Authors: Paul Auster
The lease was good for four years, but shortly after the completion of
Twenty Days
and Sophia’s return from West Newton with Una and baby Rose, Hawthorne contrived to get himself into a dispute with his landlords over a trivial matter of boundaries. The issue revolved around the question of whether he and his family had the right to pick the fruits and berries from the trees and bushes on the property. In a long, hilariously acidic letter to Mrs. Tappan dated September 5, 1851, Hawthorne set forth his case, concluding with a rather nasty challenge: “At any rate, take what you want, and that speedily, or there will be little else than a parcel of rotten plums to dispute about.” A gracious, conciliatory letter from Mr. Tappan the following day—which Sophia characterized to her sister as “noble and beautiful”—seemed to settle the matter once and for all, but by then Hawthorne had already made up his mind to move, and the family soon packed up their belongings and were gone from the house on November twenty-first.
Just one week earlier, on November fourteenth, Melville had received his first copies of
Moby-Dick
. That same day, he drove his wagon over to the red farmhouse and invited Hawthorne to a farewell dinner at Curtis’s Hotel in Lenox, where he presented his friend with a copy of the book. Until then, Hawthorne had known nothing about the effusive dedication to him, and while there is no record of his reaction to this unexpected tribute to “his genius,” one can only surmise that he was deeply moved. Moved enough, in any case, to begin reading the book immediately upon returning home, surrounded by the chaos of boxes and packing crates as his family prepared for their departure. He must have read the book quickly and intensely, for his letter of response reached Melville on the sixteenth. All but one of Hawthorne’s letters to Melville have been lost, but numerous letters from Melville to Hawthorne have survived, and his answer to this one is among the most memorable and frequently quoted letters in all of American literature: “… A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood the book. I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb. Ineffable socialities are in me. I would sit down and dine with you and all the gods in old Rome’s Pantheon…. Whence come you, Hawthorne? By what right do you drink from the flagon of my life? And when I put it to my lips—lo, they are yours and not mine. I feel that the Godhead is broken up like the bread at the Supper, and that we are the pieces. Hence this infinite fraternity of feeling…. I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.”
*
Melville makes a couple of appearances in
Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny
, but the gist of the piece is the little boy himself, the daily activities of father and son, the ephemeral nothings of domestic life. No dramas are reported, the routine is fairly monotonous, and in terms of content, one can hardly imagine a duller or more pedestrian undertaking. Hawthorne kept the diary for Sophia. It was written in a separate family notebook which they both used to record material about the children (and which the children had access to as well, sometimes adding drawings and infant scribbles of their own—and, in a few instances, even tracing their pencils directly over texts written by their parents). Hawthorne intended his wife to read the little work after her return from West Newton, and it appears that she did so at the earliest opportunity. Describing the trip home to Lenox in a letter to her mother three days later (August 19, 1851), Sophia wrote, “… Una was very tired, and her eyes looked as cavernous as Daniel Webster’s till she saw the red house; and then she began to shout, and clap her hands for joy. Mr. Hawthorne came forth with a thousand welcomes in his eyes, and Julian leaped like a fountain, and was as impossible to hold fast…. I found that Mr. Hawthorne had written a minute account of his and Julian’s life from the hour of our departure. He had a tea-party of New York gentlemen one day, and they took him and Julian a long drive; and they all had a picnic together, and did not get home till eight o’clock. Mr. Melville came with these gentlemen, and once before in my absence. Mr. Hawthorne also had a visit from a Quaker lady of Philadelphia, Elizabeth Lloyd, who came to see the author of “The Scarlet Letter.” He said that it was a very pleasant call. Mr. [G.P.R.] James also came twice, once with a great part of his family, once in a storm. Julian’s talk flowed like a babbling brook, he writes, the whole three weeks, through all his meditations and reading. They spent a great deal of time at the lakes, and put Nat’s ship out to sea…. Sometimes Julian pensively yearned for mama, but was not once out of temper or unhappy. There is a charming history of poor little Bunny, who died the morning of the day we returned. It did not appear why he should die, unless he lapped water off the bathing-room floor. But he was found stark and stiff. Mrs. Peters was very smiling, and grimly glad to see me …”
