Unlucky Old Sons

Hawthorne n 1: California suburb where Brian Wilson, American composer and Beach
Boy (b. 1942, just released 10th solo album, That Lucky Old Sun), was
raised; 2: Nathaniel (1804–1864) American author

T he Puritans dreamt of the City upon a Hill and came to the New
World to build it. Then when it went to hell their sons and sons of sons went west and
daughters, too. Get away if you can! The future’s there! And beaches,
too!

And so, to California, there they went, eventually to Hawthorne,
suburb of the City of Angels. It was the last place they could go
because the land runs out, the only thing that’s left beyond is water,
which no one can, unless they’re Jesus, walk on, but they tried (on
boards) and to degrees they could but then they couldn’t. Because as
much as anyone tries to ride a wave, a wave can’t last forever.

They set out with their modest, pure, angelic wives and found on the
other coast the tanned and leggy, long-haired girls, perditious
daughters of their deviled dreams. The wives of stalwart colonies, who
covered the vanity of hair and clothed themselves in temperate garb,
had mostly been obedient, Anne Hutchinson and the Shakers
notwithstanding. Though they were deviants, weren’t they? Iniquitous.
But way out west their malefactress daughters grew then cut their hair
(where did their long hair go?), the sons grew theirs and everyone
removed their sober clothes. Their children and their children’s kids
who’d been spared not the rod were scruffy, unwashed, drugged, and had
an awful lot of sex. (See Manson, Charles, friend of Wilson brother
Dennis, drummer, the cute one.) The daughters, who’d been silent, pure
(of, like, or as a Puritan), reported they’d had concourse with the
Evil One who’d come to them in bodily form, been sent by others, they
accused. They called these others witches (hippies, commies,
terrorists) and they were stoned, electrified. They threw them in the
water and they drowned. Like surfers who aren’t strong enough, or are,
except when some great, unexpected wave, a giant maw, swallows
them.

Some things, no matter how far apart, occur again the same. They
happen the same again and over again. The same except for different and
forever.

The witches were condemned to drown.

Like Dennis Wilson drowned. When he was stoned.

O ur Puritan forebears, and some were mine, my mother’s mother Doty
having traced us back to an indentured servant on the Mayflower, landed
on Plymouth Rock, having moved west to start over in the New World,
then, having completely fucked over this paradise, moved west again,
across the continent, to try again what they failed before and ended in
up California, dreaming.

So Hawthorne, writer from the East, and Hawthorne, suburb in the
West, are twisted in a Möbius strip, two separate things that are
the same, the child and its evil twin.

The City upon a Hill becomes the suburb in the sand.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s great-however-many-grandfather, William
Hathorne (no “w” in the old man’s name), had been among the first
Puritans to immigrate to New England in 1630. His westward move was in
a ship and it wasn’t easy. There was all of that sickness and puking
and death. That leaving behind and forgetting and not forgetting. All
of that forever goodbye and never return and always wonder. This
William became deputy to the General Court of Massachusetts, speaker of
the house, commissioner to the board of the United Colonies of New
England, and a renowned Indian Fighter (read: Genocide-r).

William Hathorne also was a judge and, in keeping with the Puritan
justice his people had suffered in England but then brought with them
because no matter how much you want to, you can never unbecome the
thing you want, meted out against evildoers harsh punishments from
among the following: Cutting off ears. Boring holes in women’s tongues
with red-hot irons. Starvation. Dragging naked women through the
streets while having them flailed by a constable with a cord-knotted
whip thus drawing blood, the desired result known as “stripes.” The
gallows. Putting into stocks. The pillory. Thumbscrews. Shackles (metal
fastenings, usually of a linked pair for the wrists, ankles, or both;
see also fetter, manacle; also any thing that keeps one from acting,
thinking, or developing as one desires). Public humiliation like having
to walk around with the name of your crime written on a board you’re
wearing around your neck, and the board, being also very heavy, leaving
marks on your neck and shoulders when, that is if, you get to take it
off. Drowning. (If she floats she’s a witch; if she’s innocent she
drowns. There’s water enough for all of us.) Stoning. Stretching on a
rack. Ripping off toe- and/or fingernails. Ridicule. Scorn. Throwing
feces on. Threatening with dogs. Covering in black hoods. Prodding with
electric prods. Waterboarding. Pissing on their holy books. Making them
do humiliating sexual things with themselves and with each other while
photographing them while photographing ourselves making them do these
things, thumbs up, hamming it up, grinning for the camera like a
motherfucker—

