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Book
ReviewSustained
Elegance of ElaborationGerms: a memoir of childhood. Richard Wollheim, 2004.
London: Waywiser Press; ISBN 1904130143, 263 pp., £7.99, paper
SAGE Publications, Inc.200710.1177/0967550706072259
HilaryDickinson
University of Greenwich
`Why
am I, who really am so similar, so different?' (p. 245). The question is about
why the author can't just flick the water out of his eyes after a shower or
a swim as other people seem to do but has to grope for a towel. But the question
could easily be a more general one, since a notion of being different from
other people pervades Richard Wollheim's memoir of child- hood. The commemorative
plaques in the church the family attended impressed him with their `pure Englishness,
evocative of rolling country- side... a world that I knew only from the back
of the car' (p. 39). The nearby houses in the Walton-upon-Thames of his early
childhood were lived in by `noisy, easy-going families' (p. 75) who had jolly
summer birth- day parties in the garden. In contrast, RW (as Wollheim will
be referred to from now on) was a solitary child: `My parents knew no other
parents, my nanny knew only a few other nannies' (p. 76) so he was rarely
invited to the jolly parties. Not that he longed for them; the excitement
of preparation for the few he was invited to led to tears, wetting himself
or trembling. At around 10 years old, he resolved on principle not to have
friends, since boys `with their interest in games and dirty jokes and lavatories
represented for me a dilution of the world of the imagination' (p. 76). Imagination
was fed by writers, such as Scott, Dickens and Charles Reade. Engaged in solitary
games, RW peopled the countryside with char- acters from Froissart and Malory.
Scott he experienced for the first time while convalescing from one of many
childhood illnesses, when still young enough to be read to by his governess.
His doctor considered that Scott was permissible so long as endnotes, appendices
and long descrip- tions were omitted. This didn't suit the young scholar convalescent
who threatened to scream if he suspected anything was being left out. Though
solitary in terms of coevals RW was a very much looked after child. There
was a nanny then, when illness cut short his early school career after four
and a half days, a French governess as well. Mademoiselle was soon replaced
by the much loved Miss King, she who was the reader of Scott. The first governess,
Mademoiselle, took looking after to a ludicrous extreme. Before going out
in winter her charge was dressed in scarf and
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overcoat
and given a silk scarf to cover his mouth with if there was a wind. The coat
was tightly buttoned and the fastening of each button reinforced with a safety
pin (p. 144). Then gloves. It was probably another obsession of Mademoiselle's
that led to her leaving as it conflicted with one of his mother's. Mrs Wollheim's
daily regime of house cleaning (which she had no need to do herself, a self-imposed
task that often delayed a later activ- ity of the day such as meeting her
husband for lunch at the Savoy Grill) was liable to an interruption that meant
she had to start a great chunk of the process over again. If someone inadvertently
opened a door while one large section of the house was being cleaned, germs
penetrated the cleaned section and polluted it (p. 142). The conflict with
Mademoiselle was that while Mrs Wollheim thought that germs lurked in the
house and needed to be swept out, Mademoiselle thought that germs surrounded
the house and must be prevented from getting in. In company, however, Mrs
Wollheim `presented herself as a dizzy hedonist' (p. 143). She was born Constance
Mary Baker, in London in 1899, into comfortable circumstances. But when her
father died a year later there were severe money problems. In spite of this
she attended a fin- ishing school in Paris and became a showgirl (respectable; chorus girls weren't). In a bid to become a proper actress she joined, in
1914, a the- atrical company that would play for the troops. This was how
she met RW's father, Eric Wollheim, who was manager of the company. Eric Wollheim
was born in Breslau in 1879. The family was Jewish, but RW says that he did
not know what religion his father was brought up in – a fact which
might indicate a paternal lack of committed interest in any religion, or on
the other hand, and equally likely, a lack of the kind of confiding relationship
between father and son that would discuss such matters. (At another point
in the memoir RW says that his father's family had converted to Christianity.)
At all events, RW's parents were married in St James's, Piccadilly, and Eric
Wollheim sometimes accompanied his son to church. RW was brought up as a churchgoer,
and in childhood took religion and prayer very seriously, though belief did
not last through ado- lescence. Eric Wollheim started his career as an impresario
in Germany, but came to London in 1911 to run a theatrical agency. From 1918
he was London manager of Diaghilev's Russian ballet company. RW had a brother,
three years older, and very little is said about this relationship. Possibly
they were little together because of boarding school. RW describes one holiday
that he spent with his nanny at a seaside resort in the kind of boarding house
where guests had to spend the day outdoors between the hours of nine thirty
and four. Meanwhile his parents and brother were holidaying on the lido with
members of the Russian ballet. No resentment is expressed over this – indeed the warmest feelings of love in Germs are, apart from Miss King, expressed
towards the nanny who
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accompanied
him on this holiday. There are no expressions of negative feeling towards
people, such as anger or jealousy, in Germs. There are, however, many glimpses
of an intense super-sensibility towards things and events in life: `I was
sure that God would understand the terrors of the night, or the pleasures
of food, or the love of books, or the lasciviousness of pictures, or the shame
of bedwetting' (p. 66). Trips to the cinema were reserved for winter, and
rainy afternoons. The latter evoked a special dread, that the sun might have
come out while RW and his mother were watching the film. The wet surfaces
glinting in the sun `a natural cause of joy to many ... stirred in me the
deepest darkest melancholy' (p. 45). One of the strangest of these extreme
reactions to ordinary things, and something mentioned several times, is utter
disgust at the smell of news- paper. This was not merely a childish revulsion,
as `the smell of newspa- per nauseated me then [i.e. as a child] as much as
it does now' (p. 89). RW has a memory of his two and a half year old self
connected with this nausea. The memory links his nanny reading, with fixed
attention, of the death of Queen Alexandra with his brother making spitballs
out of bits of newspaper and aiming them at the paper the nanny was reading
so that the face of the Queen in the photograph became `desecrated by spit,
and the smell' (p. 250). This is a rare example of a hint at explanation in
the memoir. For the most part the experiences of the child Wollheim are simply
recounted. Yet Germs is far from a naive memoir, unsurprisingly given the
author's deep interest, as a philosopher, in psychoanalysis. A `Dr S.', presumably
RW's analyst, is sometimes referred to. But there is nothing here of the
boredom or embarrassment a reader might fear of confessions from an analyst's
couch. It is a psychoanalysed life in that the reader feels that RW has understood
much of the process through which his super-sensibility, fears and shame have
come about, and any anguish from the past has been muted (and one detects
too a certain masochistic pleasure in these sensibilities). But the reader
is not called on to go through this process. In any account of Germs (such
as this review) it is hard to convey the sustained elegance of its elaboration
of the texture of a life.