The Profanation of the Child

...Beyond this, there is the 16-year-old in Paul Bowles's limpidly nauseating "Pages from Cold Point" who seduces his own father, luring him, unwilling but weak, to the final monstrous embrace...

...Judith, after her first scene, he cannot quite make come alive...

...How equivocal our attitudes toward that sub-rational life in fact are is best portrayed by the popular reception of Peter Pan, a fictional diatribe against adulthood and paternal authority, disguised as a tract in favor of fairies...

...A somewhat more camouflaged, middle-brow homosexual theme is the Tea and Sympathy defense of the "sissy": the delicate and effete Good Good Boy, presented as more worthy of the favors of some motherly female than the grossly male bully to whom she happens to be married...

...For the earlier Faulkner, the fall to sexual knowledge is a fall to inevitable corruption and death...

...In some liberal quarters any such suggestion, especially if associated with New England Calvinism, is considered absurd...

...Barrie's protagonist is Pan in a real sense...

...The reference is to a childhood book based on older romantic cliches of good clean boyish fun which Golding quite deliberately mocks, leaving us with a view of Ralph, his most sensitive child observer, "with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose" weeping "for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart...

...and the pattern of the family (at least as we dream it) is a symbolic representation of the way in which we have chosen to resolve certain persistent conflicts of what used to be called the Heart and the Head...

...Such child-figures are ambiguous, epicene, caught at the indeterminate point where the charm of boy and girl are scarcely distinguishable...

...and this awareness is easily translated into the child's bafflement before weddings or honeymoons or copulation itself...

...Like the circus freaks, the deaf and dumb, the idiots also congenial to their authors, they project the invert's exclusion from the family, his sense of heterosexual passion as a threat and an offense...

...that an Age of Innocence can be a tyranny no less terrible than an Age of Reason...

...The boy-protagonist of the latter, stumbling on a murder, helps in icy calm the rattled killer arrange all the evidence so that it looks like a suicide—then runs in panic through the dark passageways of a house haunted by imagined terrors...

...Little Annie Rooney and Little Orphan Annie play out latter-day versions of the Good Good Girl as outcast and wanderer, while Dennis the Menace revives the image of Peck's Bad Boy...

...Two larger-scale attempts at creating counter-stereotypes of the child are Richard Hughes's Innocent Voyage and The Lord of the Flies by William Golding...

...Hints of this subject are everywhere in fiction of the McCullers school, but nowhere does it seem to me to be treated with full awareness...

...The Hughes book is even more terrible in its impact, for it portrays a society in which girls play a leading part (Golding's island community is all male) ; and its 14-year old Margaret who becomes the forecastle whore as well as its younger Emily who kills a bound man, stabbing him in a dozen places, are profanations of the Good Good Girl—not mere anti-stereotypes but blasphemies...

...indeed, in the comic strips such obsolescent archetypes are embalmed, preserved apparently forever...

...it does not even bring her to self-awareness...

...Actually, he demands that we accept this ambiguous love-making as a moment of sanity before suicide, that we read the child as the embodiment of all that is clean and life-giving as opposed to the vulgar, destructive (i.e., fully sexual) wife...

...He belongs to a time when Supreme Court decisions on integration have taken the headlines away from lynchings, and is blood-brother to the youngsters celebrated in neo-realistic TV scripts about family life, written by liberals without a cause and projected by actors with a method...

...Realer monsters, child-demons implicated in the actual world we inhabit are to be found in Saki's story of the small boy rejoicing in the killing of his evil governess by a pet mongoose, and especially in Walter de la Mare's "The Perfect Craftsman...

...Faulkner is as interested in profaning the myth of the good woman as he is in debunking that of the innocent child—and the image of the child witch serves for him a double purpose...

...so that her boy-girls, with their jeans and chopped-ofE hair and noncommital first names, have made familiar to us all the fantastic image of the Good Bad Boy as Teen-age Tomboy, Huck Finn as J. Jasmine Adams...

...but in The Hamlet he tries again, on a less Gothic, more comic level with Eula Varner, more girl bitch than child witch this time, but equally terrifying...

...You old headless horseman Ichabod Crane.'" She is magnificent at that ridiculous point, a prematurely developed temptress, more myth than fact, fit symbol for all Faulkner's ambivalence toward the flesh...

