Secret Spaces of Childhood - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0472068458 ISBN 13: 9780472068456

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2003

Synopsis

Whether it's real or imaginary, every child has a secret space, and this remarkable book explores them all. For some it's a treehouse or a hidden spot beneath a bush; for others it's a private psychic refuge--a favorite book, or a dollhouse that becomes a stage for a young imagination. As the more than four dozen pieces collected here reveal, such spaces play a key role in a child's development and retain a symbolic power that resonates throughout our adult lives. No reader will put this book down without experiencing a rush of familiar memories and new insights into that bygone world. Poet Diane Ackerman evokes that "parallel universe behind the eyes / which no one shared, or dare discover"; Paul Brodeur recalls the "fort" where he and his brother defended Cape Cod against invaders in World War II; Nobelist Wole Soyinka offers a poignant verse portrait of Africa's lost children; and Paul West remembers youthful encounters with his eccentric neighbors Edith and Osbert Sitwell. Elsewhere, Robert Coles summons up memories of his first years as a doctor and a wise young patient who taught him a lesson he has never forgotten, and Mary Galbraith shows how childhood loss is transformed into art in Ludwig Bemelmans's classic Madeline. And these are just a few of the gems in a treasury that includes Anne Frank, the controversial photographs of Sally Mann and the crudely eloquent drawings of young South African refugees, clinical case studies and profoundly personal imagery. A perceptive, thought-provoking work for general readers, Secret Spaces of Childhood opens a wonderful window on the world of the young. Elizabeth Goodenough is Lecturer in Comparative Literature, the Residential College, University of Michigan.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Goodenough is Lecturer in Comparative Literature, the Residential College, University of Michigan.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Secrets Spaces of Childhood

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2003University of Michigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-06845-6

Contents

Introduction, Elizabeth Goodenough..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................1A SYMPOSIUM ON SECRET SPACES Wayne Booth, Paul Brodeur, Frederick Buechner, Peggy Ellsberg, Nol Riley Fitch, Mark Jonathan Harris, Jim Harrison, Jerry Herron, Paul Karlstrom, Nan Knighton, Philip Levine, William Meezan, Valerie Miner, John Hanson Mitchell, Kathleen Dean Moore, Robin C. Moore, April Newlin, Joyce Carol Oates, Zibby Oneal, Eugene F. Provenzo, Jr., Paul Roazen, Robyn Sarah, Lore Segal, David Shields, Tobin Siebers, David Small, Cathy Song, Ellen Handler Spitz, Ilan Stavans, John R. Stilgoe, Stephen Trimble, Marina Warner, Paul West, Edward O. Wilson.....................19The Secret Speaks, Nancy Willard................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................113Door, Julie Jordan Hanson.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................114Fields of Vision, Roald Hoffmann................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................116Mouse History, Molly McQuade....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................118On Little Boys and Their Guns, Brad Davis.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................120A Room in California, 1954, Laurence Goldstein..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................121The Children of This Land, Wole Soyinka.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................124Book of Hours, Cathy Song.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................126Boy of Sea, Allison Eir Jenks...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................127Japanese Plums, James Nolan.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................128La Isla de los Monstros, Virgil Suarez..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................130Negotiating Boundaries, Regenerating Ruins: The "Secret Spaces of Childhood" Exhibition, Margaret Price.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................135An Exhibition of Remembered Hide-Outs: Graphics Portfolio following pg..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................150Peeking through the Curtain: Narratives as the Boundary between Secret and Known, Susan Engel...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................153Like a Fable, Not a Pretty Picture: Holocaust Representation in Roberto Benigni and Anita Lobel, Adrienne Kertzer...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................167Children with a Secret, Kathleen Coulborn Faller................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................189The Camera of Sally Mann and the Spaces of Childhood, James Christen Steward....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................204Special Place-What Is That? Significant and Secret Spaces in the Lives of Children in a Johannesburg Squatter Camp, Louise Chawla...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................215PRIVAT (sic) KEEP OUT: The Diary as Secret Space, Joan W. Blos..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................236Primal Postcards: Madeline as a Secret Space of Ludwig Bemelmans's Childhood, Mary Galbraith....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................245Writing from the Secret Annex: The Case of Anne Frank, Karein K. Goertz.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................254In the Memory Mines, Diane Ackerman.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................271The Generosity of Arpeggios and Ravens, Thylias Moss............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................284My Life among the Dolls; or How I Became a Radical Feminist Playwright, Carolyn Gage............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................290Spaces Within: The Portable Interiors of Childhood, U. C. Knoepflmacher.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................297Children as Observing Critics and Skeptics, Robert Coles........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................309Telepathy and Other Imitations, Abdon Ubidia....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................319Satan in All His Glory, Karen Heuler............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................326Blue Dog in the Crazy Truck, Catherine Ryan Hyde................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................338Butterfly Meat, Wanda Coleman...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................352

Chapter One

A SYMPOSIUM ON SECRET SPACES

As part of Secret Spaces of Childhood, a letter went out to authors inviting them to contribute a brief commentary to a forum on the general topic. Along with the memoirs, essays, fiction, poetry, graphic artwork, and book reviews, this symposium is intended to help provide an iconography or conceptual map of the regions of childhood. The general commission posed to authors was the following:

Please undertake an autobiographical exercise, at least as an opening into the subject, "Secret Spaces of Childhood." Describe a significant private realm of your own early life that has left vivid images in your memory. Feel free to speculate on why this space or place was so meaningful to you, and whether it has resonated in your later life. Feel free, also, to extend your speculations to the subject in general and speak about one or more "secret spaces" that provoke or engage your imagination, from the experience of other children, or from the arts, and why you find these sites so compelling.

The commission was not meant to be prescriptive, but suggestive, and what follows provides a striking variety of places and behaviors, in a variety of prose styles, all of the commentaries sharing the condition of being intensely memorable vignettes. From them readers can make some conclusions about the situations and spaces that need preserving and extending because of the salutary influence they exert upon the human imagination and the human spirit.

Wayne Booth

A Rhetoric of Fiction George M. Pullman Professor of English Emeritus, University of Chicago

I can remember so many secret spaces, starting about age four, that it's hard to resist doing a whole book on them. When I was six, my father died suddenly of Addison's disease, and memory says that life with my mother and my two-year-old sister was overturned in ways that no written record could reveal. Somehow from then on I led what seems to me now not just a double but a multiple life:

-the perpetual weeper teased as a "sissy" by all the non-weepers vs. the "man of the family" that my devastated mother nagged me to be;

-the mean, teasing brother and cantankerous son vs. the smiling, loving, helpful "young man" whom my grandparents observed-most of the time;

-the thief stealing notebooks and pencils and even an occasional book vs. the pious Mormon boy heading already toward not just a spot in Heaven but, as a male rising rank by rank in the priesthood, achieving ultimate Godhood of another "world."

And so on.

When I turn from memory to my early diaries, begun at age fourteen, I don't find anything about the weeping sissy or my mother's nagging or my occasional thievery. Rather I find three sharply contrasting "Wayne C.'s" (my official name had been "Clayson" until my father, Wayne C., died). Perhaps most prominent is the would-be hero, the egoist aspiring to be honored as "at the top," in every direction. He's the one who proudly records, a year or so later, "Have been accepted for membership in the Book of the Month Club." Then there is the poverty-driven pursuer of cash, willing to work hard delivering and selling newspapers, or working for twenty-five cents an hour on a farm, proud about being able to save money by gluing rubber soles to worn-out shoes; his mother takes in less than $100 a month as an overworked elementary school teacher, and she is always short of cash (I wonder why the diary never records that he would occasionally pick her purse). Often overridding these two and all the others, there is the self revealed in frequent expressions of anguished guilt: the would-be saint, a pious, devout Mormon, struggling with an insurmountable awareness of character flaws, including self-reproach about pride and ambition (and implicit awareness of more serious misdeeds).

The most striking-and most secret-moment of conflict among the diverse "Wayne C.'s" is only half-revealed in separate diary entries. The conflict was discovered, accidentally, by only two people: his mother and his newspaper boss. He began delivering newspapers shortly before starting the diary, and he soon found his boss insisting that he sell subscriptions.

For quite a while he failed to sell any subscriptions at all, and he never became very good at it. Yet the diary makes him sound successful from the beginning, and often boasts about increasing sales totals. What he is willing to boast about is amusingly revealed by the following entry, written after selling "extras" on the main street of a town with 3000 inhabitants.

That inept salesman soon got captured by the excitement of sales contests. The egoist wanted to win, to be "honored" as number one, honor being seen as reducible to whatever prize was offered.

The company gave every delivery boy a small cash gift for each subscription sold. Naturally the money-grubber self wanted to earn a lot of money, while the honors-seeker figured out that since the cash gift for each subscription was almost large enough to pay for a full month of deliveries, he could chalk up a fake subscription at very small cost. So his divided selves faced a dilemma: if he entered fake subscriptions, his chance of winning the contest went up fast, while his income went down only a small amount for each subscription. Which was more important, fame or cash income? The egoist won, hands down, and his subscription rate went up and up, finally leading to his winning a contest.

