CHAPTER ONE
The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
But the past was not dead.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The Custom-House”
GUILTY. He heard the verdict and flinched. The second-born child of the very famous author had been convicted of defrauding the public, a violation of section 215 of the United States Criminal Code, in the matter of the Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Ltd., Julian Hawthorne, president. Julian’s father had written obsessively of crime and punishment and the sins of fathers visited on sons, and here he was, the son, sixty-six years old, hair white as sugar, well known, respected, and guilty—guilty—sitting in a New York City courtroom, sporting a scarlet tie.
Judge Mayer banged his gavel. Staring straight ahead, Julian frowned slightly as befitted a man of his stature and his shame. He, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, would be imprisoned a year and a day in the United States federal penitentiary in Atlanta, his term set to run from November 25, 1912, the day the public trial began.
Likely his personal trials began much earlier. The great name of Nathaniel Hawthorne will “always handicap you more or less,” poet James Russell Lowell had warned. “To be the son of a man of genius is at best to be born to a heritage of invidious comparisons,” Henry James Jr. had acknowledged—and placed the Atlantic Ocean between himself and his philosopher father. At least the younger James wrote fiction, which the elder James did not; comparisons are especially invidious when the son plies the father’s trade, as Julian did.
But it was even more than that. Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne’s children seemed to spring from one of Hawthorne’s tales, incarnating their father’s paradoxes writ large. “To plant a family!” Hawthorne had written. “This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do.” It was as if the past always lay in wait, just around the bend. The fortunes of each Hawthorne child uncannily bore out what Hawthorne considered a curse of guilt and grief, of somberness and what we today call depression, as well as talent, penury, pluck, and fortitude, all stitched together in a bright pattern, like Hester Prynne’s letter “A.”
Hawthorne’s firstborn, a daughter, descended directly from literature. Christened Una after Spenser’s heroine in The Faerie Queene, she served as the model for Pearl, the precocious child in The Scarlet Letter, and many observers noticed her resemblance to her literary father. Like him, she was handsome, tall, exacting, and remote. “The more I feel the more it seems a necessity to be reserved,” said Una at fifteen. Una had worshipped sorrow, said her mother, since the age of six. “It was impossible she should ever be happy,” remarked a friend. The sky was too blue, the sun too blazing, her own feelings too hard to bear. She died mysteriously at the age of thirty-three.
Rose Hawthorne, the youngest Hawthorne child, fared better—eventually. After the death of both her parents, a horrible marriage, a feud with her siblings, and the early loss of her only child to diphtheria, Rose fulfilled the unspoken mission of one of the characters in Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun: she takes communion. As a self-ordained Sister of Mercy, Rose consecrated herself to the poor and the sick, and at the age of forty-four, in 1896, established the charitable organization Sister Rose’s Free Home (after St. Rose of Lima) to care for indigent cancer patients. In 1899 she received the Holy Habit of the Third Order of St. Dominic, and two years later, in 1901, the home was incorporated as the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer, still extant today in Hawthorne, New York.
Then there was Julian, in the middle. On Easter Sunday, 1913, he was transported to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The formal charge against him and his cronies was misuse of the United States Postal Service, a catchall complaint designed to nail the defendants, whose real offense, according to Judge Mayer, wasn’t selling shares in a worthless silver and iron mine so much as the exploitation of their recognizable names. “Theirs is the greater crime,” spat the New York district attorney, “for they have prostituted them.” The general counsel for the Hawthorne mines, former mayor of Boston Josiah Quincy, was cleared of the one conspiracy count against him, but the neurologist Dr. William J. Morton, whose father had discovered ether just before the Civil War, went to jail with Julian.
Julian held his head up high. His conviction disgraced neither him nor his name, he said, just the sleazy people who wished to see him—for some inexplicable reason—go to prison. What else could he say? After his sentencing, he briskly strode from the courtroom into the marshal’s office and with remarkable sangfroid pulled out a small cigarette case, which he pushed toward Morton and the fourth accomplice, Alfred Freeman, a petty swindler without a fancy name. Morton stood paralyzed. Freeman circled the room. Hawthorne pocketed his case and shook the hand of a sympathetic well-wisher. “In such extremities,” he later noted, “a man’s manhood and dignity come to his support.”
