Germs: A Memoir of Childhood

by Richard Wollheim, Sheila Heti (Introduction)

Overview

A brilliant, sinuous exploration of family and childhood memory by one of the most original British philosophers of the twentieth century.

Germs is about first things, the seeds from which a life grows, as well as about the illnesses it incurs, the damage it sustains. Written at the end of his life by Richard Wollheim, one of the major philosophers of the late twentieth century, the book is not the usual story of growing up and getting on but a brilliant recovery and evocation of childhood consciousness and unconsciousness, an eerily precise rendering of that primitive, formative world we all come from in which we do not know either the world or ourselves for sure, and things—houses, clothes, meals, parents—loom large around us, as indispensable as they are out of our control. Richard Wollheim’s remarkably original memoir is a disturbing, enthralling, dispassionate but also deeply personal depiction of a child standing, fascinated and fearful, on the threshold of individual life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681374963
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	1,173,654
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Richard Wollheim (1923–2003) was born in London and educated at Westminster School and Balliol College, Oxford. He fought in France and Germany during World War II and taught philosophy at numerous colleges, including the University of California, Berkeley from 1985 until his death in 2003. He was best known for his philosophical work on art and psychoanalysis, and he served as president of the British Society of Aesthetics from 1992 until his death. He wrote and edited over a dozen books, including On the Emotions, The Mind and Its Depths, On Art and the Mind, and Painting as an Art.

Sheila Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels Ticknor, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, and the story collection, The Middle Stories. She lives in Toronto.

Read an Excerpt

Germs

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By Richard Wollheim

Random House

Richard Wollheim
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0771088957

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Chapter One

Chapter One

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, and therefore, if I trip, or when I trip, and now at long last, the waiting is over, and I have tripped, and I am, am I not? I am falling, falling -- and was it then, in that very moment when magically I was suspended in the early light, when the soft smells and sounds seeping out of the flowers and the insects and the birds appeared to be doing for me for a moment what the hand that was not there could not do, or was it, not then, but in the next moment, by which time the magic had failed, and the path was racing towards me, that I did what I was to do on many later occasions, on the occasion of many many later falls, and I stretched out my hands rigid in front of me so that my fingers formed a fan, not so much to break my fall, or to make things better for me when I hit the ground, but rather to pretend, to pretend also to myself, that things were not so bad as they seemed, or disaster so imminent, and that this was not a fall but a facile descent through the air, which would leave me in the same physical state, clean, ungrazed, uninjured, that I was in before I tripped, and that the urine would not, out of sheer nervousness, pour out of me?

When I landed, a large rose-­thorn, which had been lying in wait on the gravel path, most probably since the early hours of the morning when it had fallen from its stalk, confronted me, and met no resistance as it slid itself under my thumb-­nail, and then, like a cold chisel, worked its way up into me, making its own channel as it went, until it came to rest on the pad of pink, quivering flesh that forms a cushion underneath the nail.

Cries of surprise, cries of pain, cries of outrage, resounded through the garden, and tore apart the morning serenity.

Within seconds, someone, alerted to my absence, has run out of the house, and brusquely collected me up into her arms. Held with what was to be memorable pressure against the surface of a starched apron, I was hurried back, breast-­height, along those few yards of path which my feet had just traversed in an outward direction. But now the sounds and smells that had lured me onwards were blotted out by the protective breast. And it was only when I was safely returned to the house from which it was made clear to me that I should never have escaped, and I was set down in the darkness, and the dank smell of the hallway rose up and blended with the sharp, chastising smell of the apron, that my senses slowly came back to me. And then it was the turn of oblivion.

