Julian Hawthorne: The Life of a Prodigal Son by Gary Scharnhorst (review)

Gary Scharnhorst supplies an update to the only previous biography of Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), Hawthorne’s Son (1970), by Maurice Bassan, with this rigorous and engrossing study of “one of the most prolific—or profligate—authors in the history of American letters” (ix). Scharnhorst incorporates a prodigious amount of research, revisiting his own articles and recovering hitherto unseen papers from Hawthorne’s living heirs, in order to depict the second child of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody as a version of the Prodigal Son. Not only does this biography encompass the vast terrain of Julian Hawthorne’s oeuvre, which included an astounding array of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and journalism. It also reveals why he was so strapped for cash later in life that he partook in a scheme to defraud investors in a nonexistent mine: while living with his wife and eight children in Sag Harbor, he maintained a secret family in Manhattan. Structured along the lines of “Part I: The Heir,” “Part II: The Hack,” and “Part III: The Shadow,” bookended by a prologue and an epilogue, this biography unfolds like a three-volume novel that tells the story of Julian Hawthorne squandering the literary reputation he came into then sold out on, and scrambling to stay afloat in genteel poverty.

Scharnhorst narrates with a mix of fascination and frustration toward Hawthorne. The opening chapters establish that he eschewed academics, exercising and socializing at Harvard until he was dismissed for failing math— which apparently prefigured his struggle to please reviewers and negotiate with publishers, however indefatigable he remained in writerly pursuits. His early fiction exhibited tropes and themes from his father’s fiction, garnering reviews that acknowledged the potential of a new Hawthorne and/or lamented the deficiencies of a lesser one. Crucifying Julian Hawthorne’s work has since become a time-honored custom among scholars who choose even to touch it. One literary historian’s comment from 1915 that “No literary career so promising has ever failed more dismally” sets the tone as the book’s epigraph. Scharnhorst partly rescripts this discourse, though, with tête-à-têtes between himself, Hawthorne, and the reader. When covering Julian’s significant, yet controversial, work as a biographer of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scharnhorst essentially pulls the reader aside to say, “(In truth, there is no neat distinction between Julian’s potboilers and his ‘serious’ writing)” (113). Yet Scharnhorst allows that the author “penned perhaps the finest and most heartfelt prose of his life” in his diary when he and his wife lost a newborn to spina bifida (130), selecting portions from that entry for the longest excerpt in the book. Otherwise, the principal argument here about Hawthorne as a writer is that he was a hack who couldn’t quite hack it among the elite literary periodicals. And throughout, though it makes no apology, this biography is specially attuned to the personal as well as the commercial pressures that affected Julian Hawthorne’s shaky career.

It is a testament to Scharnhorst’s command of a wide range of materials that Hawthorne’s finances are tied to sexual development—overdevelopment, maybe. In one anecdote, at eighteen, Julian went skinny-dipping with his late father’s friend, Franklin Pierce. Noticing that “the cat was jumping,” in Julian’s words, the former President treated the virile young man to a week, as Scharnhorst puts it, of “trolling for girls” (42). Julian thanked Pierce but, predictably, entreated him to cover another bill. When Sophia found that the Nathaniel Hawthorne estate was draining, the family moved to Dresden, where Julian met his first wife, Minne Amelung. Scharnhorst pairs Julian’s effort to earn a marketable degree at Polytechnik with excerpts from Julian’s erotic love letters. This narrative builds toward Scharnhorst’s major discovery that, in 1897, Julian “yielded to temptation by deliberate choice” for writer Minna Desborough (151). Scharnhorst shows how the author recorded, in code, when he rendezvoused with Minna, whether she performed fellatio or whether they had...