by Paul Auster
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The move to Lenox had been precipitated by Hawthorne’s disastrous experiences in Salem in 1849. As he put it in a letter to his friend Horatio Bridge, he had come to dislike the town “so much that I hate to go into the streets or to have the people see me. Anywhere else, I shall at once be entirely another man.” Appointed to the post of surveyor in the Salem Custom House in 1846 (during the Democratic administration of James Polk), Hawthorne accomplished almost nothing as a writer during the three years he held this job. With the election of Whig candidate Zachary Taylor in 1848, Hawthorne was sacked when the new administration took office in March 1849—but not without raising a great noise in his own defense, which led to a highly publicized controversy about the practice of political patronage in America. At the precise moment when this struggle was being waged, Hawthorne’s mother died after a short illness. The notebook entries from those days in late July are among the most wrenching, emotionally charged paragraphs in all of Hawthorne. “Louisa pointed to a chair near the bed; but I was moved to kneel down close to my mother, and take her hand. She knew me, but could only murmur a few indistinct words—among which I understood an injunction to take care of my sisters. Mrs. Dike left the chamber, and then I found the tears slowly gathering in my eyes. I tried to keep them down; but it would not be—I kept filling up, till, for a few moments, I shook with sobs. For a long time, I knelt there, holding her hand; and surely it is the darkest hour I have ever lived.”
Ten days after his mother’s death, Hawthorne lost his fight to save his job. Within days of his dismissal (perhaps even the same day, if family legend is to be believed), he began writing The Scarlet Letter, which was completed in six months. Under great financial strain during this period, his fortunes took a sudden, unexpected turn for the better just as plans were being made by the firm of Ticknor and Fields to publish the novel. By private, anonymous subscription, friends and supporters of Hawthorne (among them, most likely, Longfellow and Lowell) “who admire your genius and respect your character … [and to pay] the debt we owe you for what you have done for American literature” had raised the sum of five hundred dollars to help see Hawthorne through his difficulties. This windfall allowed Hawthorne to carry out his increasingly urgent desire to leave Salem, his hometown, and become “a citizen of somewhere else.”
After a number of possibilities fell through (a farm in Manchester, New Hampshire, a house in Kittery, Maine), he and Sophia eventually settled on the red farmhouse in Lenox. It was, as Hawthorne put it to one of his former Custom House coworkers, “as red as the Scarlet Letter.” Sophia was responsible for finding the place, which was situated on a larger property known as Highwood, currently being rented by the Tappan family. Mrs. Tappan, née Caroline Sturgis, was a friend of Sophia’s, and it was she who offered the house to the Hawthornes—free of charge. Hawthorne, wary of the complications that might arise from living off the generosity of others, struck a bargain with Mr. Tappan to pay a nominal rent of seventy-five dollars for four years.
One would assume that he was satisfied with the arrangement, but that didn’t stop him from grumbling about any number of petty annoyances. No sooner did the family settle into the house than Hawthorne came down with a bad cold, which confined him to bed for several days, and before long he was complaining in a letter to his sister Louisa that the farmhouse was “the most wretched little hovel that I ever put my head in.” (Even the optimistic Sophia, who tended to see every adversity in the best possible light, admitted in a letter to her mother that it was “the smallest of ten-foot houses”—barely adequate for a family of four, let alone five.) If the house displeased Hawthorne, he had even harsher things to say about the landscape that surrounded it. Sixteen months after moving in, he wrote to his publisher, James T. Fields, that “I have staid here too long and constantly. To tell you a secret, I am sick to death of Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here … The air and climate do not agree with my health at all; and, for the first time since I was a boy, I have felt languid and dispirited, during almost my whole residence here. Oh that Providence would build me the merest little shanty, and make me out a rood or two of garden-ground, near the sea-coast.” Two years later, long after he had moved away and resettled in Concord, he was still grinding the same axe, as shown in this passage from the introduction to Tanglewood Tales (a second volume of Greek myths for children): “But, to me, there is a peculiar, quiet charm in these broad meadows and gentle eminences. They are better than mountains, because they do not stamp and stereotype thoughts into the brain, and thus grow wearisome with the same strong impression, repeated day after day. A few summer weeks among mountains, a lifetime among green meadows and placid slopes, with outlines forever new, because continually fading out of the memory. Such would be my sober choice.” It is ironic that the area around Lenox should still be referred to as “Tanglewood.” The word was Hawthorne’s invention and is now indelibly associated with the music festival that takes place there every year. For a man who hated the area and ran away from it after just eighteen months, he left his mark on it forever.
