A deadening ease

It took a job loss for Hawthorne—and for me—to get to work | Andrée Seu

I do not like you, Mr. Hawthorne. I see what you are up to in The Scarlet Letter and am helpless to avert it, like Elisha staring Hazael to shame but not, for all that, able to head off the damage he will do to Israel (2 Kings 8). "Whoever is not with me is against me and whoever does not gather with me scatters." The Puritans were slipping from that purity of love and needed chastening, but woe the instrument who throws out baby with the bath water. You use the word Satan in quotation marks, as it were, as poetic device. (You are so modern.) You paint the sky of Boston black and silent: God is remote and irrelevant.

But we do have some common confluence of fate, as I was charmed to learn in your biography. I read about your job loss and was put in mind of mine, and how what seemed a frown of fortune turned to our advancement. In 1848 your services are made "redundant," as your English forebears might say. And then bang: 1850, The Scarlet Letter; 1851, The House of the Seven Gables; 1852, The Blithedale Romance. Not bad recompense for forced retirement.