UNA HAWTHORNE

“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Una Hawthorne

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March 3, Sunday: Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne gave birth to a girl infant, named Una Hawthorne after Spenser’s heroine. Nathaniel Hawthorne commented that he thought he preferred “a daughter to a son, there is something so especially piquant in having helped to create a future woman.” The godfather of the infant was John L. O’Sullivan of The United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

That morning and continuing that evening, at a non-resistance meeting which was part of a series of lectures on reform and reformers at Boston’s Amory Hall by various reformers such as Charles Lane, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison –and Henry Thoreau– Waldo Emerson delivered his lengthy sermon “New England Reformers.”

The proof text for this sermon was MARK 8:36: “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lost his own soul?”

Waldo felt that his effort had had a good reception, and jotted down into his journal that:

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

1844

Somebody said of me after the lecture at Amory Hall ... “The secret of his popularity is, that he has a damn for everybody.”

Una Hawthorne “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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Summer: James Boyle’s book SOCIAL REFORM, heavily informed not only by Fourierism but also by perfectionism and nonresistance, was published. For this new “Divine Order of society” he was using the name “Association,” but the book was not an advocacy of the practical mix of sentiments which had created the Association of Industry and Education of which he was then a member as this association had never explicitly embraced any of the principles, or even the mindset, of Fourierism. His message was being well received at Brook Farm — but not at home. The Hutchinson Family Singers, returning to their family farm in Milford NH from their visit to Northampton, decided that for a trial period of one year they would convert their farm into a collective similar to the NAIE (rather than one similar to the Divine order of Fourierist society championed by Boyle and being implemented at Brook Farm).

According to page 80 of Larry J. Reynolds’s influence study EUROPEAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE AMERICAN LITERARY RENAISSANCE (New Haven CT: Yale UP, 1988), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sick ambivalences and manly defenses are readily to be discerned:

COMMUNITARIANISM

In the summer of 1844, while the Hawthornes were still at the Old Manse,Margaret Fuller, who was friends with them both, came to visit, and itwas then that Nathaniel became most intimate with her. Throughout themonth of July, they went boating at dusk on the Concord, tookmoonlit walks through the woods, and conversed at length on a varietyof subjects. (Sophia Peabody Hawthorne was occupied with the new baby,Una Hawthorne.) And, surprisingly, given his reserve and shyness, itwas Hawthorne who initiated many of their hours alone together. AfterFuller moved to New York City that fall and thence to Europe andRome, she and Hawthorne never saw one another again; however, ten yearsafter her death, Hawthorne in a long and famous passage in his Italiannotebook ridiculed her husband and called her “a great humbug” with a“defective and evil nature.” This outburst seems inexplicable,given Hawthorne’s previous friendliness, but it does make sense if onesees it as motivated by guilt and anger about his attraction to her.As Paula Blanshard has pointed out, “There is no possible way thatanyone can accuse Margaret of being evil — if he is thinking of Margaretherself. But Hawthorne was not; he was thinking of what she representedto him.” During the summer of 1849, when Fuller and her fellowrepublicans fought their losing battle against the invadingFrench, capturing the attention and admiration of the Americanpublic, Hawthorne certainly noticed, and when he wrote THE SCARLET LETTERseveral months later, he then too had in mind what Fullerrepresented: a female revolutionary trying to overthrow the world’smost prominent politico-religious leader, a freethinking temptresswho had almost subverted his right-minded thoughts and feelings.

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March 13, Thursday-14, Friday: Nathaniel Hawthorne and his daughter Una Hawthorne visited the Melvilles at their “Arrowhead” farm near Mount Greylock in the north-west corner of Massachusetts. It was raining during the visit, so Nathaniel and Herman Melville wound up philosophizing in the barn with Hawthorne seated on a carpenter’s bench. At leavetaking Hawthorne jested that were he to write a report of their discussion, he might parody the theologizing of Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS by entitling his report A WEEK ON A WORKBENCH IN A BARN.

NO-ONE’S LIFE IS EVER NOT DRIVEN PRIMARILY BY HAPPENSTANCE

Late October: Ellery Channing visited the Hawthornes in the “little red house” in Lenox, Massachusetts that had been their home since May 1850 and observed that wherever they moved, they found fault with the people among whom they settled (the Hawthornes were quarreling with their neighbors over rights to apples in an adjacent orchard, and three weeks after this visit they would relocate back to eastern Massachusetts.). He remarked that having written nine books had “greatly altered” Nathaniel Hawthorne into something of “a lion,” although an exceedingly reclusive one. He found Sophia Peabody Hawthorne not only to be no beauty but to be, in addition, fading at her age, and he found the two Hawthorne children, Una Hawthorne and Julian Hawthorne, to be not only ill-mannered but unhandsome.

