The Child in Twentieth-Century Short Fiction

The Child in Twentieth-Century Short Fiction. Gail L. Plummer The Child in Twentieth-Century Short Fiction Department of English Master of Arts This...
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The Child in Twentieth-Century Short Fiction.

Gail L. Plummer The Child in Twentieth-Century Short Fiction Department of English Master of Arts This thesis is an attempt to examine the reasons for a noticeable trend in recent American short fiction, the interest in probing the mind of a young child.

Discussion centers about

seven short stories which focus on the child and his viewpoint: Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory," Eudora Welty's "A Memory," Jean StaÎford' s "The Flannery O'Connor's

Sho:r:r~ "Th(~

Lamb," J. D. Salinger' s "Teddy,"

River," Katherine Ann Porter's "The

Downward Path to Wisdom," and Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow."

Part A studies the continuation of the traditional,

romantic belief in the purity and innate wisdom of the child; it consists of chapters on the nostalgie memory, the child as the seer of the truth of love and of religion, and the sentimp.ntal notion of his destruction by unrest within the family.

Part B

investigates the more analytical facets of the writers' interest and is composed of a chapter on the writer as a child and another on "the psychological short story."

e.

The Child in Twentieth-Century Short Fiction

Gail L. Plummer English

600b

August 5, 1968

.e @)

Gail L. Plummer

1969

NTENTS

.'

The Child in Twentieth Century Short Fiction Preface Part A.

In the Romantic Tradition

Chapter 1.

Page #

Introduction: The Tradition of Original

1

Innocence. Chapter II.

The Nostalgie f'.1emory and the "Memory" Genre:

12

Truman Capote' s "A Christmas f'.1emory" and Eudora welty's "A Memory." Chapter III. The Child's capacity for Love:

Jean

26

Stafford's "The Shorn Lamb," Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory," and J. D. Salinger's "Teddy," Chapter IV.

The Child's Ability to go Beyond Organized

41

Religion: Flannery O'Connor's "The River," Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews," and J. D. Salinger's "Teddy." Chapter V.

Disorder and Early Sorrow: Flannery O'Connor's

56

"The River," Jean Stafford's "The Shorn Lamb," and Katherine Ann Porter's "The Downward Path to Wisdom." Part B.

The New Interest in the

Chapter VI.



Introduction:

P~ology

of the Child.

Freudianism and the Child

67

·'

Chapter VII

The Artist as a Child: Truman Capote's

74

fiA Christmas Memory," Conrad Aiken's "A Silent Snow, Secret Snow," and Eudora Welty's "A Memory." Chapter VIII.The Psychological Short Story: Ann

Katherine

89

porter's "The Downward Path to Wisdom,"

Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale," and Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow." Part C.



Conclusion.

104

i

.'

Preface

A few months ago 1 had reason to look very closely at an issue of The New Yorker magazine and the two short stories which were published there.

One was about Australia, which is not surprising, for

that continent is in fashion at the moment.

The other, "Something

of a Miracle," by Ted Walker, was partially written from the point of view of a boy of four years, and it is this story that was of inter est to me.

To emphasize too much the fact of its inclusion

in this magazine would be to enter into the controversy over what constitutes what has been termed "the New Yorker short story," a discussion which would be out of place here.

But it is possible

to say:-that The New Yorker has been at the forefront in the publication of the short story during the last few decades and that it often indicates trends both in style and content.

Many of our most

celebrated writers, such as Jean Stafford and J.D. Salinger, have been published there; the majority of the tales printed by the magazine are excellent. short story

That The New Yorker has published such a

and that previously it has printed many which are

either written from a similar viewpoint or which concentrate to an unusual degree upon a child is relevant for this thesis.

It is an

indication of what is, in fact, a noticeable trend in short fiction. This thesis will attempt to examine the reasons for such an overwhelming interest in probing the mind of a small child.



1 shall

examine a representative sample of short stories which cover a variety of concerns ranging from a highly romantic belief in the

ii



purity and sensitivity or the child to attemptsto. investigate the psychology or the young child. aspects or the former interest.

Part A or my thesis will study It consists or chapters on the

nostalgie memory, the child as the seer or true love and of an intuitive belier in God, and the sentimental notion of the child's destruction by unrest within the ramily.

Part B investigates the

more analytical racets or the writers' interest and is composed or a chapter on the writer as a child and another on "the psychological short story." l have tried to choose ror explication stories written during the last thirty years (Conrad AÏken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" or 1934 is the only exception).

Although l shall mention various

stories which raIl into the categories of perspective which l have established, the discussion will center about a core or well-known short stories, Truman capote's "A Christmas Me!!!c:i..y" (1956), Eudora Welty's "A Memory" (1937), Jean

Stafford's "The Shorn Lamb" (1953),

J.D. Salinger's "Teddy" (1953), Flannery O'Connor's "The River" (1955), Katherine Ann Porter's "The Downward Path to Wisdom" (1944), and Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" (1934).

Although the

degree or objectivity with which the child is regarded varies on a continuum between the very subjective view of Aiken's child and Salinger's ractua1 recording or Teddy's words and actions, aIl or these stories contain more than one or the major threads or interest in the child's point of view •



1



Part A.

In the Romantic Tradition

Chapter 1.

Introduction:

The Tradition of Original Innocence

We are told that we are a child-oriented society, that our interest in pop-art, pop-fashion, and pop-culture has its roots in an almost compulsive concern with childhood and adolescence.

To a

certain extent this can be attributed to sociological factors. According to 1965 census figures, four-ninths of the American population is under the age of twenty-five and this segment of the population is increasing.

It should be no surprise that producers

are attentive to what is one of their largest markets for their movies, records, clothes, and books.

But the fetish has entered

every facet of our culture.

Everyone now understands the adoles-

cent, or purports to do SOt

Children are not only seen and heard,

they are the topic of unlimited discussion.

Mary pOppins is a way

of lite. Serious short fiction, however, is not aimed necessarily at adolescent and seldom at children's consumption, so it is less easy to understand why so many modern American and British story writers have chosen to center their tales around children and, particularly, to write from the child's point of view.

Perhaps because of the

growth of the sciences of psychology and sociology focus has been placed upon the adolescent as one in whom the dramatic process of



initiation into society is or is not taking place.

For the short

fiction writer the resulting tensions between youthful ideals and

2



acceptance of an adult perspective provide perfect material for the confrontation of illusion and reality important to fiction.

John

Updike, Salinger, Carson McCullers, and Hemingway have found in such crises the intellectual action which catches our interest.

It is

these short stories written about adolescence, not for adolescents, or, in any pejorative sense, fiction.

~

them that l am te:r:ming "adolescent"

But the preoccupation with the child is less easily

explained.

Unless a confrontation with some hard fact of existence

is involved, as it often is, though";without the attendant problems of puberty, the child has no such inherent dynamic potential for the writer.

Why, then, is there this concentration of interest in

the child? It is necessary first to note that the subject matter of such fiction is far from new although it has only recently been incorporated into the short story forme

The traditional view of the child

is fundamentally romantic and is based upon a remote ideal of Eden. In psychological, rather than symbolic terms, the connection is between the Eden-child and our basic instincts and desires, to the "given" in man before a cultural surface has been added.

Closeness...-

to God, simplicity, an innocence of the concept of sin, chastity, helplessness, a sympathy for other human beings and for animaIs, and relative humility:

these are some of the attributes commonly

ascribed to fictional portrayals of the child, of Adam, and of the pure heart of man.



Characteristics of sensuality and egoism which

had, by the Calvinists, been construed as "original guilt" have become acceptable in the romantic tradition as it has been established

3



during the past two hundred years.

Our vision of the child has

changed somewhat since the time of Rousseau, but the "original innocence" of childhood has remained part of the concept.

Although

the scientific analysis of the child's consciousness in the interests of psychology has added specters of complexity and sexuality, these have been subsumed in the "innocence" as our definition of the term has broadened and secularized.

To the writer concerned

with present-day existence, the child remains one of the last natural strongholds of cultural primitivisme The Cult of Childhood, by George Boas l , is helpful in placing particular interest in the child in its historical perspective. An anthropological, rather than a literary, study, it briefly traces the view of the child since primitive times as found in many different cultural records.

Boas sees the child as part of a traditional

:fascination with the so-called "innocent," often a mere projection of desires for escape in a complex society.

An intuitive wisdom, a

keen appreciation of beauty, and an apprehension of moral values, these are what Boas considers the unchanging contribution o:f the image o:f the child for our culture.

An interest in youth is closely

allied to the preoccupation with indians, the insane, and rural folk. According to these standards, today's hippies and yippies are as consciously attempting to return to a natural state as was Marie Antoinette when she played milkmaid in the palace gardens.

In

writing o:f the child the modern author is also searching, through



this less complicated being, for the basic forces which can have IGeorge Boas, The Cult of Childhood (London, 1966).

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universal truth. It is customary to believe that romantic focus on the child began with Rousseau's comprehension of the child's worth "in him•

self and not as a diminutive adult,"

2

but actually the tradition

reaches far back in Christian history with the &mulation of the Christ-child.

Although it was always tempered with the recogni-

tion of a need to socialize and educate the child, certain char acteristics of clear sight, honesty, and purity were established, so -' that, by 1628, John BarIe could consider the child a copy of Adam, "happy, because he knows no evil nor hath made means by sin to be acquainted with misery.,,3 from GOd.,,4

"The older he grows, he is a st air lower

This concern is a polarity of the concept of perfection

which has always been stressed in opposition to more urbane figures such as Castiglione's "the Courtier."

In terms of British literary

tradition the previous two hundred years have focused upon the child to an exceptional degree.

Blake, Wordsworth, Dickens, James M.

Barrie, James Joyce, and Dylan Thomas have aIl made use of his freshness of perspective and naturalresponses.

The tradition has found

its student in Peter Coveney, whose work, The Image of Childhood; The Individual and Society: ~

a Study of the Theme in English Litera-

has been of the greatest help to me in defining schools of

interest.



2peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood, revised edition (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 6. 3 Boas, p. 42. 4 Boas, p. 43 •

/

5



In the American literary tradition the child plays an even larger role.

Since l am dealing with American short stories only,

it is interesting to summarize the major American aspects of such concerne

Emerson's equation of a "healthy attitude of human

nature" and "The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner," who never burden themselves "about cOI.sequences, about interests" and who give "an independent, genuine verdict,"S sets the stage for an idealization of boyish frankness which continues through this century.

"A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the playhouse,,6

perhaps summarizes this more active, brash, and open conception of boyhood.

The literary

tradition is of course opposed by

such

pieces as Hawthorne' s "The Gentle Boy" (1832), but this milder view is overwhelmed by the more enduring figures of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

What may resemble lawlessness and lack of breeding are

actually a developed romanticism.

Huck's vision is the true one

which cuts through society's veneer; the moral standards he evolves are superior to those of his eIders. Bad Little Boy" (who makes very

Twain's "The story

of the

good) was rejected by william

Dean Howells, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly for this very reason, although its hero is simply performing his function, established by Dickens, as social cri tic. The Innocent

E~e,

Albert stone, who has, in

examined Twain particularly in relation to his

writings on boyhood, notes the "double vision" of Twain's child;



5Ralph WaldoEmerson, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston, 1957), p. 149 • 6

Emerson, p. 149.

6



like the adolescent in today's fiction he is continually aware of his former purity and future involvement in society.7 Twain's fiction, like that Louisa May Alcott, combines the "two traditions of children as audience" and "children as sUbjects,,,8 a1though stone quotes a passage from Twain's notebook, "1 write for grown-ups who have ~ boys.,,9 Other American writers did not concern themselves with the latter convention, for, as in England, children's literature was becoming accepted. per~.odica1s

There were children's

such as Youth's Keepsake Magazine.

The dime "Beadle

and Adam" nove1s began to be pub1ished in 1860, and provided adventurous and, at least at first, moral stories for young readers. The boy-child's specific connection to his generic prototype, Adam, is an apt subject for American 1iterature, for the American myth of the Promised Land, the New Eden, forces attention on its first inhabitant.

Henry Nash Smith's virgin.,Land and R. W. B. Lewis' DO

The American Adam treat the nationis literature in these terms. Lewis considers that there has been probab1y but one true Adamic hero "unambiguous1y treated" in our literature, Cooper's Natty . . t 0 reappear. 1 0 . Bumpo, b ut h e notes t h at t h e f 19ure cont 1nues . H1S

statement that "there has been a kind of resistance in America to the painful process of growin9, something mirrored and perhaps 7Albert stone, The Innocent Eve: Childhood in Mark Twain's Imagination (New Haven, 1961), p. 91. 8

Stone, p. 278.

9 Stone, p. 58.



10 . . . R. W. B. Lew1s, The Amer1can Adam (Ch1cago, 1955), p. 91 •

7



buttressed by our writers, expressing belief in repeated efforts to revert to a lost childhood and a vanished Eden"ll has been supported by other critics.

Ihab Hassan sees the American dream

in probably its most broad interpretation, as one which each person must discover for himself, by himself, "a persistent escape toward freedom which the American conscience perpetually qualifies.,,12 Leslie Fiedler, always ready to carry any hypothesis to its illogically logical extreme, finds this evidence of the nation's "regressiveness,,,13 "an unintended symbolic confession of the inadequacy we sense but cannot remedy.,,14 1 think it is possible to say that the child, in

te~ms

of the

American myth, is another instance of the national des ire to be complete, to be final, by the method of going to extremes.

Pro-

bably because of this nnew world" attempt now three centuries old, pride in the character.

be~t

and giggest is an integral part of the American

To go forward to a Promised Land is partly a regressive

escape toward an Eden of perfected stasis, of perpetuaI innocence and summer, opposing the flow of actual life.

ultimately, then, it

is an escape to a kind of death, and in extreme desires for childhood there is a type of death-wish.

At the same time, examining

lite in its least complex and elemental state in the child is necessarily an affirmation of life, another attempt to discover just Il Lewis, p. 129.



12 Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Princeton, N. J., 1961), p. 37 13 Leslie Fiedler, An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (Boston, 19~) p. 144. 14 Fiedler, p. 209~1

8



what "man" is.

Although this "womb-tomb" reconciliation-of-opposites

concept commonly leads to

li~erary

dead-ends, as 1 shall point out

later in this thesis in relation to specifie works, it does partly explain the compulsive interest in the child which has haunted our literature in its context as one phase of the Promised Land mythe It is not strange that this myth should be used and annihilated by William Faulkner.

As Sanctuary deliberately destroys the Gothic-

novel tradition in aIl but its essence of horror,

50

"The Bear"

depicts the death of the American wilderness but leaves its architypaI counterpart, a perceptive, instinctually alert boy.

Ike has

inherited the burden of the land: It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness • • • through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old, dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old, wild life. • • -- the old bear, sOlitary, indomitable, and alone • • • • 15 Only Ike and the primitive figure Sam know instinctively what he must do to see the bear.

Ike even knows that he cannot fight the

bear's death, that "there was a fatality in it • • • • It was like the last act on a set stage. something,,,16

It was the beginning of the end of

Most of Faulkner's children, such as "Sart y" of

"Barn Burning," have this wisdom of youth and attachment to nature. Others, such as Quentin of "That Evening

sun,"

report occurrences

in a naturalistic manner and thus provide the passive, uncritical medium through which Faulkner likes to pass his events.



15 \oJ'i1liam Faulkner, "The Bear," The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York, 1954), p. 229 • 16 Faulkner, "The Bear," p. 261.

9



Hemingway emphasizes the boy's association with nature less than his place in the organic view of growth.

Nick Adams matures

through various encounters and reconciliations with his environment to become the "Hemingway hero" -- a hard, urbane surface is constructed which hides a sensitive heart.

Life holds a pattern of

disillusionment for the young as romantic ideals fail to be proven; the results are pain and loss, yet there is a gain of a wiser stance in regard to reality.

"The Capitol of the World"

illustrates the disparity between the real and the imagined. The two threads of the story, the drab half-lives of the boarders at the Pension Luarca and the bull-fight dreams of Paco, come into focus when Paco is accidently stabbed to death by "the horn of a bull" which is in actuality a knife tied to a chair: The boy Paco had never known. • • what aIl these people would be doing on the next day and on other days to come. He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended. He did not even realize they ended. He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions. He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition. 17 The story could be overly sentimental: the poignance and perfection of an innocent child's death is an old convention.

But

Heming~ay's

understated prose here conveys something else -- regret at the child's loss of the chance to be completed by coming to terms with his world in some way.



17 Ernest Hemingway, "The Capitol of the World," The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories, (New York, 1938) p. 149 •

10

.'

