PRINT THE LEGENDS

by Nick Zegarac

It seems an ironic contradiction that the words “Hollywood” and “history” should appear together in the same sentence. Their domains are irreconcilable. The first is dedicated to art; the second, to fact. Yet the influence of the former on the latter cannot be underestimated. As example, there are whole generations who ostensibly would know little to nothing about many ancient civilizations were it not for the epics of Cecil B. De Mille and William Wyler.

Right or wrong (and most of the time Hollywood’s artistic license has horribly muddled historical fact) the movies galvanic impact over our perceptions on even the most basic fundamentals of society and culture has effectively managed to mask or even eclipse reality with its reasonable facsimiles. In retrospect, a line of dialogue from 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, seems to suffice as a summation of Hollywood’s provisions for truth in light of a good artistic yarn: “When the legend becomes fact – print the legend!”

HOLLYWOOD GOES TO WAR

One does not have to reach too far back into human existence to analyze just how wildly off base Hollywood’s depiction of history has been; World War II being an ideal example of artistry run amuck. Today, when considering the conflict in Europe, one is apt to conjure to mind the fleeting image of Greer Garson valiantly capturing a downed German pilot in her azaleas from William Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver (1942) or the astutely cynical – if slightly comedic - Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), keeping the Nazi’s at bay with barbed tongue-in-cheek quips against a picturesque and often exuberantly playful backdrop of Casablanca (dir.Michael Curtiz, 1942). Perhaps the most glaring example of Hollywood’s lack of ‘fact’ in bringing history to light is Raoul Walsh’s Objective Burma (1945) that transforms the essentially British invasion into an American triumph almost single-handedly achieved by Warner Bros. he-man, Errol Flynn.

Even when Hollywood attempted to take the European conflict more seriously, as in Herman Shumlin’s Watch on the Rhine (1943) or Mervyn LeRoy’s Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), the results were spun on life-affirming platitudes and doe-eyed optimism that flew in the face of a more stark cold and unvarnished documents. In Watch on the Rhine, based on Lillian Hellman’s anti-fascist stage play, freedom fighter Kurt Muller (Paul Lukas) delivers one apoplectic didacticism ladled upon the next; his impassioned – if wordy - social conscience substituting for the more immediate diplomacies of that hemisphere in flames. The speeches are meant to inspire, and, quite often do. But they are empty in their reflections, somehow missing the point of actual horror facing millions fleeing Nazi persecution; mere eloquence without a complete understanding of the brevity of the situation being discussed.

In Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, pin-up boy Van Johnson is the very embodiment of American sanguinity in the face of imminent danger. As Lt. Lawson, Johnson makes harrowing bombing raids over major Japanese cities before being downed on enemy soil. He escapes – barely - and loses a leg in the process. Yet, the circumstances surrounding his amputation are dealt with almost painlessly in an effort to quickly realign the Hollywood myth about glamorous warfare rather than examining that very genuine list of glaring casualties and fallout.

A soldier’s life – and more directly – his death are topical matter rarely discussed in these movies, or, if so, are represented with a reverence befitting the great warriors immortalized in tableaus from an ancient society – with pomp and circumstance and a lengthy affirmation that the sudden loss of life, though regrettable, is necessary in the fight for democracy overseas.

With increasing regularity Hollywood films between 1940 and 1946 chose to completely ignore the war in favor of a focus on life at home and perhaps occasionally how ‘home’ itself had changed – an exemplar more tellingly revealed in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) at wars’ end rather than in John Cromwell’s Since You Went Away (1944) made during the height of conflict.

To be certain, Cromwell’s gargantuan ode to war ‘widows’ is more an exercise in screen elephantitis than a factual examination of the realities facing women on the home front – a premise made even more expansive and absurd with David O. Selznick as the film’s producer. Immediately following the critical and financial success of his Gone With The Wind (1939), Selznick embarked on an ambitious campaign to surpass its’ popularity; producing a series of expensive follow-ups; Since You Went Away being among them.

Not merely content to recreate a poignant reflection of society at large or provide a documented snapshot of the home front, Selznick’s war weepy dwarfs the human condition with towering achievements in set design. Hence, the romance between Jane Hilton (Jennifer Jones) and doomed infantry soldier, Corporal William Smollett (Robert Walker) is supplanted by Selznick’s need to place the characters against breathtaking backdrops that rival the epic splendor of an ancient Rome or old South.