1851

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Una Hawthorne

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October 24, Sunday: Una Hawthorne sketched at the Palace of the Caesars. This would soon be assumed to have been the occasion on which she breathed bad air which had caused her to contract malaria.1

LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD?— NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES.

LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.

1858

1. The infection must actually have been received earlier, as we know now what they did not know then, that manifestation of a malarial infection always presupposes a previous period of incubation.

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November 1, Monday: Governor-General Charles John Canning, Viscount Canning of India proclaimed Queen Victoria as sovereign over all India. All powers and territories held by the British East India Company would henceforward inhere to the British crown. Viscount Canning would serve as the initial British Viceroy of India.

In Boston, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes dated the preface to his initial collected edition of his occasional “Breakfast-Table” essays for The Atlantic Monthly, titled THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST TABLE. This was the year of appearance of his “The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or ‘The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay’,” a frontal mockery of Calvinism.

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Una Hawthorne was diagnosed as a victim of the “Roman fever,” that is, malaria.

THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

THE MARBLE FAUN: The final charm is bestowed by the Malaria. Thereis a piercing, thrilling, delicious kind of regret in the idea ofso much beauty thrown away, or only enjoyable at its half-development, in winter and early spring, and never to be dweltamongst, as the home-scenery of any human being. For if you comehither in summer, and stray through these glades in the goldensunset, Fever walks arm in arm with you, and Death awaits you atthe end of the dim vista. Thus the scene is like Eden in itsloveliness; like Eden, too, in the fatal spell that removes itbeyond the scope of man’s actual possessions.

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Una Hawthorne

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Early in the month of April, while recovering from her bout with malaria, Una Hawthorne was diagnosed as a victim of miliary tuberculosis with the prognosis being quick death.2

THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT

1859

2. This diagnosis, like the diagnosis of malaria, would prove to be incorrect.

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June 29, Friday: As soon as the Hawthornes were ensconced in their “The Wayside” again, the Emersons hosted an evening strawberries-and-cream reception which the Alcotts and Thoreaus attended (Bronson Alcott, in his journal, would continue to refer to the place as “Hillside”). Also present were Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, John Master Cheney, the painter William Morris Hunt, and John Shepard Keyes.

(Hawthorne was at this time renovating his home, adding a three-story tower from the top floor of which he imagined, beyond his stand-up desk, he would be able to obtain a desired “Paul Pry” view of Concord. –Unfortunately, such an unshaded writer’s garrett would prove not only to be much too hot for the finicky author in the summer, but also much too stuffy in the winter.)

Soon after the Hawthornes had returned to their home in Concord from overseas, Una Hawthorne had to be tied down and subjected to electric shocks, something which in that period was being termed “electrotherapy.” Her father Nathaniel was so impressed by the result of these shock treatments that, in an effort to overcome his bouts of depression, he had them repeated upon himself. However, as usual, he refused to consult a medical doctor.

1860

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At about this point in time (perhaps it was early in the next month), when Nathaniel made a call at the Emerson home specifically to speak with his daughter Una’s friend Ellen Emerson, she was already in bed. So he stayed awhile to chat with the other Emerson children. Edward Emerson reported later that “to cover his shyness” he began to look through a stereoscope at stereo photographs of Concord Court and Concord Common, the Mill-dam, and various houses of the town, and expressed surprise at these photographs. Edward assumed that the interest he showed indicated either that he had never been through the center of the town or that he had always been so preoccupied with his own thoughts that he had never noticed what he was passing. Robert H. Byer has suggested, however, that what Hawthorne had been struck by was simply how this apparatus alone, quite distinct from his length of time away from home, had succeeded in making unfamiliar what had been for many years the familiar context of his life.3

June 29. Dogdayish and showery, with thunder.At 6 P. M. 91°, the hottest yet, though a thunder shower has passed northeast and grazed us, and, in consequence,at 6.30 or 7, another thunder-shower comes up from the southwest and there is a sudden burst from it with aremarkably strong, gusty wind, and the rain for fifteen minutes falls in a blinding deluge. I think I never saw itrain so hard. The roof of the depot shed is taken off, many trees torn to pieces, the garden flooded at once, cornand potatoes, etc., beaten flat. [There was the same sudden and remarkably violent storm about two hours earlierall up and down the Hudson, and it struck the Great Eastern at her moorings in New York and caused somedamage.] You could not see distinctly many rods through the rain. It was the very strong gusts added to theweight of the rain that did the mischief. There was little or no wind before the shower; it belonged wholly to it.Thus our most violent thunder-shower followed the hottest hour of the month.

