All this was done very quietly, almost in pantomime. The voices around me in my early childhood were all gentle voices. Outright rudeness or meanness were unthinkable. Ours was a highly decorous life. Every evening, when my father came home from his office, my brother and I had to meet him at the door and kiss him. He would stoop to receive each kiss with a smile that was less affectionate than baffling. In the morning, we would repeat this ceremony and kiss him good-bye. Then, with my mother, we would go to the window and watch him down the street. As he reached the comer, he would wave once and be gone.
I loved my father dearly in those days. If he “had to work,” and did not get home until late, I would often lie awake listening until I heard him turn the knob of the front door. Only then, sometimes after midnight, would I fall asleep.
Yet when he left home in the morning, it was as if the sun had come out, and the image of my mother, which, when my father was home, seemed rather quiet and withdrawn, took over and dominated the house.
IV
In my earliest recollections of her, my mother is sitting in the lamplight, in a Windsor rocking chair, in front of the parlor stove. She is holding my brother on her lap. It is bed time and, in a thin sweet voice, she is singing him into drowsiness. I am on the floor, as usual among the chair legs, and I crawl behind my mother’s chair because I do not like the song she is singing and do not want her to see what it does to me. She sings:Au clair de la lune,
Mon ami, Pierrot,
Prete-moi ta Plume,
Pour écrire un mot.
Then the vowels darken ominously. My mother’s voice deepens dramatically, as if she were singing in a theater. This was the part of the song I disliked most, not only because I knew that it was sad, but because my mother was deliberately (and rather unfairly, I thought) making it sadder:Ma chandelle est morte,
Je n‘ai plus de feu;
Ouvre-moi la porte,
Pour l’amour de Dieu.
I knew, from an earlier explanation, that the song was about somebody (a little girl, I thought) who was cold because her candle and fire had gone out. She went to somebody else (a little boy, I thought) and asked him to help her for God’s sake. He said no. It seemed a perfectly pointless cruelty to me. The song continued to its sorry end while I crept farther into the shadows beyond the lamplight and thought how much I disliked my mother’s dramatic singing and how happy I would be when my brother fell asleep and she put him to bed.
Those earliest days of my childhood were probably among the happiest of my mother’s married life. But it seems to me that, even then, she always sang sad songs. She sang them in English, French and German—songs that I have seldom heard anyone else sing, and most of whose titles I did not know. Some of them I have come on unexpectedly over the years. The melody of one of them, a Southern song, of which I recall only a few bars that went with the words:AU those little colored girls,
Way down Mobile,
I suddenly recognized, as a grown man, in the stately, uncoiling theme of Khovantchina.
Another was a simple German song. Its melody is a theme in the first movement of Mahler’s First Symphony, of which somebody gave me a recording during the Hiss Case. Hearing that mournful phrase for the first time since I was a boy, and remembering the words that went with it:Allein, und doch nicht ganz allein,
Bin ich in meiner Einsamkeit.
(Alone, and yet not quite alone,
Am I in my great loneliness),
I felt my morale dissolve. For, like Lenin, who gave up listening to music because of the emotional havoc it played with him, I have always been extremely susceptible to it.
There was another song which I thought was about some poor soul trying to get into heaven and having rather a bad time of it. I later discovered it as the little maid’s song in Tennyson’s Guinevere: Late, late, so late,
And dark the night, and chill,
Late, late, too late,
Ye cannot enter now.
I am not sure that this is the way Tennyson wrote it, but that is how my mother sang it. My dislike of my mother’s dramatic singing went so deep that even today I cannot bear to have anyone sing around me.
For that unstaunchable undertone of sadness, my mother had reasons that lay far back in her own childhood and young womanhood. She told me about them so often, and in such detail, that I seem to have lived through her life with her.
Most of her stories began with her father, my grandfather Charles Whittaker, who had died a year or two before I was born. He was the heroic presence of my childhood, and, though I did not then know what he looked like, he seemed more alive to me than many of the people whom I knew. He was born in Scotland. When he was a small boy, his father, a revolutionist of some kind, apparently a Scottish nationalist, took him in his arms, walked into the Glasgow garrison, and invited the soldiers to revolt. They declined. For this act, my great-grandfather was to have been transported to Tasmania. But friends in the government arranged to have him slip away to the United States. The Whittakers settled in Wisconsin, about 1849.
In his early teens, my grandfather Whittaker ran away from private school to fight the Civil War for the North. He was little more than a boy, and the only regiment that would accept him was a convict regiment. With this group of jailbirds, he was stationed at Harper’s Ferry, not very far from where I now live. From there, tired of the inaction, and probably of the company, my grandfather slipped off to Canada to visit a distant relative, who, to make matters worse, was also a relative of Jefferson Davis. Somehow he learned, or inferred, that active fighting was about to begin. He rejoined his regiment and was pardoned, for bravery on the battlefield. Throughout his campaigns, he carried on his back and studied the massive Greek and Latin lexicon which I now have. For, like me, he was a student of languages all his life. Like me, he spoke German fluently. Like me, he read French, Spanish and Italian. And it was from his old Ollendorff grammars that I began to study those languages.
