I had a most interesting experience last week at the intersection of Fiction and Reality.  I was in Salem, Massachusetts to look at Chinese art objects at the Peabody Essex Museum - research for my new book project.  I had time to spare so I betook myself around Salem's harbour to the House of the Seven Gables.  Hawthorne's novel has been one of my favourites since childhood.  I grew up in what was, by California standards, a very old house, built in 1861 in the Greek Revival style, in a gold rush town that had seen better days.  Tracing the house's history was, for me, part of what made me into a historian.  That so many births, deaths, christenings and Christmases had happened in the house long before I was born fascinated me and gave the house a texture and atmosphere that I had only intuited.  I could only imagine if it were a house that had been in my family for centuries, like that of the Pyncheons in Hawthorne's tale - that those ghosts were my ancestors, reinforced by the occasional family portrait glowering from a parlor wall.  This was part of the fascination for me - also the fact that some of my ancestors had lived in houses like the seven gabled manse of the Pyncheons, in Massachusetts and Connecticut, and followed the same trajectory of sea captains to wealthy landed folk to finally abandoning the creaky old house for life far away from where their ancestors had first put down now very old and brittle roots.

I don't know what I was expecting at the House of the Seven Gables, but I came armed with my one hundred year old copy of the novel, which I had been re-reading with delight.  I have always loved one particular chapter in all the work of Virginia Woolf - the scene in the middle of "To The Lighthouse", in which the author's roving intelligence meanders through a house as time itself meanders across the landscape outside, lightening, darkening, lightening again the windows and the sea cliffs, and gravity enacts its slow theatre in the dropping from time to time of a tassel of a scarf thrown across a piano, far slower than the sunlight that creeps across the carpet and then retreats like a silver tide.  Woolf's novels are all experiments in different styles, some with more success than others.  This long poem on the passage of time, however, is one of her great masterpieces.  Yet didn't Hawthorne do exactly the same thing, in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the little red cottage, when he penned the chapter in "Seven Gables" in which the corpse of Judge Pyncheon sits motionless in the parlor of the old house as night falls and day slowly rises again to the windowsills to spill over into the deathly rooms?  I re-read this in utter terror and admiration, because nothing comes close to its cinematic snapshot of phantom Time, or its haunting depiction of Time as a stage in which the spirits of the dead may come to have their turn again, actors forever trapped in the roles they last played.  I expected, when I entered the house on Turner Street, that I would pick up at least some of this, even as Hawthorne had done when visiting his cousins in the house prior to writing the novel.

The House of the Seven Gables is, of course, a kind of Disneyland of Hawthorne's novel.  It inspired the book in part, but not all; it was opened for visitors in the 1900's, as part of a charitable undertaking for the benefit of Salem Settlement House, and many features were added to it to make it as much like the house in the novel as possible.  But I was not prepared for the benignant and venerable old mansion that I toured last week, in company with ten other people who, I was astonished to discover, had never read the novel.   It is just a house, with a lovely view to the Harbour, and gardens laid out to approximate those brought back to bloom by Hepzibah Pyncheon's young country cousin, Phoebe.  It creaks and cracks as you walk on its plank floors and you wouldn't wonder at its complaints.  A scrim of fiction has been stretched over it, painted with figures of people who never lived there, participants in dramas that never occurred.  Walking through the house gave me the sense of having awakened a pleasantly dozing old lady, who has had a long and busy life and more than deserves her nap in the sun. But the real revelation came when, still in the grounds, I found myself stealing glances into the novel, as a thirsty person takes swigs of water.  The reality of this fictional house lived not in four hundred year old beams and clapboards but in the yellowed pages of my 1905 edition of the novel.  This did not, of course, prevent me from picking up a stray bloom fallen on the garden path to press inside the pages of the book.  Flowers, like the fictional House of the Seven Gables, are both real and fantastical, impressing on the eye and nostril one day and gone the next, leaving memory.  Sort of like the power at the core of the greatest fiction, the kind Nathaniel Hawthorne gave us when he wrote "The House of the Seven Gables".