Selected Tales and Sketches Read Online Free PDF Page A

some principle of situationality or “world liness” was clearly trying to insist on itself, in relation to even the most imaginative of literary performances. Evidently a mind haunted by reverie and recollection was to be given a local habitation and a name.
    But the collection was cut up: first by the editorial decision (of Samuel Goodrich) that it was not suitably publishable as a book but might profitably appear serially, in successive numbers of the New-England Magazine; and then, according to the dictate of yet another editor (Park Benjamin), that its various tales and sketches would have to appear independently, without the connecting links of setting or narrative situation. One thing thus became very many, each falling out of relation to the others and to some idea of a literary whole. Moreover, each individual thing lost part of its essential self-definition; for, even as Hawthorne’s project was about to demonstrate, literary meaning is never so inherent as to defy the rhetorical powers of speaker, occasion, and audience. And so it is not hard to believe the testimony of Hawthorne’s sister-in-law (Elizabeth Peabody) that when they “tore up the book,” Hawthorne “cared little for the stories afterward, which had in their original place ... a great deal of significance.”
    Yet out they flooded, in the two or three years that followed, in the New-England Magazine and elsewhere; to be regrouped, sooner or later, in the various collections Hawthorne’s improving luck and growing fame would authorize; but never as the composite cultural whole his all but inviolable historicity had first imagined. Whence our own largely ahistori cal criticisms have had to take them up, one by one, each as some strangely dislocated or remarkably intense thing “in itself.” Or else as fragments of some quaintly localized version of the romantic bildungsroman —as if the growth of the artist’s own mind were the only available topic of interest.
    In fact, however, the enabling cultural premise and even the initial framing construction of “The Story-Teller” have survived the original editorial deconstruction and the subsequent literary misprision: the premise alone, in a suggestive but probably superseded experiment called “The Seven Vagabonds” (not included in this volume); and both together, with clear and operative intention, in an intriguing four-part sketch which acquired the awkward and somewhat pitiful title of “Passages from a Relinquished Work.” “Vagabonds” (1833) sets loose a “strolling gentleman,” eager to become an “itinerant novelist,” among a crowd of show-men, gypsies, and confidence men-idlers all, and all on their way to a Methodist camp meeting, there to divert the sober gentry as they rise up from the “anxious bench” of their sin and salvation; in the very next moment, however, the tale swiftly defeats the idle purpose of this hilarious little pilgrimage with the austere revelation, delivered by the lonely but imposing figure of the “circuit-riding” Methodist himself, that his revival meeting is quite “broke up.” The ending has seemed a bit abrupt, yet the thematic implication is perfectly clear: according to somebody’s dichotomy of spiritual culture, the literary career is being set over against the evangelical calling. And then, as if this obvious and painful dialectic could indeed have been missed, the “Fragments” (1834) puts it forth again.
    A would-be storyteller elects to break free of the faithful watch of his ministerial foster parent, taking to the road with only his native wit for a saving grace. Instantly, however, he is joined by another would-be liver-off-the-word, an evangelical preacher named Eliakim Abbott. An odd couple, surely; yet henceforth the two will itinerate together, the one preaching salvation to all those who have ears to hear, the other