Italian Hours

I discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s luminous novel The Marble Faun (1860) after a self-imposed delay of over sixty years. When I was reading English at Cambridge in the late 1950s, the only Hawthorne on the syllabus was The Scarlet Letter (see SF no.60). It had a powerful and lowering effect on me, and I don’t think I ever reread it, though I alluded to it in my third novel, The Millstone, where the narrator Rosamund at one point states that she ‘walked around with a scarlet letter embroidered upon [her] bosom . . . but the A stood for Abstinence, not for Adultery . . .’

After this early encounter, I avoided any further acquaintance with Hawthorne until Dale Salwak, an enterprising American academic and editor with whom I’ve had a long literary relationship, sent me his newly published biography of the author. After a few chapters I realized that I didn’t want to spoil the plots of these novels that I’d never read and decided to embark on The Marble Faun. What an astonishingly beautiful and radiant novel this is! I read it with intense delight, before moving on to The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and The Blithedale Romance (1852), which are also wonderfully readable. I have Salwak to thank for this introduction, and for many happy hours in and after lockdown when I was transported to other times and other places. The Marble Faun is the most magical evocation of Italy, and of Rome in particular, that I have ever read. There is a magnificent description of the formal but weathered beauty of the gardens of the Villa Borghese, ‘covered with trees, amid which appeared the white gleam of pillars and statues, and the flash of an upspringing fountain’. Hawthorne’s marble fountains dripping with moss and grasses and trailing maidenhair are rivalled only by those of the enraptured poet Rainer Maria Rilke. He conjures up the Spanish Steps and the Pantheon and the grandeurs of the Coliseum and St Peter’s and the Capitol, as well as the charm of many lesser-known and shabbier byways and thoroughfares. Reading about these places in Hawthorne’s words is almost as good as being there. I had thought Henry James the grand master of the New World’s admiration of the Old, but Hawthorne (whom James himself much admired) went before, and his travel writing is as impressive as that of James, which is high praise. He writes movingly of the effects of time on the many-layered fabric of the Eternal City – the bricks, the marble, the pavements, the mosaics, the stones themselves – and does not ignore the seedy side of Roman life, with its small shops, its ‘narrow, senseless sepulchral streets’ and its ugly comfortless artisan houses, its sour bread and its beggars, and the ‘nastiness’ that lies piled beneath its shrines and crosses. He comments wryly on the fashion for the ‘needless labour’ of constructing artificial ruins in Rome, itself ‘the native soil of ruin’, and the way these have with time become ‘venerable in sober earnestness. The result of all is a scene pensive, lovely, dreamlike, enjoyable and sad.’ But he is by no means always reverent: he is very funny about the Trevi Fountain, where, he says, ‘some sculptor of Bernini’s school had gone absolutely mad in marble’. (In one of his most acute comments Salwak remarks that Hawthorne is ‘an enchanting, often intentionally amusing storyteller’: true on every count.) This novel is not just a travel guide: it also gives the reader a vivid sense of the social life of what was already a tourist’s Rome, with its seasonal rhythm of Anglo-Saxon visitors, its coteries of resident artists, and the underlying menace of the Roman fever, malaria, which, he ambiguously declares, bestows ‘a final charm’ on the city. (His daughter Una contracted malaria there and was permanently disabled by it.) And we are introduced to a delightful quartet of characters: Hilda, the dovelike New England copyist-artist, who lives alone and aloft in a medieval dove-haunted tower, where she keeps alive an immemorial flame; Kenyon, the gifted and aspiring sculptor, whose Cleopatra, with her Nubian features, seems to prefigure by more than a century the Afrocentric thesis of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena; the enigmatic and dramatically beautiful painter Miriam, of unknown provenance, hiding some dark secret and pursued by a fatal follower; and Donatello, the youthful and at first utterly carefree Count of Monte Beni from Tuscany. Donatello is the marble faun himself, who may or may not conceal pointed and furry ears beneath his clustering locks, as did the original sculpture by Praxiteles. These four young people enjoy an extraordinary freedom of movement and of friendship, astonishing in the 1860s, and happiness is their natural mode, despite the overshadowing of a dark Gothic plot which is never clearly resolved and which I could not wholly follow. It involves catacombs and cadavers and skulls, a murder and a grisly Capuchin sepulchre. I am not the only person to have been somewhat baffled by the narrative, the ending of which has been much debated. The author himself confessed in an afterword that some details remained as ‘clear as a London fog’, but the mystery in no way diminishes one’s pleasure in the story, which unfolds with an effortless informality that makes one feel part of the author’s thinking and lets one share in his sense of discovery. I was reminded of my own pre-Cambridge student days in 1957 when I was lucky enough to attend the Università per Stranieri in Perugia for three months, and to discover the glories of Italian art and architecture. So nostalgia mingled with my delight, and brought back youth and friendships from the past. There are many incidental satisfactions in this volume, such as the portrayal of the artistic colony in Rome at that time, with allusions to many contemporary figures, English, American, Italian and even Welsh – John Gibson from Conwy, mentioned in the text, had studied under Canova, and was famous worldwide for his neoclassical bas-reliefs. Hawthorne knew this milieu well, and he knew his art history: two paintings, Guido Reni’s St Michael the Archangel and a famous portrait of Beatrice Cenci, beloved by the Romantic poets and at that time attributed to Reni, play an integral role in the plot. Reni was then at the height of his fame in the Anglo-Saxon world, rated second only to Raphael: the Beatrice is now widely attributed to a woman artist of the Baroque period from Bologna, Ginevra Cantofoli, a premise which would have added an interesting twist to Hawthorne’s narrative. When the scene moves to Donatello’s ancestral home in the Apennines, a castle of quasi-mythical, pre-Etruscan antiquity, we have a sense of yet another landscape, wilder and more rural, where in the Golden Age of childhood he had innocently spoken the language of the animals. There is a description of the passing of a thunderstorm which makes one’s hair bristle with wonder:

