Talking to Strangers

by Paul Auster

  Hawthorne, who acceded to his wife in all family and household matters, took a far less active role in raising the children. “If only papa wouldn’t write, how nice it would be,” Julian quoted Una as having declared one day, and according to him “their feeling about all their father’s writings was, that he was being wasted in his study, when he might be with them, and there could be nothing in any books, whether his own or other authors’, that could for a moment bear comparison with his actual companionship.” When he finished working for the day, it seems that Hawthorne preferred acting as playmate with his children than as classic paternal figure. “Our father was a great tree-climber,” Julian recalled, “and he was also fond of playing the magician. ‘Hide your eyes!’ he would say, and the next moment, from being there beside us on the moss, we would hear his voice descending from the sky, and behold! he swung among the topmost branches, showering down upon us a hail-storm of nuts.” In her numerous letters and journal entries from that period, Sophia frequently noted glimpses of Hawthorne alone with the two children. “Mr. Hawthorne,” she informed her mother, “has been lying down in the sunshine, slightly fleckered with the shadows of a tree, and Una and Julian have been making him look like the mighty Pan by covering his chin and breast with long grass-blades, that looked like a verdant, venerable beard.” And again to her mother several days later: “Dear little harp-souled Una—whose love for her father grows more profound every day … was made quite unhappy because he did not go at the same time with her to the lake. His absence darkened all the sunshine to her; and when I asked her why she could not enjoy the walk as Julian did, she replied, ‘Ah, he does not love papa as I do!’ … After I put Julian to bed, I went out to the barn to see about the chickens, and she wished to go. There sat papa on the hay, and like a needle to a magnet she was drawn, and begged to see papa a little longer, and stay with him. Now she has come, weary enough; and after steeping her spirit in this rose and gold of twilight, she has gone to bed. With such a father, and such a scene before her eyes, and with eyes to see, what may we not hope of her? I heard her and Julian talking together about their father’s smile, the other day—They had been speaking of some other person’s smile—Mr. Tappan’s, I believe; and presently Una said, ‘But you know, Julian, that there is no smile like papa’s!’ ‘Oh no,’ replied Julian. ‘Not like papa’s!’” In 1904, many years after Una’s early death at the age of thirty-three, Thomas Wentworth Higginson published a memorial piece about her in The Outlook, a popular magazine of the period. In it, he quoted her as once having said to him about her father: “He was capable of being the gayest person I ever saw. He was like a boy. Never was such a playmate as he in all the world.”

  All this lies behind the spirit of Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny. The Hawthornes were a consciously progressive family, and for the most part their treatment of their children corresponds to attitudes prevalent among the secular middle class in America today. No harsh discipline, no physical punishment, no strident reprimands. Some people found the Hawthorne children obstreperous and unruly, but Sophia, ever inclined to see them as model creatures, happily reported in a letter to her mother that at a local torchlight festival “the children enjoyed themselves extremely, and behaved so beautifully that they won all hearts. They thought that there never was such a superb child as Julian, nor such a grace as Una. ‘They are neither too shy, nor bold,’ said Mrs. Field, ‘but just right.’” What constitutes “just right,” of course, is a matter of opinion. Hawthorne, who was always more rigorous in his observations than his wife—unable, by force of instinct and habit, to allow love to color his judgments—makes no bones about how annoying Julian’s presence sometimes was to him. That theme is sounded on the first page of the diary, and it recurs repeatedly throughout the twenty days they spent together. The boy was a champion chatterbox, a pint-sized engine of logorrhea, and within hours of Sophia’s departure, Hawthorne was already complaining that “it is impossible to write, read, think, or even to sleep (in the daytime) so constant are his appeals to me in one way or another.” By the second evening, after remarking once again on the endless stream of babble that issued from Julian’s lips, Hawthorne put him to bed and added: “nor need I hesitate to say that I was glad to be rid of him—it being my first relief from his society during the whole day. This may be too much of a good thing.” Five days later, on August third, he was again harping on the same subject: “Either I have less patience to-day than ordinary, or the little man makes larger demands upon it; but it really does seem as if he had baited me with more questions, references, and observations, than mortal father ought to be expected to endure.” And again on August fifth: “He continues to pester me with his inquisitions. For instance, just now, while he is whittling with my jack-knife. ‘Father, if you had bought all the jack-knives at the shop, what would you do for another, when you broke them all?’ ‘I would go somewhere else,’ say I. But there is no stumping him. ‘If you had bought all the jack-knives in the world, what would you do?’ And here my patience gives way, and I entreat him not to trouble me with any more foolish questions. I really think it would do him good to spank him, apropos to this habit.” And once again on August tenth: “Mercy on me, was ever man before so be-pelted with a child’s talk as I am!”

