Pogrom and Pop
A Victorian Boyhood. By L. E. Jones. (Macmillan, 18s.)
WHICH childhoods turn into the best books of memoirs, or form the best backgrounds for novels? Stable and solid ones, where things are simple and "above all consistent, where the child suspects nothing beyond the immediate: one place, one lot of people, one family jargon and set of values. Travel and adventure and revolution are wasted so early in life, when oddness is ' frightening, and familiarity—the child's criterion of rightness— should be laying down a basic imagery under all future experience. Variety, comes later, whether you want it or not, and the greatest disadvarftage to a child that I can see, the sharpest disruption of innocence, is to show him the, world's diversity. Pity army children, diplomatic children, international organisation children who, camping out their childhood, have no,steadfast memory of erre walk, one view, one bed and mug and fender. What child wants Cinderella different, or four bears instead of three, to make a change? The greatest boon in childhood is monotony.
Here we have two childhoods and their utterly dissimilar two worlds, yet both with that compactness, that congruence that makes a child's security. For Mr. Behrman the world meant 'the Hill' at Worcester, Massachusetts, where his father and uncles, Lithuanian pedlars and small tradesmen, who spoke only Yiddish and whose children grew up speaking only English, spent lives of piety and learning round the Providence Street Synagogue. His father !lived his entire life in an ambush, perpetually under the shadow of ancestral massacre.' Yet the children seem to have been little disturbed even by such anti-Semitism as they met, and the gap between the generations can seldom have been more startling : when Mr. Behrman as a young man used to visit his mother from New York, he could not speak to her, nor she to, him; they could only smile.
Mr. Behrman's was 'a family uprooted from a veiled and unhappy past and plumped down, unaccountably, in a tenement district of an industrial city in New England': Sir Lawrence Jones's one planted, prosperous rather than wealthy, in the squirearchy of Norfolk. In that world there were 'but three classes of person, gentlemen, shopkeepers, and working-people,' and, since the Jones
children plainly knew where' they came, even a lapse in the
family's prosperity, and continental interludes, meant little basic disruption. There was still Eton and Balliol; and, despite their father's notion (privately repudiated by his children) that things were ta lot jollier on the Continent, there was always Cranmer Hall in the background.
This solid, honourable ancestry was always there, even when the present tottered financially and Father shamed the boys by wearing turned-down collars and his hair too long over his ears; yet on Mr. Behrman, who knew nothing of his family beyond his parents, who to this day does not know his age, for it was reckoned by the Hebrew calendar, the past pressed far more insistently : a past, not of soldiers and countrymen, but of pogroms and per- secutions. Sir Lawrence Jones did not rebel or react against what he was born to : he accepted its tyrannies and limitations,, writes of his parents, of Eton, of life at Cranmer Hall, affectionately but often dryly. To Mr. Behrman, his childhood has an intenser 'col'our: his father's world, formed wholly by 'God and the thick- textured history of the Jewish people,' was 'dark, fear-ridden, and oppressive, but it had the warmth and tenderness of companion- ship in a common danger,' and it bred in him 'an acute longing to escape and shake off those extra centuries.' How far he escaped its 'sombre fascination' his depiction—in his plays, or his bio- graphy of Lord Duveen—of a world so far removed from it has shown; yet he conjures it more lovingly than Sir Lawrence does his, perhaps for the reason that he knows it irrevocably lost.
There cannot, to my mind, Niro° many books of memoirs of this sort. The world of childhood recalled may be familiar, like Sir Lawrence's, or exotic, like Mr. Behrman's; but while the child's view of it—that narrow brilliance of vision, that exclusive, con- centrated enjoyment of moments, an enjoyment generally far removed from conscious happiness—can be conjured, any world is surely worth recalling. Sir Lawrence Jones writes straight chronological autobiography, beginning with family prayers and his mother at the harmonium, and ending with triumphs at Eton that purged him for life of all further ambitions of glory.: he writes with charm and competence and makes the whole thing likeable. Mr. Behrman takes people and incidents and turns them almost into short stories : he writes with charm too and with more than competence, bringing his lost world alive into the heightened solidity of the best dreams, where the senses are keener than usual, but solid things can behave fantastically. Childhood, if I remember rightly, was something like that : at any rate Mr. Behrman makes
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