Be true! Be True! Be True!

Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 book, “The Scarlet Letter,” is often on “Great Book” and academic reading lists. Some people absolutely hate the book. James Dickey once dismissed it as “all this pother about fornication.”

But I was born, raised, and lived many years in that area just outside Boston in which the book is set, and am deeply familiar with its Puritan background. The fundamental problem of authenticity was, is, stark in that culture, as you see in “The Scarlet Letter,” but exists everywhere even if less easily noticed.

I first read it exactly fifty years ago and then again this last week. There was one sentence in the story which I had remembered verbatim over all these years and which perhaps catches the central point of the book:

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

Multi-faced Mitt Romney comes immediately to mind and Cornel West recently rather harshly described Barack Obama as “a Rockefeller Republican in black-face.” I suppose it is difficult to get elected President of the United States or anything else, or to have any other socially important part, if you tell the truth. You and your loved ones will be “living under the constant threat of death,” to use Martin Luther King Jr.'s words. But Hawthorne writes:

“Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence:-'Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!'”

You get the feeling when reading Hawthorne's book, or Thoreau's “Walden” or Steinbeck's “The Grapes of Wrath” or Salinger's “The Catcher in the Rye” that the author himself has managed to remain authentic. I'm sure there are many more such authors, but what you more often see and feel are those whose true intent is to get published, make a mark, make money, feed the ego, be famous, please ancestors who lived many years ago, or a thousand other shallow things.