What's the Matter with Kids Today?

In my last year of high school, The Lord of the Flies (1954), The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and A Separate Peace (1959) were still recent books that had not yet made their way onto the syllabus of high school English courses, but my friends and I had read them. We liked them because they confirmed our view of ourselves as complicated and even dangerous creatures whose real nature grownups didn’t understand. In Salinger’s book it was the rants against the phoniness of many in older generations that we identified with, and we found the complexities of Holden Caulfield, the narrator, rang true. We identified with much of his confusion and frustration while feeling that we had managed to hold it together better than he. With The Lord of the Flies, it was Golding’s particularly bleak view of how civilization can go that appealed, in the breakdown of the boys’ attempt to organize themselves and attract a rescue as well as the irony of the ending, as the grownups tsk-tsked about the disappointing “show” the boys had made, while their own show smoked in ruins in the background. A Separate Peace had a subtler appeal, with its sympathetic, introspective, intelligent narrator and his secret responsibility for the maiming of his more outgoing, adventurous friend Finny. Part of the book’s appeal to a seventeen-year-old, I believe, was its acknowledgment of the possibility of both danger and profound guilt in the world of the young—features that older people tended to deny or belittle.

            Only recently I have read a couple of books that have the same kind of insights into kids’ worlds. I remembered vaguely that when Lord of the Flies was being talked about in the fifties, some reviewer had commented that Richard Hughes had done all this before, in a book called A High Wind in Jamaica (1929). Well, not exactly, but the children in this book do make their pirate captors look like milquetoasts. Yet at the same time as they are able to look without blinking at wonders and horrors, the kids can show the influence of the most hidebound respectability. The seven children here belong to two families and range in age from about five to eleven or twelve. After a hurricane destroys their house in Jamaica (the children in one family seem more disturbed at the loss of their cat than the destruction of their house and the death of their black servant), the parents decide to send all the children to England. Their ship is boarded by pirates, and somehow the children end up on the pirate ship while the plundered vessel slips away. During the ensuing weeks, one of the children dies in an accident and another one, ten-year-old Emily, stabs to death a Dutch merchant captain who is trussed up in the cabin where she, in a paranoid delirium after a head injury, imagines he is going to get free and attack her. The pirates think another child is responsible. Emily has bad dreams about the captain’s death, but keeps her role in it a secret. On secrets and children, Hughes later notes that “Parents, finding that they see through their child in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realise that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances are nil.” Eventually the children return to England when the pirate captain puts them on board a passing steamer, and the pirates, captured by a military ship, are also taken to England and put on trial.

            The lawyer prosecuting the pirates finds interviewing the children heavy going. They don’t seem to have noticed any plundering or killing, and they are more shocked that the pirate captain used the word “drawers” to them (they were sliding down his deck when he was heeled under sail, and he told them to stop. “Who will mend your drawers or buy you new ones when you’ve worn these out?” he asks). Hughes thus get double duty from this satiric observation about bourgeois values, because now the parents are shocked in their turn, wondering and imagining what further might be implied by this reference to drawers. The lawyer has no hope of bringing any death—either the child’s or the Dutch captain’s—home to the pirates, but he coaches Emily carefully in the testimony she’s willing to give. But when defending counsel thinks the lack of questions about the deaths may be impeding his getting his clients off the murder charge, he asks Emily directly about the Dutch captain, and she breaks down into sobs and descriptions of his bloody body. The pirates hang.

            Another disturbing but perceptive book concerning children is less well-known than any of the previous ones: Gabriel Fielding’s In the Time of Greenbloom (1956). Fielding’s protagonist, John Blaydon, meets the love of his life, Victoria, at thirteen, saves her from drowning that same night, but is unable to save her some months later from a vicious murderer. Blaydon succumbs to an affectless depression from which he is partly aroused when he meets Horab Greenbloom. Greenbloom, who has lost a leg, is a rich college friend of Blaydon’s older brother and is in a constant search for personal pleasure and a satisfactory philosophy—first his passion is Wittgenstein; later it is Sartre. Greenbloom is able to see some things about Blaydon’s suffering no one else can and tells him “you are fortunate…because you have known what it was you have always wanted without having taken any direct part in its destruction.”

Blaydon struggles in various schools and with a crammer to prepare for medical studies at Trinity College, Dublin. Fielding is at his best depicting the torture the young feel when adults are being unfair to them; he captures the powerlessness that comes from lack of authority and inability to articulate the way one is being wronged. As he awaits the result of his latest exam, Blaydon is ready to commit suicide when he runs into Greenbloom again, and Greenbloom tells him that while he might have done away with himself shortly after Victoria’s murder, now he has a reason for living just because he is so unhappy. “You have suffered…by a supreme attachment that detachment which it is the object of all developed men to achieve,” says Greenbloom, who predicts that Blaydon will become a writer. By another lake Blaydon meets an Irish girl who reminds him of Victoria, and he begins to see the possibility of a future.