Джон Апдайк - Memories of the Ford Administration

Their conversation would have taken place in Hawthorne’s office in the unprepossessing consulate housed in a shabby and smoke-stained edifice of four stories high … at the lower corner of Brunswick Street … in the neighborhood of some of the oldest docks . The gouty, top-hatted Minister would have had to maneuver his corpulent person up a narrow and ill-lighted staircase giving onto an equally narrow and ill-lighted passageway crowded, most mornings, with beggarly and piratical-looking scoundrels … purporting to belong to our mercantile marine . Dealing with these specimens of a most unfortunate class of people composed, according to the opening pages of the memoiristic sketches collected as Our Old Home , much of Hawthorne’s duties — the scum of every maritime nation on earth; such being the seamen by whose assistance we then disputed the navigation of the world with England. Not one in twenty, he tells us, was a genuine American , but all looked to the American Consul for relief from their misery and indigence — shipwrecked crews in quest of bed, board, and clothing; invalids asking permits for the hospital; bruised and bloody wretches complaining of ill-treatment by their officers; drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and cheats, perplexingly intermingled with an uncertain proportion of reasonably honest men. Through this crowd of brutalized unfortunates, most of them wearing red flannel shirts, Buchanan, in cravat and morning coat, would have eased his way, to reach the outer office manned by vice-consuls and clerks, and then the inner sanctum, an apartment of very moderate size, painted in imitation of oak, and duskily lighted by two windows looking across a by-street at the rough brick-side of an immense cotton warehouse, a plainer and uglier structure than ever was built in America . Buchanan’s squinting eye was taken, it may be, by the large map of the United States on one wall, cartographed as it had been twenty years ago.

“Your portrait of our homeland lacks Texas, and all the California territory that we wrested from Mexico,” he genially pointed out, once the initial civilities had been pronounced. The men had met before, at the end of last April, when the Minister waited in Liverpool for the arrival of his niece, Miss Lane. I had the old fellow to dine with me , the writer wrote his publisher, and liked him better than I expected .

“Were we to draw the map twenty years hence, I fear it might show even less territory than is displayed here,” Hawthorne ventured, the mellifluidity of his voice to some extent masking the pessimism of the prediction. Since he regarded his rôle of Consul with a certain amusement, as something of an imposture, he did not greatly fear offending his superior. Further, the older man’s manner had a holiday joviality — a holiday abroad from seeking his political fortunes, and a holiday in Liverpool from his London responsibilities. And people forgive a known writer a great deal, such forgiveness constituting an inexpensive form of patronage of the arts.

Buchanan had lit a cigar, and smokily tut-tutted, “Oh come, Mr. Hawthorne, not as bad as that. With a little connivance and compromise, we shall pull the Union through. If you would mute your vociferous friends the abolitionists, and we somewhat quench our friends the fire-eaters, the plain economics of it, as they emerge in the West, will render the slavery question obsolete.”

“I fear, sir,” said the darkly handsome, high-browed Consul (whose diffident manner yet hinted at a certain premature fatigue), “that the question has become a passion, on both sides, which there will be no quenching but with blood. Senator Douglas, in laying the Kansas territory open to squatter sovereignty, has created there a witch’s brew, to which flock fanatics and madmen and all of Missouri’s gun-toting riffraff.”

“And yet, cotton will not grow in Kansas. The Missouri Compromise, I have always stated,” Buchanan affirmed, leaning deeper into the creaking Windsor armchair that amid these worn furnishings did for the seat of honor, “should never have been revoked. Douglas thought to throw a sop to the Southern half of the Democracy and advance his Presidential prospects for ’56, but in truth he has split the party in two, and in the bargain finished off the Whigs. The Know-Nothings are high in the saddle now, and opposition to Kansas-Nebraska has bred a new national party, I am informed, that calls itself by Jefferson’s old name of Republican. So much for personal ambition, Mr. Hawthorne, when it entwines itself with matters of grand policy. Douglas will never be President now; he has awakened too much hatred.” The old man’s effortful gaze wandered to the top of the Consul’s bookcase, where stood a fierce and terrible bust of General Jackson, pilloried in a military collar which rose above his ears, and frowning forth immitigably at any Englishman who might happen to cross the threshold .

The Consul followed his visitor’s eye, gauged its speculative and even alarmed expression, and offered by way of agreement, “Senator Douglas is no Jackson, though he might hope to be. As an idea, squatter sovereignty has a Jacksonian ring.”

“Jackson was a great hater,” Buchanan sighed, amid a fresh effusion of tobacco smoke, “but he had the South with him. The curious condition of our Union is, no election can be won without the South, and none with the South alone. That is the bill, and the nation has few to fill it.”

Hawthorne, though fastidiously aloof from most public enthusiasms, was in his consular capacity politician enough to know that the substantial old gentleman sitting before him was already being spoken of as the only possible candidate for the torn Democracy. [ Retrospect eds.: the word is used of course in the old sense of the Democratic party. Footnote? Or generally understood among our learned readership?] “It was perhaps a fortunate wind, Mr. Minister,” he rather wickedly suggested, the tone of address warning his guest of a construable presumption, “which brought you to service in London. Had you been still in the Senate, how would you have voted, sir, on this ill-begotten Kansas-Nebraska Bill?”

Buchanan, with a cool deliberation that the Consul had to admire, levelled his crooked glance upon his questioner, and stated, “Between us — I would have had no choice, but to vote, as would have you if in elected office, with our benefactor and chosen leader, General Pierce, who made support of the bill a point of loyalty to his administration. Nevertheless, the popular-sovereignty provision was a grave and needless mistake, hastily inserted in the late stages of working out the legislation. Douglas wished the territory to organize in the swiftest manner, to keep it from becoming Indian territory and blocking a railroad centered upon Chicago in his own state. In his haste to profit Illinois and himself, he upset three decades of precarious balance. Compared with Jackson, whose personal friendship it was my honor to claim, Douglas is an unprincipled dwarf — pardon my bluntness — who is frequently drunk, most harmfully upon the sound of his own voice.” The old man settled back into the consular office’s audibly protesting guest chair, smiling at his own indiscretion. Yet he judged it time to change the topic. “In art,” he said, “I take it there is never this distinction, to be often found in political service, between formally assenting to a thing, and inwardly assenting to the wisdom of it.”

“In art,” Hawthorne admitted, “we are sometimes invited to trim our texts, for a general good. For instance, my preface to The Scarlet Letter , which with great good nature but excessive accuracy sketched my former associates in the Salem customhouse, made such a fierce local stir that I was urged to withdraw it from subsequent editions; but I resisted those pleas. A compromised work of art becomes on the instant worthless, since we look to art for an otherworldly integrity.”