A GHOST OF CHILDHOOD--part 1

an octogenarian's personal view of a violent century

I. A Surfer in a Storm

My father is dead, long dead. According to records in the Illinois archives of vital statistics, he died April 8, 1972, at age 54: two years, 4 months and 11 days before my mother’s death also at age 54. I didn’t know him; he was not a presence in my life.

Here I must pause. This is a preamble to what is obviously going to be a memoir. And before continuing I have a confession, some cautionary statements, and exculpatory comments.

The British author, Brian Aldiss, declared "When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of Hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay."^[i]

The same may be said of treadmills. 60 years ago, I could do five 6-minute miles with manageable effort. Today, at age 86, I labor at five 15–20-minute miles. Perhaps not too bad after one heart attack and an arduous course of chemotherapy and radiation to treat bladder cancer.

Looking back, I had a lousy childhood. But at the time I had no metric to make a judgment. Things were as they were. Should I assert:

“I wish I had never been born!” (Inconsequential petulance.)

“I didn’t ask to be born!” (Phantasmagorical absurdity.)

All—theatrical laments often expressed by characters in television melodramas by bored, distraught adolescents, incoherent drunks or dopers, suicidal depressives, miscreants drowning in, “…a sea of troubles,” or catatonics trapped in episodes with no exit—imprisoned in lassitude as the world rushes by.

But if you live long enough, time—a great deceiver—will deliver us into the maw of history, even though we remain immersed in our personal melodramas. Memory, however, rides the highs of experience like a surfer in a storm—cresting a succession of waves and skimming the low points of boredom, pointless commotion and inactivity. Eventually we hurtle to shore convinced as we tumble to our doom that it is the eventful life that ends in calamity, thus camouflaging our all-too-common fate with an aura of tragedy even though we were the inconsequential extras in a vast drama..

There is artifice in chronicling our life. If we encumber it with stifling detail, puffing up every inane, humiliating detail in our desire to convey the impression that we have led meaningful lives, we lose coherence (assuming that anyone’s life progresses to some ordained conclusion). So, we contrive an exceptional life saga when, in reality, what people want is an entertaining story (the exception is celebrities and figures of fame and historic accomplishment to excite the appetites of the indulgent where no salacious detail is without interest). Mark Twain remarked on this in his autobiography (which in its initially published form suffered from some of the ills he cautioned against):^[ii]

The idea of the tale is to exhibit certain bad effects of good memory: the sort of memory which is too good, which remembers everything and forgets nothing, which has no sense of proportion and can’t tell an important event from an unimportant one but preserves them all, states them all, and thus retards the progress of the narrative, at the same time making a tangled, inextricable confusion of it and intolerably wearisome to the listener.

On the other hand, Twain knew well the fickleness of memory:^[iii]

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.

More to the point, the memoirist is laboring with reduced capacity. I am not referring to lost and diminished faculties, but to the mislaid vocabulary, grammar and syntax of the past. The semiotics of childhood invest each event or trauma with a meaning that cannot easily be recovered in adult memory. Imagine confronting your 8 or 9 or 10-year-old self and explaining, “Your life is shit! And it’s not going to get better!” He has just won two marbles in the schoolyard ringer tournament and only knows that shit is a dirty word. The richness of childhood experience is forgotten or simply meaningless to the adult as are adult judgments to the child. It is not that the past, in the words of L.P. Hartley, is a, “…foreign country…”^[iv] but that in recapitulating, we are forced to translate the hieratic symbols of a vanished sensibility into the language of the present, absent the emotional power of childhood understanding that gave the memory substance and therefore significance. In the end, we assemble a linear accounting of events—pointless drivel to the child we once were.

Even the debacles of young adulthood dissolve in the equanimity of old age. After all, we have survived, and the turbulence of the past is dimly perceived through the miasma of time although real heartbreak and real suffering will sometimes weigh on our emotional centers and submerge our sense of the real in self-pity and bathos. More often old eyes mist over with recollections at once banal and insignificant. We will blubber over the memory of a lost trinket, a discarded opportunity, or more likely, the recall of some trivial incident will trigger something deep within us, something we cannot fathom.

You are warned. I will try to be honest. But unlike Twain who forbade the publication of his life musings before his death, thus endowing it with the patina of ventured truth, I will make no such claim on your attention. Despite whatever may be of interest in this account, it is, after all, the story of an ordinary person, absent celebrity or mighty achievements submerged in events far larger and more portentous than we can grasp. This is the best I can assert. There are certain facts that can be recovered from the public record: dates of birth, marriage, residences, military service, etc.; but even here the exigencies of law and custom intervene. Birth certificates are sequestered in the case of adoptions, the details of a juridical record may be impounded, service records corrupted or mislaid; and in this era of Google, Wikipedia and Facebook, events and commentaries may be fabricated. So, caveat lector.

