Twenty days with Julian & Little Bunny by Papa

In late July 1851, Sophia Hawthorne and her daughters, seven-year-old Una and two-month-old Rose, went to visit her parents near Boston, leaving her son Julian with his father at home in a small Berkshire hills farmhouse. The novelist kept a journal of the 20 days that he and his five-year-old scion bached it (a housekeeper cooked and cleaned for them, however), which lay buried within the 800-page American Notebooks0 (1932) until now. As Paul Auster says in a superb introduction more than half as long as the journal, it shows us a different side of Hawthorne. Gone is the density and brooding of his fictional prose, replaced by straightforward recording and clearly registered observation expressed in everyday vocabulary. An undemanding parent, he quite adores his son, though Julian's volubility astounds and occasionally wearies him. He likes to call the little boy "the old gentleman," but otherwise there is nothing precious or sentimental in his writing about him. The journal is a tiny classic of parental writing about children. --Ray Olson Copyright 2003 Booklist

This charming extract from Nathaniel Hawthorne's American Notebooks is, as described by Paul Auster in his introduction, "something that no writer had ever attempted before [Hawthorne]: a meticulous, blow-by-blow account of a man taking care of a young child by himself." When his wife and daughters went away on a three-week visit, Hawthorne stayed home with five-year-old Julian. The writer's musings on this adventure are, in Auster's words, "at once comic, self-deprecatory, and vaguely befuddled," as he discovers how insistent a child's needs are, and how boundless his energy. They take walks to the lake and play with their pet rabbit; Hawthorne tends to a wasp sting, tries to tame unruly hair and discovers the pleasure of finally putting the "old gentleman" to bed after a long day during which it was "impossible to write, read, think, or even to sleep...so constant are his appeals to me." Unusual evidence, if any were needed, that a writer does indeed need a room of his (or her) own. B&w illus. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved