secret. Even his wife Sophia referred to his nature as 'an unviolated sanctuary' she never 'conceived or knew.' In a curious letter to Hawthorne, his friend and lawyer, George Hillard, speculating about his (Hawthorne's) strange 'taste for the morbid anatomy of the human heart,' surmised that his client, who seemed to be 'burdened with secret sorrow,' was a man with a 'blue chamber' in his soul which he 'hardly dared to enter.' But Melville was the first to suggest that the secret occupied a central place in the writer's work. He was convinced that 'all his life' Hawthorne had 'concealed some great secret, which would, were it known, explain all the mysteries in his career.'
Review, 3261 words
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