My expedition begins in unsettled circumstances, in a world wobbling in a metastable orbit, peopled by shadows whose substance changes with time and distance, punctuated by a series of foster homes and institutions, meandering among an assortment of waystations to West Point, the army, graduate study, university and international appointments and the gradual wind-down to retirement and reflection. Basta! I begin at the horizon of memory:

Is childhood, then, so all divine?
Or Memory, is the glory thine,
That haloes thus the past?
Not all divine; its pangs of grief,
(Although, perchance, their stay be brief,)
Are bitter while they last.

(Anne Bronte, Memory)^[v]

II. Children Afraid of the Night

the lights must never go out,
the music must always play,
lest we should see where we are, lost in a haunted wood,
children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good.

(W.H. Auden, From Another Time)^[vi]

As I said, my father is dead, long dead. I didn’t know him; he was not a presence in my life, a mist so insubstantial that there is no residue—except for the fact of my existence. My mother never spoke of him, nor did anyone else—friends, acquaintances, family. When she did marry the man, I would call Dad, towards the end of World War Two, when I was 6, a fiction was firmly established (given force by a latter-day adoption in the wake of overheard nightly entreaties) that her husband was indeed my legal father—so designated by the state if not by nature. A new, unsigned birth certificate was issued and the original sealed away by the courts. The narrative was upheld with an iron discipline that remained unbroken through the deaths of all concerned: stepfather, mother, aunts, uncles, and friends; thus, was invented history made ineffaceable. My parents would not even admit the number of years they were married when they celebrated their anniversary since the duration could not be reconciled with my age. “When? How long? A long time ago!”

There we were, an infant and a teen-age mother, alone and uncertain in a world that would rain down anguish and loss on a girl who would not accept the pain without protest. There is a picture from that time, of a little boy looking up at a pretty young woman who is looking down at him with love and assurance. I do not remember the moment, but I remember the look.

III. Post card from a four-year old to his older self:

It is 1942, I am a four-year-old boy in the middle of a vast ocean adrift in a strange craft, a sofa built in buoyant times and all around on distant promontories children are dying or preparing to die. Am I safe? In the arms of a girl married at 16, a mother at 18, divorced. Searching for a way to dry land.

It is the way with castaways that they should cling to each other and explore the depths for magic words. But the deep is a deceitful place. In life our bodies are leaden with mass restrained by inertia, our movement impounded, every breath and step arduous. Exhausted, we cling to the sofa. The vessel for our Odyssean journey.

Here on this couch, in this prison of cloth and shadow and cheap wallpaper we fly wingless to a place outside of memory where little boys are sanctuary for adolescent girls who murmur hermetic longings beyond hearing. There beneath the surface where the haven of memory lies buried.

The date of my birth, June 29, 1938, is of no particular historical moment except as an overture to the vast dissonance to follow, and the year itself, would be unremarkable except for the fact that little more than three months previously, Germany had marched into Austria and annexed that country into the greater Reich—an event that would inscribe a German word into the world lexicon, Anschluss. But Americans much preferred distraction from the unrelenting march of world events to the abyss and were delighted when Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan flew from New York to Dublin in July on a flight plan that was supposed to return him to California. Americans applauded his obstinacy in the face of bureaucratic intransigence (government officials had refused to certify Corrigan’s plane for transatlantic flight). But more fateful, in December of that year, two German scientists reported the results of a remarkable experiment that was interpreted as the splitting of what was assumed to be the immutable atomic nucleus—fission.^[vii] The race was on that would culminate in a mushroom cloud over the New Mexico desert 7 years later, the subsequent incineration of two Japanese cities and terror that continues into the foreseeable future. And finally, my arrival would coincide with the end of my mother’s marriage (whether or not I had anything to do with this last episode is a matter open to speculation). The concatenation of events that attended my emergence would create the universe in which I grew to manhood and would mark me with the colors, attitudes, aspirations and prejudices that were the abiding eccentricities of my generation. My place of birth, Chicago, would also leave a mark.