3. Nathaniel’s comments on photography are to be found in Chapter 6 of THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES.

Having been oriented for so long in his imagination tocreating defamiliarizing perspectives of the real injuxtaposition to its more self-evident appearances,Hawthorne may well have felt a bemused, perhaps weariedshock of recognition at the effects of the stereoscopeon his immediate, intimate world: for the moment,anyway, this apparatus may have seemed to actualize hisdeepest, most private inward eye (and need). Or it mayhave struck him as an uncanny reenactment of his oftentiring, abrasive, estranging experience as a Europeantraveler. The affinity and analogy suggested by thisanecdote between the effects of stereoscopic viewingand the kind of reader responsiveness produced by THEMARBLE FAUN are worth exploring further.

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Here are Una Hawthorne, Julian Hawthorne, and Rose Hawthorne as of this year:

Despairing of selling his Egyptian statue “Cleopatra,” already famous due to the advance publicity given to it by Nathaniel Hawthorne in THE MARBLE FAUN, or his Libyan statue “Sibyl,” which was being said (presumably factitiously) by some to have been inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s recountings of Sojourner Truth, the sculptor William Wetmore Story allowed them to be transported by the government of Rome into the Roman Pavilion arranged by Pope Pius IX at the London universal exhibition. He would receive, much to his surprise, a letter offering £3,000 for them:

“This gave me confidence; I continued to work.”

To distinguish more finely between truth and story, during these Civil War years Sojourner Truth would be continuing her work in the solicitation of supplies for the black troop formations of the Union Army.

DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.

1862

Una Hawthorne “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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May 24, Tuesday: People were continuing to kill each other at North Anna / Jericho Mill / Hanover Junction. In addition, on this day, people were killing each other at Wilson’s Wharf / Fort Pocahontas.

In Concord on this day, however, people were burying each other. Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal that:

1864

Yesterday, May 23, we buried Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow, in a pomp of sunshine and verdure, and gentle winds. James Freeman Clarke read the service in the church and at the grave. Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Agassiz, Hoar, Dwight, Whipple, Norton, Alcott, Hillard, Fields, Judge Thomas, and I attended the hearse as pallbearers. Franklin Pierce was with the family. The church was copiously decorated with white flowers delicately arranged. The corpse was unwillingly shown, — only a few moments to this company of his friends. But it was noble and serene in its aspect, — nothing amiss, — a calm and powerful head. A large company filled the church and the grounds of the cemetery. All was so bright and quiet that pain or mourning was hardly suggested, and Holmes said to me that it looked like a happy meeting.Clarke in the church said that Hawthorne had done more justice than any other to the shades of life, shown a sympathy with the crime in our nature, and, like Jesus, was the friend of sinners.I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more fully rendered, — in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, could not longer be endured, and he died of it.I have found in his death a surprise and a disappointment. I thought him a greater man than any of his works betray, that there was still a great deal of work in him, and that he might one day show a purer power. Moreover, I have felt sure of him in his neighbourhood, and in his necessities of sympathy and intelligence, — that I could well wait his time, — his unwillingness and caprice, — and might one day conquer a friendship. It would have been a happiness, doubtless to both of us, to have come into habits of unreserved intercourse. It was easy to talk with him, — there were no barriers, — only, he said so little, that I talked too much, and stopped only because, as he gave no indications, I feared to exceed. He showed no egotism or self-assertion, rather a humility, and, at one time, a fear that he had written himself out. One day, when I found him on top of his hill, in the woods, he paced back the path to his house, and said, “This path is the only remembrance of me that will remain.” Now it appears that I waited too long. Lately he had removed himself the more by the indignation his perverse politics and unfortunate friendship for that paltry Franklin Pierce awakened, though it rather moved pity for Hawthorne, and the assured belief that he would outlive it, and come right at last.

HAWTHORNE

LONGFELLOW

J.R. LOWELL

PROF. AGASSIZ

JUDGE E.R. HOAR

J.S. DWIGHT

C.K. WHIPPLE

C.E. NORTON

BRONSON ALCOTT

HILLARD

JAMES T. FIELDS

JUDGE THOMAS

FRANKLIN PIERCE

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“The Wayside” would be occupied by the widowed Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, with her two daughters Una Hawthorne and Rose Hawthorne and her son Julian Hawthorne, until, while again living in Europe, in October 1868 they would vend the place to George and Abby Gray.

