Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter with Joanna's notes
on the Cuban literacy campaign. I'm appreciative
of the intelligence and astuteness of her comments.

Giving literacy further thought, I infer a spectrum
ranging from the ability to decipher ones name and address,
to fluency with Shakespeare or Milton. If literacy is
to include also facility in writing, the spectrum of
literate persons becomes even broader.

Yesterday I spent a few hours making notes on the
Scarlet Letter, which I'll append below but which 
you should feel no obligation to read. Although I
have very few patients, - only two today, - it's
still difficult to find the leisure to work on my
novel, which - since you ask -, I started years ago.
I don't remember when. It now has a life of its own
parallel to mine. As I wrote earlier, there's no
end in sight.

My sister seems to be recovering from her clostridium
diarrhea, and is eager to get back to Virginia to
pack her car and drive away - into the wild blue yonder.
Klemens and I tell her that what she proposes will 
lead to catastrophe. When and where? Who knows? I'm
sensitive to and sympathetic with her desperation. It
isn't easy for her, and it isn't easy for her family.

Please stay well, and give my best to Ned.

Jochen

_               ======================

_            Who's who in the Scarlet Letter

1. "Literature" is anything that is read. Most literature
is read without further concern about what it means. One
reads the newspaper to find out about "what happened" in
Washington or in Beijing. One reads a mystery story to find
out "who done it". One reads the obituary page to find out
who died. One reads the election returns, to learn "who won".

2. Everything that one reads can have a "deeper meaning."
One may obtain from his account a hint of what the author wished
to tell, of what sort of person the author was, and what sort
or a world he or she lived in. One may find, or try to find
in what one reads an explanation of ones own experience,
a clarification of ones own hopes and desires, and sometimes
consolation for ones own disappointments.

3. Reading material in which one expects to find a "deeper meaning"
is traditionally referred to as literature; and to find a "deeper
meaning" in what you read is one of the purposes of your English
courses in high school. You're being asked to find a "deeper meaning"
in Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. I myself read the Scarlet Letter for
the first time a few days ago. I downloaded the text from the Gutenberg
Project of the World Wide Web, read it in one sitting, in one day,
and being 79 years old, I have undoubtedly already forgotten much that
I read. Your first task, therefore, is to check up on me; make sure
I'm not confused about details of the story, and make sure I don't
confuse you.

4. The Scarlet Letter begins with a very personal theme. Hawthorne wants
you to know that he has moved from the Old Manse in Concord to a new
job at the Customs House in Salem, just 29 miles away. While geographically
it was even in those days just a long days' journey from Concord to
Salem, intellectually for Hawthorne at least, Salem was still haunted
by the spirits of Bridget Bishop, George Burroughs, Giles Corey, Mary Easty,
Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, John Proctor, Philip & Mary English, and all
the other witches who were hung on nearby Gallows' Hill. The Salem Customs
House to which Hawthorne retreated was a world far removed from the Concord
of Emerson and Thoreau.

5. For Emerson, Thoreau and the other Transcendentalists, the salient
issue of existence was the harmony and sometimes the conflict of
society and solitude. In Hawthorne's writing, the salient issue of
existence appears as the battle between good and evil. Hawthorne's
life suggests that when he encountered either of them, he recognized
neither. (He supported both slavery and the fugitive slave law.)

6.  Instead of simply saying: "I became the editor of this tale
when I worked at the Custom-House." Hawthorne writes:

_     "It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House
_     sketch has a certain propriety, of a kind always
_     recognised in literature, as explaining how a large
_     portion of the following pages came into my possession,
_     and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a
_     narrative therein contained.  This, in fact--a desire
_     to put myself in my true position as editor, or very
_     little more, of the most prolix among the tales that
_     make up my volume--this, and no other, is my true
_     reason for assuming a personal relation with the public. 
_     In accomplishing the main purpose, it has appeared
_     allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint
_     representation of a mode of life not heretofore
_     described, together with some of the characters that
_     move in it, among whom the author happened to make one."

Hawthorne's style corresponds to the content of his story.
Both are neo-gothic. The ornate style is as redundant as the
"gingerbread" cornice decorations of Victorian architecture;
the contents are as suffused with unchallenged superstition
and unlamented cruelty as the morality of the Puritan divines.

7. When an author writes about a distant landscape he writes
at minimum about the spiritual world in which he is living.
When he describes heroes and villains, more likely than not
he writes about himself. Although it may not be immediately
apparent, when Hawthorne writes about Chillingworth,
he writes also about himself. de nobis fabula narratur.

8. At this juncture, I'm confronted with a dilemma.  My
dilemma is that I propose to take Hawthorne, his wife Sophia
Peabody, Emerson and the other Transcendentalists more
seriously than they take themselves.  I find such exaggeration
sometimes to be useful in penetrating to the meaning of a text,
but I am aware that by exaggerating I make myself an easy
target for my critics, who want to prove me wrong. So I'll
proceed cautiously.

