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 Sho:r:r~ Lamb," J. D. Salinger' s "Teddy,"

Flannery O'Connor's "Th(~ 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.n-

tal 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
 <X>NTENTS

.' The Child in Twentieth Century Short Fiction

Preface

Part A. In the Romantic Tradition Page #

Chapter 1. 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 P~ology of the Child.

Chapter VI. Introduction: Freudianism and the Child 67

•
·' Chapter VII The Artist as a Child: Truman Capote's

fiA Christmas Memory," Conrad Aiken's

74

"A Silent Snow, Secret Snow," and

Eudora Welty's "A Memory."

Chapter VIII.The Psychological Short Story: Katherine 89

Ann 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 pub-

lished 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 publi-

cation 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. That The New Yorker has published such a

short story 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. Part A or my thesis will study

aspects or the former interest. 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 psychologi-

cal 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 pop-

ulation 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, ~ them that l am te:r:ming "adolescent"

fiction. 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 incor-

porated 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 inter-

ests 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 differ-

ent 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).

 4

• 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-

• 2
self and not as a diminutive adult," 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 ac-

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

from GOd.,,4 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 fresh-

ness 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 cen-

tury. "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. Twain's "The story of the

Bad Little Boy" (who makes very 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, estab-

lished by Dickens, as social cri tic. Albert stone, who has, in

The Innocent E~e, 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. There were children's

per~.odica1s such as Youth's Keepsake Magazine. The dime "Beadle

and Adam" nove1s began to be pub1ished in 1860, and provided adven-

turous 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

.
Bumpo, b ut h e notes t h at t h e f 19ure cont 1nues
. t 0 reappear. 1 0 .
. 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 illogi-

cally logical extreme, finds this evidence of the nation's "regres-
siveness,,,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 be~t and giggest is an integral part of the American

character. 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 child-

hood 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 archi-

typaI 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. It was the beginning of the end of

something,,,16 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 con-

structed 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 exper-

iences. 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. And they

are younger. 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 specifi-

cally "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. Capote's words "She is

still a child" are the highest prai~e 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 out-

side 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 •

.
'
 12

• 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 child-

hood 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 enter-
tained, 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 cen-
tral 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 Much of

Capote's early work was concerned with his youth. 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
4
lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours too."

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 selÏ-

indulgence. 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. It is a tearjerker and can

go sour at any moment. 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 relationship to a later, older

adult. 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 con-

trasts 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 • • • • They couldn't get

away from it. 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. The author himself,

who at the end 0;[ 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. It aspires to fiction rather than mere

pathos. 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 book-

length treatment of Eudora Welty's work, A Season of Dreams) and

Robert Penn Warren have pointed out, is a key story in the exposi-

tion 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 pro-

tection of Lher7 dream" and the ugly beach scene of reality. She

need not choose. 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." The

f'at woman in particular is vulgar. 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 "concen-

trationon 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 dark-

ness 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 con-

ception 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.o-

tected," 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 per-

haps the only group with which l am concerned here which must

defend itself against Leslie Fiedler's charge of a "regressive-

ness" 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 fic-

tion writing than the usual digressive recollection. Why must

Miss \'lelty's tale be a memory? 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 out-

side 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 50 much

popular fiction as in our century. 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 "happily-

ever-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 per-

ceiver 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

1
her golden hair, she is indeed a "shorn lamb," ugly and exposed.

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 inci-

dent 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 ~ her curIs,

"spun gold," or "waste"? 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 well-

turned phrase which give away the author's perceptions.

For Hannah, "love" is the primary sensation of warmth and pro-

tection 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 incor-

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

.a, 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." Even her hair is

rare and valuable by analogy. 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 atmos-

phere such as this the child cannot but follow the pattern. The

marriage of the pare·nts i$..."bQund, not by love, but by social con-

cepts 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. Loss o:f love involves a loss o:f

individuality. 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." \vithout the attentions which have

made her so 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 per-

fected 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 completely~ with a w~ole

heart. 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 personifi-

cation 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
7
readily speak up, or down to," however, he states a parad~which

nearly undermines his tale. 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 orig-

• inally 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. A mystic is, after aIl, a mystic, at what

ever age. 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 intellec-

tuaI 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. This is aIl relatively neat.

