by Paul Auster
Since that remarkable debut, Spiegelman has continued to confound our expectations, consciously using his inventiveness as a destabilizing force, a weapon of surprise. He wants to keep us off balance, to catch us with our guard down, and to that end he approaches his subjects from numerous angles and with countless shadings of tone: mockery and whimsy, outrage and rebuke, even tenderness and laudatory affection. The heroic construction-worker mother breast-feeding her baby on the girder of a half-finished skyscraper; turkey-bombs falling on Afghanistan; Bill Clinton’s groin surrounded by a sea of microphones; college diplomas that turn out to be help-wanted ads; the weirdo hipster family as emblem of cross-generational love and solidarity; the crucified Easter bunny impaled on an IRS tax form; the Santa Claus and the rabbi with identical beards and bellies. Unafraid to court controversy, Spiegelman has offended many people over the years, and several of the covers he has prepared for The New Yorker have been deemed so incendiary by the editorial powers of the magazine that they have refused to run them. Beginning with the Valentine’s Day cover of 1993, Spiegelman’s work has inspired thousands of indignant letters, hundreds of canceled subscriptions, and, in one very dramatic instance, a full-scale protest demonstration by members of the New York City Police Department in front of The New Yorker offices in Manhattan. That is the price one pays for speaking one’s mind—for drawing one’s mind. Spiegelman’s tenure at The New Yorker has not always been an easy one, but his courage has been a steady source of encouragement to those of us who love our city and believe in the idea of New York as a place for everyone, as the central laboratory of human contradictions in our time.
Then came September 11, 2001. In the fire and smoke of three thousand incinerated bodies, a holocaust was visited upon us, and nine months later the city is still grieving over its dead. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, in the hours and days that followed that murderous morning, few of us were capable of thinking any coherent thoughts. The shock was too great, and as the smoke continued to hover over the city and we breathed in the vile smells of death and destruction, most of us shuffled around like sleepwalkers, numb and dazed, not good for anything. But The New Yorker had an issue to put out, and when they realized that someone would have to design a cover—the most important cover in their history, which would have to be produced in record time—they turned to Spiegelman.
That black-on-black issue of September 24 is, in my opinion, Spiegelman’s masterpiece. In the face of absolute horror, one’s inclination is to dispense with images altogether. Words often fail us at moments of extreme duress. The same is true of pictures. If I have not garbled the story Spiegelman told me during those days, I believe he originally resisted that iconoclastic impulse: to hand in a solid black cover to represent mourning, an absent image to stand as a mirror of the ineffable. Other ideas occurred to him. He tested them out, but one by one he rejected them, slowly pushing his mind toward darker and darker hues until, inevitably, he arrived at a deep, unmodulated black. But still that wasn’t enough. He found it too mute, too facile, too resigned, but for want of any other solution, he almost capitulated. Then, just as he was about to give up, he began thinking about some of the artists who had come before him, artists who had explored the implications of eliminating color from their paintings—in particular Ad Reinhardt and his black-on-black canvases from the sixties, those supremely abstract and minimal anti-images that had taken painting to the farthest edge of possibility. Spiegelman had found his direction. Not in silence—but in the sublime.
You have to look very closely at the picture before you notice the towers. They are there and not there, effaced and yet still present, shadows pulsing in oblivion, in memory, in the ghostly emanation of some tormented afterlife. When I saw the picture for the first time, I felt as if Spiegelman had placed a stethoscope on my chest and methodically registered every heartbeat that had shaken my body since September 11. Then my eyes filled up with tears. Tears for the dead. Tears for the living. Tears for the abominations we inflict on one another, for the cruelty and savagery of the whole stinking human race.
Then I thought: We must love one another or die.
June 2002
Hawthorne at Home
Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny, by Papa is one of the least known works by a well-known writer in all of literature. Buried in the seventh folio of Hawthorne’s American Notebooks—that massive, little-read tome of treasures and revelations—the fifty pages that comprise this brief, self-contained narrative were written in Lenox, Massachusetts, between July 28 and August 16, 1851. In June of the previous year, Hawthorne and his wife had moved to a small red farmhouse in the Berkshires with their two children, Una (born in 1844) and Julian (born in 1846). A third child, Rose, was born in May 1851. A couple of months later, accompanied by her two daughters and her older sister, Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne left Lenox to visit her parents in West Newton, just outside Boston. Remaining in the house were Hawthorne, the five-year-old Julian, Mrs. Peters (the cook and housekeeper), and a pet rabbit who eventually came to be known as Hindlegs. That evening, after putting Julian to bed, Hawthorne sat down and wrote the first chapter of his little saga. With no intention other than to record the doings in the household during his wife’s absence, he had inadvertently embarked on something that no writer had ever attempted before him: a meticulous, blow-by-blow account of a man taking care of a young child by himself.
