Hawthorne: A Life (2003)

Few of the personages of past times are anything more than mere names to their successors. They seldom stand up in our Imaginations like men. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote these words in his early bio-sketch of Sir William Phips, governor of Massachusetts from 1692-95. But in our living years, the sentiment could well be self-applied by the author, particularly in regard to James Mellow's 1980 biographical treatment Nathaniel Hawthorne in his Times, a comprehensive and encyclopedic work, essential as a reference but most often a cold and dark reading experience, with few visible details.

A license must be assumed in brightening the materials which time has rusted ... fancy must throw her reviving light on the faded incidents which indicate character, whence a ray will be reflected, more or less vividly, on the person to be described. Following this charge, Brenda Wineapple provides the recently published Hawthorne: a Life, which infuses historical fact with lively details. But rather than resort to fancy, she makes liberal use of extracts from letters and journals, enabling the easy-flowing narrative to reach back and capture a contemporary Hawthorne in all his conflicted glory, rending him tenderly human as the musing, frustrated author of tales and novels that have aged and grown beyond the scope of any life he could imagine -- and he was capable of imagining quite a lot.

Born on July 4th, 1804, in bustling, "self-obsessed" Salem, Hawthorne divided his childhood between the city and a wooded family estate in Maine. There, finding more happiness in isolation, he began the habit of deliberate extraction from the mainstream of society that would continue throughout his life. Sent back to Salem for schooling, Hawthorne injured his foot and hobbled for over a year, refusing at times even to walk; this telling, self-punitive rebellion allowed for secluded self-education: "Instead of pursuing the ragtag parade of schoolboys with muskets, Nathaniel could study ... lying at home on the carpet, where he built a house of books for the cats."

Following education at Bowdoin College (classmates included Horatio Bridge, Henry Longfellow, and lifelong friend Franklin Pierce), Hawthorne entered a state of jittery suspension; he secretly longed to pursue a life of the mind, and scribbled accordingly, though plagued by reservations: Authors are always poor Devils, and therefore Satan may take them. As Wineapple points out: "Idle, ambitious, and damned either way." It seems almost ridiculous to contemplate, that the man who would write the first great American novels would be so reticent and unsure of his own talents: I shall never make a distinguished figure in the world, and all I hope or wish is to plod along with the multitude.

This grapple between the demands and responsibilities (both perceived and palpable) of employment, and the less-restrictive observational life of an author continually vexed Hawthorne. Wineapple points to this struggle as the best explanation for his otherwise confusing decision to toil at Brook Farm, the famed Transcendentalist commune, for most of a year, despite his non-commitment to (and sometimes downright derision of) the founding principles. He was more interested in buying himself time to write, and in working to provide a comfortable, stable home for future wife Sophia, in hopes of ending their protracted, secret engagement. (Hawthorne was thirty-eight before they finally married -- "middle-aged" if not frankly old by the standards of the day.)

The major periods -- idyllic life in Concord & greater New England as husband and author, friend to Thoreau, literary guru to Melville, and cagey associate to Emerson; frustrated life in Salem as Customs Officer (cut abruptly short by political maneuvering); twilight life in Europe as government emissary and disconnected literary lion -- constitute the bulk of Wineapple's extrapolative attentions. Seen as socially demure (or taciturn and diffident depending on the reports, one of which has him ducking behind trees to avoid speaking to passersby) Hawthorne shied from putting himself forward with strangers but was warm and open when comfortable among friends.

(For contrast, a more tender, surprising view of Hawthorne can be found in the recently published Twenty Days with Julian and Little Bunny by Papa, an extract from his journals, accompanied by a terrific introduction from Paul Auster. With Sophia and the girls off visiting family, Hawthorne was left alone for three weeks with his five-year-old son. The account of this time -- the endless childhood questions, the forays into neighboring Shaker communities, and typical domestic crises -- is nothing less than a precise snapshot of early fatherhood, and delivered in language crisp and quick, not what is generally expected of Hawthorne.)