One incident of his soldiering made a lasting impression on me. In a little engagement at Snicker’s Gap, in Virginia, my grandfather and the others found themselves advancing without cover across a line of Confederate fire. One man became so nervous that he jumped from behind my grandfather, whose body was protecting him, in front of my grandfather, and was instantly shot dead. That was in my mind when I used to say sometimes to nervous friends, during the Hiss Case: “Let’s not jump out of line”—for the past reaches out incalculably to touch the present.
After the war, my grandfather married Mary Blanchard, of a refugee Huguenot family that had reached the United States after several generations in Ireland. Even in her ravaged old age, my grandmother Whittaker was one of the most majestic women I have ever seen. Later, my grandfather published the first literary magazine in the Northwest, became superintendent of schools in Milwaukee, was a successful inventor (the hat rack under theater seats, the hot and cold water faucet, which, for some time, he manufactured himself). He also owned a brass factory in Chicago. The workers were German radicals and he had trouble with them. My mother sometimes told me how my grandfather borrowed from them several German pamphlets by Marx and Engels (two German “anarchists,” she explained), which he studied in an effort to find out what was stirring up his men. In that way, I first heard the names of the founders of Communism.
My grandfather, like most Whittakers and most Chamberses, had no sense at all about money. He made and lost several small fortunes. But in their prosperous days, my grandparents’ social life was so crowded with spanking teams, smart carriages and smart parties, that they had little time for their only child. So, at the age of five, my mother was packed off, a lost and lonely little girl, to a private school in Racine, which happened to be an extremely good one. There she remained most of her girlhood, learning the proper manners, reading the proper books. There she grew up with the scions of other rising middle-class Western families—“the Case girls” (farm machinery), the Horlicks (malted milk) and others whose patents of bus
iness nobility have slipped my mind. Even as a child, I used to wonder why, if all these great people were such dear friends, they never came to visit us.
Those golden girlhood days in Racine, with its beautiful old homes, were my mother’s land of lost content. For she turned from that loved life just when she should have entered upon it most fully. Just when she should have gone to college in the East, as she planned, my grandfather Whittaker lost his last fortune. He was too old, too tired and beaten, ever to make another. To support herself and her parents, my mother, untrained for any useful work, did the most sensible and profitable thing a beautiful girl could do. She went on the stage. In those days, the 1890’s, it was an almost scandalous course, and by taking it my mother shut the door to the only world she loved and longed for quietly behind her.
She was desperately out of place on the stage for whose atmosphere her whole past unfitted her. She deplored what she called its “moral laxness.” Even Isadora Duncan, probably the most gifted of her theatrical friends (after the Russian Revolution she was to dance the Marseillaise barefoot down the streets of astonished Moscow), seemed to my mother “to lack refinement.”
Then my mother met my father, who, if scarcely refined in the sense she meant, was gentle and quiet. He could talk about books, pictures and plays. They married. But she never quite accepted my father as a social or intellectual equal. In her heart of hearts, my mother always felt, or at least she made me feel, that she had married the cook.
So she buried herself in the little Long Island village and resolved “to live,” as she said, “entirely for her children.” Some day, she hoped, the children would find their way back, translating her with them, to that upper-middle-class world which was, for her, the earthly paradise. But I think that something told her—perhaps by then she knew too much about chance and time—that this would not happen. And that is why she sang in the sad voice from which, as a child, I recoiled:Late, late, too late,
Ye cannot enter now.
V
My father had never wanted to buy the house on Long Island, in the first place. It was big, built like a nest of boxes and painted a faded yellow. Over the years, the paint faded still more and peeled off in an incurable acne. The shutters, that had once been green, weathered to a washed-out blue. Some became unhinged and had to be taken down. That made some of the windows look like lash-less eyes. My father would never give my mother money to repaint the house. I believe that I was in college before my mother somehow saved or earned enough money to have the house repainted—at least fifteen years after we moved into it.
The kitchen was an addition to the original house. It had been made by moving an outbuilding against the main structure. The joining at the room was never tight, and in spring when the snows melted, or during rains, water would flood in through the joining until the kitchen floor was awash. We used to rush up pots, pans and floor rags, but whoever passed from the kitchen to the next room, which was known as “the dog room,” had to step through a little Niagara. My father refused to have this leak repaired or even to notice that it was leaking. We lived with it for ten or twelve years until my brother, who early showed unusual skill with tools and for practical jobs, built himself a ladder, begged some pitch from a road gang and got tin from somewhere else. Then he climbed up to the roof and mended the leak.
“The dog room” was completely bare and was used as a spacious kennel for our part-bull dog whom my father named “Taurus.” This was considered very clever, and I sometimes heard my mother explaining to people that taurus is Latin for bull. There was never enough furniture in the other rooms, either, and what there was was hodge-podge and nondescript, though I believe that both my parents were under the impression that some of the older pieces were rarities. But they had a habit of coming unglued.
