Collected Prose

David had a friend who had recently landed in Bellevue after suffering a nervous breakdown, and when David went to visit him in the hospital, he left behind his copy of Joubert—on loan. Two or three weeks later, when the friend was finally released, he called David to apologize for not returning the book. After he had read it, he said, he had given it to another patient. That patient had passed it on to yet another patient, and little by little Joubert had made his way around the ward. Interest in the book became so keen that groups of patients would gather in the day room to read passages out loud to one another and discuss them. When David’s friend asked for the book back, he was told that it no longer belonged to him. “It’s our book,” one of the patients said. “We need it.” As far as I’m concerned, that is the most eloquent literary criticism I have ever heard, proof that the right book in the right place is medicine for the human soul.
    As Joubert himself once put it in 1801: “A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.”

    August 11, 2002

Hawthorne at Home

    Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny, by Papa is one of the least known works by a well-known writer in all of literature. Buried in the seventh folio of Hawthorne’s American Notebooks —that massive, little-read tome of treasures and revelations—the fifty pages that comprise this brief, self-contained narrative were written in Lenox, Massachusetts, between July 28 and August 16, 1851. In June of the previous year, Hawthorne and his wife had moved to a small red farmhouse in the Berkshires with their two children, Una (born in 1844) and Julian (born in 1846). A third child, Rose, was born in May 1851. A couple of months later, accompanied by her two daughters and her older sister, Elizabeth Peabody, Sophia Hawthorne left Lenox to visit her parents in West Newton, just outside Boston. Remaining in the house were Hawthorne, the five-year-old Julian, Mrs. Peters (the cook and housekeeper), and a pet rabbit who eventually came to be known as Hindlegs. That evening, after putting Julian to bed, Hawthorne sat down and wrote the first chapter of his little saga. With no intention other than to record the doings in the household during his wife’s absence, he had inadvertently embarked on something that no writer had ever attempted before him: a meticulous, blow-by-blow account of a man taking care of a young child by himself.
    In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of the old folk tale about the farmer and his wife who swap chores for a day. There are many versions of the story, but the outcome is always the same. The man, who has either belittled the woman for not working as hard as he does or scolded her for not doing her work well, makes a complete botch of it when he dons an apron and assumes the role of domestic manager. Depending on which variant you read, he either sets fire to the kitchen or winds up dangling from a rope attached to the family cow, who, after a long chain of misadventures, has managed to get herself onto the roof of the house. In all versions, it is the wife who comes to the rescue. Calmly planting crops in a nearby field, she hears her husband’s screams and runs back home to extricate him from his predicament before he burns the place down or breaks his neck.
    Hawthorne didn’t break his neck, but he clearly felt that he was on rocky ground, and the tone of Twenty Days is at once comic, self-deprecatory, and vaguely befuddled, shot through with what the grown-up Julian would later describe as his father’s “humorous gravity.” Readers familiar with the style of Hawthorne’s stories and novels will be struck by the clarity and simplicity of expression in the Notebooks . The dark, brooding obsessions of his fiction produced a complex, often ornate density to his sentences, a refinement that sometimes bordered on the fussy or obscure, and some readers of his early tales (which were mostly published unsigned) mistakenly assumed that their author was a woman. Henry James, who wrote one of the first book-length studies of Hawthorne’s work, learned much from this original and delicate prose, which was unique in its ability to join the intricacies of acute psychological observation with large moral and philosophical concerns. But James was not Hawthorne’s only reader, and there are several other Hawthornes who have come down to us as well: Hawthorne the allegorist, Hawthorne the high Romantic