"The Yachts" by William Carlos Williams: Class War in America and the Ongoing War on the Poor

"The Yachts" by William Carlos Williams: Class War in America and the Ongoing War on the Poor


“It’s a Class War, Stupid,” Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi loudly proclaimed in his brilliant and shocking July 15, 2008 column. To back up his claim, he recounted a recent informal survey taken by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders:

He sent out a notice on his e-mail list asking Vermont residents to "tell me what was going on in their lives economically." He expected a few dozen letters at best — but got, instead, more than 700 in the first week alone. Some, like the excerpt posted above, sounded like typical tales of life for struggling single-parent families below the poverty line. More unnerving, however, were the stories Sanders received from people who held one or two or even three jobs, from families in which both spouses held at least one regular job — in other words, from people one would normally describe as middle-class…..

Sanders got letters from working people who have been reduced to eating "cereal and toast" for dinner, from a 71-year-old man who has been forced to go back to work to pay for heating oil and property taxes, from a worker in an oncology department of a hospital who reports that clinically ill patients are foregoing cancer treatments because the cost of gas makes it too expensive to reach the hospital. [emphasis mine] The recurring theme is that employment, even dual employment, is no longer any kind of barrier against poverty. Not economic discomfort, mind you, but actual poverty. Meaning, having less than you need to eat and live in heated shelter — forgetting entirely about health care and dentistry, which has long ceased to be considered an automatic component of American middle-class life. The key factors in almost all of the Sanders letters are exploding gas and heating oil costs, reduced salaries and benefits, and sharply increased property taxes (a phenomenon I hear about all across the country at campaign trail stops, something that seems to me to be directly tied to the Bush tax cuts and the consequent reduced federal aid to states). And it all adds up to one thing.


"The middle class is disappearing," says Sanders. "In real ways we're becoming more like a third-world country."


And please be reminded, gentle reader, that this hideous tale of horror was penned before the recent international economic collapse, thanks to the failure of the ethically-challenged Lehman Brothers. What do you think people are going through now?


William Carlos Williams, the great American modernist poet and author of "The Yachts," would understand the devastation of today’s economic warfare well, and we know where his sympathies lie. "The Yachts" is about class war in America and the war on the poor. He wrote the poem in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, and it’s as true today as it was back then.

* * * * * *

Listen to William Carlos William recite his great social consciousness poem “The Yachts” here.”

The Yachts

contend in a sea which the land partly encloses
shielding them from the too-heavy blows
of an ungoverned ocean which when it chooses

tortures the biggest hulls, the best man knows
to pit against its beatings, and sinks them pitilessly.
Mothlike in mists, scintillant in the minute

brilliance of cloudless days, with broad bellying sails
they glide to the wind tossing green water
from their sharp prows while over them the crew crawls

ant-like, solicitously grooming them, releasing,
making fast as they turn, lean far over and having
caught the wind again, side by side, head for the mark.

In a well guarded arena of open water surrounded by
lesser and greater craft which, sycophant, lumbering
and flittering follow them, they appear youthful, rare

as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace
of all that in the mind is feckless, free and
naturally to be desired. Now the sea which holds them

is moody, lapping their glossy sides, as if feeling
for some slightest flaw but fails completely.
Today no race. Then the wind comes again. The yachts

move, jockeying for a start, the signal is set and they
are off. Now the waves strike at them but they are too
well made, they slip through, though they take in canvas.

Arms with hands grasping seek to clutch at the prows.
Bodies thrown recklessly in the way are cut aside.
It is a sea of faces about them in agony, in despair

until the horror of the race dawns staggering the mind;
the whole sea become an entanglement of watery bodies
lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold. Broken,

beaten, desolate, reaching from the dead to be taken up
they cry out, failing, failing! their cries rising
in waves still as the skillful yachts pass over.

"The Yachts" by William Carlos Williams: Class War in America and the Ongoing War on the Poor

William Carlos Williams' poem "The Yachts" is a stellar example of how a great artist can deal with a central social theme—the horror of class war in America—and avoid producing propaganda, but instead yield art.

Brughel's Hunters in the Snow: subsistence living

To achieve his end, Williams uses two of the oldest tools in the poet’s workshop, symbols and the artful use of language. The yachts, owned by the rich, represent the plutocracy. The "sea which the land partly encloses" (line 1), the "well guarded arena of open water," (line 13) in which they contend, is their sheltered lifestyle that their wealth provides for them. The "ungoverned ocean" (line 3) beyond is the chaos of the rest of the world. The crew that "crawls/ant-like, solicitously grooming them" (lines 9-10) is the class of their servants, tending to the yachts.