Oblivion came down. It came down with a swish, with the great, heavy swish of velvet curtains suddenly released from the high gilded arch of an opera house, or an old music hall, stirring up as they fell the smell of sawdust aerated with the cold dusty draught that blew in from the wings and dried the nostrils. At school I knew that I differed from other boys in that I could recognize this smell, and they could not. It was familiar to me from early visits backstage with my father, which sometimes brought with them moments of excitement as well as the more usual embarrassment, as when, of a sudden, a troupe of eighteen-­, nineteen-­year-­old girls, rushing off the stage, shouting to one another, "Darling," "Dearest," "Did you see him?" as they headed for their dressing-­rooms, accidentally surrounded me, and I dared to hope that, as they drew themselves up on their toes, I might, by some mischance or some misunderstanding, brush against their strong, horse-­like bodies. But never so. It never happened. Forced to look down through artificial eyelashes, past cascades of ringlets stuck to their cheeks with sweat, and so eventually to take stock of my little boy's body, they reacted with a quick intake of breath, a "Tut" or a "Tss," and, then resuming their speed, swerved past me and on to their dressing-­rooms. Into that brief gasp of theirs I read much. On the surface, there was surprise, surprise at my mere presence; below that, there was some desire, in a sisterly way, to protect me; then below that, there was shame at whatever it was about them from which I needed protection; and then, deepest of all, there was, I knew, their withering contempt for whatever weakness there was in me that made me need, or made them feel I needed, protection from them. Why, they wondered, was what was good enough for them not good enough for me? Whenever I recalled such moments, I noticed how a look of apprehension passed over my father's face as he turned from them to me, and then a look of relief as he turned back from me to them.

It was, as my reader will have guessed, a long, a very long, time before I succeeded in brushing against a woman's body.

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Excerpted from Germs by Richard Wollheim Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

chapter one
My Land

chapter two
My Families

chapter three
Love and Fear 

List of Illustrations 
A Note on the Text 
Acknowledgements 

Editorial Reviews

A frighteningly good memoir.” —Andrew O’Hagan, London Review of Books

“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. . . . 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.” —Frank Kermode

“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, The Guardian

“Germs evokes a prelapsarian world of infantile ecstasy and nightmare with uncomfortable honesty and almost hallucinogenic power.” —Hilary Spurling, The Telegraph

“Germs is written with extraordinary elegance. Wollheim seems incapable of writing a bad sentence. . . . There is nothing quite like this poignant and mournful memoir. It is remarkable as a kind of sensory autobiography and as that rarest of memoirs, where one has the sense that one is in direct, intimate and occasionally frightening contact with the mind of a child.” —Michael J. Lewis, The Wall Street Journal

“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.” —Los Angeles Times

“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 to Pre-Raphaelite painting, crowded with lovingly observed and richly colored detail . . . I doubt anyone who has read it will forget it.” —Literary Review

"The intensity, delicacy and precision of the act of memory in Germs have provoked comparisons with Proust. Just comparison 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." —The Irish Times

“[A] radiant masterpiece. . . [Germs] is by turns exquisite, appalling, mysterious, and very, very funny. . . . Brought this close up to what it feels like to be a child, or for that matter an adult, Wollheim helps us see with awful clarity what an emotional and moral predicament it is to be alive. . . . [He] is one of those supreme observers who we feel is presenting things as they actually were and not as they emerge from the alembic of memory.” —John Banville, The Nation

From the Publisher

Philosopher Wollheim (The Mind and Its Depths) tells a compelling tale of a childhood in England during the Twenties and Thirties among celebrities, governesses, and often distracted parents. His impresario father and Gaiety Girl mother entertained such cultural figures as Kurt Weill and Diaghilev. But despite this apparent glamour, Wollheim spent much of his childhood in hotels with nannies while his parents traveled elsewhere. Complicating this lonely existence, his beautiful, eccentric mother had an obsession with cleaning, which came before anything else. Wollheim's unusual childhood probably contributed to his having been a sickly child, and the time he spent convalescing encouraged his love of reading. By age ten, his interest in painting provided another refuge from an ever-present fear of grown-up neglect and disapproval. Remarkably, Wollheim recollects events and feelings from the distant past in Proust-like detail to create a moving yet sometimes humorous portrait. Published posthumously and set at a time of increasing turmoil in Germany, this memoir also conveys Freud's influence as Wollheim analyzes the discomfort he felt as the child of a German Jew living in England. Recommended for public and academic libraries. Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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