The Hilton family dwelling is not just another cozy hamlet in middle class America but a sprawling family complex large enough to entertain a curmudgeonly boarder (Monty Wooley) and provide lodgings for feisty housekeeper, Fidelia (Hattie McDaniel) – the latter working simply because she wants to. Despite the fact that the Hilton’s matriarch, Anne (Claudette Colbert) cannot afford to pay Fidelia, she readily maintains glamorous dinner engagements at roomy bistros with old flame, Tony Willet (Joseph Cotten) and luncheons with fair-weather friend and vapid gossip, Mrs. Hawkins (Agnes Moorehead) inside lavishly appointed art deco inspired nightclubs. Since You Went Away is therefore not life as it was for the American housewife circa 1944 but rather an idealization of what life ought to have been.

The screenplay by Selznick, based on Margaret Buell Wilder’s novel, is not honest about a single aspect of this life; choosing a faux front of beautiful people in beautiful costumes and places - seemingly resplendent, if tolerating, the perceived woes inherited by a sudden absence of their husbands and sweethearts. Clearly, the focus of Selznick’s masterwork is not to hammer home the obviousness of the American condition to the soldiers seeing the movie overseas – then contemporary in the minds of everyone – but instead to provide an escapist platform for sublime wish fulfillment. Herein, Since You Went Away is undoubtedly more successful – its characters morally superior beings of impeccable pedigree who are a template for propriety and decorum; intangible platitudes once more that the film suggests the average soldier in the trenches is fighting for.

That same year, Selznick released another, less ambitious war-themed production, I’ll Be Seeing You (1944) with Ginger Rogers playing Mary Marshall, a prison parolee released on a weekend pass and who falls in love with shell-shocked war veteran, Zachary Morgan (Joseph Cotten). Once again, the focus of the film is firmly on the burgeoning maudlin romance between two damaged individuals - not on the emotional psyche of the young man scarred in battle. Such a stark critique would wait until wars end and Harold Russell’s magnificent and heartfelt performance as double amputee Homer Parrish in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

In I’ll Be Seeing You, the oft’ overused suggestion in the movies, that love alone can unravel even the greatest mysteries of the human mind, is given a patina of grand superficiality with Mary’s understanding heart restoring Morgan’s courage – at least enough that he is determined at the story’s end to continue the good fight.

It is perhaps important herein to pause briefly to acknowledge that Hollywood’s sentimentality with the war as a backdrop, rather than focal point, is most directly the result of filmdom’s creative brain trust working behind the cameras – many of them European exiles, immigrants and refugees fleeing Nazi occupation. Thus, these craftsmen infuse the Hollywood product and style of their dream factories with their own overly-sentimentalized view of Europe – a sort of tear-stained recollection in absence of any immediate first hand knowledge from the currency of their homelands, seen primarily through very thickly crafted rose-colored glasses.


SINGING A SONG OF FREEDOM…

As the demographic in movie patrons shifted with the advent of war, to a more prominent female base, Hollywood weaned their status quo on a steady diet of melodramas, musicals and screwball comedies. Musicals in particular were an increasingly popular form of diverting entertainment. Whereas the most celebrated offerings in the genre during the 1930s had been a strange amalgam of light-hearted operettas – mainly taking place in a fanciful recreation of bygone Europe (Naughty Marietta 1935, Rose Marie 1936, The Desert Song, Maytime 1937) - or completely escapist flights into absurdly lavish art deco fancy (Swing Time 1936, The Great Ziegfeld 1936, Rosalie 1937), the musicals of the 1940s increasingly sought refuge in some glorified past of an America that probably never was (Meet Me In St. Louis 1944, The Dolly Sisters 1945) and a Latin America that most certainly did not exist (Down Argentine Way 1940, That Night In Rio, 1941).

Even such patriotic flag wavers as Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) and This Is The Army (1943) – both memorably directed by Michael Curtiz - with their obvious war-themed plots, chose instead to ground their narratives in a loving retrospective of that blind optimism immediately preceding WWI, but stopped just shy of a resurgence for another celebrated charge into conflict in WWII.
Yankee Doodle Dandy is the loosely interpreted biography of songwriter/performer George M. Cohan; so lax in its facts that upon seeing the finished film Cohan reportedly asked Jack Warner who the movie was about. The story is thus a relic of pure fiction, exploiting Cohan’s inimitable style in composition as a backdrop to hang its ‘we shall overcome’ philosophy – quaint and glossy and mirroring a faithful call to arms that would help break America’s isolationism. The same is true of This Is The Army – Irving Berlin’s galvanic salute and tribute to the American Armed Forces; its show-stopping finale ‘This Time Is The Last Time’ suggesting that America’s involvement in the war is not only desirable but essential in bringing about a lasting world peace for all time.

