Many thanks to Julie Hall for inviting me to contribute a personal reflection to this issue of the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, which will be her last as editor. I'm very much indebted to Julie and to her predecessors Frederick Newberry and Monika Elbert for their fine editing, impeccable scholarship, and warm friendship. This reflection is a new genre for me, but I'll do my best at casting a backward glance over my life with Hawthorne. It's been a long road, marked by moments of surprise, pleasure, and gratitude.I first became acquainted with Hawthorne in graduate school at Duke University some four decades ago, when I had the good fortune to study with two eminent Hawthorne scholars, Buford Jones and Arlin Turner. Buford's seminar on Hawthorne and Melville was a model of its kind. In it, he shared exciting findings from his own unpublished research, such as a genealogy of Hawthorne's Gothic aesthetic, a chronology of the composition of Hawthorne's tales, and a chart of “The Custom-House,” showing the fifty-year stages by which Hawthorne carefully and artfully takes the reader into the past and Hester's world, all the while combining the actual and the imaginary. From Buford, I also learned to explore historical contexts, attending to small details others may have missed. Although Duke became known for its heavy-hitting theorists in the 1980s, Buford was an old-school empiricist. For him, basic historical facts took precedence over theory, even if those facts took time to discover and even more time to flower into conclusions. Although I have come to understand how facts do not become facts without a guiding epistemology of research, Buford's teaching has inspired much of my own work on Hawthorne. One of my first publications, “Melville's Use of ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” began as a paper in his class.At Duke, I wrote my dissertation on Melville's ambivalent political views under the direction of Arlin Turner, who was at work on his long-awaited Hawthorne biography. In my memory, Arlin's image and personality now merge with the subject of his book. His modest and gracious manner was always reassuring, yet he maintained a reserve that took years to overcome—my file of correspondence indicates about five. After his death, his wife Thelma, an exceptional scholar in her own right, supported my career through her advice and encouragement. One time as a student, I made the mistake of asking Arlin how his Hawthorne biography was coming along, and the look I got before he replied let me know this was a presumptuous question to ask. He finished his book five years later, and I have turned to it whenever I have needed accurate information about Hawthorne's life. It's not bloated, snarky, or wildly speculative, just concise, fair, and reliable. As Fred Newberry has said, it may be the best Hawthorne biography available, and Fred is an expert on them all.1My most exciting work on Hawthorne began in 1982, when I spent a spring semester as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Oporto in Portugal. During this time, I had no access to research materials and no ongoing projects. (I had just completed my first monograph, on James Kirke Paulding.) With the luxury of time and attention, I read The Scarlet Letter more carefully than I ever had before, making notes in the margins wherever I encountered a word, an allusion, an emphasis that seemed strikingly new to me. A number of these details started coalescing around the fact and idea of revolution. When I returned to the United States, I sought to determine what contextual events or materials might have informed Hawthorne's emphases on beheading, the guillotine, the scaffold, and political martyrdom. There was his firing, of course, and the wrenching death of his mother. And there was the growing turmoil over the slavery issue, soon to become worse. For some reason, just curiosity perhaps, I decided to delve into the newspapers and magazines published during 1848 and 1849, and it was there I encountered the explosion of excitement about the European revolutions of 1848–49 that everyone in the United States was writing and talking about.In pursuit of more contextual knowledge, I read the books that Hawthorne apparently read as he began his romance, using Marion I. Kesselring's Hawthorne's Reading, 1828–1850 (1949) as my guide. It led to François Guizot's History of the English Revolution of 1640, Commonly Called the Great Rebellion; from the Accession of Charles I to His Death (1846), which revealed the specific international context of Hester's story, set in an age when “men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings” (164). It also revealed the simultaneity of the Puritans' beheading of Charles I and Arthur's death on the scaffold. As for the scaffold itself, I learned that it was not used by the Bay Colony Puritans but did appear dramatically in another source of Hawthorne's, Alphonse de Lamartine's History of the Girondists (1847–48), where it is the setting of the History's most powerful scene (the beheading of Louis XVI) in the exact center of Lamartine's three volumes. I was drowsily reading in my library carrell when I came upon this scene, which electrified me. I immediately realized that Lamartine's use of the scaffold as a dramatic setting and unifying structural device paralleled Hawthorne's own usage, and that one of the most celebrated settings in American literature had probably been borrowed from the Place de la Révolution of eighteenth-century