Tess and Brock explore Nathanial Hawthorne’s childhood home in Raymond, Maine. Hawthorne’s writing colors the house as an idyllic childhood summer home and so it remains. Today, the local community uses the house as a space to come together—like it or not, Hawthorne! Tess and Brock remain persistent in their attempts to reveal the true story of Hawthorne and his house, but Hawthorne manages to keep up his image as a mysterious, and intensely private writer.
Tess and Brock explore Nathanial Hawthorne’s childhood home in Raymond, Maine. Hawthorne’s writing colors the house as an idyllic childhood summer home and so it remains. Today, the local community uses the house as a space to come together—like it or not, Hawthorne! Tess and Brock remain persistent in their attempts to reveal the true story of Hawthorne and his house, but Hawthorne manages to keep up his image as a mysterious, and intensely private writer.
Mentioned:
The house:
Tess Chakkalakal is the creator, executive producer and host of Dead Writers. Brock Clarke is our writer and co-host.
Lisa Bartfai is the managing producer and executive editor. Our music is composed by Cedric Wilson, who also mixes the show. Ella Jones is our web editorial intern, and Mark Hoffman created our logo.
This episode was produced with the generous support of our sponsors Bath Savings and listeners like you.
TESS CHAKKALAKAL Literary houses are, like, the Disney Land of literature.
BROCK CLARKE I get the attraction of writers’ houses. It’s a thing you do when you’re extraordinarily bored. Is that thing you experience, though, when going to writers’ houses? Like, do you have the-the version—
TESS Do you know I-what my experience is, like “God, some of these writers were rich!”
[LAUGHTER]
BROCK This is Dead Writers, a show about great American authors and where they lived.
TESS I’m Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And I’m Brock Clarke.
TESS A decade ago, I became obsessed with saving Harriet Beecher Stowe’s house in Maine. And I did save it. And I’m still obsessed with literary houses—not just Stowe’s.
BROCK I wrote a novel called An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, because I couldn’t figure out why anyone goes to writers’ homes, let alone tries to save them.
TESS You’d think I’d hate Brock.
BROCK But you’re my colleague. You can’t hate me.
TESS It’s true. That would be awkward.
BROCK So instead of hating each other, we made this show.
TESS The Hawthorne House in Raymond is unassuming. It’s a white wooden house that sits on a corner where two small roads intersect in a leafy neighborhood a few blocks from Sebago Lake. And two unassuming Raymond residents, Abel Bates and Tom Ewing let us in. The house that’s so well preserved on the outside turns out to be pretty empty on the inside. The second floor has been taken out, and most of the house is just one big room.
ABEL BATES After they left, the house was vacant, obviously, and it's been used for a number of things. It was, I think, a stage stop at one time. Because this used to be the main road that came down through to bypass, bypasses it now.
TESS Abel Bates knows the ins and outs of this house. He’s the one who's been fixing the leaks, installing new windows and a heat pump. And Abel thinks that the inside of the house was torn out in the late 19th century when Nathaniel Hawthorne’s relative, who was a minister, decided to use the building as a meeting house.
ABEL BATES And then after that, again, it went vacant again. And it was in pretty much disrepair until the Hawthorne Association was formed in 1922.
[COMMOTION]
TESS Did you get that? The Hawthorne Association was formed in 1922. And community members like Abel and Tom has kept it going ever since with the help of Hawthorne lovers from around the world.
ABEL BATES We had a couple from England that's been here two or three times now, and they've been just very generous and very, I mean—this woman is a real nut on Hawthorne's life. We had a Japanese guy. Apparently, Hawthorne is very popular in Japan.
TESS Nathaniel Hawthorne has been very popular in the U.S., too, since his novel The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850. It was one of the first mass-printed books in the country, and 2,500 copies of it sold within the first ten days of it being in stores. A staggering amount at that time. It’s still taught in most U.S. highschools. And if you didn’t read it then, you might have heard it referenced in movies like Easy A with Emma Stone, or Crazy Stupid Love with…Emma Stone, again. The Emma Stone—Hawthorne connection could maybe be its own podcast episode? Anyway, it just goes to show how relevant his writing still is.
