IV.
That was the family, and as the much younger George was coming to know them, he was himself becoming an individual. This was often a matter of figuring out how things worked. One of his earliest memories was of receiving, on his third birthday, the gift of a locomotive molded out of ice cream. But locomotives, he had been told, were very hot: how could this one be cold, and how could he be expected to eat it? On another occasion, George saw his cousin Charlie James fall into the lake at Nagawicka. Instead of trying to rescue him, George ran to announce tearfully to the grown-ups that “Charles is drowned,” only to have them laugh as the sopping sputtering Charlie staggered up the hill behind him. Milk delivery horses, George discovered, had to be anchored with heavy weights, like boats, to keep them from straying. Bicycles required falling off in order to learn to stay on.37
Another mystery, for young George, had to do with relieving himself. He recalled being astonished, upon entering first grade, at seeing “little boys piddle standing up.” His trousers had no fly, so he cut his own slit, and his stepmother was furious: “I think she spanked me for it, or scolded me very severely.” The injustice would rankle for decades to come. So too did the discovery, two years later in Germany, that mothers there allowed little boys to pull their pants down and go, on the grass in the park. He remembered thinking “how wonderful it would be if you had a mother to whom you would admit—you would tell her—when you wanted to do this.”38
A weightier matter that worried Jeanette and George was how you would know that a war was about to break out. Kassel, where they spent six months in 1912, was a military town, and the children had picked up rumors of naval buildups, war scares, even the possible need for an early return to the United States. They were alone in their room one day when a military band marched up the street. “We were sure,” Jeanette recalled, “that this was the way a war would start.... Would we ever get home? We had heard a lot about Germany’s wars and even about one called the Thirty Years War. I don’t know how long we waited until Mother and the girls came in and said the band was serenading a General and his bride. We felt a little silly then.”39
Self-confidence slowly came, though. Both children learned German easily: George would pride himself on his fluency for the rest of his life. German boys would occasionally harass him for being an American but he held his own, “flailing away with my fists.” Faith in Santa Claus fell victim to the absence of a fireplace in the pension where the family was staying: “I knew damn well he couldn’t come down the stove.” And George asked his father’s permission, “when I am big,” to join the United States Navy.40 After returning with his family to Milwaukee, George wrote his first surviving poem, entitled “My Soldier”:
It was a respectable literary effort for a child of nine, and George carefully preserved it—it remains the earliest document in his papers.41
George portrayed childhood, in his memoirs, as existing along an “unfirm” boundary between external and internal reality. He lived in a world “peculiarly and intimately my own, scarcely to be shared with others or even made plausible to them. I habitually read special meanings into things, scenes, and places—qualities of wonder, beauty, promise, or horror—for which there was no external evidence visible, or plausible, to others.” At the end of Cambridge Avenue was a grimy brick building with a gloomy entryway, behind which lurked something with “a sinister significance all its own.” There may, or may not, have been fairies in Juneau Park. And George was “absolutely scared green” of his grandfather Kennan’s Victorian mansion on Prospect Avenue: when left alone there one day, he turned all the gaslights on and cowered in the corner, where nothing could get behind him until rescuers arrived .42
Jeanette, who knew him better than anyone else, thought him preoccupied with death when he was little. She did not find it funny when George and his cousin Charlie took to jumping off the porch at the Nagawicka house, joking that they might die, then rolling on the ground laughing. Even more disturbing was a conversation on a sleepy afternoon under a tree overlooking the lake. Jeanette was nine and George was seven, but what he said stuck in her mind so clearly that she could repeat it word for word decades later:
George: [A] person wouldn’t have to live if he didn’t want to, would he? He could kill himself.
Jeanette: But that wouldn’t be nice at all. Why would you want to do that?
George: Well, you could shoot yourself, or maybe drown yourself in the lake.
Jeanette: But we don’t have any guns, and how could you make yourself stay under water?
George: Papa has. He has his hunting gun in the closet in his room. You know that.
Jeanette: Yes, but it’s so big. And if you tried to drown how would you keep yourself down?
Jeanette later understood this conversation as a brother trying to spook his sister by discussing the practicalities of committing suicide, but she did not take it that way at the time. George was insisting then, she thought, on “the freedom to die if one really wanted to.” It was “too awful to talk about.”43
And yet George did not recall his boyhood as being unhappy: “I was a very normal boy.” Among his fondest memories were the wrestling matches with Charlie : “two grubby little fellows, grunting, pushing, straining, and squirming—both being too stubborn (after all, we were both Scots) to admit defeat, and both of us returning, mussed and dirty, for dinner, only to be sent upstairs first . . . and told to make ourselves more presentable.” George remembered being “a little bit timid, a little bit of a sissy,” but this did not show up in the diary he began keeping on New Year’s Day 1916, at the age of eleven.44 It opened with another poem:
What followed reflects, on the whole, an average boy’s life—including the tendency to treat ordinary and extraordinary events in much the same way:
January 6: This morning Cary Jones and his father plunged over the railroad bridge in a limousine and were both killed instantly. I walked around there this afternoon only all that I could see was a busted railing and a lot of splinters. Then I went down to the Town Club to peek at the dancing class.
January 9:
