and indistinguishable from adults, though they were my sister Hautie and a friend of hers, both twelve years old.
How far back into childhood can we remember? I remember the first snow of my second winter, when probably I hadn’t reached the age of eighteen months; I remember how that snow disappointed me. I know it was the first snow of the winter because I’d been looking forward to it.
There’s much argument about rememberings. One of the younger members of a family claims to recall something; the others tell him he couldn’t; they say he only thinks he does because he’s heard it described by his elders, and of course it’s true that we not seldom find it difficult to discriminate between what we ourselves recollect and what’s been put into our minds by frequent hearsay. Nevertheless, having been born at the end of July, 1869, I remember the first snow of the winter of 1870–1871. If that snow fell in December of 1870 I was between sixteen and seventeen months old.
A novelist must make the exercising of his memory—as well as other self-searchings—a constant practice, or he will not understand and make real the creatures he puts into his books; but if other people did the inward delving that he professionally does, they would no doubt turn up as much from their own obscured infancies. My earliest recollection isn’t here recorded as a feat; it leads to a suggestion.
A Very Young Man Goes West
When, at probably less then eighteen months, I looked out of a window at the first snowflakes of that year, I was disappointed because of their smallness. I was disappointed because I then remembered snowflakes that had been as large as the palm of my hand, and these now weren’t half that size. Thus, though I don’t remember the larger snowflakes that fell when I was less than a year old, I remember that when I was less than eighteen months old I did remember them, and that at less than a year old I had observed their size as compared to the size of the palm of my then hand.
I didn’t tell anybody about this, hence nobody told me about it later; I remember it. The suggestion is that the youngest baby has more than what are called “prenatal memories”; that he’s not only thinking, he’s already recollecting, and that conscious memory is an activity within us at birth.
Two years old, I was complacently aware that I owed some of my importance to the achievements of another person, for whom I’d been named. Our family possessed, besides worthy ancestors, a living Great Man; and, like all other families that have this privilege, we borrowed greatness from our hero. He was my mother’s brother, Newton Booth. Physically delicate, just out of college, and beginning the practice of law in that agreeable town, Terre Haute, he’d suddenly swung his placid young life to Western roads of adventurous and sometimes tragic hardship. Now—generous, rich, still young, and still a bachelor—he’d become the governor of California. My mother and my sister and I went to spend a year with him in Sacramento.2
Uncle Newton made much of me; so did the circle of gay early Californians surrounding him. Toys almost glutted me; I heard tales loudly told of me, saw groups of expectant faces about me awaiting the delights of my wisdom; and bearded men, as well as hourglass-shaped ladies, professed themselves ravished by photographs of me in kilts and velvet jacket. The flatteries I received might easily have convinced me that I was a philosopher, or a wit, or a great beauty. They did. I thought I was all three.
Much was made, too, of some imagined companions of mine, a family I’d found in the air. Where I got the name of these ghostly people, the “Hunchbergs,” and the name of their dog, “Simpledoria,” nobody knew, nor did I; but Mr. and Mrs. Hunchberg, and their son and daughter, almost grown up, and Simpledoria, appear to have had reality for me. I talked with them at great length, when actual people were present as well as when I was alone. I quoted the Hunchbergs incessantly, played with Simpledoria on the carpet, spoke to him from my bed at night. Uncle Newton gave a dinner for the Hunchbergs, with chairs placed for the four of them and a plate on the floor for Simpledoria. Through me, the translator as it were, my uncle talked seriously with Mr. Hunchberg, had cigars passed to him and was regretful that he didn’t smoke. To my three-year-old eyes those empty chairs weren’t vacant; I saw the dear Hunchbergs there, and my uncle understood because in his own childhood he’d had an unseen companion—a boy braver and more dashing than himself and known to him as “Bill Hammersly.”3
The Way of a Transgressor
In that whole year in the golden land, my happiness was as unclouded as my self-esteem—except for two slight setbacks. These were caused by social errors on my part that evanescently dimmed me; and both are now known to me mostly through hearsay, though memory brings flickerings. The first of the two episodes reflects even less credit upon my innate character than does the second—which was, morally speaking, disgraceful—for the first seems to show that I deliberately tried to be funny. Humor isn’t accomplished in that way.
A lady, a stranger to me, was making an admiring to-do over me; and we two were the center of a group after lunch at my uncle’s. Conspicuous to me were her nose and a beautiful gold tassel at the end of a chain about her neck. In response to her courtesies, I asked, “What do you wear that pretty gold tassel for? To dust your big ugly nose with?”
Out of a startled hush my uncle for the first time spoke to me sharply. He said, dumfoundingly, “Tut! Tut!”
In a panic, I spoke hastily, “I mean, do you wear that tassel to dust your little pretty nose with?”
I was hustled away, crestfallen; but later in the day my vanity was again inflated. What I’d said to the lady I overheard repeated by several people—and not as a reproach to me. From all I could learn I had behaved excellently.
The second instance, somewhat grotesque, sheds out of the long ago a faint light upon the California of that period. Uncle Newton gave a great dinner for gentlemen important in the affairs of the state, and probably few tables in the country could have been surrounded by owners of more picturesque pasts; most of the banqueters, like my uncle, must have been men of the early gold rush.4 It had been arranged that the governor’s nephew and namesake should be presented to them, and, in evening clothes—white dress and blue satin sash—I was brought in, toasted noisily, and urged to remain.
Accustomed to tributes, I was anything but embarrassed, and readily occupied a chair—or the top of a dictionary upon a chair—among flushed new friends. Far away at the other end of the beflowered long table, my uncle didn’t observe what happened to me. Someone offered me a glass of champagne. I drank it, and seemed to perceive that in affording me this pleasure life was promising to consist entirely of exaltation. In fact, it’s all too significant that even so early I took to champagne, asked for more, got it, and became uninterruptedly talkative.5 The hardy forty-niners about me made merry; I may be said to have been plied with wine, and it was afterward hushedly related that I astonished the pliers by a precocious talent for absorption. Thus, in one particular line of accomplishment, I am now probably without a living colleague. I doubt that any other inhabitant of the year 1941 has the right, so to put it, of recording that he got howling drunk in the state of California in 1872.
There comes to me faintly, faintly a picture of results: wholly unexpected dreadful illness, expressions of indignant solicitude uttered by those who put me to bed. I suffered; and yet—and yet, as days passed, there stole into me from without—perhaps from heard whisperings—more than a suspicion that again I had done something remarkable; that once more, in a manner of speaking, I had distinguished myself.
The gilded year in California ended; my mother and my sister and I came back to my father and to Indianapolis—and to something near penury. Calamity was upon the