Before her death, my mother explained how I came to be named Irving. It is the tradition among Jewish parents to name their children after a deceased family member—especially the first born. By rights I was to receive the Hebrew name ‘Yitzchak’ (יִצְחָק) transliterated to Isaac in English (I never learned whom I was honoring). But she affirmed, she could not abide the thought of someday opening a window to entertain the neighbors by yelling, “Izzie, lunch!” She fell back on an alternative brought by the more cosmopolitan Jews migrating to America through Northern Europe and England. “Irvin” or “Irving” was thought to fit the Gaelic-Anglo-American traditions of their new home while maintaining a tenuous alliterative link. This was the name given to me. It was the first of many misapprehensions that would mark my small corner of the Jewish Diaspora in America.

The list of players begins with a child—me, a young mother just emerging from her teens, a vaporous presence—my disappeared father, and Hitler. Other characters would be added in short order: a stepfather, brother, wives, families, friends, acquaintances—all crowding onto an expanding but diminutive stage. Before enlarging the cast, I will summarize where we stood in the first years after my birth.

It was before penicillin, of polio summers and hard-scrabble times. And when a teenage mother was diagnosed with a chronic disease like tuberculosis, there was no alternative to internment in a sanatorium for months, perhaps years, all the while enduring cruel treatment and imposed inactivity. Perhaps the brutality of successive needle invasions in the pulmonary cavity to collapse each diseased lung in succession to deprive the Mycobacterium tuberculosis of the oxygen needed to thrive was tolerable to a youngster but the boredom and enforced removal of her child must have been torture for the mother. In time, she would have her revenge.

Then too, the Depression accelerated the spread of homelessness, fractured families, desperation and hunger. The advent of the New Deal would revitalize moribund social welfare programs to treat the despair of desperate times. If the Depression precipitated an increase in the numbers of abandoned and homeless children, the war to come would multiply the misery. To accommodate these children in the cities (in an attempt to reduce the incidence of foraging gangs and homeless youths), municipal governments would vastly expand the foster home program by providing a modest sum to caregivers for each child taken in. The result was a new storage industry where children would be warehoused in attics and basements with little supervision and even less maintenance.^[viii]’^[ix]

My mother had married Robert Goldstein, a clerk in a fish store, in November of 1936—a history hidden from me until records became available 76 years after the fact. She was 16 (Robert was 19) and I was the issue of that union in 1938. Robert Goldstein vanished at my birth except for his name which I and my mother continued to use until she remarried in 1944 and I was formally adopted sometime later. Rissel Goldstein née Lutwak married Private Arvin L. Lerch on February 14, 1944, and shortly thereafter the new bride was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium outside the city—the first of several banishments.

So it was, in our collective tender years, my mother and I temporarily went into our separate exiles. But the look she gave me—recorded in that picture taken more than 80 years ago—promised a return to the enchanted kingdom of family.

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[i] "Brian Aldiss, in 2015, looks back on today," The Guardian (August 18, 1971)

[ii] Charles Neider, Editor, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Harper Collins Publishers (2000), page 253

[iii] Ibid, page 30

[iv] L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, Hamish Hamilton (1953)

[v] Anne Bronte, Memory, from Poems By Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1848.

[vi] W.H. Auden, From Another Time, “September 1, 1939,” Random House (1940)

[vii] O. Hahn and F. Strassmann (1939). "Über den Nachweis und das Verhalten der bei der Bestrahlung des Urans mittels Neutronen entstehenden Erdalkalimetalle ("On the detection and characteristics of the alkaline earth metals formed by irradiation of uranium with neutrons")". Naturwissenschaften 27 (1): 11–15. Bibcode 1939NW.....27...11H. DOI:10.1007/BF01488241. The authors were identified as being at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Chemie, Berlin-Dahlem. Received 22 December 1938.

[viii] By 1940, 1.5 million married women were living apart from their husbands. More than 200,000 vagrant children wandered the country as a result of the breakup of their families (http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/learning_history/children_depression/depression_children_menu.cfm).

[ix] The board money paid to foster families has been a source of conflict to agencies throughout the development of this program. “Mothering” is definitely something which one would like to think should not be paid for. Agencies have been known to reject any applicants who showed an interest in the board rate. There are several reasons, however, for questioning this point of view. Families into which children are placed are, generally speaking, of such financial circumstances as do not permit them to assume the responsibility for the cost of bringing up an additional child. The early history of farming out and of indenturing children naturally brought an awareness that children could be exploited unless there were adequate supervision, that is, unless the agency took some responsibility for what was happening to the child. [Child Welfare League of America Special Bulletin, “A Study of Board Rates,” compiled by Henrietta L. Gordon, January 1942, 3-4, 5, 7-8, 11-12, 13-14, Child Welfare League of America Papers, microfilm reel 3, Social Welfare History Archives, University of Minnesota. See http://pages.uoregon.edu/adoption/archive/CWLASBSBR.htm]