No hint there of any guilt about cheating. A few pages later he boasts that he has been chosen by the bishop (the head of the congregation) to become "the supervisor of one of the Deacon's quorums. I consider this quite an honor." Again there's no hint of any conflict between that pious achievement and what he is doing each month as he records fake subscriptions.

Suddenly the whole episode, with its fame-winning facade, crashes: he contracts Bright's disease and hears a doctor speculate about possible death. He has to turn over his routes and records to the boss, and they reveal a total jumble of dishonest subscriptions and careless juggling of data: a huge cash debt (actually quite small, as I consider it now), and incontrovertible evidence of non-existent subscriptions.

His boss turns out to be a generous man: he waits until the boy is back on his feet and attending school again, after two months at home, before he shocks the mother by revealing his discoveries. He did not turn Wayne C. in to any authorities; all he insisted on was some more work, without pay, until the losses had been paid off.

Does the diary reveal the truth of any of this? Not at all. It talks as if Wayne C. were now simply working a few hours again for his old boss but in a different job. Does it confess to any guilt about it? Not at all. While confessing guilt about masturbating and about being egotistical and about being "too critical" and about "boasting too much," it never acknowledges that the crazy desire to be number one had produced an atrocious hypocrite reveling in being a winner. Occasionally the later entries do, like this report, reproach the boy strongly for his ego-driven aspirations. But they seldom reveal openly what memory records: many other moments when the would-be saint conceals his struggle with desire for fame and desire for money.

I'm naturally tempted to conclude by boasting a bit (oh, yes, I still have to deal with such temptations: I hope, for example, that this account will appeal to many readers) by celebrating the boy's grappling with the very theme of this collection: secrecy, and its limits. Aware that he has many faults, and that he has revealed many faults in his diary entries, he wonders about just who should read what. In the middle of his sixteenth year, he concludes his first volume with a twelve-page confessional about his many faults, including the "sinful" fact of having "periodical sexual excretions," some of them by "violent physical agitation producing the flow of liquid." (He apparently does not yet know the word "semen.") Then he says, "I still don't know whether I should write this or not. I wish that I had a more adequate brain to be able to know what to do.... I cannot blame this sin on not knowing of its being a sin, because I knew it was so.... I have heartily repented and have tried & succeeded to keep from repeating." Which of course could not have been true.

But then, still to my astonishment, he addresses directly-and in a sense honestly-the question of silence. He turns to the frontispiece of what he labels Volume I, and writes the following:

BOOK 1 To Wayne C. Booth

from Grandma Booth August 15, 1935 August, 1937 To be read only by my wife, whoever she may be & other people older than at least 17 years of age, at which age my own children girls as well as boys shall be permitted to read it. (sounds rather simple)

So the sixteen-year old has decided that at least one of his secret spaces should no longer be kept secret-provided readers are at least six months older than he is as he writes!

Paul Brodeur

The Stunt Man Staff writer, The New Yorker, 1958-1996

It was the summer of 1942, and our family had made its annual migration from Boston to a rented cottage on Duxbury Beach, some forty miles south of the city. My father came down on weekends; my mother spent her days at the cottage tending my infant sister; and my brother and I, clad in bathing suits that had faded and dwindled into ragged loincloths, roamed freely from morning until night. The beach was a sandbar peninsula seven miles long, with the ocean on one side and Duxbury Bay on the other, and, except for a few summer people like us, who lived in cottages near the mainland, and some Coast Guardsmen out at Gurnet Point, it was uninhabited. A dirt road that ended at the cottage colony and a wooden bridge that rambled across the bay on piles, a mile farther along the peninsula, were the only routes of access. On Saturdays and Sundays picnickers came over the bridge and spread themselves upon the sand, but during the week the beach was deserted.

Like all boys at the seashore, my brother and I were beachcombers. We poached quahogs, collected driftwood, captured minnows trapped in tidal pools, and filled gunny sacks with pop bottles left behind by picnickers. But, above all else, we considered ourselves patriots. We salvaged tinfoil for the war effort from discarded cigarette packages, helped local residents dry sea moss to collect nitrates for munitions makers, and used the pop-bottle refunds to buy Victory stamps at the Post Office.

