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JULIAN HAWTHORNE
The Life of a Prodigal Son
By GARY SCHARNHORST UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Gary Scharnhorst
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03834-1
CHAPTER 1
1846–64
"I do not at all despair of seeing him grow up a gentleman"
"A small troglodyte made his appearance here at ten minutes to six o'clock this morning," the proud father announced on June 22, 1846. "He has dark hair and is no great beauty at present, but is said to be a particularly fine little urchin by everybody who has seen him." The "troglodyte" was not christened for nearly a year, because his parents could not agree on a name. They bandied about a few, such as Theodore and Gerald; meanwhile, his father called him the "Black Prince" and "Bumblebreech." For whatever reason, they finally chose Julian, the name of a pagan and apostate.
A well-born child, he was the heir of distinguished New England families. On his mother Sophia's side, he was descended from "Boadicea, queen of the Britons," or so he bragged, and the Revolutionary general Joseph Palmer. His mother's sisters, Mary Mann and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, were renowned reformers, the first a teacher and wife of progressive educator Horace Mann, the latter an antislavery activist, feminist, and champion of kindergartens. The corpulent Aunt Lizzie—Julian once estimated her weight at "several tons"—"became the honored and loved friend of most of the eminent persons of her time and place," and she "overflowed with unselfish love and good works for everybody, for us children especially."
On his father Nathaniel's side, Julian was descended from the Puritan selectman William Hathorne, who accompanied John Winthrop to the New World aboard the Arbella in 1630. His forte was the "adjudication of crime, particularly illegal fornication." William's son John was a presiding magistrate at the Salem witch trials. Julian's great-grandfather "Bold Daniel" Hathorne was a hero of the Revolution, and his grandfather had been a sea captain in the merchant marine and died of yellow fever in Surinam in 1808. Julian's paternal grandmother had been a Manning, a prominent Salem family. Julian's ancestry was not without blemish, however. Philip Young documents an episode of incest in the Manning family in the late seventeenth century. As Nathaniel remarked in his tale "Main Street," "Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages."
Sophia bore her second child in the relative safety and comfort of her parents' house in Boston near her mother, her physician father, and her homeopathic doctor. For six months her husband commuted to his job in the Salem Custom House. In August 1846, father, mother, daughter Una, and baby Julian moved to a small house on Chestnut Street in Salem, then two months later to a more spacious, three-story house on Mall Street. Julian's grandmother Elizabeth Clarke Manning Hathorne (aka Madame Hawthorne) and her daughters, Elizabeth (aka Aunt Ebe) and Louisa, were ensconced in rooms on the second floor just below Nathaniel's study. "It will be very pleasant to have Madame Hawthorne in the house," Sophia claimed. "Her suite of rooms is wholly distinct from ours, so that we shall only meet when we choose to do so." The house rented for two hundred dollars a year, a small fraction of Nathaniel's twelve-hundred-dollar annual salary.
Though Julian purported in later life to have been a fragile child, the opposite seems to be true. In November, five months old, he weighed a hearty twenty-three pounds. A month later his mother reported that he was "a Titan in strength & size" and "as large as some children of two years." His father thought he resembled "an alderman in miniature.... There never was a gait more expressive of childish force and physical well-being." At twenty months he was a headstrong "little outlaw" fond of mischief. In December 1848, Sophia noted that Julian at age two "rides very far on his hobby-horse,—round the whole earth,—and then dismounts, loaded down with superb presents for us all." Or as Emerson might have said, "Hawthorne rides well his hobby-horse of the night." His father hoped to foster a martial spirit in his son, who possessed "a disposition to make use of weapons—to brandish a stick, and use it against an adversary," what his father considered a normal "masculine attribute." Julian played with a wooden cannon and trumpet at the age of seven, and Nathaniel bought him a toy pistol for his eighth birthday.
In short, the young Julian was indulged by permissive parents. His mother scorned "those who counsel sternness and severity instead of love towards their young children!" She regarded Julian as "the son of a King ... anointed by Heaven." His father once joked that "if Julian sent for mamma's head, I suppose she would do it up in a bundle" and send it. The biographer Randall Stewart fairly noted that Sophia regarded all of her children as "unfallen angels." Nathaniel, on the other hand, worried that his son was too soft: "Julian has too much tenderness, love, and sensibility in his nature; he needs to be hardened and tempered." As Julian recounted in his biography of his parents, "The mother sees goodness and divinity shining through everywhere; the father's attitude is deductive and moralizing." In contrast to her brother, Una seemed odd-turned, an anomaly who defied the norms, "neither male nor female and yet both." Her father would ascribe some of her eccentricities to the elfin child Pearl in The Scarlet Letter.
