Julian Hawthorne
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JULIAN HAWTHORNE “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Julian Hawthorne HDT WHAT? INDEX JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE 1846 June 22, Monday: In Salem, Massachusetts, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne gave birth to a 2d child, Julian Hawthorne. Initially this apparently unwanted or resented child would not be named: for at least the first eight months his mother and father would refer to him merely as “bundlebreech” (on a following screen is Nathaniel Hawthorne, as depicted in this year in crayon and chalk on paper by Eastman Johnson). Benjamin Robert Haydon, would-be redeemer of British art, creator of grand agendas, his magnum opus “The Anti-Slavery Convention” finally completed in a world which greeted it with a grand “ho-hum,” at the age of 61 wrote “Stretch me no longer on this rough world” and made in the journal he had been keeping for 38 years a blood-smeared entry: My soul aspires My spirit is wounded My hand fumbles My heart races My brain aches to burst My hand drops the impasto-laden brush HDT WHAT? INDEX JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE My eyes wail hot tears I fail to shave, to wash to change my linen The glory of being a painter resides in one’s utter neglect by critics and public. * * * * I ask friend L—— for £100. We dine in the city on mutton, wine, and trifle. Laughter is a patina. O God, Thy will be done! He breaks the news: bad times prevent his advancing even a threepence. At home I drink much, the only time, my Mary says, she’s seen me so. The hottest, most airless summer on record, “a sultry month.” I do not sleep, except in fits. I stare like an idiot at Alfred. The paint on his face is cold gravy. I write to Lord Peel, Beaufort, and Brougham. Nothing avails. I burn more letters and papers, pack up my valuables, what might be sold as income — the drawings of Wellington, Wordsworth, my wife and dead children, plus a metal box containing journals — and carry all to Elizabeth Barrett. She’ll keep them from my creditors — she’s promised. Miss Barrett, in purple, reclines on a sofa. (The evening is stifling.) Flush sleeps in her lap. She strokes him as she is speaking. I’m lost in a wish to sketch her, am abstracted rehearsing the line round her thin mouth, the cheek bones, the tendrils of hair scooping her temples.... “If only I could die,” I exclaim, “there’d be a subscription (I trust the English people) to support my family.” Monday, June 22, 1846. Stop at Riviere, the gun-maker, in Oxford Street. Purchase one of a pair of small pistols. At 9, I breakfast alone, then go to my painting-room. I write letters to my children, re-write my will, and sketch some final thoughts. As usual, I lock myself in. My daughter Mary, my confidante (more even than her mother) suspects nothing when she tries the door. She says (through the door) that she and her mother are going out. “Very well,” I say. Impulsively, I go to her, kiss her fervently, and linger. There is something I wish to say. But I walk away. I load the pistol, poise a lone straight-razor near. It’s 10:45. I face the door. Noise in the street. The hot air is a pall. I squeeze the trigger. Its small caliber deflects along the bone. Why, even now, must I fail! Desperate (for Mary will hear) I grab up the open razor and slice my throat, from ear to ear. HDT WHAT? INDEX JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE Finis. Benjamin Robert Haydon. SUICIDE (The debts far exceeded any assets. The surviving widow and three children would need to be rescued in extremis by friends such as Sir Robert Peel, the Count d’Orsay, Mr. Justice Talfourd, and Lord Carlisle.) HDT WHAT? INDEX JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE HDT WHAT? INDEX JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE Famous Last Words: “What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853 1836 James Madison unsolicited comment “I always talk better lying down.” 1846 Benjamin Robert Haydon final entry in 38-year journal before “Stretch me no longer on this tough world. offing himself — Lear” 1848 John Quincy Adams had just voted “no” on war on Mexico “This is the last of earth. I am composed.” 1849 Washington Goode offered a cup of water before being “This is the last Cochituate water that I hanged in Boston shall ever drink.” 1849 Edgar Allan Poe in bad shape in Baltimore “Lord help my poor soul.” 1850 John Caldwell Calhoun unsolicited comment “The South! The poor South! God knows what will become of her.” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE 1851 Late October: Ellery Channing visited the Hawthornes in the “little red house” in Lenox, Massachusetts that had been their home since May 1850 and observed that wherever they moved, they found fault with the people among whom they settled (the Hawthornes were quarreling with their neighbors over rights to apples in an adjacent orchard, and three weeks after this visit they would relocate back to eastern Massachusetts.). He remarked that having written nine books had “greatly altered” Nathaniel Hawthorne into something of “a lion,” although an exceedingly reclusive one. He found Sophia Peabody Hawthorne not only to be no beauty but to be, in addition, fading at her age, and he found the two Hawthorne children, Una Hawthorne and Julian Hawthorne, to be not only ill-mannered but unhandsome. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Julian Hawthorne “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE 1852 February 8, Sunday: Herman Melville wrote to Julian Hawthorne: My Dear Master Julian I was equally surprised and delighted by the sight of your printed note. (At first I thought it was a circular (your father will tell you what that is)). I am very happy that I have a place in the heart of so fine a little fellow as you. You tell me that the snow in Newton is very deep. Well, it is still deeper here, I fancy. I went into the woods the other day, and got so deep into the drifts among the big hemlocks & maples that I thought I should stick fast there till Spring came, — a Snow Image. Remember me kindly to your good father, Master Julian, and Good Bye, and may Heaven always bless you, & may you be a good boy and become a great good man. Herman Melville Feb. 8. Mrs Buttrick says that she has 5 cents for making a shirt, and that if she does her best she can make one in a day. It is interesting to see loads of hay coming down from the country now a days – (within a week) they make them very broad & low. They do not carry hay by RR yet. The spoils of up-country fields. A Mt of dried herbs. I had forgotten that there ever was so much grass as they prove.– And all these horses & oxen & cows thus are still fed on the last summer’s grass which has been dried! They still roam in the meads. One would think that some people regarded character in man as the botanist (regards character) in flowers– who says “Character characterem non antecellit nisi constantia.” but this is well explained, and so that it becomes applicable to man, by this parallel aphorism of Linnaeus – Character non est, ut genus fiat, sed ut genus noscatur.” It is apparently Fries who is made to say of his own system – or it may be Tuckerman who says it – that “By this key, I have not yet found that any plants, manifestly & by consent of all allied, are sundered.” Tuckerman says cunningly “If the rapt admirer of the wonders and the beauties of life & being might well come to learn of our knowledge the laws and the history of what he loves, let us remember that we have the best right to all the pleasure that he has discovered, and that we are not complete if we do not possess it all. Linnaeus was as hearty a lover & admirer of nature as if he had been nothing more”. Night before last our first rain for a long time– This afternoon the first crust to walk on. It is pleasant to walk over the fields raised a foot or more above their summer level – and the prospect is altogether new. Is not all music a hum more or less divine? I hear something new at every telegraph post. I have not got out of hearing of one before I here a new harp. Thoughts of different dates will not cohere. Carried a new cloak to Johnny Riaden? I found that the shanty was warmed by the simple social relations of the Irish.