• 8
Ihab Hassan, p. 276.
 36

• But what of love? Teddy appears to be an unloving child, 50

in the xinal analysis he must be the most loving. Actually, he

replaces the term "love" at least as it is applied to human rela-

tionships with the word "affinity." "Love" is taken more in the

Hindu sense of a union with God. It etan be attained if "you

opened up wide enough." 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 philo-

sophy. 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 sensa-

tions and her emotional reactions to them, however unrobust, Teddy

discounts such zesponsci.s entirely. They simply are not "good" for

anything. 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. If he has emotions he

doesn't "use" them. Again it is a matter of extremes. Peeling off

layers of acquired culture we find not the expected basic inStinc-

tive responses to life but a lack of them. In Teddy we are not

discovering a childlike animal being but a most refined one. This

• sounds weIl in theory. 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 con-

trasting "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 com-

ponents 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. She

• is completely enveloped in her vision of true affection. Miss

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

by the teachings oÎ 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. The picture of Jesus is

of "a man wearing a white sheet." 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. That's the river you have to lay you pain

in, in the River oÎ Faith, in the River of Life, in the River of

Love, in the rich red river oÎ 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. Miss O'Connor sees them

through the eyes of the boy. 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 embodi-

ments 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

7
• • • the unacceptable" 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 connec-

tion 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 Ozzie is not a Wordsworthian

child. 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. And he is

uninhibi ted about asking i t. 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. The final halo image

sums up his position. 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? It' is no

wonder that his new question is "Is it US? • • Is 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." But his

belie:fs have little to do with organized religion. His perceptions

are, i:f we are to believe salinger, his own. His link to God is

direct and uncomplex. 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." A loss of what we con-

sider "consciousness" is involved. 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 neces-

sarily 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. A

reaction such as George Steiner's is likely to set in: 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. Zen
•
1S •
'lln .e
..Las h·10n.', Il l 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. The child's traditional role as the perceiver

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

clarity oÎ his vision. And there are problems in the mechanics

oÎ his way oÎ liÎe. 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 when Salinger puts such words in his

mouth it's aIl too serious. The prophecies and Teddy's death

itself are technicalities, especially the exact date. Are they

jokes too? Presumably note Salinger is fond of Zen. Isa Kapp

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." His perception is that it is very simple.

d. 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 proxi-

mit 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. Whether Harry is a "romantic" child

is doubtful. 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. As l have noted above, Ozzie is

not a Wordsworthian child. Perhaps he is too old; his comprehen-

sion of God is necessarily eclectic, drawn tioth from his own inti-

mations 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, protec~

tiveness, and steadiness a~ necessary during the child's first

year. 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 criti-

cism 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 care-

less, 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 testi-

Ïies. 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 She didn't get up."

(p. 154) 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. And aIl points of his education

have been neglected. 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. without new experiences a child ceases to

grow. 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 impor-

tance 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. Yet this

object is "gelded," "soft," and "fat." Basically sterile, it can

produce children, of necessity, but not parental love. The mother

is trapped in her maternaI role. 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 posi-

• tive 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 the Gestapo,

Hitler. 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. The mother is a "brood mare," and the

father a "weasel." 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. AlI manifest a degeneration from the human

condition to animal 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 tradi-

tion; 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. For the

most part Miss Porter succeeds. 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 intim::~tely affected by the dis-

order in his parents. He is unwanted in the way that James's

Maisie was unwanted. 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. Stephen has seen

her tantrums and he compares them with his own: "His mother's voiee.
rose in a terrible scream, screaming something he could not under-

stand, 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. She too is

primari1y se1fish: "Go home, daughter. Go away, David. l'm sick

of your quarreling. l've never had a day's peac~ or comfort from

either of you. l'm sick of you both. Now let me alone and stop

this noise. Go away." (pp. 108-109) 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." Old Janet, too, remarks,

"WeIl, just as l thought, • 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. He reacts swiftly to

sudden shifts in the moods of others. Perhaps through his school

experiences he is less spineless at the short story's end. At

this point ·"he is able to reject aIl his home and Ïamily. 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 In the last story we see the final view of the romantic

child. 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 explana-

tion (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 populariza-

tion 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 tu-

nate 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 for-

gotten /In the amnesia which hides our childhoodl have nevertheless

left the deepest traces in our psychic lite, and acted as determin-
2
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 person-

ality 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' ~tories

of ~hildhood,~to 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 senti-

ments the 'ange1' theory of chi1dhood.,,4 Yet, during our century,

these theories have becom~ 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 uncom-

p1ex 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 state-

ment 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 above the normally warping

process of selection of episode. 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

3
active, quick to get dirty, curly," living a normal yet extremely

perceptive and sensitive childhood. 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 pine-

tree 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 o~

the country setting. 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 fes-

tooned 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 sky-

fish as they swim into a wind," and dollar bills are as "tightly

rolled and green as May buds." Even people's emotions do not

escape such .analogy: 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 that of an ideal youth.