In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of the old folk tale about the farmer and his wife who swap chores for a day. There are many versions of the story, but the outcome is always the same. The man, who has either belittled the woman for not working as hard as he does or scolded her for not doing her work well, makes a complete botch of it when he dons an apron and assumes the role of domestic manager. Depending on which variant you read, he either sets fire to the kitchen or winds up dangling from a rope attached to the family cow, who, after a long chain of misadventures, has managed to get herself onto the roof of the house. In all versions, it is the wife who comes to the rescue. Calmly planting crops in a nearby field, she hears her husband’s screams and runs back home to extricate him from his predicament before he burns the place down or breaks his neck.
Hawthorne didn’t break his neck, but he clearly felt that he was on rocky ground, and the tone of Twenty Days is at once comic, self-deprecatory, and vaguely befuddled, shot through with what the grown-up Julian would later describe as his father’s “humorous gravity.” Readers familiar with the style of Hawthorne’s stories and novels will be struck by the clarity and simplicity of expression in the Notebooks. The dark, brooding obsessions of his fiction tended to give a complex, often ornate density to his sentences, a refinement that sometimes bordered on the fussy or obscure, and some readers of his early tales (which were mostly published unsigned) mistakenly assumed that their author was a woman. Henry James, who wrote one of the first book-length studies of Hawthorne’s work, learned much from this original and delicate prose, which was unique in its ability to join the intricacies of acute psychological observation with large moral and philosophical concerns. But James was not Hawthorne’s only reader, and there are several other Hawthornes who have come down to us as well: Hawthorne the allegorist, Hawthorne the high Romantic fabulist, Hawthorne the chronicler of seventeenth-century colonial New England, and, most notably, Hawthorne as reimagined by Borges—the precursor of Kafka. Hawthorne’s fiction can be read profitably from any one of these angles, but there is yet another Hawthorne who has been more or less forgotten, neglected because of the magnitude of his other achievements: the private Hawthorne, the scribbler of anecdotes and impulsive thoughts, the workman of ideas, the meteorologist and depictor of landscapes, the traveler, the letter-writer, the historian of everyday life. The pages of the American Notebooks are so fresh, so vivid in their articulations, that Hawthorne emerges from them not as some venerable figure from the literary past, but as a contemporary, a man whose time is still the present.
Twenty Days was not the only occasion on which he wrote about his children. Once Una and Julian were old enough to talk, he seemed to take immense pleasure in jotting down some of their zanier utterances, and the notebooks are studded with entries such as these:
“I’m tired of all sings and want to slip into God. I’m tired of little Una Hawsorne.”
“Are you tired of Mamma?”
“No.”
“But are you tired of Papa?”
“No. I am tired of Dora, and tired of little Julian, and tired of little Una Hawsorne.”
Una—“You hurt me a little.”
Julian—“Well, I’ll hurt you a big.”
Julian—“Mamma, why is not dinner supper?”—
Mamma—“Why is not a chair a table?”—
Julian—“Because it’s a teapot.”
I said to Julian, “Let me take off your bib”—and he taking no notice, I repeated it two or three times, each time louder than before.
At last he bellowed—“Let me take off your Head!”
On Sunday, March 19, 1848, during the period when he was employed at the US Custom House in Salem, Hawthorne spent the entire day recording the activities and antics of his two offspring—one just four and the other not quite two. It is a dizzying account of some nine pages that conscientiously takes note of every whim and twist of mood that occurred in the children over the course of eleven hours. Lacking the sentimental flourishes one might expect from a nineteenth-century parent, devoid of moralizing judgments or intrusive commentary, it stands as a remarkable portrait of the reality of childhood—which, on the strength of these passages, would seem to be eternal in its sameness.
Now Una offers her finger to Julian, and they march together, the little boy aping a manly measurement of stride. Now Una proposes to play Puss in the Corner; and there is a quick tatoo of little feet all over the floor. Julian utters a complaining cry about something or other—Una runs and kisses him. Una says, “Father—this morning, I am not going to be naughty at all.” Now they are playing with India rubber balls. Julian tries to throw the ball into the air, but usually succeeds no farther than to drop it over his head. It rolls away—and he searches for it, inquiring—“where ball?” … Julian now falls into a reverie, for a little space—his mind seeming far away, lost in reminiscences; but what can they be about? Recollections of a pre-existence. Now, he sits in his little chair, his chunky little figure looking like an alderman in miniature … Mamma is dressing little Una in her purple pelisse, to go out with Dora. Una promises to be a very good little girl, and mind Dora—and not run away, nor step in the mud. The little boy trudges round, repeating “Go!—go!”—intimating his desire to be taken out likewise. He runs to-and-fro across the room, with a marvellous swagger—of the ludicrousness of which he seems perfectly conscious; and when I laugh, he comes to my elbow and looks up in my face, with a most humorous response … He climbs into a chair at my knee, and peeps at himself in the glass—now he looks curiously on the page as I write—now, he nearly tumbles down, and is at first frightened—but, seeing that I was likewise startled, pretends to tumble again, and then laughs in my face. Enter mamma with the milk. His sits on his mother’s knee, gulping the milk with grunts and sighs of satisfaction—nor ceases till the cup is exhausted, once, and again, and again—and even then asks for more. On being undressed, he is taking an airbath—he enjoys the felicity of utter nakedness—running away from Mamma with cries of remonstrance, when she wishes to put on his night-gown. Now ensues a terrible catastrophe—not to be mentioned in our seemly history … Enter Una—“Where is little Julian?” “He has gone out to walk.” “No; but I mean where is the place of little Julian, that you’ve been writing about him.” So I point to the page, at which she looks with all possible satisfaction; and stands watching the pen as it hurries forward. “I’ll put the ink nearer to you,” says she. “Father, are you going to write all this?” she adds, turning over the book … I tell her that I am now writing about herself—“That’s nice writing,” says she … Una now proposes to him to build a block house with her; so they set about it jointly; but it has scarcely risen above its foundation, before Julian tears it down. With unwearied patience, Una begins another. “Papa! ’Ouse!” cries Julian, pointing to two blocks which he has laid together … They quit the blocks, and Julian again offers to climb the chair to the bookcase; and is again forbidden by me;—whereupon he cries—Una runs to kiss and comfort him—and then comes to me with a solemn remonstrance, of no small length; the burthen being, “Father, you should not speak so loudly to a little boy who is only half years old” … She comes and takes her place silently in my lap, resting her head on my shoulder. Julian has clambered into a chair at the window, and appears to observe and meditate; so that we have a very quiet interval, until he disturbs it by coming and pulling off her shoe. He seldom pretermits any mischief that his hand finds to do:—for instance, finding her bare knee, he has just taken occasion to pinch it with all his might …
Hawthorne repeated the exercise four days later, on Thursday, March twenty-third, and six times more in 1849, covering what would amount to another thirty pages in the Centenary Edition of the Notebooks. Adding to his descriptions of his children’s games and squabbles and inner storms, he sometimes paused to make a number of more generalized remarks about their personalities. Two small passages about Una are of particular interest, since she is usually taken to be the model on which he based the character of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. From January 28, 1849: “Her beauty is the most flitting, transitory, most uncertain and unaccountable affair, that ever had a real existence; it beams out when nobody expects it, it has mysteriously passed away, when you think yourself sure of it;—if you glance sideways at her, you perhaps think it is illuminating her face, but, turning full round to enjoy it, it is gone again … When really visible, it is rare and precious as the vision of an angel; it is a transfiguration—a grace, delicacy, an ethereal fineness, which, at once, in my secret soul, makes me give up all severe opinions that I may have begun to form respecting her. It is but fair to conclude that, on these occasions, we see her real soul; when she seems less lovely, we merely see something external. But, in truth, one manifestation belongs to her as much as another; for, before the establishment of principles, what is character but the series and succession of moods?” From July thirtieth of the same year: “… There is something that almost frightens me about the child—I know not whether elfish or angelic, but, at all events, supernatural. She steps so boldly into the midst of everything, shrinks from nothing, has such a comprehension of everything, seems at times to have but little delicacy, and anon shows that she possesses the finest essence of it; now so hard, now so tender; now so perfectly unreasonable, soon again so wise. In short, I now and then catch an aspect of her, in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell. The little boy is always the same child, and never varies in relation to me.”
By the summer of 1851, Hawthorne was a seasoned observer of his own children, a veteran of family life. He was forty-seven years old and had been married for close to a decade. He couldn’t have known it then, but nearly every important word of fiction he would ever publish had already been written. Behind him were the two editions of Twice-Told Tales (1837 and 1842), Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), and The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales (already finished and planned for publication in late 1851)—his entire output as a writer of short stories. His first two novels had been published in 1850 and 1851. The Scarlet Letter had turned “the obscurest man of letters in America” into one of the most respected and celebrated writers of his time, and The House of the Seven Gables had only strengthened his reputation, prompting many critics to call him the finest writer the Republic had yet produced. Years of solitary labor had at last won him public reward, and after two decades of scrambling to make ends meet, 1851 marked the first year that Hawthorne earned enough from his writin
g to be able to support his family. Nor was there any reason to think that his success would not continue. Throughout the spring and early summer, he had written A Wonder Book for Girls and Boys, finishing the preface on July fifteenth, just two weeks before Sophia’s departure for West Newton, and he was already making plans for his next novel, The Blithedale Romance. Looking back on Hawthorne’s career now, and knowing that he would be dead just thirteen years later (a few weeks short of his sixtieth birthday), that season in Lenox stands out as one of the happiest periods of his life, a moment of sublime equipoise and fulfillment. But it was nearly August now, and for many years Hawthorne had routinely suspended his literary work during the hot months. It was a time for loafing and reflection, in his opinion, a time for being outdoors, and he had always written as little as possible throughout the dog days of the New England summers. When he composed his little chronicle of the three weeks he spent with his son, he was not stealing time from other, more important projects. It was the only work he did, the only work he wanted to do.