...After all, "satanic" is merely another word for the impulsive, unconscious life otherwise called "innocent...

...the work of William Faulkner provides a paradigm of all the possibilities...

...The last mad pursuit in which the naked Cardinal chases Don Skylark around the empty Cathedral, the "cage of God," and the final vision of the great writer von Ashenbach, painted and hectic at his shameful end, indicate the same thing: that what they have all along desired, all along known that the child really figured for, was self-destruction...

...Indeed, it had been anticipated before Firbank and Mann by Ibsen in The Masterbuilder...

...Eula finally knocks him down...

...Like most anti-religious literature, Lolita is perhaps too dedicated to assaulting belief to speak the disinterested truth...

...and dies by his own hand on the verge of manhood, having learned his own implication in the human tangle of incest and nostalgia, murder and miscegenation...

...but he had projected the elusive image of youth teasing the artist toward his own destruction as a half-mad girl already past puberty...

...And in each the innocent protagonists are shown as reinventing the evil of which the sentimentalists had considered them the passive victims...

...The Small Angel in the House and the Little Devil survive side by side...

...he is obviously destined to grow up into another consciously noble, impotent windbag with a Phi Beta Kappa key like his uncle Gavin Stevens—a second J. Alfred Claghorn...

...In Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, the young girl Judith is discovered leaning over the edge of a loft and screaming with the bloodlust her brother does not share (he trembles, nauseated) , while her father wrestles naked and bloody with one of his field Negroes...

...but the Oedipal slaying (the triumph of boy over man, the father figure fed to the vagina dentata.') with which the play reaches its climax is sufficiently disguised in sticky cuteness to make its reading a nursery ritual, and the trip to see it in the theater a holy pilgrimage of the bourgeois family...

...We begin to feel that we are the slaves of our anxiety about our children, guilt-ridden by our fear of rejecting them, not giving them enough security or love, robbing them of spontaneity or creativeness...

...I know," says a bewildered Naval officer...

...Even at the level of popular literature, certain anti-stereotypes of the child begin to establish themselves...

...They serve as symbols of exclusion as well as innocence, though no longer (as in Faulkner's case) merely of the exclusion of the fallen aristocrat and the unsuccessful writer...

...It is the latter theme which filled the theaters and movie houses with middlebrow, middle-class beholders eager to participate in the defilement of their own sacred images...

...Eula belongs not with her adult namesake whom Faulkner tries to redeem, but with Hughes's Emily or the child-murderer of William March's The Bad Seed, reading Elsie Dinsmore and acting out for unsuspecting adults the role of winsome innocent she has learned from such literature...

...In the place of the sentimental dream of childhood, writers like Faulkner and Nabokov have been creating for us a nightmare in which the child is no longer raped, strangled or seduced, but is himself (better herself...

...It involves multiple ironies...

...but it is Carson McCulIers who has adapted it to the popular imagination, breaking out of the bounds of the novel (with the help of Julie Harris) to stage and screen...

...Unlike Quentin, Chuck is finally undismayed by any revelation of evil in his society or family, finding no ambiguous echo in himself...

...True enough, the child's manipulation of her would-be seducer's excitement is documented, as it must be, physiologically and step by step, but Bowles's story is by all odds "dirtier...

...The work of recent writers for whom tales of childhood are inevitably tales of terror, in which the child poses a threat, represents a literature blasphemous and revolutionary...

...Quentin Compson (the chief mask of the young Faulkner) watches as a child a drama of passion and death in "That Evening Sun Go Down," which he relives as an adolescent witness and participant in The Sound and Fury and Absalom, Absalom...

...Certainly, in a permissive, family-oriented, servantless America, whose conscience is forged by popularizations of Freud, a new tyranny has become possible...

...The most ordinary Broadway producer knows these days that poor papa in his doghouse and the evil Captain Hook ought to be played by the same actor...

...and are engaged at the moment of rescue in a war, which their rescuers take as a game...

...Such an authority on witchcraft and diabolism as Shirley Jackson can call a book about children Raising Demons and sell chapters of it to the ladies' magazines, as long as her readers continue to believe that when she speaks of kids raising hell she is using a jocular metaphor...