Meanwhile, his vacillations between public, salaried appointments and reclusive turns at authorship became more pronounced; at one point, Wineapple explains: "He said he couldn't compose fiction because, working for the government, he felt he no longer owned himself; but... Hawthorne held on to his government job not just because he needed the money or because the country ignored its artists, but because he liked it." Yet just a few years later, during the period that produced The Scarlet Letter, Sophia reports "He writes immensely. I am almost frightened about it". (Hawthorne himself more coldly -- though correctly -- characterized his spotty output: A life of much smoulder, but scanty fire.) And finally, Wineapple boils it down to: "Hawthorne needed the consulship as much as he needed to write ... writing meant everything to Hawthorne and yet cost everything. It was his heart of darkness, an isolation no one could fathom or relieve; it was a source of shame as much as pleasure and a necessity he could neither forgo nor entirely approve."

Perhaps most troubling to modern audiences are Hawthorne's ambiguous views of slavery and emancipation, and Wineapple is careful to reveal these within context. Hawthorne banked his later employment upon his friendship of (and thus the political policies of) Franklin Pierce, a man often blamed for contributing (via ineptitude) to the instabilities that led to the Civil War. To that end Hawthorne extended his loyalties, perhaps over-extended them; there is some evidence that he simply did not give the matter much thought beyond providing the opinions that were expected to tow the party line. Though he despised the slave trade, he also opposed emancipation -- a tricky stance, and one that earned him a good deal of criticism in his own time. Yet there is no doubt: the fighting of the Civil War, which he did not live to see the end of, broke his patriot heart: I hear the cannon and smell the gunpowder through everything.

Ultimately, Wineapple does for Hawthorne what David McCullough did for John Adams -- freeing him from history so that he may walk among us, again. It's a clear, populist approach, a daguerreotype in narrative, devoid of criticism or speculation. Yet, just as it is impossible (also, worthless) to render the life of a politician without discussing his politics, so it is with a writer and his work. Wineapple utilizes Hawthorne's fiction as an overlay for crucial moments in his life, deftly mapping parallels and intersections but without crossing into shady realms of sheer speculation. The works are dissected not for literary merit, but for humanistic evidence. Declining the role of critic, Wineapple concentrates more on what the stories might have meant to Hawthorne, less on what they might mean to an audience. And just as well to draw on this record -- Hawthorne was notorious for covering his own historical tracks, burning letters, manuscripts, journals, and begging friends and associates to follow suit. As he wished, his fiction stands as the testimonial to his life and thoughts; we are thus obligated to listen to it.

Stemming from a man so obsessed with shameful, suspicious legacy -- particularly his own harsh Puritanical ancestry -- it is tempting to note (though one must enter willfully into the realm of supernatural speculation to do so) the phenomena of Hawthorne's ongoing reputation and fame. Hawthorne's forefathers publicly flogged Quakers (great-great-grandfather William Hathorne) and presided in the Salem Witch Trials (great-grandfather John Hathorne). Young Nathaniel changed the spelling of his last name to distance himself from their blood, but that wasn't all. He wrote of these dubious achievements, as if to purge himself of a guilt he felt by association. Time and again in Hawthorne's writing, and nowhere more perfectly than in The House of the Seven Gables, the World seeks balance and retribution for wrongs committed, even if reparation must be done in secret, or if those who benefit from it cannot entirely grasp how things have been set right. As physical manifestation of that idea, modern-day downtown Salem (which now does honor the literary son it once drove away in disgrace) would not be recognized by those men who hanged the witches -- the open practice of Wicca, the horror-movie museums and haunted house attractions, and most especially the memorial that remembers the victims of their cruel injustice.

Redemption is the noble goal in Hawthorne's fiction, though it might never be achieved -- still, it is the reaching for that goal that matters most, not the attainment of it. And Nathaniel Hawthorne, via his writing, certainly did make the reach. And now it is more than 140 years since his death; still his name is spoken, and still his face is gazed upon in portraits -- quite the opposite of the anonymous, failed man he wrote of in "The Ambitious Guest." Hawthorne would perhaps be surprised. But who is to deny that some elemental force isn't still repaying him for the gesture -- Sarah Goode, perhaps, smiling down from above in eternal appreciation.

Originally published in the Mobile Register as "Humanizing Hawthorne," December 07 2003

Stone, Wood, Water

It is three days before Christmas and only a few degrees above freezing in Concord, MA when I crest the rise in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery known as Author's Ridge. Laid out below me is a slumping dell clustered with graves, wound through by footpaths that crisscross before leading back out through the trees. The morning light sets aglitter a few stubborn patches of snow; in contrast the slatted shadows of the evergreens seem as heavy as the tombstones over which they pass.

