The Siege

Should I have been taken in? Perhaps this nonrepresentational, matter-of-fact objectivity was merely a cover for her true preoccupations. [30] That might be true. It might also be false. We could only watch and guess. ‘A primrose by a river’s brim/ A yellow primrose was to him,/And it was nothing more.’ There are people like that. I remembered one of Kanner’s differentia between schizophrenic and autistic children: that schizoid children lived among fantasies and even hallucinations, whereas autistic children did not seem to hallucinate at all. As Elly never seemed to; I had never seen any sign that she related, negatively or positively, to anything that was not objectively there. It fitted with all I knew of Elly that to her a red circle should be a red circle — only that. On the rare (though increasingly frequent) occasions when she departed from pattern- making, the departure was evident. It was unnecessary to ask ‘What’s that?’ We could see what it was. But if we did ask, after the idiotic manner of grownups, Elly did not answer ‘red’ or ‘peacock blue’; she said matter-of-factly, ‘stairs’, ‘bed’, or ‘girl’. She could draw, if she pleased, people and objects, or she could draw patterns. The two realms were not confused, nor, apparently, did they overlap. Real things were not patterns, and were not treated as such. Her representational drawings were markedly less ordered than the great body of her work; figures, objects, did not repeat, and they might be clustered at the bottom of the page or to one side. It was as if she knew that the world of reality and the world of pure form were distinct — and knowing this, preferred the world of form.

I write surrounded by scraps of paper on which I have jotted down Elly’s ideas of order. The problem of selection here is severer than anywhere else. Elly has the kind of mind that given the series 2, 4, 6... will spontaneously supply 8 and carry the series to 100. She will do the same thing with a progression by 5s, 10s, 11s, 100s. She will do it with 3s and 4s, but with more difficulty; though she can add 9 plus 3, she may make a mistake on 49 plus 3. What is illustrated is not her ease in performing arithmetical processes, but her grasp of an ordering principle. The grasp is more remarkable because we do not ask her to supply the next number, any more than the psychologist who tested her at three and a half had to ask her to pile five cubes in order of decreasing size. It is simply apparent to her that that is what is there to be done — that the system itself demands it.

When she was first learning to count verbally, at five and six, she still had difficulty with new words. Two words for the same thing confused her and I avoided them where possible. Consequently I anticipated difficulty with ordinal numbers (for ‘first’ and ‘second’ are very different words from ‘one’ and ‘two’), and also with the verbal shifts as she must move, for example, from ‘...twenty-eight, twenty-nine’, so orderly and easy, to ‘thirty’. But she grasped ordinals at once, even making the effort necessary to put a slight noise on ‘fifteen’ to adumbrate ‘fifteenth’. And though she did initially say ‘twenty-ten’, she knew without being told that twenty, thirty, etc., were different from other numbers and like each other, and in a day or so was spontaneously correcting her seventy- or eighty- tens to ‘eighty’ and ‘ninety’. Not only were numbers readily available to her, but words as well, if only they reflected an ascertainable order.

Elly’s natural grasp of ordering principles seems to tell her what defines a system and consequently what is needed to make it complete. I had deferred teaching her zero; I knew it was a sophisticated mathematical concept, and what the Greeks had lacked, Elly, I thought, could do without. But Elly picked it up somewhere, at kindergarten perhaps, and brought it into common use. I had not forced numbers on Elly; she was seven and a half before I suggested that 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 1= 3. She intuitively added larger sums for years, and I made sure to associate the abstract symbols with blocks or objects. She was now in kindergarten and it did not seem too much to teach. I was, however, unprepared for her critical reaction: ‘No zero!’ She wanted 0+1 = 1 and I supplied it. Then, ‘Oh, we forgot! Zero plus zero equals zero.’

Similarly, she could grasp the principles behind the verbal representation of numerical order. A few months after she was eight, at a time when she had been able to count correctly for years, we found her making numbers on a sheet. ‘One-ty nine, one-ty eight, one-ty seven. one-ty one, one-ty zero, zero-ty nine’… all the way down to zero-ty zero. What could be a clearer verbalization of the way our notational system works? If 29 is represented as ‘twenty-nine’, the word ‘two’ buried in the ‘twenty’ (as of course we had never even thought of teaching her), then ‘one-ty nine’ will be the equivalent of ‘nineteen’, and ‘zero-ty nine’ of ‘nine’, and when one gets at last to zero-ty zero there’s reason to shout out what had become Elly’s new cry of triumph, ‘Yo ho!yo ho! yo ho!’[31]

