An Outermost Love Triangle

A Review of Salt House by Hazel Hawthorne

An early twentieth-century literary darling of the Outer Cape (and a descendent of Nathaniel Hawthorne), Hazel Hawthorne and her second husband, Morris S. Werner, spent many years living and working between New York and Provincetown. From the back cover of her 1934 novel Salt House, recently reissued by Provincetown Arts Press, Hawthorne peers up at the viewer through deep-set eyes, the whisper of a moustache marking the corners of her mouth, upturned at the edge of mischief. There’s also that haircut, commonplace among the Bushwick dykes these days. Despite the fact that across her life she married two men and raised five children, her portrait still manages to register the ambiguity of sexuality for bohemian women living in 1930s Provincetown: a place where, despite the patriarchal constraints of the broader culture, social boundaries frayed, affording some women a crucial space for expression and exploration. 

Judith, the narrator of Salt House, is a writer living in a dune shack at the edge of the Cape and waffling between two lovers. She is a self-described “woman who could sit a glittering horse, drink whiskey neat, and take any man she wanted” (6). Over the course of a summer, Judith flits between New York and Provincetown, partying, hitchhiking, and writing somewhat solipsistic diary entries in which she laments her romantic predicament. Indeed, the Times had this to say upon the novel’s publication: “This elaborately wrought modernistic diary of a self-consciously wavering young woman is little more than an embroidery on the old pattern of ‘how happy could I be with either, were t’other dear charmer away!’”

At first, I had to agree. And yet, by the end of my reading, I came to find Hawthorne’s explorations of infidelity refreshing and emotionally subversive. In the novel’s first third, Judith anxiously awaits the arrival of her long-term lover, Philip, and begins an affair with Rake, a nineteen year old with “playful yet indecisive [hands], like puppy paws…freckles, gray eyes, and rank black hair” (13). When Philip arrives, he sleeps with a woman named Ione, and, it’s later implied, a young man named Sammy. Judith and Philip appear aware of one another’s trysts, though not bothered to the extent of breaching the subject. One morning after sleeping with Rake, Judith writes in her diary, “I felt full-blooded and guiltless. I might try to prove that I had good reasons for not feeling guilty, but it wouldn’t be true. I didn’t have any reasons. Love is not a rag or a stone, but something that is always either growing or dying” (86).

Even in an arts colony filled with bohemians, a woman directly discussing sexuality and desire was a scandal in 1930s Provincetown. Salt House was suppressed after its initial publication: bookstores in town refused to sell it, and it was hidden away at the Provincetown Public Library, where I now sit writing this. Judith, Rake, and Philip move through the world of the novel with a sense of permission attributable to Provincetown’s peculiar magic. Indeed, across the two summers I’ve spent here, I’ve come to observe an echolocative timelessness that renders certain relations and revelations uniquely possible. “Would I have loved Philip Hatefield, or Rake Basque, anywhere but here?” Judith wonders towards the end of the novel. “The wide landscape and the bare walls focused on us; it was we alone who moved between them, and perhaps that is why our least emotions assumed a theatrical importance” (147).

In Salt House, narrative grows out of the natural landscape, which Hawthorne takes great care to detail, in indulgent, Woolfian passages: the sea is “clean and energetic, neatly defining its edges with incessantly forming scallops of foam” (11). Clouds have “outstretched necks and greedy mouths,” and the sky is “dark, with a strange, livid light flowing out from under the clouds” (14, 11). And Salt House itself—the shack on the dune in which Judith lives—is “isolated as a ship, and silent, with the living silence of an audience, though at the same time filled with the unceasing fluid articulation of the sea” (17).

We can understand the “exquisite unreality” of Judith’s life on the dunes in part as an insulation from the financial depression of the interwar period. Inklings of this historical backdrop spring up throughout the novel, from Judith and Philip’s conversations about poverty (“it is so stupid to find oneself on hands and knees to Materialism,” writes Philip before arriving to the Cape, lamenting his lack of travel funds) to Rake and Judith purchasing bread and sausage on credit from the grocery store (16). Other tidbits, though, feel plucked from a much more contemporary world;  Philip’s inexplicable pet monkey, for example, which surfaces only in New York, and Rake’s appearance as of a drowned boy or a “wild colt”—in other words, your average lower east side dirtbags.

By the end of the novel, Rake has left town for good. Judith and Philip go walking in the woods with Sammy, who, it’s implied, is sleeping with Philip. Judith responds to Sammy’s infatuation with the humored, blasé solidarity of two lovers scorned by the same man: “It takes talent to love him. I congratulate you!” she tells him (154). Soon after, Philip leaves town to live with his family, and Judith, kicked out of a party, trudges back towards the dunes. “As I went through the heavy sand in the shrouded woods, I thought how instead of feeling rejected I felt powerful and content, and though the day lay behind me, unfulfilled and lonely, yet somehow it had been like music” (160). Here, Provincetown’s natural beauty seems to fortify Judith against the torment of heartbreak, lending her a greater perspective on matters of the heart than the constraints of her time might otherwise allow. In Salt House, Hawthorne’s triumph lies in capturing the particular magic of this outermost place, and readers will appreciate the singular window the novel offers into the experience of a 1930s woman defining her life through art, desire, and exploration. Of Provincetown, she writes, “I always have a feeling that any life that has been here is retained and goes on echoing and being known” (11).

Hana Rivers is an MFA candidate in fiction at Brooklyn College and the editor-in-chief of The Brooklyn Review. A 2023 Periplus fellow, you can find her fiction and book reviews in The Los Angeles Review of Books, DREGINALD, High Country News, and elsewhere. She has spent the past two summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts working at The Fine Arts Work Center, a residency program for writers and artists.