b. 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 expres-

sion 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. "There were more important

things. fvliracles. 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 snow-

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

the gutter. 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 ivory-

tower 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 per-

forming 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 "tragi-

cally isolated and wrongly condemned by society," artists for whom

the forthcoming death (or in Paul's case the cessation of conscious-

ness) 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 subcon-

sciousness 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 eÀ~erience of life which is

death. 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 percep-

tion is oÎ sight, of beauty, the second is oÎ sound -- th~ snow

was "getting deeper and àeeper and silenter and silenter." with

a Îew exceptions and some synesthetic ble~ding 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. She draws conclusions and

Ïorms judgments. 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 solidi-

fication 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. The

ethereal nature of her love excludes aIl sensuality. 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 super-

ficialities 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.

tions, and this is important.

She continues ta frame her observa-

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 intro-

duction 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 child-

father. 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 perfec-

tion 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. But are they "artist-children" or

"children?" Neither Aiken nor Welty limits the story by being

exact on this point •

•
 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 psychologi-

cally 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) The answer,

of course, must be a resounding "Yes." 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 su<:"h an involved

concern with technical introspection c)f character as "The Downward

Path to Wisdom.!I Stephen is viewed in a particularly subjective

manner. The story begins with a definite restriction of conscious-

ness to his four-year-old mind. Even the sentence structure,

diction, and phrasing are the child's own, as these paragraphs

from the text will illustrate:

The little boy had to pass his father on the way to the door.
He shrank into himself when he saw the big hand raised above him.
"Yes, get out of here and stay out," said Papa, giving him a
little shove toward the door. It l'las not a hard shove, but it
hurt the little boy. He slunk out, and trotted down the hall
trying not to look back. He was afraid something was coming
after him, he could not imagine what. Something hurt him aIl
over, he did not know why.

He did not want his breakfast; he would not have it. He sat
and stirred it round in the yellow bowl, letting it stream off
the spoon and spill on the table, on his front, on the chair.
He liked seeing it spill. It was hateful stuff, but it looked

.. funny running in white rivulets down his pajamas. (p. 83)

Although the narrator is clearly not the child and the factual

sentences are intact, this is a simplified attempt ta catch the

 91

progression or thoughts in a small child's mind. As the story

continues such moments recur, but they become interspersed with

derinite recourses to Miss Porter's own words, such as her sentence

about Stephen, "This was the rirst real dismay or his whole lire,

and he aged at least a year in the next minute, huddled, with his

deep serious blue eyes rocused down his nose in intense specula-

tion." (p. 100)

William L. Nance has theorized that this short story, both in

title and content, contains the germ or Miss Porter's rejection

theme, a concept which he rinds basic to aIl her stories. l The

ract that this short story, written partially rrom a child's point

or view, contains a summary or the author's work may point to the

reason ror its existence. In a small child we may see psychological

mechanisms clearly, with few complications of conflicting rorces.

Stephen's mind thus becomes a prototype for others of Miss Porter's

characters. When he is sick hearing his mother's tantrum and when

he cries after hearing Uncle David scold him, we see how he feels.

The events or the entire story obviate the necessity for the "quiet,

inside," "comfortable, sleepy" song at the story's end.

As l have noted in the chapter on "disorder," the pattern of

emotional instability in this story is shown to be a cumulative

one, descending from the grandmother, to the mother, to the child.

As "Old Janet" says, "It certainly is bad, • • • aIl this upset aIl

. '
1 William L. Nance, S. M., Katherine Ann Porter and the Art
or Rejection (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1964), p. 7 •
 92

• the time and him such a baby." (p. 87) She fails to connect the

two, but the story clearly demonstrates that it is Miss Porter's

belief that such unrest is the cause of Stephen's immaturity. In

her probing of his mind as he experiences fears, uneasiness, and

moments of triumph, we see simple cause-and-effect relationships.

It is hard to believe, at certain points, that Miss Porter has not

been reading Freud. Stephen's vomiting is a type of rejectionj

the paragraph about his concern over "a little end of him fl which

shows through a slit in his trousers shows an awareness of other

aspects of Freudian psychology. It may be a criticism of his

theories of infantile sexuality, for Stephen never connects his

"little end of him" with anything sensuous and masturbation seems

to be only Janet's idea. But l think it is more likely that Miss

Porter means to show the harmful inhibitions that a little boy can

acquire through handling by ignorant people, an aspect of sexuality

also stressed by Freud. His suspicions are put in his own terms:

fi • • • inside his clothes there was something bad the matter with

him. It worried him and confused him and he wondered about it.