...Oddly enough, J. D. Salinger (elsewhere more grossly sentimental about children than any contemporary writer of similar stature) comes once to the very verge of expressing it in "A Good Day for Bananafish," when Seymour Glass trifles erotically with the child Sybil, playing with her fingers, kissing her feet in an appalling demonstration which the author will not quite let us accept as pathological...

...Most importantly, Lolita and the tradition to which it belongs represent a resolve to reassess the innocence of the child, to reveal it as a kind of moral idiocy, a dangerous freedom from the restraints of culture and custom, a threat to order...

...In Light in August, Joe Christmas, at the age of 5, his mouth full of stolen toothpaste, witnesses the love-making of an orphanage nurse and learns from her that he is a Negro...

...and, like a good deal of the anti-stereotypical literature of childhood, it is not innocent of sadism, relished by writer and reader alike...

...The more serious successors of Faulkner, the homosexual-gothic novelists who have, unexpectedly enough, inherited his symbolic Southern landscape and his concern with evil, have ignored his later versions of the plight of the child in favor of the earlier ones...

...In each, we are presented not with a single child but with a gallery of children ranging in age from just out of infancy to just short of full adolescence...

...and therefore not only a callous, amoral, vain boy, but a devil against whom all windows must be shut...

...But ever since Henry James's Turn of the Screw, subtle writers have presented as objects of horror children possessed, children through whom the Satanic attempts to enter the adult world...

...Emily's crime is not only unsuspected...

...but the later Faulkner, plagued perhaps by declining powers and certainly converted to more "positive" attitudes, has revised his views of these matters, as he has revised his tragic view of life in general...

...The scene in which the schoolmaster Labove, helpless with the desire that an 11-year old girl has stirred in him and will not satisfy, chases her mindless, quivering flesh round and round the classroom comes closer than anything in American literature to the horrific vision of Cardinal Perelli...

...Yet our latter-day sadism seems refreshingly pure compared to the necrophilia of Victorian deathbed scenes or the secret relish of the 19th-century exposures of the evils of child labor...

...It is the final blasphemy against the cult of the child...

...Stop pawing me,' she said...

...He represents, that is to say, a sentimental-comic version of initiation, initiation viewed not as a catastrophic ordeal but as a rather painful induction into compromise and responsibility...

...To have made the little girl a little boy would have given the game away...

...and unless the writer sentimentalizes pederasty on some romantic, English public school model, he finds himself confronting a subject as dark and terrible as Dostoyevsky's evocation of the child-rapist...

...rapist, murderer and seducer...

...The child remains still what he has been since the beginnings of Romanticism, a surrogate of our unconscious, impulsive lives...

...and it is undoubtedly as an irreligious book rather than a pornographic one that Lolita has been forced under the counter...

...The avowed "serious" themes of March's book (the question of whether criminal traits can be inherited, and the decision of a mother to kill her own child) scarcely matter before the evocation of the sweet, young thing as diabolical killer...

...Jolly good show...

...but if his exigencies were similar Mark Twain did not know it...

...In a single work, Richardson, Dickens and Henry James are controverted, all customary symbols for the encounter of innocence and experience stood on their heads...

...for it is the naive child, the female, the American who corrupts the sophisticated adult, the male, the European...

...Truman Capote is a notable contributor to this gallery of ephebic forms...

...At any rate, in Death in Venice and The Eccentricities of Cardinal Perelli, Mann and Firbanks have created with great tenderness but even greater truth portraits of boy-coquettes...

...Like the Coral Island...

...The not-quite-mature boy, dimly aware of his own homosexual alure, seems finally a more apt, certainly a more sinister embodiment of the Romantic drive toward self-immolation...

...and that the gods of such an age, if not yet dead, must be killed, however snub-nosed, freckled-faced or golden-haired they may be...

...and, like slaves everywhere, we grow sullen and resentful...

...in Golding's more recent book, by an atomic bombing) a group of children is removed from the constraints of normal adult society...

...and nothing in his vapid later novel, The Town, can convince us that so monstrous a figure was all along only a Good Bad Woman in embryo...

...Barrie's story is finally a "fantasy" (capable of being transformed by Disney's vulgar touch into a mere dream) and even Henry James's tale a "ghost story," an entertainment to which one condescends a little...