Wait a second. I’m getting mixed up. They didn’t do all of those
things back then, did they? Electricity hadn’t been invented yet, or
photography. They only did some of those things to their fellow
countrymen and women. The other things had to wait until, through
rational inquiry and scientific progress, we invented them.

B rian Wilson’s grandfather William “Buddy” Wilson headed back to
California in 1914. (What is it with these grandfathers, Nathaniel’s
and Brian’s, named William? I guess it’s a common enough name, my
brother’s, for example.) I say “back to” California because when he was
young, William (“Buddy”) had gone to California when his father, also
William (Brian’s great-grandfather?), tried in 1904 to move the family
from Kansas to California in search of a better life, which did not
transpire, so the Wilsons then returned to the Midwest where William,
not William “Buddy,” resumed work as a plumber and then later William
(son?) came back. See what I mean about how
everyone gets confused
with everyone else? Like we’re all sort of the same person trying the
same things and making the same mistakes again?

Edgar Allan Poe, a contemporary of Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote a
story called “William Wilson.” Actually, he wrote “William Wilson”
twice, once in 1839 and then a variation in 1845. Even a fictional
William Wilson gets mixed up with other versions of himself! It gets
worse. “William Wilson” ends like this: “In me didst thou
exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own,
how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”

I am you who destroyed yourself. Your dream will be the death of all
your kids.

William Wilson went to California in 1914. He was ambitious,
determined, stocky, and a drinker often to the point of violence. He
beat his family, particularly his wife. Sometimes his son Murry tried
to rescue his mother, coming between her and his father, who then hit
him, so then he hit his father back and so on and so forth.

When he grew up, Murry Wilson, Brian’s father, was, like his father
Buddy (William), ambitious, determined, stocky and, after he married
(Audree Korthof in 1938) and became a father, a drinker often to the
point of violence. Not against his wife, though, just his sons. His
sons were Brian (born 1942, composer, arranger, producer, dreamer,
genius), Dennis (born 1944, the drummer, the cute one, the sexy one,
the one who fought back most, the one who drowned), and Carl (born
1946, the quiet one, the chubby one, the lead guitar, who took over
producing the band when Brian dropped out in the late ’60s when he went
crazy, and who was dead of cancer in 1998).

I was born in California, too.

Murry had work during the Depression, when a lot of other people
didn’t, and he was proud of that. He always said if you worked hard
enough you would succeed in America. His sons remember him shouting,
over and over again and in the vernacular, the Puritan work ethic upon
which this great nation was founded: “You’ve got to get in there and
kick ass!” Murry moved up the ranks at the Southern California Gas
Company to a post in junior administration. After his sons were born
and the Second World War, he moved his family to Hawthorne.

It was a move up. There he got a better job in administration at The
Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company where, in a perhaps
Nathaniel-Hawthorne-not-on-a-good-day metaphor-like accident, he lost
his left eye. (Blinded. No perspective. Can’t see past the nose on his
face. Etc.) Murry left Goodyear—though his sons stayed in its
shadow for a while, writing song after song about cars, car tires,
laying rubber (“gotta be cool now, power shift here we go”)—to
start his own business. He called it A.B.L.E., for Always Better
Lasting Equipment, a name the Puritans could have dreamt up, as if some
divine prescription for the perfectibility of God’s chosen children
always getting better, as if someday in some New! Improved! beyond, we
would be better and forever everlast.