The children of the short stories l am analyzing here, with the exception of Capote's Buddy, are freed from the pastoral setting, but they have the same instinctive perception of the truth and are affected by t he cumulative nature of their experiences.

It is these specifie aspects of the child which have been

carried over into the modern image of youth from the previous American authors rather than the free rough-and-tumble boyhood. AlI these children are dreamier, quieter, and less adventurous than their American predecessors such as Huck Finn. are younger.

And they

It is as though, in their search for the true

Adamic child, our authors are turning to the younger, purer child, while at the same time freeing themselves from the specifically "American" tradition of bpyhood. The fact that these authors are also allying the child with other representatives of those outside our system of acquired culture is a similar telling signe

One short story considered

here, Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory," uses a woman who is both elderly

and feeble-minded and, therefore, a perfect sympa-

thetic companion for a child of seven. still a child" are the highest

prai~e

Capote's words "She is he can give to someone who

has the native empathy and sensitivity of Buddy' s

'~f:dend."

Faulkner's "Benjy" and Eudora Welty's "Clytie" are similar retarded people whose comprehensive vision is seen as the center for the values of warmth and love in their respective fictional works •



Il



Jean stafford embodies a similar sentiment in her story "Children Are Bored on Sunday," where only two older despairing people, because of their previous misfortunes, can play together with aIl the innocence of children.

Her story frees the "child" from any

age-group or intelligence-group, stipulating only that he be outside of and tired of the existing norms of the society in which he moves.

In her short story we see deÏined the most fundamental

"child," the person who is for some reason, at any moment in time, on the other side of the barrier which separates the civilized and rational from the natural and emotional.

The truth and worth

of such a personts perspective is usually the concern of the writer who is attempting to portray the world of the very young child •

.

'

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Chapter II.

The Nostalgie Memory and the "Memory" Genre: Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" and Eudora Welty's "A Memory."

Probably the most numerous short stories written rrom a child's point or view are the nostalgie personal memories.

Some

or these, such as Eudora Welty's "A Memory" and Lincoln Stephen's "A Miserable Merry Christmas," touch upon events which the authors consider signiricant, but others, such as Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory" and Mark Twain's personal reminiscences, are designed to recall "the good old days."

As Huck Finn's raft exis-

tence can be interpreted as a memory or lire berore the Civil War, the Eden-child boyhood or twentieth-century authors orten rel ives a carerr'ee pastoral youth ber ore "the war" or whatever milestone the author has taken as an emblem or his world's particular "raIl." His stories portray lire berore the destructive mechanical age, or, more exactly, berore his awareness or such an age.

These are part

or the eentury's "cult or nostalgia" ror a youth spent in the country berore the typical move to the city or suburbs, for the "rural rolk" or Norman Rockwell's paintings, Will Rogers' jokes, and Yankee magazine.

Anthologies or such reminiscences such as

C. B. Davis' The Eyes or Boyhood and Whit Burnett's Time to Be Young collect these stories, while some authors (William Saroyon

.'

and Walter de la Mare, ror example) make this time or lire the topic ror volumes or short stories.

Graham Greene goes so rar as

13



to state that the child is the only true reader; here are lines Ïrom his preÏace to his collection oÎ critical essays on childhood reading, The Lost Childhood: Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep inÏluence on our lives. In later liÏe we admire, we are entertained, we modiÏy some views we already hold, but we are more like1y to Ïind in books merely a conÏirmation oÏ what is in our minds already • • • • OÏ course l should be interested to hear that a new novel by Mr. E. M. Forster was going to appear this spring, but l could never compare that mild expectation oÏ civilized p1easure with the missed heartbeat, the appalled glee l Ïelt when l Ïound • • • a novel by Rider Haggard • • • • 1 In an attempt to approximate a childlike point oÏ view some authors have written in a sort oÏ child's dialect: Henry A. Shute's "Sequil -- Or Things Whitch Aint Finished in the First" is a diary with appropriate misspellings and lack oÏ punctuation; Ring Lardner presents in "The Young Immigrunts" a manuscript ostensibly typed by a child oÏ Ïour with similar quaint grammar and one pathetic pun, the "rye smile" oÏ a drunken Ïather. Stories such as these Ïorm the "entering wedge" Ïor the child's admission into short Ïiction. a. Truman Capote's liA Christmas Memory" Van Wyck Brooks' analysis oÏ Mark Twain's Ïixation with his youth, one which applies to the "cult oÏ chi1dhood" writer in general, is pertinent in a consideration oÏ Truman capote's "A Christmas Memory": 1

Graham Green, The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (London, 1951), p. 13.

14



It is generally understood. • • that when people in middle age occupy themselves with their childhood it is because some central instinct. • • has been blocked by either internaI or external obstacles: their consciousness flows backward until it reaches a period in their memory when l~fe still seemed to them open and fluid with possibilities. Although this statement is generally evaluative of the man and not of his works, each of which should be separately considered, it is weIl to keep it in mind in an analysis of this story.3 Capote's early work was concerned with his youth.

Much of

The sensibility

of the central character of Other Voices, Other Rooms resembles that of Colin in The Grass Harp and the "1" of this story.

The

experience of being raised by his two elderly cousins, his "friend Dolly Talbo" and her sister Verena, who is not an "easy woman" (1 use their Harp names), apparently had enough impact to haunt Capote and supply him with fictional material.

Like the grass harp he

must be "always telling a story," for the harp "knows .aU the stories of aIl the people on the hill, of aIl the people who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours too."

4

Ihab Hassan finds Capote a narcissitic writer, placing his interest in childhood in a lost of "The prevalence of dreams, • • • the negative concept of adolescent initiation, the concern with self-discovery, the emphasis on homoeroticism, and the general 2



Van Wyck Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain (New York, 1920), p. 175. 3 Truman Capote, nA Christmas Memory," Breakfast at Tiffany's: A Short Novel and Three Short·Stories (Toronto, 1966). References will be to this edition. The story was originally published in Mademoiselle, 44 (December, 1956), 70-71+. 4 Truman Capote, The Grass Harp (New York, 1951), p. 4 •

15



stasis oÏ /iiis7 mythic world,,5 which aÏÏirm this tendency.

"A

Christmas Memory" barely escapes this charge oÏ excessive selÏindulgence.

A Series oÏ vignettes coming to a somewhat Ïorced

philosophical conclusion with "his friend's" view of God, its chief reliance is upon a preciousness of child;1ike expression and the evocative folksy setting. go sour at any moment.

It is a tearjerker and can

In accordance with capote's theory of

literature, that Itstyle is the mirror of an artist's sensibility -- more so than the content oÏ his work,,,6 careful attention is given to each detail, particularly as it concerns the narrative viewpoint.

Here there is a discrepancy.

Ostensibly the story

is told by an older person reminiscing about the Christmas when he was seven, yet the narrator is the child throughout most of the tale, verbs are in the present tense, and there is a clear attempt at imitation of a child's diction and expression.

There

are, for example, little interjected exclamations, "and oh, so much flour, • • • spices, flavoringsj why, weIll need a pony to pull the buggy home." (p. 116) Some of these miss the speech of a seven-year-old, such as "Oh, the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven!" (p. 118)

Other such techniques are lists

and parentheses:



5 Hassan, p. 235. 6 Truman Capote. These words are credited to Capote but no source is given in the Ïollowing article: Paul Levine, "Truman Capote: The Revelation of the Broken Image," The Virginia Quarterly· Review, XXXIV (1958), 601 •

16



Here are a few things she has done, does do: Killed with a hoe the biggest rattlesnake ever seen in this county (sixteen rattles), dip snuff (secretly), tame hummingbirds (just try it) till they balance on her finger, tell ghost stories (we both believe in ghosts) 50 tingling they chilI you in JUly, talk to herself, • • • (p. 117) EIders are "Those who Know Best."

There are question, abrupt

phrases, and combinat ions of diary and stage directions such as "Enter: two relatives.tVery angry." But of course projection of the "memory" into a child's language is not complete; the lyric images of the conventional pastoral setting betray an older and more practised narrator: Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods. • • • A mile more: of chastising thorns, burs and briers that catch at our clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and molted feathers. Here, there, a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not aIl the birds have flown south. Always the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitch vine tunnels. (p. 122) The ending, of course, explains the double viewpoint, one which has been evident, but, I think, not strained.

But that the

story occasionally lapses into preciousness is a harder charge to answer.

The woman "friend" who has no other name, and who resem-

bles the imaginary friend children invent for their playmates in her resourcefulness and "alter-ego" relationship to Buddy; the conventional picture of the two of them waking relatives and opening presents; their companion Queenie, who does everything a dog is supposed to do, including burying a bone: aIl are a bit



too poignant, too familiar, too sentimental.

In trying to imitate

childish expression, "home-town" phrasing and Dylan Thomas-like

17

.'

lyricism, Capote has placed a great burden on his prose style. Given only a simple story and sentimental atmosphere, it cannot save the work from coming painfully close to the nostalgie tales of lesser writers. As regards the child (and those who, like "the friend," are still children), the story is similar to those of the James M. Barrie school.

The specifie "cult of the child" associated with

his name, which carried the interest in the child established by the Pre-Romantics to an extreme, surrounded the child with an aura of quaint nostalgia.

The worldof childhood became separated

from adulthood; unlike the youth which Wordsworth recounts in The Prelude, its events bear no adult.

relationship to a later, older

The child became a repository for desires for escape to

an idyllic, yet adventurous paradise such as those of Lewis Carroll and James M. Barrie.

Barrie's Peter Pan, for example,

presents a "frame" of a relatively prosaic childhood which contrasts to the vivid fairyland of indians and pirates.

The tale

had great appeal, "hundreds and thousands of /adults reportedli7

. . • fell

right into his open trap • • • •

away from it.

They couldn't get

And they, too, suddenly hated being grown up.,,7

In nA Christmas Memory," as in the "cult of childhood," the child is not only irrevocably separated from the adult world, his

.

7 Cited by Coveney, p. 250. The quotation is presumably from The Story of J.M.B. (London, 1941) by Denis Mackail which is mentioned in Coveney's bibliography, but page numbers are not given • '

18



sensibility is seen as the truest, and his coming of age a tragedy. Older relatives simply can do no good -- they anticipate no Christmas, exercise their authority foolishly, and impose a strict Christianity.

Even their gifts are "skin-flint."

"Friends" worthy

of their Christmas fruitcakes are those who, on short acquaintance, exhibit only

childlike characteristics, such as the willingness to

wave from a bus every àay, or the extreme kindness which the narrator connects chiefly to childhood alone. who at the end

0;[

The author himself,

the tale is now a "grown-up" in a boarding school

or college, has also lost the spontaneity and freedom of his youth, as the last image of "rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven""indicates.

Capote comes close to stating

the very dangerous, very romantic equation of everything good with childhood and everything bad with adulthood.

The negative view of

"grown-upl is barely qualified by Mr. Haha Jones and those few people who receive fruitcakes. b.

Eudora Welty's "A

Mem~ry."

Eudora Welty's "A Memory" is less saccharine and cannot actually be placed in the same category as the usual rambling personal reminiscence. pathos.

It aspires to fiction rather than mere

The narrator is clearly older; there is no distracting

attempt at a child's phrasing.

Because the viewpoint is well-

established, the events recorded can be put in perspective and

••

commented upon by

the narrator.

This is a story with action,

not a plot sequence of large events, but a recognition, a reaching

19

.'

of a conclusion. The question of the autobiographical nature of "A Memory" is not important for my purposes.

Its problematic origin places

th~

story in the genre of perhaps true, perhaps fictional tales which examine a childhood incident not only as if it were fact but as though it has impact on the fictional older character.

Naturalis-

tic reporting and depiction of local color are obviously secondary. The story takes it place with Salinger's "The Laughing Man," Graham Greene's "The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard," and Robert Penn Warren's "Blackberry Winter." "A Memory," as both Alfred Appel (the author of' the only booklength treatment of Eudora Welty's work, A Season of Dreams) and Robert Penn Warren have pointed out, is a key story in the exposition of Eudora Welty's fictional philosophy, particularly as it relates to other short stories of the volume in which it was first cOllected, A curtain of Green aBè

O*Ae~ ê~e~ies

(1941).

The child

of this short story is able to be a part of both worlds, "the protection of Lher7 dream" and the ugly beach scene of reality. need not choose.

She

For the adults of the rest of the volume, Mrs.

Larkin of "A Curtain of Green" and Clytie of the story of that name, some decision or action is necessary.

Appel theorizes that

this view of the child is central to Miss Welty's fiction.

Its

establishment in "A Memory" makes it possible for him to continue: "But what of the adult?



In its encounter with experience, how

20



does the self' preserve its innocence, or identity, or sanity?"a There is evidence that "A Memory" is specif'ica11y designed to state this concept.

Bef'ore the qualif'ication of' reality by

the arrivaI of' the bathers, the beach scene and the enveloping dream are closely

weighted in desirability; there is no tension.

The "1" of' the story is consistently candid in describing her sensations and their implications, nevertheless a statement such as the f'ollowing stands out as a deliberate1y placed indication of' the normal balance of' the narrator's "dual lif'e, as observer and dreamer":

"1 still wou1d not care to say which was more

rea1 -- the dream l cou1d make b10ssom at will, or the sight of' the bathers.

l am presenting them, you see, on1y as simu1taneous.,,9

The romantic dream is a1most imagined:

"it was possible

during that entire year for me to think end1essly on this minute and brief' encounter which we endured on the stairs, until it would swe1l with a sudden and overwhelming beauty, like a rose f'orced into premature b100m f'or a great occasion." (p. 145)

But the

bathers are real -- "loud, squirming, ill-assorted people." f'at woman in particular is vulgar.

The

Her action of' dumping out sand

caught inside her bathing suit is the epitome of' the

bather~s~

collective inhumanity:



a Alf'red Appel Jr., A Season of' Dreams: The Fiction of' Eudora 'VJelty (Baton Rouge, 1965), p. 8. 9 Eudora Welty, "A Memory," A curtain of' Green (Garden City, New York, 1941), pp. 146-147. Subsequent ref'erences will be to this edition. "A Memory" was originally pub1ished in The Southern Review, III (1937), 317-322 •

21



She bent over and in a condescending way pulled down the rront or her bathing suit, turning it outward, so that the lumps or mashed and rolded sand came emptying out. l relt a peak or horror, as though her breasts themselves had turned to sand, as though they were or no importance at aIl and she did not care. (pp. 150-151) The description or ::the human in nonhuman terms"lO and the "concentrationon dissociated parts or the bOdy"ll combine to make this vision a strangely abhorrent one.

In terms of polarity, the story

provides a microcosm of conflicting rorces which Robert Penn Warren is justiried in extending to aIl experience, contrasts or "the idea and nature; innocence and experience; • • • love and knowledge.,,12 In the race or a repugnant actuality the narrator consciously clings to her dream, "the shudder or /ber/ wish shaking the darkness like leaves where Lshe7 had closed /her7 eyes," but it will not, ror a time, return.

She can only open and shut her eyes,

juxtaposing the garish vision or the bathers and the "sweetness" and "happiness" which accompanied her rantasy.

The dream-lire

perseveres, ror t'he bathers leave, but it is opposed by some conception or a necessary compromise with reality.

The narrator reels

"pit Y suddenly overtake" her as she sees the remaining "small worn white pavilion" or her dream.

But the last paragraph indicates

that the incident only supplements her love.

She thinks or the

ruture (not, as al ways berore, the past) when she will see "the boy /She7 loved walking into the classroom, when /she7 would

.'

10 Appel, p. 101. Il Appel, p. 100. 12 Robert Penn Warren, se1ected Essays (New York, 1951), p. 163.

22



watch him with this hour on the beach accompanying /her7 recovered dream and add to /her/ love." (p. lSl) For the child the vision does not

end~

the dream or the

ability to dream; rather, it is simply incorporated into her persistent romanticism.

It serves to heighten the contrast between

the boy she loves, "speechless and innocent," "solitary and unp:r.otected," as she insists in seeing him, and other people with whom she comes in contact.

Like Buddy and his "friend" of "A Christmas

Memory" she finds it easiest to love those she sees least, whose inevitable vulgarity do es not jar her from her conception of the ideal.

As a child, she is allowed to continue in her fantasy.

And she is also able to live this "dual life, of observer and dreamer" (the words, Miss welty's, are from the story).

The

narrator's conception of observation, which l will look at more closely in a later chapter, is far from passive, yet to dream and to observe is not to participate in any physical way in the real world.

The implication is that such active involvement is not

required of the child, that this age is reserved for thought and the forming of concepts.

