Samuel Coale

“A Monstrous Oeuvre of Manichean Proportions”


If the title I’ve flung at the head of this review sounds a bit overripe, it’s because I want to prepare you, dear reader, for a certain reality. In Hawthorne’s Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer is no vademecum or enchiridion for a day at the beach! Truth be told, some of Professor Coale’s prose is as dense as anything I’ve ever read — and as a former philosophy major at Columbia University, I’ve read some damned dense stuff in my time!

First do yourself a little favor (as I did, albeit belatedly): look up “Manichean” if you’re not already on back-slappy terms with the word. Why? Because you’re going to see that qualifier applied more often in the next couple of dozen hours’ reading time than you’ve probably seen, heard or read the word “mommy” in your lifetime. You might want to tear your hair out or at least launch the book into oblivion after you’ve seen it a few hundred times. But hold your horses: there are some other treats in store—most of which are neither manic nor Manichean, but rather downright delectable!

In Hawthorne’s Shadow is literary criticism of the highest order in which Professor Coale does a heroic job not only of explicating Hawthorne’s text, but also of bringing certain other writers to the fore. Whether you buy into Coale’s assertion that Hawthorne was the “father” of the American Romantic tradition and, ipso facto, the artistic “grandfather” to a lot of American writers from Melville to Didion, what Coale does quite convincingly is show you why he thinks Hawthorne deserves both accolades. Moreover, he manages to convince you (or at least to convince me!) that any number of American writers you/I might’ve overlooked until now are well worth a read. I may never again read Hawthorne (and even if I do, it won’t be with anything like the reverence Professor Coale thinks Hawthorne is due), but I’m already chomping at the bit to get me some of that William Styron and the three Johns plus one Joan (Cheever, Updike, Gardner and Didion) Coale gets his Manichean hooks into. This, in part because I agree with his choice of Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Theroux for further delectation. Ditto with Herman Melville, even if my personal jury is still in question on Norman Mailer.

As for William Faulkner, however, wild horses couldn’t drag me back—whatever the good Professor has to say about him. And he says plenty!

Is it absolutely necessary that you, the prospective buyer of In Hawthorne’s Shadow, understand the difference between literary concepts like “Romantic” and “Naturalistic” before shucking this treasure-oyster of a book? No, it’s not. And yet, it might behoove you to look at something Hawthorne himself wrote from Concord, Massachusetts to a Mr. Horatio Bridge on May 3, 1843 (and which Professor Coale quotes in full towards the end of the book):

“I would advise you not to stick too accurately to the bare fact, either in your descriptions or narrations; else your hand will be cramped, and the result will be a want of freedom, that will deprive you of a higher truth than that which you strive to attain. Allow your fancy pretty free license, and omit no heightening touches merely because they did not chance to happen before your eyes. If they did not happen, they at least ought — which is all that concerns you. This is the secret of all entertaining travellers” (p. 206).

The above quote is direct from the horse’s mouth as it were — the horse being Hawthorne; and if our venerable writer is in error with that comma between “freedom” and “that,” well, he is, after all Hawthorne — a Romantic and not a pedant (as this particular reviewer may well be). And whether Romantic or simply romantic, I strongly suspect that Hawthorne would’ve been as wary of the appendage of “Hawthornian” or even “Romantic” to his particular style as Marx was wary of the epithet “Marxist” when carelessly applied to his person and political philosophy once upon a time.

A final word by way of apology to the good Professor Coale: I read most of this book in the subway between Brooklyn and Manhattan and on the way to work. If the white noise of subway traffic and the anticipation of the next eight hours in the hell of ABC-TV had been the only distractions between pages 1 and 205, I would’ve counted myself lucky. The fact is, both the white noise and the anticipation were the least of my worries.

But woe and worse betide you if you don’t first brush up on “Manichean.” Oh, and on alliteration. Why? Because Professor Coale is a sucker for alliteration on occasion — even in his own/I> prose. Caveunt emptor et poeta alike! And, as Dante once wrote at the commencement of his Divine Comedy, “All who enter here, give up!”

RRB
12/10/12
Brooklyn, NY
… (altro)