Though Murry pushed his boys, often literally, to get what they
wanted, as soon as they started getting it, he resented them. Demeaned
them. Then tried to control both what they got and them.

For what Murry had always wanted to do, ever since he was a boy, was
write hit songs.

But Puritans do not sing. Or dance. They are both sins.

The dreams of the fathers visit the sons, the envy and failure
too.

W illiam Hathorne’s son John became, in 1683, a deputy to the General
Court in Boston. I don’t know if this was before or after the
34-year-old John married a 14-year-old girl, their notions of evildoing
somewhat different than ours today. (Poor Jerry Lee Lewis! He might
have fared better as a Puritan!) Anyway, John Hathorne (still no “w” in
his name), Nathaniel’s great-great-grandfather, “inherited,” in
Nathaniel’s words, “the persecuting spirit, and made himself so
conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may
fairly be said to have left a stain upon him,” and, we may conclude
with confidence, his ancestors. For Nathaniel went on to confess, “I,
the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon
myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by
them—as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous
condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to
exist—may be now and henceforth removed.”

John Hathorne certainly could have been cursed, having dispensed
most gruesome punishments such as—oh Christ, let’s not go through
all that again. See above if you must. This Hathorne was the one who,
during the trials of 1692, condemned
Salem witches to the gallows
and to drown.

Fulfill your father’s dreams and he will envy you to death.

You take your father’s sins upon yourself.

A century and some years later, while living at his family home in
Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne walked, reclusive and alone, to Gallows
Hill, to be among the ghosts of whom his fathers had condemned.

Can you remember things you didn’t do but someone else did? Can you
get over them for someone else? Can you get over them at all? Can you
forgive them?

T he Scarlet Letter: A Romance, published in 1850, was mostly written
in 1849, the year of the California Gold Rush. As contemporaries of his
were heading west again, where they hoped this time to find if not a
spiritual at least a financial paradise, Nathaniel Hawthorne was
looking back at what his forebears had done deadly earnest wrong.

The Scarlet Letter was Hawthorne’s fourth book for adults (he’d also
written for kids) and he was as surprised it did as well as it did. The
first edition of 2,500 sold out in 10 days and his publishers had to
reprint. In other words, this story of forbidden love was, like a Top
40 radio single, a hit.

In the chapter entitled “The Recognition,” Hester Prynne, condemned
to wear the scarlet letter “A” on her dress, is leaving prison with her
newborn love child. Someone, Hawthorne narrates, “the eldest clergyman
of Boston,” calls “Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!” and exhorts her to
confess, repent, and name the father of her child. This speaker is,
like many characters in Hawthorne’s work, based on a real person, in
this case a leading Puritan divine, John Wilson (1591–1667).

Look, I’m not saying this Wilson was an ancestor of our
California-bound Wilsons. On the other hand, don’t we all believe, as
our Puritan ancestors did, that if we go back far enough, we all go
back to the same old Adam and Eve?

B rian and his brothers sang each other to sleep at night, their
three-part harmony angelic, sweet, divine. Their father stood outside
their bedroom door and listened, misty eyed. He later beat them.

Hawthorne’s father died at sea when he was 4, and after that, his
sister Elizabeth recalled, Nathaniel loved to read. She remembers her
brother at 6 years old sitting in a corner pretending to read his dead
father’s copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress.

Brian said he went deaf in one ear when his father beat him. Half of
what he hears he only hears inside his head. But then he said elsewhere
that he was born that way. No matter who tells the story, the story
changes.

Nathaniel hurt his foot in 1813 and, incapacitated, read even more.
He walked with a limp, self-consciously. He wrote to both reveal and
hide. From “The Custom House”: “It is scarcely decorous… to speak at
all, even where we speak impersonally…. Thoughts are often frozen and
utterance benumbed… we may prate of the circumstances that lie around
us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.”
Half of what he said he only said inside his head.