Family plots are numerous -- central obelisks swarmed by smaller stones, like satellites orbiting a fixed celestial point. Such are the markers for the Family Thoreau, at the head of the ridge. The focal marker is tall and stout but of modest craftsmanship, bearing only names and dates -- no titles, no epitaphs. At the northeast corner of the plot, on ground suitably gnarled with the exposed roots of a nearby oak, stands a simple weather-worn stone, barely a foot high. Henry. It is adorned by no "bawbles" but a few yellow flowers only, preserved in the cold, and by piles of smaller stones, undoubtedly brought by other pilgrims, from the Pond to here. Many a traveler came out of his way to see me…

The Thoreau family marker broadcasts a long shadow across the footpath, over a plot of graves even more anonymous, each marker carved identically with a single name: Hawthorne. We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death. Bartlett's 1885 guide to Concord describes Nathaniel's grave as "surrounded by a low hedge of arbor vitae, as if the gifted author sought in death the modest retirement which he loved in life." No such flora exists now, and I am left to guess that Hawthorne's grave is the one farthest from the path. It too is garlanded with frozen daisies.

A walk farther down this increasingly sunlit path reveals a who's-who resting ground of 19th century Transcendentalists and social reformers and literati who were the architects of the American Renaissance -- that moment when we at last shrugged off English and Continental cultural influences and came into our own on the stage of Global Thought. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the World. Here is Elizabeth Peabody, the progressive educator who opened the first kindergarten in the United States. Here is Harriet Lothrop, author of Little Peppers and How They Grew. Here is Sam Staples, the constable who jailed his friend Thoreau, thus inspiring Civil Disobedience. The Alcott family is marked by an elaborately carved obelisk, still faithfully decorated each Memorial Day by the residents of Concord.

Finally there stands a towering boulder of native pink quartz, alchemically glistening as though fresh from the quarry. Bartlett mentions that friends of Thoreau, after his passing, had intended to place just such a monument at Walden Pond; that dedication seems to have been reserved instead for his mentor and friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Give me insight today, and you may have antique and future worlds.

And here I pause. There is a natural expectation of graveyards for a spectral haunting, or at least some chance of revelation -- that to visit and refresh a feeling of loss and disconnection will allow us to reroute those emotions into something more privately constructive. These are the places where we might allow the Dead to lead us back to ourselves. A parapsychologist would argue that the expectation itself is the key; poltergeists appear only in conjunction with certain personality types, just as specific chemical reactions occur only when the correct elements are mixed in the correct proportions.

If so, then this particular morning the Dead and I don't mix. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. My own experience with death has convinced me funerals and burials and the hallowed grounds that result are for the living. (What living person haunts the site of his future burial, if he knows it? What ghost would want to linger at his eternal one?) The spirits of the departed, if they move among us, are more likely to do so in familiar environments, both psychic and physical, and appear to us in ways to which we are most receptive.

So though I have come here to pay my respects to a pocket of men and women who noticeably shaped their world, and I believe still weave a certain magic in our own, I am left bereft. I am too late, even to kneel before unfamiliar stones and send silent prayers, a few words of thanks… Perhaps they have been dead too long, and there is nothing beneath these rocks but dust, and more dust. For what are they in all their high conceit, when man in the bush with God may meet?

The fabled row of black ash trees leading to the front door of the Old Manse is now gone, as is the apple orchard which once connected the backyard with the bank of the Concord River. It is certainly the most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered, imperceptibly, towards its eternity, the sea. Only a few winter-barren birches remain. Leaves float on an updraft breeze, like angels seeking heaven at last.

The Manse itself appears much as it did in 1770, when it was built according to the specifications of Rev'd William Emerson (Ralph Waldo's grandfather), and the furniture within still dates from the time of construction. Relatively modest by current standards, the arched, barn-like structure was the first two-story (three, if you count the garret) home in Concord; chock-a-block extensions of the ground floor snake from the rear, toward the river -- symbolic of Concord at-large, which has expanded and modernized gracefully, retaining a historical identity without falling victim to excessive over-development and franchising.