Perhaps the most subliminally interesting blend of these two polar opposites in the musical genre was Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn (1942); a plot-silly little nothing extolling the celebrated national holidays of Berlin’s adopted country, but also interjecting the very pro-war propaganda ‘Song of Freedom’ during the film’s Fourth of July sequence. Ironically, it was another Berlin song, ‘White Christmas’ that unintentionally strove toward a more poignant evocation of wartime conflict by resurrecting the specter of familial absence and separation.

The lyrics to White Christmas are a painful reminder of this separation (I’m dreaming of a white Christmas. Just like the ones I used to know…where the treetops glisten and children listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow) – sentiments mirrored with even greater longing and immediacy in the lyrics to Hugh Martin and Arthur Blaine’s Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas from Meet Me In St. Louis (1944).

To be certain, Meet Me In St. Louis is a classic example of how pervasive, if subliminal, the message of wartime familial displacement was to echo throughout nearly all of Hollywood’s wartime product – even when taken out of context from both time and space. Meet Me In St. Louis’ story concerns the Smith family who are about to lose their livelihood in the only home they have ever known, thanks to the suggested move by their father’s (Leon Ames) law firm from St. Louis to New York.

Though the story is set in an idyllic America at the time of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, its timely logic is more reticent of the contemporary strain affecting the American family unit across the country. Martin and Blaine’s lyrics to their poignant holiday tearjerker, ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’ bears this out. (“Have yourself a merry little Christmas. Make the yuletide gay. Next year on we may all be living miles away…” then later, “…someday soon we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow…”)

In essence, Meet Me In St. Louis is a time capsule for the renewable faith in America’s involvement in the war. With few exceptions, the Hollywood musical would rarely delve quite so deeply into this particular brand of wartime sentiment – though it would frequently produce ‘feel good’ musical prologues, as in Busby Berkeley’s The Gang’s All Here (1943) or George Sidney’s Thousands Cheer (1943) – effortless, lighthearted fluff movies that set the war to swing time and bolstered its bond rally efforts by millions.


CRIME MUST PAY…OR BE FEMINIZED
Of all the movie genres to suffer during WWII, the crime story proved the most susceptible to absolute annihilation. Occasionally, detective stories continued to surface on the big screen – but these were not cut from the same gritty ilk that had strengthened the genre prior to the war, and that a studio like Warner Brothers had excelled at during the 1930s with actors James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft at the helm.

Only part of this tempering of the crime genre derived from the influence of Hollywood’s Censorship and Production Code. Indeed, studios like Warner Brothers proved that when it came to satisfying either the Code or their box office, the latter ruled. They were quite willing to pay modest fines to distribute a movie that would reap millions in return – Code or no Code!

Moreover, with President Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ policies slowly but steadily resurrecting America from its Great Depression and, with WWII providing new reasons to be ‘depressed,’ theater goers were simply no longer entertained by stories that depicted violent conflicts in their own backyard – particularly since the rest of the world seemed to have ample violence to go around.
By the mid-forties, the aesthetics of film noir had already slightly intruded into this crime absentee paradise; reflecting a cynical morality shift from lightness to darkness, though with a continuous patina of surface gloss and romantic idealism attached – at least enough to entice the female theater patron into her seat for a few hours.
Thus detective stories and thrillers like Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), Michael Curtiz’ Mildred Pierce (1945) and Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946) took crime out of the speakeasy and/or bar room, but they also attached a woman-identifying face on the nature of a beast that, prior to the war, had almost entirely been ascribed to male counterparts.
In Preminger’s Laura, a fashion artist played by Gene Tierney is the presumed victim of a brutal homicide that compels police detective, Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) to obsess over her portrait. In Curtiz’ Mildred Pierce, a headstrong restaurateur (Joan Crawford) lavishes her evil offspring, Veda (Ann Blyth) with every conceivable luxury, only to have her steal her husband. In Gilda, a corrupted beauty (Rita Hayworth) marries the boss (George Macready) of her former lover, Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) out of spite – only to discover that she still loves Johnny. In most cases, the woman’s role in these crimes remain secondary to the crime itself; the character of Veda being a rare exception. She actually kills her mother’s husband.
However, by mid-decade, the tone of these crime thrillers had turned uglier with women frequently becoming antagonists and purveyors of criminal activity, not merely its accidental participants; as in Barbara Stanwyck’s scheming Phyllis Dietrichson – out to make her husband’s murder look like an accident in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), or Lana Turner’s Cora – the vindictive viper luring an unsuspecting grifter to his doom in Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) or even better still, Rita Hayworth’s malicious Elsa Bannister – a rich wife determined to be rid of her crippled husband while framing an unsuspecting lover in Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947) – all femme fatales with a deliberate taste and relish for death.

