Germs: A Memoir of Childhood

by Richard Wollheim

Richard Wollheim grew up lonely and sad in London's wealthy suburbs during the 1920s and 1930s, yet his was a childhood more interesting than most. He had an impresario father and a “Gaiety Girl” mother; together they attracted important guests (Diaghilev, Kurt Weill, Serge Lifar) to the grand houses and hotels that punctuated the landscape of Wollheim's early years. Germs is his account of that time, of the years he spent adoring his charming but distant father; of his regret for loathing his beautiful, mindless mother. Told in prose that with hypnotic ease moves from deadpan comedy to poignant loneliness, Germs is already a classic work of memoir.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Memoir, Literature, Autobiography

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2004

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Wollheim was a British philosopher whose work focused on the influence of visual arts on the mind and emotions. Germs is the autobiography of his childhood written late in life. As a memoirist he was particularly interested in those elements of childhood which produced the man. Germs themselves refer to "the seeds from which a life grows," and at the end he refers to them as scattered grains he's poked through.

Wollhem grew up the privileged son of an actress and a theatrical producer. His home environment included frequent visits by many well-known artists, performers, and writers of pre-war Europe. They receive their mention without any shocking details, if Wollheim knew any. Though his parents were naturally his primary influence, he lists a parade of nannies, governesses, and tutors from whom he learned a great deal mostly by observation. He remembers them as well as anybody in his childhood and has given them important space in his story by portraying them as among the most incarnate people of his development.

The style reminds me a little of Proust. The young Wollheim's sensibilities and confusions often seemed like young Marcel's, particularly in how he perceives the details of the world outside the home. There are several moments of heightened awareness when things--fences, trees, shadows--come into a focus revealing secrets of existence not known before. He wanders wondering through his childhood to arrive in his teen years unexpectedly perceptive of girls, the nature of love and sexuality, and of the transactional necessary dynamic between teachers and the misbehaving students they whipped in the school system of his day. And that's the thing. All memoir involves a degree of evaluative hindsight. In this case it's mostly brilliant.

I don't always enjoy books about young kids and how they grow up. But I found this to be an interesting, well-written book engaging enough to be considered a page-turner.

[Niklas Pivic · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had no idea who Richard Wollheim was before reading this book. I’ve since learned a few things about him, notably by reading this book.

Lifting my eyes, I see that the garden, and everything in it, moves. The flowers move, and the lavender moves, and the tree above me is moving. I am standing in the sun, my body is tipped forward, and I am walking. Walking I shall trip, and, if I trip, trip without a helping hand, I shall fall. I look above me, and I feel behind me, searching for the hand that is always there. There is no hand, and therefore, if I trip, or when I trip, and now at long last, the waiting is over, and I have tripped, and I am, am I not? I am falling, falling – and was it then, in that very moment when magically I was suspended in the early light, when the soft smells and sounds seeping out of the flowers and the insects and the birds appeared to be doing for me for a moment what the hand that was not there could not do, or was it, not then, but in the next moment, by which time the magic had failed, and the path was racing towards me, that I did what I was to do on many later occasions, on the occasion of many many later falls, and I stretched out my hands rigid in front of me so that my fingers formed a fan, not so much to break my fall, or to make things better for me when I hit the ground, but rather to pretend, to pretend also to myself, that things were not so bad as they seemed, or disaster so imminent, and that this was not a fall but a facile descent through the air, which would leave me in the same physical state, clean, ungrazed, uninjured, that I was in before I tripped, and that the urine would not, out of sheer nervousness, pour out of me?

It’s quite a dreamy state, reading this book; It’s one of those books that feels mostly like listening to really good ambient music and also like seeing worlds through the eyes of someone who has lived for quite some time and thought about things.

Having said that, this book isn’t airy and lofty in an ignorant and solipsistic sense. I don’t think it’s grandiose either, which I think is a state that some authors suffer from as they try to weave together a story from as long back as they can remember to the present day.

Wollheim wrote this book at the end of his life, at the start of the twenty-first century. It both allows for long, dreamy passages and brief ones.

At a period when, having finished one undergraduate degree, and unable to decide what to do next, I was briefly working at an editorial job in London, I suffered greatly from the fact that I was separated from a girl who was still in Oxford, and whom I loved, and who, I eventually allowed myself to believe, loved me.

