on Juvenelia
Saved by mothers, fathers, siblings, teachers, and by accident, the letters of children are ubiquitous and almost never interesting. Never, that is unless the child evolved into an adult of genius. Then they seem endlessly fascinating, immediately attractive documents, predicative of the future and redolent with the talent that was to be, or poignant indicators of later tragedy or psychopathology. Paper relics, they sometimes hold an almost holy remembrance of golden ages, better times, funnier faces. “Let each child have that’s in our care/ as much neurosis as the child can bear,” quipped W. H. Auden, who as a wistful grownup was always conscious of his happier childhood as a sort of Eden in limestone. Baudelaire, of course, felt that “genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself.” Others would look at the relationship between childhood and art (drawing, writing, painting, etc.) as less useful, or even entirely hindering. Samuel Butler, in his appropriately titled The Way of All Flesh, was extreme in his association of childhood with the less-than-perfect: “Could any death be so horrible as birth? Or any decrepitude so awful as childhood in a happy united God-fearing family?” In equally merry misanthropy 300 years later, Dorothy Parker exclaimed: “All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t sit in the same room with me.” In any case, writing and childhood seem inevitably entwined, arising from a common source, which is not quite the same as believing everything is everything. It is much more hopeful.
No comments:
Post a Comment