But when the deputy marshal clicked a pair of steel handcuffs round his wrist, Julian blinked in disbelief and with some confusion walked through the slanting rain to the city jail, a place familiarly known, à la Hawthorne, as the Tombs. “I was sure we should be acquitted,” he muttered.
Yet by and large the only son of America’s most esteemed novelist maintained a transcendental faith in his own innocence, a trait that linked him more to his tender, doting mother than to his morally particular father, who spent a lifetime probing motives, his own most of all. An epicure of intent, Hawthorne knew what the heart held in thrall. “It is a very common thing,” he wrote near the end of his life, “—this fact of a man’s being caught and made prisoner by himself.” But Julian knew what he was doing when he exploited the Hawthorne name, which he plainly saw as false. Nathaniel Hawthorne: to the public it conjured American probity and success; to Julian it was fraudulent, overblown, hollow at the core.
Dissimulation was the keystone of Julian’s career. And inadvertent parody of his father. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writing life was short and well crafted; Julian’s, an interminable flood: hundreds of second-rate novels and poems, stories, histories, travel books, reminiscences, essays, even a two-volume biography of his parents, all capitalizing on the eminent patronymic. (With spooky foresight, his father once said of Julian that “his tendencies … seem to be rather towards breadth than elevation.”) In 1908, when Julian abandoned literature for geology, as the president of the Hawthorne Silver and Iron Mines, Ltd., he managed to write hundreds of promotional letters as well as several promotional books. His energy was amazing.
If his father obeyed the Muse, Julian served Mammon. On selling his first short story, he thought, “Why not go on adding to my income in this way from time to time?” It seemed easy enough. “I think we take ourselves too seriously,” he said of his fellow novelists, and at his death was credited as one of the first American writers to make literature “a bread-and-butter calling.” When Henry James published his incisive study of Hawthorne, Julian confided to his diary that James deserved success “better than I do, not only because his work is better than mine, but because he takes more pains to make it so.” In public, however, Julian protected himself from James and, more importantly, from his father’s literary scruples. “I cannot sufficiently admire the pains we are at to make our work … immaculate in form,” he declared. Aesthetic niceties are effeminate. Success is a racket.
Broad-chested and handsome—like his father—and with the same high coloring and dark wavy hair, Julian was born “to have ample means,” declared his adoring mother. Friends thought she overpraised him, and that his father hadn’t praised him enough. Whatever had happened, Julian combined his father’s cynicism with his mother’s ebullience. He loved women (though he was no feminist), tailored clothes, abundance, and a good scam. Hawthorne dryly assessed his son’s character; he ought to join a ministry, he said.
Julian floundered at Harvard, quitting just months after his father’s death, his interests inclining more to sport than study. He floundered at the Lawrence Scientific School and at the Realschule in Dresden, where he proposed to study civil engineering with a view toward knocking together a huge fortune in the American West. This plan also went awry. Unlike his father, who had delayed his marriage to Sophia, Julian married at the age of twenty-four and sired ten children, eight of whom survived. But he never had enough, kept enough, saved enough, planned enough.
His insouciance exasperated Rose. That he wouldn’t accept a pardon unless William Morton also received one was yet another instance of his irresponsibility, she told his family. “But he is he, so to speak,” she said, throwing her hands up. Still, Rose mounted a loyal defense. “I know that he really believed in the mines,” she reportedly told Joseph P. Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary. To Julian, however, she starchily observed, “I am consoled about your personal trials by knowing that you have always adapted yourself to deprivations with the unconcern—or, rather, the manly vigor of one of your remote ancestors.”