After Hawthorne’s death in 1864, Sophia was prevailed upon by James T. Fields, Hawthorne’s publisher and also the editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, to choose excerpts from her husband’s notebooks for publication in the magazine. Passages appeared in twelve successive issues in 1866, but when it came to
Twenty Days with Julian & Little
Bunny
, which Fields was hoping to include, she hesitated, claiming that Julian would have to be consulted first. Her son apparently had no objections, but still Sophia was reluctant to give her consent, and after some further reflection she decided against printing the material, explaining to Fields that Hawthorne “would never have wished such an intimate domestic history to be made public, and I am astonished at myself that I ever thought of it.” In 1884, when Julian published his own book,
Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife
, he included a number of extracts from
Twenty Days
, commenting that the three weeks he spent alone with his father “must have been weary work, sometimes, for Hawthorne, though for the little boy it was one uninterrupted succession of halcyon days.” He mentions that a full version of the diary would make “as unique and quaint a little history as was ever seen,” but it wasn’t until 1932, when Randall Stewart put together the first scholarly edition of the
American Notebooks
, that
Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny
was finally made available to the public. Not as a separate book (as Julian had suggested) but as one section in a lengthy volume of 800 pages that spans the years 1835 to 1853.
Why publish it now as an independent work? Why should this small, uneventful piece of prose command our interest more than one hundred-fifty years after it was written? I wish I could mount a cogent defense on its behalf, make some dazzling, sophisticated argument that would prove its greatness, but if the piece is great, it is great only in miniature, great only because the writing, in and of itself, gives pleasure.
Twenty Days
is a humorous work by a notoriously melancholic man, and anyone who has ever spent an extended length of time in the company of a small child will surely respond to the accuracy and honesty of Hawthorne’s account.
Una and Julian were raised in an unorthodox manner, even by the standards of mid-nineteenth-century Transcendentalist New England. Although they reached school-age during their time in Lenox, neither one was sent to school, and they spent their days at home with their mother, who took charge of their education and rarely allowed them to mingle with other children. The hermetic, Eden-like atmosphere that Hawthorne and Sophia tried to establish in Concord after their marriage apparently continued after they became parents. Writing to her mother from Lenox, Sophia eloquently delineated her philosophy of childrearing: “… Alas for those who counsel sternness and severity instead of love towards their young children! How little they are like God, how much they are like Solomon, whom I really believe many persons prefer to imitate, and think they do well. Infinite patience, infinite tenderness, infinite magnanimity,—no less will do, and we must practise them as far as finite power will allow. Above all, no parent should feel a
pride of power
. This, I doubt not, is the great stumbling-block, and it should never be indulged. From this comes the sharp rebuke, the cruel blow, the anger. A tender sorrow, a most sympathizing regret, alone should appear at the transgression of a child … Yet how immitigable is the judgment and treatment of these little misdemeanors often! When my children disobey, I am not personally aggrieved, and they see it, and find therefore that it is a disinterested desire that they should do right that induces me to insist. There is all the difference in the world between indulgence and tenderness.”
