Volume 11, Number 7 · October 24, 1968
The Ghost Sense
By Alfred Kazin
When Nathaniel Hawthorne died in 1864, the most distinguished man of letters in New England, his neighbor in Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had nothing positive to say: 'I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more fully rendered—in the painful solitude of the man which, I suppose, could no longer be endured, and he died of it.' How much Emerson himself contributed to that solitude he never knew, for he could not read fiction, did not understand its dramatic necessity, regularly attributed the faults of the worst novelists to the best. Whenever he condescended to say anything about the fiction of his time, he wrote about it with a stealthy insight into its weaknesses that was used to support his moralistic distaste for fiction.
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