9.  The focus of Hawthorne's imaginative composition is Hester's
conjugal relationship with Chillingworth. The focus of Hawthorne's
real life is Sophia Peabody's conjugal relationship with Hawthorne.
Chillingworth, a physician with deep insight into the human soul
is described as follows:

"Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinised his patient carefully, both
as he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed
pathway in the range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he
appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of
which might call out something new to the surface of his
character.  He deemed it essential, it would seem, to know the
man, before attempting to do him good.  Wherever there is a heart
and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged
with the peculiarities of these.  In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought
and imagination were so active, and sensibility so intense, that
the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its groundwork
there.  So Roger Chillingworth--the man of skill, the kind and
friendly physician--strove to go deep into his patient's bosom,
delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and
probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker
in a dark cavern.  Few secrets can escape an investigator, who
has opportunity and licence to undertake such a quest, and skill
to follow it up.  A man burdened with a secret should especially
avoid the intimacy of his physician.  If the latter possess
native sagacity, and a nameless something more,--let us call it
intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable
prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power,
which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such
affinity with his patient's, that this last shall unawares have
spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such
revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so
often by an uttered sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate
breath, and here and there a word to indicate that all is
understood; if to these qualifications of a confidant be joined
the advantages afforded by his recognised character as a
physician;--then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of
the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark but
transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the
daylight."

What else is Hawthorne the author, but a physician with deep
insight into the workings not only of the human soul, but
into the workings of nature herself? Chillingworth undertakes
to destroy Dimmesdale by persistently and continually reminding
Dimmesdale of the evil lurking in Dimmesdale's soul. Hawthorne
persistently and continually reminds the reader of the wickedness,
the evil and the witchcraft which lurk among the citizens of
Boston and with which some of them commune when they escape the
town and flee into nature. Could it be that Hawthorne's morbid
obsession with devils and with evil is spiritually destructive
in a manner analogous to the destructiveness of Chillingworth?

10. Hester, Chillingworth's wife, has a child by Arthur Dimmesdale.
Hence, to put it mildly, she is afflicted with divided loyalty. I'm not
about to suggest that Hawthorne's wife, Sophia Peabody had an affair
with any other man, but I need to point out that if one takes matters
of the intellect and of the spirit seriously, Sophia Peabody did have
a potentially devastating divided loyalty of her own, which grew out
of her Transcendentalist heritage and affiliation.  My knowledge of
the Hawthornes' family affairs though insufficient to press the
argument, is not insufficient to ask the question, whether Sophia's
Transcendentalism might not have been the spur that moved Hawthorne
to explore the possibility of making his home with her at Brook Farm,
and when Brook Farm turned out to be impractical, to moving with
Sophia into the Old Manse in Concord, and most poignantly, to ask,
how did Sophia Peabody respond when her husband repudiated everything
that she and her family and her friends in the Transcendental movement
believed in?

11. Literary history tells that Hawthorne himself conclusively
repudiated or betrayed Transcendentalism with its humanitarian
philanthropy and its empathy with the slaves.  The Blithedale
Romance, and the campaign biography of Franklin Pierce can leave
no doubt of Hawthorne's apostasy.  Sophia Peabody adored her husband;
she delighted in reading his writings at least twice (which to
my mind, isn't saying much) and I've never seen any suggestion
that she disapproved of his obscurantism, of his repudiation of
Transcendentalism, that she disapproved of his pro-slavery and
pro fugitive slave act views.

12. Even when social and political expediency mandate their concealment,
deep ideological divisions never disappear. I am unable to ignore the
circumstance that Ralph Waldo Emerson was a preacher and lecturer with
enthusiastic audiences, just like Arthur Dimmesdale. Moreover, like
Arthur Dimmesdale, Emerson's success as a preacher was expressive
of the presumed absence of evil from himself and his audiences. If
evil was as pervasive as Hawthorne surmises, then in denying evil
Ralph Walso Emerson was a hypocrite of whom the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale
was a parody.  I ask my potential critics to note, that I don't
insinuate that Emerson was the father of Una Hawthorne, but I suggest
that Emerson was a spiritual mentor who had some claim on the loyalty of
Sophia Peabody, and that Hawthorne had reason enough to be vindictively
jealous if not of Emerson, then of the likes of him.

13. In comparing my reflections on Hawthorne with traditionl
literary criticism, such as F. O. Matthiessen's "American
Renaissance", I recognize my mistake of taking both Hawthorne
and Emerson more seriously than they took themselves.
Hawthorne was not cut out to be a reformer, a moralist
or a theologian. He wanted to write books that would be popular,
that would sell, books from which he could earn a living.
Mystery stories about witches and demons is what people wanted
to read, and Hawthorne was prepared to satisfy their wishes.
Nor was Emerson a passionate philosopher or theologian.
He valued the cameraderie with his literary contemporaries
more highly than any ideological premise. Although he agreed
neither with Hawthorne's politics, nor with Hawthorne's
ethics, nor with Hawthorne's esthetics, it was not at
all inconsistent of him to be one of the pall-bearers
that carried America's most famous author to his grave.

I acknowledge that I am inclined to take Hawthorne's writing
more seriously than did Emerson, Thoreau, or for that matter
Hawthorne himself. What reconciled those prominent authors
to one another was the success of their publications. Like
members of an intellectual club of some renown, each one
derived more benefit from the public esteem accorded to
their community than from the clear and unvarnished
assertion of his ideas.  Their artistic and intellectual
efforts in the end seem calculated to reaping the benefits
of fame.  The critic who assumes that they cared more about
substance than about appearance, makes himself ridiculous.

14. I have posted a number of short essays on Transcendentalism
and on Hawthorne on my web-site:
http://home.earthlink.net/~ernstmeyer/bookgroup/bookgroupindex.html