Hawthorne, who acceded to his wife in all family and household matters, took a far less active role in raising the children. “If only papa wouldn’t write, how nice it would be,” Julian quoted Una as having declared one day, and according to him “their feeling about all their father’s writings was, that he was being wasted in his study, when he might be with them, and there could be nothing in any books, whether his own or other authors’, that could for a moment bear comparison with his actual companionship.” When he finished working for the day, it seems that Hawthorne preferred acting as playmate with his children than as classic paternal figure. “Our father was a great tree-climber,” Julian recalled, “and he was also fond of playing the magician. ‘Hide your eyes!’ he would say, and the next moment, from being there beside us on the moss, we would hear his voice descending from the sky, and behold! he swung among the topmost branches, showering down upon us a hail-storm of nuts.” In her numerous letters and journal entries from that period, Sophia frequently noted glimpses of Hawthorne alone with the two children. “Mr. Hawthorne,” she informed her mother, “has been lying down in the sunshine, slightly fleckered with the shadows of a tree, and Una and Julian have been making him look like the mighty Pan by covering his chin and breast with long grass-blades, that looked like a verdant, venerable beard.” And again to her mother several days later: “Dear little harp-souled Una—whose love for her father grows more profound every day …was made quite unhappy because he did not go at the same time with her to the lake. His absence darkened all the sunshine to her; and when I asked her why she could not enjoy the walk as Julian did, she replied, ‘Ah,
he
does not love papa as
I
do!’…. After I put Julian to bed, I went out to the barn to see about the chickens, and she wished to go. There sat papa on the hay, and like a needle to a magnet she was drawn, and begged to see papa a little longer, and stay with him. Now she has come, weary enough; and after steeping her spirit in this rose and gold of twilight, she has gone to bed. With such a father, and such a scene before her eyes, and
with eyes to see
, what may we not hope of her? I heard her and Julian talking together about their father’s smile, the other day—They had been speaking of some other person’s smile—Mr. Tappan’s, I believe; and presently Una said, ‘But you know, Julian, that there is no smile like papa’s!’ ‘Oh no,’ replied Julian. ‘Not like
papa’s
!’ “In 1904, many years after Una’s early death at the age of thirty-three, Thomas Wentworth Higginson published a memorial piece about her in
The Outlook
, a popular magazine of the period. In it, he quoted her as once having said to him about her father: “He was capable of being the gayest person I ever saw. He was like a boy. Never was such a playmate as he in all the world.”
All this lies behind the spirit of
Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny.
The Hawthornes were a consciously progressive family, and for the most part their treatment of their children corresponds to attitudes prevalent among the secular middle-class in America today. No harsh discipline, no physical punishment, no strident reprimands. Some people found the Hawthorne children obstreperous and unruly, but Sophia, ever inclined to see them as model creatures, happily reported in a letter to her mother that at a local torchlight festival “the children enjoyed themselves extremely, and behaved so beautifully that they won all hearts. They thought that there never was such a superb child as Julian, nor such a grace as Una. ‘They are neither too shy, nor bold,’ said Mrs. Field, ‘but just right.’ “What constitutes “just right,” of course, is a matter of opinion. Hawthorne, who was always more rigorous in his observations than his wife—unable, by force of instinct and habit, to allow love to color his judgments—makes no bones about how annoying Julian’s presence sometimes was to him. That theme is sounded on the first page of the diary, and it recurs repeatedly throughout the twenty days they spent together. The boy was a champion chatterbox, a pint-sized engine of logorrhea, and within hours of Sophia’s departure, Hawthorne was already complaining that “it is impossible to write, read, think, or even to sleep (in the daytime) so constant are his appeals to me in one way or another.” By the second evening, after remarking once again on the endless stream of babble that issued from Julian’s lips, Hawthorne put him to bed and added: “nor need I hesitate to say that I was glad to be rid of him—it being my first relief from his society during the whole day. This may be too much of a good thing.” Five days later, on August third, he was again harping on the same subject: “Either I have less patience to-day than ordinary, or the little man makes larger demands upon it; but it really does seem as if he had baited me with more questions, references, and observations, than mortal father ought to be expected to endure.” And again on August fifth: “He continues to pester me with his inquisitions. For instance, just now, while he is whittling with my jack-knife. ‘Father, if you had bought all the jack-knives at the shop, what would you do for another, when you broke them all?’ ‘I would go somewhere else,’ say I. But there is no stumping him. ‘If you had bought all the jack-knives in the world, what would you do?’ And here my patience gives way, and I entreat him not to trouble me with any more foolish questions. I really think it would do him good to spank him, apropos to this habit.” And once again on August tenth: “Mercy on me, was ever man before so be-pelted with a child’s talk as I am!”