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Friday
I am giving over my Friday blog posts to a memoir I am writing on “My Life through Literature.” Today’s essay is the second in the series. The first can be found here.
We returned to the States when I turned two, and although my parents tried to keep my French going—including reading the books they had picked up in Paris—the language didn’t stick and I would have to relearn it the hard way when I turned 13. We spent a year in Evanston close to my grandmother as my father wrote his dissertation, with my brother Jonathan arriving in August of 1954. A couple of weeks after the birth we headed for Sewanee, Tennessee, where my father had landed a one-year post at the University of the South at Sewanee.
Located 2000 feet up on the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau, Sewanee is breathtakingly beautiful. Nevertheless, we came only because my father hadn’t received any other offers. Or do be precise, he had received an offer from the University of California, Riverside, but thanks to former California Sen. Richard Nixon he would have had to sign a loyalty oath to get the job. So Sewanee it was.
Although my father would be offered a position in the Carleton French Department the following year, the Sewanee position had opened up and he opted to stay. An ardent birdwatcher, he had fallen in love with the mountain environment and had bonded with Stratton Buck, a Flaubert scholar and head of the French Department. As a result, I would grow up in the segregated south rather than in liberal Northfield, Minnesota. Stratton, who served as a father figure, became my father’s staunch defender when his advocacy of integration landed him in hot water with the administration.
I am still amazed at some of the works that he taught in those early years, including a special seminar for seniors on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I, of course, was oblivious to this. The book I remember was The Cat in the Hat.
Doctor Seuss’s classic was somewhat controversial at the time for the way that it acknowledged that children have anarchic alter egos that would take great satisfaction in trashing a house. (Thing One and Thing Two anticipate Max and the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are). Because of my determination to be a good little boy, I was horrified—and yet nevertheless fascinated—by the devastation the characters unleash. Torn in two directions, I ultimately came down on the side of the fish, functioning as the book’s superego. “They should not be here when your mother is out!” he warns continually, and I remember sharing the general panic when the mother is spotted returning. In my memory I can vividly see the glimpse we are given of her red dress and a stylish shoe striding purposefully towards the house. Given the intense anxiety I experienced at the mayhem, the Cat’s special pickup machine came as an intense relief.
The book triggers another memory as well. I distinctly recall standing on the long porch that fronted our three-story wooden apartment building and excitedly explaining to an adult how, by simply changing the first letter of a word, you could create a whole new word (I think I used the example of “cat” to “hat”). This must have been one of those cognitive leaps described by child psychologist Jean Piaget where a child suddenly sees a larger system at work. The fact that I so vividly remember my excitement indicates the importance of the moment.
Another book I remember from those years, which is very self-revealing when I explore why I loved it so much, is Little Bobo and His Blue Jacket, from the Little Golden Book series that one could purchase in supermarkets. Bobo is an elephant whose mother makes him a blue jacket, which he proudly shows off to his animal friends. Unfortunately he slips in the mud while he’s strutting around and they all laugh at him. To add insult to injury, the coat shrinks when it is being washed—an old monkey washerwoman mishears the mother’s instructions—so that it no longer fits. After a brief moment of sadness, resilient Bobo thinks that maybe the coat will fit one of his friends (those who have laughed at him). Big Brother Hippo is determined to wear it and, in the process of pushing his large arms into the sleeves—he can barely move–he inadvertently stretches it so that Bobo can don it again. Happy ending.
What lessons did I take away? One was not to strut your stuff because it makes you vulnerable to the mockery of others. Another is that, instead of acknowledging your own hurt, you should be selfless and help others. If you do so, you will be rewarded.
I’m not sure which comes first, the book or the character trait—I’m sure they feed off each other—but I grew up fearful of drawing attention to myself (no strutting) and believing it was a good thing to ignore one’s hurt. In other words, I’ve always been a bit repressed, a theme I will return to regularly in these pages.
Other cherished books from these early days were Ruth Krauss’s The Carrot Seed (illustrated by Crockett Johnson) and her collaborations with Maurice Sendak (A Hole Is to Dig and A Very Special House); Eve Titus’s Anatole series; and Kay Thompson’s Eloise.