This fact makes the milestone a more

subtle and indefinite one that those commonly reached in what l am terming "adolescent" fiction •



23



c.

Summary.

Edgar Allen Poe, in his criticism of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, has established what have become "classic" directives for the short story writer.

He states that the short fiction work

should strive for the creation of "a certain single effect.,,13 Wben the author has decided upon this "he then combines such events, and discusses then in such tone as may best serve him in·establishing the preconceived effect.,,14

Stories such as

"A Christmas Memory" violate the ground rules of short fiction by choosing incident before outcome.

Their "single effect,"

which may still be produced, arises Dot from a combination of events and considered style, but from the nostalgie potential in the occurrences themselves. Capote begins with a memory of Christmas fruitcakes, and his elaborate prose does not hide this facto

Yet it is not hard to

see .hy·such experiments are confined chiefly to short fiction. Any work in which style is emphasized over narrative action and theme must of necessity be short; essentially formless, often one or two simple vignettes, the

t~pical

recollection tends to

be boring if extended or read in any quantity.

Such tales are

often written in subjective unbroken monologue form, one which tends to clog if overused.



13 Edgar Allen Poe, The Selected writings of Edgar Allen Poe, edited with an introduction and notes by Edward H. Davidson (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), p. 448. 14 Poe, p. 448 •

24



Perhaps the most striking characteristic of this group of short stories is their autobiographical nature, which l have mentioned in connection with the Capote short story; it is perhaps the only group with which l am concerned here which must defend itself against Leslie Fiedler's charge of a "regressiveness" of American fiction in its "compulsive veneration of youth."

The tradition has, of course, its European counterpart

in Dylan Thomas.

"A Child's Christmas in Wales" and "Holiday

Memory" from his Quite Barly One Morning volume are typical lyric pieces which do perhaps approximate memories of a day -- detailed, yet impressionistic.

His words "The memories of childhood have

no order, and no end,,15

best explain the curious, almost inbred

fascination which youth holds for these writers. Danger arises, of course, when nostalgie sentiment takes precedence over concerns of style and form, when the author's self-indulgence excludes consideration of his reader.

In the

second group of "memory" stories represented by Welty's "A Memory" this seldom happens.

Closely knit, with evident theme and "single

effect," they conform more closely to Poe's ideals of short fiction writing than the usual digressive recollection. Miss \'lelty's tale be a memory?

Why must

l suggest that it is the presence

of an older narrator that intrigues the many writers who have chosen to write stories in this forme



This hypothetical reminis-

15 Dylan Thomas, "Reminiscences of Childhood," Quite Barly One Morning (New York, 1954), p. Il •

25

.-

cing adult extends the story by implying continuity between the time oÎ the related incident and the time oÎ the writing oÎ the short story.

One such "memory," Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's

Tale," implies the nature oÎ this older person in its title, but others, suchas Miss Welty's tale, leave his identity more shadowy.

We can perhaps guess at the personality oÎ a person

who would write in such a style, choosing such an incident, but nothing more.

Such stories Îorm the basis Îor what l term

"the psychological short story,"

The narrator such as that oÎ

liA Memory" views the events Îrom a wiser and sader stance outside the world oÎ the story.

And, in this reliving oÎ his

early traumas or pleasuret he dramatizes them, deepening the contrast between Îorces such as the love-dream and the reality oÎ

Miss Welty's story.

Even the least aesthetic occurrences

take on a latent cuteness or some hidden prophetie meaning which the reminiscing adult can recognize and stress •



26



Chapter III.

The Child's Capacity for Love:

Jean

Stafford' 5 "The Shorn Lamb," Truman capote' s "A Christmas Memory," and J.D. Salinger's "Teddy."

The definition of "love" has been the concern of many eras, but perhaps at no time has it received the attention of popular fiction as in our century.

50

much

Erich Fromm considers the

"art" of loving, the psychologist investigates the ability to love, the mystic values the attainment of love.

While what has become

solidified into a sentimental "love-at-first-sight" and "happilyever-after" heterosexual love has been the topic for the mass of woman's magazine literature, the short story, as weIl as other serious fiction, has been defining the term in a more comprehensive fashion.

In some works the equation of God and love has taken on

a meaning

50

vast that this indefinable emotion has supplanted

traditional religion and become the ultimate attainment. In this chapter l shall examine the child's role as the perceiver of "tnue" love in these short stories.

The conceptions of

love presented by the three stories dœtfer greatly, but they have in common the fact of rébellion against a harshly and vividly portrayed "norm" of conventional human interaction which is in some way responsible for the nature of this postulated alternative of love •



27



a.

Jean Staf'ford's "The Sho:rn Lamb."

Of the three children studied in this chapter, five-year-old Hannah has the most chilàish and sensuously oriented conception of love.

Stafford has portrayed her most obvious need as warm,

caressi~attention

from others; both the lack of it at present

and the strangeness in its expression have made her relatively passive.

without the affection which has come to her because of

her golden hair, she is indeed a "shorn lamb," ugly and exposed.

1

As in Eudora Welty's "A Memory," little happens outwardly in the story, yet a crucial event in the child's life is being examined. References to Hannah are in the third pers on, but the author has made every attempt to enter her consciousness and view the incident through her eyes.

Both the child's static physical and

emotional position and the long explanation of it by the mother aid in the accomplishment of this.

Other techniques are more

subtle, such as the reference to the person talking to the baby's mother as "Aunt Louise," rather than "her sister."

As Hannah

listens to her mother's facile record of her troubles, we see her own understanding of them chiefly through the device of giving to the child's mind confused associations: her mother's phrase "anti-man" reminds her of the "ottomans" by the fireplace and 1



In Bad Characters, a volume of short stories by Jean stafford first collected in 1964, "The Shorn Lamb" is printed, with no major differences, as "Cops and Robbers." l am using the title as it appeared in the story's original publication in The New Yorker, 28 (Jan. 24, 1953), 28-34, in Best American Short Stories, 1950-1954 and~prize Stories 1954: The O. Henry Awards •

28



lead her back to the thought of her neglect; what "spun gold," or "waste"?

~

her curIs,

Stafford is adept at slipping "omniscient"

comment into the narrative where it does not distract the reader, so that, as in Capote's short story, it is vocabulary and the wellturned phrase which give away the author's perceptions. For Hannah, "love" is the primary sensation of warmth and protection she had experienced in her parents' soft bed, in what is now "the privileged cat' s place beside her mother. ,,2

Now she is

left outside like the winter bird she pities in the "frozen, formaI garden."

The contrast is seen in very simple, natural

terms -- heat and cold, spring and winter, confortable disarray and structured order, being fussed over, and being left alone. For example, there are three times "the baby" of five years old remembers when she "and her hair had been the center of attention." (p. 222)

It can be no accident that in each of these aIl five

senses are carefully mentioned.

Taste is usually secondary, estab-

lished chiefly through the presence of explicitly described drinks or food.

The first "hour" Hannah remembers, the time of tea and

candied orange rind before the fire, holds for her "the thought of her mother's golden hair in the firelight, and the smell of her perfume in the intimate warmth, and the sound of her voice saying, 'Isn't this gay, Miss Baby?'" (p. 217)



The hour of morning

2 Jean Stafford, "The Shorn Lamb," Prize Stories 1954: The O. Henry Awards, ed. Paul Engle and Hansford Martin (Garden City, N.Y., 1954), p. 217. Subsequent references will be to this edition •

29



hair-combing and the "other af'ternoons" in the painter's studio are similar times or attention by the grown-up world which incorporate the same careful pattern of senses.

Love for "baby" is

the basic mothering and cuëlëlling she receives in the "oceanic" and "bosomy" bed, but other adjectives which describe this object show it as something less than a symbol of love: it is as "soft and fat as the gelded white Persian cat," and has "silky depths" of luxurious pillows and blankets.

It is, in fact, symptomatic

of the "disorder" in the story which l shall consider in Chapter Five.

But for the child the bed is love and it is only necessary

to note the irony of the fact that it represents this quality only to her, not to those who, in a normal marriage, would recognize this value, the parents. For the present, Hannah must be content with the "mothering runnels" of her tears, for her mother, who has been the most important person of her small world, has lost interest in her. Although to readers now the mother is too reminiscent of the stereotyped sex-kitten of the Marilyn Monroe era, her sensuality is perfect for her role here.

Lazy and exotic, she represents aIl

that is perverse in a too refined femininity.

She has completely

captivated Hannah, almost seduced her, as these lines from the story attest: "Bewitching, indec ipher able , she always dulcified this ho ur with her smoky, loving voice and her loving fingers. • • •

~sometimes

.a,

her hands would leave the child's head and go to her

own, to stroke it lovingly." (p. 222)

Her surroundings are

30



luxurious; she dreams of travel to far-away lands and speaks familiarly of Chinese and E9yptian "style." rare and valuable by analogy.

Even her hair is

She is as varied as Cleopatra,

and perhaps as decadent; it is no wonder that she can comprise an entire world for the child who has failed to recognize the self-love inherent in her mother's nature.

Th~

masculine world

of this story cannot, in Hannah's mind at least, compete with such a creature.

The autocratie father offers no alternative

love; indeed, he and the other men mentioned by her mother seem to be its negation. The hair of both the mother and Hannah is constantly described as golden and richly alluring.

Ironically enough, what is usually

a symbol o'f sex is here an object in which a materially described worth is cortcentrated.

Only the youngest chi Id recognizes the

fact that love for the person has been

disp~aced

to the haire

That the golden hair of the two is interchangable in importance is obvious in the mother's remark that the cutting of the baby's curIs was symbolic of the cutting of her own and her gesture of stroking her own hair instead of the child's, a telling detail indicative of her selfishness.

Actually, the warping or love

into selr-Iove is the "matter" or the tale; in a familial atmosphere such as this the child cannot but follow the pattern.

The

marriage of the pare·nts i$..."bQund, not by love, but by social concepts of "bad form" and the fact of the five children.

Neither is

the "friendship" between the mother and Rob a mature one.

It simply

31



o:f:fers a gentle "way out" :for the mother :from a domination by the male "epees" on the wall. '" '" I:f love, :for Hannah, is beauty and sensuous warmth, its absence is the "ugly and ungenerous;" "narrow and splintery," attic stairs where !Üle now sits, shut out like a winter bird, shut in like the "stingy and lonesome" bees. individuality.

Loss o:f love involves a loss o:f

Hannah is constantly re:ferred to in comparative

phrases and epithets.

Only the narrator uses her personal name.

The boys calI her a "skinned cat," and a

"mushroom~'

:for example,

and the members o:f the household, in general, treat her as "the car or a piece o:f :furniture." made her so

\vithout the attentions which have

devo~ependent,

she is less a person.

"She

:felt that she was already shrinking and :fading, that aIl her rights o:f being seen and listened to and caressed were ebbing away. Ghilled and exposed as she was, she was becoming, nonetheless, invisible." (p. 224) A:fter Mattie's rejection o:f her love, she turns to the snow.

It represents to her the same escape as it

does to Paul o:f Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow."

Its

"sleep" is death and a cessation o:f unhappiness. Jean Sta:f:ford, then, sees the child as especially sensitive in :feeling and reacting to the nuances o:f love and the lack o:f love.

By entering into the child's mind, she is able to de:fine

some o:f the subtle shades o:f intuitive understanding and rational misunderstanding which comprise the consciousness o:f a child o:f



:five.

She is commenting, through this sadly thought:ful child, on

32



the fact that unloving natures perpetuate themselves in their children.

And the failure of love, or what is taken by

th~

child

as love, is of overwhelming importance. b.

Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory."

The definition of "love" for the spokesman of Truman Capote

'nt. \)..~.....'ft\ M

in his "A Christmas Memory" bears a resemblance to that of {arson McCullers' "A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud."

Beginning with love for

simple objects such as those in the stories t t:itle., he has perfected his science to the point where he is a master of its intricacies.

He can love anything: "No longer do 1 have to think

about it even, 1 see a street full of people and a beautiful light comes in me. •

He can love everything and everybody.

To

love a woman is the last step, to be taken after a long educative process.

In Capote's The Grass Harp Judge Cool questions Colin:

"How could you care about one girl?

Have yibu ever cared about one

leaf?"~ and Dolly ramembers her "first loves, .. • • " a dried honey-

comb, • • • a jaybird's egg.,,5

For these two, love is a chain of

love, as nature is a chain of life,,,6 and the heart must be trained in the process, the art, of loving. Buddy and his "friend" who are so similar to the Co1.in and Dolly of



~ ~

Harp are joined by the ability to love.

One a

3 Carson McCullers, "A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud," Prize stories 1943: The O. Henry Awards, ed. Paul Engle and Hansford Martin (Garden City, N. Y., 1943), p. 230. 4 Capote, Harp, p. 75. 5 Capote, Harp, p. 76. 6 Capote, Harp, p. 75.

33



child, the other "still a child," they alone can be unashamed of a squeeze of the hand "I-love-you."

And they are apparently

being educated in the love of the smal! things first -- the wainuts, the kites, the trimmings of the Christmas tree, the fruitcakes. The adjectives used to describe these and other objects show, even more than careful observation, a caressing, happy

~

for them.

The love of the two is selfless -- the "friend" remarks that "It's bad enough in life to do without something you want; but confound it, what gets my goat is not being able to give somebody something you want them to have." (p. 124) This is surely a more mature view of relationships than Hannah's, but Capote has adapted it to his own purposes, changing it into one more isolating agent in the worid of these two "children."

That

only they, a child and his simple-minded cou.sin, are able to love is dangerously in the James M. Barrie tradition which we noted before in relation to this story.

At the talets end Buddy expects

to see "rather like hearts, a lost pair of kit es hurrying toward heaven." (p. 127) The "irreplaceable part of myself" that is let loose like a kite is the ability to love heart.

completely~

with a

w~ole

The death of his childhood symbolized by this death of

his ide al friend is aiso the end of this talent, and again we note the unbridgeable gap between childhood and adulthood implicit in this story.

An adult can perhaps be a "friend," if he shows the

requisite sensibility, but his is incapable of being the "best



friend" of anyone •

34



The ideal love portrayed here is of a special kind.

As

Hannah's was that of the "baby," Buddy's is that of a "buddy," of one pre-adolescent boy for another.

Although it is sober in

its approach and offers a contrast to instant boy-meets-girl love, it is puerile in its nature of a defense against an uncomprehending world.

Capote's search for the truth of love in this story fails.

"Best friends" the two may be, but mature lovers of people they are not, for their love draws them chiefly to themselves. c.

.J. D. SaI inger' s "Teddy."

As it is Salinger who has attempted to create the personification of the word "love" in his fictional char acter Seymour Glass, it is he who has portrayed a child who best understands love in his short story "Teddy."

When the author observes that

Teddy has "too little of that cute solemnity that Many adults readily speak up, or down to," nearly undermines his tale.

7

however, he states a

parad~which

We can imagine that it would be diffi-

cult to determine how to address Teddy; in his constant probe of what is behind every value, Salinger has created an impossible child.

The story is a vehicle for the projection of his specifie

ideas.

l have said that the child, for our century, has become

the final representative of primary values, but Salinger has replaced childhood with mysticism.



A child such as Teddy is, in

7 J. D. Salinger, "Teddy," Nine Stories (New York, 1964), p. 178. Subsequent references will be to this edition. "Teddy" was originally published in The New Yorker, 28 (January 31, 1953), 26-34 •

35



Ihab Hassan's words, "the last resort of innocence,,,8 and that is the chief reason for his existence. At first glance it seems less necessary for Teddy to be a child than Hannah and Buddy. ever age.

A mystic is, after aIl, a mystic, at what

Yet the fact that he is young adds another level of

meaning to the story.

Teddy is a child, yet he is wise with a

sober maturity usually associated with experience.

Going beyond

this, there is his advocation of the symbolic "vomiting up" of the apple which is the act of freeing oneself from "logic and intellectuaI stuff," a return to an animal innocence before the fall.

In

Teddy's words, the process is "emptying out," rather than learning. If one is a baby, it is the act of self-discovery which is still a type of "unlearning."

The fact of age has little to do with this

sort of acquired innocence,

as Booper's behavior testifies.

True

innocence is lost soon after birth and in its recovery one moves to the extremity of self-knowledge where knowledge is innocence. And then one achieves -- what?

Everything, of course, the

innocence which is our knowledge, the loss of consciousness which is the highest consciousness, the God which is our love.

Everything

carried to an extreme meets its opposite and the author has a good reality-illusion controversy with sides being taken by Teddy and Bob Nicholson.

However, Bob's "reality" turns out to be illusion

and what at first appears to be Teddy's "illusion" ends up as reality.



8

This is aIl relatively neat.