The "sychophant" (line 14) "lesser and greater craft" (line 14) that follow the yachts and make them look good in comparison could well be the upper middle classes that can afford some luxury items, such as small craft, but not yachts. The race they are engaged in is the game of status played by the social and economic elite.

Pop star Beyonce relaxing aboard a yacht

And finally, the "sea of faces'' (l. 27) belonging to the "watery bodies/lost to the world bearing what they cannot hold," which the poet recognizes in the last three stanzas, is the mass of people whose bodies the yacht-owners have used and run over to attain their status—the dead poor; "what they cannot hold" (which kills them) is the burden of supporting the yacht-owners.

A gentleman relaxing aboard a yacht with Paris Hilton. Talcum powder, of course

His choice of words communicates his emphasis. Over and over, he stresses that the yacht race is held in a protected environment sheltered from the outside. At the outset, he declares that the yachts "contend" (line1); they do not fight; and they do so "in a sea which the land partly encloses/shielding them from the too-heavy blows/of an ungoverned ocean" (lines 1-3). They are shielded from destructive chaos, so that they can contend "in a well guarded arena of open water" (line 13).


Of an almost ethereal enchantment, they are precious, even fragile ("Mothlike in mists," line 6) and yet glamorous in a way that F. Scott Fitzgerald would have appreciated; "scintillant in the minute/brilliance of cloudless days" (lines 6-7), "they appear youthful, rare/as the light of a happy eye, live with the grace/of all that in the mind is feckless, free and/naturally to be desired" (lines 15-18). Also mentioned are "their glossy sides" (line 19). In their universe, they are worshipped and looked up to. If their elegance is "mothlike in mists," then "over them the crew/crawls ant-like" (lines 9-10). They are "surrounded by/lesser and greater craft which, sychophant, lumbering/and flittering follow them" (line 13-15).


The narrative line runs like this: in the first stanza, the poet establishes the tranquil scene; in the second, he introduces the element of chaos, to which the yachts are impervious, ending the stanza with an idyllic description of the yachts sailing, as if to dispel the fear of chaos. The third develops this mise-en-scene, the swollen sound of "broad bellying sails" (line 7), enhancing the image it describes. The fourth details the duties of the crew, the swift succession of particples communicating their antlike scurrying.

Self-portrait by a young William Carlos Williams: as Herman Melville said, be true to the dreams of thy youth

The capital letter beginning the fifth stanza (“In”) sets it off from the previous four, which have all begun with lower-case letters, signifying the start of a new section of the poem. Where the first section, composed of stanzas 1-4, set the milieu, the second section, stanzas 5-0, introduces the race and describes its beginning. Stanza five elaborates on the superior status the yachts hold among the other boats; stanza six tells of the state of grace the yachts enjoy.


Stanzas seven and eight stress the perfection of the yachts—"[the sea] is moody, lapping at their glossy sides, as if feeling/for some slightest flaw but fails completely” (lines 19-20). "Now the waves strike at them but they are too/well made" (lines 23-24). In stanza seven, where the yachts are standing still, the rhythm of the first two lines mirrors the quiet mood of the sea, as the short sentences of the third line mirror the sudden change in mood when the wind comes. The quick rhythm of the language of the eighth stanza follows the progress of the race with all the tense excitement of a racetrack announcer.

The doctor is in: pediatrician Williams in his office in Paterson, NJ

Abruptly initiating the third section of the poem, the ninth stanza describes with blunt, brutal phrases cut short by periods the mass of have-nots, literally "a sea of faces,” which the poet sees the yachts running over in the progress of the race. In the tenth stanza, the poet expands his focus from the yachts to the surrounding sea, in a rush a words swamping the reader with the scene. Stanza eleven ends the poem with a blast of words devastating in their finality; the string of adjectives begun at the end of the previous stanza is carried over, swelling, until the second line of the stanza, where the poem reproduces the futile cries of the lost ("they cry out, failing, failing!” line 32), which rise in waves—the waves holding the yachts buoyant—"as the skillful yachts pass over," (line 33) skillful for having remained afloat so long, ending the poem on a depressing note. In the end, Williams sees the haves ignoring the have-nots even as their yachts pass over the sea of faces.

