'The Company of Other Children'

Many of the people who follow Anecdotal Evidence are thoughtfully enthusiastic readers eager to share their pleasure in what they happen to be reading. A fellow of about my age in the Hill Country of Texas has been enjoying The Oxford Book of Essays (1991), edited by the late John Gross. He was especially taken with “The Savage Seventh,” a review by Philip Larkin of Iona and Peter Opie’s The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (1959). It inspired, my reader writes, “a lot of laughs.” Can you think of another top-shelf poet as funny and profound as Larkin? The first half of his review doesn’t mention the Opies or their book and stands on its own as a self-contained essay. It begins: 

“It was that verse about becoming again as a little child that caused the first sharp waning of my Christian sympathies. If the Kingdom of Heaven could be entered only by those fulfilling such a condition I knew I should be unhappy there. It was not the prospect of being deprived of money, keys, wallet, letters, books, long-playing records, drinks, the opposite sex, and other solaces of adulthood that upset me (I should have been about eleven), but having to put up indefinitely with the company of other children, their noise, their nastiness, their boasting, their back-answers, their cruelty, their silliness.”

 

Such talk is anathema to much of my generation and those who followed. Starting in the nineteen-sixties, the romanticizing of childhood accelerated and became gospel (which didn’t stop anyone from abusing and neglecting kids). The distinction between child-like and childish disappeared. Among adults, faux-innocence replaced responsibility and a good working sense of guilt. What is the defining quality of very young children and their grownup imitators? Self-centeredness, of course. Irresponsibility replaced a mature consideration for others. Hedonism became a sacrament. Adults forgot how to talk like adults. They refused to put away childish things. Now you can hardly walk down the street without tripping over a goofy, rudderless, emotionally stunted man-boy. Larkin goes on:

 

“Until I began to meet grown-ups on more or less equal terms I fancied myself a kind of Ishmael. The realisation that it was not people I disliked but children was for me one of those celebrated moments of revelation, comparable to reading Haeckel or Ingersoll in the last century. The knowledge that I should never (except by deliberate act of folly) get mixed up with them again more than compensated for having to start earning a living.”

 

Here I part company with Larkin, to a degree. I like most children who are, chronologically speaking, children. When I was a kid what I most wanted to be was an adult. That sentiment came to me without seeking it. It seemed like part of a natural process. Being an adult meant independence. I knew it also entailed getting a job, paying taxes and obeying the law, but none of that seemed odious or unfair, just part of the deal. Back to Larkin:

 

“Today I am more tolerant. It’s not that I loathe the little scum, as Hesketh Pearson put it . . . The two chief characteristics of childhood, and the two things that make it so seductive to a certain type of adult mind, are its freedom from reason and its freedom from responsibility. It is these that give it its peculiar heartless, savage strength.”