OUR BEST AT HIS BEST (via The Mother Judd)

Rosy Days of Fatherhood, Far From 'The Scarlet Letter' (MEL GUSSOW, 8/11/03, NY Times)

In the summer of 1851, when Hawthorne was 47 and had written all his major works including "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables," his wife went to visit her parents, taking their daughters, Una and baby Rose. She left their son, Julian, with his father in their home in Lenox, Mass. At 5, Julian was a babbling brook of ideas and emotions. The first thing he said after their departure, according to the story, was: "Father, isn't it nice to have baby gone? Because now I can shout and squeal just as loud as I please!"

For three weeks father and son lived alone (with the help of a housekeeper), and Hawthorne kept a diary of their daily activities. Habitually Hawthorne did not write fiction during the summer and so was able to devote himself to his son. The diary offers a portrait of Hawthorne in a lighter mode, delighted--although sometimes quietly exasperated--by the constant demands of the boy, but a generous family man with infinite patience and a deep appreciation of nature.

Here is Hawthorne climbing trees, scaling stones with his son and playfully wrestling with him. They take long walks in the Berkshire woods, indulge Julian's pet rabbit. Hawthorne rescues a cat from a cistern. Julian reveals a natural curiosity, asking why a rainbow is not called a sunbow. In the course of the book, the two become as close as a father and son can be.

One day on the way home from the post office, they sit down in a grove and Hawthorne reads a newspaper. "While thus engaged," he wrote, "a cavalier on horseback came along the road and saluted me in Spanish; to which I replied by touching my hat, and went on with the newspaper. But the cavalier renewed his salutation. I regarded him more attentively, and saw that it was Herman Melville!"

Melville lifts Julian up and puts him in the saddle, "and the little man was highly pleased, and sat on the horse with the freedom and the fearlessness of an old equestrian." Sometime later Julian confided to his father that he loved Mr. Melville as much as he loved him, his mother and his older sister. There goes another foreboding image from American literature.

"For many years I've been a great admirer of Hawthorne,' Mr. Auster said recently. "There is a deep affinity I have for his writing and also for him as a man. The more you penetrate the peripheral writings, the letters and diaries, you see this tremendous wit that was there from a very early age." Next year will be the 200th anniversary of Hawthorne's birth.

Hawthorne is one of those authors whose other works end up ignored because we're all forced to read The Scarlet Letter in school. But try just two of this short stories Earth's Holocaust and The Birthmark and you'll see that he remains readable and relevant. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 11, 2003 12:05 PM