And, after
all, to be rid of the surveyorship was a relief.

But matters were not to be run off quite so easily as this. The Scarlet
Letter, upon coming to close quarters with it, turned out to be not a
story of such moderate caliber as Hawthorne had hitherto been used to
write, but an affair likely to extend over two or three hundred pages,
which, instead of a month or so, might not be completed in a year; yet
it was too late to substitute something more manageable for it--in the
first place, because nothing else happened to be at his disposal, and
secondly, because The Scarlet Letter took such intimate hold upon
the vitals of his heart and mind that he was by no means able to free
himself from it until all had been fulfilled. Only men of creative
genius know in what glorious and harrowing thraldom their creations hold
them. Having once been fairly begun, The Scarlet Letter must inevitably
finish itself for good or ill, come what might to the writer of it.

[IMAGE: BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS]

This is a story of people and events, not a study in literary criticism;
but the writing of The Scarlet Letter was an event of no trifling
importance in the story of its author's life. To read the book is an
experience which its readers cannot forget; what its writing must have
been to a man organized as my father was is hardly to be conveyed in
words. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth--he must live through each
one of them, feel their passion, remorse, hatred, terror, love; and he
must enter into the soul of the mysterious nature of Pearl. Such things
cannot with impunity be done by any one; the mere physical strain, all
conditions being favorable, would be almost past bearing. But my father,
though uniformly his bodily health was all his life sound, was never
what I would call a robust man; he was exquisitely balanced. At the time
he began his book he was jaded from years of office drudgery, and he was
in some anxiety as to the issue of his predicament. The house in
which he dwelt, small and ill-placed in a narrow side-street, with no
possibility of shutting out the noise of traffic and of domestic alarms,
could not but make the work tell more heavily upon him. But in addition
to this there were fortuitous occasions of emotional stress, all of
which I shall not mention; but among them were the distasteful turmoil
aroused by his political mishap; and, far more poignant, the critical
illness o