If viewed against the body of Williams' work, "The Yachts" is a continuation of his concern with the forces he saw shaping America, the theme of which he dealt with at length in Paterson. It reflects an awakened social consciousness that, through the art of poetry, brings to our attention the daily situation of the world's silent majority of sufferers, which we—or at least I—all too often forget.

In his attitude toward class war in America, Williams takes a position between two other American writers. Poe, writing "The Masque of the Red Death" from a moral standpoint of a century before Williams, saw to it that the aristocratic revelers who sealed themselves off from the world while it was wracked with plague received due punishment, even if it had to come from a supernatural source. F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing in his fiction from his standpoint abetted by a Princeton education, viewed the rich as a class of beings set above the rest of humanity. Even though he exposed their viciousness, emptiness, and uncaring destructiveness in The Great Gatsby, he remained enamored of them to the end.

The young WCW

Williams wrote "The Yachts," significantly, in 1935, when the American intellectual's social consciousness was waking up. At the beginning of the poem, in the first section, we view the lifestyle of the rich as the official culture wishes us to, idyllic and glamorous. By the end, when we see their crushing ascendancy over the masses, we are bristling with horror, disgust, and indignation.

A burning yacht

A sinking yacht

One may ask why Williams bothered to write the poem as a work of art, and not as a piece of propaganda, if he believed that injustice would triumph. I think he wrote it merely to bring the situation to our attention. From there, it's up to us to finish the poem.

* * * * * *

Afterword: William Carlos Williams on "The Yachts"

"I wrote the whole damn thing with a change," Williams noted later. "I was thinking of terza rima, but gave up rime—the very vague imitation of Dante. I was quickly carried away by my own feelings." So Williams told John Thirwell.

From notes Williams filed in a folder with his letter to Henry W. Wells dated July 27, 1955 (now among the manuscripts held in Columbia University's rare book and manuscript library): " . . . the yachts do not sink but go on with the race while only in the imagination are they seen to founder. It is a false situation which the yachts typify with the beauty of their movements while the real situation (of the poor) is desperate while 'the skillful yachts pass over.'"




A University of Pennsylvania English professor has created a fascinating Webpage, The Reaction Against" Modernism: The Radical Thirties, that demonstrates how the Great Depression transformed the avant-garde literary experimentalists of the Twenties into fiery left-wing social activists. “The Yachts” is offered as a prime example, and a host of other brilliant poems are showcased as well. In fact, several of them are so brilliant that I can’t help but reproduce them in full here, to share with you.


If you saw Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman in the hit 1987 Washington, D.C. political thriller No Way Out, then you’ve been exposed to the work of Kenneth Fearing. No Way Out was based on poet Kenneth Fearing’s famed 1946 thriller The Big Clock.


Kenneth Fearing’s poem “Green Light” is confusing. It’s meant to be. I didn’t understand it when I first read it—the subject of the poem keeps changing, and its identity is always especially vague. Fearing was trying to capture the frenetic fragmentation of twentieth century life, its lack of differentiation, its ephemerality—and thereby dramatize our alienation.

Or maybe the poem’s subject is not protean, but instead unchanging. Maybe the subject is Reality—and how it smacked you in the face in the Thirties.

Kenneth Fearing, "Green Light" (from Angel Arms)

Bought at the drug store, very cheap; and later pawned.
After a while, heard on the street; seen in the park.
Familiar, but not quite recognized.
Followed and taken home and slept with.
Traded or sold. Or lost.

Bought again at the corner drug store,
At the green light, at the patient’s demand, at nine o’clock.
Re-read and memorized and re-wound.
Found unsuitable.
Smashed, put together, and pawned.

Heard on the street, seen in a dream, heard in the park, seen
by the light of day;
Carefully observed one night by a secret agent of the Greek
Hydraulic Mining Commission, in plain clothes, off
duty.
The agent, in broken English, took copious notes. Which he
lost.
Strange, and yet not extraordinary.
Sad, but true.

True, or exaggerated, or true;
As it is true that the people laugh and the sparrows fly;
As it is exaggerated that the people change, and the sea stays;
As it is that the people go;
As the lights go on and it is night and it is serious, and just
the same;
As some one dies and it is serious, and the same;
As a girl knows and it is small, and true;
As the corner hardware clerk might know and it is true, and
pointless;
As an old man knows and it is grotesque, but true;
As the people laugh, as the people think, as the people
change,
It is serious and the same, exaggerated or true.

