A Child of the American Century

Sweet Dreams is a richly detailed memoir that delivers on the straightforward promise of the title, along with its implied ironies. The author has subtitled it A Family History, and while there is abundant material about DeWitt Henry’s parents and siblings and other close relations, it is in essence the story of his life: his coming of age and sometimes floundering attempts to find his way in the world. But do not be misled by the personal nature of the account; both the narrative arc and the plainspoken manner of telling allow the reader easy access to the material. With a few adjustments here or there, Sweet Dreams could well be your story too, and mine.

Detail from cover

The title alludes to the treats that come from the candy factory that is the family business and sustains their comfortable existence. Of course there are deeper, sweeter dreams too, and some that turn out not so sweet. The memoir in a way is like a slow amble through the post-World War II landscape. In any number of ways Henry—Dee to friends and intimates—is a child of the American century, the product of a less complicated, more optimistic time and a country that can hardly be found anymore—if it ever truly did exist outside of popular myth. Born in the months before Pearl Harbor, Henry grew to manhood in the towns and suburbs outside Philadelphia in the 1940s and 50s. College followed (Amherst), and in the early 60s grad school (Harvard), a bit too soon for Vietnam and the culture wars that would shortly roil the country. The attitudes and values he brought from home—about race, class, religion— were predictably narrow and conservative.

In a way, Sweet Dreams is a book not only of memories but about memory itself and the role it plays in shaping who we are. Despite the painstaking reconstructions, and the book brims with detail, there are places where memory fails, and there are gaps. The story thus resembles an album of snapshots or home movies. And then abruptly, an image will be missing, or the screen will go blank, and Henry will be left to wonder. Early on, for example, he tells us, “I have no direct memory of my father before I am eight…. [M]y memories…from when I am five, or even earlier, are rich. I search for him, for where he must have been…but nothing is there.”

These gaps and absences are affecting. It is one of the more interesting features of the book, and it shows up in a few ways. The world the Henrys moved in was overwhelmingly white and middle class, one in which African Americans, Jews, and other minorities had minimal presence and were only marginally accepted. Yet for years the family had a live-in “colored” maid with whom Henry was close. Only years later does he come to understand that he knew almost nothing about her real life and circumstances. He writes of a time when she no longer boards with them and stays at her sister’s: “I had little sense…of the world, apart from and foreign to ours, where she would come from and return… that she was not loved or appreciated there….” And then he adds, “She is in none of our family pictures, movies or stills.”

One of Henry’s high school classmates, a gifted African American student, gets a neighborhood girl pregnant and does the right thing, setting a lethal chain of events in motion. Several years later, Henry’s father sends him a clipping from the local paper. His once-promising schoolmate had walked into the local dry cleaner’s and shot the clerk to death. Drugs were apparently involved. Henry notes, “I try, but I can’t imagine him. Not Rudy. Not murder. Not prison.”

Perhaps the most persistent dream, nursed from childhood, is to become a writer, and after a year of...