The only people who never seemed to notice there was something wrong

with him were Mommanpoppa. They never called him a bad boy • • • • fI

(p. 92) It is not difficult to imagine that these misconceptions

in a four-year-old boy will have a great effect on the adolescent

and young man.

Yet why is this paragraph placed in the story? Except as one

• explanatory contributing factor of stephents withdrawal it is not

integral to the story and is linked with no other happening. A

 93

• smaller but similar incident is his dream of "the face of somebody

who came at night and stood over him and scolded him when he could

not move or get away." (p. 84) The face is aIl too obviously that

of his nurse Marjory, "terribly near, red and frowning under a

stiff white band." (p. 84) This dream, evidently meant as a pro-

jection of Stephen's fears into his sleeping fantasy, seems

analytical, as does the careful inclusion of three generations of

disorder and the mention of the little boy's sexual inhibitions.

Although Miss Porter does not overstep the point where art is

forgotten in the interests of scientific fact and theory, she

comes nearer to it in this story than my other chosen authors,

with the exc~ption of Peter Taylor. The straight line of the

disclosure of events reminds one of a case history.

b. Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale."

Peter Taylor's "A Spinster's Tale,,2 is the most explicitly

Freudian of these stories. In the childhood events which it des-

cribes one can gather the reason why the spinster narrator is

frightened of sexual experience and guess that these are meant to

be the circunstances which have kept her unmarried. A tale such

as this aspires to scientific precision as much as to fiction.

Where Miss Porter's story might be a case history, Taylor's might

be the record of what is revealed upon the psychiatrist's couch.

2 Peter Taylor, "A Spinster's Tale," A Long Fourth and Other

Stories (New York, 1948). References will be to this edition.

•
The story was first collected in this edition •
 94

• This short story is the only one l am studying which deals

specifically with the problems of puberty and its inclusion in

..... .....
this chapter perhaps needs some justification; Betsy is thirteen,

and later fourteen, years old. In a general discussion of the

author's methods of integrating the sentimental tradition with the

principles of psychology, Taylor's story forms a link between the

tales of Miss Porter and Aiken. He has used Freudian theory for

the enrichment of his story and the result illustrates the trap

into which an author who attempts this may fall. He is free of

the pathos of the Porter short story, but he has yet to integrate

his psychological theory with the interests of storytelling as

Aiken has done. As the one true adolescent touched upon in this

thesis Bets~ represents a contrast to the children Q~ the other

tales. Her problem has aIl the dynamic interactions of forces

which have led the short fiction writer to concentrate upon the

young people of her age group. She must be her age to have such

events affect her so deeply.

Taylor's most obvious use of psychoanalytic theory is in the

translation of Freud's specific dream-symbols into significant

details of the plot. Explanations of these symbols can be found

in the tenth lecture of Freud's A G~neral Introduction to P,pcho-

analysis. 3 AlI are sexual and aIl point to the blighting of the

3 Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis,

Authorized English Translat10n of the Rev~sed Ed1t10n by
Joan Riviere, with Prefaces by- Ernest Jones and G. Stanley

•
Hall (New York, 1952), pp. 156-177. The copyright date of
the original edition is 1920 •
 95

• young protagonist's efforts to comprehend and come to terms with

the world of men. It is probably possible to discover a sexual

explanation for each animate and inanimate object mentioned in

this story, but l shall mention only the most obvious ones which

would be recognized by the casual reader as having bearing on the

story. The male symbols obviate the sexual nature of Betsy's

terrors of the masculine world and comprise the largest group of

such items. Hands, war, horses, Mr. Speed's hat and cane, and

even the .flames of the fireplace are connected with this world.

The .female is associated with a room or house; thus Betsy's mother

is always remembered in connection with the "warmth," "comfort,"

and softness of her room. (p. 109) Even the .fact that the house

is on Church street is probably a specifie reference, fo~

"churches and chapels" are mentioned by Freud as female symbols

in this lecture. 4 Entry into such buildings, or into rooms, is

emblematic of sexual intercourse. It is not by chance, then, that

the Benton boys enter Betsy's sitting-room and even that she her-

self enters the men's den. The incident of Mr. Speed's admission

to the house is the ultimate violation of Betsy's female integrity

by the world of men, and it is described in explicitly erotic

detail. other symbolism which evolves about this fear of violation

is that of the loft ladder and "the long, red-carpeted stairway"

by which a man (her brother) ascends to her room. (p. 113) There

is also the use of the metaphor of "playing" with the opposite

• 4 Freud, Introduction, p. 163.

