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A
note about Germs: A Memoir of Childhood
"It
is
early. The hall is dark. Light rims the front door.The panes
of violet glass sparkle. The front door has been left open.
Now I am standing outside in the sun. I can smell the flowers
and the warmed air. I hear the bees as they sway above the lavender.
The morning advances, a startled bird runs fast across the dew.
Its breast quivers, in, out, and its song scratches on my ear.
Lifting my eyes, I see that the garden, and everything in it,
moves. The flowers move, and the lavender moves, and the tree
above me is moving. I am standing in the sun, my body is tipped
forward, and I am walking. Walking I shall trip, and, if I trip,
trip without a helping hand, I shall fall. I look above me,
and I feel behind me, searching for the hand that is always
there. There is no hand ...”
Thus
begins a remarkable exploration of his childhood by the late
Richard Wollheim, one of the English-speaking world’s most
distinguished postwar thinkers, and the author of many acclaimed
works of philosophy, including Painting as an Art and
The Thread of Life.
“This
is a book like no other. It is the work of a philosopher who
was also an imaginative writer, and whose philosophy was sustained
by a devotion to aesthetics and psychoanalysis. Richard Wollheim
died in 2003, not long after the completion of the book, which
he felt to be his ‘best piece of work’. An earlier
book, A Family Romance, the portrait of a tormented manhood,
shares some of its concerns. Germs, which traces a passage
from childhood to youth, is a recovery of the past that is rich
in sensation and in an exposure to the world.
It
opens with the anxious somnambulism of a child’s exploring
steps, with the ever-lengthening sentences of a paragraph in
which an idea of development, and a sense of subsequent developments,
are conveyed. Here is the first of many falls. Pierced
by a thorn, the child is placed against the starched apron of
a woman’s breast. Soon he is the boy who brushes against
the ‘horse-like’ bodies of back-stage ballerinas:
further brushes of the kind were to be long deferred.
His
father is a fastidious impresario, a friend of Diaghilev’s
and the incarnation of an Old Europe. His mother is a figure
commandingly comic in her absurdities: a vexation and a fascination.
Wollheim’s ‘Confessions’ tells the story of a
wrestle for meaning with an environment wonderfully evoked,
of an ordeal in the dark wood of experience which is both moving
and funny, and which has the origins of an adult sexuality and
of adult encounters with works of art. Hypersensitivity, and
idiosyncrasy, are made a pleasure, and a version of the human
condition. Once read, Germs will not be forgotten.”
–
Karl Miller
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Book
of the Year Nominations
Times
Literary Supplement, December 3rd 2004
Germs
was nominated by three of the contributors to the TLS's
International Books of the Year feature. Only two other books
received as many nominations and none received more. The nominations
were from Frank Kermode, Roy Foster and Karl Miller and are
reprinted below.
Frank
Kermode
"Germs,
Richard Wollheim's posthumously published 'memoir of childhood'
is a great book, strange and beautifully written, candid yet
ornate, as if Rousseau were being rewritten by Proust, with
interpolations by another author familiar with Beckett. Wollheim's
spoilt childhood – eccentric parents, important
visitors (Diaghilev, Kurt Weill, Serge Lifar), grand houses
and grand hotels – was lonely and sad and strange
enough, but immensely more interesting than most. The child
became an intelligent and sensitive observer, and what he recalls
of those early days is here treated mostly with delicate irony.
This is not a book to be admired for a season or a year, but
to be counted among those masterpieces of which the fading memory
continually demands return and refreshment."
Roy
Foster
"The
1935 cover photograph of Richard Wollheim's masterpiece of early
autobiography, Germs: A Memoir of Childhood, gives a hint of
what to expect: a serious twelve year old in school uniform,
flanked by his elegant mother and Kurt Weill. Wollheim's childhood
was spent observing the glamorous company kept by his impresario
father, trying to understand his distant and dissatisfied mother,
and balancing the demands of love and fear; he explores it by
methods which owe an equal debt to Proust and Freud, and it
does much to explain the remarkable philosopher and aesthetic
analyst that he became. The voice is inimitable: subtle, seductive,
moving from deadpan hilarity to aching sadness."
