American writers who were diplomats: Nathaniel Hawthorne.

• Author: Sommers, William

When Franklin Pierce gained the presidency in 1853, one of his first acts was to nominate an old school chum, Nathaniel Hawthorne, as the American consul in Liverpool. Pierce and Hawthorne were close friends since their undergraduate days at Bowdoin College, a friendship that continued until Hawthorne's death in 1864. Though the nomination had the air of the "old-boy network," Hawthorne had earned it. Early in Pierce's campaign, Hawthorne was asked to write a praiseworthy - and politically important - campaign biography. Laying aside the pen that had lately raised his literary stature - though not his bank account - via The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables--Hawthorne took in hand his political quill and wrote a laudatory, somewhat fictional piece (he couldn't shake the habit) on the soon to be fourteenth President of the United States. Hawthorne also pushed for Pierce's election among his Concord literary friends and enlisted, as well, support from his Boston publishers.

Hawthorne's nomination was not without precedent. Thomas Jefferson appointed Philip Freneau ("Poet of the Revolution") as the State Department's first French translator, while James Madison, in 1811, sent Joel Barlow (Hasty Pudding) to France as chief negotiator on a tricky non-impressment treaty. And President Tyler continued the custom by appointing Washington Irving (The Alhambra) as minister to Spain in 1841.

Though Hawthorne gave well-written bangles to his old college chum, his actual goal was a job with a steady income to support his growing family. He was at the pinnacle of his literary powers, no doubt, but his books were not best sellers. The Old Salem darkness did not move sales, and there were no movie rights, nor New Yorker type magazines or other outlets to insure a regular income. His literary efforts barely kept food on the table and the cold New England winter from the door. The Liverpool appointment was a funded nirvana. The consul's salary came from a set percentage of fees collected at the port, and Liverpool was the main entry for American ships headed to England. The author of The Scarlet Letter viewed the Liverpool Consulate as his lease on financial independence. What it was to cost him in soul-searching and the wear and tear of the daily grind was yet to be reckoned.

During his four-year stint in Liverpool, Hawthorne abandoned the well know fiction that had made him famous, keeping instead a meticulous journal of English goings-on which was eventually transformed into a 300,000 word tome published as the English Notebooks. At the same time, his consular activities were detailed in a stream of letters, dispatches and reports which filled over seven hundred pages of the consulate files. A review of these papers shows Hawthorne's fascination -often negative - with the job, revealing a modernity making him kin with all who have been swamped by the paper work entailed in similar assignments.

When the Senate confirmed his nomination on March 26, Hawthorne set out for Washington where, like most novice entrants to the Department, he received an "orientation" of sorts. He lunched with President Pierce and discussed consular affairs with Secretary of State William Marcy, whom he was later to title, somewhat irreverently, as "Old Lord Massey." He avoided whatever passed...