I first encountered “Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood” in November 1953, on the same day in a college survey of English literature that introduced the class to Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy. The professor in charge of the lesson pointed to the portrait as an embodiment of the further thought some lines later in Wordsworth’s poem that “a six years’ darling of a pygmy size” is both a “mighty prophet” and a wise philosopher, that a “growing boy” is “nature’s priest.”Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
—William Wordsworth
I didn’t know the painting, but the costume I recollected from having seen it on the person of Larry Spenser, five years old in September 1940, stepping out of a chauffeured Rolls-Royce on his first day at the Peninsula School in Menlo Park, California, trailing precisely the same cloud of glory—blue silk suit, lace collar, white stockings, ribboned shoes—except that he was wearing, not holding, the plumed hat. The noisy, unkempt children already present in the schoolyard, myself among them, stared in silent, gap-toothed wonder at the heaven-sent being that had cometh from afar to fall in our midst, not in utter nakedness, but in his mother’s intimations of immortality.
Larry’s mother was devoted to “the arts” and rich enough to afford the privilege of her enthusiasms—multiple husbands, houses in Switzerland and Italy, a large estate in the hills west of Palo Alto furnished with pavilions in the Chinese style, best of all with Larry, her life’s star and most prized possession. He looked the part, but the picture was deceptive. Willful, clever, ruthless, predatory, vain, Larry was nature’s brute creation, a growing beast.
Between the ages of five and eight we spent a good deal of time together, at school and on the hillside estate, where I could count on always finding him either angry or aggrieved—the German governess had burned the milk; he didn’t like the Shetland pony his mother found for him in Scotland. What she had brought him that he really liked was a sword said by the dealer in Paris to have accompanied Napoleon to Austerlitz, worn by Larry in the sash from one of his pirate costumes. His passion was cruelty to small animals, and what he liked to do with the sword was to stab a frog, behead a chicken, roast a chipmunk or a squirrel.
I was well acquainted with the swiftness of Larry’s deft and joyful turns to violence when on a Saturday afternoon in 1943 we went together to a children’s concert in the San Francisco Opera House to see Pierre Monteux conduct the orchestra playing Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. The two of us at the age of eight were seated in the center of a row thirty feet from the stage, and Larry had with him what looked to be an old and venerable book, fitted with brass hinges and bound in leather. Ten minutes into the performance he decided that he didn’t like the music, found it so disagreeable that he thought the time had come to play a merry prank and do away with the fat man waving the baton. Opening the book that proved to be a box, he drew forth an eighteenth-century dueling pistol (another present from his mother’s Paris connection), its barrel oiled and loaded, its flash pan primed with powder.
As to what happened next I can’t now say for certain. I remember knowing at the time that Larry was a harsh critic, apt to act on impulse and not likely to make an important distinction between a Frenchman and a squirrel. Maybe he was only fondling the pistol to show and tell himself a mighty prophet and a wise philosopher. Then again, maybe not.
by Lewis H. Lapham, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Thomas Gainsborough
