The Lure of the Camera

by Charles S. Olcott

This old Custom House upon which we are looking furnishes the explanation. When Hawthorne took possession as surveyor, he found offices ornamented with rows of sleepy officials, sitting in old-fashioned chairs which were tilted on their hind legs against the walls. These old gentlemen made an irresistible appeal to his sense of humor, such that he could scarcely have avoided the impulse to write a description of their whimsicalities. After his “decapitation” he yielded to the impulse and prepared in the best of good humor the amusing description of his former associates in the “Introduction” to “The Scarlet Letter.” It brought the wrath of Salem upon his head. These old fellows did not fancy being caricatured as “wearisome old souls,” who “seemed to have flung away all the golden grain of practical wisdom which they had enjoyed so many opportunities of harvesting, and most carefully to have stored their memories with the husks.” Especially enraged were the family of the Old Inspector of whom Hawthorne said nothing worse than that he remembered all the good dinners he had eaten. “There were flavors on his palate that had lingered there not less than sixty or seventy years, and were still apparently as fresh as that of the mutton chop which he had just devoured for his breakfast,” said Hawthorne with fine humor. “He called one of them a pig,” said a Salemite to me, indignantly.

After all, Salem never really knew Hawthorne. Though the town was his birthplace, he had little liking for it, and was seldom there. During the four years of his incumbency of the Custom House, he kept aloof from the townspeople, most of whom had no knowledge whatever of his literary efforts. When the fame of “The Scarlet Letter” had made Hawthorne’s name a familiar one throughout America and England, the author was no longer a resident of Salem, for immediately after the publication of his first and most famous novel, he was glad to seek relief from the gloomy memories of Mall Street in the fresh mountain air of the Berkshires.

Hawthorne, though apparently glad to escape, still allowed his thought to dwell in Salem, for in the same year of the completion of “The Scarlet Letter” and his removal to Lenox, Massachusetts, he began “The House of the Seven Gables.” The identity of this house has long been a matter of curiosity. Three old Salem houses, two of which have since disappeared, have been pointed out as originals, the authenticity of all of which has been denied by George Parsons Lathrop, Hawthorne’s son-in-law, who maintains that the author’s statement, that he built his house only of “materials long in use for constructing castles in the air,” must be taken literally.

It must not be supposed that an author need ever describe such a building in detail or provide for its future identification. He may do as Scott often did, put the details of three or four houses into one structure, taking his material, not “out of the air,” but from recollections of many places he has seen. It does not detract from the supposed “original” to find that the author has made material, even radical, departures from the original plan. The real point of interest is to know whether the old landmark suggested anything to the author, and if so, how much.

To those who follow this line of reasoning, an old house at the foot of Turner Street, now commonly known as “The House of the Seven Gables,” has many points of interest. It is a weather-stained old building dating back to 1669, and contains so many gables that you are reasonably content to accept seven as the number, though I believe it has eight, not counting the one over the rear porch, recently added.

The identification of this house as the one which, more than any other, suggested to Hawthorne the idea of a house of seven gables, rests upon two facts. The first is that in 1782 it came into the possession of Captain Samuel Ingersoll, whose wife was a niece of Hawthorne’s grandfather. It passed, later, to their only surviving daughter, Susannah. Her portrait, which now hangs in the parlor of the old house, shows that, as a young woman, she was not unattractive. An unfortunate love affair caused her to withdraw from society and to live a life of solitude in the old house, from which all male visitors were rigidly excluded. An exception seems to have been made in favor of her cousin Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, it is said, was a frequent visitor and listened with interest to the legends of the house as told by his elder cousin.

THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

The second fact of identification rests upon more recent evidence. The building was purchased in 1908 by a generous resident of Salem and turned into a settlement house. This lady, who possesses the highest antiquarian instincts, determined to restore the house to its original form. In doing so she discovered traces of four gables which had been removed. These, with three that remained, made the desired seven, but, unfortunately, about the same time an old plan was unearthed which proved that the house at one time must have had eight gables! So the house has been restored to its full quota of eight. When Hawthorne was calling there it had only three gables, and his elderly kinswoman must have told traditions of the time when it had seven or eight, as the case may be. And so the question of gables becomes as bewildering as Tom Sawyer’s aunt’s spoons.

Aside from this not very profitable speculation, the house is an interesting survival of the time when Salem was a seaport town of some importance. A secret staircase has been reconstructed according to the recollections of the man who took it down a quarter of a century ago. It opens by a secret spring in a panel of the wall in the third-story front room, now known as “Clifford’s chamber,” and ascends through a false fireplace in the dining-room. It will be remembered how Clifford mysteriously disappeared from his room, and as mysteriously reappeared in the parlor where Judge Pyncheon sat in the easy-chair, dead. Perhaps he came down this secret stairway, though Hawthorne forgot to mention it.

A little shop, where real gingerbread “Jim Crows” are sold, makes the present “House of the Seven Gables” seem real, so that when the bell tinkles as you open the door, you would not be at all surprised if Hepzibah Pyncheon herself should appear, entering from the quaint little New England kitchen on the right. A sunny chamber upstairs now called “Phœbe’s room,” and a pleasant little garden in the rear, still further heighten the illusion and make one feel that if this is not the real “House of the Seven Gables,” it certainly ought to be.