Paris and imaginatively transported to the Marketplace of seventeenth-century Boston.My reading of contemporary newspapers also yielded helpful materials, especially Margaret Fuller's riveting dispatches from Italy in the New-York Tribune, which described the republican revolution in Rome, the assassination of the Pope's prime minister, the flight of the Pope from the city, and the French army's bombing of Rome and restoration of the Pope to power. I soon realized the importance of these dispatches, and started tracking Fuller's connection to the Hawthornes, learning from Sophia's letters in the Berg Collection that, while in search of a new home, Sophia had visited Fuller's good friend Caroline Sturgis Tappan just before Hawthorne began writing his romance in earnest, and Caroline was the one person in the country who knew that Fuller in 1848 had given birth to a child out of wedlock. (The father, we know, was her lover, the Marchese Giovanni Ossoli.) If Caroline shared this shocking news with Sophia and she shared it with Hawthorne, then, I suspected, this may have fed into Hester's moral predicament, her radical spirit, and “the period of hardly accomplished revolution and still seething turmoil, in which the story shaped itself” (43), as Hawthorne put it. The controversial 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, which Fuller had inspired, seemed to add to her likely influence on Hawthorne as well.My article “The Scarlet Letter and Revolutions Abroad” became the cornerstone of the book I subsequently wrote, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (1988). Somehow, I achieved a rhythm as I wrote this book. On non-teaching days, I would get up early in the morning, about 4 a.m., work until about 8 a.m., and then go for a long jog-walk through a local wooded park and back. The round trip was about five miles, and afterward I would do a set of exercises, finishing off with a shower about 11 a.m. All the while that I jogged and showered, I would write paragraphs in my head, based on the work I had been doing, and later that afternoon, I would type them. At one point in these outings, when I reached a certain bench in the woods, I would stop and lie on my back and look up at the sky through the trees. During the first months, I mulled over the sad state of my career, but as I got into the project, I took secret delight in contemplating how my work might change American literary study, giving it a new transatlantic context.After I finished the entire manuscript, rather than send it out immediately as I was urged to do and tempted to do, I spent an entire semester polishing the prose. I removed all the rough and weak sentences and paragraphs I could find, strengthened all the verbs, and used a number of metaphors to give my points vitality and freshness. My inspiration for this approach came from Thoreau's parable about the artist of Kouroo, one of my favorite parts of Walden. As this artist makes his staff, his singleness of purpose and resolution endow him with perennial youth. Time stands still as he works. I've been called by administrators a “dawdler,” and I understand that view of my habits, but I take so long to do my work because I want to craft it as well as I can. In the summer of 1987, I received an acceptance of my manuscript from Yale University Press, which was immensely gratifying. The reviews were heartening as well.While researching my chapter on Fuller in European Revolutions, I came across her then-unpublished 1844 journal at the Massachusetts Historical Society and learned about her fascinating interactions with Hawthorne, including their boating on the Concord River until after sunset, their moonlight walks, and their sharing their dreams with one another at night on the rock behind the Manse. In her journal, she wrote, “I love him much, & love to be with him in this sweet tender homely scene. But I should like too, to be with him on the bold ocean shore.”2 After I shared my transcription of this journal with one of my graduate classes, my student Thomas R. Mitchell became intensely engaged by the Hawthorne-Fuller relationship, which became the subject of his dissertation and his wonderful book Hawthorne's Fuller Mystery (1998).In 1992, I presented a paper on the Hawthorne-Fuller-Emerson relationship at the biennial Hawthorne conference in Concord and there met the brilliant feminist Bell Gale Chevigny, whom my friend Pat Valenti had encouraged to attend in order to speak with Tom Mitchell. Tom had not come to the conference that year, but Bell sat in on my paper, which argued, provocatively I'll admit, that there was something literally transgressive about Fuller's personal interactions with Hawthorne and Emerson, especially by crossing into the domestic spheres that Sophia and Lidian considered their own. (Sophia did not mind, I pointed out, but Lidian certainly did.) Bell found my paper appalling, understandably so, but we soon became friends and decided to form a Margaret Fuller Society, which we did later that year. Bell has strong negative feelings about Hawthorne, because of his harsh comments about Fuller in his Italian notebooks, and I could not convince her to join with the Hawthorne Society to put on a joint conference. The best I could do was persuade her to participate in a Fuller Society panel at the Hawthorne Conference in Rome, which she thoroughly enjoyed. She and her husband Paul stayed at the American Academy, “flush against the wall the reactionary French breached in 1849” (263–64).In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I