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If, at one sitting, he caught a glimpse of what happened to be a genuine and permanent expression, it would probably be less perceptible, on a second occasion, and perhaps have vanished entirely, at a third.
-Hawthorne, The Marble Faun
This all started by accident. I noticed the repetition of an unusual name, Fanshawe (or Fanshaw), in three American novels separated widely in time and literary sensibility. The fact might be dismissed as a coincidence, except that certain thematic similarities emerged among the three works. Further investigation revealed that the last book in the series had invoked the name as a deliberate echo of the first. The name was a tiny thread in American literature, but the more I pulled at it, the more I found myself involved in subterranean intertextual adventures.
The basic facts are easy to summarize. Nathaniel Hawthorne published his first novel, Fanshawe, at his own expense, in 1828. Hawthorne's queasy relationship with Fanshawe is well !mown. Millicent Bell, who annotated the Library of America edition of Hawthorne's novels, is succinct: "Ashamed of this first effort (which does not bear his name on its title page), he forbids his friends to mention his authorship and refuses to discuss the book in later years. His wife does not learn of its existence until after his death."
In Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom Ripley, having murdered Dickie Greenleaf and assumed his identity, deposits Dickie's things at an American Express office in Venice under an assumed name. The passage concerning this is brief and the use of the name "Fanshaw" seemingly inconsequential:
So, after scraping the initials off Dickie's two suitcases, he sent them, locked, from Naples to the American Express Company, Venice, together with two canvases he had begun painting in Palermo, in the name of Robert S. Fanshaw, to be stored until called for. The only things, the only revealing things, he kept with him were Dickie's rings, which he put into the bottom of an ugly little leather box belonging to Thomas Ripley, that he had somehow kept with him for years everywhere he traveled or moved to ...
In The Locked Room (1986), the final volume of Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy, the narrator reveals that...