Initially, this shift from desirable movie goddess to contemptuous screen vixen had almost been subliminal, brokered by the sudden appearance of Lauren Bacall’s Slim Browning in Howard Hawks’ To Have And Have Not (1944). Slim is a harmless pickpocket whose penchant for browbeating Bogart’s Harry Morgan with a bit of his own sass and wit makes her both sweetness and poison at the same time. Though Slim never actually contributes to anyone’s demise, she certainly gives a fairly accurate impression that she might, particularly if the circumstances are right. As for Bacall, she would continue to develop her sharp tongue as Vivien Rutledge opposite Bogart’s confirmed worldly cynic Philip Marlowe in Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946) before essaying into the role of relative good girl, Irene Jansen in Delmer Daves’ Dark Passage on year later.

Of the three aforementioned incarnations, perhaps Bacall’s Irene is the most deceptively dangerous. She’s an artist with a penchant for helping convicted felons escape from prison after her own father has been wrongfully accused of a crime, was sentenced to life in prison and died behind bars. However, Irene is selective in whom she abates.

Like the character of brittle prostitute, Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) – a woman who begrudgingly invests in the FBI’s sting of her one time lover turned husband, Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), Irene is out for quiet vengeance – perhaps on the side of the law, perhaps not. Unlike Alicia – who knows the target of her aggressions – her FBI contact, Devlin (Cary Grant) – Irene is out to exonerate Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) a man she’s never met, though Irene’s association with backstabber, Madge Rapf (Agnes Moorehead) – a woman who desperately desired Parry’s affections before the murder of his wife – is enough to convince Irene of Parry’s frame up for that crime.

In any case, the Production Code and Catholic League of Decency ensured that all of the aforementioned women were – at their core – either motivated by dark shades of selfishness or more virtuous selflessness; with a distinction made to their own survival in each film before the final reel.

Sin could be in so long as a woman paid for it with her life. Indeed, the arch for female criminals on the screen was meteoric and brief. By 1949, the femme fatale had run her course. A character like Annie Laurie Starr in Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950) had to be more clearly depicted as pure evil with a psychotic streak.

As Hollywood left the war behind it also readily abandoned its focus on female patrons for its box office. With soldiers returning home bearing the physical and emotional scars of conflict, and America’s prosperity set for its greatest boom since the early 1900s, the need for melodrama gave way to more desirable celebrations of the ‘bigger is better’ mentality that Hollywood would eventually exploit with Cinemascope and Biblical epics – morality tales spread across its larger than life canvas with even more spurious reflections.

With WWII’s end, women on film would no longer dominate the box office. Some of the biggest female stars from the ‘40s, like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford ended their studio tenures, only to discover no place for their renewable talents - suddenly replaced with the less threatening flash of a Marilyn Monroe or Jane Mansfield. In the final analysis, the war abroad had been a bastion of peace time for its screen goddesses. Though bombshells and pin-ups would continue to be desirable commodities on the big screen, the glory days of real actresses were sadly at an end.

With an assembly line release date of roughly 55 movies per annum, each of Hollywood’s studios yielded some of their most diverse and engrossing entertainment between 1940 and 1949. However, with the advent of television quickly developing as the movie’s next big threat for the new decade – Hollywood would have to prepare for yet another seismic shift – this time away from its audience. Briefly however, everyone simply breathed a genuine sigh of relief. It was good to be home, and as Dorothy (Judy Garland) the astute Kansas waif had so indelibly expressed herself at the end of The Wizard of Oz (1939) a decade earlier, there was ‘no place’ quite like it.

@Nick Zegarac 2008 (all rights reserved).

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.