Hawthorne's Line

THE MEMOIRS OF JULIAN HAWTHORNE --Edited by Edith Garrigues Hawthorne--Macmillan ($2.50).

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his bluestocking wife had three children, Una, Julian and Rose. Una became an Angelican nun and died in England at 35. Julian became his father's biographer, wrote some 50 volumes, died in 1934 in San Francisco, Calif, at the age of 88. Rose turned Catholic and founded, under the Dominican rule, the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer and headed the order until her death twelve years ago. Because Nathaniel Hawthorne's powers of observation were extremely acute, and because he filled his many notebooks with jottings about his children, his random writings about them make up one of the best pictures of childhood in U. S. literature--tender, unexpected, funny, but with the overtones of melancholy that run through all Hawthorne's writing.

Readers who may have wondered what happened to these children after they grew up can find some enlightenment in Julian Hawthorne's posthumous Memoirs. An old man's book, it suggests the rambling, good-natured discourse of some cultivated gentleman who has known all the literary great of his day, as well as all the agreeable anecdotes about them; who never gives offense by anything he says, and who moves leisurely from anecdotes about ice skating in Concord to speculation about the changing rules of baseball and the cut of bathing suits. The anecdotes are genial, but if they consider what Julian might have contributed to an understanding of his father, readers are likely to be disappointed in The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne.

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