Writing at the Margin

It was a cold evening in December. The four of us, Opa, Oma, daughter, and granddaughter, were playing hide-and-seek with an element of conspiracy that allowed each of the adults to be found readily enough. “I’m going to hide in April weather,” my little granddaughter announced. She hid her eyes and considered herself hidden. Her name is Nadine—Dini, as she is affectionately called; and on that day she was four years old. Once again by her presence I was taken into the imaginative territory of childhood. I felt fortunate to be invited into her world, to be told that the house would turn into a train and do somersaults, to take part in conversations between two cats, Caruso and Annette, and to listen as cakes and crackers and vitamins declared that they wanted to be eaten—that was why they were here. On that particular day she wanted to know how “the three” felt since she had gone on to be four.

I was reminded again of things I was glad to remember, things that the years, far from obscuring, have revealed with heightened clarity and increasing value. Children know everything. It was a fullness of being that animated Dini’s imagination, the expression of the dreaming and fantastic side of what is true in her nature; her rages and frustrations spoke for her as well. Now that I am a grandmother and stand more than seventy years deep, as I look beyond my daughter’s generation to the next the connections between generations become more personal, more apparent, more encompassing; and the special value of childhood emerges more vividly than ever.

I did not expect to be a mother. Coming from parents who, for whatever reasons, exercised their roles mainly in the form of tyrannical control, puritanical self-righteousness, constant criticism, and mutual destructiveness, of which the consequences for a child were continual guilt for having been born, I had no desire to contribute to the chain of generation. Though I had yet to discover in a conscious way what a powerful instrument of psychological violence, denial, and repression the family can be (much to the convenience of economic and political systems, religious institutions, and society in general), I emerged from my family with little sense of it as a positive arrangement.

I began writing in junior high, and I even sent off a collection of stories to a publisher when I was thirteen. In high school I continued to write, together with trying to paint and to act in plays. In a family in which one’s very sentences were finished by someone else and in which the best recourse was silence, I was no doubt drawn toward some form of creative expression. With two adults and my younger sister and me sharing a three-room duplex—I could sleep on the back porch during the summer—there was little privacy. I wrote stories in the bathroom, the only place other than the living room—there, the radio was always going—where there was enough light to see by. I moved the ottoman from my father’s chair for something to sit on and, setting my father’s ancient Remington on the top of the toilet seat, I worked in between the periods of use. A trip to the bathroom meant that my arrangements had to be temporarily scuttled. So marked the beginnings of that questionable activity that now engenders those famous and troublesome debates over work space and privacy and those often guilt-ridden demands on the people one happens to live with. I can appreciate my father’s irritation.

The stories I wrote were dreadful. I had not understood at the time how much had to be cleared away of false sentiment and distorted values, let alone the necessity of discovery of some real and significant vision. I was under the impression one wrote for money and fame. One of my early stories, I remember, was called “A Place for Beatrice,” about a girl whose arm was crippled by polio and who therefore was unable to play basketball, but...