Then there were the Dick, Jane and Sally series that we had in school and that helped reinforce in me the sense that a white middle class family—woman at home, father at work–was the social norm. It certainly coincided with my own experience of family: my mother stayed at home with the children (David arrived in 1956, Sam in 1960), cleaned the house, and cooked the meals, while my father came home for a sit-down supper at six. After dinner he read to us on the couch in the living room while my mother washed up.
All parents should read regularly to their children (also share the housework, but that’s another story), but I’m pretty sure my father had an extra motive: by revisiting the books he loved as a child, he reconnected with that childhood. He was obsessed with what he called “the desecration of innocence,” and as I look back at his history I can understand why. At 18 this thin, short-sighted, sensitive, introverted, and very bookish boy was thrust into what Ken Burns’s describes as “the worst war ever,” at one point witnessing firsthand the bodies stacked up in Dachau. If (as my mother frequently informed me) he was enthralled with me when I was born, it was because I was an embodiment of the innocence that he longed for. Reading to me and then later to my brothers allowed him to return to his own innocence.
I think I owe my name in part to his desire to have a relationship with me such as Christopher Robin has with Pooh. Because of that desire, he wouldn’t read to us the final chapter of House on Pooh Corner, which hints that Christopher Robin will be leaving Pooh as he enters grows up. “Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred,” he says, as well as, “Pooh, whatever happens you will understand, won’t you?” By the same token, my father hated the ending of Peter Pan when Wendy grows up. Part of him wanted to be the boy who never aged.
This desire of his proved to be a double-edged sword as far as I was concerned, however. I’ll talk more about this as my memoir proceeds but it meant that, to be the innocent he wanted me to be, in certain ways I deliberately tried not to grow up. I tried to shut down awareness of the dark things going on in the world and cultivated a certain cluelessness. This became more difficult when I hit middle school, but I still avoided the profanity and sex talk of the other boys and I tried to persuade myself that I didn’t like rock music (I felt guilty for my secret love of the Beatles).
It was a little easier to play the perpetual innocent because, throughout my childhood, we did not have a television. As a result, we could be more easily cloistered in my father’s childhood books. Every night each of us got a chapter and then, when we were in bed, a poem. I’m not sure when I was introduced to certain books (with the exception of Narnia and Lord of the Rings, which I’ll talk about later), but my inner landscape was peopled by Ratty, Mole, Toad and Badger from Wind in the Willows; Lewis Carroll’s Alice; George MacDonald’s Princess and Curdie; E. Nesbit’s Bastable family; Jim and Long John Silver; Peter and Wendy; the Borrowers; Maria and the professor from Mistress Masham’s Repose; the boys from Cecil Day-Lewis’s Otterbury Incident; a vast array of characters from the Oz books (especially Dorothy, Tip, and the Shaggy Man); Andersen’s Little Mermaid (although I was traumatized by the ending); Tom Sawyer; Penrod; the five little Peppers; Mowgli and the wolves; Charlotte and Wilbur, Phileas Fogg and Passepartout; Alcott’s Little Men (but not Little Women), and the three musketeers.
The poems my father read us included lyrics by Dorothy Alcott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter de la Mare, Alfred Noyes, A.A. Milne, James Whitcomb Riley, Ogden Nash, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll and countless others. We also read Lucy Fitch Perkins’s twin books (The Scottish Twins was my favorite); V.M. Hillyer’s A Child’s History of the World; and J. Walker McSpadden’s How They Carried the Mail. Most of these we still own.
Above all I loved the works of fantasy. Perhaps we were a bit like the Bronte family, who in their childhood buried themselves in their invented world of Gondal. Through our bookish upbringing, it was as though we had entered a magic portal that separated us from the rest of our society. E.D. Hirsch may talk about the importance of cultural literacy in holding a society together, but the common referents for the world in which I grew up were Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, The Flintstones, The Beverly Hillbillies, Get Smart, and The Ed Sullivan Show, not Alice in Wonderland and The Jungle Books.
I don’t regret this upbringing—in fact I’m grateful for it—but it does mean that I’ve often felt out of sync with those around me. I’ve often felt naïve and vulnerable to people who know more about the broader world than I do. Some of the problems caused will become clearer as my memoir proceeds.