The paper on most of the walls was faded and browned and sometimes bubbled and peeled off. Where a new partition had been run up, the walls were rough, unpapered plaster. At one end of the living room, which was also the dining room (in those days we still ate at the table; later we gave up the constraining practice), a sizable piece of ceiling fell down one day, exposing the laths. My mother endured this for some time. Then, she donned overalls (rather a daring act in those days) and stretched and glued cheesecloth over the hole. My brother and I admired her skill. We were even more interested by the fact that mice soon nested behind the cheesecloth. It sagged where their feet made little twinkling bulges. This fascinated our cat which would sit for hours on the floor below, watching the cheesecloth with drooling bafflement. My father had named the cat Claude (i.e., “clawed”) because it had been altered. This, too, was considered very clever and was told to people in whispers, which were unnecessary, for Claude was dead before I grasped the point.
My mother often begged my father to give her the money to repaper the house. He always refused. She had overridden him in buying the house, and he was determined that he would do nothing to improve it. As long as he lived, he never did.
At last my mother made a little parcel of her jewelry—a fairly pathetic hoard, which included a brooch watch her father had given her and some rings and pins, chiefly of sentimental value. These she took to New York and pawned—an act that made her skin crawl, as she told me. With the money she obtained, she had the walls repapered. She expected my father to be pleased. Instead, he studiedly ignored the papering while it was going on and made no comment at all when it was finished. My mother wept and her sobs were dreadful to hear.
My father also refused to give her the money to redeem her jewelry and she lost all of it.
VI
In justice to my father, it must be said that he regarded himself first and foremost as an artist. How he lived meant little or nothing to him and he had no intention of surrendering to middle-class standards of comfort. He would not have said middle class. He would have said “other people’s” standards; for, in matters of art and culture, he felt himself divided by a deep gulf from all but a very tiny circle of mankind. He was withering in his comments on those who could not make the small talk he loved about art shows and plays, and having discovered that there were few fellow spirits around him on Long Island, he rode the commuter trains a solitary recluse, never having, for over twenty years, more than a nodding acquaintance with one or two others in that swarming fellowship.
Just what his own standards were, it is difficult to say. When I became old enough to wonder and observe, it seemed to me that he had no general view of the world at all, no coherent system of ideas, not even a suspicion that ideas have a history, a force, an interaction, and that art is one expression of them. This lack, which would have been perfectly natural in somebody else, I found rather strange in a man who was so self-consciously artistic. At last, to my astonishment, I was forced to conclude that for art in its great forms—painting, sculpture, architecture—my father had no real liking at all. I first suspected this when, in our occasional dreary tours of the Metropolitan Museum, he would rush me through the great paintings down to the medieval armor or textiles. I had the feeling that greatness annoyed him in a personal way, like a challenge to which he felt unequal, and that he endured it only as a backdrop to his real interest, which was in ornament costume, scenery—the minutiae and surfaces of things.
Later on, he developed a passion for grand opera. (E. B. White, in the New Yorker, has caught a blurred glimpse of him in that phase.) His interest was not in the music, for which he cared little, but in the spectacle, for which he cared a great deal. He rarely, if ever, listened to symphonic or chamber music. In his later years, he became an omnivorous reader of the moderns—Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, Hauptmann, Tolstoy, Nietzsche—men who had struck the chords to which man’s spirit was to reverberate for a century—all lay on his table from time to time. They were always library books. He never cared to own them. Curiously enough, he did own three volumes of Dostoyevsky—The House of the Dead, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment—which stood in his bookcase between D. G. Rossetti’s poems, Sc
hnitzler’s The Green Cockatoo and a half-dozen King Arthur books in which my father prized the Howard Pyle illustrations (Pyle had been one of his art teachers). My father and I were reading the great Europeans at about the same time. But I never discovered what they meant to him, or what, if anything, he made of them, for we were scarcely speaking to each other at that time.
Nevertheless, our house was a peeling outpost of what both my father and mother would have summed up as “culture.” Culture was visible in the overflowing bookcases and bookshelves, which were everywhere, and culture was visible in the pictures that covered the walls. Both provided curious clues to the character of my parents’ tastes and minds. On one wall of the living room was a big India print against which was hung a big, round, flat Spanish wool basket. Nearby, was a line of framed color prints—illustrations for (if I remember rightly) Goblin Market. As a child, I did not like these, just as, later on, I was never able to share my parents’ enthusiasm for Arthur Rackham. There were other framed prints: a Holbein, a Velasquez, Van Dyke’s Charles I, Dürer’s Melancholia and a Ritter, Tod und Teufel. And there was, of course, a Mona Lisa and a sizable plaster cast of the Venus de Milo. At one end of an old couch, hung a print of a 19th century Italian painter which showed a hooded skeleton, beckoning to its embrace a line of proletarian figures with bundles—rather like a scene in an Ellis Island waiting room. During the frightful toothaches that often tormented my brother and me (nobody paid much attention to our teeth), this couch was our refuge, and we would lie for agonized hours, gloomily studying that print, which was titled: Il Conforto—Death, the Comforter.
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