Aunt Kate said that years before in Boston she had known one of Hawthorne ’s sisters, who was a pleasant lady, all the more pleasant for being extremely limited. The sister had told her that her brother’s marriage had crowned him, that up to then he had been a recluse, forcing his family to leave his meals outside the locked door of his room. He did not go out during the day, Aunt Kate said, and did not see the sun save through the small window in his room. He seldom chose to walk in Salem, where he lived, except at night. In the dusky hours, she said, his sister had told her that the novelist took walks of many miles along the coast, or else wandered about the sleeping streets of Salem. These were his pastimes, she said, and these were apparently his most intimate occasions of contact with life. And, Aunt Kate added ominously, his sister told her that Nathaniel had never made a single penny from all his work as a writer.
Henry senior then asked Wilky and Bob for their view, since they had both studied at Sanborn with Julian, the novelist’s son. Even Wilky, who was seldom at a loss, could think of nothing to say except that Julian was a very fine fellow. Bob told the table that he had believed until this moment that the elder Hawthorne was a minister. He thought only women wrote stories.
Henry’s mother had not spoken until now. She interrupted the general laughter to say that she had known all of the Hawthorne sisters and that they had told her of an injury Nathaniel received while playing ball which had caused him much pain and difficulty over several years so that he was confined to bed. It was, apparently, this very confinement, she said drily, which led to his becoming a writer.
Having sought out Perry to discuss the book with him and to tell him what he had gathered about its author, Henry discovered that Perry knew more, that Nathaniel Hawthorne had recently travelled much in Europe, especially in England and Italy, that he was not, as Henry’s father had supposed, a country bumpkin, but a serious artist, well read, well travelled, possibly one of the most sophisticated minds in America. Over the rest of the summer, as Henry and Perry prepared to enter Harvard, they read and re-read all of Hawthorne ’s books and met most days to share their impressions.
THE WAR, that first summer, seemed oddly distant. Even the proximity of a field hospital at Portsmouth Grove did not bring the conflict any closer. They could, they were told, visit the convalescing soldiers, the invalid troops lying under canvas or in roughly improvized shanties, as onlookers, tourists almost. With Perry, Henry went over in the steamboat, unsure what he would say, or how he would avert his eyes from wounds or missing limbs. On arrival at the camp he noticed the silence at first; he and Perry were unsure whom to approach or if they needed to ask permission to do so. As no one came towards them, they spoke briefly to an unshaven soldier sitting in his underwear on a log outside a tent. His voice was soft, but his tone quite indifferent, and his eyes were drained of all energy. He was content to offer no detailed information, merely that the two visitors were free to speak to anyone or to go anywhere they wished. At the end of the exchange, when they were at a loss to know how to take their leave, Perry gave the soldier a coin which the man hastily put away, looking around him to check if he had been observed.
The sick soldiers lay inert, half dead, watching the two young men from Newport from the sides of their eyes. What struck Henry first was how young most of them seemed, so soft and raw. As he and Perry separated and each moved alone among the soldiers, he felt a great tenderness for them and a desperate urge to console them. He had expected open wounds and blood and bandages, but what he found instead much of the time were fevers and infections. He went where he thought he could, where a pair of eyes had fixed on him and seemed receptive, where a figure seemed not too fevered to be unreachable and not too hostile. He was careful not to say too much at the beginning in case his voice or his tone, added to his general bearing and his clothes, might appear offensively opulent, but soon it became clear that this did not seem to matter, that, if anything, it added to the shy guarded welcome he received from each of the soldiers he visited.
One of these, he discovered, was younger than he was, a blond youth with clear blue eyes totally devoid of fear or fright. He asked the boy politely how he had been injured, then leaned in close to listen to his reply. The boy said nothing at first, shaking his head from side to side, but soon, as though he had been interrupted and was resuming a previous conversation, he began to speak about how he had not felt the bullet entering his leg, he had not felt it at all, he said, as though that alone were his problem. It was nothing more than a bite from a bug, he said, and it was only when he put his hand down and touched the place, that a terrible burning began.
He had hated the waiting, the boy said, the days sitting doing nothing, getting orders to march one way and then orders to march another way, with rumours all the time and nothing happening. And now, he said, the waiting was all over and he wished he were back waiting again.
Henry told the boy that he was sure he would get better, but the boy neither assented nor demurred. He had learned stoicism, Henry thought, which sat oddly with his youth. The agony had somehow entered into his spirit and rested there, unyielding. Henry wondered if the boy’s parents had been told of his missing limb, or if they knew where their son was. He thought of asking if he wanted a letter written or word sent, but he did not feel he could ask. It was obvious that if the infection did not clear he would have further surgery or he would die, and what Henry could not fathom as he tried to speak naturally and gently to the boy was his calm bravery, his whispering readiness for what was coming.
In the end, when he could think of nothing else, he offered the boy money, which the injured soldier quietly accepted, and he wrote his address at Newport down for him in case he was in need once he had recovered. The boy studied the writing and nodded, unsmiling. Henry did not think he could ask him if he was able to read.
He sat on a deckchair on the steamboat back to Newport that evening, he and Perry keeping apart as the creaking vessel paddled slowly home. While he watched the dwindling light and wallowed in the fading heat, he felt involved for once in an America from which he had kept himself apart. He had listened carefully but he had not known how to respond. He tried to imagine that young man’s life under the canvas, battling for survival, expecting the worst while hoping for home. He tried to conjure up the moment when the surgeon’s knife was solemnly unsheathed and the leg held down, and whatever available morphine and whisky were taken, and the arms were pinned back and the gag put into the mouth. He wanted to hold his young friend, help him now that the worst was over, take him home to his family to be looked after. But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would not be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone its own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency.
And suddenly now, on this return journey by steamboat in the warm evening, with the view of the soft and settling horizon, the realization of how deeply real and apart this self was came fiercely home to him; how intact and separate this self was once the knife was cutting ruthlessly into the flesh of someone else, into the fat and muscles, the tendons and nerves and blood vessels, the hard bone of another self, the someone in agony who was not you, the someone injured far from home under the canvas. He realized that his own separateness was complete, inviolate, just as the soldier could never know the comfort and privilege which came from being the son of Henry James senior, who had been kept away from the war.