Karl
Miller
"The
philosopher Richard Wollheim died last year, not knowing whether
any publisher would want the memoir of his childhood, Germs,
which he had just completed. Waywiser Press have now done what
other presses felt unable to do. This is a moving and funny
book, an extraordinary book, richly exposed to the Home Counties,
in touch with the world created by Proust, and yet not in the
least old-fashioned or archaic. He was the son of an impresario
and dandy, and a maddening comic masterpiece of a mother. For
some, the memoir may seem to conform to a pattern of compulsive
behaviour which gets a lot of attention these days: the boy
makes lists, which include one of royal mistresses, drawn up
in ignorance of what royal mistresses did."
Evening
Standard , November 29th 2004
D.J.
Taylor
"Philosopher
Richard Wollheim died last year; shortly after completing Germs,
an acutely evocative memoir of his early life, spent in bourgeois
Surrey but with an enticing Mittel European cast."
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Reviews
of Germs: A Memoir of Childhood
The
Reader,
#16, 2005
If
ever there was a book condemned to be overlooked by the Common
Reader,
this posthumous memoir by the philosopher and psychoanalyst
Richard Wollheim is it. That it exists at all is as an act of
piety. That it has its defects as a memoir-it is over-verbal,
often hysterically accurate, and often hyper-explanatory-is
obvious. But I would hope that some readers will want to explore
this dense, memory-clogged and enormously interesting book.
The easiest way to describe it is as a sort of Bildungs-essay,
an examination of growing up in two (or more) cultures. More
accurate would be to call it an essay on the formation of a
fine, perhaps overly-sensitive mind. The reason for reading
it lies in the fact that Wollheim was an outstanding representative
of a generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals transplanted
into the Anglo-Saxon world, a member of a generation whose father
was a friend of Diaghilev's and who transformed himself into
a typically self-tormenting yet generous member of the academic
upper classes. From intense self-scrutiny much can be learned,
and this memoir, which extends from childhood into Wollheim's
first acquaintances with art, has much to offer. It is the tone
that may keep the unwary reader away. Not everyone today would
write, 'It was many years after those visits back-stage with
my father that I first brushed against a woman's body.' What
is riveting here is Wollheim's sense-appetite, the way he perceives
light, sound and shapes, colors and human beings, everything
as seen through eyes and ears that must have been analytical
at birth to have learned so much. –
Keith Botsford
Globe
and Mail (Canada)
I
so admire Richard Wollheim's memoir of his childhood, Germs,
that it feels like a book written for me. I mean that in two
ways. I mean both that I felt, while reading Germs, as
if I were Richard Wollheim's ideal reader but also, and more
remarkably, as if he were speaking directly to me. I was engaged,
in other words, as a reader (an admirer of Wollheim's exquisite
style) and as a human being, one who has experienced some of
the terrors, sadness and beauty Wollheim captures … The
description I've given of the various parts of Germs
doesn't convey two of the most attractive aspects of the book:
Wollheim's great, dry wit and his literary innovation. Germs
is often very amusing, earnest in its absurdities (Wollheim
strives heroically to explain his lifelong dread of newspapers,
for instance) and, ultimately, filled with wonder. People, places,
plants and animals are given their due, and Wollheim manages
to be both caustic about and forgiving of his younger self.