What struck me hardest when reading the book were passages where Wollheim questions things that a lot of men take for granted.

Amongst Allen’s miscellaneous tasks, set him presumably by my parents, was that of trying to teach me a number of manly skills, such as carpentry, and boxing, but all ultimately to no avail. I always made an enthusiastic start, and the idea of learning a new subject, and particularly a subject that came with new words, a new vocabulary, excited me. But, in a short while, the excitement deserted me. Fear, fear that my body would fail me, compounded by the further fear that I would not be able to live with this fear, so that my mind would give out even before my body, soon drove out every other concern. Allen told me that, when I was a grown man, I would regret not being able to defend myself. But the appeal fell on deaf ears. I did not particularly want to grow up, and, even less, to grow up to be a man.

The second way in which women showed their superiority was in the more interesting and enjoyable lives that they lived. Men had to make money, which women, on the whole, did not, and this had the striking consequence that, whereas men were never permitted to talk about how they passed their days, it was something that women discussed continuously. Women could, I knew, be painters, sculptors, poets, dancers, actresses. There was no limit to the paradise that opened up at their feet and stretched forwards indefinitely, whereas for men such possibilities existed only rarely, and then mostly in the past, in history.

This is a gem of a book. I’ll remember it fondly and will read it again.

[Taylor Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

What curious, woven fragments make this memoir. About them hangs a mist only barely admitting of penetration, for they are drawn from childhood, early years that with age are made shaped differently than initially. Time’s a glass at through which a past we gaze, and events they wear a different hue. No wonder a memoir, that which memory celebrates, feels a fog-laced street and hazy, clarity failing. That’s its nature. Time wears. Imperfections us all. And sometimes a feeling we take for beauty, or sublimity, in the holes worn into a memory’s fabric by time’s teeth, like an acid on iron, or a moth’s gnawing in cotton, rests.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat uneven memoir of his childhood by the art critic Richard Wollheim. I did not know anything about Wollheim when I picked up this book, sent to me as part of my membership in the NYRB Classics book club.

The story is not chronological, but is organized by topic, discussing his homeland (suburban London), his family, places he visited, and love and fear. It comes across as a rumination on how we come to be who we are as adults. How much is in our nature and how much is the result of our experience of family? Wollheim seems to have had a very lonely childhood, partially by choice. There is very little here that involved meaningful interactions with other human beings and his family comes across as dysfunctional. Still, he is a good writer and makes many interesting observations.

The book also works well as a look into a way of life that doesn't really exist anymore. He dwells a bit on the details of life that once seemed important to himself or others and captures this theme best while remembering a passage in Scott's Quentin Durward to the effect that one should feast his eyes on what he came to see, for it will soon be gone due to the "relentlessness of history." And so it is for all of us.

Near the end of the book, he gets into a long discussion about how lives would have turned out differently from some slight change of circumstances. It follows not long after his description of a brief relationship with a young woman as a teenager, the continuation of which was thwarted by overly vigilant nuns, at least for 60 years or so. It is a touching story, one of several in the book. Other sections are a bit tedious, still others strange enough to make you wonder about the author and his preoccupations.

Not the greatest book by any means, but thought-provoking and warm.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, odd prose delineating the sense and texture of a childhood between the wars. The evocation of that lost world is worth the price by itself (the violet implement his father rubs his head with in an attempt to restore his hair); the haunted, dead-end questions Wollheim pursues about his parents put it on a very high shelf of memoir, alongside e.g. Ackerly’s My Father and Myself. Cameos from Diaghilev and Kurt Weill.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reads like a philosopher writing like a novelist but forgetting to key us in to important details.

[Mimi · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very strange memoir from recently dead Berkeley professor of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. Contains a description of how he had a fear of getting his genitals caught in the metal clasp of his mom's purse.

[Elderberrywine · Rating 4 out of 5]

But not what you think. Let Wollheim explain.

“. . . such was the hope, I would, in saying one thing after another after another after another, each with a grain more of truth to it than its predecessor, come to spill the beans: I might, if only the ear stayed steady, and that was another hope, find myself, with one broad archaic gesture, scattering the germs.”

Wollheim was born in England between the two wars to a German Jewish theatrical producer and an English mother who had to leave the stage, unwillingly, after he was born. He grew up with very little in the way of hands-on parenting, although there was always plenty of staff about. He must have been a so-called difficult child, sickly, and unable to bear having people about. School did not work out well for him, and so he spent most of his days on his own, observing. And, since his future career was that of an art critic, that worked out rather well for him.