Ihab Hassan, p. 276.

36



But what of love?

Teddy appears to be an unloving child,

in the xinal analysis he must be the most loving.

50

Actually, he

replaces the term "love" at least as it is applied to human relationships with the word "affinity." Hindu sense of a union with God. opened up wide enough."

"Love" is taken more in the

It etan be attained if "you

And this is the reason for Teddy's death.

In his terms, death is the fulfillment of life, for it is the means of "stopping and staying with God, where it's really nice." (p. 191)

The ending implies that he, of aIl the children we are

considering, finally encompasses his conception of love. About "affinity" Teddy says little, but it appears that if one "loves" in "that way" one accepts another without attempting to change and tries toreach people by simple acts of kindness. Teddy's few actions show a pattern which conforms to this philosophy.

He is persistently kind to Nicholson and others who tend

to be "kittenish."

His "affinity" for his parents enablE!s him to

clean up their ashes and wear their dogtags without criticizing them.

He even dislikes hearing them castigated as being outside

some norm of genius-parent behavior.

It is essential that he does

not confuse the externality of their views of life with their selves. The conception of such an austere and dedicated love is salinger's answer to the existent "unreliable" love which he portrays to the point of caricature in the parents, who exhibit the selfish love which seeks to change.



It is perceptive to say

that such people "love their reasons for loving us almost as much

37



as they love

USa"

(p. 187)

This, Salinger is saying, is how the

majority of people love; there is barely a pretense.

A substitute

for mother love is automatically requested by the mothex, who demands and receives one token kiss.

Her use of the words "Darling"

and "lover" rapes them of aIl affection.

Both sne and the narcis-

sistic father try to change their children in small nagging ways. It is no wonder that Booper hates them(and Teddy as the emissary of their health-directed order) and "everybody in this ocean." What seems essentially unreal in Salinger's alternative to this joyless love is the criticism of aIl human enotions.

The achieve-

ment of true love has been elevated from its place in this reservoir of natural feeling to the realm of the inhuman.

Where the normal

"baby" such as Hannah of "The Shorn Lamb" is dominated by sensations and her emotional reactions to them, however unrobust, Teddy discounts such zesponsci.s entirely. anything.

They simply are not "good" for

In particular, they should never be projected into

"things that have no emotions" such as poetry.

This does not seem

a matter of semantics, for at several points Teddy quarrels with "naming" objects and feelings; definition is a limit he would not impose.

He really is an unemotional child.

doesn't "use" them.

If he has emotions he

Again it is a matter of extremes.

Peeling off

layers of acquired culture we find not the expected basic inStinctive responses to life but a lack of them.

In Teddy we are not

discovering a childlike animal being but a most refined one.



sounds weIl in theory.

This

But an earthly reader must be forgiven if

38



he finds Teddy a stark, cold child whose love contrasts unfavorably with human needs for security and relationship.

l think we must

finally say that the strength of Salinger's depiction of two contrasting "loves" inthis story lies in thenegative power of his satiric portraits of the parents, Booper, and Bob Nicholson. d.

Summary.

Jean stafford, Capote, and salinger have in these short stories betrayed their very human uncertainty of a final deiinition of love, but they have made it outstandingly clear what they are rebelling against.

Adult pettiness and stereotyped behavior which reveals a

lack of love rather than actual emotion are shown to be the components of the adult worlds.

Only in Capote's short story, where

the concept of love is implied more than it is directly stated, is the bulk of the narrative given to descriptions of actively loving behavior. Both Buddy and Hannah are romantically viewed; because they have not learned, or at least submitted to, adult behavior patterns, they are uninhibited in their visions of love.

Hannah is at one of

those difficult moments when one aspect of her enveloping protection of illusions is being destroyed.

with Mattie's rejection of her one

gesture of love she may weIl become a miniature of her unfeeling mother.

She is the youngest of these loving young people, and the

lack of both "cuddling" and attention which are



50

important to a

baby produce a little girl warped in her perception of love. is completely enveloped in her vision of true affection.

Miss

She

39

.'

StafIord views the child as having the capacity to give himselI over completely, no matter how dependently and passively, to such love and to be intimately afIected by response to it.

This

totality oI being is Hannah's contribution to the child's ability to love. Buddy's comparable contribution is unselIishness.

He and his

"Iriend" are seen as very natural and spontaneous beings.

They

dance when they are happy, are swayed by changes oI weather, and cry when they are hurt.

And their lack oI selIishness is a

similar consequence oI their closeness to nature.

Civilization

and adulthood strip the person oI such innate qualities rather than endow him with them.

The majority oI the adults oI this

story, like those referred to in Saint-Exupery's Le Petit Prince, are too bothered with "matters oI consequence" to be spontaneously giving and loving.

Capote's tale is the most sentimental OI aIl

oI these analyzed here, Ior in Buddy and his "Iriend" the reader

may see personified the inborn goodness oI "original innocence." Salinger's more philosophie concept oI the chi Id and true afIection emphasizes similar unselIishness -- active loving Ior Salinger discounts the selI and its wants entirely -- but it seems that this quality is not a native emotion, for these are discounted as useless.

The reader never knows exactly how one learns to love

as Teddy can, but, as with Hannah and Buddy, the action involves the entire being and cannot be divorced Irom other segments oI his



40



character.

Perhaps it is this Ïact which aIl these authors are

intending to stress.

None oÏ them have to oÏÏer a deÏinite

answer to the question, "What is love?" but they aIl emphasize the importance oÏ love Ïor the child and their whole-hearted reaction to its display •



41



Chapter IV.

The Child's Ability to Go Beyond Organized Religion: Flannery O'Connor's "The River," Philip Roth's "The Conversion



the Jews,"

and J. D. Salinger's "Teddy."

The assumption that the child is best able to perce ive religious truth has two sources

~n

British romantic literature.

William

Blake Îirst deÎined the dichotomy between innocence and experience within a religious Îramework.

A natural, pagan joy in existence

coupled with a simple perception



Christianity, is set against

the corruption oÎ the established church.

Qualities oÎ intrinsic

joy, mildness, and native sympathy which Blake adds to the concept oÎ

by

the child are similar to those oÎ the ideal Christian stressed the teachings



Christ.

The child and his relationship to

God is the concern oÎ the three stories l am analyzing in this .,

1

chapter, but none oÎ their creations have the austere na1vete oÎ Blake's chimney sweep or his little black boy.

Here are lines

about the Îormer: And the angel told Tom, iÎ he'd be a good boy, He'd have God Îor his Îather, and never want joy.l It is this single-minded dedication to a Îew very basic perceptions oÎ

God that has been used by Flannery O'Connor, Philip Roth, and

J. D. Salinger in the short stories l am analyzing here. \oJordsworth' s "Immortality Ode" also presents an inÏluential



l William Blake, "The Chimney Sweeper," Selected Poems oÎ William Blake, ed. F. W. Bateson (London, 1961), p. 25.

42



concept linking the child and God, although it is used directly in only one o:f these short stories, Salinger's "Teddy."

For the child

o:f this story lines such as these :from the Ode would be relevant: Our birth is but a sleep and a :forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our li:fe's star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh :from a:far: Not in entire :forget:fulness, And not in ut ter nakedness, But trailing clouds o:f glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our in:fancy!2 For Teddy, too, proximity to God is something lost through normal education rather than gained.

The simple belie:f that God "is

our home" is common to Teddy's and Wordsworth's belie:fs; both lament the ruin o:f the initially :fEee person who simply "is a certain way." a.

Flannery O'Connor's "The River."

"1 see :from the standpoint o:f Christian orthodoxy.

This means

that :for me the meaning o:f li:fe is centered in our Redemption by Christ and that what l see in the world l see in relation to that.,,3 These words, Miss O'Connor's own, should be kept in mind in an analysis o:f her short story "The River."

This tale o:f a small boy

who walks into a river in the hope o:f :finding there "the Kingdom o:f



2 \villiam Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations o:f Immortality :from Recollections o:f Early Childhood," Wordsworth's Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchison, A New Edition, revised by Ernest de Selincourt (London, 1904), p. 460. 3 Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction VJriter and His Country," The Living Novel: A Symposium, ed. Granville Hicks (New York, 1957), p. 162 •

43



Christ" is not a wholly sentimental or ironie comment on the extent to which a childts misunderstanding or adult words can lead him, though l suspect that the story has elements or both irony and pit y, understated as these May be.

The intensity of Miss otConnorts

faith colors the tone or I!The River" and, indeed, aIl her riction. Her view or Harry is in the romantic tradition: as an innocent child he really

~

been able to comprehend the truth of God and

Christ and he acts accordingly.

As the mistake in name imp1ies,

it is this "Bevell! who is the spiritual center or the tale.

In

his experience there are two places, one where everything is a "joke," which l sha1l consider in the nest chapter on "disorder," and one where there are I!no jokes."

Although it is evident that

Miss O'Connor's views do not coincide with those or the people at the evange1ical healing depicted here, neither her beliefs nor theirs are "jokes." At the beginning of the story Harry is presented as wholly innocent of aIl re1igious knowledge.

He was made by a doctorj if

he had thought or "Jesus Christ" at aIl, "he would have thought

f.i::7 was

a word like ' oh' or 'damn t or 'God ' ,,4

AS an inexper ienced

child of "four or rive years," his f'irst perceptions of Christ are uncluttered by any abstract connections. of "a man wearing a white sheet."



The picture of Jesus is

The evocative, rich1y imagiatic

4 F1annery O'Connor, I!The River," Three bl' Flannery O'Connor (New York, 1964), p. 149. Subsequent rererences will be to this edition. "The Riv~r" was rirst eollected in A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York, 1955) •

44



words of the preacher impress him.

The red and the gold col ors

with which Miss O'Connor has painted the image of the preacher standing in the river are those of beauty and vitality. "There ain't but one river and that's the River of Life, maàe out of Jesus' Blood. in, in the River



That's the river you have to lay you pain Faith, in the River of Life, in the River of

Love, in the rich red river



Jesus' Blood, you people!" (p. 151)

Such words, repetitious, simple, and direct in appeal, lead Harry to believe he

~

go to "the Kingdom of Christ" under the river

not that he understands what this means.

But he perceives that if

he goes under the river he does not "go back to the apartment" and that, for him, is a reasonable alternative.

In his search for this

"Kingdom of Christ" there is no confusion and only one minute of hesitation; he seeks for a better place to be and he finds it.

The

irony lies not in his aisunderstanding of what the preacher was telling the people, for it

was true comprehension, but in the fact

that for him and for everyone this "place" is death.

As a child,

then, Harry has reached a conclusion l have noticed in other short stories here: that the only escape Îrom the burden of reality lies in the sleep of death.

Teddy, Hannah, and Paul also withdrew from

the world; Harry's specifie retreat is from boredom. The presentation of the existing religion of the story, that of the people at the healing, is factual. through the eyes of the boy.



Miss O'Connor sees them

Although her perceptions are not as

submerged in his as those of Aiken's are in Paul's, she enjoys

45



simply giving details and restricting her comments to those of a child Harry's age, a technique she uses again in "A Temple of the Holy Ghost" of the same volume.

Through her exact and unpretty

representation of dialogue she lets the people at the healing give themselves away, as is typical in her fiction.

Their religion

which is so luxuriously colored by the words of the preacher is, as it is for Harry, an escape.

The healer harps on the river's

ability to carry away one's pain and sorrow.

His phrases, imagi-

native as they seem to Harry, are largely ignorant, hackneyed rant designed as an emotional appeal. Yet the chief skeptic of this religion, Mr. Paradise, is aIl too clearly indicated by traditional methods as a devil.

Sever al

times he is connected to the "grey and sour-Iooking" pigs which Harry has just learned are chased out of men by Jesus.

Further

support for his position as the representative of the baser, more earthly elements of man is found in references to him as "some ancient water monster" -- an indication of his bestial nature -and "an old boulder."

Even color shows his position in the tale:

the "purple bulge" of cancer on his head -- a physical sign of moral decay -- as weIl as the orange of his gas pumps and soda are picked up by "the orange and purple gulley beside the road." (p.149) Fictional connections to the earth are usually favorable, but the garishly colored land of "The River" is harsh and unregenerating. It contains nothing positive; it is a fallen world •



46



Mr. Paradise is marked as a devil chiefly, however, by his grotesque appearance, which Harry immediately shuns.

Because of

her frequent depiction of the grotesque, Miss O'Connor is most often discussed as a "southern gothic" writer, and her vision of the twisted creatures sh. portrays does coincide with the use of the deformed and tortured psyches of gothic fiction: such characters embody the forces of evil and unhealthy degeneration in the story. Critics of Miss O'Connor's fiction have found them physical embodiments of "the inner horrors of sin."S

Her own words support these

assumptions, for .he has explained what others have termed her "gothic" vision in the same article quoted above:

"The novelist

with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.,,6

In order to project this vision of "the perverse and

• • • the unacceptable"

7

she is forced to "shock -- to the hard of

hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and . ~. 8 startll.ng ..Ll.gures."

Although Mr. Paradise is perhaps one of the

least completely drawn figures among Miss O'Connor's gothic portraits, he does represent the evil of disorder inherent of aIl of them.

Ironically enough, it is he who gives Harry the final

S Ollye Tine Snow, "The Functional Gothic of Flannery O'Connor, The Southwest Review L (1965), 287. 6 O'Connor, "Fiction writer," pp. 162-163. 7 O'Connor, "Fiction writer," p. 162.



8

O'Connor, "Fiction writer," p. 163 •

47



impetus toward "paradise" with his "red and white club." Harry is not a "good" boy in the Christian sense, for he lies and steals, yet this vision of the grotesque is the final weight on the opposite forces of the story which elevate him to a connection with ultimate good.

It makes apparent the blackness and

whiteness of Miss O'Connor's spiritual world which .he projects in her fiction, where "My God" and "for Christ's sake" mean two different things to two groups of people. b.

Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews."

The use of the child's ingenuous question as a method of approaching existent beliefs and institutions is an old one.

For

our culture it begins with the church-school room print of a beatific child Jesus disputing with the eIders and continues through such figures as Paul Dombey (who asks, if money could do anything, "why didn't it save me my malUla?"),9 James's Maisie, and the little boy who asks why the kipg has nothing on in "The Emperor's New Clothes."

Our century has tended to ascribe this knack of as king

the question to the adolescent such as Updike's David Kern and .Yoyce's stephen.

Ozzie, of Philip Roth's "The Conversion of the

Jews," is thirteen, but his relationship to his question is so childlike that l feel justified in analyzing it here.

His inquiry

concerns sex, the usual problem of the adolescent, but it relates sex only very indirectly to himself.



Ozzie is still the precocious

9 Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (London, 1948), p. 67 •

48



child with a history oÎ embarrassing queries rather th&n the smirking adolescent such as Itzie. Ozzie's question is this:

• • iÎ He cou1d make aIl jthe

"•

creatioEV in six days, and He could pick the six days he wanted right out oÎ nowhere, why couldn't He let a woman have a baby without having intercourse?"IO child.

Ozzie is not a Wordsworthian

His "clouds oÎ glory" come Îrom his own actions, not

Îrom any native proximity to God.

For Wordsworth, aIl children

were born with such misty halos, not just one, and the other boys oÎ

the story trail no clouds.

Neither, at times, does Ozzie, Îor

his Îeeling oÎ "Peace" and "Power" which he Îirst experiences on top oÎ the building is not too laudab1e.

Yet he is an individual

with a deep and pervasive apprehension of God's power.

He is

convinced that God can do anything, and this belieÎ neat1y destroys erudite theological arguments.

To Ozzie, people 1ike the Rabbi

Binder, who attempt to limit his power, "don't know anything about God." (p. 146)

His steady belieÎ puts his mother and the rabbi to

shame. IÎ

it is not because as a child he is close to God that he asks

the question, then, what qualities oÎ the child prompt his argument? Originally he does lack know1edge.



His des ire to know "something

10 Philip Roth, "The Conversion of the Jews," Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short stories (Cleveland, Ohio, 1960), p. 141. Subsequent reÎerences will be to this edition. "The Conversion oÎ the Jews" was original1y published in The Paris Review, 18 (Spring, 1958), 23-40 •

49



different" is the initial impetus behind the question. uninhibi ted about asking i t.

And he is

He is not, l ike Itzie, awa,re of the

unacceptableness of his phrasing for his age group.

He simply asks.

Unlike Paul Dombey, however, Ozzie is aware of the import of his question.

Although he scarcely expects to receive an answer that

will destroy his question, he is still sincere in asking it.

His

ability to question der ives from the primacy of his ideas, which are viewed as positive attributes of childhood.