In fact, it may well be that the deepest goal of Germs,
as he himself hints, is to convey why the things that are important
to him are important, why the particular (the child) is still
so vital to the adult he has become … His innovation lies
in how he allows the sections of the book to play against each
other. Though each section covers roughly the same time period,
each complements and deepens the others. It's rather like Nabokov's
Speak Memory, but Wollheim –
passionately Freudian, which Nabokov pointedly was not –
is a more surprising and open guide to his own childhood, especially
its inner aspects. And as for "truth," it is, in Wollheim's
memoir, a kind of accumulation of bright details. He writes,
on the last page of Germs: "Eventually, or such
was the hope, I would, in saying one thing after another after
another after another, each with a grain more of truth to it
than its predecessor, come to spill the beans: I might .....
find myself, with one broad archaic gesture, scattering the
germs." … It was, for me, very moving to read Wollheim's
recreation of the process. I can't recommend it highly enough.
–
Andre Alexus
Los
Angeles Times, August 14th 2005
"Whether
put off by the title or baffled by its singular prose, big publishers
turned this remarkable memoir down. Fortunately, a small press,
Waywiser, saw the point. Germs came out in Britain last
year, not long after Wollheim's death in November 2003 at the
age of 80. It dazzled critics. Many made it their book of the
year ... Wollheim is tireless at finding fresh aspects to an
experience he is describing. Just when you think he has shown
you every last facet of some childhood episode, up he comes
with more. There may be no one who has teased out more fully
the significance of seeing a father dress himself, or scrutinized
with greater care the four distinct theories a sisterless boy
dreamed up to explain the difference between the sexes. Years
of psychoanalysis, Wollheim reminds us, sharpened this inward
gaze ... In its own highly crafted voice, [Germs] records
a moral and sentimental education. Not only does Wollheim follow
through on the idea that a past left unrecalled traps a person
into mindless repetition, but he brings together, in a personal
way, many of his philosophical preoccupations. From Hume, he
took the idea that moral sentiments are a natural outgrowth
of human circumstance; from Mill, the idea that each of us has
our own ideals of happiness, which we should refine in the light
of experience; and from Freud, the idea that those moral responses
and ideals will twist or imprison us unless they have sprung
from us in the right way: They must not be imposed from the
outside or by imaginary figures of authority that we have, from
fear or however, made our own. Other philosophers challenged
him to put flesh on this skeleton, suspecting either that the
parts did not fit or that, if they did, the result would be
close to an unpalatable amoralism. One way to think of Germs
is as Wollheim's characteristically idiosyncratic reply to that
challenge. –
Edmund Fawcett
New York Review of Books, March 10th 2005
"Wollheim
writes like no one else: the density of his prose, the detail,
the intensity, the startling unexpectedness of what he says
and the way he says it are unique and constantly amazing ...
The term 'Proustian' keeps cropping up in reviews and conversations
about Germs, but there is something more scientific about
Wollheim's mode, as the title suggests ...[I]n
spite of the fact that he seemed a very urban kind of man, [Wollheim's]
descriptions of nature, especially of changing light, are magically
perceptive and detailed, atmospheric without getting overblown
... Guessing the initials in Germs [Wollheim refers to
many of the people who appear in the memoir by their initials]
has become a party game among London intellectuals. But that
doesn't stop them from admiring Wollheim's memoir, which was
chosen by several distinguished writers as their 'book of the
year.' If reviews of his work seem too full of quotations, it
is because Wollheim's writing is indescribable – except
possibly by him. It is as though he were both the analyst and
the patient on the couch, both of them a remarkable and idiosyncratic
prose." – Gabriele Annan
Irish
Times, February 19th 2005
"[A]
small masterpiece ... Poets, it is said, are the same as other
men and women, only more so: they may well perceive things more
intensely than you or I but, more importantly, are also more
noticing of what they see and feel, less inclined to
shrug it off, more literally to remember it, tease it out, turn
it round and make something precious of it. And of course they
are not particularly noted for being happy. Though writing here
in prose, Wollheim's sensibility is certainly that of a poet.