Coming from Rose, it was an equivocal compliment. She knew their Puritan ancestors whipped, scorched, hanged, and banished women such as herself for views far less heretical than hers. Julian too had disapproved of her vocation, though more amiably than their ancestors would have. After her death, he remembered Rose as a headstrong girl prone to egregious errors of judgment. Her errand in Washington, D.C., on his behalf, was one of these. On April 3, 1913, Mother Alphonsa, as Rose was known, traveled by train to the nation’s capital to ask President Wilson to pardon her brother.
“What had I to do with ‘pardons’?” Julian was furious. “Pardon for what?” But Rose was determined to restore luster to the Hawthorne name. A band of white cloth pleated across her forehead and stern black robes sweeping about her ample figure, she was every bit as fierce as Hester Prynne and probably just as nervous when she boarded a humid trolley for the White House. Tumulty received her. Strangely affected by the pink-cheeked woman in black and white, he ignored protocol and sent her request directly to the president.
Or said he had. Nothing happened. Public opinion was against Julian. Parole was denied. Not until the following fall, on October 15, 1913, was Julian Hawthorne released from prison. Again, he wore the scarlet tie.
Rose Hawthorne was born when her father was forty-seven. “She is to be the daughter of my age,” he remarked, “—the comfort (at least so it is to be hoped) of my declining years.” Hawthorne died, however, just before his sixtieth birthday and the day before her thirteenth.
He had called her Pessima. She was mercurial, fastidious, self-critical, and impatient. Explained Sophia in the double-edged terms she perfected, “I think you inherited from Papa this immitigable demand for beauty and order and right, & though, in the course of your development, it has made you sometimes pettish and unreasonable, I always was glad you had it.”
Rose wanted to write, but her father’s interdiction against the literary life put an end to that. In fact, both parents were wildly ambivalent about the practice of literature, declining to teach their children to read until they reached the ripe age of seven. Sophia was adamant about this. “I have not the smallest ambition about early learning in my children,” she declared. And though her two sisters were educators of note and her brother-in-law, Horace Mann, once the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Sophia refused to hand her children over to schoolmistresses of dubious intent. Hawthorne deferred to her. “The men of our family are compliant husbands,” his own sister later scoffed.
Encouraged to paint by her artistic mother, Rose dutifully studied art until Sophia’s death in 1871, and then she cut loose, sort of. Barely twenty, she quickly married George Parsons Lathrop, a twenty-year-old aspiring writer. But if Rose believed she was replacing her parents by replicating their wonderful marriage—artist to writer—she was utterly mistaken. “Love is different from what I supposed and I don’t like it,” admits a character in one of her short stories. She did write after all.
George Lathrop got a job as assistant editor at the Atlantic Monthly, the showcase for much of his father-in-law’s work, and when he lost the post he and Rose drifted to New York, where they nibbled at the edge of the literary set. Often dressed in yellow, her favorite color, Rose was soon known as a passable if gloomy poet and indifferent author of short stories, her best production fittingly called “Prisoners.” George, a conventional and reasonably prolific writer, was known as a drunk.
The Lathrops converted to Catholicism, but religion didn’t help their failing marriage, and after much soul-searching, Rose separated from her husband in 1895. Una suspected abuse. Then, in a volte-face that Julian found “abrupt and strange,” Rose chose to rededicate her life to “usefulness.” To Rose, however, it was her father’s fine-grained appreciation of suffering that motivated her. “He was as earnest as a priest,” she said, “for he cared that the world was full of sorrow & sin.” Certainly Hawthorne’s last illness had cast a pall over his youngest child; and in 1887 she was devastated yet again by the premature death of poet Emma Lazarus, a cherished friend.
This stiffened her purpose once and for all. On May 19, 1898, the thirty-fifth anniversary of her father’s death, she clipped her auburn hair and stowed the leftover tufts under a linen cap. Henceforth she dressed in an austere monkish gown. “I gave up the world,” she said, “as if I were dead.” She swore off men and earthly things, and for the rest of her life lived productively in a community of faithful women. “From close observation I have learned something about the true courage of women,” she had written years earlier.
