After my daughter was born, I flew around the apartment where I lived, in the grip of a new mother’s euphoria. I couldn’t look at my darling’s tiny face enough, couldn’t see it enough, and I had to creep into her room when she napped just to stare down at her in stupefied awe. But when I looked at her, I often wondered what the world was like from her point of view. She didn’t know where she began or ended, didn’t know that the toes she found so entertaining belonged to her. But connections come fast for babies. Meanings are made early through the presence and absence of the mother, through the cry answered, the smile answered, through sounds that are not language but like language, and then words themselves appear as a response to what is missing. Now that she’s eight, Sophie lives in a world so dense with shaping fictions that her father and I are continually amused. She’s a poor woman with a scarf around her head and a begging cup. She’s a country-and-western singer, drawling out lyrics about lost love. She’s Judy Garland in an obscure musical called Summer Stock. She’s Pippi. She’s Anne of Green Gables. She’s a mother with a vengeance, changing, burping, waking the angel from naps, cooing and singing and patting and strolling her. The “baby” is life-size, plastic, and made in France.
For all the radical persona experimentation we call “play,” children are placemongers. More than adults, they like to stay put, and they like order in the form of repetition. They attach themselves fiercely to houses, rooms, and familiar objects, and change is frowned upon. The son of a close friend of Paul’s and mine is a case in point. For years he lived with his painter father in a loft in downtown Manhattan. The bathroom in their loft was a sad affair with broken flooring. When the father started earning more money from his work, he renovated the bathroom. His son mourned. “That old bathroom floor was my friend.” Parents often discover that their redecorating schemes are anathema to their children. My daughter has moved just once in her eight years, from a small apartment in Brooklyn to a large brownstone a block and a half away. When we showed her the new house, she didn’t like it. She worried about the strange furniture in it. I think she imagined that the people from whom we bought the house would leave their things, and all those unfamiliar objects made her uncomfortable. Then she had to survive the painting of the house, including her room, which took a couple of weeks, and she didn’t like that either. But once she had settled herself there, and had arranged her toys, she glued herself to that place and has invested it with all the affection she felt for her old room. The power of forms — spatial and verbal — as needed orientation in life can hardly be overestimated.
And every night I read to her. We have made our way through innumerable books, all fourteen Oz books, five Anne books, the Narnia series, all the Moomintroll books, E. Nesbitt and Lloyd Alexander and fairy tales from all over the world. Reading is a ritual which is itself associated with place, an event that happens after her teeth have been brushed and before she sleeps. No matter how harrowing the tales or how deep the identification (Sophie gasps, shudders, and, on occasion, sobs loudly during our reading), her body at least is securely in its bed. It may be that the singularity of place within the ritual is exactly what makes the sadness, fear, and excitement of these stories not only bearable but pleasurable. Repetition within ritual creates order through time, and repeating the form brings stability. As children my sisters and I cultivated the holiday rituals in our house to a degree that bordered on the fanatical. We still do. Every year, we — and that now includes three Jewish husbands and a lone Protestant, as well as five offspring — reenact the Christmas ritual at my parents’ house in Minnesota. The sequence of celebration is written in stone and has never altered. From the bringing in of the Jul log to the food, to dancing and singing around the Christmas tree, the event unfolds as it always has. Age may have made us more flexible in theory, but in practice our Christmas is as predictable as the sunrise, and we love it wholeheartedly. My parents moved to that house outside Northfield when I was in the third grade, and they have lived there ever since. The clothes my sisters and I wore for “dress-up” can still be found in the same box. Many people move from place to place, but my parents didn’t. That house holds my childhood with them and with Liv and Astrid and Ingrid, and I think the very idea of that place has given us a sense of ground, order, and continuity that is more rare than common. And that indisputable firmness of place is what allowed us all to go far away. For several years, Liv lived in Hong Kong, Astrid in Paris, and Ingrid and I were in New York.