But somewhere along the line, he learned to write as well. The middle section of the book consists of a run-down on his family background, which was probably of more interest to him than the general audience (although I do appreciate the photos). But the two outside sections are snippets of an over-privileged and decidedly odd upbringing. And so visual!

Here is how he introduces his memory of a trip to the coast. “Again I start with a Memory. It turns up like a card in a card trick, so that, cut the pack, and it magically rises to the top, crisp and fresh as if it had been newly painted. The memory takes me back to a seaside holiday, and it must date from my sixth or possibly my seventh year.” Every aspect of his young awareness is so clear I can very nearly smell the salt air. Then of course there was the “kind of manhunt, which swept holiday towns at the height of the season. A decapitated body, generally of a young girl with painted fingernails, would be found in a suitcase, abandoned in the Left Luggage office of a seaside railway station. A new series of “trunk murders” had begun.” Ah, the joys of seaside life.

[Angela Woodward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such an unusual and beautiful book. Wollheim concentrates on his early childhood, which he remembers with an impossible vividness--the shapes of clouds, the neckties of his father's friends, and the complex stories he told himself, branching off of Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott. His mother was an actress and his father an impresario who brought Diagalev's Ballet Russe to England, which may partially account for his superbly sensitive nature. The opening scene is some of the most beautiful prose I've ever read. Wollheim leaves out his battles in World War II, his higher education, and how he came to be a philosopher, only to concentrate on a few scenes and episodes from his early life. He doesn't try to justify or explain so much as revisit, with great tenderness, his odd younger self.

[Andrew F · Rating 4 out of 5]

Germs is a dreamy, meandering memoir of Richard Wollheim, 20th century philosopher of art and son of a German, Jewish impresario father and rural, English actress mother. I was affected by several passages including the following: when he describes how he identifies and differentiates gender and sexuality; when he confesses his lack of swimming ability and struggle to understand music and levels of pitch; and when he explains his absolute revulsion of the existence / proximity of newsprint and its smell. The intricate, precise prose has been compared with that of Henry James. This is a text meant to be savored as a fine wine.

[Bonnie · Rating 5 out of 5]

How delicious it would have been to have found myself at a dinner table with Richard Wollheim. He had a reputation as a delightful conversationalist and no wonder. His detailed memories of a lonely childhood take the reader deep into a bright neurotic child's vivid imagination. The book invites slow and careful reading. Give yourself time to relish the marvelous language, the intricate tales.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn’t think I would get into the random memoir of someone I have never heard of, but his recollected tics and fears are very similar to my own, even in ways I had forgotten until reading about them here.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you'd ever wanted to read Walter Benjamin's 'Surrey Childhood around 1935', is this the book for you

[Laura Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is very densely written and I almost gave up on it. I’m glad I persevered though.

[Chiara Yaar]

Nyrb tend to publish Books that make one feel as if they’re watching a woody Allen movie

[Glen Helfand · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the introduction to this eccentric, incisive book, Sheila Heti notes that memoirs really are collections of images and memories. Richard Wollheim's, written in old age but concentrating on childhood, is full of all those strange conceptions, hallucinations, misinterpretations and proclivities that we gravitate towards without the layers of adult understanding that constrain expression. Wollheim was a philosopher, and he wrote often on aesthetics. It is fitting then, that as a child he was, what you might call sensitive. He was sickly, effete, generally alone. He contrived elaborate rationale and curious tastes, stories about the places he inhabited, the people that crossed his path (family members, nannies, the rare friend), and yearnings. His perspectives are curious, queer, and while not gay, though questioned about that by a cousin, his recollections seem to anticipate the concept of the non-binary. As a child he distinguished gender roles in terms of their ability to relay feeling, art, while also viewing his penis as an object, a strange thing between his legs. The title of the book alludes to infection (he was a sickly boy), but also of things that blossom. His strange, sometimes abject reflexes (the smell of newsprint gave him nausea) are also the source of his honed perspective, his curiosities, his ability to look at the world as a place that each of us gets to define for ourselves.

[loafingcactus · Rating 3 out of 5]

It moves exceedingly slowly while gathering no steam. I might have been able to read it on vacation but while living life at speed it was intolerable.