Seeing Things At Night Part 9

Picture him now at thirty--he has neuralgia. Somebody mentions the theory of blind abscesses and he has all his teeth pulled out. No good comes of it. He goes to a psychoa.n.a.lyst and the doctor begins to ask questions. He asks a great many over a long period of time. Eventually he gets a clue. He finds that when H. 3rd was eight years old he dreamed three nights in succession of stepping on a June bug.

"Was it a large, rather fat June bug?" asks the doctor carelessly, as if the answer was not important.

"Yes," says H. 3rd, "it was."

"That June bug," says the doctor, "was a symbol of your father. When you were twenty months old he took a Carving knife away from you and you have had a suppressed anger at him ever since. Now that you know about it your neuralgia will disappear."

And the neuralgia would go at that. But by that time I'd be gone and nothing could be done about this suppressed feud of so many years'

standing. My mind went through all these possibilities and I decided it would be simpler and safer to let H. 3rd keep the carving knife as long as he attempted nothing aggressive. A wound is not so dangerous as a complex.

"And, anyhow," I thought, "if he can make that carving knife cut anything he's the best swordsman in the flat."

DECEMBER 20, 1919.--Our att.i.tude toward H. 3rd and the carving knife turns out to have been all wrong. We received a letter from Floyd Dell to-day in which he points out that no Freudian could possibly approve our policy of non-interference. Mr. Dell says we should have used force to the utmost.

"Psychoa.n.a.lytically speaking," he writes, "I think you were wrong about H. 3rd and the carving knife. There is really no Freudian reason why, when he came carrying it into the parlor, you should not have gone over to him and, 'after a short struggle,' taken it away from him by main force. Of course, that would have made him mad. But what harm would that have done?... Unless, of course, you had previously represented yourself to him as a Divine and Perfect Being. In that case his new conception of you as a big bully would have had to struggle with his other carefully implanted and nourished emotions--and his sense of the injustice of your behavior might have been 'repressed.'

"But you know quite well that you are not a Divine and Perfect Being, and, if you consider it for a moment from the child's point of view, you will concede that his emotional opinion of you under such circ.u.mstances, highly colored as it is, has its justification. When you yourself want something very much (whether you are ent.i.tled to it or not) and when some one (however righteously) keeps you from getting it, how do you feel? But you know that you live in a world in which such things happen.

H. 3rd has still to learn it, and if he learns it at his father's knee he is just that much ahead. The boys at school will teach it to him, anyway. The fact is, parents are unwilling that their children should hate them, however briefly, healthily and harmlessly.

"The Victorian parent spanked his offspring and commanded them to love him any way. The modern parent refrains from spanking (for good reasons) and hopes the child will love him. The Freudian parent does not mind if his children do hate him once or twice a day, so long as they are not ashamed of doing so. If H. 3rd swats his father in an enraged struggle to keep possession of the precious carving knife he is expressing and not repressing his emotions. And so long as he has done his best to win he is fairly well content to lose. What a child doesn't like is to have to struggle with a big bully that he mustn't (for mysterious reasons) even try to lick! The privilege of fighting with one's father, even if it does incidentally involve getting licked, is all that a healthy child asks for. Never fear, the time will come when he can lick you; and awaiting that happy time will give him an incentive for growing up.

Quite possibly you don't want him to grow up; but that is only another of the well-known weaknesses of parents!"

DECEMBER 22, 1919.--Concerning H. 3rd and the carving knife I am gratified to find support for my position from Dr. Edward Hiram Reede, the well-known Was.h.i.+ngton neurologist, who finds that from the point of view of H. 3rd there was soundness in my policy of non-interference.

"Speaking for him," he writes, "I commend your action. Urged as he is by the two chief traits of childhood, at the present time--curiosity and imitation--I see no reason for direct coercion. So long as the modern child is environed by a museum, as the modern home appears, his curiosity must always be on edge, and if each new goal of curiosity is wrested from him by the usual 'Don't!' or the more ancient struggle for possession instead of by a transference of interest, then the contest will be interminable.

"H. 3rd by right of experience looks upon the armamentarium of the kitchen as his indisputable possessions and can hardly be expected to except a carver. The deification of the parent occurs in accord with the ancestor wors.h.i.+p of primitive forebears, and the father will remain the G.o.d to the child so long as observation daily reveals the parent as a worker of miracles. Parental self-canonization is not at all necessary to produce this."

DECEMBER 23, 1919.--Recently, a reader wrote to inform us that in her opinion we were a "semi-Bolshevist," and added, "your style is cramped by this demi-semi att.i.tude, and your stuff seems a little grotesque both to conservatives and radicals." This seemed fair comment to us and we confessed frankly that we were not a conservative and on clear and pleasant days not quite a radical. This business of sticking to the middle of the road, with perhaps a slight slant to the left, seems ever so difficult. One is ambushed and potted at from either side. Seemingly, even in our confession we have again offended, for Miss Mora M. Deane writes:

"As it happens I have just read your comment on my letter; and since you have turned out to be merely an egotist who twists an adverse criticism to his own advantage, I must now add to my letter that part which I lopped off considerately. This precisely because I did not know you were an egotist. The deleted part which originally closed the letter follows:

"At any rate I have lately heard intelligent persons from both camps saying, 'Heywood Broun is responsible for my going to see some pretty rotten plays and for reading some stupid books.'