BROCK I was going to ask, because you both are so well informed, vested in stories about Hawthorne, but do you have favorite Hawthorne stories or novels or anything?
ABEL BATES You want me to be really honest?
BROCK Yes, I do.
ABEL BATES I haven't read very much of Hawthorne since I was in high school.
BROCK Did you read Scarlet Letter in high school?
ABEL BATES Of course. Everybody—
BROCK Yep.
ABEL BATES Obligatory reading.
TOM EWING I think that for me that's more interesting is the story of Nathaniel Hawthorne himself when he was here. I mean, there are really quite interesting little anecdotes about this sort of thing. I know he broke his leg at one point.
ABEL BATES Yeah, he was lame when he came up here.
TOM EWING Oh, was he—
ABEL BATES I don’t know. Some kind of issue with his leg. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I know that he had a cane, and—or crutch—and, at some point, I think the Raymond-Casco Historical Society has what they think is his crutch.
TOM EWING Is his crutch. Yeah, yeah. But then, you know, you go further on, when he— because he’s never really made much money, and he became very good friends with Franklin Pierce when they were at Bowdoin together. And Franklin Pierce made him a consul to the U.K., and I think that helped him along financially—I think actually Franklin Pierce helped him along financially in a lot of different ways. And, you know, like most of these artists, they aren’t noticed until they’re dead.
BROCK Until they’re dead. Yeah, writers all need benefactors. Yeah.
TOM EWING But, you know, his friends with—Longfellow was there. So it's kind of funny when you read all that history.
TESS Tom and Abel know a lot of those Hawthorne stories, especially about his time in Raymond, like which rock he liked to fish from as a kid, or where he took his canoe. Actually, the way Tom and Abel talk about the house is a lot like how Hawthorne remembered his time here. He didn’t actually live here for very long. He spent the summer of 1816 here when he was 12, and then again three years later—just a few more months. Even though Hawthorne spent less than a year in this house, it has attained a kind of mythical status. And that’s not just because it now acts as home to the Hawthorne Association. It’s because that’s how Hawthorne himself thought of it. I found a letter he wrote to his sister Louisa from Salem in 1820, and he sounds like a sappy kid. Here’s what he says: “But I shall never again run wild in Raymond, and I shall never be so happy as when I did.”
TESS That sounds like the setting for an ideal summer childhood. But the house itself is more a hodgepodge, agreeably so. It seems less like a memorial and more like a place for people to hang out. There’s an odd mix of furniture in the room. Plush armchairs and a framed poster of Demi Moore playing Hester in the 1995 film version of The Scarlet Letter. And to one side of the large space are several card tables set up in a row lined with collapsible chairs, ready for a neighborhood potluck, community meeting or a card game. That’s what we do. We sit down for a game of “authors”, which is kind of like Go-Fish but with writers and books.
ABEL BATES Brock, do you have the House of Seven Gables by Hawthorne?
BROCK You have to have a Hawthorne card though. Do you have a Hawthorn card in your hand?
ABEL BATES Yeah.
BROCK Oh, okay.
ABEL BATES You just asked the wrong person!
BROCK Yeah…right, right, right!
ABEL BATES Do you have the Wonder Book by Hawthorne?
BROCK [DEFEATEDLY] Yes.
ABEL BATES And do you have Twice Told Tales book?
BROCK It makes sense. It's only right one of you would get the Hawthorne book.
ABEL BATES Of course. It's only—
TESS Now you read all those books. Now you got to read all of those, Abel.
[BROCK LAUGHS]
TOM EWING I think you're the only one at the table that has!
ABEL BATES Yeah!
TESS While we’re playing cards and joking around with Tom and Abel, we also talk about their hopes for the house. Because after decades of being active in the Hawthorne Association, they’re still working on realizing their dream for it.
TOM EWING Originally what I had thought we could do is to say “Make this your headquarters, and we'll give you a locker upstairs. You keep all your stuff—”, but that hasn't panned out yet.
TESS But that would be the idea. You want to get to a point where people kind of make this into their own space.
TOM EWING Right. Yes. But right now, as a matter of fact, I was just talking to the Chamber of Commerce this morning. Business break, the June is available. So I nominated us, together with the Fullers, to do the business break in June.
TESS The business break is a networking event for local merchants where they get together, drink beer, eat pizza, and talk shop. Is that something Hawthorne would have wanted to happen in his historical home? Probably not. But the Hawthorne House in Raymond is unique among the writers houses we’ve visited: it’s as much a place for the community to spend time in as it is a place where the community can learn about and think about Hawthorne.
TOM EWING Because there are a lot of things that happen in this community where we need each other. So it's kind of a great way to get to know everybody.
TESS There aren’t that many year-round residents in Raymond. It shouldn’t be hard to get to know everyone, except that there aren’t many gathering places. The town hall is mostly a place to apply for permits, and it’s housed in the same building as the overcrowded community school. That is why the association offered up the Hawthorne House to host a recent town meeting. The district representative, the district senator, and the zoning code enforcement officers all came to the house to talk about their shared problems.
TOM EWING And because we've had some problems with a number of owners of buildings on the lake who've kind of ignored the zoning. And so the town has to go out and try and fight this legally. And that takes a lot of money.
TESS The towns around Sebago Lake have been having problems with summer residents who ignore the environmental rules.
ABEL BATES And, in a lot of cases, the communities are even more strict than the state, but we have no enforcement power. And so small towns like Raymond and all of the towns around the lake, we just can't afford to fight some of the deep pockets that can just—you know, “It’s the cost of doing business. I'll just do what I want and let them find me.”
[MUSIC]
BROCK So, all this talk about the individual and the community, this remind you of anything, Tess?
TESS It does! It reminds me…of The Scarlet Letter!
BROCK Yeah, and everything else, every other conversation that’s ever been had about America is writ small by Scarlet Letter.
TESS I know! But The Scarlet Letter just does it so much better than everybody else. It’s Hester against the community!
BROCK Yeah, but it doesn’t—that’s true, right, so if everything was as well done in our culture as Hawthorne makes it, but, you know, it doesn’t actually track with what Abel and Tom are saying. So are we saying—we’re not saying that, in Scarlet Letter the community is this normalization of, this oppressive normalization. So you’re not saying that’s true of Tom and Abel? Because if so, let’s get Tom and Abel in here and let them speak for themselves.
TESS Well, that’s not all the community is. I mean, even in The Scarlet Letter, yeah, there are the ugly gossips who want to crucify Hester Prynne and all that. But there are also some nice people in the community who want to protect her, and that’s why she’s wearing the scarlet letter in the first place instead of executed.
BROCK Yeah, I do love that moment early in the book where the gossips you were talking about, they begrudgingly praise the quality of the “A” that Hester’s made for herself. So Hawthorne’s funny about this.
TESS Oh, Hawthorne is very funny about the community and what they’re trying to do to Hester, and they’re all ugly, and she’s beautiful. And that’s part of the problem.
[‘GOVERNOR BELLINGHAM” FROM THE 1934 FILM ADAPTATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER] “Hester Prynne, so that all men may know you are guilty of the sin of adultery and shun you as a thing of evil, it is now ordered that you should wear upon your bosom for the rest of your natural life a scarlet letter “A”.
BROCK So, you know, Hawthorne is so associated with Salem. And, when I think of—you know, he has a long family tie-in with the Salem witch trials. It was his great-great grandfather—was involved with them in some way or another?
TESS That’s what he says in "The Customs-House" to preface.
BROCK Yeah, right. Yeah, and I see Salem, obviously, in Scarlet Letter, when I see—that’s the town I think of. And this is—we’re talking about Raymond now too.
TESS And any small New England town, they’re all kind of the same, aren’t they?
BROCK That’s what I was going to ask you, what your sense of it was. Does Raymond seem the same as Salem?
TESS Well, they don’t make as big a deal about Hawthorne as they do in Salem. Whereas Raymond, it’s just a kind of nondescript town. It’s got a lake. It’s got a bunch of old people living in it, you know. And they get together—that’s what’s kind of cool about small towns in New England is that people actually get together in the same way that they did back when Hawthrone was around.