Though it didn’t appear on an album until 1963, the first ballad
Brian ever wrote, “Surfer Girl,” was inspired by “When You Wish Upon a
Star,” the song Jiminy Cricket sings to Pinocchio. He composed this
song while driving in a car on Hawthorne Boulevard.

After his father died, brought down a social rung, Nathaniel and his
mother and sisters lived in his mother’s family’s many-gabled home.
They paid for rent and board and were polite, impermanent, and nervous
hangers-on.

Murry bought a professional quality organ so he and Audree could
play duets. Though Brian played piano and listened to records, Murry
taunted him: no discipline. A jackass. Lazy.

Nathaniel’s father turned his back on the traditional and shameful
professions of the Hathorne men (judges, soldiers, murderers) by going
to sea, and died when he was young. How could Nathaniel not?

B ecause everyone is confused with everyone else. Everyone’s sort of
the same person making the same mistakes again. Not getting and not
getting over it. Not better, though lasting forever, alas. Alas.

W hen he was 14, Brian went to Hawthorne High. He was tall, sweet, a
fantastic baseball player. He began spending time at his buddies’
houses listening to records and the radio and getting away from
Murry.

When he was 16, Nathaniel started a family newspaper called The
Spectator, which is what he always was, looking in from the
outside.

When he was 16, Brian was singing his own arrangements of the Four
Freshmen, Bill Haley, and Elvis with friends at school and brothers and
cousins at extended-family gatherings.

Nathaniel went to Bowdoin College because it was near where
relatives lived in Maine and was inexpensive. There, though he became
friends with future president Franklin Pierce, and a lifelong,
cigar-smoking Democrat, he was loath to studying anything that would
lead to a conventional profession.

Brian went to Hawthorne High where he gave his first quasi-public
performance, then El Camino Junior College where he studied music and
psychology until he dropped out. Because one day his little brother
Dennis came home talking about surfing, and he decided to write a song
about that. A few weekends later, the Wilson parents went to Mexico for
a holiday and left the boys with money for food. The brothers and their
folk-singing friend, Al Jardine, spent this money, and some lent to
them by Al’s mom, on renting a mic, an amp, and a stand-up bass. Then,
with cousin Mike (evildoer) Love, they spent the weekend rehearsing
“Surfin'” in hopes of making a demo tape. When Murry came home, he
yelled at them for spending the money the way they did. They begged him
to listen to the song, and when he heard it, he thought that they might
have a hit and promptly appointed himself their manager. At first they
were called “The Pendletones” after their striped shirts.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a natty dresser.

Murry worked hard to create publishing and radio contacts for the
band, but he also humiliated and fought with his sons, more physically
with Dennis and psychologically, in the studio, with Brian. In 1965 the
sons had to fire their father from the band. From “I’m Bugged at My Ol’
Man” by Brian Wilson, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), 1965:

I’m bugged at my ol’ man

‘Cause he’s makin’ me stay in my own room.

Darn my dad…

I wish I could see outside

But he’s tacked up boards on my window

Gosh it’s dark

The Beach Boys could not, however, fire their father from being
their father.

Nathaniel tried to. When he was 21, he changed the spelling of his
surname, adding the “w.” As if this single letter could separate
himself from them. As if a single letter could tell us who you are.

Brian wrote a string of hits. He was the native genius, American
music’s answer to the sophisticated pop of the British Invasion. Brian
and the California sound he created not only rivaled the Beatles,
Animals, and Stones (who after all had created their sound by imitating
American blues and rockabilly) on the charts, he also gained the
admiration of classical composers like Leonard Bernstein. Everyone
wanted to work with Brian Wilson in the studio. He treated the studio
as an instrument.