Her choice reflecting a condition of her parents’ lives—intimate friendships with members of the same sex—Rose started one of the first hospices in America in a tenement house on Scammel Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she nursed the dying poor. Proceeds from a memoir of her father, published in 1897, supported her in this, and with Alice Huber, a “life-helper” (her word), she opened Sister Rose’s Free Home in a three-story red brick building at 426 Cherry Street. Unlike her siblings, Rose managed to remake Nathaniel Hawthorne’s legacy into something of her own. “The ice in the blood which he feared,” observed Flannery O’Connor, “and which this very fear preserved him from, was turned by her into a warmth which initiated action. If he observed, fearfully but truthfully; if he acted, reluctantly but firmly, she charged ahead, secure in the path his truthfulness had outlined for her.”
In 1926, just three months after receiving the Gold Medal of the New York Rotary Club, Mother Mary Alphonsa Lathrop, the former Rose Hawthorne, died. It was her parents’ wedding anniversary.
Una Hawthorne installed her father’s walnut writing table in her bedroom, and after her mother’s death slipped Sophia’s wedding ring onto her finger. “I do indeed love them better than myself,” she said of her parents. They were her compass and her doom.
Of the three children, Una was said to be most like her father. She thought so herself. “Sometimes I wish there had never been anything done or written in the world!” she once exclaimed. “My father and I seem to feel in this way more than the rest.” A perfectionist, she battered herself with her own yardstick. And she seemed inspired not by realities but by fiction—again, like her father.
As a child, she’d been rambunctious, moody, and smart. “Her natural bent is towards the passionate and tragic,” wrote Hawthorne. He watched Una with absorption and loved her deeply, though with characteristic ambivalence about her strength, willfulness, pride, and intellect—qualities he both admired and censured in his stunning female characters. “If there were not so many strong objections,” he confided to his journal, “it would be an excellent thing to send her to school; we should see no more of this premature ennui—her mind would be filled … and—what I greatly desire—she would have a much happier childhood.”
She was educated in desultory fashion but her brain matured too rapidly anyway, warned one physician, who prescribed vegetables. A few years later, another doctor suggested she terminate all instruction, including her dancing lessons. She protested, though not for long. To vanquish the vanquishers, she participated in her own imprisonment, smothering emotion with self-sacrifice and self-reprisal. Then, as if to crown her achievement, Una contracted malaria during the winter of 1858, when the Hawthornes lived in Rome. She lay in bed, face to the wall.
The brush with mortality provided an explanation for Una’s increasingly drab temperament. But occasionally she chucked her good-girl manners and kicked and screamed until her terrified parents rigged her up to a galvanic battery and jolted her with electricity. Calm again when an aunt visited in the fall of 1861, Una rowed her and her father to the middle of Walden Pond and blithely announced it was a most dangerous place.
Engaged to be married shortly after her father’s death, Una abruptly severed relations with her fiancé when he disappointed her in some unforgivable way. Besides, her parents’ sublime marriage couldn’t be reproduced in this vulgar world by mere men and women. So she stayed near her mother in London and participated in the new family enterprise, the publication of all of Hawthorne’s journals and unfinished tales. When Sophia died, she simmered in misery, a strange light in her eye.
Six months later, at Rose’s marriage, the lid flew completely off. Una alleged that Lathrop had jilted her for Rose. There was no truth to the charge, except of course the truth of Una’s feelings. Descending into a pit of “insanity,” Una spent great sums of money, and an uncle reported that she “nearly took the lives of three persons”—evidently her own, her sister’s, and Lathrop’s—while she denounced Rose for having betrayed her. Placed in restraints, she was hauled off to an anonymous asylum, where she was confined until Rose and George Lathrop could escape to America without her.