BROCK I don’t want to slur on Salem at all, although I kind of will, right. It’s all witches, and it’s all Hawthorne.
TESS Yeah, it’s all about Halloween.
BROCK And, whereas Raymond, it’s not about any of those things. Like you would not know, and, I mean this is praise, you wouldn’t know that Hawthorne’s there except if you drove—you knew about that house, and, or you drove past it.
TESS Exactly.
BROCK You saw, for some reason, the plaque.
TESS And maybe what you’re saying is it’s better that way? That the house is so hidden away, there aren’t all these signs saying, “Hawthorne Sign This Way”.
BROCK Yeah, that would be hilarious if there was a “Hawthorne Sign This Way” and there were a big witch around it, or just him as, like, an eleven year old, hanging out there. We could twain it up. We could huck him up, and put him in ragged, short pants.
TESS What are you talking about here? Like a Hawthorne dummy? A Hawthorne doll?
BROCK That would be great—
[LAUGHTER]
TESS Created a Hawthorne figure.
BROCK Right, Hawthorne hologram. All these things would horrify him, the most private man in 19th century American literature.
TESS Exactly
BROCK Let’s make him a fantasia. A fantasm.
[MUSIC]
TESS So we’re in Raymond, we’re hungry, and we don’t know anything around there. But we look it up on our phones, and the first thing that comes up is Eric’s Church. We pull up at Eric’s Church which oddly is in a quiet strip mall. And we walk into a large, almost empty bar with a huge dance floor and country music blasting. Emma Forgues, the bar manager, takes our order, and she gives us an idea of what the place would be like if only we were there in the evening, say around ten o’clock instead of a Monday at lunch.
EMMA FORGUES On Thursdays we do karaoke, which is usually a mess. But…
[EMMA FORGUES LAUGHS]
BROCK Do you ever, when you're working here, do you karaoke as part of it? Or…?
EMMA FORGUES No, I wish. But…
BROCK It's not, it's not allowed.
EMMA FORGUES Right.
TESS How long have you worked here?
EMMA FORGUES I've worked here for three years.
TESS And do you live around here?
EMMA FORGUES I do. I used to live in Gorham, but that was kind of a commute up to here. So I moved up to the Wyndham area just recently, and it's been a life changer.
BROCK Yeah! What's it like living up here?
EMMA FORGUES It's amazing. The community up here is just so much different than anywhere else I've ever been, and it just translates to this place, too. Like, the regulars that we have and the people that come in here are just amazing people
TESS It definitely seems like Raymond and Windham have amazing people, at least based on our sample size of three: Abel, Tom and Emma. And Like Tom and Abel, Emma has also read The Scarlet Letter in school but nothing else by Hawthorne. And she had no idea that he spent part of his childhood just up the road from where she works.
BROCK Five minutes is the birthplace of the great American writer Hawthorne…
EMMA FORGUES I did not know that. That is awesome. That is really cool. In Raymond, you said, right?
BROCK In Raymond, right in the right. It's on Hawthorne Street, which is right—I think it goes right into the lake.
EMMA FORGUES I did not know that. That's so cool.
BROCK So you can imagine, if you're in a jet ski in the lake anytime soon and you look over there and you think that's the home of a major American author, and you, like, leave a little spray in the jet ski.
[EMMA FORGUES LAUGHS]
[MUSIC]
TESS Let’s go back to the late 19th century when Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, first met Nathaniel Hawthorne. It was a beautiful summer day when they had decided to climb Monument Mountain in the Berkshires. There were a bunch of other writers there, but that’s not important. Hawthorne was forty-six. He was a really attractive but painfully shy, brooding writer. You know the type. And he was already a celebrity. Melville—whose debut novel had made him a literary star in his twenties—had just turned thirty-one. And Hawthorne had published his collections of short stories Mosses from an Old Manse about a year earlier, and Melville found it exhilarating. The rest, they say, is history. Or, what I would call, maybe “American literature”. I mean, would there be American literature without Hawthorne and Melville getting together?
