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2 The Complexities of Childhood
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
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Whoever inquires about our childhood wants to know something about our soul . . . we love with horror and hate with an inexplicable love whatever caused us our greatest pain and difficulty. —Erika Burkart, in Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good What inquirer can discover the hidden country of childhood? Hammy was silent about his, but Fran mined her memories and arranged them in My Double Life, a book that invites reflection.1 The saying, “It’s all true, even if it didn’t happen,” applies, for her selective, dramatic account of the life of a poor little rich girl and its themes of rejection and rebellion became her truth. Her nonconformist life, achievements, and strongly held views so distant from those of her family-of-origin surely rise from these early years. Fran was the first of four children and the only daughter of a prominent Boston family with old money.2 Her father, Laurence B. Flint (born in 1874) and his older brother, Carleton, were deserted by their father when Laurence was just eighteen months old.3 His mother, of necessity, became an executive assistant, valued by successful lawyers for copying documents in her beautiful, clear handwriting , and for her diligence, accuracy, and discretion. The necessity of earning a living caused Helen Flint to board her sons with a family named Giles, and when Laurence was seven, she shipped him and his brother to Germany and Herr Thümmer’s boarding school near Dresden .4 Her career flourished; she was able, in time, to build a “cottage” in Hull, the four-story house overlooking Boston harbor that Fran 13 2 The Complexities of Childhood describes in her memoir.5 The effect of this disruption of family life on the boys is unrecorded but could not have been all bad, since Laurence chose to make adult contact with Herr Thümmer in the years before World War I. In due course the brothers came home. Laurence became an office boy for the Walter Baker Chocolate Company. His marriage to twentytwo -year-old Helen Chase in November 1906 freed him from the need to participate in the corporate world and to ignore the example of his father-in-law, William Leverett Chase. Chase was a merchant prince who owned the H&O Chase Bags and Bagging Company; he went to his office every day, and his predictable and ordered life epitomized success to his adoring daughter. Helen Flint had the last word on how her inheritance was to be spent, which may have complicated the customary adjustments required by newlyweds. The young couple’s first child, Fran, arrived on 17 December 1907, and brother Bertram arrived on 3 July 1909. Fran paints her mother as weak, her marriage a long series of concessions to an unreasonable husband. (Fran’s own marriage gave her little experience of a difficult husband or of bearing two children in less than eighteen months under the eye of an apparently ruthless motherin -law.) Mrs. Flint Sr. was demanding of her son and cruelly critical of her daughter-in-law—and, according to her grandson Putnam Flint— of the rest of mankind. Her son had to take her to the symphony every Saturday in the season: (“Helen will keep the children”). The dutiful Laurence, a bright, autocratic, and stubborn person, was a difficult husband. He was determined to pursue his own interests: travel and “criminology, photography . . . and making parts for his expensive automobiles ,” in Fran’s accounts. In 1912, Laurence took his growing family and his 1906 runabout, “Merry Wheels,” to Germany. Putnam Flint provided me with a timeline on which to place Fran’s general, selective vignettes. Between 1909 and 1912, Helen Flint spent two years at a Dr. Stedman’s clinic. She suffered from severe postpartum depression, which may explain her mother-in-law’s 1914 comment , when a recovered Helen became pregnant again with another son, Vasmer. Grandmother Flint wrote in her diary, “Isn’t it a shame that Helen is pregnant again!”6 Putnam, the last child, was born in 1919. Mice in the Freezer, Owls on the Porch 14 [44.220.251.57] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:39 GMT) As her diary records, in 1912 Grandmother Flint accompanied her son, at least part of the time, on an Edwardian grand tour. Trunks and servants were sent ahead, dressmakers frequented, residences established in several cities. Grandmother Flint’s diary also indicates an unusually rigid set of expectations for her first granddaughter, another aspect...