found myself heading up a small research group at my university, which we called the Interdisciplinary Group for Historical Literary Study (IGHLS). We brought to campus a number of scholars, including literary historians and a group of prominent theorists from the United States and abroad. While under the influence of these visitors, especially Walt Herbert, then at work on his Dearest Beloved (1993), I ventured a Lacanian essay titled “Hawthorne and Emerson in ‘The Old Manse,’” my only serious foray into psychoanalytic criticism. For example, at one point, I argued, “The figure of Emerson in ‘The Old Manse’ thus plays an essential part in the psychological growth being portrayed, for, like the child in the mirror stage of development, the author arrives at a sense of who he is by having his image reflected back by this other with whom he identifies” (70). Fred Newberry, then writing the annual Hawthorne chapter for American Literary Scholarship, called my essay “farfetched” (40), and I couldn't argue with that.During the 1990s, I started drafting a book tentatively titled “The Making and Breaking of the Concord Circle,” which featured Hawthorne, Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, and Alcott. It was an attempt to trace the arc of the interpersonal-intertextual relations of this group from the 1840s to the mid-1860s. Both Walt Herbert and Lee Person encouraged me in this project, and persuaded me to join the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, where I was overwhelmed by the kindness and goodwill of a number of Hawthorneans, including David Kesterson, Nina Baym, Rita Gollin, John Idol, Lea Newman, Margaret Moore, Sam Coal, Millicent Bell, and Rick Millington. When Rick kindly asked me to contribute to his edition of The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004), I decided to pirate portions of my unfinished manuscript for the compressed cultural history titled “Hawthorne's Labors in Concord,” which I gave him. The rest went into chapter 4, “Accord in Concord,” and chapter 7, “The Stationary ‘Fall’ of a Public Intellectual,” of Devils and Rebels: The Making of Hawthorne's Damned Politics (2008).Devils and Rebels began with a feeling of dismay as I was editing the Historical Guide to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2001), which had a stellar group of contributors, including Brenda Wineapple, who was working on her Hawthorne biography at the time and had generously recommended me to Oxford University Press as editor for the volume. Brenda and Jean Fagan Yellin in their essays dealt with Hawthorne's politics severely, coming down hard on his racism and failure to speak out against slavery. Their perspectives aligned with those of other critics who had previously condemned Hawthorne's politics, including Sacvan Bercovitch, Jonathan Arac, and especially Eric Cheyfitz. Given my own admiration for Hawthorne, I suspected that if one could approach his politics with less presentism and more historicism, a fuller and more nuanced understanding might emerge.And yes, the new historicism had begun to affect my scholarship. With my friend and colleague Jeff Cox, I had recently coedited a collection for IGHLS titled New Historical Literary Study (1993), and in our introduction, “The Historicist Enterprise,” we generated an overview of the new “reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of history” (4), to quote Louis Montrose. Our contributors included Lawrence Buell, Ralph Cohen, Stephen Greenblatt, Jerome J. McGann, Lee Patterson, Michael Rogin, Edward Said, and Hortense Spillers. I admired the stirring work of all of these visiting luminaries, as well as that of our colleagues in the volume, but it was the theoretical ideas of Jerome McGann that I found most applicable to my own scholarship, especially his concept of the “incommensurate,” that is, those key details, persons, events within a text that resist overdetermination by sociohistorical forces and assure historical contextuality its independence, thus allowing the past, reconstituted in the present, to critique the present and enable the future.3At the 2004 Hawthorne Society Conference in Salem, I presented a paper making the case for a new historicist approach to Hawthorne. The paper, titled “Hawthorne and Politics,” concluded: Although it is easy today to charge Hawthorne with “immoral political passivity,” such facile judgments strike me as unfair to such a catholic imaginative man. As American literary scholars continue to study and judge conservative authors such as Hawthorne, alongside progressive ones such as Fuller and Douglass, I challenge them to present his view of the case as well as their own. While I have no quarrel with a “politics of liberation” nor with judging an author with respect to one's own present set of moral values, I believe we need to resist the temptation to treat these values as transhistorical, transcultural absolutes. Only through a more self-conscious methodology that explores Hawthorne's historically informed, albeit still partial, imaginative world as it interacts with our own, can critical studies strengthen, not weaken, their claims to inclusiveness and fairness. The paper was well received. In fact, the applause was so sustained that Joel Pfister told me to stand up and take a bow, but I declined. Robert Levine, also on the panel, leaned over to whisper “nothing like preaching to the choir,” which kept my head from swelling. Nevertheless, I was encouraged by that reception and by the