Confronted with the workmanlike diaries of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of whom he is writing a critical biography, Henry James is positively confounded. And, truth be told, a little annoyed!
I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note-Books, by the way–this seems as good a place as any other to say it–are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding with them in the whole body of literature. They were published–in six volumes, issued at intervals–some years after Hawthorne’s death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books; but I am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written–what was Hawthorne’s purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the large part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence, or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne’s mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in them.
I haven’t read the notebooks in question, but this reminds me for all the world of the sort of observations that Andy Warhol’s diaries elicited. But nobody really brought to those the sky-high expectations that James seems to have brought to his predecessor’s notebooks. What I love about the above passage is the heated contest of James’s impulses to protect Hawthorne and to excoriate him for being so dull, a contest that ends in a stalemate. First, James thinks he’s going to be tactful about this and tell you what he really thinks only between the lines: he’s thankful for notebooks–“as a biographer.” As a reader, one gets the sense, he’s about an inch away from tossing them into the fire. Then he gives up the charade: “I am obliged to confess”…that I haven’t the foggiest what Hawthorne thought he was up to! Then he’s tactful again: the chronicle is valuable…if you want information about Hawthorne “at any cost.” And so on.
The reigning note, however, is confusion verging on a sense of having been betrayed by the notebooks’ emptiness. You don’t often catch James not knowing what to say, but here the discovery of his literary father figure’s personal banality has him practically sputtering. Rather affecting, if you ask me.