BOO KS
145
There was a time, I suppose, when it was possible to believe that
Hazlitt's great essay, "On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth," stated
an enduring truth about human nature: "No young man believes he
shall ever die." But, at least in novels, these days the reveries and con–
versations of eighteen-year-old girls seem rarely to stray from wrinkles
and crows-feet, sagging breasts and haunches. Whenever they look at
their parents they shudder: for them the grim reaper begins his work
at the vernal equinox.
Yet we ought also to remember that our notions of certain distinct
periods of life (of, say, boyhood and young manhood) are themselves
historical and were to a considerable extent created by nineteenth–
century English writers-Wordsworth may be said to have virtually in–
vented the idea of boyhood-and by the English schools, which institu–
tionalized an entire period of growth and almost seemed to have perma–
nently stabilized it by means of the ritual life of the institution.
It
is
quite possible that these stages of life are dissolving; the typical notion
now is that one passes from childhood into what is called adolescence,
which is not really a semi-autonomous state of being but the state of be–
ing a problem. Such changes in society and in our ideas are registered
by young novelists; and despite the crudity of the registration, despite
their cliches and silliness and spiritlessness, they do represent a response,
and not a simply dishonorable one, to the world of shifting arrange–
ments and institutions. They are symptoms of how the young of our
time are capable of self-conscious submission to an environment that
they feel is hostile to their existence and to their freedom to pursue what
we think of as self-realization.
It might be possible to take them even more seriously and sympa–
thetically, even to admit that they could be in some essential way justi–
fied, were it not for the appearance now and then of a book that shows
up this phenomenon of youthful lassitude and submissive wisdom as
the rather minimal and unengaging thing it is. Such a book is Michel
del Castillo's
Child of Our Time.
Tanguy, the protagonist of this fiction–
alized autobiography, has also had an experience of our time, and in
spades. Tanguy's mother worked for the Loyalists in Spain; after their
defeat she and her son flee to France and to her husband who despises
his wife's politics; in 1940 he denounces his wife and child to the Vichy
French, and they are put in a concentration camp. They contrive an
escape, and then eight-year-old Tanguy's mother deserts him and makes
her way to England, while he winds up in a German concentration
camp, where he spends the rest of the war.
Tanguy is truly robbed of his childhood: "He was absolutely alone.
He was going to be treated as though he were a man. He was no