inspiring conversation I had with Bob at lunch that day. Few scholars, I've learned, can match Bob's comprehensive knowledge of the nexus between antebellum U.S. politics and literature. In the months that followed, I developed my paper into the article “The Challenge of Cultural Relativity: The Case of Hawthorne,” which appeared in a special issue of ESQ devoted to reexamining the American Renaissance.In the spring of 2003, I began taking up the challenge I had set out. This moment coincided with George W. Bush's determination to start a war by bombing and invading Iraq. To protest this war, I, along with my wife and children, attended candlelight peace vigils organized by our local Friends Congregational Church and also joined more vocal demonstrations on the sidewalks of our town, College Station, Texas. Although I considered myself an opponent of critical presentism, my commitment to pacifism no doubt influenced my respect for Hawthorne's own pacifism and allowed me to understand how vital it was to his politics. As I state in the preface to Devils and Rebels, “[T]his study posits that a Christian pacifism, not unlike that of the Quakers, serves as the foundation of [Hawthorne's] politics, which, though characterized as thoughtless and benighted, actually possess a depth and subtlety comparable to those of his literary works themselves” (xvi). Nina Baym, as outside reader for the University of Michigan Press, expressed strong support for this thesis, along with many useful suggestions.I won't rehearse the argument of my book here, but I do want to point out two things: first, one section of the book has recently seemed so relevant to the present political situation that I have uploaded it to my https://tamu.academia.edu/LarryJReynolds site with the title “The House of the Seven Gables as Prelude to the Age of Trump”; second, Hawthorne's and the Transcendentalists' views of slavery and abolitionism differed little in the 1840s, but during the 1850s, Hawthorne maintained his pacifism while they became willing to condone violence to effect political change. Like the Quakers, Hawthorne remained committed to a value system emphasizing peace and compassion, while Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott supported the violence of John Brown and beat the drums of war.In chapter 5 of my book Righteous Violence: Revolution, Slavery, and the American Renaissance (2011), I elaborate upon Hawthorne's engagement with Brown and the Transcendentalists, especially Bronson Alcott. My account argues that Oliver Cromwell's extremism, the resurgence of a Puritan spirit in New England, representations of Brown as a heroic Cromwellian figure, and the American Civil War itself all encouraged Hawthorne during his final years to revisit in his American Claimant manuscripts the scene of the English Civil War and address the question of whether the killing of an oppressor, such as Charles I or a slave owner, is a righteous act or not. Hawthorne did not meet Brown in person, of course, as his Concord neighbors did, so he escaped the attraction of the man's presence. Brown swayed everyone he met, even his jailor and the Governor of Virginia. “I think him about the manliest man I have ever seen,” Bronson Alcott wrote in his journal, claiming that Brown's countenance and frame were “charged with power throughout” (316). The fact that Brown traveled armed especially impressed his Concord admirers. While I was researching Righteous Violence in the Boston Public Library, one of the curators told me they had in their collections one of Brown's notorious pikes, made with Bowie knives at the end, which Brown took with him to Harpers Ferry. The curator asked if I would like to see and hold it, but fearing the residual power of that holy warrior, I declined.Brown's appeal to New Englanders can be attributed in part to a residual New England Puritanism. As Moncure Conway, Emerson's abolitionist friend from Virginia, explained, “[T]here had remained in nearly every Northern breast, however liberal, some unconscious chord which Brown had touched, inherited from the old Puritan spirit and faith in the God of War” (2: 185). Hawthorne resisted this appeal, I believe, because his spirit and faith were founded upon the New Testament. When I was asked to give the keynote address at the 2014 Hawthorne Conference, in North Adams, I sought to illuminate this recently discounted aspect of his religious sensibility. Using examples from his writings, I focused on key moments when his Christian sympathy and compassion become evident, as he suggests the divinity to be found in some of the most lowly and tormented individuals. In the conclusion to my talk, I shared photographs of the painting Christ at the Column, by Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, which Hawthorne viewed in Siena, Italy, and wrote so movingly about in his journal and The Marble Faun.I had taken these photographs when I was in Italy in 2013 and made a pilgrimage to Siena to see the painting myself. It was a memorable experience. I was deeply affected being in the quiet, dark gallery of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, standing perhaps where Hawthorne stood, imagining myself seeing that remarkable painting through his eyes. When Hawthorne recalled his experience in The Marble Faun, he was struggling with the prospect of Una's death and perhaps his own: One of the most striking effects produced is the sense of loneliness. You behold Christ deserted both in Heaven and earth; that despair is in him, which wrung