The Price of Addle Tree

Not many pleasures attach to growing old. And as former pleasures pass away one by one, fewer still emerge, new and unrehearsed. Reading, albeit more slowly and through spectacles, remains a source of knowledge and provides the increasingly rare frisson of sheer delight. Most unexpectedly in my perilously lengthening lifetime, however, arrived the spanking new and rejuvenating joy of rereading.

As with all pleasures there is a risk of disappointment – nothing like as sharp, however, as the heartbreak of youthful disappointments. I was sorry but not moved to tears, for example, to find that Tristram Shandy, a favourite of my teens, did not tickle the older me, seemed, in fact, a trifle tiresome. But to reread is not simply to rediscover a forgotten book; it is also to discover at last who it was who read that book the first time – the serious little swot, for example, gleefully shocked by what she later took as read: ‘When the misfortune of my NOSE fell so heavily upon my father’s head . . .’ Holy smoke! Great Literature was allowed to be comic! By the same token, on a recent trip to America, I began to skim a novel my classmates and I used to dismiss as deadly, and to my surprise I found my more experienced self captivated by a masterpiece. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a gorgeous surprise for overstretched memory and superannuated organs of pleasure. Even better, here was an author who accorded with all my own prejudices. For as we grow old, we brook less and less disagreement, until finally we tolerate none at all: we do not dare, for gradually over the years we have become the sum of our opinions. Challenge one of them, even just the efficacy of cod-liver oil, and the whole construct trembles. In my opinion, and I don’t care what anyone says, my motherland America has ever been, and never more than now, twice as solemn, three times as reverential, and infinitely more tight-assed than any of her European parent nations. And here was Hawthorne agreeing with me. Americans were, he wrote in the late 1840s, a people ‘amongst whom religion and law were almost identical . . . and . . . thoroughly interfused’. ‘You can say that again, brother!’ I cried aloud, startling the book pedlar from whose stall in Princeton I had idly picked up Hawthorne’s dazzling work. There was more. ‘The people’, Hawthorne wrote, of the populace of Salem, Massachusetts, ‘. . . offspring of [English] sires who had known how to be merry . . . have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.’ I looked up from reading these words and saw a bench at a nearby bus-stop. Nailed to it was a notice: ‘No littering. No loitering. No sleeping.’ ‘What is there left to do on an American bench?’ I wondered. The Scarlet Letter begins on the threshold of the prison in Salem. A young woman, Hester Prynne, emerges before a jeering crowd. In her arms her illegitimate baby girl blinks against sunlight she has never seen; she was born in the cells. On the bodice of Hester’s dress, embroidered by her own hand, is the sign of infamy she has been condemned to wear: the scarlet ‘A’ naming her sin and labelling her ‘Adulteress’. From Hester’s life thereafter, under the burden of that blazing letter, Hawthorne makes a riveting tale while creating a protagonist who is the first genuine heroine of American literature. Writing as the omniscient author, Hawthorne nevertheless managed to go deep and true into his female protagonist’s heart, as many other men, artists too, have failed to do. Hester Prynne’s lonely suffering, the dignity and self-denial of her solitude – no lamentation, no exhortation to those who despised her – and most of all, her selfless devotion to Pearl, the vivid and captivating offspring of her transgression, comprise a kind of wisdom that is altogether womanly. The way Hester fancifully embroidered the bloody ‘A’ revealed the genius of a talented and courageous, genuinely moral woman trapped in a society of fundamentalists and hypocrites. ‘It was the art’, writes Hawthorne, ‘– then, as now, almost the only one within a woman’s grasp – of needlework. She bore on her breast in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative skill . . .’ One morning more than half a century ago, after my classmates and I had as usual pledged allegiance to the flag and the one nation indivisible under God for which it stood, our fourth-grade teacher Miss Carnes asked which of us baby Yanks could name the Ten Commandments. Murder, stealing, graven images and all the other easy ones had been taken by the time my turn arrived. Those were the days when a spinster was still a spinster. When I chirruped ‘Thou shalt not commit addle tree . . .’, it was clear from Miss Carnes’s thunderstruck expression that she had little more idea than I of what ‘addle tree’ actually was. Looking back, I have to wonder how my teacher hoped to get to a total of ten sins without counting the seventh. Vigorously she managed to sidestep the issue in spite of voices piping up from every corner of the room: ‘Please, Miss Carnes, what’s an addle tree? And why isn’t it allowed?’ Like so many gifted poets and novelists before and since, Hawthorne held down a soul-threatening day-job; he was a functionary in the custom-house of Salem. When The Scarlet Letter was first published, he prefaced it with a long introductory essay, ‘The Custom House’, which I was pleased to find my edition contained. It illustrates the difference in emotional engagement between irritable essayist and poetic novelist, both with axes to grind, and both in the same body. It also gives the lie to those who say my countrymen lack irony. Tension between artistic ambition and workaday drudgery generates irony even in Yankees. When Hawthorne is shockingly dismissed from a post he had assumed to be a lifetime sinecure, he writes: ‘In view of my . . . weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meets with the good hap to be murdered.’ One good book often leads to another. The warmth of my enthusiasm for The Scarlet Letter prompted me to buy the long treatise Hawthorne when I found it in one of my favourite browsing bookstores: Micawber’s of Princeton, New Jersey. (It was there, incidentally, that I exercised my constitutional right and signed a petition at the checkout desk objecting to the FBI’s power to requisition records from libraries and booksellers so they can see what suspects, and not-so-suspects too, choose to read, saving themselves the dirty job, I guess, of burning the books.) Hawthorne is a rare early study of an American author by another American author, the redoubtable Henry James. We old folks with wits still about us do not want to be humoured, only to be heard and agreed with, thank you. How gratifying therefore, to find that no less a literary personage than James admired Hawthorne as much as I. James cannot, of course, resist some carping over Hawthorne’s diction, but then he relents: ‘The Scarlet Letter has the beauty and harmony of all original and complete conception . . .’ Could I have put that better myself? It was from James’s critique that I learned of Hawthorne reading the final pages of his manuscript aloud to his wife and finding himself so flooded with emotion, he could barely speak. As, indeed, I found myself moved by the same pages on the bus back to New York. There is very little gaiety in The Scarlet Letter, but there is hope. After many years raising her fatherless child in Europe, Hester returns alone to grow old and die in Salem and voluntarily takes up the symbol of her shame once more. With time, the scarlet letter has ceased to be a stigma and becomes instead a source of awe, and of comfort. ‘Women, more especially – in the . . . trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passions – or with  the dreary burden of a heart . . . unvalued . . . came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy!’ Thus, finally, after decades of loss and atonement, Hester Prynne became agony aunt to good old witch-burning Salem. Now is that a happy ending or isn’t it? Outside the window of my bus on the approach to a small New Jersey town, I saw five small signs stuck into the bank beside the road. ‘Say NO to abortion!’ was printed in bold letters on each of them. For a moment I amused myself with the notion of designing bigger and bolder signs to plant in the rich country soil that read: ‘And bring back the Scarlet Letter!’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 4 © Irma Kurtz 2004