Ozzie is "child

and logician," able, with his command of natural logic, to question with validity and cogency.

And he succeeds.

Philip Roth's attitude toward his story is never as clear as Miss O'Connor's toward "The River."

He is satirizing in this story,

not the Jewish religion, but the more external characteristics of the Jewish immigrant.

Yakov Blotnik and certain modes of expression

such as "A martyr l have" are +0'ùched upon as only an author wi th intimate knowledge of the culture can do -- with warm, affectionate humor.

These and the epithets "bull" and "bastard" used in connec-

tion with his question, and the witt Y comments such as those applied to Itzie undercut what might be a sober story. sums up his position.

The final halo image

On the surface, it carries with it aIl the

expressive sarcasm of Mrs. Freedman's gesture of lowering her arms and her words, "A martyr l have.

Look! • • • • My martyr," (p. 155)

which reduces the action to the purely factual level.

Ozzie is,

after aIl just a boy who has accidently found himself on a roof.



Yet he really is ready at one point to choose martyrdom.

He is

50



ready to jump because Itzie has given him the suggestion: Suddenly, looking up into that unsympathetic sky, Ozzie realized aIl the strangene'ss o:f what these people, his :friends, were asking: they wanted him to jump, to kill himsel:fj they were singing about it now -- it made them happy. And there was an even greater strangeness: Rabbi Binder was on his knees, trembling. I:f there was a question to be asked now it was not "Is it me?" but rather "Is it us? •• Is it us?" Being on the roo:f, it turned out, was a serious thing. I:f he jumped would the singing become dancing? \oJould it? \oJhat would jumping stop? Yearningly, Ozzie wished he could rip open the sky, plunge his hands through, and pull out the sun; and on the sun, like a coin, would be stamped JUMP or DON'T JUMP. (p.156) Ozzie is ready to be a "Martin" rather than disappoint his :friends.

But isn't this the same thing as being a "ill;lrtyr" rather

than live where the ultimate power o:f God is denied? wonder that his new question is "Is it

US?

• • Is

It' is no

it us?"

The

last image o:f Ozzie's jump into "the center o:f the yellow net that glowed in the eveningts edge like an overgrown halo" (p. 158) is appropriate.

Ozzie does not die, so he is not technically a

martyr, but, :for success:fully upholding his belie:fs, he can wear a halo -- overgrown, :for he has questioned with "adult" wisdom. c.

J. D. Salinger's "Teddy."

Teddy's convictions, like those o:f Ozzie and Harry, reach their apotheosis at the story's end; he too wins a "halo." belie:fs have little to do with organized religion. are, i:f we are to believe salinger, his own. direct and uncomplex.

But his

His perceptions

His link to God is

Be:fore going on to discuss his speci:fic

comprehension o:f God, it is necessary to consider how re:fined, yet



simple, his notion is.

Primarily, it has no boundaries o:f subject



matter.

l have probably discussed much of this material in my

chapter on the child and love for this reason.

For Teddy, aIl

such abstractions as "God," "love," "death," "life," "man," and "matter" are intimately related.

In discussing God we are dis-

cussing them aIl; their acknowledgement requires aIl of Teddy's self.

Salinger intimates this, a bit too teasingly, in Teddy's

reply to Bob Nicholson's remark, "As l understand it • • • you hold pretty firmly to. the Vedantic theory of reincarnation."

Teddy

answers, "lt isn't a theQry, it's as much a part --" (p. 188) The implication is that incarnation, for Teddy, is an established and unarguable facto

One doesn't debate this because it does not

belong in the category of ideas which might, in another's mind, be alterecd.

Ideas imply "Logic and intellectual stuff" (p. 191)

which we must forget. "1 was six when l saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and aIl that. • It was on a Sunday, l remember. f>ly sister was only a very tiny child then, and _he was drinking her milk, and aIl of a sudden l saw that she was God and the milk was God. l Mean, aIl she was doing ;as pouring God into GOd' if you know what l mean." (p. 189) This happening, what Bob Nicholson terms lia mystical experience," takes Teddy out of "the finite dimensions." sider "consciousness" is involved.

A loss of what we con-

One gathers through Teddy's

words that one meditates, and, if one does this weIl, one is allowed to "stop and stay" "with God, where it's real1y nice"

.-

(p. 191) in a reservoir of bliEisful existence where our "life" plays no part.

In this event one is not reincarnated and sent

back to earth; "consciousness" is permanent1y lost.

52



One's critical attitude toward salinger's "Teddy" will necessarily be colored by the extent to which one is sympathetic toward Zen.

A dislike oÎ its basic tenems will activate a dislike oÎ

Salinger's ideas and make the story almost impossible to enjoy. reaction such as George Steiner's is likely to set in:

A

he considers

that Salinger suggests to his young readers "that Îormal ignorance, political apathy and a vague tristesse are positive virtues.

This

is where his cunning and somewhat shoddy use oÎ Zen comes in. • • .e h·10n.', Il 1S 'lln ..Las

l

Zen

gather that Steiner chieÎly deplores any sim-

plification which may become popularized.

Although l tend to con-

sider the essential message oÎ Teddy's philosophy concerning the wholeness and imperviousness oÎ liÎe worthwhile, l too sense a little uneasiness in the story. There is Îirst the Îact that Teddy is a child, even though he is a genius-child. oÎ

The child's traditional role as the perceiver

simple truth has its eÎÎect, making it diÎÎicult to doubt the

clarity oÎ his vision. oÎ

his way oÎ liÎe.

And there are problems in the mechanics

Why, Îor example, iÎ you are "making good

spiritual advancement," meet a "lady," and stop meditating, is the punishment necessarily returning to liÎe in an American Îorm? This is surely one oÎ salinger's little jokes.

But Teddy deÎinitely

Il George Steiner, "The Salinger Industry," Salinger: A Critical and Personal Portrait, ed. Henry Anatole Grunwald (New York, 1963), p. 91 •



53



lacks a sense o:f humor,

50

mouth it's aIl too serious.

when Salinger puts such words in his The prophecies and Teddy's death

itself are technicalities, especially the exact date.

Are they

jokes too?

Isa Kapp

Presumably note

Salinger is fond of Zen.

notes the fact that Salinger must "bolster a mention of • • • Zen Buddhism by a frank, virile burst of swear words, or an apologetic phrase.,,12

This device of "playing down" erudition is aIl too

noti~ble in "Teddy," where there are few big words and many

"

phrases such as "get the heck out of your body," and l never saw such a bunch of apple eaters."

These may be devices to make Teddy

seem little-boyish, like his run-down clothes and "incongruously handsome" aligator belt and his use of the word "lady."

But it

may also be that this uneasiness arises from an awareness of the hopelessness o:f trying to put in New Yorker terms such a complex theory.

What Teddy is saying is, after aIl, immensely involved,

and yet very simple.

We can note again the meeting-of-the-extremes.

The chi Id Teddy has worked his way through the intellectual maze and come out with his basic ideas on the nature o:f "God," "love," and "everything." d.

His perception is that it is very simple.

Summary.

The children of these three short stories are performing their traditional roles as critics o:f organized religion through their innate perceptions o:f God.



Only in "Teddy," as l have noted in the

12 Isa Kapp, "Easy Victory," Salinger, pp. 87-88 •

54



introduction to this chapter, is the concept of the child's proximit y to God directly stated.

For both Miss O'Connor and Philip Roth

other attributes of the child such as ingenuousness lead him to make his critical action rather than his native closeness to God. Harry suffers from a lack of religious trainingj starved for some realization of an explanation of his existence, he grasps at the evangelist's revelation of Christ and goes to seek Him.

It is his

child's intuition of the truth in the jumble of phrases which Miss O'Connor is underlining here. is doubtful.

Whether Harry is a "romantic" child

This ability to quickly understand what will fulfill

his spiritual needs and to act accordingly points to a closeness to God, yet Miss O'Connor makes it clear that to be fully "Christian" Harry must be given instruction.

In this case the author's relig-

ious stance prevents sentimentality.

The complexities of Christian

doctrine, like the social behavior in which Harry is deficient, must be taught.

Miss O'Connor's child is able to intuit only its

basic concepts. We know even less about the origin of Itzie's relationship to God, but it is obvious that Roth places ev en less value than Miss O'Connor on points of doctrine. not a Wordsworthian child.

As l have noted above, Ozzie is

Perhaps he is too old; his comprehen-

sion of God is necessarily eclectic, drawn tioth from his own intimations and from his education.

He performs his function of

..

,.

religious critic perfectly, for he has the attributes of naivete



and sincerity he needs to ask the question which will undermine the

55



existing religion. As Teddy's perception or the all-encompassing nature of love summarizes the contribution of the child to that concept,

50

his

ideas of religion draw together what the child can offer to a sense of God.

Aware of the immense complexities or Hindu mysticism,

Teddy still asserts that the concept of God is uncomplex.

The less

a chi Id has been influenced by patent ideas about the world he lives in, the more he is able to comprehend the nature of God.

His

ability comes from a certain naturalness and lack of adult fears of death or social stigmas.

These notions are also basic to the

child in the fiction of Miss O'Connor and Philip Roth and to Buddy's "friend" in Capote's short story.

We can note again the

belief of these authors that the primitive mind is superior in its perception of fundamental truths •



56



Chapter V.

Disorder and Early Sorrow: Flannery O'Connor's "The River," Jean Stafford's "The Shorn Lamb," and Katherine Ann Porter's "The Downward Path to Wisdom."

Like Thomas Mann, whose short story gives this chapter its title, the writers of the short stories of this chapter foc us upon the subtle effect of family and social disorder upon the child.

It is interesting to note that the mother, in aIl three

stories, is the chief agent of a lack of pattern.

T~e

conven-

tion of child-rearing in our society stresses her warmth, tiveness, and steadiness year.

a~

protec~

necessary during the child's first

As the components of her blood pass to the blood of her

unborn child, so contentment or unrest in her life intimately affects him after his birth.

Her relationship to her husband

is of similar importance, as the last two stories analyzed will illustrate.

Miss Stafford's "The Shorn Lamb" treats the subject

sentimentally; attention is centered in the pathos of the neglected child.

"The Downward Path to Wisdom," by Katherine Ann Porter, is

more analytical and provides a transition to a more psychologically oriented viewpoint.

In her story, we are limited to a child's mind

and his perception of events •



57



a.

Flannery O'Connor's "The River."

l begin with a st ory much more in the tradition of the "disorder" theme, "The River" by Flannery O'Connor.

This story

raises the problem from the individual family to the structure of the society in which it exists, as does Mann's short'story.

Here

the child's consciousness is a finely balanced device which can be swayed at any moment by forces of dissension and unrest which have no direct bearing on its life. , The child's first entry into prose was in this

;o.uù,

but the stress was placed, not on his reactions,

but upon the society which his sadness comments upon.

For Dickens,

for example, the child preserved the innocence and freedom from hackneyed modes of thought which he had had in a pastoral setting, but he was removed to a squalid city background.

This made it

necessary for his native purity to be in constant collision with the brutal actualities of sIum life and he became tough-minded, able to withstand the constant assaalt upon his integrity.

Like

machines of virtue, such children as Paul Dombey and Sissy Jupe gave fresh opinions about the institutions of their time. But the child of "The River," and, actually, of all these stories, has changed.

He is softer, more human, more childlike.

Harry, who is "four or five years old," has not the initial vision of right and wrong to guide him and he is lees bold in his criticism of his elders.

He can be swayed by their opinions.

Not his

questions, but his behavior, passes judgment upon the society



around him.

Harry ultimately rejects the world of "the apartment,"

the world of jokes.

58



We have seen in the previous chapter the polarities oÏ Miss O'Connor's vision and her adherence to Christian orthodoxy.

Her

disapproval oÏ Harry's parents is obvious in Many details.

From

the Ïather's "aÏter-thought" goodbye to his son to the mother's badgering over the day's experiences we sense that they are careless, thoughtless people.

To aIl appearances they are absorbed

in a round oÏ parties where hangovers and anchovy paste take precedence over normal routine.

The alI-important mother is a

sloppy housekeeper, as the condition oÏ her reÏrigerator testiÏies.

Mrs. Connin's Ïirst view oÏ her indicates disapproval:

"That would be her, Mrs. Connin decided, in the black britches -- long black satin britches and bareÏoot sandals and red toenails.

She was lying on halÏ the soÏa, with her knees crossed

in the air and her head propped on the arme (p. 154)

She didn't get up."

Her"red toenail~' and "long black satin britches" May be

external signs oÏ a grotesque nature, but it is her language which betrays her as a "black" character oÏ the story's opposing Ïorces.

"Who ever heard oÏ anybody named Bevel," she exclaims

rudely, and "My God! what a name."

Her careless use oÏ "God"

places her in the category oÏ those Ïor whom such words are simply exclamations.

Part oÏ the "disorder" oÏ the story comes Ïrom the

Ïact that neither she nor the Ïather have religious belieÏs (she despises baptism), nor have they instilled them into their child.

.'

That Harry has been given no perception oÏ religion is undoubtedly a black mark in Miss O'Connor's book.

She does not

comment upon the lack oÏ standards in the couple; she merely allows

59



Harry's comments upon his home life to reveal the parents' conduct. His thought "Where he lived everything was a joke" (p. 153) implies a world with no :fixed moral values.

This may be only one dissolute

couple, but, since the other people at their party seem little different, it is likely that they are meant to be symptomatic of a larger social disorder.

This is Miss O'Connor's expression of

opinion of a value-less group of "modern" people. Their amoral state has its effect upon their child.

since Harry

has no perception of God or any moral imperatives he lies and steals as a matter of course.

He is far from an 110riginally innocent l1

child; he must be educated in the ways of God before he can be considered truly a social being. have been neglected.

And aIl points of his education

Part of "motherly love" is helping the child

to separate himself from the family and learn of new experiences. Clauses such as "You found out more when you left where you lived l1 (p. 149) are evidence of her neglect.

But when Miss O'Connor tells

us that in the world of the "apartment" I1There was very little to do at any time but eat" (p. 157), we realize that Harry' 5 major complaint is boredom. grow.

without new experiences a child ceases to

It is interesting to note that, as in Aiken's "Silent Snow,

Secret Snow," the child's withdrawal from the world centers about his rejection of the mother.

When she enters Harry's room to calI

him back from his oblivion in sleep, .he takes the same hateful form as Paul's mother, that of someone forcefully dragging him back



to an existence he detests.

As Paul must vanish into his snow

dream to be free from her, 50 must Harry go away to the river to

60



escape her "bitter breath": even in his half-sleep he hears "her voice from a long way away, as if he were under the river and she on top of it." (p. 156)

As Paul' s fantasy takes on human charac-

teristics, so does Harry's conception of the river.

At the last

he is pulled by "a long gentle hand" which finally, unlike his mother's, takes him to a new place. b.

Jean stafford' s "The Shorn Lamb."

In Miss stafford's short story, as in Miss Porter's, the focus is upon the unhappy situation of the parents. of the child.

The

tension in their marriage is undermining the whole family:

the

older and hardier children are becoming cruel; Hannah is sadly retreating to a world of sleep. For Jean Stafford, too, the mother's love is of primary importance for the young, sensitive child.

Hannah, unlike Harry, has

received this love, but its abundance and sensuality have kept her a "baby of five years old."

She is passive and dependent.

Her

mother is able to laze about in bed gossiping and drinking tea aIl day.

She is "woman as queen"; her bed is her throne.

object is "gelded," "soft," and "fat."

Yet this

Basically sterile, it can

produce children, of necessity, but not parental love. is trapped in her maternaI role.

The mother

Her relationship with Rob is her

only escape, but he seems too much the jargon-ridden artist to offer any real haven for either the mother or the child.



(He speaks

of himself, for example, as "the artist" in the manner of a positive force, and talks of the "lambencies" of the hair in "a state of nature.")

His kindness to Hannah only confuses her, giving her

61



two very different fathers. The other men mentioned have also little to recommend them; they are connected to a usually Nazi militarism Hitler.

the Gestapo,

The father is an "autocrat" whose manhood is embodied

in the phallic duelling swords on the wall.

Overwhelmed by his

wife's sensuous power, he relies on a defensive cruelty when he does not get his own way.

He set a bad example for his children

-- lying, swearing, and enforcing ru les rather than being at aIl loving. It is no wonder that the quarrels and their consequences div ide the family into "belligerent" camps and that the children often hate their parents.

It is difficult to tell if Miss stafford means

these parents to be indicative of a larger problem of wealth and ease.

The mother who lounges aIl day in her soft bed is somewhat

stereotyped, yet it is impossible to extend the situation in the way we can Miss O'Connor's.