Yo ho indeed. For a year zero has been Elly’s favourite number. [32] She uses it interchangeably with ‘no’ in common speech (‘zero car in garage’), and she has even developed a purely verbal system in which ‘nobody’ and ‘somebody’ (an especially difficult concept for her because indefinite and inexact) become ‘zero-body’ and ‘one-body’, occasionally joined by ‘two-body’ and ‘three-body’, depending on the number of people in question. (Alternatively, the opposite of ‘nobody’ may be ‘yes-body’. ) Elly, in fact, focuses on hard-to-get ideas through systems as she once focused on them through colour. The shifts in such relative notions as dark and light are hard for her, and she has been slow to acquire comparatives and superlatives, but one of her favourite games now is to darken a room, and as she shuts its door the diminishing light from the hall illustrates ‘dark, darker, darkest!’

She is delighted when words exhibit ordering principles. The actual principles behind English word order, being so deeply situational in nature, she grasps (as I have noted in the preceding chapter) less well than a normal three-year-old, but it is quite otherwise with a principle that is not rooted in situations and usage, but arbitrary and devoid of content. We watched, incredulous, as Elly, just turned eight, extrapolated from what she had at long last learned: that the plural of ‘man’ is ‘men’. I had been able to convey it by a picture: the two words first, and below them, one man and several. The next day, Elly, totally absorbed, produced five pictures of her own. One was a reproduction of my man-men original. Next came MAMA-MEME, illustrated, of course, by one mama and several, followed by DADDY-DEDDY, SARA-SERE, and MATT-METT, each illustrated with a single figure and a group. (The single member of the family whose name did not contain the letter A was of course not pluralized. ) The utter divorce from common usage (Elly still does not form conventional plurals, though she knows how to, since S is for her the most difficult of the final consonants), the total disregard of human and situational plausibility are obvious; so too is the spontaneous abstraction and application of an ordering principle. One is no more extraordinary than the other.

Again and again we had felt it; something more than a simple lack of interest in things human — a positive commitment to, a genuine pleasure in that which is abstract, arbitrary, devoid of content. The passive two-year-old Elly saw the parquet formboard out of the corner of her eye and actually madethe effort to go upstairs so she could play with it. Elly four years later could go into an ecstasy that tensed every muscle in her body as she communicated the simple observation that some sleeves are short while others are long. Today she says to me, ‘Do rithmetic?’ and as I sit on her bed and transcribe the sums and answers she dictates, the springs shake as she jigs and bounces, smiles, chuckles, squeals, laughs aloud in the intensity of her pleasure. If an experience is empty of content, of a sort that the average child would find particularly uninteresting, Elly is almost sure to enjoy it. She has just discovered our zip code number — 01267. Of course she loves it.

Of all things in the varied world — cars and houses, animals, flowers, and people — why should Elly be interested in the conventions of notation? At five and a half, as I sat and drew for her, she asked for ‘pea’. Pea? I thought. Peach?Pear? We often drew the forms from her fruit-and-vegetable curtain, and she was so indistinct I could never be sure. I tried out all three. They weren’t right. Elly’s frustration mounted to the point where she made a supreme effort to communicate. ‘Lelluh?’ Lettuce? I wondered, and drew one without calming her in the least. And then I caught on: ‘Letter!’ She laughed, bounced, that was it, she wanted the letter P. From then on I felt less need to defend myself against possible charges that I was pushing my child into activities that would satisfy my own intellectual pride. If I wanted to be proud of a child who — like the rest of her family — liked letters, I had one. Elly had had a set of plastic letters for years — twenty-six capitals and ten numerals. It was with that that, at five, she had spelled her name. When she was seven, in kindergarten and already able to recognize many words, I got her a rather elaborate set of wooden letters — a real compositor’s chest, full of e’s and a’s, enough to spell words in plenty. You could choose between capital letters and small, and I had bought the small, since she had the others. As Elly played with the letters I heard her say some curious syllables. ‘Uh-puh- cay?Uh-puh-cay?’‘Apple-cake?’ I said uncertainly. Though Elly had no special interest in apple-cake, it seemed a possibility; it was the sort of thing a child might say. Perhaps she had apple-cake at school. It was strange, at any rate, how she kept repeating these sounds. ‘Uh-puh-cay?’ Some urgency came into the voice. I looked again at the letters and suddenly I knew. ‘Uppercase?’ No uncertainty now: ‘Up-uh-cay!’ I got the old set of capitals and began to make words, but Elly was not interested in them. Instead she occupied herself happily in producing the set of twenty-six upper- and lower-case pairs.