The sisters reconciled but crossed swords again when Lathrop, using family documents in Rose’s possession, dared to write a book about Nathaniel Hawthorne. Allies since childhood, Una and Julian closed ranks, and Julian took the battle public, writing scurrilous pieces in newspapers—much to the public’s chagrin, for Hawthorne was a national monument which it hated to see debased by anything as crude as family squabbling. Canonization had already begun.
The family injunction notwithstanding, all three Hawthorne children had wanted to be writers. Only Julian succeeded, after his fashion, though it wasn’t until the death of both parents that he pursued the literary career they had inveighed against.
When Una declared she would compose romances, her mother ignored her. “She will fulfil her destiny doubtless,” she’d said, “but I do not intend it shall be hastened one hour.” As an adult, Una tried her hand at a novel, and she wrote at least one poem, ominously entitled “Dead Sunshine.” Mostly, however, she involved herself in charity work, donating her time and small income to the Industrial Orphanage Home and School in London. When the effort grew too exhausting, she took refuge in Julian’s home nearby and on occasion among the nearby Anglican Sisters of Clewer, where many women of her kind—“invalid ladies in reduced circumstances,” as they were known—sought rest and moral refreshment.
She’d become engaged again, this time to a tubercular writer, Albert Webster. It was a ridiculous match, damned from the start. Webster immediately sailed to Hawaii, as far away from Una as he could. Meantime, at Julian’s, Una sewed her wedding dress without, one suspects, much hope. On February 3, 1877, while Una was out, Julian noticed on the front table a white envelope postmarked Honolulu. It was addressed to Una, but the handwriting wasn’t Webster’s. Una returned at teatime, opened the letter, and slowly read the contents aloud, word by scalding word. Webster had died before his ship reached Hawaii. She lowered her head and sobbed.
Julian clenched his teeth. “Has Una had so happy and self-indulgent a life as to need this desolating blow at last?” he cried. For five months she corresponded with Webster’s sister and in August envisioned a heavenly reunion between her and her sickly sweetheart. “The idea that you suggest that he wants me even where he is, never occurred to me. Oh I wonder if he does!”
A little more than a month later, on September 10, the unhappy Una died in her retreat at Clewer. Julian and his family were vacationing in Hastings in a house loaned by a fan of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and though they’d urged Una to come with them, she’d gone to Clewer instead. But something was terribly wrong. She seemed ill. She wrote Rose, who received the letter “almost at the time—if not the hour—of her death, and was appalled at the agitation that beset me as I read it.” Frantic, the Clewer Sisters contacted Julian, who told them if there was no improvement in Una’s condition, they should telegraph him right away. Una seemed better. Then she fainted. She couldn’t see. Another telegram brought Julian to Clewer too late.
From afar, Rose learned that the doctor diagnosed exhaustion and pyrosis, a stomach inflammation she blamed for her father’s death. More romantic, Julian decided his sister had died of a broken heart.
No one contradicted him. Whatever records may have existed can no longer be found.
The Hawthorne children idealized their father, although, as Julian’s career attests, their relation to him was neither uncomplicated nor untroubled. How not? In his own lifetime—and under his own roof—he was venerated as a model father, husband, and genius. Partly as a consequence, he was a man deeply isolated, unable to forget himself, and his children were unable to forget him.
With an insight so fine it bordered on the voluptuous, he crafted a style of exquisite ambiguity, of uncompromising passion and stubborn skepticism. Yet his characters are often curiously static, poised between self-knowledge and indifference and, like Hawthorne himself, confounded by what and who they are. For Hawthorne was a man of dignity, of mordant wit, of malicious anger; a man of depression and control; a forthright and candid man aching to confess but too proud, too obstinate, too ashamed to do so; a man of disclosure and disguise, both at once, keen, cynical, intelligent, who digs into his imagination to write of American men and women: isolated in their communities, burdened by their history, riven by their sense of crime and their perpetual, befuddled innocence; people ambitious and vain and displaced and willing, or perhaps forced, to live a double life, a secret life, an exemplary life, haunted and imprisoned, even as his children were—or, in Hawthorne’s terms, as are we all.