These are two mismated people pampered

by their wealth. Hannah is bored -- her long days and her loss of a reason for existence point to this.

And we have seen that her loss is mani-

fe~ted

in a loss of identity; she is a "rag-do1l," "the baby," and

so on.

The other children react in a similar way, although we see

1ess

evidenc~

of this.

They too are bored, and have become

estranged from their real selves.

Janie runs "like a dog," and

they, more than anyone, calI Hannah by otller names (she is a "mush-



room" and "a skinned catIT).

The original tit1e of the story, "Cops

and Robbers," underlines the fact that this is a general, familial

62



predicament.

The members of the family are "cops and robbers" of

a:ffection: not real people. father a "weasel."

The mother is a "brood mare," and the

The people with whom the family comes in con-

tact are similarly described as Gestapo and rear admiraIs.

Even

the men in the barbershop resemble the "fat stut"fed skunk" regarding itself in the mirror. condition to animal

AlI manifest a degeneration from the human

behavi~r.

Miss sta:fford's child is an "originally innocent" one -- note her dislike of lying and her perception that eavesdropping and spying are "sins."

Mournful, loving, and good, her personality

heightens the pathos of her mother's neglect.

The long-drawn-out

melancholy of the child places this story in the romantic tradition; Hannah is a modern Little Nell.

Complications of her

"decline" are kept at a minimum or lost in the directness of Miss sta:ffordJs focus upon the pathos of the situation.

We see more of

Hannah's thought processes than we do Harry's; so little of his "suicide" is explained.

Here, both direct connections such as

those between "anti-man" and "ottoman" and the subtleties of love and the feelings of rejection are explained, if not deeply explored. c.

Katherine AnD Porter' s "The Downward Path to Wisdom."

"The Downward Path to Wisdom" marks a point of transition between the purely romantic story of the pathetic child and the psychologically oriented short story.

.'

It is not so carefully

subjective as Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," however, for Miss Porter's aim is different.' stephen is neither a potential

63



artist nora schizophrenie.

He is a young child, Îour years old,l

with a limited comprehension of what goes on about him; to see the world through his eyes requires discipline and perception. most part Miss Porter succeeds.

For the

Sae lapses once into a glimpse of

Frances' mind and she does comment upon Stephen occasionally, but in general she restricts her perceptions and vocabulary to those of a four-year-old.

The effort that one senses, however, gives

the story a sense of psychological falsification which l shall examine more closely in the chapter on "the psychological short story."

For the present l shall restrict my remarks to the theme

of "disorder" in the story. Like Hannah, Stephen is being order in his parents. Maisie was unwanted.

intim::~tely

affected by the dis-

He is unwanted in the way that James's His only value for other Îamily members is

as a tool for retaliation upon still other members.

Both parents

are childish: the father cruel and thoughtless in his treatment oÎ stephen; the mother quick to exploit any emotion. her tantrums and he compares them with his own:

Stephen has seen "His mother's voiee.

rose in a terrible scream, screaming something he could not understand, but she was furious; he has seen her clenching her fists and stamping in one spot, screaming with her eyes shut; he knew how she looked." (p. 85)

Her behavior denotes theatricality, for at the

story's end she gives a tense, rehearsed speech in a storm of anger

.

-

1 Katherine Ann Porter. "The Downward Path to Wisdom," The Leaning Tower And Other Stories (New York, 1944), p. 81 • Subsequent references will be to this edition. This short story was originally collected in this volume.

64



which "b10ws over" 1ike a sudden raine

Her mother's words, "1 hope

you'll be feeling better," indicate that this has happened before. The connection between Stephen's tantrums and his

mother~s

is

more meaningfu1 than that between the "dec1ines" of Hannah and her mother.

If the grandmother's reaction to her chi1dren's quarre1

can be taken as any indication of her conduct when they were young, we can understand their natures in terms of her own. primari1y se1fish: of your quarreling. either of you. this noise.

"Go home, daughter.

Go away, David.

l've never had a day's

l'm sick of you both.

Go away." (pp. 108-109)

She too is

peac~

l'm sick

or comfort from

Now let me alone and stop The grandmother too can be

dramatically pathetic one minute and "cheerful" the next.

If our

small glimpses of her are meant to reveal her character in this way, the story adds another generation to this pattern of family disorder. Lack of self-control and thoughtfulness has created a formula of negative expectation.

Uncle David says, "1 shouldn't expect too

much of him" and "it's in the b100d." "WeIl, just as l thought,

Old Janet, too, remarks,

• Just as l expected." (p. 103)

As

the children are not expected to be moral, so their offspring are not presumed to be so.

The fights between Stephen's parents indi-

cate their lack of decision over his discipline.

He has a vague

and sometimes inexact apprehension of right and wrong.

Thus he

feels guilty about taking the teapot and hides -- but he takes it



anyway.

Somewhere he has learned the evil of stealing -- perhaps

where he learned "Name father son holygoat."

Neither the permissive

65



mother who babies Stephen and gives him pet names as Hannah's mother did nor the ridiculously moral uncle have the right moral view.

The child, between two opposing Ïorces, suÏÏers the pain

oÏ being discussed.

Miss Porter has portrayed Stephen as an

extremely sensitive barometer of feeling. sudden shifts in the moods of others.

He reacts swiftly to

Perhaps through his school

experiences he is less spineless at the short story's end. this point ·"he is able to reject aIl his home and Ïamily.

At Like

Harry, in a world with no standards he evolves his own absolutes. d.

Summary.

The authors of these thxee short stories, then aIl view the child as an impressionable being whose balance can be easily destroyed by the forces of unevenness around him.

At the mercy

of every breeze that blows, these three children ultimately reject this inconstant atmosphere.

Whether disorders are marital, relig-

ious, or authoritarian, the child's consciousness registers them and reacts accordingly.

Event5 which seem minis cule to the adult

are large Ïor him. Unlike the boys of traditional American fiction, these three children are not resilient.

perhaps they are too young and

untrained to be able to stand up to the oblivious adult world which surrounds them.

Their only solution is withdrawal, and aIl, Harry

joyÏully, Hannah sadly, and Stephen desperately, cast off aIl that



is Ïamiliar to them.

Yet the three authors show, through their

respective treatments of the same general theme, a marked difÏerence

66



in objecte child.

In the last story we see the final view of the romantic

Stephen's withdrawal, unlike Hannah's, is analytically

viewed; we see exactly his reasons for his sensations in his surroundings and we get a description of them.

Only at the end

does Miss Porter allow the pathos or the other two staries.

When

Stephen's head accidently cames to rest on his mother's knee, the tale is given an ironie and melancholy twist •



67



Part B.

The New Interest in the Psychology of the Child.

Chapter VI.

Introduction:

Freudianism and the Child.

In the chapters of Part A l have stressed the continuation ùf the romantic tradition in the portrayals of the child.

The

analysis of the stories in this second part of my thesis does not discuss an interest which opposes this tradition but explores its new aspect which involves a scientific investigation of the child's consciousness.

In general the basic concern of the story remains

a sentimental one; in nearly aIl the stories considered the native sensitivity of the child is contrasted to adult vulgarity, stupi= dit y, and callousness.

Only in Peter Taylor's "A Spinste:r's Tale"

and Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" are the viewpoints of the characters so warped that the tensions which arise bear little relationship to those between the child's and the adult's views of the world.

In the former tale it is the contrast between

the male and the female which fascinates Betsy, while in Aiken's short story it is the insensitivity of those who do not comprehend his psychotic fantasy which angers Paul.

In both stories these 1

contrasts are so distorted by the child~n:inds that they are forces only within their respective tales. For the other stories l am considering the study of the child's .....,'" ;c..h

mentality~exists

in conjunction with the concept of the worth of

his perceptions and the pathos of their destruction.



Perhaps it

is more exact to say that, aIl too often, the interest in psychology which leads the author to attempt the explication of the child-mind

;'

68



through an internaI monologue style and such significant details as dreams is grafted on to the sentimentality l have noted in the ~hapters

above.

Miss Porter's short

st~ry

is the most obvious

example of this technique which l discuss at greater length in relation to her story.

For the writers of the chapter on the

writer as a child, psychology has been of benefit in the explanation (and sometimes the glamorization) of their craft. This new interest in the psychology

of the child in short

fiction has arisen since the growth of the sciences, particularly psychology, at the end of the last century and their popularization during our own time.

Probably the Theory of Recapitulation

formulated by Darwin, which compares the life of individuals to the agas of history, was of greatest effect in returning the image of the child to its place in the continuity of a lifetime,l but Freud's theories of infantile sexuality are of similar importance. Both removed the concept of the child from emulation by the adult world as successfully as did the recurring theories of "the for tunate fall" which have always run counter to romantic interest in the primitive mind.

Put in its place

eRee~

(for, in terms of

specifically literary works, Wordsworth's The Prelude contains the kernel of the organic view of childhood), youth could once more be of valid interest.

In an age of persons who had wept over their

lost childhood during the performances of Peter Pan this return to the notion of the child as "father of the man" was a noticeable



change • IBoas, p. 61.

69



A statement such as "the very impressions which we have forgotten /In the amnesia which hides our childhoodl have nevertheless left the deepest traces in our psychic lite, and acted as determin2 ants for our whole future development," which has revolutionized child care and education, has also great fictional potential.

The

long, flexible novel form could trace the evolution of the personality through an entire lifetime.

Biographies and such fiction

works as Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage make use of this concept. The short story could play with the analysis of one specifie event and intimations of its influence upon future behavior.

The majority

of tales which concern children -- most of these studied in this thesis, Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg," and Dylan Thomas' of

~hildhood,~to

~tories

name only a few -- make use of this idea to a

greater or lesser extent. Although l would stress this emphasis on childhood as a valid aspect of human development as Freud's contribution to child-study, Peter Coveney places importance on the tact that, in this new factual approach, the child is freed from concepts of both original sin and original innocence. 3

Freud's business-like examination of ~

sexuality in young children and his daughter's consideration of lines of development and the relationship between the child and the adult, which blast the concept ,of "original innocence" for the

••

2 Sigmund Freud, Three Contributions to a Theory of Sex, transe A.A. Brill, Third Revised Edition (New York and Washington, 1918), p. 38. 3 Coveney, pp. 291-292 •

70



orthodox, have had a great effect.

As Frederick J. Hoffman puts

it, they "threatened to disabuse us of one of our strongest sentiments

the 'ange1' theory of chi1dhood.,,4

these theories have

becom~

Yet, during our century,

subsumed in factua1, secu1ar know1edge.

The discoveries of sexua1ity and aggression in chi1dren no longer a1arm us as indications of the evil nature of natural man.

The

tradition of the romantic chi1d has been able to survive without having to admit these phenomena as evidence of inherent sin. The most immediate and well-explicated effect or the theories or Freud and psycho1ogists such as Jung and Adler was upon writing style.

The influence or his "rree association" method of psycho-

ana1ysis upon the practitioners or what William James has called the "stream of consciousness" writing style has been studied by Leon Ede1 in The Psycho10gical Novel 1900-1950 and Frederick J. Hoffman in Freudianism and the

~iterary

Mind.

Freud's studies of

dream interpretation, repression, and displacement have added new areas ror fictional exploration for various authors and become part or what Houston Peterson terms the Ifmania psychologica" which àominated the first rew decades of the century.

James Joyce,

Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Faulkner, Conrad Aiken, and Sherwood Anderson were only a few or the authors who used the new principles of psychology in their work.



4 Frederick J. Hofrman, Freudianism and the Literary Mind, Second Edition (AnD Arbor, Michigan, 1967), p. 14 •

71



As a result o:f the "discovery o:f the unconscious," attention began to be given to the child not only because it is in childhood that patterns o:f unconscious association are :formed, but also because it is in the child that the :forces of motivation are least complex.

Involved thought processes have not yet been :formed.

A

short past and :fewer experiences make behavior less complicated than in the adult, so that the components o:f

~he

childfs mind can,

at least in theory, be separated and analyzed in :fictional form with more ease than those o:f the adult mind.

The most enjoyable

experiment with this concept is the opening section o:f Joyces's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man of 1914; baby tuckoo, Dante, heat, damp, smell and song are aIl 1inked in a pattern of association which might exist within the mind o:f a small boy. Original as the style was at the time the book was written, the conception o:f the story had its :forerunner in a book published in 1897, Henry James's What Maisie Knew.

The fact o:f the child's

point of view, as James explained in his pre:face, was a necessity as a :factor in the "germ" o:f the conceived plot, not as an uncomp1ex medium :for viewing the story, yet the mind of the little girl, which James does consider a restriction, a "limited consciousness," does serve the purpose.

Given an extreme "sensibilityll and IIfresh-

ness," it has the capacity :for expansion during the course of the book.

.'

Mamsie remains able "to resist. • • the strain o:f observation

and the assaul t o:f experience;'S but she dE:f:tni tel y begins at one level of childish :fears and illusions and matures to a more realistic 5 Henry James, What Maisie Knew (New York, 19G8), p. xi.

72



one.

The "moral decision" at the end, however, is a :farcical one,

:for Maisie has no conception o:f the ethics involved.

She is in

nearly aIl senses a "romantic child": her thought processes, as Beach has pointed out, are those o:f a child;6 as the "ironie center" she comments on the adult situation; she is able to "intuit" true morality. Yet Maisie's portrayal is a technical attempt to probe a child's mind and its comprehension of a situation, and it is :for this reason that l include it here.

In his descent into the inner mind James

was before his time, but his inbred and allusive style restricts him from entering his young creation's consciousness as other authors (such as Conrad Aiken and James Joyce) have done.

Perhaps

it is un:fair to judge James on this scale, :for the book is, in Beach's words, a fltechnical excess" in quite another category. The preface states di:fferent intentions.

An objective view of

l\iaisie, an overly contrived plot, a strict moral sense, and a relatively "straight" use of the third-person narrative separate it from later experiments in the forme Such attempts to find in an individual child., man, or even animal a microcosm o:f the essential individual or society have been popular in our century.

One outstanding study dealing with

children should be mentioned, William Golding's Lord of the Flies. In concentrating on the dissolution o:f a group of boys alone upon an island as a metaphor for the human condition upon the earth,



6 Joseph Warren Beach, The Method o:f Henry James (Philadelphia, Penn., 1954), p. 239.

73



Golding has shown the workings o:f a sort o:f "original sin" as a destroyer o:f civilization.

The "extreme case" o:f seeing the

:faults o:f society in a group o:f children to explore the truth is part o:f a traditional search :for the discovery o:f the common and universal characteristics o:f mankind.

It takes its place

with the use o:f a :future "utopia" in George Orwell's

~

and

Aldous HuxleylBrave New World and Orwell's use o:f animaIs in Animal Farm •



74



Chapter VI l •

The Wr i ter as a Clild:

Truman Capote' s "A

Christmas Memory," Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," and Eudora Welty's liA Memory.1I

The exploration of the youth of an artist as a method of gaining insight into the nature of the creative person has a tradition with several "high points" in British literature worth mentioning here. Unlike the "cult of the child" literature, such investigations typically stress the organic nature of human development.

AlI

events are relevant, although some have a greater effect upon the child than others, and aIl contribute in some way to the growing pers on as weIl as to his purely aesthetic perceptions.

Such studies

explore both the innate characteristics cf the particular child and those contributed by his environment.

Wordsworth recounts his

childhood and youth in this very unsentimental way in The Prelude. The continuous contribution of his surroundings to his mature phil os ophy, morality, and peetry is the controlling theme of his conscientious scrutiny into his pasto

"The chi Id is father of the

man" -- an obvious statement, perhaps, but one which has seldom been emphasized as it was to be later in the nineteenth century and in our own time.

In The Prelude importance is attached, as

it is in Rousseau's Confessions, perhaps the most frankly egoistic work in this genre, to relatively small events, such as the "act of stealth/ And troubled pleasure"l resulting in an evening row



upon the lake.

The concept that these occurrences do shape the

1 Wordsworth, p. 499.

75



later char acter and that they should be examined in context is Wordsworth's major contribution to the child's history in English literature.

His description or the "rair seed-time" or his soul

is an attempt to discover just what goes into the making of a poet. As a psychological study, it is an early echo of what came to be a more technical inquiry into the makeup or the child's mimd at the beginning or the next century.

His stress upon the chi1d as

"father of the artist" is important for our time, but his statement that Uthe chi1d is father of the man'" is in some way the basis for nearly aIl the modern short stories that rocus upon the chi1d. VJith the new interest in psychology, concern ror the artistic. child took on a new analytic character.