The desire for coherence and order is human. Nonsense and chaos wreck people as surely as a terrible beating. And nonsense and chaos are everywhere. The self exists in time and space: the narrative of the self in memory and a continuity of place in “home.” My stepson, Daniel, who is now eighteen, does not remember living in one place with both of his parents. That is a paradise lost. Although one might imagine “two homes” as a doubling of the comforts of home, real experience doesn’t bear this out. The old expression, now out of fashion, “a broken home” comes closer to the truth. Children, especially, long for wholeness, for unity, perhaps because they are closer to that early, fragmentary state before any “self” is formed, or perhaps because they are truly not the masters of their destinies. And although divorce is commonplace enough and often benign — without open rancor between parents — going from here to there can become a form of being nowhere. The child finds himself yonder in a land between father and mother. Because “home” is more than a place to park the body, because it is necessarily a symbolic landscape, what can it mean to have two of them? Two homes inevitably contradict each other, always in small ways, sometimes in big ones. What happens if the words spoken in one place contradict the words in the other? Where does the child reside then? And what does it mean for that child’s relations to the symbolic world in general — to language itself as the expression of truth, of all meaning? When Daniel was in the second grade, he invented a place he called the “Half-World.” I think it was in outer space, and all the people who lived in it were literally cut in two. He wasn’t old enough to know why he had concocted this place, but when he told me about it, I suffered a sharp, terrible pang of recognition. I asked him if those people could ever be put back together again. He said yes. And I think he was right. There are ways to sew the Half-World together again, even though it is impossible to change its torn history. Daniel takes photographs, and some of them are remarkable. Many of them are images of places he has isolated in ways I would never have imagined. When I look at his shadows cast on sidewalks, his mirror images in windows, the cracks and ruined lines on his doors of abandoned houses, or the invasive vines that blur the architecture of a small building, I know that these pictures are threads of himself. He sews with his camera and in the darkroom. And no matter how derelict his subjects are, there is radiant order to each and every picture. They are precisely framed. Every line, every shadow is exactly where he wants it to be.
A photograph of a place is not a real place any more than a book is, but we inhabit photographs nevertheless as spectator or as identifying actor. Words are more abstract than images, but images are inevitably born of them. The pictorial drama of reading corresponds to the one of writing. You cannot have one without the other. Reading is active, but writing is more active. Making fiction is making a place for the reader in the text, and this brings up the eternal question of making a book: what to put in and what to leave out. One can argue that there are two kinds of writers in the world: the ones who put it all in and the ones who leave a lot of it out. Sweeping claims can be made about history and these impulses. Inclusion and volume can be understood as a literary idea that was begun in the eighteenth century, developed in the nineteenth, and lasted through Joyce. (He may have turned literature on its head but he kept a lot in.) Exclusion, too, can be seen as essential to late modernism, most notably Kafka and Beckett. But these are not useful categories “here.” (The reader is “here” with me if he or she has come so far.) There are times when a detailed description of a living room and all its furnishings is annoying, when it gets in the way of reading, and then there are times when it does not. Austen is spare in description. Had she described every object in the Bennet parlor, Paul never would have squeezed in his New Jersey living room among all that clutter, and it seems to me the moral resonance of that book would have been partly lost. On the other hand, I cannot imagine Dickens without his full descriptions of places — the stinking Thames and Mr. Venus’s ghastly workshop in Our Mutual Friend, for example; but these descriptions, like Sterne’s clock in Tristram Shandy, are always to a purpose. They accelerate the book. They don’t bog it down in pointless novelistic gab. Good books usually say enough about where they happen, but not too much. Enough can be more or less, but it’s bad books that treat the reader to his expectations about what a novel or a story or a poem is or where it is. There is something comforting about bad books, which is why people read them. Surprise can be a wonderful thing, but, on the whole, people don’t want it, any more than most children want their rooms changed. They want what they already know to be confirmed, and they have been richly supplied with these fictional comforts since the late eighteenth century, when the novel became popular with the rise in mass literacy. But the good reader (a quality not at all determined by literary sophistication) wants room to fill in the blanks. Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn’t there, and that creative invention becomes the book.