"I myself should like to warn you against letting Heywood 3rd ever read Floyd Dell's book. The very idea of his advising about children leaves a bad taste in the mouth. You'll be sorry some day if you ever take him seriously."

Of course, Miss Deane does wisely to let us have the deletion. First impulses are usually sound.

And in one respect Miss Deane has scored more heavily than she could well have realized. Her warning that I should protect H. 3rd from radical literature touches an impending tragedy in my life. Almost by intuition Miss Deane seems to realize that the child and I are not in agreement in our political opinions. Of the fifteen or twenty words in which H. 3rd is proficient one is "mine" and another is "gimme." When he goes to the park he wears a naval uniform with the insignia of an ensign on his left arm. There is gold braid on his cap. Moreover, H. 3rd has in his own right two Liberty bonds, a card of thrift stamps, a rocking-horse, a railroad, a submarine, three picture books, an automobile and a Noah's ark. Any effort to socialize a single one of these holdings is met by a protest so violent that I cannot help but realize that the child's sense of property rights is strongly developed.

That is, his own property rights, for he is often inclined to dispute my t.i.tle to cigarette stumps, safety razor blades and carving knives.

Moreover, H. 3rd is unblus.h.i.+ngly parasitic. We fail to remember that he has ever offered to make any return for the regular income of milk and oatmeal, and sometimes carrots, which is issued to him regularly by his parents. To be sure, he once gave me a chicken bone and on another occasion a spool of cotton, but both times he promptly took them away again. I am even inclined to question whether, in any strictly legal sense, the chicken bone or the spool were his. Granting that they had been carelessly discarded by other members of his family, and that, by his own efforts, H. 3rd rescued the spool from the sc.r.a.pbasket and the chicken bone from behind the trash box, the fact remains that it was I who bought the chicken and Miss X who purchased the spool. We were ent.i.tled at least to a royalty during the life of the two utilities, but H. 3rd merely absorbed them without explanation or promise.

I doubt whether Dell or Eastman or even Karl Marx himself could avail to check the rampant individualism of the child. He has always displayed an impatience and an irritation at abstract arguments. The best that can be done is to avoid introducing contentious subjects. For the present Miss X and I are able to carry on destructive and seditious conversations even in his presence by spelling out "p-r-o-l-e-t-a-r-i-a-t" and "b-o-u-r-g-e-o-i-s-i-e" and other words which might make him mad. We have even been able to keep Trotzky's picture above the mantelpiece in the red room, but in this case Miss X adopted a subterfuge which seems to me rather questionable. She told H. 3rd that it was a portrait of Nicholas Murray Butler.

When H. 3rd is twenty-one he will come into undisputed possession of the two Liberty bonds and the card of thrift stamps for which Miss X and I starved and sc.r.a.ped. I rather hope he will thank us, but beyond that I expect nothing except good advice. I can see him now squaring his shoulders, as becomes a man of property and independent income, and then laying a kindly hand on my shoulder as he says, "Dad, can't you understand how wrong you are? Don't you see that if you disturb or even threaten the inst.i.tution of private property you undermine the home, imperil the state and destroy initiative?"

JANUARY 21, 1920.--When the rest went out and left me alone in the house, they said that H. 3rd would surely sleep through the evening.

n.o.body remembered that he had ever waked up to cry. But he did this night. I didn't quite know what to do about it. I sang "Rockabye Baby"

to him, but that didn't do any good, and then I said "I wouldn't cry if I were you." This, too, had no effect, and, in fact, no sooner had I uttered it than I recognized it as a piece of gratuitous impertinence.

How could I possibly tell whether or not I would cry if the safety pins were in wrong or anything else of that sort was not quite right?

Nor was it even fair to a.s.sume that H. 3rd was crying for any such personal reasons. After all, he lives in a state which has recently suspended five duly elected a.s.semblymen, and in which as fine a book as Jurgen has aroused the meddlesome attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and his country has gone quite hysterical on the subject of "Reds" and "Red" propaganda and I haven't paid him back yet for that $50 Liberty Bond of his which I sold.

And after I had thought of these things it seemed to me that he was entirely justified in crying, and that I ought to be ashamed of myself because I didn't cry, too, since there were so many wrong things in the world to be righted. Humbly I left him to continue his dignified protest without any further unwarranted meddling on my part.

JANUARY 24, 1920.--"My attention has been called," writes John S.

Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, "to a paragraph of your article in the _Tribune_ of January 21, wherein you refrain from blaming H. 3rd for crying, because among other things, he 'lives in a state which has recently suspended five duly elected a.s.semblymen, and in which as fine a book as _Jurgen_ has aroused the meddlesome attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice.'

"I a.s.sume that H. 3rd is too young to appreciate the contents of any publication, but some day he will be old enough, and no doubt his character will be molded and his conduct controlled, in a measure, by what he reads and the thoughts suggested by such reading. That is the usual thing.

"If, when H. 3rd or any other young person, reached the age of understanding a stranger came into the home and attempted to entertain the young mind with stories and suggestions such as are contained in the book in question, whoever had in charge the moral welfare of the young person would no doubt be very indignant and the stranger would be expelled forthwith. We cannot properly have a rule for the protection of our own and fail to extend that protection to others."

Mr. Sumner is incorrect in his a.s.sumption that any stranger who told H.

3rd such merry and gorgeous stories as those of _Jurgen_ would be expelled forthwith by "whoever had in charge the welfare of the young person." To be sure, this description hardly fits us. We mean to have as little to do with the morals of H. 3rd as possible. It seems to us a sorry business for parents to hand down their own morals, with a tuck here and a patch there, and expect a growing child to wear them with any comfort. Let the child go out and find his own morals.

But if H. 3rd went out and found _Jurgen_ and read it at the age of adolescence, or thereabouts, it might be excellent literature for him.

After all, a boy has to learn the facts of s.e.x some time or other, and Cabell has been felicitious enough in _Jurgen_ to present them not only as beautiful, but merry as well. Those elements ought to be present in everybody's s.e.x education. The new knowledge comes to almost all youngsters as a distinct shock, because, while the things their boy companions tell them may be merry enough, they are also sufficiently gross to be distinctly harmful in a number of cases; and, if their parents tell them it is either in some form so highly poetic that it means nothing, or as something decidedly grim and solemn as Sunday School. In either case this knowledge is apt to be regarded as something of which to be ashamed, and it seems to us that the world is just beginning to realize that shame is almost the most destructive of all the evil forces in the world. And so, unless our opinions change, we shall continue to pray each night, "Oh G.o.d, please keep all shame out of the heart and mind of H. 3rd."

MARCH 10, 1920.--Some little time ago we were asked what method we were going to use to instil moral ideas into the head of H. 3rd. We said then that we rather hoped that he would be able to get along, for a while at any rate, without any. We felt that it was the last thing in the world concerning which we wanted to be dogmatic. Unfortunately, the moral sense seems to arise early. Already H. 3rd is constantly inquiring "Good boy, dada?" Usually this comes after he has chipped the furniture or broken some of the china.

Of course, we ought not to answer him. We have no idea whether he is a good boy or not. The marks of his destruction are plain enough, but without knowing his motives we can't pa.s.s on his conduct. We were slightly annoyed when he broke the lamp, but perhaps it was no more than pardonable curiosity on his part. Perhaps it was wanton. How can we tell? And yet, it is impossible to preserve neutrality. After the fifteenth or sixteenth reiteration of the query we always say, "Yes, you are a good boy," and then he goes away satisfied. But we are not. He is beginning to make us feel like the Supreme Court or Moses. It's too much responsibility.

MARCH 12, 1920.--"Your troubles are just beginning," writes M. B. "H.

3rd knew he was a bad boy when he broke that lamp. He has simply been testing your moral sense, which for some months he has suspected of being inadequate. I foresee that you will be a great disappointment to him as time goes on. In twelve years or so he will find your political views unsound and your literary tastes decadent. I doubt whether he will approve of the way you spend Sunday.

"You may think you can retain his affection, if not his respect, by keeping clear of the arbitrary methods of a bygone generation. Alas! I don't think there is even that hope for the radical parent of a conservative child. By the time H. 3rd has grown to adolescence he will feel that dogmatism is a _sine qua non_ of parenthood, and he will wish that he had had a real father. He may even resolve to have military discipline in his home.

"I am sorry. I wish I could see brighter things for you in the days to come. Please forgive the impertinence of this prophecy. It has been wrung from the experience of one who has been condemned out of the mouth of fourteen as a socialist, a pacifist and (if he had known the word) a pagan."

We have feared as much. Already we have found that we do not know the child. A week ago we were delighted when he picked up a pocketbook and, with a scornful exclamation of "Money!" threw it far across the room.

"He will be an artist," we said, but last Sat.u.r.day morning he came charging down upon the c.r.a.p game loudly shouting, "I want a dollar!" He had to be forcibly restrained from gathering up the entire stake--it was two dollars and not one--which lay upon the floor. We were so disconcerted by the revelation of his spirit that we threw twelve twice and failed on an eight. Of course, that is not the thing which disturbs us. We fear that H. 3rd will grow up to be a business man. As such, of course, he may become the support of our old age, but we shall consider support more than earned if it entails our receiving with our allowance a monthly homily on the reason and cure for unrest.