Childwold

Excerpt

Sleep beside me, let us sleep side by side, chaste as brother and sister, father and daughter. Chaste as the dead. I will do you no harm—no harm! Unless I've told you too much of my life, my past. Have I? Cannot recall. The adultery, the charade of "talking it over," the rumors spread around Cambridge—Fitz John is, didn't you know, crazy, haven't you always sensed, paranoid, isn't it obvious, a potential murderer, don't his strange eyes give him away?—quite, quite mad. Can't remember what I said. Drunken monologue. Girl beside me, listening, too alarmed to speak. I love her. Loved. Don't dare see again. For her sake, for mine. . . . If we could only sleep side by side, holding hands, perhaps, good friends, loving friends! . . . wanting only the best for each other, wishing for the best. Or is she the daughter I never had, the daughter I crave? Her gray eyes, her soiled angelic face, her rosebud lips, bobbing curls. . . . Kierkegaard was a cripple like me, a vengeful dwarf, ugly, wizened, never a day without pain (like Pascal also: why is there so much pain in us, in genius?) which explains the cruelty of his pronouncement: Either/Or. But it must be Both/And! BOTH/AND! Both the girl and God, both time and eternity, both beloved and daughter, wife and sister, beauty and goodness. Both! Both!

Other Editions

Epigraph

Every man's condition is a solution
in hieroglyphic to those inquiries
he would put. He acts it as life,
before he apprehends it as truth.

—Emerson

We are not the readers but the very
personages of the world-drama.

—William James

Awards

• New York Times Notable Books of the Year

Reviews

• Publishers Weekly, September 6, 1976, p57
• Booklist, November 1, 1976, p392
• Library Journal, November 15, 1976, p2394-2395
• Newsweek, November 15, 1976, p115
• New York Times Book Review, November 28, 1976, p8
• National Observer, December 11, 1976
• New Yorker, January 3, 1977, p74
• Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1977, p62
• Best Sellers, April 1977, p5
• Choice, April 1977, p202
• New Republic, May 28, 1977, p36-37
• Sewanee Review, Fall 1977, p693-694
• Times Literary Supplement, October 14, 1977, p1185
• Observer, October 23, 1977, p29
• Listener, January 19, 1978, p94
• Glamour, April 1978, p76
• Kliatt Paperback Book Guide, Fall 1978, p13