-
Epilogue
- University of Illinois Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Epilogue At Julian’s death Edith lost her only source of income. He had no life insurance . She eked out a living by selling some Hawthorniana, including a draft of Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret in Sophia’s hand and a batch of Elizabeth Hawthorne’s letters, to the Rare Book Department at Scribner’s for $250. She spoke occasionally on KFRC radio in San Francisco on topics gleaned from his papers. When he died, moreover, the Star-News had a backlog of thirty-eight of his columns, and Edith silently wrote seventeen more from his notes“in self-defense.”1 They appeared posthumously and without interruption for eleven months, and the Star-News then serialized his Memoirs, edited by Edith, from June until December 1935. Julian continually puttered over these reminiscences in his final years—he finished no fewer than four distinct versions, each with a different title: “Literary Lights of Old Concord,” “Giants of Old Concord,” “Things in General,” and “Thinking Things Over.” He realized that literary scholars would“find small value”in them, but he figured archeologists“will grin over the mouldering pages.”2 It was hardly an intimate autobiography; rather, it was a chronicle of his public persona. He nowhere mentions in it either of his wives, any of his children, or his imprisonment. Though publishers were interested, none of them was interested enough to accept it. According to Edith, they “pronounced the material very valuable, but said they were not in shape for publication.” So after he died she “took hold of these manuscripts, and after more than two years work on them, again submitted them to Macmillan,” which accepted an abridged version of “Thinking Things Over.”3 Julian’s valedictory volume was published in April 1938, nearly four years after his death, to favorable reviews. The Los Angeles Times proclaimed it “a really valuable contribution to our knowledge of New England and its literary pioneers,” and the Christian Science Monitor called it “a genuine contribution to the history of American letters.” Odell 216 epilogue Shepard, professor of English at Trinity College, supposed in the Nation that “there can have been few more successful sons of great and famous men” than Julian. In September 1938, ironically, after blacklisting several of his novels during his life, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York listed Julian’s Memoirs among books it approved.4 Edith died in January 1949 in the same San Francisco apartment she had shared with Julian. In the Pasadena Star-News, Helen Haines memorialized her, saying Julian “was her lifework: he was at once her child, her lover, her husband, and her father.”5 He was the only child of Nathaniel and Sophia blessed with adult offspring; all their heirs descend through him, and his children who survived infancy all led long lives. Hildegarde became, like her father and grandfather, a professional author and died at eighty-one; Jack, who nearly died of yellow fever in 1898, enjoyed a successful newspaper career and died at eighty-seven; and after a distinguished career as a sportswriter, Fred died at seventy-two. Henry died at eighty-five; Gwendolen at ninety-four; Beatrix at eighty-eight; and Imogen at seventy-three. Mayflower and Joan lived to the ages of seventy-five and ninety without the recognition they might have received as descendants of the Hawthornes.The present generation of“legitimate”heirs knew nothing about Julian’s shadow family until July 2004, when two of Mayflower’s descendants attended the bicentennial celebration of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s birth in Salem. ...