Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (61 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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This is crazy but with the craziness of Leverkühn's genius. His later remark, "it is not to be" (es soll nicht sein), that is, that a hopeful theodicy (the ninth symphony, as he elliptically puts it) is now invalidated, has something of the labored theoretic note that lurks in Mann's most powerful writing, but this bitterness at his own purely imaginary responsibility for the child's suffering makes a perfect seam between the self-contained pathetic episode, and the larger Faust-story. Seam: for a seam joins whole panels of cloth, leaving each intact but incomplete, and each child death canindeed mustbe read both as complete in itself and as part of a larger, disquieting whole.
Rosshalde
is the only one of these three books that tries to render the child's illness through his own consciousness. The first sign of trouble comes when Pierre wanders through the garden in a kind of intensified childish boredom, "restless between expectation and mistrust in search of something new, some discovery or adventure, no matter what" (unruhigzwischen Erwartung und Mißtrauen,auf der Suche nach irgend etwas Neuem, nach irgendeinem Fund oder Abenteuer).
Man sollte sich hinlegen und schlafen, dachte er, so lange schlafen, bis alles wieder neu und schön und lustig aussähe. Es hatte ja keinen Sinn, da herumzugehen and sich zu plagen, und auf Dinge zu warten, die doch nicht kommen wollten. (Chapter 10)
One should be able to lie down and sleep, he thought, and go on sleeping till everything seemed new and beautiful and pleasant again. There was no point in wandering about tormenting oneself and waiting for things that didn't want to happen.
When he does manage to lie down and sleep, he has a dream of alienation, in which he wanders through the garden and finds it "more beautiful than ever, but the flowers seem oddly glassy, large and strange, and the whole shines with a sad, dead beauty" (die Beete waren schöner, als er sie je gesehen hatte, abet die blumen sahen alle sonderbar gläsern, groß and fremdartig aus, und das Ganze glänzte in einer traurig toten Schönheit (chapter 11). When he wakes up, he wants to know why he had vomited when he had not eaten anything bad like half-ripe plums: like any child he is finding, but more painfully than usual, that the world is not fair.
As the illness develops we move outside the child's consciousness to an account of the symptoms as observed. All three novelists describe these in
 
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some detail: the vomiting, the violent twisting of the body, and the terrifying scream. Remission, when it comes, brings relief to the sufferer, to the parents, and to the reader; and only Mann offers us no remission. Pierre, after his first bad day, seems to get better, then relapses, then towards the end seems a great deal better, so that his father can read to him, producing a smile, and even remark to the doctor that there seems to have been a miracle; almost immediately after that they hear a shrill scream and rushing to see Pierre find him with hideously distorted mouth, his shrivelled limbs twisting themselves in violent cramps, and his eyes stared in unreasoning terror ("mit gräßlich verzogenem Munde, seine abgemagerten Glieder krümmten sich in wütenden Krämpfen, die Augen stierten in vernunftlosem Entsetzen" [chapter 17]). Soon after that he loses consciousness and dies.
Phil Quarles has only one remission, even more dramatic: "suddenly and without warning" he opens his eyes, and declares he is hungry. He speaks to his parents, makes his father draw for him, eats, drinks and laughsbut has gone completely deaf, and keeps asking, "Why don't you ever say anything?" (chapter 35). As in
Rosshalde,
this prefigures the end, which comes shortly after.
Medically, remission is unlikely in the course of meningitis, but as a plot strategy it is obviously valuable. Plot as a sequence of events demands contrast, and the impact of death is clearly heightened if it is preceded by what could look like recovery, as the death of the tragic hero is often preceded by an apparent resurgence of his earlier, undamaged self. Literary experience could teach the seasoned reader, when Pierre and Phil stage their apparent recovery, that they are about to die; medical knowledge, if the reader considers it reliable in fiction, may already have told him that.
Medical science in the first half of the twentieth century knew more about disease than it had a hundred years earlier, but whether it could do more, until the advent of antibiotics, is doubtful. The doctors attending these three children are more prominent, and more fully treated as characters, than any of their Victorian predecessors, but they are all helplessand know that they are helpless. To Huxley, this is matter for scorn; to Hesse, for compassion and even a kind of admiration. Huxley's Dr. Crowther, "a small man, brisk and almost too neatly dressed," is treated with contempt from the beginning. He does not share, or even interest himself in, the mother's distress, and for this Huxley punishes him by describing his self-control in terms of physics: "His conversation had been reduced to bedrock efficiency. It was just comprehensible and nothing more. No energy
 