forth the saddest utterance man ever made—“Why hast Thou forsaken me?” Even in this extremity, however, he is still divine. The great and reverent painter has not suffered the Son of God to be merely an object of pity though depicting him in a state so profoundly pitiful. He is rescued from it, we know not how—by nothing less than miracle—by a celestial majesty and beauty and some quality of which these are the outward garniture. (339–40) Hawthorne concludes, in what I consider one of his most profound observations, “[T]his matchless picture … has done more towards reconciling the incongruity of Divine Omnipotence and outraged, suffering Humanity, combined in one person, than the theologians ever did (340).Although Hawthorne never went to divinity school, his fiction, which Emerson dismissed as “not good for anything” (7: 465), makes the case, time and again, for holy sympathy, or as Melville put it in his review of Mosses, “boundless sympathy with all forms of being” (520). The former Puritans Tobias and Dorothy Pearson in “The Gentle Boy,” who take in the Quaker child with the Muslim name, model this ideal behavior.Some of Emerson's current admirers, most notably Lawrence Buell, have found my take on the relative merits of Hawthorne and Emerson “somewhat perverse.” I have been in awe of Larry's intelligence and erudition throughout my career, so I suspect he's right; nevertheless, I cannot escape my sense that Hawthorne accurately perceived a dangerous Puritan severity in Emerson that his followers missed. And yes, Hawthorne's personality had its flaws, too, especially his racism (which Emerson shared). Both men took sly pleasure in needling one another from time to time. One telling example of Emerson's devilry appears in the travel diary of the young Englishman Henry Arthur Bright, who visited with Emerson and Hawthorne in 1852 after learning that Fredrika Bremer planned to express her displeasure with Hawthorne in her forthcoming Homes of the New World (1853). Bright and a friend named Burder were dining with Emerson, who invited Hawthorne to join them. Here is Bright's account: Hawthorne arrived, and seemed in decent spirits and all right. Unluckily, a moment or two before dinner Emerson maliciously said “I hear Hawthorne that Miss Bremer makes honourable mention of you.” “Where?” asked Hawthorne; Emerson appealed to Burder who had mentioned to Emerson the story I had told him about Miss Bremer: Burder threw the onus of it all on me, and I had to blurt out that I didn't know that anything was printed, Miss B. had mentioned Mr. H. in private conversation. “My interview with Miss Bremer was not a very successful one,” said Hawthorne, and, dinner being announced, he said he could not stay, and vanished, to my annoyance and Emerson's amusement. (399–400) Hawthorne could sense a slight, no matter how subtly delivered.As is widely known, during his first residence in Concord, Hawthorne satirized Emerson by name in several publications, mainly “The Old Manse,” where he appears “with that pure, intellectual gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a shining-one,” but one jibe I found that seems to have gone unnoticed appears in Hawthorne's editing of Horatio Bridge's Journal of an African Cruiser (1845). Emerson, in his 1844 Antislavery Address, lavishes praise on the British for ending their slavery in the West Indies, yet Hawthorne in the Journal makes it clear that British cruisers on the coast of Africa, when they capture slave ships, do not take the freed slaves back to Africa but transport them as “emigrants” to their West Indian colonies, where they labor under “wretched” conditions. Hawthorne points out (contra Emerson), “[H]owever benevolent may be the motives that influence the action of Great Britain, in reference to the slave-trade, there is the grossest cruelty and injustice in carrying out her views” (52). Unintended consequences seldom escaped Hawthorne's ironic notice. They pervade much of his fiction.In the spring of 2008, as I was researching Hawthorne's specific contributions to the Journal of an African Cruiser, I spent some pleasant hours, along with Lee Person, examining the marginal markings in Bridge's copy of his book in the Longfellow-Hawthorne Library at Bowdoin. Lee and I explored the possibility of coediting a scholarly edition of the Journal, but could not find a press that was interested at the time. In June of 2016, at the suggestion of Julie Hall, I returned to Bowdoin, to prepare a brief note on the marginalia, but to my surprise, as I researched the who, where, and why of the materials, the project expanded into a thirty-page manuscript titled “Transatlantic Visions and Revisions of Race: Hawthorne, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, and the Editing of Journal of an African Cruiser,” which Julie published in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review for Fall 2016. The piece argues that a black, self-educated, American-African political leader, Liberian Governor Joseph Jenkins Roberts, attempted to educate two white Bowdoin College graduates about the construction of racial identity.My friends Bob Levine and Al Von Frank have both suggested the African Cruiser materials have the makings of a larger scholarly study, and I can see that, but at present I'm content to let someone else undertake it. I've thoroughly enjoyed reading and writing about Hawthorne for more than forty years, but “in the early candle-light of old age,” as Whitman called it, I find the wayside exerting an irresistible appeal.