Nathaniel composed his most celebrated romance soon after he lost his patronage job in the custom house. When he was "decapitated" on June 8, 1849, three months after the inauguration of Zachary Taylor, his dismissal became a national cause célèbre. He did not appeal the decision, however, because he had wearied of the menial labor. According to legend, he began the book the same day he was fired, when Sophia revealed that she had saved about $150 in pin money for just such an exigency. Within weeks, Nathaniel's mother died, which helps explain why the gloomy romance was, he said, "a positively hell-fired story, into which I found it impossible to throw any cheering light." At the age of three, Julian understood nothing about his father's despondency. He only knew that in a chamber on the second floor "lay an old woman of striking aspect, with a brow and eyes resembling our father's own. As the book grew to life, she faded out of existence, and before the fame of it had been sounded she was gone."
Raised on the stories of Hans Christian Andersen, the brothers Grimm, Mother Goose, and Lewis Richter's The Black Aunt, Una and Julian "believed in fairies, in magic, in angels, in transformations," and in changelings. Sophia boasted that Julian had "developed a superb creative genius & we think he inherits his father's imagination." In winter, in the backyard of the house on Mall Street, the children "rejoiced in the snow; and my father's story of the Snow Image got most of its local color from our gambols." In the tale a small boy and his sister fashion a girl from snow and it leaps to life. The children are easily recognizable as Julian and Una. With his "broad and round little phiz," the boy runs around "on his short and sturdy legs as substantial as an elephant." In his journal Nathaniel also remarked on Julian's "rozy little phiz," "round little face," and "stout, sturdy, energetic little legs." A year or so later he modeled some of the characters and events in The Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales on the adventures of his children. Nathaniel, Una, and Julian were thinly disguised as Eustace Bright, Primrose, and Sweet Fern. As their father finished each of the tales, he read it aloud to the family, and before the manuscript was printed, "the children could repeat the greater part of it by heart."
The sales success of The Scarlet Letter enabled Nathaniel to earn a modest livelihood by his pen. No longer tied to Salem, he looked for another place where he could write without distraction. He had hoped to settle near the sea, but when Sophia's friend Caroline Tappan offered a small red cottage on her estate in the Berkshires near Lenox in western Massachusetts, he accepted reluctantly. The family settled there in late May 1850 and remained for eighteen months. Nathaniel wrote The House of the Seven Gables in the "Red House," where the Hawthornes' third and last child, Rose, was born on May 20, 1851.
Among their near neighbors was the actress Fanny Kemble, grandmother of the novelist Owen Wister. Infatuated with Kemble, Julian once listened as she read an entire Shakespeare play, and on another occasion she rode her horse to the Red House and asked Julian if "he would like to have a ride; and, on his answering emphatically in the affirmative, she swung him up astride the pommel of her saddle, and galloped off with him." When they returned, Kemble "held him out at arm's length, exclaiming, 'Take your boy!—Julian the Apostate!'"
But by far the most important friend Nathaniel made during these months was Herman Melville, who lived on a farm six miles away. The thirty-one-year old author of Typee and Omoo "was the strangest being that ever came into our circle," Julian later remarked, although he remembered him mostly as having "a black beard, with a pair of dark, glowing eyes above it, and a white forehead contrasting with darker cheeks." Melville "would tramp over once in a while" to charm the children with his stories, especially during the winter, and he dedicated to Nathaniel the romance he was writing at the time—Moby-Dick.
When Sophia and Una left Lenox on July 28, 1851, for three weeks in Boston, Julian remained behind in the care of his father. Nathaniel kept a detailed diary of these weeks titled "Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny" to share with his wife when she returned. Julian recalled this period as "one uninterrupted succession of halcyon days," although one of Nathaniel's biographers has detected a different subtext, writing: "Hawthorne spared the rod and made his own life miserable. Julian made nasty comments about visitors, bellowed for more bread at the table, and hit his father when it was refused." As for the pet bunny, Nathaniel found it "stark and stiff" in its box on August 16. "Julian seemed to be interested and excited by the event, rather than afflicted," his father noted. He "laughed a good deal about Bunny's exit." Little did he know that Julian had poisoned it—"my first murder, which I did not confess for twenty years." This sadistic streak sometimes emerged in his adulthood, especially in his relationships with women.
The highlights of these weeks were a pair of encounters with Melville. On August 1 they crossed paths by chance. Melville alighted from his horse, lifted Julian into the saddle, and "the little man" had "a ride of at least a mile homeward." Melville stayed for supper, and after Nathaniel put Julian to bed, the two men "had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night." Five-year-old Julian dozed in the next room while his father and Melville enjoyed one of the most famous conversations in the history of American letters. A week later, Melville, the Hawthornes, and George and Evart Duyckinck visited a nearby Shaker village. Nathaniel was horrified. For all their claims of physical purity, "the Shakers are and must needs be a filthy set" and "the sooner the sect is extinct the better." Much to his father's delight, Julian "desired to confer with himself"—that is, he evacuated on the grass—and "neither was I unwilling that he should bestow such a mark." The next day, Evart Duyckinck wrote his wife that Julian, with "his ringlets and quick electric ways," was "overflowing with life." That day, too, Julian announced that he "loved Mr. Melville as well as [his father], and as mamma, and as Una." Weeks later, Melville replied to a letter from Julian that he was "very happy that I have a place in the heart of so fine a little fellow as you."
