"He was Known to Us as Mr. Omoo": Julian Hawthorne on Melville

“He was Known to Us as Mr. Omoo” Julian Hawthorne on Melville GARY SCHARNHORST University of New Mexico J ulian Hawthorne (1846–1934), the son of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, was a prolific novelist, poet, and journalist, though never of the first rank. He was also an important book critic, working as a literary editor over the years for the London Spectator, New York World, the Philadelphia North American, and other papers. As his biographer has noted, the younger Hawthorne was critically adept and could “quite seriously advance his critical views on other writers and the art of writing” in the various venues available to him.1 Indeed, his influence was such that another scholar blames him for the neglect of the writings of Margaret Fuller until the latetwentieth century.2 During his checkered career he often courted controversy by exposing the private peccadilloes of such figures as James Russell Lowell, and as Fuller’s nephew later lamented, he was “not one to spoil a sensation to save a friend.”3 Not only was he inclined to smash literary idols whenever possible, he shamed his own family name when he was convicted of mail fraud in federal court in 1913 and sentenced to a year in prison. More to the point here, his memories and literary judgment were not always trustworthy, especially with regard to Melville. As an influential figure in Melville studies, Julian Hawthorne often revised the narrative of his association with Melville to make more interesting “copy,” much as he sensationalized over time the narratives of his relationships with Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Henry David Thoreau, and others. Scholars are familiar with his book Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1884), which devotes several pages to his father’s relationship with Melville, publishing for the first time four of Melville’s letters, in whole or part. In other publications, cited below, he recorded his memories of Melville, whom he had known since C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Maurice Bassan, Hawthorne’s Son: The Life and Literary Career of Julian Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1970), 175. 2 Thomas R. Mitchell, “Julian Hawthorne and the ‘Scandal’ of Margaret Fuller,” American Literary History 7 (Summer 1995): 213. 3 Frederick T. Fuller, “Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller Ossoli,” Literary World, 10 January 1885, 11-15. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 93 G A R Y S C H A R N H O R S T childhood. Julian last visited Melville in New York in August 1883 while he was working on the biography of his parents. In his later years, he promulgated the notion that Melville was prone to mental illness, initiating a debatable undercurrent in Melville scholarship that persists to this day. Harrison Hayford averred that Julian Hawthorne did perhaps as much as any one person to foster the legend of Melville’s insanity. During Melville’s life, to be sure, he published no such report; but in every account he wrote after Melville’s death he took care to make the assertion, and he spoke always as one having authority. . .. Whatever he may owe to the father, Herman Melville has little for which to thank Julian Hawthorne.4 In all, Brian Higgins lists nine references to Melville by the younger Hawthorne published between 1884 and 1938.5 In fact, Melville loomed larger in Julian Hawthorne’s imagination, both before and after the Melville revival of the 1920s, than previously known. I have located fifteen additional works by Julian Hawthorne published between 1887 and 1931, each mentioning Melville, including a major 1924 essay hitherto lost to scholarship, as well as three additional references to Melville in unpublished manuscripts. These newly discovered pieces confirm that, despite his influence, the younger Hawthorne was not a particularly astute or accurate literary critic. He mistakenly believed that Melville’s first book was Redburn,6 and he was outspoken in his condemnation of Pierre. His favorite Melville books were Typee, Omoo, Redburn, and White-Jacket...