Still, it was the best moment of his life, whether he knew it or not. Solvent, successfully married to an intelligent and famously devoted woman, in the middle of the most prolific writing burst of his career, Hawthorne planted his vegetable garden, fed his chickens, and played with his children in the afternoon. The shyest and most reclusive of men, known for his habit of hiding behind rocks and trees to avoid talking to people he knew, Hawthorne largely kept to himself during his stint in the Berkshires, avoiding the social activities of the local gentry and appearing in town only to collect his mail at the post office and return home. Solitude was his natural element, and considering the circumstances of his life until his early thirties, it was remarkable that he had married at all. When you were a person whose ship-captain father had died in Suriname when you were four, when you had grown up with a remote and elusive mother who had lived in a state of permanent, isolated widowhood, when you had served what is probably the most stringent literary apprenticeship on record—locking yourself up in your room for twelve years in a house you had dubbed “Castle Dismal” and leaving Salem only in the summer to go on solitary rambles through the New England countryside—then perhaps the society of your immediate family was sufficient. Hawthorne had married late to a woman who had likewise married late, and in the twenty-two years they lived together, they were rarely apart. He called her Phoebe, Dove, Beloved, Dearissima, Ownest One. “Sometimes,” he had written to her during their courtship in 1840, “during my solitary life in our old Salem house, it seemed to me as if I had only life enough to know that I was not alive; for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm. But, at length, you were revealed to me, in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own. I drew nearer and nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and you came to me, and will remain forever, keeping my heart warm and renewing my life with your own. You only have taught me that I have a heart,—you only have thrown a light, deep downward and upward, into my soul. You only have revealed me to myself; for without your aid my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow,—to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions. Do you comprehend what you have done for me?”
They lived in isolation, but visitors nevertheless came (relatives, old friends), and they were in contact with several of their neighbors. One of them, who lived six miles down the road in Pittsfield, was Herman Melville, then thirty-one years old. Much has been written about the relationship between the two writers (some of it pertinent, some of it nonsense), but it is clear that Hawthorne opened up to the younger Melville with unaccustomed enthusiasm and took great pleasure in his company. As he wrote to his friend Bridge on August 7, 1850: “I met Melville, the other day, and liked him so much that I have asked him to spend a few days with me before leaving these parts.” Melville had only been visiting the area at the time, but by October he was back, acquiring
the property in Pittsfield he renamed Arrowhead and installing himself in the Berkshires as a full-time resident. Over the next thirteen months, the two men talked, corresponded, and read each other’s work, occasionally traveling the six miles between them to stay as a guest at the other’s house. “Nothing pleases me more,” Sophia wrote to her sister Elizabeth about the friendship between her husband and Melville (whom she playfully referred to as Mr. Omoo), “than to sit & hear this growing man dash his tumultuous waves of thought against Mr. Hawthorne’s great, genial, comprehending silences … Without doing anything on his own, except merely being, it is astonishing how people make him their innermost Father Confessor.” For Melville, the encounter with Hawthorne and his writings marked a fundamental turn in his life. He had already begun his story about the white whale at the time of their first meeting (projected as a conventional high-seas adventure novel), but under Hawthorne’s influence the book began to change and deepen and expand, transforming itself in an unabated frenzy of inspiration into the richest of all American novels, Moby-Dick. As everyone who has read the book knows, the first page reads: “In token of my admiration for his genius, this book is inscribed to Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Even if Hawthorne had accomplished nothing else during his stay in Lenox, he unwittingly served as Melville’s muse.
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.”
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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 for 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 com
pany 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.”