HAWTHORNE

MAY 23, 1864How beautiful it was, that one bright day In the long week of rain!Though all its splendor could not chase away The omnipresent pain.The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, And the great elms o’erheadDark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread.Across the meadows, by the gray old manse, The historic river flowed:I was as one who wanders in a trance, Unconscious of his road.The faces of familiar friends seemed strange; Their voices I could hear,And yet the words they uttered seemed to change Their meaning to my ear.For the one face I looked for was not there, The one low voice was mute;Only an unseen presence filled the air, And baffled my pursuit.Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream Dimly my thought defines;I only see — a dream within a dream — The hill-top hearsed with pines.I only hear above his place of rest Their tender undertone,The infinite longings of a troubled breast, The voice so like his own.There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold,Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told.Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clew regain?The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower Unfinished must remain!

WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MINDYOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF

OLD HOUSES

Una Hawthorne “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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Richard Henry Dana, Jr. put out a new edition of TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST with significant changes.

Alexander H. Japp’s MEMOIR OF N. HAWTHORNE.

In England, building the reputation of her father with the help of Robert Browning, Una Hawthorne prepared certain unfinished The Atlantic Monthly manuscripts as SEPTIMUS FELTON; OR, THE ELIXIR OF LIFE. This would be prepared in Boston by James R. Osgood in terra-cotta cloth decoratively stamped in black and gilt, inside a half-morocco slipcase.

According to an “Afterward” on page 474 of the Dover Edition of Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU: A BIOGRAPHY, Henry Thoreau’s grave was moved from the New Burying Ground to

Authors’ Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery “ten years or so after the original burial,” which would be at about this point. Walt Whitman would write about a visit he would make to Concord during the Fall of 1881, that he “spent a half hour at Hawthorne’s and Thoreau’s graves. I got out and went up of course on foot, and stood a long while and ponder’d. They lie close together in a pleasant wooded spot well up the cemetery hill, ‘Sleepy Hollow.’ The flat surface of the first was densely cover’d by myrtle, with a border of arbor-vitae, and the other had a brown headstone, moderately elaborate, with inscriptions. By Henry’s side lies his brother John, of whom much was expected, but he died young.” Clearly, as of Whitman’s visit in 1881 at least, Henry’s grave

1872

DIGGING UP THE DEAD

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had already been relocated to the tourist spot they were calling Authors’ Ridge, and clearly, the headstone Walt saw in 1881 was dissimilar to the severely plain and small one that is above Henry’s body now. One wonders what that inscription said. (By 1874 the old Thoreau family stones would be recycled to cover a drainage ditch, and new “neat, plain, brown” ones set in place above the graves. The cemetery association keeps spare gravestones for Henry’s grave in a shed somewhere, as these memorabilia do seem from time to time to wander away.)

The Brooks family house that stood where the Concord Free Public Library now stands, at the intersection of Main Street and Sudbury Road, was at this point moved to 45 Hubbard Street.

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Bronson Alcott’s CONCORD DAYS4 (pages 11-17):

My friend and neighbor united these qualities of sylvan andhuman in a more remarkable manner than any whom it has been myhappiness to know. Lover of the wild, he lived a borderer on theconfines of civilization, jealous of the least encroachment uponhis possessions.

“Society were all but rudeIn his umbrageous solitude.”

I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of thecountry, and so purely a son of nature. I think he had theprofoundest passion for it of any one of his time; and had thehuman sentiment been as tender and pervading, would have givenus pastorals of which Virgil and Theocritus might have enviedhim the authorship had they chanced to be his contemporaries.As it was, he came nearer the antique spirit than any of ournative poets, and touched the fields and groves and streams ofhis native town with a classic interest that shall not fade.Some of his verses are suffused with an elegiac tenderness, asif the woods and brooks bewailed the absence of their Lycidas,and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one another,—responsivelike idyls. Living in close companionship with nature, his musebreathed the spirit and voice of poetry. For when the heart isonce divorced from the senses and all sympathy with commonthings, then poetry has fled and the love that sings.The most welcome of companions was this plain countryman. Oneseldom meets with thoughts like his, coming so scented ofmountain and field breezes and rippling springs, so like aluxuriant clod from under forest leaves, moist and mossy withearth-spirits. His presence was tonic, like ice-water in dog-days to the parched citizen pent in chambers and under brazenceilings. Welcome as the gurgle of brooks and dipping ofpitchers,—then drink and be cool! He seemed one with things, ofnature’s essence and core, knit of strong timbers,—like a woodand its inhabitants. There was in him sod and shade, wilds andwaters manifold,—the mould and mist of earth and sky. Self-poised and sagacious as any denizen of the elements, he had thekey to every animal’s brain, every plant; and were an Indian toflower forth and reveal the scents hidden in his cranium, itwould not be more surprising than the speech of our Sylvanus.He belonged to the Homeric age,—was older than pastures andgardens, as if he were of the race of heroes and one with theelements. He of all men seemed to be the native New-Englander,as much so as the oak, the granite ledge; our best example ofan indigenous American, untouched by the old country, unless hecame down rather from Thor, the Northman, whose name he bore.