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was wasted on the uttering of unnecessary words." Once this figure of speech is introduced, it is grimly repeated. He shakes his head once only, not speaking: "a foot-pound saved is a foot-pound gained." The point is no doubt appropriate: the man who treats the invalid as a predictable machine treats himself the same way. But it is an easy point, and Dr. Crowther is the least interesting of the doctors.
Hesse does not give his doctor a name: he is called the doctor, the physician, the medical officer (der Doktor, der Arzt, der Sanitätsrat), but this is not to score points off him, for he is presented as sympathetic and understanding. He hurries when he is not with a patient, becomes slow and careful when he is; he is interested in Veraguth's renown as a painter, is tactful and understanding when he breaks the news of how serious the illness isbut he is helpless. Both he and Dr. Crowther, when confronted with the child's apparent improvement, say nothing, for both of them know the remission does not mean recovery.
Mann too is aware of the contrast between scientific impersonality and emotional involvement. Echo's scream, heart-rending and piercing, is also referred to as the typical hydrocephalic scream, rendered less unendurable to the doctor because he can diagnose it: the typical leaves us cool, it is only that which we understand as individual which causes us to lose all self-control (das Typische läßt kühl, nur das als individuell Verstandene macht, daß wir ausser uns geraten). The touch of irony here, gentler and subtler than Huxley's, points to the ambivalent attitude toward medical science, which in this book is complicated by the presence of two doctors, the local country physician and the specialist called in from Munich for consultation. Dr. Kürbis is cool in contrast to Adrian and the other heart-broken bystanders, but in contrast to the distinguished Professor von Rotherbuch he appears warm and sympathetic. He had asked for a second opinion, claiming that he was only a simple man and that they were confronted with a case requiring a higher authority (Hier ist ein Aufgebot von höherer Autorität am Platze). This very remark renders him more sympathetic; when the narrator observes that he believes it was uttered with a subdued or sad irony (betrübte Ironie), he is welcoming Dr. Kürbis as a spirit like himself. The Professor, when he arrives, is dignified and slightly condescending, perfectly correct, but helpless: it is made clear that the simple country physician was quite as competent as medical science was capable of being. Science is able to diagnose, to attach learned names to the condition, but even at its most eminent science
 
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cannot cure; like theology, it can turn suffering into the typical, which leaves us cool.
And the child? All three children are loved: Phil perhaps only by his mother, Pierre intensely by both parents, Echo by all who know him. The moment he appears at Pfeiffering, Echo wins everyone's heart by his elfin appearance, his charm, and his quaint locutions. He seems a figure from fairy tale, a visitor from the dainty world of the small and the delicate (von Märchen, von Besuch aus niedlicher Klein- und Feinwelt). When the narrator addresses him in a hearty, patronizing tone, he immediately realizes his mistake and realizes that Echo is aware of it too, and aware of his embarrassment. The child, feeling ashamed on his behalf, lets his head sink and pulls down his mouth as one does when biting back a laugh (beschämt für mich, das Köpfchen senkte, indem er den Mund nach unten zog, wie einer, der sich das Lachen verbeißt). For Echo is so sensitive that he feels distress at the distress of others, even attributing regret to those who forbid him something, even stroking them in compassion at their having to deny him, clearly against their will.
Echo's language is quaint and highly individual. He has his own abbreviations, such as "habt" when he has had enough, an abbreviation of "Ich habe es gehabt": Helen Lowe-Porter translates, with her usual ingenuity, as "nuff"an alternative would perhaps be "had." Echo's careful articulation and archaic vocabulary derive partly from his Swiss father, but mostly seem to be a sign of his unearthliness. He recites children's rhymes with a droll solemnity that makes bystanders laugh, whereupon he looks into their faces, watching the merriment with roguish curiosity (er blickte in die Gesichter dabei, unsere Heiterkeit mit schelmischer Neugier beobachtend). When he goes to bed he recites strange old-fashioned prayers, of which he has a large repertory:
Swie groß si jemands Missetat,
Got dennoch mehr Genaden hat,
Mein Sünd nicht viel besagen will,
Got lächelt in Seiner Gnadenfüll'. Amen.
Though my offence be ne'er so great
The grace of God is greater yet.
Shall my sins scathe? But surely no,
See how God's grace doth overflow.

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