  These little bursts of irritation are precisely what give the text its charm—and its truth. No sane person can endure the company of a high-voltage child without an occasional meltdown, and Hawthorne’s admissions of less-than-perfect calm turn the diary into something more than just a personal album of summer memories. There is sweetness in the text, to be sure, but it is never cloying (too much wit, too much bite), and because Hawthorne refrains from glossing over his own faults and downcast moments, he takes us beyond a strictly private space into something more universal, more human. Again and again, he curbs his temper whenever he is on the verge of losing it, and the talk of spanking the boy is no more than a passing impulse, a way of letting off steam with his pen instead of his hand. By and large, he shows remarkable forbearance in dealing with Julian, indulging the five-year-old in his whims and escapades and cockeyed discourses with steadfast equanimity, readily allowing that “he is such a genial and good-humored little man that there is certainly an enjoyment intermixed with all the annoyance.” In spite of the difficulties and possible frustrations, Hawthorne was determined not to rein in his son too tightly. After the birth of Rose in May, Julian had been forced to tiptoe around the house and speak in whispers. Now, suddenly, he is permitted to “shout and squeal just as loud as I please,” and the father sympathizes with the boy’s craving for commotion. “He enjoys his freedom so greatly,” Hawthorne writes on the second day, “that I do not mean to restrain him, whatever noise he makes.”

  Julian was not the only source of irritation, however. On July twenty-ninth, the wifeless husband unexpectedly exploded, blasting forth with a splenetic tirade on one of his constant obsessions: “This is a horrible, horrible, most hor-ri-ble climate; one knows not, for ten minutes together, whether he is too cool or too warm; but he is always one or the other; and the constant result is a miserable disturbance of the system. I detest it! I detest it!! I de-test it!!! I hate Berkshire with my whole soul, and would joyfully see its mountains laid flat.” On August eighth, after an excursion with Melville and others to the Shaker community in nearby Hancock, he had nothing but the most vicious and cutting remarks to offer about the sect: “… all their miserable pretence of cleanliness and neatness is the thinnest superficiality … the Shakers are and must needs be a filthy set. And then their utter and systematic lack of privacy; their close junction of man with man [two men routinely slept in one small bed], and supervision of one man over another—it is hateful and disgusting to think of; and the sooner the sect is extinct the better…” Then, with a kind of gloating sarcasm, he applauds Julian for answering a call of nature during their visit and defecating on the property. “All through this outlandish village went our little man, happy and dancing, in
excellent spirits; nor had he been there long before he desired to confer with himself—neither was I unwilling that he should bestow such a mark of his consideration (being the one of which they were most worthy) on the system and establishment of these foolish Shakers.” Less severely, perhaps, but with a noticeable touch of disdain, he also had some unkind things to say about his neighbor and landlady, Caroline Tappan—a good month before the infamous fruit-tree controversy, which would suggest a prior antipathy, perhaps one of long standing. (Some biographers have speculated that she made a pass at Hawthorne during Sophia’s absence—or at least would have been willing to do so if he had given her any encouragement.) Hawthorne and Julian had given the pet rabbit to the Tappans, thinking the animal might be happier in the larger house, but for various reasons (a threatening dog, mistreatment by the Tappans’ young daughter) the new arrangement had not worked out. Mrs. Tappan came to Hawthorne and “spoke of giving him to little Marshall Butler, and suggested, moreover (in reply to something I said about putting him out of existence) that he might be turned out into the woods, to shift for himself. There is something characteristic in this idea; it shows the sort of sensitiveness, that finds the pain and misery of other people disagreeable, just as it would a bad scent, but is perfectly at ease once they are removed from her sphere. I suppose she would not for the world have killed Bunny, although she would have exposed him to the certainty of lingering starvation, without scruple or remorse.”