The war affected us in many ways that summer. There was a strict blackout every night, and when we went outside before bedtime, the unaccustomed darkness and the profound sea made us feel close and vulnerable to the conflict. Wreckage washed ashore from ships sunk by U-boats, and each day we poked through fresh piles of debris, vaguely aware that we were examining the flotsam of catastrophe. The grownups talked incessantly of a submarine that had surfaced off the shore during World War I and lobbed a few shells into the marshland behind the beach. Had the Germans been aiming at the old Cable Station? Would they try again? The speculation of our elders filled us with delicious tension. The tin cans my brother and I were forever tossing into the waves became submarines, and the rocks we threw at them depth charges, and the constant vigil we maintained for flotsam, pop bottles, and marine life took on a new dimension. For now we were patrolling a stretch of the coast-a strategic flank of the republic.

As it happened, our favorite place to play-indeed, our secret position of defense-was an abandoned duck-hunting camp that lay hidden in the dunes several miles beyond the old bridge and almost halfway out to Gurnet Point. The camp was a rambling frame-and-tarpaper affair, upon which time and the elements had wrought a deceptive camouflage. Winds and winter storms had so shifted the dunes that it was nearly buried. Foxtail and beach-plum bushes had taken root in sand covering the rooftop, and only in a hollow on the leeward side was any part of the building visible. Here my brother and I had torn away some rotted boards and fashioned an entrance.

The interior of the camp was cavernous and dank. It consisted of four rooms, three of which were half-filled with sand that had sifted down through cracks in the roof. In the largest room, there were several bunks with mildewed mattresses, a rusted iron stove, some overturned chairs, and a long table. For us, these were the furnishings of a bunker from which we operated against the foe.

A typical day found us lying on the summit of a nearby dune, waiting to ambush enemy saboteurs who were disembarking from their rubber boats. When they came into range, we unleashed a volley of shots at them from toy wooden rifles. Then we retreated to the invisible fastness of our fort and hid until they stumbled, with Teutonic stupidity, into our line of fire, giving us an opportunity to decimate them with additional volleys fired through apertures in the rotting planks. Fierce struggles took place as the last fanatic attackers breached our bastion. It was hand-to-hand for more than an hour, as we backed slowly into a corner, each forefinger a revolver that barked incessantly, firing at Nazis who were climbing through holes in the roof and dropping grotesquely dead at our feet.

On one of these days, reality intruded upon our game in the form of an explosion that sent a shower of sand upon us from the sagging roof above our heads. The beach, it turned out, was being bombed and mock-strafed by low-flying Army airplanes taking part in a training exercise being conducted by a National Guard regiment that had rumbled out across the planks of the old bridge that connected the peninsula to the mainland. The officers whom we encountered as we tried to run home seemed almost as badly frightened as we when they realized that they had failed to clear the beach properly, which is how (after being sworn to secrecy) my brother and I came to be adopted for one whole week as regimental mascots, and, to the envy of all our friends, were allowed to eat with the soldiers in their mess tent, help them dig foxholes, wave signal flags, stand inspections, and walk guard.

The saddest day of my life till then was the day my brother and I stood at attention, after the last tents had been struck and a long line of soldiers had given the beach a final policing, and watched a column of trucks and jeeps rattle back over the old wooden bridge and on to God only knows how many other beaches.

Seventeen years later, not long after I began what would become a thirty-eight-year career as a staff writer at The New Yorker, the magazine published a short story of mine entitled "A War Story." It was a first-person account of the events of the summer I have just described, and it began with a sentence that reads, "This is one of those stories that, for reasons of honor, have had to be suppressed."

That wasn't true, of course, but merely a literary conceit to explain tongue in cheek why I hadn't written the story before. At the time-it was 1959-I had no idea that I would spend most of my tenure at The New Yorker unraveling the dark secrets of the manufacturers of asbestos products, and those of other captains of industry, who were inflicting disease upon their workers and poisoning the land, as well as those of government officials, who fostered the climate of secrecy that cloaked so much of our national life during the Cold War.

It may be revealing that in a 1997 memoir, Secrets: A Writer in the Cold War, which gives an account of my experiences as an investigative journalist, I include a few sentences about the adventure that befell my brother and me on Duxbury Beach in the summer of 1942, and a longer section about a family secret that my parents kept from me. Having been sworn to secrecy about what had happened on the beach by officers of the National Guard regiment, we never breathed a word of it to our parents. Nor did they ever tell me about my father's previous marriage and a half brother to whom I had been given almost the same name, even though I must have suspected something about it and him at an early age.

Like everyone else, I have been touched as a child by secrets.

Today, a pair of carved decoys from the old duck hunting camp sit on a shelf in the living room of my home on Cape Cod. They remind me of the secret place in which my brother and I waged our fantasy war, of how lucky we were to have been so young, and of the power of secrets kept and those revealed. (Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0472068458
• ISBN 13: 9780472068456
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368
• Editor: Goodenough Elizabeth N.