The Secrets of Hawthorne's Writing Desk

Abstract

The Secrets of Hawthorne's Writing Desk Julian Hawthorne (bio) JULIAN HAWTHORNE (1846–1934), whose work took many forms and whose career led him in multiple directions, was the son of American author Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, he and his two sisters spent some of their childhood in Concord once the family settled there, growing up in the company of the literary luminaries of the day. After Nathaniel Hawthorne was named American consul to Liverpool, the family moved to England from 1853 to 1857, then traveled to Italy for an extended stay. Julian Hawthorne pursued his education at Harvard in 1863 but never reached graduation; after his father's death in the spring of 1864 he assumed the role of head of household and came to occupy his father's study, the writing chamber described in these pages. Testing out new possibilities, this young man, whose athletic build and prowess led some to urge him to consider prizefighting, sought training as a civil engineer in Dresden in 1868–69. It was there that he met Minnie Amelung, whom he married in 1870 and with whom he would have seven children. While employed as an engineer in the New York Docks Department, he published his first story ("Love and Counter Love; or, Masquerading") in Harper's Weekly Magazine in 1870, and from this time on endeavored to make his living as a writer. In Germany and England during the next ten years he continued to place stories in American magazines, and in 1873 published a novel titled Bressant, soon followed by Idolatry: A Romance. Over the next decades he produced a wide variety of works, including forays into gothic horror, detective fiction, cultural commentary, and textbook surveys of history and literature. Among his most memorable achievements are two studies of his family background: Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884) and Hawthorne and His Circle (1903). From the early 1880s to the mid-1890s he spent most of his time in New York, serving in 1885 as literary editor of the New York World; from 1894 to 1897 he lived in the West Indies, and in the later part of this period, more and more drawn to journalism, he published reports on the 1897 plague and famine in India (in Cosmopolitan magazine) and on the Spanish-American War (in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal). In later years many of the projects that he took on were determined by a pressing need for money. In addition to his family, he had a longtime lover requiring support—Edith Garrigues (whom he would ultimately marry after the death of his wife in 1925). Under these circumstances, he lent his name to a speculative mining venture organized by an old friend, and though he consistently maintained his innocence, after litigation by shareholders in 1913 both he and the friend were convicted of mail fraud, resulting in a one-year sentence in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary for Hawthorne. Following his release, in 1914 he published The Subterranean Brotherhood, an argument against inhumane incarceration. Resuming work as a journalist, covering baseball for the Boston American, he was able to interview Babe Ruth, but he soon decided to move to California, where he continued to produce pieces appearing in the Los Angeles Herald and also tried his hand at screenplays. In the summer of 1934 he died in Newport Beach, where, after a private ceremony, his ashes were scattered. The selection here is taken from Hawthorne and His Circle, published by Harper & Brothers (New York and London), 1903. —SD [End Page 184] The study was on the third floor of the house, secluded from the turmoil of earth, so far as anything could be in a city street. No one was supposed to intrude upon him there; but such suppositions are ineffectual against children. From time to time the adamantine gates fell ajar, and in we slipped. It seemed a heavenly place, tenanted by a being possessed of every attribute that our imaginations could ascribe to an angel. The room and its tenant glimmer before me as I write, luminous with the sunshine of more than fifty years ago. Both...