Following My Grandfather

Following his line, that is. There is a strange thing about my family; well, perhaps not so strange, when one and only one member, one ancestor was and is so famous that English readers around the world, and many people reading other European languages, as well, would have heard of him. He was my grandmother's grandfather, a giant of American literature, and probably one of the reasons that my grandfather could found the New York Times Book Review--he was married to the man's granddaughter; her father was a bestselling author at the time.

Almost no one has heard of Julian Hawthorne, unless he or she is a Hawthorne enthusiast. He was my grandmother's father, a somewhat untamed man, who lived large, and wrote what would now be regarded as typically bad late Victorian-American prose, highly ornate, romantically literary; it was prose that is too highly colored for contemporary tastes. He named his daughters as if they were characters in one of his novels: Hildegarde, Rosamund, Beatrix (my grandmother) and Imogen. His sons were named by their mother, Minnie: Fred, Jack and Henry. You wonder that the marriage survived as long as it did, considering those names and the different values and styles they connote.

Yes, Julian's father was Nathaniel Hawthorne; Julian was his only son, the one to carry on his name, and to profit from it. No, that's not entirely fair. Nathaniel's older daughter, Rose, because of the advantage of his name, was almost supernaturally successful in raising money for her ground-breaking, and inspired, cancer hospices that later became hospitals. She had a formidable determination and a conviction that she could do what she thought was right, but not many would have had the connections that she could create, because of her name. For her efforts, humility and force of character, but also because she accomplished so much, she has become a near-saint in the Catholic Church (in the process towards canonization).

The point of all this digression from my grandfather was that he was not a Hawthorne, and neither of his sons bore his first name, or that of his father. They were named after their mother's father, and her father's family: Julian and Hawthorne, respectively.

I claim Scottish ancestry, however, because my father and his father both carried the middle name of Campbell. My father's brother's middle name was Lewis. I have been told that a Lewis, up the family tree, was the Lewis who signed the Declaration of Independence, so, I would guess both middle-names were family names. Since Clifford Campbell Smyth named his eldest son Julian Campbell, and his younger son Hawthorne Lewis, it's probable that his mother's maiden name was Campbell. His father's mother's maiden name may have been Lewis (both Scottish, at least by name); that would have covered two preceding generations on both sides, with precedence given to the Hawthorne side, despite the apparent fact that any money was on the Smyth side.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's publishers got most of his money, but my grandmother was able to send her three children to college by selling Hawthorne papers and books.

The money on the Smyth side, supposedly, was lost in 1907, the 1907 Panic, the year my father was born. There must have still been money somewhere in the family, however, because my father told the story of being out on a large yacht in New York harbor (obviously after 1907); the yacht was not his father's, but belonged to someone in his father's family, perhaps one of his uncles; he fell into the water when the yacht tacked and the boom swung across and knocked him overboard. He was rescued, of course; he was too young to swim far. The other story might have come from before 1907, however; my grandfather told my mother stories of vacationing at Boscobel, a well-known estate on the Hudson, one that has now been moved to a new location, further up the river, and is preserved as an historic restoration.

Connections made a difference, both in my grandfather's career, and in that of his wife's family.

But connections like that don't extend past one or two generations. If you look at the subsequent generations of famous men: politicians and writers, especially, the charm of a familiar family name doesn't carry through that many generations--unless money comes along with it. The Rockefellers come to mind, of a family in which some members, even after three generations, may still be famous, in part, because of their family name.

Will Bushes, or Clintons? It's likely that GW's children, and Chelsea will be able to trade on their names, if they want to. It's more likely that the Bush family name will continue to carry importance in subsequent generations--if the family money (even if made from war profits dating first from World War I) goes with them.

The point, if there is any point to this rambling personal essay, is that the fact that my grandmother's grandfather was Nathaniel Hawthorne, has made absolutely no difference to my writing career, although it may have been one of the reasons I began to write in the first place--the family tradition.

I am still an unknown. And except for this website, and a variety of short stories and freelance articles, I am unpublished. I have written novel after novel. Some, I think, are good; some suck. I would never submit to publishers the ones that suck, now--I did before I knew better. Two of my best are on this website, for sale as e-books, because their setting and content have very much to do with the premise of the website, and of the non-fiction book also on sale here.

I've decided not to pursue conventional publication, anyway, unless one of two things happen. Either: this website takes off, or, my wife's series, The Maeve Chronicles of the Celtic Mary Magdalen become genuine bestsellers (they deserve to). I guess in the latter case, if I wanted, I might be able to make better connections, based on someone else's name, a little like my great-grandfather Julian, and like my grandfather, Clifford Smyth. On the other hand, if this website took off, well, then I'd be trading on my own name, wouldn't I?