The intensity, delicacy and precision of the act of memory in
Germs have provoked comparisons with Proust. Just comparisons
perhaps, but this is a Proust who can also make you laugh out
loud ... In this fine memoir, Richard Wollheim has transmuted
his childhood hurt and loneliness into an artful, precise, self-deprecating
detachment. It is a very English sublimation." –
Enda O'Doherty
Literary
Review, February 2005
"Wollheim's
powers of description astound. Topographically or architecturally,
no one has ever depicted London's more prosperous suburbs with
such exactitude. His prose is the verbal equivalent of Pre-Raphaelite
painting, crowded with lovingly observed and richly coloured
detail ... [An] elaborately subtle and disturbing book ... [B]ecause
of the intensity with which a remarkable man has offered us
a view of his inner self, I doubt whether anyone who has read
it will forget it." – Diana Athill
Independent,
December 27th 2004
"
... Germs is not only elegantly written; it is a human
document of considerable power and importance. In Wilhelm
Meister, the first great Bildungsroman, Goethe sets
his hero's formal transition to adult maturity in a library
which contains the secrets and confessions of men who enjoy
worldly success. Only in the light of such admissions can the
hero sanely assess himself. Wollheim avoids the two vices to
which self-revelation is inclined: exhibitionism and apology.
Germs is simply the sober, tactful admission by a highly
cultivated and competent man of the reality of his inner world."
– John Armstrong
Guardian,
December 18th 2004
"
... Germs [is a book] in which childhood experience,
described with Proustian subtlety and thoroughness, remains
invested with lasting power and singularity ... In
Wollheim’s hands the sentence – often half
a page long, full of sinuous purpose and subtle qualification
– takes on extraordinary interest as he searches
for the precise colour and purport of a childhood memory. The
effect is of intellectual exactness given expression as a work
of art. For all the book’s rigour it is its poetry –
the play of charged imagery, the sense of something impalpable
that outlasts analysis – that one most remembers."
– Alan Hollinghurst
To
read the whole of Alan Hollinghurst's review, click here
Times
Literary Supplement, December 10th 2004
"[A]
precise, intensely reflective and above all literary sensibility
... lies at the heart of Germs ... At first sight [it]
might seem a variant on the Holroyd/Cobb/Lewis brand of English
autobiography, which achieves its effects by way of of the meek
self-effacement and the bumbling near-anonymity of the subject.
In fact it is a very different kind of animal. Wollheim knows,
or doesn't mind admitting, his intelligence and his intellectual
precocity, is confident, above all, that these things are worth
writing about. Richard Wollheim died in 2003, before the manuscript
was submitted for publication. One hopes that an early reader
or two had assured him of its abiding quality." –
D.J. Taylor
Daily
Telegraph , November 27th 2004
"Germs
evokes a prelapsarian world of infantile ecstasy and nightmare
with uncomfortable honesty and almost hallucinogenic power."
– Hilary Spurling
Spectator,
October 23rd 2004
"Posthumous
publication reveals [this memoir] to be a masterpiece –
an unclassifiable work of startling originality in which the
acutely sensual and confusedly cerebral experience of infancy,
boyhood and adolescence is brilliantly recreated. Although it
carries self-scrutiny to an extreme of scrupulous candour which
I believe to be unique, the term 'confessional' –
with its suggestion of apology and therapeutic exhibitionism
– does not apply. There is little here of personal
secrets being exposed to public view, but rather of the reader
being intimately drawn into the heart of a deeply private life
... [A]s
a writer, Wollheim is entirely and gloriously his own man. Everything
he tells us is totally unpredictable and, however surprising,
always convincing ... Germs
is destined to be a classic." – Francis Wyndham
Observer,
October 17th 2004
"[A]
densely evocative book, achiev[ing] a degree of self-examination
rarely found in the words people write about themselves ...
[The] exquisitely written investigation of an inner landscape
... [T]here is a Proustian feel to the memoir, although W.G.
Sebald is probably the nearest in style and unremitting excavation
of every detail in this testament of an alienated youth."
– Emma Tennant
To
read the whole of Emma Tennant's review, click here
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