Factors in heredity and

environment which produce a ,creative child began to be examined. Boas has pointed out that even many later nineteenth-century writings such as James Sully's Studies of Childhood (1895) connect the aesthetic sensibilities of the child and the artist as a matter of course~ and the results of such investigations had their effect upon speciric aspects of the artistic children depicted in fiction.

The foundation for the movement still lies in The Prelude,

with Wordsworth's recognition of his own earliest sensibilities, but now the movement broadens not only to "the existing artist as child" but also to the non ... autobiographical studyor "the child as artist." It is perhaps a truism to say that every literary character subjec ...



tively examined is in some way autobiographical. Zaoas, p. 83.

Some "child as

76



artist" writings are stated personal remembrances, but others are drawn only

partially from the author's experience.

Of the stories

l am considering in this chapter, only one, Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow, Il seems a technical, non-personal examination of a sensitive child. James: Joyce's own A portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the most obvious work in this forme

The importance placed upon

sensation, the emphasis upon lyric rhythm in song, the changing of reality to something slightly different in a creative manner ("The green wothe botheth"), an early concern with language and definition of words and situations, and an ease of association can aIl be noted in the first page and a half as specifically aesthetic apprehensions.

The extension of unconscious associa-

tion and patterns of imagery throughout the novel make this the most deliberately "organic" of aIl these works. An autobiographical perspective such as this is,of course, subject to self-flattering

dist~ion

process of selection of episode.

above the normally warping

The subjective nature of Joyce's

Portrait makes such egoism more difficult to catch in his novel than the personal indulgence of Dylan Thomas' comparable Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940).

The reader can easily tire

of Thomas' penchant for seeing himself as "small, thin, indecisively active, quick to get dirty, curly," perceptive and sensitive childhood.



3

living a normal yet extremely One can scarcely find a boy

3Dylan Thomas, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (New York, 1940), p. 68.

77



between the picturesque representation or the two polarities or swagger and imagination.

The reminiscing author betrays his

presence in the conception and phrasing or such stories as "The Fight." Although the three stories l shall deal with here vary in the extent to which the y are autobiographical, aIl three writers have portrayed their children as unusual in ways which underline their awareness and creativity.

AlI continue the tradition_or the

exploration or the artistic tempe~ent through an explication of facets of their own natures. a.

Truman capote's "A Christmas Memory"

"Buddy," of "A Christmas Memory," is a sensually alert child. The "Caarackle" of walnuts, the smell of the "ocean" from a pinetree patch or the odor or baldng rruit-cakes, the touch of smooth nickles and a tugging kite, and the taste of whiskey are aIl recorded, although they take second place to the Many sights the country setting.

o~

These are imaginatively depicted: "The

kitchen is growing dark.

Dusk turns the window into a mirror:

our rerlections mingle with the rising Moon as we work by the fireside in the rirelight," (p. 116) and "a large log cabin festooned inside and out with chains of garish-gay naked light bulbs and standing by the river's muddy edge under the shade of river trees where MOSS drifts through the branches like gray mist." (p.IIS)



Perhaps it is the diction, however, that is the Most striking • Capote loves the shape and texture or words.

He often records them,

78



as has been noted in the "memory" chapter, in the manner of children's lists which take on the character of rhythmic chants. Here, for example, is a list of groceries to buy:

"Cherries and

citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and • • • • " (p. 116)

His

attention to alliteration, assonance and cadence produces a peculiarly chiming, lilting record of common articles.

Although

this pattern of recording is the older author's, the magic of the words is remembered.

The colleciiou of coins shows a similar

preoccupation, as does the list of Christmas tree decorations, "coils of frazzled tinsel gone gold with age, one silver star, a brief rope of dilapidated, undoubtedly dangerous candy-like light bulbs." (p. 123) As important as the diction are the Many metaphors and similes. Capote consistently gives the objects he describes a fOlksy slant by comparing them with objects even more "natural," a device often used by the "nostalgie" writer.

Thus the iron stove "g10ws like a

lighted pumpkin," the paper kites twitch "at the string like skyfish as they swim into a wind," and dollar bills are as "tightly rolled and green as May buds." escape such .analogy:

Even people's emotions do not

Buddy feels "warm and sparky as those

crumbling logs, carefree as the wind in the chimney. l'

These have'

the effect of creating in Buddy, even though he, at the age of seven at least, is not the narrator, a kind of child of nature •



Such

r~cording

of sensations (although these are chiefly pleasant

ones, it should be noted) and concern with words, metaphors,and

79



similes seem to be his, even if obviously polished by the older narrator. This lyric depiction of a poetica11y alive boyhood close to nature is tradi tional.

Like the 'Wordsworthian child, Buddy has

no restrictions on the perceptions of his eyes, ears and touch. The preoccupation with appropriate words and lists are purported to be "Buddy's" :first attempts to structure observations and to describe them.

Yet somehow the effect is too calculated.

One

fee1s that this is Capote fashioning the boyhood of a writer by the simple device or transferring accomp1ished technique from his own writing to b.

that of an ideal youth.

Conrad l\Ïken' s "Silent Snow, Secret Snow."

Paul, of Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, secret Snow!," is also sensitive to the nature around him, but purely sensory data and the words to describe and compare them are only part of what makes Paul a special child.

Aikents story is carefully modulated; we

first see Paul as a relatively normal boy in a normal setting.

It

is not until he slides deeper into his snow world that the contrast between it and his home and parents becomes alI-important.

!Yluch

critical ef:fort has been expended in construing the story as the withdrawal of a schizophrenie into his world of fantasy, but there is reason to believe the'it Paul is also m.:ant in sorne way as an extraordinary child, a gifted creative spirit.



This view has its

chief advocate in Ann Grossman, who has explicated the reading from Sophocles and the final cold seed image in terms of artistic expression in the 1964 Studies in Short Fiction.

80



From the first lines of the story Paul is set apart by his partial understanding of what is happening to him, his sight, his analogies, and his vocabulary.

And these, Aiken has deftly given

us to believe, are not his own (Aiken's) but those of the boy. The author's viewpoint is completely, almost uncannily submerged in Paul, even though the

s~ory

remains in the third person.

From

Paul's first simile comparing his "secret" to "a particularly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser pocket," it is through Paul that we are viewing events. There is, for example, the walk homeward, in which each detail is carefully recorded -- twigs, an advertisement, dog tracks, a birdhouse, a stenciled "H."

But these material observations

ultimately take second place for Paul. things.

fvliracles.

"There were more important

Beyond the thoughts of trees, mere elms ••

Beyond the thoughts ev en of his shoes.,,4

..

He is already going

xurther than the natural fact to what~ever principle may lie behind it.

One wonders what kind of "creator" Paul would become.

He

has not the lyric interest in words and their combinat ions to be a poet in the sense that capote would have it, of stylistic worth rather than content.

He would become a more profound and philo-

sophie artist or author. paul's graduaI withdrawal from everyday life into his snowworld signi:fies a rejection of a world which becomes increasingly 4Conrad Aiken, "Si1ent Snow, Secret Snow," Among the Lost People (New York, 1934), pp. 141-142.' Subsequent references will be to this edition, in v/hich this story was f"irst collected.

81

distasteful.

Examining the list of observed details during the

afternoon walk one finds that they are predominantly ugly: Branches are IIvery thin and fine and black and dessicated." "Dirty sparrows" huddle "in the bushes, as dull in color as deac1 :fruit left in leaÎless trees." the gutter.

"A li ttle deI ta of fil th': lies in

These revelations of the world's hideousness show no

evidence of a vision of fleurs

~~,

of acceptance

~nd

under-

standing to the point where there is a perception of real beauty. If Paul's withdrawal is at aIl an aesthetic one, it is the ivorytower retreat of one who cannot make his peace with reality.

His

contrasting fantasy-world is aIl too beautiful and pure: IIIts beauty was paralyzing -- beyond aIl words, aIl experience, aIl dreams.

No fairy story he had ever read could be compared with

it -- none had ever given him this • • • ethereal loveliness. • •• (p. 144)

The contrast of reality and illusion becomes more striking

as the story progresses through IIthe inquisition":

his father's

tone changes to IIthe familiar voice of silken warning,1I then ta IIthe well-knawn 'punishment' voice, resanant and cruel. 1I

Their

investigation places him on a "brilliantly lighted stage, under a great round blaze of spotlight," like a IItraineù seal, or a performing dog. 1I (pp. 149-150) The snow-dream beconles more involuntary, more desirable, more beautiful

and more human.

At the last it

lifts "long v.hite arms," "puts on its manners,1I whispers and laughs. rt

r;oes "take the place of everything" in the material world and,

Li.ncüly, the place of the parents themselves.

Attempts to I!inquisi-

tion" Paul, ta talk hin; out of his clream, are what amounts ta attempts

82



to cure the artist of his imaginative fantasy.S The passage which Paul reads to the doctor has been identified by Ann Grossman as a choral ode from Oedipus

~

Colonus.

She finds

evidence that the passage links Paul and oedipus as persons "tragically isolated and wrongly

condemned by society," artists for whom

the forthcoming death (or in Paul's case the cessation of consciousness) is an apotheosis. 6

For myself, however, the reference to

Sophocles' Oedipus seems obscure.

Aiken carefully chose the passage,

l would suggest, for its elaborately poetic

image~which

are ironi-

cally absurd,read during the "inquisition" of a potential artist or poet as a test of his eyesight. Most of aIl it is the vision of the snow which Paul's subconsciousness has chosen which marks his creative bent.

with aIl its

associations of co Id and whiteness, the snow is perfectly adapted for a symbol of "peace," "remoteness," (of "the polar regions"), "cold," and "sleep."

The reconciliation of opposites embodied in

the phrases "white darkness" and "a little co Id seed" applied to his secret fantasy and the fact that it is described as at once unbelievabl.1 lovely and "deliciously terrifying" indicate that Paul is going beyond the life he sees to the infinite, in terms of what he knows.

Like Teddy, he is searching, in his cessation

of normal existence, for the ultimate death.



eÀ~erience

of life which is

His snow-fantasy is also something he is able to love with

SAnn Grossman, u'Silent Sno\'1, Secret Snow': The Child as Artist," Studies in Short Fiction, l (1964), 126 • 6Grossman, p. 127.

L

83



aIl his being, as "He loved it -- he stood still and loved it" indicates.

That the white Îlakes become a protecting Îemale Îorm

which supplants his bateÎul mother suggests his childish conception oÎ

love.

He "dies" into himselÎ to become an embryo ready to begin

liÎe again in a more ideal atmosphere. Aside Îrom this poetic aptness oÎ the cold seed image, this Îantasy is consistent1y seen as a choice oÎ the beautiÎul.

The

Îirst intimation oÎ the snow in the bedroom brings the thought: "How love1y! • • • the long white ragged lines were driÎting and siÎting across the street, across the Îaces oÎ the old houses, whispering and hushing, making little triangles oÎ white in the corners between cobblestones, • • • t! (p. 132) The initial perception is oÎ sight, of beauty, the second is oÎ sound --

th~

snow

was "getting deeper and àeeper and silenter and silenter." a Îew exceptions and some synesthetic

ble~ding

with

such as seeing

through an "accompaniment, or counterpaint" oÎ snow, this pattern continues throughout the story, pointing to the Îact that there is initially a choice of the artistically pleasing and pure over the congealed sawàust and the advertisement for ECZEMA ointment.

Only

then is the necessary muffling oÎ actuality which the deadening quality oÎ the snow symbolizes a part oÎ his illusion.

"Silent

Snow, Secret Snow" is best interpreted as the withdrawal oÎ a sensitive child from a cumbersome reality.

l think we need not

see it as the typical retreat of the artist-personality but instead



consider it as the retreat of the artistic quality in each child as

84



the Ïirst and primary line oÏ the withdrawal Ïrom adult reality. c.

Eudora Welty's "A Memory"

The child oÏ Eudora Welty's "A Memory" is engaged in a very necessary activity, that oÏ observing liÏe around her and attempting to discover in it some pattern oÏ order. Ïorms judgments.

She draws conclusions and

When Ïorthcoming observations do not then conform

to her expectations she is "Ïrightened" by "a vision oÏ abandonment and wildness which /tears at her/ heart with a kind oÏ sorrow." (p. 144)

Small observations take on huge signiÏicance, becoming

indicative oÏ larger rules oÏ organization.

So Ïar this is normal

behavior, but this child orders her percepticns in a peculiar way, through the act oÏ "Ïraming" them with her Ïingers. "Ever since !She/ had begun taking painting lessons," Miss Welty tells us, she has been viewing things

th~Q~gh

such Ïrames, and the

world she views through this device seems to her a "projection" oÏ herself.

Nearly every observation seems to reveal to her lia

secret o:f life 7 " an intimation both of what is within herself and also "projected' ! into the outer world she then observes.

Any art

work, \'l1hether a poem, a sculpture, or a framed painting, is in some way an imposition of arder upon the chaos oÏ existence, the solidification oÏ some perception of an instant.

The frame oÏ a landscape

or still life roay be the most sim~stic boundary possible, and it may be the inorganic pressure of an external border rather than



internal structure, but it is one means oÏ Ïorming a control oÏ such chaos.

It seems that this "Ïraming" device is a distinctly

85



aesthetic notion.

When the child of this short story creates a

"painting" inside her frame of fingers,she is attempting to capture some significant forme

Artistic perfection here is not seen as

the utterance of an earthshaking moral or intellectual message or even the depiction of some insight.

Rather, it is the achievement

of a pleasing and meaningful pattern, an arrangement of objects pleasing to the eye.

As the boy Joyce creates poetry by the forming

of words, so this child plays with picturing objects with her "frame." The narrator has told us that when events occurred which did not "comorm" to her ideal she was terrified.

And her relation

of the classroom incident is an example of the way in which her expectations are disappointed.

If there is one certainty of child-

hood it is that fantasies of beauty and the ideal will be disproven; i f there is one certainty of the artist it is that attempts to

achieve ultimate perfection will fail.

This is the link between

this initiation of the child into adulthood and the perception of the artist, always fresh, that he will never have the ultimate "say," that reality will constantly surprise him and alter even the basic premises of his beliefs. The short story here, then, recounts another instance of what occurs when the narrator's imposition of a "perfect" and static pattern is broken.

The bathers appear without benefit of the "frame"

device and she is unable to incorporate them in any pattern.



She

can only perform her function as an observer; the sound she "identifies" as a laugh, she "begins to comprehend" the structure

86



of their communication as "a progression, a circle of answers." (p. 149)

Like Paul's observation of details on his homeward walk,

this section of the story is a small masterpiece of slanted writing. Seldom does the narrator definitely state the fact of the group's ugliness, yet the clever use of adjectives and analogies have the cumulative effect of real disgust. In the aimless, awkward stupidity and lack of self-respect of the bathers the narrator finds a microcosm of the human condition which shatters her ide al.

Her fantasy, "the undefined austerity

of /her/ love." has been a protection from such horror.

In observing

"everything /the boyï did, trying to learn and translate and verify," her vision and her ideal have not been incompatible.

Her illusion

contains the story's only image of beauty, the rose which "blossoms at will" and carries an odor of sweetness, and is associated with soothing, protecting darkness; it is, at the end, identified with the "small worn white pavilion," battered, but intact. ethereal nature of her love excludes aIl sensuality.

The Even the

"minute and brief encounter" on the stairs is "endured" and the sight of the child's blood, which makes her faint, must have been a revelation similar to the one she describes here.

Her love is

the essence, the ideal quantity which remains when aIl the superficialities of knowledge, sexuality, and even respect -- his face, for example, carries a look of "stupidity" -- have been lost.

The

girl here cries in a burst of pit Y for what she recognizes as a



pathetic, yet enduring ideal.

She continues ta frame her observa-

tions, and this is important.

From this it seems that Miss Welty

87

.,. considers this disillusionment as one of Many which occur in the time of childhood or the life of the artist which serve to shape his perceptions.

The focus of her attention is upon the point of

impact of the inexperienced ideal and the world. d.

Summary.

The traditional examination of the nature of the artist through his childhood has its origins, as l have pointed out in my introduction to this chapter, in a writer usually considered highly "romantic," Wordsworth.

l place this chapter in the section of

my thesis which considers the "psychological" aspect of these short stories because it seems to me to involve a more analytical approach to the nature of the chi Id than purely fictional interests. The careful "planting" of details which tell of a particularly creative vision of the world is an indication of interest in just ~

characteristics are integral to the makeup of the artiste

probably because they realize that extensive analysis of this type would destroy the value of their stories, none of these three authors bring technical details to the attention of the reader.

The

stories of Capote and welty are "memories," but whether the latter is truly a memory or merely"written within the "memory" genre, as is Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale," is uncertain.