...but this Salinger refused to do, clinging like a good American to Little Eva even on the verge of the tragic...

...The boy and his dog may still creep into a corner to mourn, the misunderstood kid find in the town drunk his truest friend, or the golden-haired young girl win the crusty old curmudgeon to virtue and affection...

...In each (in Hughes's nostalgic evocation of the end of piracy, by a typhoon...

...Like all sophisticated yearnings for the primitive and inchoate, the nostalgia for innocence and the child is suicidal...

...Their books reflect a growing awareness on the part of us all that our society has tended (at least aspired) to become not the conspiracy against the child against which our ancestors raged—but a conspiracy in his favor, against the adult...

...In two European novellas by Ronald Firbank and Thomas Mann, however, the final step had already been taken, long before the time of Salinger or McCullers or Capote...

...Nowhere are the myths of sentimentality more amusing and convincingly parodied, and it is surely for this reason that the book has been banned...

...The disease with Romantic primitivism that underlies the tragic statements of Mann and Firbank, is at work, though less profoundly, elsewhere in our culture...

...Emily has not remained an isolated case...

...on a symbolic level, images of death itself...

...Unlike Golding's Ralph, she sinks back into innocence without regret or self-reproach and is lost in a crowd of schoolgirls: "Looking at that gentle, happy throng of clean innocent faces and soft graceful limbs, listening to the ceaseless, artless babble of chatter rising, perhaps God could have picked out from among them which was Emily: but i am sure that I could not...

...Quentin is recreated as the bowdlerized boy, Chuck Mallison, who was born in a Saturday Evening Post detective story and has been kept alive through Intruder in the Dust and The Town...

...and one can even suggest, as Stephen Crane did before the turn of the century, that the Golden-haired Girl is a little devil herself—as long as it is clear that one is (finally) only kidding...

...Much has remained the same—the Negro, for instance, still providing comfort for these transvestite Hucks in their moments of misery, though Jim, too, has been transformed from male to female...

...But the appeasement of the child is only one form of the appeasement of the id, a resolve to give the (former) devil his due...

...and at 33, he decapitates the aging woman who has made him her lover, thus assuring his own eventual lynching...

...This is, of course, horror pornography—last product of the endless Gothic search for something ultimately odious enough to shock our ultimately jaded tastes...

...But Barrie, sentimentalist and popular entertainer, equivocates before he is through, making Pan only a Good Bad Little Devil, who must be sewed for and told stories—although he will not abide mothering contaminated with sex, and in the end lights out for his territory...

...Their pre-adolescent protagonists confront still the decaying plantation house, the miasma-laden swamp, the secret lives of the Negro...

...certainly, they are not tempted by the sentimental fables so popular with their British opposite numbers and recently worked by Angus Wilson into his AngloSaxon Attitudes...

...That defilement is carried even further in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, whose subject is the seduction of a middle-aged man by a 12-year old girl...

...For a long time, however, quite serious writers have suggested that children may indeed be instruments of the diabolic rather than embodiments of innocence...

...What such poetic treatments have once established no later version of the lust for childhood can quite ignore...

...If in the comics the baby-sitter cowers in terror before Junior and in Nabokov the grown man trembles in passion before the pre-pubescent coquette, the causes are the same...

...On the literal level, they are callow flirts, cruel without any deep sense of the real pleasures or the true threat of cruelty...

...Once the child has been remade by homosexual sensibility into the image of an ambiguous object of desire, the lust for the child is revealed as a flight from woman, the family, maturity itself...

...at 14, he brutally kicks the naked black girl with whom he might have lost his virginity...

...It is turn and turn about, for Huck once played the girl as these now ape the boy...

...In the latter kind of story, a disgustingly female, aging wife is portrayed as engaged in a struggle with a young boy-girl (or girl-boy, it scarcely matters) for the soul and dignity of a gentle scholar-husband...

...Such writers have come to believe that the self can be betrayed by impulse as well as rigor...

...In the Golding book, indeed, they recapitulate, on the island on which they are cast, the whole terrible history of civilization...

...The Harper's Bazaar Faulknerians remain faithful at least to the tragic implications of the initiation story...