[MUSIC]
TESS Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel have co-written the novel Dayswork which describes in beautiful detail the Melville-Hawthorne friendship. Chris is a novelist, and Jenn is a poet. And they’re married—to each other. This is the first book that they’ve written together. And they did it during the most intense period of Covid lockdowns when they holed up at home with their two daughters and dog. Dayswork is about Herman Melville, but you can’t really talk about Melville without talking about Hawthorne. They were friends, at least they had a short and intense friendship while they were neighbors in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The book came out of Jenn’s obsession with Melville. And, of course, houses, because houses play into a question Jenn and Chris like to think about: how art gets made.
JENNIFER HABEL How art gets made, the conditions it's made under, and, you know, the homes are so much a part of that. And, you know, to what extent you're happy in that space, to what extent you yourself are responsible for taking care of that space, or paying for that space, decorating that space. Do you have your own private space inside that space, you know, which is your private sanctuary? Hawthorne apparently had a sky parlor in one of his houses.
[CHUCKLES]
BROCK What does that mean?
CHIRS BACHELDER A tower!
JENNIFER HABEL It was a tower, basically.
BROCK That sounds pornographic.
[LAUGHTER]
JENNIFER HABEL He had it built, I think, and he called it a sky parlor. And that's where he would go up to write. I don't know. Yeah, I really just thinking about this. I don't know why, really.
TESS And even if Jenn can’t exactly say why she is so curious about where and how writers write, she knows she is. So when the lockdown let up, her and Chris traveled to Arrowhead, the house in Massachusetts where Melville wrote Moby Dick.
CHIRS BACHELDER Well, the items too. Like, we quote Julian Barnes, whatever, “Why aren't the books enough?” You know, why do we hound the writers? But it's really hard not to see these things as just talismanic or glowing when you enter these spaces. It's really hard not to, you know. You kind of know better, that the work should stand for itself. But it was great to be in Arrowhead. It was magical to be in Arrowhead. It was incredible. And I think the other thing is the book is trying to negotiate, or is interested, in the two poles of life: domesticity and adventure. You know, so Melville, who goes out on the ocean and comes home to a house full of a bunch of women, so far from, so far from the sea. And it’s snowing. I think we’re interested in houses, too, especially during the quarantine. You know, we’re on this adventure together trying to write this book, but, you know, it’s completely domestic.
TESS And it is that talismanic quality that we’re really talking about here. Does being in a writer's house change anything about how we read the books, or whether we read them at all? And, in this case, would it change how Jenn and Chris wrote their own book? That is our question, especially since Jenn and Chris are following up their collaborative Melville novel with a Hawthorne one. This time, there’s no pandemic. No lockdown to prevent them from going straight to one of Hawthorne's homes in Maine or Massachusetts. But Chris doesn’t feel they need to go to Raymond to write the book.
CHIRS BACHELDER It’s just, at this point, and I can’t imagine this chaning. It's a relentlessly interior book. The setting is this guy's head. He's the guy, you know, he’s the guy in Daywork, I suppose it's loosely based on me, I suppose, but he's on the periphery and Daywork somewhat aloof. So we just wanted to explore this guy, but he's very, very interior. And so it's lightly plotted, but it's mostly him considering, at middle age, these issues of being inside of a system versus struggling to get outside of the system, and the costs associated with each.
JENNIFER HABEL So, I mean, it really just sort of has the spirit of Hawthorne behind it, as opposed to being about Hawthorne in any way or being research based. So it's really just entirely different in that way.
CHIRS BACHELDER Yeah, and Wakefield looms back there. The story of Wakefield.
BROCK Wakefield is maybe Hawthorne’s spookiest work of fiction, a short story about a London man, Wakefield, who tells his wife that he’s going to be away for a few days and who then disappears. That is, his wife doesn’t know where he is. But the reader knows that he’s just moved into an apartment around the corner, where he lives for the next twenty years, only to then to walk back into his old house with a “crafty smile which was the precursor of the little joke that he has ever since been playing off at his wife's expense.” And why does he do this? Is he cruel? Is he lost? Is he crazy? Does he himself know? Does Hawthorne? This is the most disturbing aspect of the story, the sense of unknowability, and is exactly what has drawn Chris and Jenn to the story, and to its author.
