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Some
Portraits Of Early Ideas Leonard
Feeney, S. J. (Sheed and Ward, 1941) I. THE
VOICE During the
first year of my life, I lay in the cradle and mumbled innumerable sounds
into which it was impossible to read any meanings. At
the age of one, I began experimenting with the syllables of the English
language, and six months later spoke my first sentence. My parents were
startled to discover that one of the words contained in it was “Damn!” — an
expletive picked up — so my parents hasten to assure me — from a tramp who
came begging at our door and was invited in for coffee. Although such a
precocious display of profanity might well have induced my parents to believe
that I was destined to become a desperado, they had the unique consolation of
remembering that I had been born into this world free from the guilt of
original sin. This extraordinary privilege came as a result of my having been
baptized some hours before birth at a moment when it seemed certain that the
price of my life was to have been my mother’s death. Among
the very few papers in my possession which might be honored with the dignity
of being called “notes” is the certificate of my birth, a copy of which I
secured some years ago from the Registry of Births in my native city. It is
such a decisive, laconic, frightening document, that I have often stared at
it with something of the feeling one might have if he could tip-toe into his
own nursery and find himself asleep in his own crib. The document remarks,
concerning an existence which is indubitably mine: Name of Child: Leonard Edward Feeney Date of Birth: Feb. 15, 1897 Sex: Male Color: White Place of Birth: 118 Adams
Street, Lynn, Mass. Father’s Name: Thomas Butler Feeney Mother’s Maiden Name: Delia Agnes
Leonard It
was the original intention of my parents to give me no middle name, but by a
combination of my father’s and my mother’s family names, to make my own a
happy union of the two. The Edward was thrown in at Baptism in honor of my
Uncle Edward, who was my sponsor, but was thrown out later after we had satisfied
him with this courtesy. When
I went to school I came to believe that Leonard derived from the Latin words:
leonis ardor, meaning “fierceness of a lion,” and I was wont to boast
of this signification. Some years later, however, I met an Italian priest in
Florence named Leonardo, and he told me that our name is taken
straightforwardly from the Latin: leo and nardus, meaning “lion
and spikenard,” and rendered freely as “strength and fragrance” or “strength
and healing.” However gracefully he put it, I was not pleased with the new
translation. I preferred being “a wild lion” to being a “sweet lion,” and
wish I had been left under my original illusion. This
same queer feeling of an identity retroactively experienced by looking at a
birth certificate, was also mine a few years ago when I was examining an old
family album, and came upon a picture of a small boy named Leonard, snapped
at the age of ten, on his front lawn, by way of exhibiting how dressed-up he
looked in a new Easter suit and hat. I felt impelled at the time to
commemorate my emotion (one of the oddest human experience has to offer) by
penciling a few lines under the picture which ran as follows: So
that’s me, taken on the lawn, At
ten, In
my new Sunday hat! Good
Lord, have I been going on Since
then, And
was I that? But
let us go back again to my infancy for a few more hurried observations. My
mother was eighteen when she married, and I am her oldest child. She is now
in her sixties, and by way of describing her — if now, a fortiori then
— I can only repeat what an astute observer said of her in my hearing not
long ago: “She is like a little doll!” My
mother claims that my father was her first and only beau, and I believe her.
My father disavows this, maintaining with great emphasis that when he married
my mother, she had in her keeping a letter written her by another suitor and
inscribed to her “in his own blood.” My mother says it was not “in his own
blood” but “in red ink.” My father insists it was not “in red ink” but “in
his own blood.” And thus they argue back and forth, and have been doing so
since I first met them. My father seems inordinately proud of the fact that
he was able to wrest the hand of my mother from the clutches of such a gory
rival. My mother, on the other hand, grows indignant at the accusation of
having been associated in any way with such a Bluebeard. At all events,
whatever pigment stained the precious paper, it has since been either
destroyed or lost (“destroyed” says my father, “lost” says my mother), and so
historians will be left forever in the dark concerning this sanguinary phase
of my parental past. One
romantic experience of my mother’s before marriage, she herself will admit.
One would need to know first hand my mother’s radiant innocence — an
innocence uniquely possessed by immigrant girls who are at once Catholic and
Irish — to appreciate both the charm of the following story, and the
guilelessness which induces my mother to tell it. “One
day,” says my mother, “when I was seventeen, I was riding in the train from
Boston to Lynn. A young man came in and sat beside me. He was quite handsome,
and handsomely dressed. He had the most elegant manners. He was a traveling
salesman. We talked all the way from Boston to Lynn. When we were about to
leave the train, he invited me to take dinner with him at one of the hotels.
I was tempted to accept the invitation, because he was the soul of courtesy.
But something inside me grew frightened, and something my mother once told me
as a child kept saying ‘Don’t!’ So I said ‘No!’ and I didn’t.”
