Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen
The last time I read an autobiography was more than forty years ago - Philosopher at Large : An Intellectual Autobiography by Mortimer J. Adler. I read the book since, at the time, I was interested in the Great Books of the Western World and Mortimer Adler spearheaded the project.
I mention this to let readers know memoirs and personal reminiscences are generally not to my taste. For me, a recounting of day-to-day happenings is not nearly as provocative as a shifting into the fantastic via imagination. By way of example, here's a childhood episode as recounted by one of my favorite authors:
CEMENT by Barry Yourgrau
I am at the beach with my mother. I bury her up to her neck in sand, "Alright, now please let me out," she says finally. "It''s hard to breathe." Only if you pay me a tremendous amount of cash," I inform her, teasing. I start to dig her out, but I can't. The sand is like stone. It's turned to cement. "Please, stop joking, get me out," my mother pants. "I can't breathe." I'm not joking, something's wrong," I protest. I scratch at the cement desperately. I pound on it with my fists. The surf surges around us, splashing my mother in the face. "Help me, help me," she bleats, wildly. "I''m trying. I can't do anything.!" I cry. "I'll have to get help!" I rush down the beach, waving and shouting, frantic. Some men are drinking beer by a pickup truck. They run back with me with shovels and pickaxes.
I wander about holding my head in my hands. They smash up the cement, their pickaxes swinging high and low, violently. "Careful, oh please be careful," I plead, walking back and forth, helpless. One of them crouches by my mother, cupping her chin out of the water. Her eyes are haggard with terror. "Can't breathe . . . can't breath . . . " she keeps bleating, through clenched teeth. "You'll be okay, you'll be okay," I promise her desperately.
Finally they have her out. The seawater gushes and roams in the rubble. Other, different men appear, they bear my mother over the dunes, carrying her high in a litter. An oxygen line runs into her nose from a cylinder. A catheter bag sways from a little handle, its hose running up under her pale thighs.
I follow behind in a distraught daze, plodding through deep sand carrying our sandy beach towels, my mother's much-ornamented beach bag. "How did it happen, how did it happen?" I moan, over and over again. A small plane flies low over the beach, dragging a long, fluttering sign. I give out a sobbing cry, imagining the sign bearing her frail name, the helpless dates and particulars of her obituary.
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However, I did enjoy many parts of Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen, especially when she speaks of her connection to writing and poetry. Here are several direct quotes along with my comments:
"She was foreign and strange, and I thought that I had been exchanged at birth and she wasn't my mother at all."
Tove recounts her feelings as a preschooler, sensing she belongs with another mother. Our modern society has a name for this sense that usually doesn't hit women and men until they are young adults: alienation.
"I sleep to escape the night that trails past with window with its train of terror and evil and danger."
When Tove begins to venture outside with or without her mother, her sense of alienation deepens - not only does Tove feel she belongs to another mother; she intuits she belongs to another world.
"All of my childhood books where his (her Father), and on my fifth birthday he gave me a wonderful edition of Grimms' Fairy Tales, without which my childhood would have been gray and dreary and impoverished."
Ah, even as a five-year-old, Tove comprehends there is a world where she can escape the trap of a deadening associating with the adults she's fated to live with: a book!
Tove's father tells her that Maxim Gorky was a great poet. To which, Tove tells him, "I want to be a poet too!" Tove then relates that "Immediately he frowned and said severely, "Don't be a fool! A girl can't be a poet." Tove's subsequent reflection, "Offended and hurt, I withdrew into myself again while my mother and Edvin laughed at the crazy idea. I vowed never to reveal my dreams to anyone again, and i kept this vow throughout my childhood."
So, so sad. And not all that uncommon - a child expresses a desire to be an artist or writer or musician and the inevitable putdown by an adult. The reason? Mainly because literature and the arts represent a threat to the uptight, constipated world created by legions of conforming mediocre stiffs.
Tove Ditlevsen documents her confrontation with her family and the world as she moves through her childhood, all the while deepening her love of books and writing, expressed in language that's clear, straightforward and remarkably poetic.
Danish author Tove Ditlevsen, 1917-1976
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However, I did enjoy many parts of Childhood by Tove Ditlevsen, especially when she speaks of her connection to writing and poetry. Here are several direct quotes along with my comments:
"She was foreign and strange, and I thought that I had been exchanged at birth and she wasn't my mother at all."
Tove recounts her feelings as a preschooler, sensing she belongs with another mother. Our modern society has a name for this sense that usually doesn't hit women and men until they are young adults: alienation.
"I sleep to escape the night that trails past with window with its train of terror and evil and danger."
When Tove begins to venture outside with or without her mother, her sense of alienation deepens - not only does Tove feel she belongs to another mother; she intuits she belongs to another world.
"All of my childhood books where his (her Father), and on my fifth birthday he gave me a wonderful edition of Grimms' Fairy Tales, without which my childhood would have been gray and dreary and impoverished."
Ah, even as a five-year-old, Tove comprehends there is a world where she can escape the trap of a deadening associating with the adults she's fated to live with: a book!
Tove's father tells her that Maxim Gorky was a great poet. To which, Tove tells him, "I want to be a poet too!" Tove then relates that "Immediately he frowned and said severely, "Don't be a fool! A girl can't be a poet." Tove's subsequent reflection, "Offended and hurt, I withdrew into myself again while my mother and Edvin laughed at the crazy idea. I vowed never to reveal my dreams to anyone again, and i kept this vow throughout my childhood."
So, so sad. And not all that uncommon - a child expresses a desire to be an artist or writer or musician and the inevitable putdown by an adult. The reason? Mainly because literature and the arts represent a threat to the uptight, constipated world created by legions of conforming mediocre stiffs.
Tove Ditlevsen documents her confrontation with her family and the world as she moves through her childhood, all the while deepening her love of books and writing, expressed in language that's clear, straightforward and remarkably poetic.
Danish author Tove Ditlevsen, 1917-1976
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