CHIRS BACHELDER There's so many quotes about Hawthorne. Everybody who met him sort of nailed him down and just said, “This guy is a ghost”. “He keeps his feelings under his feet,” just over and over these amazing quotes about how aloof and withdrawn he is.
JENNIFER HABEL Yeah. One of the quotes I was remembering was that Hawthorne wrote at age 53, “I doubt whether I've ever really talked with half a dozen persons in my life, either men or women”, but I think Melville was one of the people that he did talk with.
TESS Jenn, you were mentioning that you got sort of obsessed during COVID, during lockdowns and all that, with Melville. So I take it you're not as obsessed with Hawthorne? He hasn't inspired that kind of obsession for you? What is your feeling about Hawthorne, just sort of personally? You guys said you aren’t spending research—you’re not researching Hawthorne the way you did Melville. So what is Hawthorne doing for you?
JENNIFER HABEL He’s—Initially we thought we might actually have him be a ghost in this book, an actual ghost. And he's not going to be, but there are ghosts.
CHIRS BACHELDER Literally.
JENNIFER HABEL Yeah. But there are sort of ghosts through the book. I think he's existing as this, what people described him, as a fine ghost in a case of iron. He's sitting there as this sort of unattainable, alluring—well, obvious, I don't know what he's doing! But that's actually a good place to be in when you write a book. I think maybe we shouldn't know exactly.
CHIRS BACHELDER Yeah, he doesn't inspire. I mean, obviously “Melville—the Vortex.” Melville inspires mania among many people, and I guess we got to that place too. And Melville is lovable in this way, even though he is—there's really unsavory things about Melville. Hawthorne is harder. He's not so cuddly. He’s really—and he’s said some incredibly cruel, incredibly cruel things. And he’s just more difficult, if you think about him, “I’m going to study Hawthorne and write a novel about him.” I mean, you could, and you could do it well. But he’s harder—I think he’s a harder figure to spend that much time with.
BROCK “Not so cuddly” is an understatement as this passage from Wakefield makes clear. [READING] “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world , individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the outcast of the universe.”
TESS This tension that Jenn and Chris are describing between being immersed in something, a family, a neighborhood, a religious community or standing on the outside of the system is one of the recurring themes of both Hawthorne's writing and our visit to the Hawthrone house in Raymond. The house doesn't pretend to provide some great insight into Hawthorne--the way he thought, the way he wrote.
BROCK So are you a musical fan?
TOM EWING I am.
BROCK Yeah. Good.
TOM EWING I’m very much a music fan. It’s my favorite form of entertainment, I must say. And I can sing a lot of musicals.
BROCK Really?
[LAUGHTER]
TESS What's your favorite song?
BROCK I was going to say—
TESS What’s your favorite? You don't have a favorite Hawthorne story, but you might have a favorite song.
TOM EWING Well, I mean, “I walked the walk down the street before”. I love that one. I like the “Pajama Gang”. I don't know if you know, I'm trying to think now. It was started with, [SINGING] “Seven and a half cents. Doesn't buy a hell of a lot. Seven and a half cents doesn't mean a thing but give it to me every hour, 40 hours every week. That's enough for me to be living like a king.” And then it goes, “Oh, so much money. Wow. That's enough for me to be a Sultan in the Taj Mahal in every room. A different doll, not to mention a 40 inch television set.”
TESS Tom—
BROCK I feel like our work here is down.
TESS You got to—you’ve got to write the musical for The Scarlet Letter. It hasn't been done yet, and I think you're the guy.
TESS The house, according to Abel and Tom, is being preserved as a center of a community that needs and wants a center. Hawthorne is the excuse for the community, even if that community is precisely one of things that made Hawthorne wary.
TESS You have listened to Dead Writers with me, Tess Chakkalakal.
BROCK And me, Brock Clarke. Our managing producer and editor is Lisa Bartfai.
TESS Cedric Wilson has created our theme music and mixed the show.
BROCK Ella Jones is our web editorial intern. Thanks for listening.
TESS And a very special thanks to our generous sponsors, Bath Savings, and listeners like you.
BROCK You can find more information about the writers, their books, and their houses at our website on MainePublic.org. Thanks for listening.