 96

•• sex -- the contrived "incident" in her bedroom, the chess game,

and the use of the word "game" in her good-bye to Henry Benton.

Two dreams (aside from the many daydreams) are mentioned in

the story and each makes use of the Freudian theory of displace-

ment, which is expounded in the ninth lecture of the volume

referred to above, as weIl as sex symbols. The last line of the

story, "It was only the other night that l dreamed l was a little

girl on Chur ch street again and that there was a drunk horse in

our yar.d," (p. 129) is probably meant as a fantasy of wish-fulfill-

ment. (The narrator regrets ber hast y action and would like to

relive it and correct her error.) The image of the horse out-of-

control and reckless with drink is that of the male in Betsy's

mind. The other dream of the enlarged hands, (p. 119) which

confuses her identity, is evidently a vacillating, suppressed

wish for the male penis, for hands too, are named sex symbols

by Freud. Peter Taylor is indeed anxious to pack aIl aspects of

a possible situation into his tale; he even adds, in Betsy's desire

to be struck by her brother, a wish for the sexual violence of

sadisme

\'Jhen one attempts to look beyond these symbols to the story

and narrative itself, one finds that there is little else of

interest. There is only the final discovery, relatively unstressed,

of a link of innate cruelty betweenthé opposed masculine and

feminine psyches. The story is th~ interaction of these symbols.

.' The plot action is almost wholly dependent upon the revelation of
 97

• their meanings. The activity of the reader during the course of

tha story is to diagnose the spinster's "hang-up." It is not an

enjoyment of style or theme. It is not an experience of the

"effect" which Poe emphasizes as important to short fiction.

The serious, heavy-handed inclusion of this "psychological"

symbolism here contrasts to its lighter use in such stories as

Sherwood Anderson's "The Egg." In Anderson's "memory" of a

childhood incident, what could be an overwhelmingly pretentious

symbol of the beginning of doomed lire and the shadow it has cast

over the narrator since he was a child)is given a humorous treat-

ment. The irony of what is here a symbol of infertility lands

itsèlf weIl to the wry tone of Anderson's tale. The story is

relaxed and open. By avoiding the tightly constructed web of

significant details. Anderson leaves room for speculation on

the nature of "the egg" and its impression upon the mind of a

small boy.

c. Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow."

When one speaks of Conrad Aiken's short story as a "psycho-

logical" tale, however, it is to discuss a carefully constructed

exegesis of the mind of a mentally ill child. v-Jhile the story

comes down heavily against the actual process of psychoanalysis,

as the coldness and futility of the "trial" scene attests, an

uncommon attempt has been made to view the- world from the inside

of the mind of a boy who is quickly s1ipping into a fantasy world

• of snow. Even if Aiken's continuing interest in psychoanalysis

 98

.' and his admissionthat he has been "profoundly" inrluenced by Freud

and his followers

5
were not proo:f of his knowledge in this area,

the reader would recognize the analytical bias oÏ this tale. Paul

is one of Aiken's "lost people."

Yet, unlike the psychological mechanics of the tales of 101iss

Porter and Peter Taylor, those of "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" are

excellently combined with the integrity of paul's consciousness.

They never undermine the narrative in the way that Taylor's do.

'-Je are never quite "outsidel! paul's mi'!ldj whan he laughs, for

e:>cample, 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 "voice" help to keep the tale l'Ii thin the

boy's consciousness. 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 psycholo-

gical 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 view-

point.

• 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 50 when one considers the elaborate diction of the

narrator. 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

~iJhat
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)

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. The

setting is almost too quiet, too idyllic. 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. "There

l'lere more important things. Miracles. Beyond the thoughts or

trees, mere elms • • • • Beyond the thoughts even or his own shoes,

which trod these sidewalks obediently, bearing a burden -- ~aE

above or elaborate mystery." (pp. 141-142) 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 considera-

tion of Paul's "schizophrenie" withdrawal into a "catatonie

6
trance." 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, Secret Snow,'"

The Explicator, XVIII (1960), 34.

•
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 character-

istics 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

2
that such writers remain in "the nursery of life and art." In

his quarrel with Salinger in particular and "the New Yorker school"

in general, he laments this facto l am not sure that it is neces-

sary;to do so. 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 selr-

examination 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 mother-

hood. 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 per-

ceptions 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. He is always y

treated sympathetically. 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 opposi-

tion, 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. The

stress upon childhood e}~erience by recent psychologists has given

new impetus to the inherited pattern, Ior it has validated the con-

cern 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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