Nathaniel’s books, a string of hits, were read, reviewed. He was
revered at a time when his countrymen were trying to create a
particularly American culture (the Hudson River painters, Melville,
Whitman, Poe) distinct from the English and European models they’d been
handed. Kind of a 19th-century highbrow version of the 20th-century
pop-culture response to the British Invasion (the second,
twist-and-shouting one, as opposed to the first, guns-and-shooting
one). He treated his own, his family’s, and our nation’s history as
Romance. A story we cannot escape. A myth that will not ever have an
end.

He saw himself as set apart, an oddity, a wounded boy inside a room,
a gabled house, a continent of sons and daughters doomed.

Gosh it’s dark…

B rian Wilson kept to his house for years. After the triumph of Pet
Sounds (1966), he pulled the plug on what would have been his
masterpiece, Smile, and lay in bed. He took a lot of drugs and ate a
lot of steaks, ignored his wife and daughters and got fat. Sometimes in
bed or at his piano and in his filthy pajamas, he wrote little songs
about health food, feeling great, and love. When he did leave his home,
he wandered, long-haired, filthy-bearded, unwashed, weird. Everyone
thought he was crazy.

Nathaniel Hawthorne kept to his house for years. After graduating
from Bowdoin, he returned to ghost-filled Salem, to live in his family
home. (Melville later called him “Mr. Noble Melancholy.”) He wrote, in
isolation, and published anonymously (there was something about his
father’s name that galled him), and at his own expense, his first
novel. About this time he also added the “w” to his name. He soon
pulled the plug on his own career by burning every copy of the novel he
could find. For the next 10 or so years, he lived reclusively with his
mother and sisters, stayed in his room and wrote, tore up what he
wrote, and published, anonymously, little stories. When he walked to
the graves of people who’d been murdered by his Hathorne (without a
“w”) forebears, he walked alone. He was evasive, skittish, melancholy,
weird. Everyone thought he was crazy.

But maybe it was the world that was crazy then. Midcentury America
was not only the land of transcendentalism but also of TM, of
spiritualism and the Jesus movement, of mesmerism and the Manson
family, Ouija boards and table rapping, good vibrations and animal
magnetism. Millennial cults and Back to the Land-ers, the California
Gold Rush and the Summer of Love, railroads and rocket ships, Seneca
Falls and Ms. magazine, the Civil War and civil rights, assassinations
of presidents and Edgar Allan Poe.

He wrote The Scarlet Letter the year of the California Gold Rush. He
wrote “The Warmth of the Sun” after the assassination of Kennedy. An
elegy, a fantasy. A warning, a regret. He lived beside and walked along
the shore of the Atlantic, the Pacific, but couldn’t keep his sights
out there alone. He looked back where he’d come from and toward the
waves his fathers rode, his brothers tried to ride. He walked among the
graves his fathers and his brothers filled.

He was an innocent, an always-boy. A skeptic never-boy. Forever
wise, forever sad. Forever wanting to forgive and to pretend it wasn’t
bad and getting worse. Forever going back as if remembering or taking
on, undoing what the fathers did, the fathers’ sins, our own. He was
before and past and utterly in time.

I n 1969 despite the dead he wrote, or rather cowrote, a song:

Time will not wait for me

Time is my destiny…

I can break away from that lonely life

And I can do what I wanna do…

And My world is new…

Where the shackles that have held me down

I’m gonna make a way for each happy day

That’s from “Break Away,” a happy song credited to B. Wilson and R.
Dunbar.

For Hawthorne time was always past and destiny. We are always
looking back. What happened? Why? We came from there. How do we get
away? Forgive or forgiven? His words were his attempts to break
away.

Brian Wilson stayed an innocent. For him, time is, as is for all
westward travelers, the future. In the future you can start over again.
Despite the “shackles” (remember them?) that have held him as they held
his Puritan forebears. But he still hopes, as if one can again or once,
“my world is new…”

As if the sins of fathers wash away.

R. Dunbar is short for Reggie Dunbar. Reggie Dunbar was a pseudonym
used by Murry, Brian’s father.

A son forgives a father’s sins.

What mercy has the child for the man.