  Apart from these rare instances of pique and outrage, the atmosphere of Twenty Days is serene, measured, bucolic. Every morning, Hawthorne and Julian went to fetch milk at a neighboring farm; they engaged in “sham battles,” collected the mail at the Lenox post office in the afternoon, and made frequent trips to the lake. On the way, they would “wage war with the thistles,” which was Julian’s favorite sport—pretending that the thistles were dragons and beating them heartily with sticks. They collected flowers, gathered currants, and picked green beans and summer squashes from the garden. Hawthorne built a makeshift boat for Julian, using a newspaper as a sail; a drowning cat was saved from a cistern; and during their visits to the lake, they variously fished, flung stones into the water, and dug in the sand. Hawthorne gave Julian a bath every morning and then wrestled with the task of trying to curl his hair, seldom with satisfactory results. There was a bed-wetting accident on August third, a painful wasp sting on the fifth, a stomachache and a headache to be attended to on the thirteenth and fourteenth, and an untimely loss of bladder control during a walk home on the sixth, which prompted Hawthorne to remark, “I heard him squealing, while I was some distance behind; and approaching nearer I saw that he walked wide between the legs. Poor little man! His drawers were all a-sop.” Even if he wasn’t completely at home with the job, the father had little by little become the mother, and by August twelfth we understand how thoroughly Hawthorne had assumed this role when, for the first time in more than two weeks, he suddenly lost track of where Julian was. “After dinner, I sat down with a book … and he was absent in parts unknown, for the space of an hour. At last I began to think it time to look him up; for, now that I am alone with him, I have all his mother’s anxieties, added to my own. So I went to the barn, and to the currant-bushes, and shouted around the house, without response, and finally sat down on the hay, not knowing which way to seek him. But by and by, he ran round the house, holding up his little fist, with a smiling phiz, and crying out that he had something very good for me.”

  Barring the excursion to the Shaker Village with Melville on August eighth, the pair stayed close to home, but that outing proved to be an exhilarating experience for the little boy, and Hawthorne is at his best in capturing his enthusiasm, in being able to see the event through his son’s eyes. The group lost its way on the carriage ride home, and by the time they passed through Lenox, “it was beyond twilight; indeed, but for the full moon, it would have been quite dark. The little man behaved himself still like an old traveller; but sometimes he looked round at me from the front seat (where he sat between Herman Melville and Evert Duyckinck) and smiled at me with a peculiar expression, and put back his hand to touch me. It was a method of establishing a sympathy in what doubtless appeared to him the wildest and unprecedentedest series of adventures that had ever befallen mortal travellers.”

  The next morning, Julian announced to Hawthorne that he loved Mr. Melville as much as his father, his mother, and Una, and based on the evidence of a short letter that Melville sent to Julian six months later (long after the Hawthornes had left the Berkshires), it would appear that this fondness was reciprocated. “I am very happy that I have a place in the heart of so fine a little fellow as you,” he wrote, and then, after commenting on the heavy snowdrifts in the woods around Pittsfield, concluded with a warm valediction: “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.”

