Childhood

(By Shannon Burns – 2022)

Having forgotten virtually all of my childhood (relentlessly happy I imagine, thus unfit to record), I tend to spurn memoirs of early years, having confined myself to undoubted classics, such as Gorky’s My Childhood, Speak, Memory, and Unreliable Memoirs.

Childhood is a worthy addition to those classics and also stands as a bemused, relentless, almost angry monument to the power of compartmentalization (selective forgetting), and particularly, the redemptive and palliative power of great literature (Burns shares with others a love of The Brothers Karamazov). “We read to know we are not alone” (attributed to C.S. Lewis) and this record bashfully celebrates that. The vulnerability and unhappiness, that can infuse childhood, here recall some of the saddest (and funniest) passages in Dickens. For example, when the boy starts filling exercise books with a Clarissa-sized story, only to find, on review, that it is mere gobbledygook.

“And how do you escape from yourself?” Brought-up in beautiful Mansfield Park (South Australia’s Mount Druitt) and other tortuous and sinister suburbs, Shannon Burns spares nobody, least of all himself, in his hauntingly beautiful account of an ultimate release from arrested development. Scenes swing from the intense to the insouciant – A broken, impoverished home, or series of homes; an abusive and alcoholic mother who ‘works nights’; exposure to lazy racism and adolescent sexual exploration; unwholesome foster care; restless impatience with the impenetrable feelings of others; petty and grand crimes; the burgeoning awareness of class and cultural difference. And after his escape from the clutches of outrageous misfortune, the pessimist in him finds himself “dangerously contented.”

Moving seamlessly between tenses and first / third person narration, Childhood charts a path through a landscape filled with shadows, tedium, and terrors, determinism and dreams, reading often like a modern novel. One problem that arises is what has been recognised as the “experience of familiarity [having] a simple but powerful quality of ‘pastness’ that seems to indicate that it is a direct reflection of prior experience“, such quality of pastness being, naturally, an illusion.* (We wondered about that when the lad and his mate, Ryan, poked holes on the bottom of milk cartons delivered to the front porches of houses – did the milkman deliver anything but bottles?)

Some random samples from Childhood will show its heft and muscle:

“I have to strain my neck to see above the dashboard of an early model Ford or Holden, and I’m amazed that the driver simply trusts the road to keep extending beyond the darkness.”

“Are they harsh and callous to begin with, or do they become harsh and callous over time? Does the boy wear them down with his glum demeanour? Do they become the parents he remembers partly because he resented them from the beginning, because his refusals made them mean?”

“Compared with the more respectable working class, the welfare class has long been regarded as a kind of human waste…And if you make the terrible mistake of befriending or, worse, marrying or having children with one of us, we will quickly bring you down to our level.”

“We have committed to each other, I think, and I already feel a peculiar loyalty to her, as if she is my responsibility now, as if I owe her fidelity and our bond will be everlasting.  From that day on, the girl is forbidden to play with me.”

“I lie sleepless on the floor in an unfamiliar room, listening to the snoring man who is my father, a stranger with the enormous body of a man.”

“I will be told, many times, that my mother ‘sleeps with men for money’, but I have no way of understanding what it means beyond the literal sense: she falls asleep with men, perhaps snuggling. I’m jealous of these men, of the comfort she brings them.”

“My mother presses the shelter’s buzzer for a long time before someone comes to let us in.”

“I spend a lot of time pestering my youngest uncle, who is shy and antisocial…When he’s not available to annoy, I bounce a tennis ball against the outside wall and dive to catch it, like a slips fielder; or I throw it at a tree stump, like an infielder; or I bowl yorkers down the driveway, pretending I’m Curtly Ambrose.”

“This is his way of contemplating escape, and escape now comes in two clear forms: leaving home, or suicide.”

“He has only one goal now: to escape his family, to live his own life, to start from scratch. His other ambitions are subservient to that one overpowering desire. He has decided to leave home as soon as he turns fifteen. That’s all he cares about, all he dares to imagine, the single thing he can control. Everything else is suspended until that moment.”

[On the anxiety of influence:] “The initial thrill of the encounter with Shakespeare, with Keats and Wordsworth, the sense of being possessed by something that made the world seem new, and alive with meaning and feeling, has been dulled by a new imperative, to convert it into writing and thereby make himself into that special thing: an artist.”

Alexandra Coghlan, reviewing Stephen Hough’s “Enough: Scenes from Childhood”, asked “At what point did the ponderous autobiography get edged out by the slinky elliptical memoir?” We think it’s been a while, actually, but Childhood by Shannon Burns is happily emblematic of that development.

[*”Illusions of Immediate Memory: Evidence of an Attributional Basis for Feelings of Familiarity and Perceptual Quality”, Journal of Memory and Language 29 (1990): 716-32, quoted by Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011.]