This persistence of Native Spirit could very well be attributed to the silent influence of the Manse. Built for a minister and later inhabited mainly by clergymen, including Ezra Ripley, it seems a spot conducive to that reverence and meditation which concerns the soul. Awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written there. One exception was Nathaniel Hawthorne -- a "profane lay occupant," though certainly known for wrestling with his own Demons of Morality; Mosses from an Old Manse was scribed here, including Young Goodman Brown's midnight encounter with the Devil. Hawthorne claimed the house haunted by none other than Ripley -- describing how door latches would raise without the aid of human strength, and cold otherworldly gusts would sweep through the rooms.

As a gift to newlyweds Nathaniel and Sophia, upon their moving in, a new garden was planted on the south side of the house by Henry Thoreau; each spring this vegetable patch is resurrected, as per the specs of Hawthorne's journals, with the eventual produce donated to local soup kitchens. The giddy Hawthornes employed Sophia's wedding ring diamond to etch inscriptions in the windowpanes of the upstairs study (the room where Emerson wrote "Nature," a cornerstone of the Transcendentalist movement, a few years prior). These etchings can still be seen: Nath Hawthorne/This is his study/1843.

Through this same window, eighty-six years earlier, William Emerson viewed a singular skirmish on the planks of the Old North Bridge. Here once the embattled farmers stood. Four hundred minutemen, tipped off by Samuel Prescott, lay in wait for the advancing British army. (Paul Revere was already captured at Lexington, ten miles east of Concord.) Setting a pattern which has resonated throughout history, the Americans did not fire until fired upon, but at the command of Major John Buttrick -- Fire, fellow soldiers, for God's sake, fire! -- let loose volley after volley after volley, and sent the Redcoats scrambling.

The original bridge, of oak and stone, was dismantled in 1793 due to dilapidation from wear, weather, and war. When Hawthorne wrote the introduction to his Mosses, only a modest cenotaph erected in 1825 marked the spot. (Some locals were rankled that this monument stood on the east bank, where British, not Colonial soldiers, fell.) The North Bridge now in place, built in 1956 and of a design and materials meant to replicate the original, links with the west side where stands the famous Minuteman statue, commissioned by Louisa May Alcott's friend, Daniel Chester French.

If there is any ounce of soil that might be said to lay claim to the conception of the American nation, this is it. Yet this field, separated from the Manse grounds by a shin-high stone fence, interested Hawthorne less as a historic battleground than as a former Indian village. Thoreau, who has a strange faculty of finding what the Indians have left behind them, first set me on the search. It is not hard to imagine the two of them, Thoreau stooping low to scrape the earth with the blade of his garden-trowel, while Hawthorne allows himself a moment of distraction at the beauty of the early springtime blue squill in bloom. There is an exquisite delight in picking up an arrow-head that was dropt centuries ago, and has never been handled since, and which we thus receive directly from the hand of the red hunter.

The first places we go in seeking a past, whether personal or cultural, are the graveyards. The stones point the way back into immovable history, even as the temporal sun winds shadows around and around them. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it, but I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. We are, for the same reason, drawn to the wood in well-traveled homes -- window sills and doorframes, shelves, cabinets, the handles of hammers and shovels, knives and cutting boards -- any place that wears away beneath our hands, soaks up our natural oils, allowing the grain to rise and speak in testimony of our arrivals and departures, of the work we have done.

In the Concord woods, one half-mile from Walden Pond, is a ten-by-fifteen foot patch of land, lined in stone. A small house once stood here. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. A replica of that house stands nearer the pond; it is built of new and treated wood and will serve, for now, as well as any monument.

And here is a kettle-hole, formed 12,000 years ago by the retreat of a mighty glacier. It is lined with evergreens, along steep grades that lead down to a broad sandy cusp. The water is mirror-clear: green and silver where it reflects the trees and sky, shading to blue towards the center, where mysteries arise about its ultimate depth, a quarter-mile from shore. The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and does not approach to grandeur.

On the shore, a curiosity on this bitter winter day, a lone seabird pecks at the shallows. My life is like a stroll upon the beach, as near the ocean's edge as I can go. The temptation is too great not to walk toward it, as though it might carry some message... but the bird launches itself from the sand, over the water, then into the sky.

Overhead, the moon floats in the afternoon heavens -- that glowing rock loved by poets and dreamers ever since we have had language for our dreams. For it is those dreams that allow us to trespass against time -- and language that allows us to navigate the way. In a way, it is Language that brought you here... Heaven is under our feet.