We are never

sure if Paul is meant to be definitely an artistic child: is it a sane Paul who constructs this lovely snow fantasy, or is its beauty



only chance?

Thus in aIl three stories there is uncertainty.

Is

this the adult writer when he was young or is this an attempt to

88



link "the child" and "the artist" in a more general way? Capoteis chi Id is the most sensually oriented, tèe most romantically conceived.

In his portrayal

th~re

is an obvious

attempt at the depiction of an artistically perceptive childfather.

He is close to nature and its beauty leads him to find

words and phrases :for its description.

"Buddy" (or the older

Capote) is the natural, spontaneous poet. Conrad Aiken's Paul is marked as a youthful artist or author by the nature of his snow fantasy.

An abnormally sensitive boy,

he rejects the prosaic place he has found his world to be for the elaborately beautiful dream.

80th paul's specifie vision and that

of Eudora Welty in UA Memory" are "romantic" in their tendency to polarize the child and adult worlds.

For both there is a vital

link between the ideal, described in terms which connect it to qualities of aesthetic love, the nature of love, and the child. Both children choose to remain within their dreams of the perfection of aIl values, but Miss \velty's child is able to reconcile her new concepts with her dream in some way.

For both Paul and

her elaboration of the ideal is in some way essential.

They are

the dreamers who can mold experience into an ideal more tangible than the world about them. "children?"

Neither Aiken nor Welty limits the story by being

exact on this point •



But are they "artist-children" or

89

••

Chapter VIII.

The Psychological Short Story:

Katherine

Ann Porter's "The Downward Path to Wisdom," Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale," and Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow."

"The psychological short story is a genre by itself, and its practitioners include Sherwood Anderson, Peter Taylor, and Conrad Aiken.

It is not surprising that many such stories are written

from a child's point of view.

Much of modern psychology underlines

the importance of childhood events in shaping the character of the older adult, as l have emphasized in my introduction to this section of n>y thesis.

Novels \'!hich follow a character through an extended

length of time, such as Joyce's Portrait, can study a complex of interrelated events and their consequences, but the short story rocuses upon one such occurrence and gives it in such psychologically pertinent detail that the development of the personality is implied.

An obvious example from a familiar short story will

illustrate my point.

Eudora Welty's narrator of "A Memory" says,

after recounting the time when the boy she loved had a nosebleed and she fainted, "Does this explain why, ever since that day, l have been unable to bear the sight of blood?" (p. 295) of course, must be a resounding "Yes."

The answer,

And there we have a complete

incident, secure in its significance for the adult life.

.'

A note should be added on the style of these stories.

Leon Edel,

whose critical work The Psychological Novel 1900-1950 gives my chapter its title, has analyzed the various r.omponents of such novels.

90



Both he and Frederick J. Hoffman consider works such as Joyce's Portrait experiments closely linked ta psychalagical studies in their use of the internaI monologue.

This form has been adapted

by Katherine Ann Porter and Conrad Aiken, although Miss Porter's use of it in "The Downward Path to Wisdom" can be cansidered only fragmentary.

l wish to make it clear that in speaking of "the

psychological short story".;l l am referring both in content and ta method of presentation. a.

Katherine Ann Porter's "The Downward Path to Wisdom."

The bulk o:f Miss Porter's work does not show sucample, we are given his observation of the effect of this laugh on his parents, but we never see him laughing.

Techniques such

as placing external events in parentheses during the classroom scene and the use of rhetorical questions within Paul's mino which seem to be in his

OVin

boy's consciousness.

"voice" help to keep the tale l'Ii thin the The story takes place in four places, in

four scenes from one day -- the schoolroom, the walk hOli1eWard, the "inquisition" in the living room, and the retreat into the bedroom -- yet there are so many flashbacks of preceding events that we become vJell-informed of the progress of Paul' s psychological deterioration during the previous :few days.

Aiken' s st}71e

here approximates the stream-of-consciousness technique of Ulysses, yet he maintains the sentence structure and the third person, working within the conventional forros to gain his subjective viewpoint.



5 Cited by Hoffman, p. 279. He quotes Aiken's words on this point from an article in New Verse XI (1934), 13.

99



The tale is a small triumph in the utilization of the form, even more narrator.

50

when one considers the elaborate diction of the

The fact that thLs being is "outside" Paul allows him

to use an immense vocabulary which describes situations more exactly, if with less sentimentality, than Katherine Ann Porter's limited use of \\Tords could do.

When Paul, upset and frightened

at the last, speaks of his trial, we cannot wish such diction eliminated for the sake of restriction to a child's mind: a joke! As if he weren't so sure that reassurance was no longer necessary, and aIl this cross-examination a ridiculous farce, a grotesque parody! What could they know about it? These gross intelligences, these humdrum minds so bound to the usual, the ordinary? Impossible to tell them about it! \~y, even now, even now, with the proof 50 abundant, so formidable, so imminent, so appallingly present here in this very room, could they believe it? (p. 151) ~iJhat

Miss Porter, after aIl, has limited herse1f unfairly.

The narrators

of both pieces are not the children and it is impossible to pretend that they are.

Because of the precocious phrasing and diction,

some critics have thought that Paul's vocabulary is an indication that he is a genius, for his age can only be about eight years old.

But l think that this vocabulary is Aiken's exploitation

of the fact that his narrator is another person.

\'lith the third-

person, after aIl, one cannot wholly fuse subject and object, and he rec?gnizes and enjoys this facto

Paul seems bright.

He answers

quickly in the classroom and he worries about his observations of

.

'

even such simple things as dog-tracks, but there is little reason to label him a genius •

100



\'Jhy, then, has a child been chosen to illustrate the beauty and magnitude of a schizophrenie fantasy?

My theory is that

AÏken, like Miss Porter, has chosen a young person because the forces which control his behavior are less complex in relation to those of an adult in a comparable situation.

We have seen that

Paul's balance of illusion and reality is a complicated thing, but it is possible to envision the infinitely greater complexity of an adult mind.

Paul, for example, has few tasks and worries.

He does not have to worry about the responsibilities of children or job; polishing his shoes is a small consideration compared to these.

Even his emotional commitments are less strained, for

he has no problems of puberty or competition.

In aIl ways, Aiken

has simplified the situation as much as possible.

His family is

not complex, with no siblings to create tension, no poverty, and no truly offensive people.

In the light of larger difficulties,

the tendencies for the person to divide his lire between illusion and reality can be easily explained, but Aiken has sought the simplest possible example.

He is thus able to explain the nuances

of such a retreat into fantasy. The "realitylT of Paul's life seems, at first, quite unfrightening and congenial -- a

pictur~sque

cobbled-street home, concerned, if

imperceptive parents, a friendly schoolteacher and children. setting is almost too quiet, too idyllic.

The

The reader soon realizes

that Paul has magnified the distasteful things of this world into a

••

polarity of menace and hate which, by contrast, ebhances his snow

101



world.

The remembrance or the rirst morning's awakening indicates

that the rantasy posed no problems ror Paul; he did not dread the day, or rind threats in his parentIs behavior.

And the snow-dream

was at rirst believed to be real, to have a simple, natural cause. bd!:~

But even then the snow was fla rortress, a wall.\which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion." (p. 128)

It is revealed that he

wants "a secret place or his own."

The snow says "peace,"

"remoteness," "cold," and "sleep.u

Like the girl or Jean Starrordls

"The Interior Castle," Paul is retreating into himselr. l'lere more important things.

Miracles.

"There

Beyond the thoughts or

trees, mere elms • • • • Beyond the thoughts even or his own shoes, which trod these sidewalks obediently, bearing a burden -above

or elaborate mystery." (pp. 141-142)

~aE

Paul dislikes having

his b09Y and mind known by others, for such erforts reduce him to an animal state.

It is, arter aIl, his own individuality that he

is maintaining, and the secrecy and privacy of his soule The homeward walk and the inquisition bring his world or home and surroundings into rocus.

l have already commented on the

vision of ugliness he rinds on his walk

the "dirty sparroVis

huddled in the bushes, as dull in color as dead fruit left in leafless trees," and the "little delta of filth" in a drain.

Yet

Aiken again is carerul not to luake this ugliness too overwhelming. This vision is opposed by some beauty -- the egg-shaped stones, for example,-- and objects simply noted in passing in the continuing



observations or Paul's mind -- "The green hydrant, with a little green-painted chain attached ta the brass screw cap."

102



The "inquisition," however, leaves no doubt as to what Paul is , rejecting. The doctor's "false amiability" and the "hostile presences" which attempt to probe his mind are repelling.

They

are "bound to the usual, the ordinaryi" unable to follow his flight into a lovely dream. So Paul, like Harry, deliberately slips away into another world.

We have seen in the chapter on the artist and the chi Id

that this illusion embodies the extremities of aIl Paul knows, of love, oÎ space, oÎ beauty, and oÎ life.

It is carefully

chosen to contrast to the dull and meaningless existence he now pictures his life to be.

It is possible to analyze this short

story in strictly psychiatrie terms, as has been do ne by William M. Jones, who discusses even Deirdre's freckles in his consideration of Paul's "schizophrenie" withdrawal into a "catatonie trance."

6

Leo Hamalian carries the study into a specifically

Freudian area and insists on finding here an

Oe~ipal

situation

supported by lists oÎ Freudian male and female sex symbols. 7 l think, in the interests oÎ purely literary criticism, that such explication is unnecessary, but it is interesting to know that Aiken has so constructed his story that this can be done.

6 william M. Jones, "Aiken's 'Silent Snow, The Explicator, XVIII (1960), 34.



Secret Snow,'"

7 Leo Hamalian, "Aiken's 'Silent Snow, Secret Snow,'" The Explicator, VII (1948), 17.

103



d.

Summary

It would seem that Aiken begins with a scientific interest in schizophrenia and manages to evolve a very successful short story. He avoids Taylor's submersion in the facts of a psychosis such as this.

Miss Porter, on the other hand, has begun in the opposite

fashion -- with a romantic, even pathetic tale -- and has cluttered it up with skillfully placed, yet extraneous material.

Her short

story is not nearly so successful, for the reader is ever aware of "clues" which are meant to lead him to the song of hate at the story's end.

Her contriving, like that of Taylor, has produced

an unreal child. The strangeness of these three short stories comes, however, not from their methods of composition, but from the fact that psychiatric study has been used at aIl.

One can probably say

in the cases of Aiken and Porter that such investigation has helped the writers to gain their desired "effect," yet why have they been used?

They postulate a reading public able to "catch"

the clues which have been so carefully placed, and thus in some way limit their audience to those readers with sorne knowledge of psychology.

Such attempts go beyond a consideration of the

pê.rticular person to a&l exploration of the universal characteristics of rejection, inhibition, and withdrawal.

They put the

child, as a young person, in a realistic perspective, but perhaps they rob him of those characteristics which have made him a



fascination for centuries •

104



Part C.

Conclusion.

Maxwell Geismar has remarked upon the facts that "the New Yorker school of fiction" al ways returns to "That lost world of childhood • • • • that pre-Edenite community of yearned-for bliss, where knowledge is again the serpent of aIl evil."l

He considers

that such writers remain in "the nursery of life and art."

2

In

his quarrel with Salinger in particular and "the New Yorker school" in general, he laments this facto sary;to do so.

l am not sure that it is neces-

If a vision such as this is possible to work into

excellent fiction, and this thesis is an attempt to prove that it is, it is unfair to criticize the frequency of its occurrence. In Chapter VIII l have emphasized the ihterest in the child as the simplest embodiment of universal human behavior.

Paul's enjoy-

ment of a seclusive beauty and an exciting, progressive fear, for example, is part of a typical, studied pattern of withdrawal. Because the makeup of his characted.is relatively simple, the consequences of events which occur can be analyzed.

This is, l

suggest, a quite different object from that of the fïrst story l have considered, Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory."

In Capote's

focus on the particular nostalgie memory there is almost an opposite concern with the chilcL

There is aIl the difference between

a highly subjective interest in the self' and a technical search for 1 Maxwell Geismar, . American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity (London, 1958), p. 209.



2 Geismar, p. 209 •

105



classic patterns or behavior.

The two ends or the continuum or

interest in the child may meet: at just what point does selrexamination come upon the basic rorces or emotions, motivation, and modes or thought?

It is ror this reason one can discuss the

memories or Capote as a sentimentally reminiscent recollection and as a search ror a native artist-child.

For the most part,

however, the two are unreconciled. l think it is necessary to say that the short story writers of this century, -in concentrating upon the child, are continuing a mode of approach which is essentially "roroantic."

The child,

who was originally considered good because he was near ideal nature, has retained this innate value although his buttressing, pastoral tradition has been almost completely destroyed.

(It

lingers still in Capote and in some of the better-known writers of the century l am not considering in detail, such as Faulkner and Hemingway.)

The child's closeness to the natural forces

derived from the idyllic setting such as Wordsworth's and the sensible vlÎsdom of his ideas have continued to constitute his image in our century. It is p:r.obably necessary, at some point, ror each person to decicle I::for" this natural impulse or "ror" the educated man. Although our century tends to scofr at the terms "original sin" and lforiginal goodness," it seems that the concepts represented, although freed from specifically Christian evil, have simply been



transformed into a more subtle forme

The child of the romantic

tradition of our century remains allied with the forces dI., good.

./

106



To doubt his wisdom is comparable to slandering the worth or motherhood.

Perhaps his chier value ror the authors of these representa-

tive short stories is his immense sensitivity.

/

In any very young

being there is a spareness, almost a transparency.

The various

aspects or his body and his behavior cannot help but be revealed. His reactions are pure.

Even the child or rive or seven years

retains some or this initial rascination.

For the writer seeKing

the truth or love, or creation or any other abstraction the perceptions or such a being cannot help but be alluring.

The story

can end in pathos or triumph, but the apprehensions of the child provide the philosophie center or its values. Perhaps this child-image is inevitable in a complex and urban society

which has somehow "gone wrong."

Dissatisfaction with its

many defects leads to the emulation of those values not found there. Complexity, bustle, and corruption in the midst or stagnation have their opposite in the image (ir not the actuality) or the country and of the child.

As long as an elaborate, imperrect culture exists,

the "romantic" tradition will oppose it and the child will remain the critic and saviour.

His initiation into the necessary problems

of adulthood will be regretted.

Mary Poppins, the Peter Pan of our

century, will still be viewed; TOlkien, Joan Walsh Anglund, and

.

/ sa~nt-Exupery

,s

Le Petit Prince will still be read.

l have stressed the continuation or the romantic tradition in part A of my thesis.

In attempting to demonstrate the "why" of the

rascination or the child l have undoubtedly ommitted facets which

/

107



might be oI interest, (the continuation of the pastoral tradition represented by Faulkner's "The Bear" and the sympathetic link between children and elderly people could comprise chapters in themselves).

For aIl these writers the image of the child is a

positive, sensitivE int.iicator of the "right" way in a "wrong" world.

If he does wrong, as Miss porter's Stephen does, it is not

his fault -- he has not been taught carefully enough. treated sympathetically.

He is always

y

If the adult world causes his destruction,

he becomes an object of pity.

Such stories as Miss Stafford's and

Miss Porter's always contain a kernel of irony, for something /

innocent and pure is in the process of being destroyed.

This sentimentality has received a boost, rather than an opposition, from scientific interest such as that 1 have described in Part B of my thesis.

As l have stated in the introductory chapter

for that section, the confrontation of the two has involved a "grafting on" of principles of psychology to traditional material. This is obviously not a recent development -- Aiken's story was lvritten before any of the others studied in my thesis -- but it is one that has influenced many of the writers to some degree. stress upon childhood

e}~erience

The

by recent psychologists has given

new impetus to the inherited pattern, Ior it has validated the concern with childhood.

A more organic view, such as that originally

underlined by Wordsworth's The prelude, has become the usual matter of the short stories l have analyzed here.

Unlike Paul Dombey, the

blighted children do not simply fade pathetically and cease to existe

108



If they do die it is because some major confrontation with life has taken place.

Harry, in Flannery O'Connor's short story, for

example, chooses to leave what has been revealed as an inferior and debilitating place, the "apartment."

The personalities of

those who live, such as Paul and Hannah, are twisted in ways which cannot fail to affect their future development.

This developmental

view has always been a part of American tradition -- Hemingway's In Our Time is probably the best-known such work -- but it has tended to stress the adolescent boy.

In utilizing the very young

child in a similar context, the short story writers studied in this thesis are following the tradition to its genesis.

In doing

so, they have lost the original brashness and ruggedness of the Huck Finn tradition.

But they have found the same integrity.

There is never mistrust of the values they represent, or of the nature of their comment upon the society within which the y existe

109



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