Bought at the drug store down the street
Where the wind blows and the motors go by and it is always
night, or day;
Bought to use as a last resort,
Bought to impress the statuary in the park.
Bought at a cut rate, at the green light, at nine o’clock.
Borrowed or bought. To look well. To ennoble. To prevent
disease. To entertain. To have.
Broken or sold. Or given away. Or used and forgotten. Or
lost.


And now for another dose of reality. You get the uncomfortable feeling the poet was writing from experience. A shoutout for Sarah Palin!


Ruth Lechlitner, "Lines for an Abortionist's Office" (c. 1936)

Close here thine eyes, O State:
These are thy guests who bring
To gods with appetites grown great
A votive offering.
Know that they dare defy
The words of law and priest---
(Better to let the unborn die
Than starve while others feast.)
The stricken flesh may be
Outraged, and heal; but mind
Pain-sharpened, may yet learn to see
Thee plain, O State. Be blind:
Accept love's fruit: be sleek
Fat and lip-sealed. (Forget
That Life, avenging pain, will speak!)
Thrust deep the long curette!


Lastly, a view of the Korean War, the beginning of the postwar Endless War that Orwell envisioned in 1984, in which the U.S., Russia and China would forever be contending. Hint: the “piano-movers” are American bombers dropping napalm on Korean civilians. See Norman Mailer’s The Deer Park (1955); the narrator Sergius O’Shaughnessy, Korean War hero and ex-U.S. Air Force pilot, is haunted by the fact that he was “an orphan burning orphans.” In the poem, “Pak Yip” is a Korean.

George Hitchcock, "War" (1952)

The piano-movers come in the morning
the piano-movers come in the afternoon
the piano-movers come to the house of Pak Yip
their bellies filled with roses.

In his gloss dome, over his comic book
sits my insouciant brother.

The sky fills with teacups
and doorknobs
the tibia of children
with ashes
with needles
& floral rembrances

What do you think, my brother?
Awaking at four sweating, the sudden erection?
The fat man at the hamburger stand?
The death of Mickey Mouse?

The sky fills with spoonhandles
eggshells
testes
Fire engines scream in the forest.

In the house of Pak Yip my sister lies,
flaming rosebuds in her loins.

from George Hitchcock, The Wound Alphabet: Poems Collected & New, 1953-1983 (Santa Cruz, CA: Jazz Press, 1984), p. 4.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Williams, William Carlos. "The Yachts," American Poetry, ed. Gay Wilson Allen, Walter B. Rideout, and James K. Robinson. New York, 1965.



Note: I originally wrote an earlier version of this essay as a sophomore at Princeton in November 1974 for an English class in American Poetry taught by Prof. Richard Ludwig.

Number 5 in Gold, a very famous abstract portrait of Williams by Charles Demuth (1883-1935), inspired by a Williams poem about a red firetruck, "The Great Figure"

Hawthorne’s "Man of Iron": The Leadership of Hollingsworth in THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE

Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Blithedale Romance

The utopian community Brook Farm, where The Blithedale Romance takes place

The Soviet Hollingsworth, Stalin, offers a rudimentary demonstration of social engineering: the horrific enforced Ukrainian famine of the Thirties, over five million dead

Stand up and be counted: Tiananmen Square, 1989

Hawthorne’s "Man of Iron": The Leadership of Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance

When does a hero become a criminal? And when can a criminal become a hero? These are the questions that haunt Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance, and in George W. Bush’s America, they are questions that haunt us still.

* * * * *

Chinese cops get their kicks: Tiananmen Square, 2001

Hawthorne’s "Man of Iron": The Leadership of Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance

Through the character of Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne was warning his day of a trend that alarmed him: the rise, in a time of great confusion, of ruthless, charismatic leaders who fail to realize the consequences of their actions, resulting in social destruction.

In the novel’s plot, the warning is revealed in Hollingsworth's calculating manipulation of Zenobia, Priscilla, and Coverdale, which ends in the death of Zenobia.