Closer, to the spot so hurriedly abandoned by the seabird, where just beneath the water caressing the shoreline is a smooth white rounded stone, about the size of an egg and appearing to hold as many secrets, and as much promise. The water is cold, remembering the glacier it once was. The stone is quickly fished from the shallows, snatched from the threshold of another world. Not a stolen treasure, but a measure of wordless insurance -- proof that this place is real.

What better could be done for anybody, who came within our magic circle, than to throw the spell of a tranquil spirit over him? And when it had wrought its full effect, then we dismissed him, with but misty reminiscences, as if he had been dreaming of us.

Originally published in the Mobile Register, June 30 2002

Haunted in Salem

We got lost, wending our way into Salem. The highways surrounding Boston (which were well marked... weren't they?) sent us spiraling deeper, deeper into the New England landscape. Gazing at the frost-encrusted granite and the shuddering white birches along the roadsides, it was no stretch to imagine that we were intersecting, late by more than a century and at inconsiderate speed, some well-trodden path favored by Henry David Thoreau in a search for berries, or Nathaniel Hawthorne on one of his solitary, melancholy constitutionals.

Weaving through Danvers (where the infamous witch trials actually took place, where slave Tituba spun supernatural tales for impressionable young girls), then Peabody, we at last landed in downtown Salem. The historical center is still a drowsy village huddled at the water's edge -- at least, as drowsy as the tourist trappings allow. My first view of the city was a narrow, cobbled street, lined on either side with shop windows displaying all manner of "witch" merchandise. It was as if the gift kiosk outside the Haunted Mansion at Disney World had spawned an entire town, or Anne Rice had spellbound and redecorated the French Quarter in her own image.

Perhaps due to familiar association, I was not immediately struck by the plethora of shore-side commercialism. Those of us who've seen decades pass on the Gulf Coast treasure our memories of unspoiled dunes as wave upon wave of developers now strike the beaches and ever-cresting condominium roofs pile toward the horizon. In that spirit, several Bostonians chided my excitement to see the town: "Walden? Salem? Those are tourist traps now, too commercial…" Still, I was like a person coming to the shoreline for the first time, having been landlocked for months in some cold climate, to be dazzled, despite the condos, by the glistening white sands, by the thump and rush of the waves, by the sunlight melting through the salt-flecked atmosphere. By those natural forces which exist -- and will continue to exist -- despite what man erects to exploit them.

Salem, maybe, has something humanely tangible to "exploit." There is a perpetual Halloween atmosphere, and the holiday itself is celebrated with as much intensity and verve as is Mardi Gras on Southern shores -- museums, shops, restaurants, even private homes are transformed into graveyards, haunted houses, spooky dungeons. But these surface clichés belie an undercurrent of seriousness -- selling Witch City fridge magnets is the least they can do. Here, the supernatural is sincerely indulged; as if in penance for all the wrongs committed in the name of the Unseen, there is now not mere tolerance but actual liberty. The Witch Trials Memorial, a stone's throw from the central burying ground, was dedicated in 1992 by Holocaust historian Elie Wiesel. In a candleshop I overheard the word coven spoken without stigma, being used synonymously with congregation. Salem is home to Laurie Cabot, officially appointed in 1988 as State Witch. And farther towards the old seaport, the souvenir shops remain but take on a more underground flavor, and the windows become a little darker, a little more suggestive. There's a definite sense that all this isn't being done merely to attract tourists… though that's certainly the acceptable impression.

But I wouldn't be haunted, at least not by witches. Due to time constraints, I was unable to visit Concord, Thoreau's stomping grounds. (Though I did at least learn the correct pronunciation -- rhymes with conquered -- and anyone saying, as I always had, "CON-cord" would be looked upon with as much disdain as would a Yankee in these parts mouthing a word such as "MO-beel" when everyone knows it's properly pronounced "moe-BEEEEEL.") I was thus intent on getting an eyeful of the House of the Seven Gables.

At the dead end of Turner Street, the Pyncheon home (actually the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion) still overlooks the gull-infested north end of Salem Harbor. It is now part of a settlement association, and the grounds contain a collection of five other trucked-in structures, including Hawthorne's birthplace (which resembles a mini-Old Manse); all of these are on the National Register of Historic Places, thereby qualifying the site as its own historic district. The famed House of Seven Gables, built in 1668, is itself one of the oldest surviving 17th century wooden houses in New England. Painted a dark, dark gray, it is actually of humble size, though composed of odd, near-occult angles.