By November 1851, the same month Moby-Dick appeared, Nathaniel was ready to relocate. He had wearied of the Red House, "the most inconvenient and wretched little hovel that I ever put my head in," and he had the offer of the Manns' home in West Newton for the winter. There the family moved, and there he wrote The Blithedale Romance. But the arrangement was only temporary, given the acrimony between the in-laws. Horace Mann disapproved of Nathaniel's smoking and drinking, and Nathaniel disapproved of Mann's radical politics, especially his abolitionism. Even as a child Julian was frightened by his uncle's stern moral strictures. Julian recalled a visit to the village by the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth that winter. Kossuth was in the United States to raise money for the struggle in his homeland, one of the European revolutions of 1848, and while on his travels he stopped for an hour at the depot in West Newton. Julian had printed the message "God bless you, Kossuth!" on a card and presented it to "the slender, dark, bearded gentleman," who read it, "looked me in the eyes with a quick smile of comprehension, and, stepping towards me, laid his hand upon my head."
In February 1852 Nathaniel began to search for a dwelling where he could settle more permanently. "He is very anxious to get into a home of his own, where his mind will be free to follow the calling on which his bread depends," Sophia's mother wrote. The couple had lived in the Old Manse in Concord early in their marriage, and Bronson Alcott was selling a house a mile east of the village. "My father's first look at 'The Wayside' had been while snow was still on the ground," Julian remembered, "and he had reported to his wife that it resembled a cattle-pen." Still, it was located on several acres of meadow and woodlands along Lexington Road. Ephraim Wales Bull, the developer of the Concord grape, lived next door. Nathaniel paid fifteen hundred dollars for it, the only house he ever owned.
The site of the first battle of the American Revolution, Concord was also the mecca of transcendentalism and home to Alcott, Ellery Channing, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Julian disdained Alcott, "whose unselfish devotion to the welfare of the human race," he once mused, "made it incumbent upon his friends to supply him with the means of earthly subsistence." The joke went around that his daughter Louisa May was his greatest contribution to literature. Julian also belittled the poet Channing, whom he considered "not altogether sane." As for Thoreau, Julian remembered best the day in 1852 when the "hermit of Concord" surveyed the grounds of the Wayside: "Wherever he went I followed; neither of us spoke a word from first to last." When he had finished, Nathaniel "paid him ten dollars, and Thoreau strode away, after remarking, with a glance at me, 'That boy has more eyes than tongue.'"
Whatever he thought of the local cranks, Julian revered Emerson. "If we regard Alcott as the cow that jumped over the moon, Emerson's was the hand that let down the bars of the pasture," in his view. Nicknamed the Concord Sage, Emerson was the greatest American poet, indeed "the only original poet" of his generation. Julian befriended Emerson's children Edward and Edith, and their father reciprocated the affection. "There is no child so fine as Julian," Emerson remarked when Hawthorne père and fils visited him on July 4, 1852. If George Washington was "the Great Repose," he declared, then "Julian is the Little Repose—hereafter to become the Great Repose!" Emerson once invited Julian to walk with him and his children "to Fairy Land," meaning the Walden woods, and he went "in a state of ecstatic bliss."
Meanwhile, Julian and his sisters were homeschooled. Unfortunately, he was a desultory student. Their mother taught reading, geography, and drawing; instructed them in the Bible; and read to them from Homer's epics, John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Longfellow's poetry. As an adolescent, Julian knew "the story of all the mythological personages" in the Iliad and the Odyssey; and he was obsessed with the character of Giant Despair in Bunyan's allegory, who seemed to stalk him. His father taught him elementary French, and Aunt Lizzie tried to instruct him in history, but to little avail. "As a pupil I was always most inept and grievous in dates and in matters mathematical especially," he admitted. Thomas Wentworth Higginson visited the Wayside around this time and recalled that Nathaniel "twirl[ed] his magnificent boy" in the air. Not all the visitors to the Wayside were similarly charmed with Julian, however. Channing complained that the Hawthorne children were "brought up in the worst way" and had learned "nothing but bad manners. They break in when not required, & are not in fact either handsome or attractive." On another occasion the poet Richard Henry Stoddard chatted with Nathaniel in his study while Julian played with the inkstand. "He was ordered to desist, but of course he did not" and soon overturned it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from JULIAN HAWTHORNE by GARY SCHARNHORST. Copyright © 2014 Gary Scharnhorst. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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