4. Bronson Alcott. CONCORD DAYS. Boston MA: Roberts Brothers, 1872 [bound in green cloth, blind-stamped; “Concord Days” stamped in gold in center of front cover; spine stamped in gold; brown wove endpapers]Although this volume was issued in 1872, according to a date past the title page, it appears to be a series of journal entries(with some other stuff inserted) initiated between April and September of 1869.

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A peripatetic philosopher, and out-of-doors for the best partof his days and nights, he had manifold weather and seasons inhim; the manners of an animal of probity and virtue unstained.Of all our moralists, he seemed the wholesomest, the busiest,and the best republican citizen in the world; always at homeminding his own affairs. A little over-confident by genius, andstiffly individual, dropping society clean out of his theories,while standing friendly in his strict sense of friendship, therewas in him an integrity and love of justice that made possibleand actual the virtues of Sparta and the Stoics,—all the morewelcome in his time of shuffling and pusillanimity. Plutarchwould have made him immortal in his pages had he lived beforehis day. Nor have we any so modern withal, so entirely his ownand ours: too purely so to be appreciated at once. A scholar bybirthright, and an author, his fame had not, at his decease,travelled far from the banks of the rivers he described in hisbooks; but one hazards only the truth in affirming of his prose,that in substance and pith, it surpasses that of any naturalistof his time; and he is sure of large reading in the future. Thereare fairer fishes in his pages than any swimming in our streams;some sleep of his on the banks of the Merrimack by moonlightthat Egypt never rivalled, a morning of which Memnon might haveenvied the music, and a greyhound he once had, meant for Adonis;frogs, better than any of Aristophanes; apples wilder thanAdam’s. His senses seemed double, giving him access to secretsnot easily read by others; in sagacity resembling that of thebeaver, the bee, the dog, the deer; an instinct for seeing andjudging, as by some other, or seventh sense; dealing withobjects as if they were shooting forth from his mindmythologically, thus completing the world all round to hissenses; a creation of his at the moment. I am sure he knew theanimals one by one, as most else knowable in his town; theplants, the geography, as Adam did in his Paradise, if indeed,he were not that ancestor himself. His works are pieces ofexquisite sense, celebrations of Nature’s virginity exemplifiedby rare learning, delicate art, replete with observations asaccurate as original; contributions of the unique to the naturalhistory of his country, and without which it were incomplete.Seldom has a head circumscribed so much of the sense and coreof Cosmos as this footed intelligence.If one would learn the wealth of wit there was in this plainman, the information, the poetry, the piety, he should haveaccompanied him on an afternoon walk to Walden, or elsewhereabout the skirts of his village residence. Pagan as he mightoutwardly appear, yet he was the hearty worshipper of whatsoeveris sound and wholesome in nature,—a piece of russet probity andstrong sense, that nature delighted to own and honor. His talkwas suggestive, subtle, sincere, under as many masks andmimicries as the shows he might pass; as significant,substantial,—nature choosing to speak through his mouthpiece,—cynically, perhaps, and searching into the marrows of men andtimes he spoke of, to his discomfort mostly and avoidance.

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Nature, poetry, life,—not politics, not strict science, notsociety as it is,—were his preferred themes. The world was holy,the things seen symbolizing the things unseen, and thus worthyof worship, calling men out-of-doors and under the firmament forhealth and wholesomeness to be insinuated into their souls, notas idolaters, but as idealists. His religion was of the mostprimitive type, inclusive of all natural creatures and things,even to “the sparrow that falls to the ground,” though never byshot of his, and for whatsoever was manly in men, his worshipwas comparable to that of the priests and heroes of all time. Ishould say he inspired the sentiment of love, if, indeed, thesentiment did not seem to partake of something purer, were thatpossible, but nameless from its excellency. Certainly he wasbetter poised and more nearly self-reliant than other men.