in the east, where the tempest was yet trailing its ragged skirts, lay a dusky region of cold and sullen mist, in which some of the hills appeared of a dark purple hue. Others became so indistinct, that the spectator could not tell rocky height from impalpable cloud. Far into this misty cloud region . . . hilltops were seen brightening in the sunshine; they looked like fragments of the world, broken adrift and based on nothingness, or like portions of a sphere destined to exist, but not yet fully compacted . . . the sculptor fancied that the scene represented the process of the Creator, when he held the new, imperfect earth in his hand, and modelled it.

Yet despite these grand poetic flights and his deep love of Arcadian antiquity, Hawthorne also had a curious and enquiring mind which strikes the reader as peculiarly modern, and he moves easily from mystification to lucidity. There is a surprising passage about Donatello’s pedigree, in which Hawthorne discusses the possibility that the Monte Beni family really did have faun-like furry ears, a point on which we are never enlightened, as the young man never lets his friends actually see his ears. Maybe, he suggests, this inbred ancient race had inherited and handed down this genetic peculiarity in the same manner and for the same reasons as the royal house of Habsburg had inherited what he calls the ‘Austrian lip’. We know he was interested in spiritualism and the afterlife, as were many of his contemporaries, but there was always in him something that questioned superstitions, that tried to seek the rational and the reasonable. The Marble Faun offers a wide range of attitudes to religion, which combine a conventional New England Puritan recoil from ‘priest-ridden Italy’ with a remarkably sympathetic account of the relief that the troubled Hilda finds in confession to an English-speaking priest in St Peter’s, the very epicentre of Catholicism and Popery, described in all its pomp and architectural grandeur. This powerful scene recalls the moment when Charlotte Brontë’s Lucy Snowe, driven almost crazy by loneliness, seeks consolation from a priest in Villette (see SF no.61), a novel published a few years before Hawthorne’s, which he could well have read. His mind was open, generous and impressionable. There is nothing in him of the judgemental harshness of his Puritan forefathers from Salem. He is an excellent and genial companion. Indeed he is fond of the word ‘genial’, which does not leap to mind when one thinks of The Scarlet Letter. I am very glad to have got to know him better.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Margaret Drabble 2025