Zenobia, as depicted in an illustrated edition

Hawthorne clearly indicates what he believes are the sources of Hollingsworth's conquering drive. His monomaniacal impulses are the wedding of Puritan absolutist zeal and insane moral perfectionism to mindless Transcendental egotism. Hawthorne goes out of his way to mention "the Puritanism which, however diversified with later patchwork, still gives its prevailing tint to New England character" (p. 205), and in the climactic chapter, "The Three Together," he describes Hollingsworth as a "a Puritan magistrate" judging Zenobia (pp. 220-1). Hollingsworth's unquestioning belief in himself and his mission is derived from the Transcendentalist conviction in the sovereignty of the judgment of “special” individuals, expressed in the following passage from Emerson's "Self-Reliance”:

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity for a taskmaster. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law, to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity is to others! (1)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the flinty "sage of Concord," has been cited as a possible model for the ruthless Hollingsworth

The power of The Blithedale Romance grows out ofHawthorne's awareness of the tremendous dangers inherent in such a supposition. Although attempts at guessing literary cross-fertilization are chancy at best, it is quite possible that in creating Hollingsworth, Hawthorne was influenced by the novel published less than half a year before (1851) by his friend Herman Melville, Moby-Dick. Certainly Hollingsworth is an exponent of Ahabism, and where Ahab takes the crew of the Pequod down with him, Hollingsworth destroys Zenobia.

Herman Melville, 1861: he and Hawthorne were best friends and neighbors, and then had a mysterious falling-out, possibly of a nautical nature; when I try to envision Hollingsworth, I see Herman

Hawthorne leaves two clues that hint at the extent to which the book is marked by Melville's influence, both of which originate from Father Mapple's sermon in Moby-Dick. The first clue: Coverdale the narrator informs us that Hollingsworth, at the end of his sermon from Eliot's Pulpit, would descend and "generally fling himself at full length on the ground, face downward" (p. 137), just as Father Mapple, at the end of his sermon, "covered his face with his hands, and so remained kneeling, till all the people had departed, and he was left alone in the place." (2)

Father Mapple, by Rockwell Kent

In both instances, the preachers, after their sermons, make dramatic gestures that symbolize their inevitable isolation as spiritual leaders. We obtain the second clue when Hollingsworth obviously fulfills the prescription for a Puritan leader made by Father Mapple in the second half of his sermon; here Melville is foreshadowing Ahab, and like Ahab, and Father Mapple, Hollingsworth believes that

Delight is to him—a far, far upward and inward delight—who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self. Delight is to him whose strong arms yet support him when the ship of this base treacherous world has gone down beneath him. Delight is to him, who gives no quarter in the truth, and kills, burns, and destroys all sin though he pluck it out from under the robes of Senators and Judges. (3)

Orson Welles as Father Mapple in John Huston's Moby Dick

As Charles Feidelson, Jr., comments on Father Mapple’s sermon:

Here he praises the "inexorable self" of the Puritan leader who consciously acts as the instrument of God. Toward the world, such a man is a ruthless individual, but he gains his individuality by complete submission to the divine will. (4)

Utopian educator Bronson Alcott, father to Little Women, often posited as a possible model for Hollingsworth

This is a perfect description of Hollingsworth's character. Coverdale calls it "the terrible egotism which he mistook for an angel of God" (pp. 78-9). In his discussion of fanatics like Hollingsworth, Coverdale says,

And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism. (p. 93)

The famous "holy portrait" of L. Ron Hubbard

As a consequence, Hollingsworth sees the place of women only as functionaries in his own master plan (pp. 139-40). Coverdale has

doubts whether his strength of purpose had not been too gigantic for his integrity, impelling him to trample on considerations that should have been paramount to each other. (p. 150)

A haggard Mao after the Long March: was this when he started to lose his soul?

Coverdale is right. But since Hollingsworth feels he is the instrument of divine will, it follows for him that all of his actions and impulses, being inspired by Heaven, must also be righteous.

The great New York educational reformer Horace Mann, also a possible model for Hollingsworth

However, Hawthorne shows that Hollingsworth's blind impulses have a deeper source; he goes so far as to suggest that Hollingsworth's crusade is in the nature of an existential gratuituous act to define his existence. Hollingsworth sketches blueprints of his dream, an ideal community for the reformation of criminals, "as lovingly as another man might plan those of the projected home where he meant to be happy with his wife and children" (p. 79); because Hollingsworth has no family, his visionary ideal instead fulfills his life. He admits he would dedicate his energies with the same fanaticism to any end, when he declares: "it matters little what my outward toil may be. Were I a slave at the bottom of a mine, I should keep the same purpose, the same faith in its ultimate accomplishment, that I do now" (p. 90). It makes no real difference that he chose philanthropy. Any pursuit would be satisfying, as long as it filled his life.