“The happy man who lived content With his own town, his continent, Whose chiding streams its banks did curb As ocean circumscribes its orb, Round which, when he his walk did take, Thought he performed far more than Drake; For other lands he took less thought Than this his muse and mother brought.”

More primitive and Homeric than any American, his style ofthinking was robust, racy, as if Nature herself had built hissentences and seasoned the sense of his paragraphs with her ownvigor and salubrity. Nothing can be spared from them; there isnothing superfluous; all is compact, concrete, as nature is.His politics were of a piece with his individualism. We mustadmit that he found little in political or religiousestablishment answering to his wants, that his attitude wasdefiant, if not annihilating, as if he had said to himself: —

“The state is man’s pantry at most, and filled at anenormous cost,—a spoliation of the human common-wealth.Let it go. Heroes can live on nuts, and free-men sunthemselves in the clefts of rocks, rather than selltheir liberty for this pottage of slavery. We, the fewhonest neighbors, can help one another; and should thestate ask any favors of us, we can take the matter intoconsideration leisurely, and at our convenience give arespectful answer.“But why require a state to protect one’s rights? theman is all. Let him husband himself; needs he otherservant or runner? Selfkeeping is the best economy. Thatis a great age when the state is nothing and man is all.He founds himself in freedom, and maintains hisuprightness therein; founds an empire and maintainsstates. Just retire from those concerns, and see howsoon they must needs go to pieces, the sooner for thevirtue thus withdrawn from them. All the manliness ofindividuals is sunk in that partnership in trade. Notonly must I come out of myself, if I will be free andindependent. Shall one be denied the privilege on coming

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of mature age of choosing whether he will be a citizenof the country he happens to be born in, or another? Andwhat better title to a spot of ground than being a man,and having none? Is not man superior to state orcountry? I plead exemption from all interference by menor states with my individual prerogatives. That is minewhich none can steal from me, nor is that yours which Ior any man can take away.”

“I am too high born to be propertied, To be a secondary at control, Or useful serving man and instrument To any sovereign state throughout the world.”

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

Una Hawthorne “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project

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September 10, Monday: Una Hawthorne died in England.

1877

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T. Walter Herbert’s DEAREST BELOVED: THE HAWTHORNES AND THE MAKING OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY (Berkeley: U of California P).5

“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY

1993

5. The relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne has been characterized as a model loving relationship. That’s not the way I reconstruct it. I see the two of them as inveterate game-players, dancing around in very tight and lifelong circles of one-uppance the obvious payoff for which was that everyone, literally everyone, in their lives had to wait on them hand and foot, while meanwhile they manipulatively struggled to protect themselves from becoming utterly subservient to each other’s manipulations. In the husband’s case, of course, the scam was that he being the family breadwinner, his writing came first, and also, it was ever so important to defer to him, to put his person always first, because his was such an artistic sensitive soul and such sensitivities might so readily be bruised by reality. He was so shy, he was so solitary, he was so perceptive — except when he was out drinking with his buddies and could let his shyness, his solitude, his perceptiveness, and his other self-serving poses slip away. In the wife’s case, on the other hand, she obviously needed to sit around in the parlor and have plural maidservants to run errands for her, because anytime anything disagreeable would come up, such as a household chore or some distressingly otiose idea, or a sudden noise, she could acquire the most splitting of headaches. Nathaniel was denying himself so totally for his lovey-lovey Sophia, and Sophia was denying herself so totally for her lovey-lovey Nathaniel, it must have been a total pain to hear them go at it! The chickens would come home to roost in the next generation after this self-legitimating and self-deceiving co-conspiracy, in the warped and spoiled self-indulgent lives of their offspring Una and Julian and in the exceedingly difficult life of Rose.

DEAREST BELOVED

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HDT WHAT? INDEX

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>.

Prepared: February 21, 2015

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested thatwe pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of theshoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What thesechronological lists are: they are research reports compiled byARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term theKouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such arequest for information we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obviousdeficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored inthe contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then weneed to punch that button again and recompile the chronology —but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary“writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of thisoriginating contexture improve, and as the programming improves,and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whateverhas been needed in the creation of this facility, the entireoperation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminishedneed to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expectto achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring roboticresearch librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.