  An earlier visit from Melville to Lenox on August first (his thirty-second birthday) provided Hawthorne with what were probably his most pleasurable hours during those three weeks of bachelor life. After stopping in at the post office with Julian that afternoon, he paused on the way home in a secluded spot to read his newspapers when “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 renewing his salutation, I regarded him more attentively, and saw that it was Herman Melville!” The two men walked the mile to the red house together (with Julian, “highly pleased,” sitting atop Melville’s horse), and then, in what are probably the most frequently quoted sentences from the American Notebooks, Hawthorne continues: “After supper, I put Julian to bed; and Melville and I had a talk about time and eternity, things of this world and of the next, and books, and publishers, and all possible and impossible matters, that lasted pretty deep into the night; and if truth must be told, we smoked cigars even within the sacred precincts of the sitting-room. At last, he arose, and saddled his horse (whom we had put into the barn) and rode off for his own domicile; and I hastened to make the most of what little sleeping-time remained for me.”

  That was the one galvanizing moment in an otherwise torpid stretch of days. When he wasn’t taking care of Julian, Hawthorne wrote letters, read Fourier as he prepared to begin The Blithedale Romance, and took a halfhearted stab at Thackeray’s Pendennis. The diary includes many keenly written passages about the shifting light of the landscape (few novelists looked at nature as attentively as Hawthorne did) and a handful of droll and increasingly sympathetic descriptions of Hindlegs, the pet rabbit, who unfortunately expired as the chronicle was coming to an end. More and more, however, as his solitude dragged on, Hawthorne yearned for his wife to come home. By the beginning of the final week, that feeling had been turned into a constant ache. After putting Julian to bed on the evening of August tenth, he suddenly let himself go, breaking down in a rhapsodic gush of longing and allegiance. “Let me say outright, for once, that he is a sweet and lovely little boy, and worthy of all the love that I am capable of giving him. Thank God! God bless him! God bless Phoebe for giving him to me! God bless her as the best wife and mother in the world! God bless Una, whom I long to see again! God bless Little Rosebud! God bless me, for Phoebe’s and all their sakes! No other man has so good a wife; nobody has better children. Would I were worthier of her and them!” The entry then concludes: “My evenings are all dreary, alone, and without books that I am in the mood to read; and this evening was like the rest. So I went to bed at about nine, and longed for Phoebe.”

  He was expecting her to return on the thirteenth, then on the fourteenth, then on the fifteenth, but various delays and missed communications put off Sophia’s departure from West Newton until the sixteenth. Increasingly anxious and frustrated, Hawthorne nevertheless pushed on dutifully with the diary. On the very last day, during yet another visit to the lake with Julian, he sat down at the edge of the water with a magazine, and as he
read, he was moved to make the following observation, which in some sense stands as a brief and inadvertent ars poetica, a precise description of the spirit and methodology of all his writing: “… the best way to get a vivid impression and feeling of a landscape, is to sit down before it and read, or become otherwise absorbed in thought; for then, when your eyes happen to be attracted to the landscape, you seem to catch Nature at unawares, and see her before she has time to change her aspect. The effect lasts but for a single instant, and passes away almost as soon as you are conscious of it; but it is real, for that moment. It is as if you could overhear and understand what the trees are whispering to one another; as if you caught a glimpse of a face unveiled, which veils itself from every wilful glance. The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as much a mystery as before.”

  As with landscapes, so with people, especially little people in the flush of childhood. All is change with them, all is movement, and you can grasp their essence only “at unawares,” at moments when you are not consciously looking for it. That is the beauty of Hawthorne’s little piece of notebook-writing. Throughout all the drudgery and tedium of his constant companionship with the five-year-old boy, Hawthorne was able to glance at him often enough to capture something of his essence, to bring him to life in words. A century and a half later, we are still trying to discover our children, but these days we do it by taking snapshots and following them around with video cameras. But words are better, I think, if only because they don’t fade with time. It takes more effort to write a truthful sentence than to focus a lens and push a button, of course, but words go deeper than pictures do—which can rarely record anything more than the surfaces of things, whether landscapes or the faces of children. In all but the best or luckiest photographs, the soul is missing. That is why Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny merits our attention. In his modest, deadpan way, Hawthorne managed to accomplish what every parent dreams of doing: to keep his child alive forever.