Selected Tales and Sketches Read Online Free PDF

seeking variously to amuse or mildly edify whoever happens to have the price of admission to some village theater. The dichotomy is too cruelly and humorously perfect to be anything but Hawthorne’s satiric yet not quite self-pitying version of the problem of secular or “historical” literature in a puritanic or “typological” culture. It even sheds a little light on the tone and bearing of the famous “writer of story books!” passage in “The Custom-House. ”
    What follows most immediately from this highly suggestive beginning is, clearly, the Story-Teller’s first public performance: an impromptu recitation of a rather tall tale called “Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe” (1834), which used to be taken, in isolation, as evidence of Hawthorne’s real gift for local color along with a spurious capacity for gratuitous over-plotting, but which can yet be recovered as an outrageous parody of the philosophical problem of “testimony,” particularly as it relates to the Christian story of a miraculous resurrection. The audience laughs uproariously, at nothing more than the name of the nominal protagonist, even as the Story-Teller deploys the schoolbook (but still potent) skepticism of David Hume; and even as Eliakim Abbott preaches that nearer-home cruci fixion of Christian repentance, to a small congregation in the narrow confines of the local schoolhouse. Suddenly Hawthorne’s talent for spiritual dilemma appears terribly up-to-date. Yet perhaps a present cultural situation is also history, whenever we choose to problematize it as such.
    What was to follow along after this latter-day definition of the enduring “literary” hegemony of Puritanism will probably never become entirely clear. Evidently our fictional exponent (possibly to be named “Oberon”) and his evangelical antagonist were to wander, in tandem and in tension, all around New England, observing what they found, philosophizing their radical differences, and situating, one way or another, a number of tales which opened the spiritual history of a country many observers declared barren of significance and hence of literary opportunity. Most of the tales and local sketches Hawthorne published between 1834 and 1837 have been more or less plausibly assigned to “The Story-Teller” but, as the significant connections have been impossible to reinvent, such ascriptions have seemed not so much speculative as empty. This collection includes only one compound example of “what might have been”: “The Ambitious Guest” (1835), a moralized tale of what might be called the insecurity of nature, and which appears to echo Jonathan Edwards’ infamous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” is clearly (if partially) prepared for by the “aweful” speculations of a sketch called “The Notch,” which was published as part of a larger unit called “Sketches from Memory by a Pedestrian” (1835). It is just possible that a few other such relationships may yet be discovered among the large assortment of tales and sketches which appeared separately in these years. But for the most part “The Story-Teller” comes down to us more as a cultural idea than as a literary reality.
    Yet the idea remains full of critical significance. For one thing, the example of its elaborate narrative plan forces us to recognize the first collection Hawthorne did succeed in publishing as in fact a “miscellany.” The cogently titled Twice-told Tales (1837)—which Horatio Bridge silently underwrote, even as his letters volubly tried to cheer up his badly discouraged college chum—really did end Hawthorne’s long stint as nameless writer-of-supply for New England magazines and Christmas gift books; and clearly it did much, as the Preface to its third edition (1851) famously confesses, “to open an intercourse with the world.” But it