To Julian Hawthorne - photo 1
To Julian Hawthorne - photo 2

To Julian Hawthorne

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$ 12 600
Auction dateClassic
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -04:00
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CHRISTIE'S
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USA, New York
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ID 967669
Lot 139 | To Julian Hawthorne
To Julian Hawthorne

Herman Melville, 10 August 1883

MELVILLE, Herman (1819-1891). Autograph letter signed ("H. Melville") to Julian Hawthorne (author and son of Nathaniel Hawthorne), [New York,] 10 August 1883.



Two pages, bifolium, 177 x 114mm (separated folds, spine rehinged with clear tape, touching, but not covering a few letters in text).



Herman Melville assists the son of his close friend Nathaniel Hawthorne with a planned biography: "As to the information you seek—little enough, I think, it will prove." Julian Hawthorne had written to Melville, collecting information for his book, Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, which appeared in 1884. Melville—out-of-fashion and working as an outdoor Customs House officer—responds to the son of his great friend: "I am sorry that circumstances have prevented my answering your note earlier. — It gave me pleasure to receive it, and this for reasons you can readily imagine. As to the information you seek — little enough, I think, it will prove, at least for the purpose you name — it can be more conveniently conveyed personally than by note. So if you will be kind enough to come & see me as you propose, I shall be happy to greet you ... I am obliged to be away [a] good part of the day [as a Customs House officer], nor, during these summer nights am I much at home except when in bed..." Melville closes by suggesting a date and time for the proposed visit.



Julian Hawthorne commented several times in print on his visit to Melville. In one, quoted in Jay Leyda's The Melville Log (New York, 1951), vol. 2, p. 783, he writes: "I talked with him in his house in New York [probably on 15 August 1883]; he was then more than sixty years old [actually 64], and a melancholy and pale wraith of what he had been in his prime ... It was a sad interview; he seemed partly to shrink from the idea that obsessed him, and partly to reach out for companionship in the dark region into which his mind was sinking. I ... had applied to him for any letters that Hawthorne might have written to him in reply to several of his own during the 1850's. But he said, with agitation, that he had kept nothing; if any such letters had existed, he had scrupulously destroyed them ... When I tried to revive memories in him of the red-cottage days—red-letter days too for him—he merely shook his head...'" Melville's wife purchased a copy of Julian Hawthorne's book in 1885, but Melville made no recorded comments. Published in Horth, Letters, p. 480-481. Provenance: Charles Hamilton, 11 December 1953 – Carnegie Bookshop – Roger Barrett (traded to H. Bradley Martin but not included in his 1990 sale at Sotheby's, New York – Christie's, New York, 29 May 1998, lot 73.

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