The Accidental Fuehrer: A guy walks into a beer hall in 1919...

Coverdale laments Hollingsworth's lack of broadening education, which accounts for his narrow mind (p. 79). But Hollingsworth’s problems go far deeper. Formerly a blacksmith, he now seeks to mold human nature—and the destiny of those around him—as he once fashioned metal. Coverdale compares Hollingsworth's ambition to a man who strives to drive mankind like a herd of oxen. "But are we his oxen?" Coverdale asks (p. 119). "And what right has he to be the driver?"

Andy Warhol does Mao, 1972

Hollingsworth may have no right, but he is certainly filling a vacuum in his society with his evangelistic zeal. Coverdale and Zenobia may make light-hearted comments asking why he doesn't concern himself with a better class of people than criminals; but the fact remains, no one else—in the book, at least—cares about the fate of his fellow man. Zenobia may make ringing speeches about the equality of woman, but she still treats Priscilla as a maid-servant. Coverdale lacks the emotional dedication to make a moral commitment to any undertaking. Priscilla is at the mercy of these people.

One of Stalin's Ukrainian victims

And the times are hungering for Hollingsworths. "It needs a wild steersman when we voyage through chaos!" cries Zenobia (p. 137); and when Coverdale peruses the leading Romantic works produced by the deaths of ancien regimes around the world, while recovering from his illness (pp. 73-4), we can see that from the shambles of dying worlds will emerge men like Hollingsworths as leaders. In Boston, Coverdale can see, from his hotel window, homes that all look alike (p. 164), and from this newly-created mass society is seething alienation, manifested in the alcoholism Coverdale notes in the town taverns (p. 188). In the midst of this despair, even the normally mild Coverdale voices apocalyptic longings. "I began to long for a catastrophe.... Let it all come!" (5) (p. 170).

Dies Irae, 2001

"Except in love, or the attachments of kindred, or other very long and habitual affection, we really have no tenderness," Coverdale remarks (p. 66), and his observation about American society is bolstered by the abundance of broken homes, marriages, and hearts that populate the book. It is a testament to Coverdale's lack of perception that when the "pale man in blue spectacles" at the lyceum exactly describes the Fuehrers that are to emerge from this cultural and emotional wreckage, Coverdale fails to recognize Hollingsworth:

He cited instances of the miraculous power of one human being over the will and passions of another.... Human character was but soft wax in his hands; and guilt, or virtue, only the forms into which he should see fit to mold it. The religious enthusiasm was a flame which he could blow up with his breath, or a spark which he could utterly extinguish. It is unutterable, the horror and disgust with which I listened, and saw that, if these things were to be believed, the individual soul was virtually annihilated, and all that is sweet and pure in our present life debased, and that the idea of man's eternal responsibility was made ridiculous, and immortality rendered at once impossible, and not worth acceptance. But I would have perished on the spot, sooner than believe it. (pp. 206-7)

I love Big Brother

If hubris is Hollingsworth’s transgression, his most serious offense in Hawthorne’s eyes is his arrogance in his personal relationships, when he cynically manipulates Zenobia, Priscilla, and to a lesser extent Coverdale to attain his dream of a temple to rehabilitation. Here Hollingsworth commits what for Hawthorne's Puritan sensibilities is the unforgivable sin of the spirit, the crime of Roger Chillingsworth in The Scarlet Letter, whose gravity far transcends the understandable sin of the flesh of Hester and Dimmesdale; like Chillingsworth, Hollingsworth seeks "to delve into the secrets of the human heart." He is exploiting the emotional vulnerabilities of others, getting that person to confide in him nakedly, and then coldly manipulating them for viciously destructive ends. In contemporary slang, he is fucking with people's heads. Think Scientology.

What if a failed science fiction writer created a fake religion in Southern California to make a million bucks, and then blackmailed celebrities by taping them secretly while they made confessions in "therapy"... Nah, too far-fetched. Already done in Farewell My Lovely.

L. Ron Hubbard, after a long day of battling Thetans

At the root, Hollingsworth's flaw is that although he crusades to eradicate the stain of sin from the souls of others, he cannot perceive that all men—himself, especially—are born with moral flaws. As a Romantic and an enshriner of the individual, he has lost sight of the doctrine of Original Sin. In seeking to create a new world, he shares the blindness of self-righteousness that afflicts all radical reformers, most memorably, in the context of the novel, the Puritans who founded America. He wants to establish absolutes in the face of bewildering uncertainties; and frustrated with the sloppy and stupid morals that men use to conduct their existence, he strives to realize perfection.

The young Darth Vader: Stalin, 1894

Ukrainian children

His failure is inevitable, it is inherent in his scheme; despite all attempts at social engineering, man the flawed will never found a flawless society. All such attempts are insane, and doomed to violent failure. Of the construction of the Tower of Babel, Genesis 11:3 says, "And slime had they for mortar," and so the Tower, a symbol of man setting civilization as its own end, toppled.

Dore, Confusion of Tongues

Only at the end of the book, after her dreams have been destroyed, after she has been crushed, does Zenobia admit to Coverdale, "Of all the varieties of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery, in our effort to establish the one true system" (p. 232). But her realization has arrived too late, and after her breakdown (which Coverdale witnessed on pp. 227-9), Zenobia, schooled in a society based on absolutist dreams of perfection, cannot adjust, and drowns herself. Although there is some consolation that from this Hollingsworth learns his lesson and decides to reform himself before he cures the rest of humanity, still, the damage has been done—Zenobia and all of her beautiful bright promise are dead.

Women's rights pioneer Margaret Fuller has been cited as the probable basis for Zenobia

More disquieting is the less obvious fact that Coverdale feels no responsibility for her death, although he might have saved her by disclosing his suspicions, learned from Westervelt, that Hollingsworth was using her; the thought never even enters Coverdale's mind.

A young Nathaniel Hawthorne, who in the novel is clearly Miles Coverdale

Hawthorne's tragic vision was broad enough to include the reality that American society would continue to produce Hollingsworths, who would in turn devastate Zenobias; their stories would be recorded by obtuse narrators like Coverdale, and the process would repeat itself until, as Hawthorne's historical perspective discerned in The Marble Faun, America went the way of Rome, all with the help of self-righteous crusaders after perfection like Hollingsworth.

Jenna, thanks for enlisting

Fascinatingly enough, the story of The Blithedale Romance is clearly rooted in fact. According to the February 2008 Wikipedia entry on The Blithedale Romance:

The Blithedale Romance is a work of fiction based on Hawthorne's recollections of Brook Farm,^[1] a short-lived agricultural and educational commune where Hawthorne lived from April to November 1841. In the novel's preface, Hawthorne describes his memories of this temporary home as "essentially a daydream, and yet a fact" which he employs as "an available foothold between fiction and reality." His feelings of affectionate scepticism toward the commune are reflected not only in the novel, but also in his journal entries and in the numerous letters he wrote from Brook Farm to Sophia Peabody, his future wife.

Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: on meeting her future husband, she described him as "a young Byron"

A younger Hawthorne

Hawthorne's claim that the novel's characters are "entirely fictitious" has been widely questioned. The character of Zenobia, for example, is said to have been modelled upon Margaret Fuller, an acquaintance of Hawthorne and a frequent guest at Brook Farm. The circumstances of Zenobia's death, however, were not inspired by the shipwreck that ended Fuller's life but by the suicide of a certain Miss Hunt, a refined but melancholy young woman who drowned herself in a river on the morning of July 9, 1845. Hawthorne helped to search for the body that night, and later recorded the incident at considerable length in his journal.^[2] Suggested prototypes for Hollingsworth include Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Horace Mann^[3], while the narrator is often supposed to be none other than Hawthorne himself.^[4]

Brook Farm

Brook Farm was a utopian community founded on the principles of the idealistic French socialist Charles Fourier; it was one of a series of notable utopian communities that flourished in pre-Civil War America, such as Oneida and New Harmony. Think of the hippie communes that sprang up in the Sixties, and you’ll get an idea of social idealists, disillusioned by the dead-end life offered by the Establishment, striving to create a new society.

The shrine in the sacred grove: the grave of Karl Marx in Germany

As we found in the Sixties, there was also another side of the communes. The worst was the Weatherman nightmare, where in order to destroy “reactionary individualism,” compulsory bisexuality was enforced, and the leaders chose which same-sex member you’d spent tonight with. (For some reason, however, Weatherman chieftain Bernadine Dohrn chose not to engage in lesbian relationships. Lucky her.) Few things are as horrifying as being pressured to engage in a form of sexual behavior that’s not intrinsically in your nature. That’s rape. This is a matter that Hawthorne would have been especially sensitive to, and rightfully horrified by (see Chillingsworth’s demonic psychological manipulation of the Reverend Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter). Talk about fucking with your head.

