by James C. Clar.
“Under the pretense of administering wholesome medicines, the physician had been cherishing the hidden fire of the disease.”
~ The Scarlet Letter
Some years ago, while perusing a little-known library that had once belonged to an early nineteenth-century Unitarian society in Providence, I encountered an object that defied classification. It was a thin notebook, unbound. Its pages were sewn together with a green filament that left a faint, bitter odor on one’s fingers when touched. On the cover, in an ink now turned the color of spilt tea, was written simply: Confession. R.C.
I am a collector of rare texts. My passions are apocrypha and marginalia, those parasitic texts that fasten themselves to canonical works and (if heeded) quietly alter their meaning. I believe firmly that literature is not a simple procession of original creations, but a palimpsest in which every text conceals beneath itself another and another interconnected one. My initial reading of the notebook served to strengthen that belief.
The handwriting was meticulous, narrow, and possessed an almost surgical precision. The author identified himself without flourish: “I am called Roger Chillingworth, though I have borne other names, some of them less well-known and hence more convenient.”
The conclusion was unmistakable. I appeared to be holding a confession written by a man who, according to Nathaniel Hawthorne, existed only within the circumscribed world of a novel published in 1850. Stranger still, the purported confession was not primarily moral. It was, in fact, botanical and literary.
Chillingworth devotes several pages to a plant he called dwale, occasionally glossed in Latin as solanum lethale. For the sake of clarity, and at the risk of anachronism, I note that later herbalists would call it Atropa belladonna.
Chillingworth, of course, never uses that Italian sobriquet. If it had been current in his day, I’m sure he would have dismissed it in a parenthetical aside as “a name coined by women and vain physicians.” With poetical exuberance, however, he describes the leaves of the plant as dull and ovate and the berries as “shining with a trembling, treacherous innocence.” He notes as well dwale’s dual reputation as both remedy and poison.
“By its very nature,” he comments, “the plant instructs us in the virtue of moderation. In excess, it kills. In restraint it persuades the body to betray itself slowly.”
Chillingworth’s herbal lore is correct. Dwale quickens the pulse, warms the blood, dilates the pupils. In small quantities, it grants the illusion of renewed vigor. It was, he goes on to claim, precisely what the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale desired.
Midway through the text there is a dialogue. A dialogue recorded without undue emotion and, at times, with the clinical detachment of a legal deposition:
“You look fatigued, physician,” said the Reverend.
“Fatigue is merely the body’s reluctance to move forward,” I answered.
“And this draught you recommend?”
“An old herb. Known to monks, soon-to-be widows, and those who seek the reserves to endure.”
What intrigued me most was not the exchange itself but the marginal commentary that accompanied it. Chillingworth annotates his own narrative, citing Galen, the ancient Roman and Culpeper, the Englishman, as well as other, more obscure herbalists as to the properties of dwale.
More disquieting still, he refers several times to The Scarlet Letter, damning it as “that subsequent fallacious and morally overwrought account.” In another note he asserts: “The author mistakes my intention. I did not punish Dimmesdale; I perfected the story.”
The confession makes clear that no single fatal dose was administered. Dwale, Chillingworth observes, “abhors haste.” He administered it gradually, under the pretense of medicine, allowing Dimmesdale’s strength to flare even as his constitution imperceptibly decayed. The famous scaffold scene, Chillingworth alleges, was not the miracle of conscience it has been made out to be, but the culmination of a long, invisible and insidious pharmacological intervention.
It was at that point that I closed the notebook. The reading room seemed to contract and my pulse quickened as – to my shame – I surreptitiously slipped the text into my backpack. Since that day I have mulled the implications of what the notebook contained. If the confession were genuine, then that crafty antinomian, Hawthorne, was not a novelist but rather an editor, an historian. His book was not a work of fiction but a version or interpretation of a real event. If, on the other hand, the notebook was a forgery or literary hoax, it was one of remarkable foresight, anticipating (validating even) post-modern assertions about authorship, hermeneutics and textual autonomy.
At one point, I dared to show the manuscript to a trusted colleague, a botanist by the name of Watson. Watson’s skepticism always bordered on the dogmatic.
“It’s a fabrication,” he said. “The dosages are wrong.”
“But plausible,” I replied. “From what I’ve read about the plant, they are not far off.”
My colleague smiled thinly. “It is true, dosage depends on a great number of factors. In the absence of further data …”
It was only later that I noticed what I had overlooked. The green filament binding the pages was not thread but the dried stem of a plant, braided and flexible. I crushed a fragment between my fingers. The rank, camphoraceous scent now revealed its true identity. I’m not at all sure what, if anything, that proves.
I have never published the confession and never will. To do so would be to announce the indiscretion of my theft. Perhaps more significantly, it would require deciding whether the notebook is literature or evidence. I therefore remain a simple collector, one content with that ambiguity.
Still, rereading Hawthorne and, in all honesty, any work that calls itself fiction, I now sometimes imagine an unseen hand at work not on the text but on my sense of reality, patiently redacting it until fact and fabrication are one and the same. That sense, like some “hidden fire” of disease, surpasses the power of any herbal or botanical preparation to extinguish.
The End