A keen eye, turned inward

THIS is surely one of the stranger autobiographies by a philosopher. The author’s intellectual heroes, David Hume and John Stuart Mill, opened their memoirs more conventionally. After pro forma apologies for the vanity of the exercise, they began at the beginning, as they saw it, with their birth. This is not Richard Wollheim’s way. He starts with an early memory. He has just learned to walk. On a gravel path in the garden of his parents’ home outside London, he stumbles and falls. Someone with “a protective breast” sweeps him up. He is soon back in the house, which he is admonished for having left. Pain, maternal consolation and a reproving voice: There is no prize for guessing that the third member of Wollheim’s theoretical trinity was Sigmund Freud.

Though eminent in his field -- Wollheim was chairman of the philosophy department at University College, London and then at UC Berkeley -- he was never a household name. Even among philosophers, his wide interests, which included art, psychoanalysis and ethical thought, made him hard to place. Whether put off by the title or baffled by its singular prose, big publishers turned this remarkable memoir down. Fortunately, a small press, Waywiser, saw the point. “Germs” came out in Britain last year, not long after Wollheim’s death in November 2003 at the age of 80. It dazzled critics. Many made it their book of the year.

Wollheim’s style of thinking and writing were not like anyone else’s. In 1968, he published “Art and Its Objects,” a pathbreaking essay on aesthetics that shifted attention from artistic evaluation to the nature of artworks themselves. In 1984 came “The Thread of Life,” based on his lectures at Harvard on the structure of the mind and the growth of our moral sense. Unusual for an analytical philosopher, Wollheim approached both topics in Freudian terms. A few pages of either book are enough to show how many angles Wollheim could find to a philosophical problem. In art galleries, he claimed, he would look at a painting for an hour or more before “irrelevant associations” fell away. In “Germs,” the same subtlety of eye and power of concentration are on full display.

Wollheim is tireless at finding fresh aspects to an experience he is describing. Just when you think he has shown you every last facet of some childhood episode, up he comes with more. There may be no one who has teased out more fully the significance of seeing a father dress himself, or scrutinized with greater care the four distinct theories a sisterless boy dreamed up to explain the difference between the sexes. Years of psychoanalysis, Wollheim reminds us, sharpened this inward gaze.

He must have been an unusually watchful little boy to start with. In “My Land,” the first of the memoir’s three parts, Wollheim vividly conjures up the typically English suburbs southwest of London where he grew up. The second part, “My Family,” introduces his ill-matched parents and their friends, which young Richard, like any child learning about grown-ups, puzzled over. His father, Eric, was a theatrical impresario. He worked with and, Wollheim speculates, may have been a lover of, the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Whether that was true or not, it was plainly convenient to park the family in Walton-on-Thames to keep himself free in London. Wollheim, we gather, liked and admired his father. He recalls outings together with conspiratorial warmth. The father was German by birth, and despite his uncosmopolitan surroundings, Wollheim was proud not to have grown up wholly English.

His relationship with his mother, a former showgirl, was different. He remembers her, with little affection, as superstitious, pleasure-seeking and obsessive. His description of her daily house-cleaning ritual, which provided him with his book title, is hilarious, though cruel. It reads like a psychological case study that might have been written up by James Thurber. Germs, his mother believed, gathered inside the house, and continually had to be swept out.

Not that her concern was wholly foolish. Wollheim details the “excessive ferocity” of childhood illnesses that left him in darkened rooms for months at a time. With the passion of a collector, he also records his aversions. Music, he feared, would drown him like water. The mere smell of newspaper would make him want to vomit.

In family snapshots that dot the book, we glimpse an older brother, Jimmy. Did he not shake young Richard from his self-observant reveries? We are not told. Wollheim has expunged him from his memoir as thoroughly as Rousseau suppressed his brother Francois from the “Confessions.” Jimmy gets at most three or four mentions, each of them hostile.

Growing up was not all sickness and hypersensitivity. Lasting attachments came too. In “Love and Fear,” the third part, Wollheim describes the onset of his love of art, and of reading. School gave him a lifelong mistrust of authority, impatience with hierarchy and a suspicion for the motives behind punishment. On a Devon holiday, a bookish girl in a tartan skirt and shiny boots revealed to him the possibilities of friendship, vigorous argument and sex. The first actual sex came with a French prostitute in wartime Piccadilly. Wollheim tells us, mysteriously, that he wanted “to be her.” In this final part he notes too how he came to value friendship more than “such brutal ideas as duty, and blame, and responsibility.”

Though Wollheim himself would no doubt have thought of more, there are three misconceptions one could have while reading “Germs.” First is to forget that this is a work of imaginative recall. Nobody tries and fails to learn German, as Wollheim claims, 30 times. His father cannot have found himself in an elevator of Berlin’s Adlon Hotel in 1933 alone with Hitler, for by then Hitler would almost certainly have had a bodyguard. In places he evidently embellishes a good story.

Another mistake is to think that the raking light Wollheim shines on a detached, lonesome child reveals the man. In life, Wollheim was sociable, omnicurious and a marvelous raconteur. He was funny and had good timing, as you might expect from the child of show people. He enthralled students and colleagues, who spoke of him in memorial tributes with affection and loyalty that went beyond convention. How the cold bath grew hot, Wollheim does not explain, but that would have taken him beyond his stated task, which was a memoir of childhood.

Finally, Wollheim’s deadpan clowning in “Germs” makes it easy to underestimate his seriousness. A few jokes were probably funnier spoken than on the page. He writes that hearing moral philosophers talk of responsibility always reminded him of the moment his parents first entrusted him with wiping his bottom on his own.

Yet “Germs” was not written for laughs. In its own highly crafted voice, it records a moral and sentimental education. Not only does Wollheim follow through on the idea that a past left unrecalled traps a person into mindless repetition, but he brings together, in a personal way, many of his philosophical preoccupations. From Hume, he took the idea that moral sentiments are a natural outgrowth of human circumstance; from Mill, the idea that each of us has our own ideals of happiness, which we should refine in the light of experience; and from Freud, the idea that those moral responses and ideals will twist or imprison us unless they have sprung from us in the right way: They must not be imposed from the outside or by imaginary figures of authority that we have, from fear or however, made our own. Other philosophers challenged him to put flesh on this skeleton, suspecting either that the parts did not fit or that, if they did, the result would be close to an unpalatable amoralism. One way to think of “Germs” is as Wollheim’s characteristically idiosyncratic reply to that challenge.

Do read this remarkable book. It is both disconcerting and fun. *