I visited at low tide on a cloudy day, seabirds invisible among the lower cumulus, their disembodied cries drifting eerily through the air. Hawthorne, the Alcotts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, all of whom knew this place, would doubtless have seen identical days, from identical standpoints. And here was I, in this age of cellphones and internet (not to mention the jet that had helped bring me to this spot), marveling at the "coincidence" -- though I have stood innumerable mornings on the concrete pier of my own small home town, and heard the same sorts of birds, smelled the same sort of brackish, salt-tuned air.

It is interesting how the mind seeks, even strains for, such associations -- definite, archetypal points in time, constructed of our environments -- for the purpose of deeper, familiar connection, either to ourselves or to those who have passed before us. Such is the purpose of the Civil War re-enactor, charging a rise which, at least for an afternoon, he believes to be Cemetery Ridge; or the pilgrim daring the desert sands, bent towards Mecca; or for that matter the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox ritual of Transubstantiation -- these are our best efforts, our willful, faithful reconstructions of the Past into a new life, and a new memory.

I'd experienced the same heaviness of history the day before, in Boston, in the Old South Meeting House on Washington Street -- where Benjamin Franklin had been baptized, where George Washington had made one of the first speeches ("How dare they speak of the sanctity of their churches while they desecrate our own?") of the Revolutionary War -- as I listened to the plank flooring creak beneath my feet. And in the Granary Burying Ground on Tremont Street, walking past the resting places of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere. Slate gravestones from the 17th century rose from freshly fallen 21st century snow, bearing astonishing carvings of winged skulls and morose angels that were like visions delivered from the depths of Time.

A man and woman just up the path were remarking on the designs -- they seemed too weird and scary to her, too gothic, almost disrespectful by today's standards. I thought then of a retired old man I had once known who kept a geode shop in a converted garage, polishing and cutting into stones to reveal delicate layers of crystals, cragged ice-like geometric patterns, tiny secret caves lined with glistening rainbow-flecked minerals. Walking into his shop, folks never ceased to oooh and aaah at the contents of his display cases. "Whatever rock they pick," he would say, "always tells you something important about that person." He never explained this nugget of psychic-geomancy, but I always took it as that -- people would choose, knowingly or not, a stone that somehow revealed their inner composition, that spelled out the mysteries behind the human geology of their own faces, the crags time would eventually reveal.

There are moments of such recognition, when our souls ring, as a bell struck. I stared and stared at the House of Seven Gables, waiting for such a moment. I walked around it and counted the windows. I rested my hand on the front door-knocker. Eventually there did come a lonesome tolling -- from the church near the central burying ground, where we had parked our car. Merely a reminder that it was time to return to Boston.

Walking back, we followed the waterline, and I stopped to examine the reproduction of a pirate ship docked at the long, turfed protrusion of Derby Wharf. No doubt a souvenir boutique, I mused, allowing myself, after being surrounded by so much history yet not quite touched by it, a flash of cynicism. Which was the moment one of my traveling companions said, in the laconic manner of one simply marking the time: "Oh, there's the Customs House."

We'd already walked past it. It was as if it had chosen this instant to materialize, out of the past, just over my shoulder. Brick and granite and topped by a shining brass eagle, yet nearly unassuming -- essentially unchanged in the more than 150 years since Hawthorne described it lovingly, if bitterly, in the opening sketch of The Scarlet Letter. And as clearly as any cloud above or wave below, there, I swear, I could verily see the man, standing on the marble steps, one hand on the brass rail, coat tail fluttering in the ocean breeze -- seeing him as surely as others, long before me, had seen him of a morning, pausing for a pre-work chat, or to scan the sky for traces of impending rain. Yet, oddly, this figure, which I can still so clearly envision with my mind's eye, is nowhere in the photograph I snapped, not even a shadow…

As if the steely blue-eyed literati, Salem's favorite son, has forsaken my Kodak Moment, silver nitrate and all, just as he had eventually forsaken Salem itself: "My native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist brooding over and around it; it ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else."

Originally published in the Mobile Register, October 29 2000