The beautiful Bernadine Dohrn, 1969: some animals are more equal than others

Of course, what the Weathermen indulged in the early Seventies was kid stuff compared to the horrors of twentieth-century totalitarian mind control. If the Weathermen ended up running a Maoist kindergarten, Mao turned China into a nightmare of social mind control, to the point that in during the Red Guard upheaval of 1966-68, the gleeful citizens of Guangzhou (the former Canton) were making soup out of their conquered political enemies and enjoying it heartily. Jesus Christ, even the fucking Nazis didn’t do that in Auschwitz, and that’s saying something.

Joseph Stalin, a real-life James Bond villain: he dropped lighted matches on Party leaders, knowing they could never protest or object, and then joked, "I just sent your wife and family to Siberia." And sometimes he carried through on the joke, sometimes not.

Speaking of Hollingsworth, the history of Communism in the twentieth century is, without question, a tragic story of a utopian dream gone horribly wrong, because absolute power was given to flawed individuals who were unable to perceive their own fallenness, and because there were no checks and balances. To find an apt historical parallel to Hollingsworth we need look no farther than Karl Marx—and Lenin, Stalin (“the Man of Steel” to Hollingsworth’s “Man of Iron”), and the infallible Mao. They did all the wrong things for all the right reasons.

He murdered fifty million of his fellow countrymen to stay in power

As for America in Hawthorne’s day, perhaps we can see traces of Hollingsworth even in well-meaning Civil War civilian leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis and the military “killer angels” like Ulysses Grant, Robert E. Lee, and William Tecumseh Sherman.

The gravestone of Puritan worthy William Hollingsworth of Salem, Mass.: it's speculated that Hawthorne may have picked up the name of his character in a cemetery ramble

In post-Civil War America, it’s not hard to find other parallels to Hollingsworth. Christian fundamentalist crazies come immediately to mind. Elmer Gantry is their apotheosis, but there’s also the Reverend Billy James Hargis of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, who was outed in the Seventies when two young members of his choir learned on their wedding night that the good Reverend has deflowered them both. In the Eighties there were the escapades of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and Jimmy Swaggart, and more recently the ultraconservative Rev. Ted Haggard, who in private danced the night away with a male hustler with a little help from crystal meth. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!

The Rev. Ted: bringing the two Americas together

Of course, we have another Hollingsworth right before us—born-again ex-cokehead and maybe not-so-ex-alcoholic President George W. Bush, who has led us into the dark valley under the guise of righteousness.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Mass.

NOTES

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Self-Reliance," The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, 1950), p. 161.

2. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, ed. Charles Feidelson, Jr. (New York, 1964), p. 81.

3. Ibid.

4. Charles Feidelson, Jr., editor, Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (New York, 1964). p. 81n.

5. It is fascinating to note that in his third novel, The Deer Park, Norman Mailer has Marion Faye, a bisexual Hipster psychopath, make exactly the same declaration while parked in the Nevada desert waiting for the sun to rise and hoping it will be an atomic fireball. "So let it come, Faye thought, let this explosion come, and then another, and all the others, until the Sun God burned the earth. Let it come, he thought, looking into the east at Mecca where the bombs ticked while he stood on a tiny rise of ground trying to see one hundred, two hundred, three hundred miles across the desert. Let it come, Faye begged, like a man praying for rain, let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink, let it come for all of everywhere, just so it comes and the world stands clear in the dead white dawn." Norman Mailer, The Deer Park (New York, 1955), p. 139. The apparent influence of The Blithedale Romance on Mailer becomes even more intriguing when one learns that in his second novel, Barbary Shore (1951), he named a major character, a sinister FBI agent, Hollingsworth.

Rip Torn, who played Marion Faye onstage in a dramatic adaptation of The Deer Park by Mailer, 1967; Mailer and Torn were such good friends, they tried to kill each other on the set of Maidstone (1968)

It wasn't in the script


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A first edition

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Self-Reliance," The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York, 1950).

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. New York, 1970.

Mailer, Norman. Barbary Shore. New York, 1951.

Mailer, Norman. The Deer Park. New York, 1955.

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. ed. Charles Feidelson, Jr. New York, 1964.

This article is based on an American Studies paper I wrote in January 1976 while an undergraduate at Princeton. According to the father's side of my family, I'm alleged to be a direct descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne.