Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864; Novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography
it. In the tale of "Young Goodman Brown," when Goody Cloyse says, "I was
all anointed with the juice of small-age and cinquefoil and
wolf's-bane," and the Devil continues, "'Mingled with fine wheat and the
fat of a new-born babe,'--'Ah, your worship knows the recipe,' cried the
old lady, cackling aloud." A few scraps of correspondence, mostly
undated, which I have looked over, give one a new view of him in the
bustle and vexation of this brief editorial experience. He sends off
frequent and hurried missives to one of his sisters, who did some of the
condensing and compiling which was a part of the business. "I make
nothing," he says, in one, "of writing a history or biography before
dinner." At another time, he is in haste for a Life of Jefferson, but
warns his correspondent to "see that it contains nothing heterodox." At
the end of one of the briefest messages, he finds time to speak of the
cat at home. Perhaps with a memory of the days when he built
book-houses, he had taken two names of the deepest dye from Milton and
Bunyan for two of his favorite cats, whom he called Beelzebub and
Apollyon. "Pull Beelzebub's tail for me," he writes. But the following
from Boston, February 15, 1836, gives the more serious side of the
situation:--
"I came here trusting to Goodrich's positive promise to pay me
forty-five dollars as soon as I arrived; and he has kept promising from
one day to another, till I do not see that he means to pay at all. I
have now broke off all intercourse with him, and never think of going
near him ... I don't feel at all obliged to him about the editorship,
for he is a stockholder and director in the Bewick Company; ... and I
defy them to get another to do for a thousand dollars what I do for five
hundred."
Goodrich afterward sent his editor a small sum; and the relations
between them were resumed.. A letter of May 5, in the same year,
contains these allusions:--
"I saw Mr. Goodrich yesterday.... He wants me to undertake a Universal
History, to contain about as much as fifty or sixty pages of the
magazine. [These were large pages.] If you are willing to write any part
of it, ... I shall agree to do it. If necessary I will come home by and
by, and concoct the plan of it with you. It need not be superior in
profundity and polish to the middling magazine articles.... I shall have
nearly a dozen articles in The Token,--mostly quite short."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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