. . . Then there is a pause, and my mother looks at you sharply
with her challenging gray eyes and says, half reflectively, half in interrogation,
“Wasn’t I the coward?” This
is my mother, pro and con. Genealogy
is a fascinating pursuit, and I have often wanted to investigate mine for the
sake of studying certain unexplainable traits in my nature. On my mother’s
side our roots are easily retraceable. We are, through her, of the O’Briens
of County Clare, Irish pure and undefiled, possessed of the quiet gentleness
of the West Coast folk, and with as reasonable a claim as any to have
descended from Brian Boru, County Clare’s great warrior and king. On my
father’s side our ancestry is more difficult to review. My
father, who is often mistaken for an Italian, is a mixture of Irish ingrained
with Spanish. This latter strain would account for his swarthy complexion and
terribly dark eyes, eyes that scrutinize you as though you dwelt in a
dungeon. He has been fairly copied in looks by each of his four children,
since none of us resembles my mother. But it has often struck me that there
is little of the authentic Latin in my father’s temperament, or in ours. We
possess the Latin excitability, but not the Latin repose. We gesticulate
precisely and close to the body, never in the expansive full-flung fashion of
Southern Europe. We are sensitive without being quarrelsome, and our
impetuosity, which is unpredictable, is interspersed with sudden bursts of
caution. It is one of the strongest hunches of my life that what passes in us
for Spanish blood is really something too fantastic to mention. Our modal
quality of thought is different from all our kindred, and our Celtic
lightheartedness is chastened, and sometimes completely shut off, by bursts
of mysterious and exotic loneliness, occasionally verging on despair. A
mathematician standing in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve were being
banished, and endeavoring at the time to quote the odds against our chances
for existence, would be driven into a problem in differential calculus
containing so many numerical symbols and such a vast procession of zeros,
that all the forests of the world would scarcely supply him with paper
sufficient on which to make the estimate. He would give us up as a bad job
and say that it was mathematically certain that none of us should ever be. And
yet, we are! We are by reason of a million romances that came out correctly.
In each generation there were the necessary infants who invariably survived
the wars, the plagues, the famines and the pestilences of history, matured to
the age of courtship, were mellowed with the enticements of love, and became
the acceptable bridegrooms and consenting brides requisite for prolonging the
pattern of the human race to the point where we took on. Some years ago I
attempted to express this profundity in a verse, which ran as follows: When
I said Mass at Christmas
And candles were
aglow, I saw a white old woman,
Two thousand
years ago: My
very great grandmother,
Who spun me
flesh and bone, Who
felt my lingers aching
In the atoms of
her own, In
whom my eyes were shining,
However far
away, When
Christ was in His cradle
And it was
Christmas Day! This
verse, executed, as I supposed, in a moment of high seriousness, was accepted
by most of my critics as a piece of whimsy; for I have suffered under the
curse of being considered a whimsical poet, and have been laughed at when I
thought to make others cry. Be
that as it may, it is with extreme seriousness that I contemplate a certain
summer evening years ago, in a little cottage by the sea, overlooking the
rocks on the North Shore of Massachusetts, just at the point where King’s
Beach in Lynn is separated from Fisherman’s Beach in Swampscott, where my
mother in a light blue dress and a summer hat disporting a streamer, was
invited to “spend the evening” with some friends. By a lightning-like stroke
of timing on the part of the Providence of God, it happened that my
father was there too, airing his Irish idiom, flashing his Spanish eyes. It
need not be said that my existence hung by a thread on every item of that
meeting: on the fact that my mother chose to be there instead of elsewhere;
on the fact that the conveyance brought her early and not late; on the detail
of her seeming more attractively dressed for the summer evening than any of
the other young ladies. My existence likewise depended on the avoidance of
anything that might have kept my father away, such as a rash from poison ivy,
or the throbbing of a sore tooth. It
was a pleasant gathering, so I am told, and everybody enjoyed everybody
else’s company, particularly my father my mother’s. There was the gaiety and
song appropriate to a group of merry exiles dwelling in a Puritan stronghold
by the beaches of the North Shore. There was ginger ale for the girls, which
makes them giggle, and beer for the young men, which makes them bothersome.
My mother in her light blue dress and delicate manners easily prevailed, and
my father was taken captive by the little steamer dangling from her hat. There
was a short courtship, a sudden proposal, and a very simple marriage.
Everything happened precisely at the right time, just as it had been
accurately happening all through the ages A. D. and B. C., back
through the eras of the dripping hourglass, back through the clockless
centuries of the caveman, back to the early pages of Genesis and the first
meeting of a maid and a man. Even my conception occurred exactly at the time
when God had planned it. The child arriving in our home at any other season
or year which was not the winter of 1897 would have been my brother or my
sister, not myself. And what chronicle he or she would care to write
concerning the same parents, or what tribute pay them for an existence not
mine, must be left in the realm of the sheerly metaphysical. I
am not a child psychologist, nor indeed a psychologist of any kind, but I
should like to offer some of the experiences of my early childhood for
clinical examination by those capable of appraising such things
scientifically. It is my belief
that in those years of a child’s life which antecede the use of reason, when
his mind is slumbering in a world of sensations and playthings, there are
definite moments when the intellect leaps forward, so to speak, ahead of its
cue, takes in some situation by swift intuition or insight, makes a judgment
— and then returns to dawdle on in its haze of simple apprehensions. I can
recall three such experiences happening to me before the age of six. The
first occurred when I was four, and was brought into the parlor to see my
grandmother lying in her coffin. Frankly, I did not know I had a grandmother
at all until I found her dead. Then, for one brief instant of reasoned
consciousness, which I can recapture now as vividly as when it first
occurred, I looked at the lifeless form of my grandmother and said to myself,
if not in the maturity of these words, at least with the absolute clarity of
this idea: “Oh! So there is death attached to this business of life! And this
is the way we all end!” . . . An hour later, my grandmother, living
or dead, had infinitely less interest for me than a shadow dancing on the
wall of my playroom, or a rubber ball rolling elusively across the floor. My
second experience with the use of reason in an embryo stage (my mother
declares I was five at the time) was when I heard a woman say to my mother
concerning another woman who was suffering from asthma, that she was drinking
kerosene oil for a cure! Upon hearing this, I paused long enough to
wrinkle my brow and soliloquize: “This is a queer world I have gotten into!”;
and then went back to the loggerheadedness of my normal development, paying
no further attention to what my mother and the other woman had to say to each
other. The
last incident of this kind, in which I executed a premature judgment with a
definite awareness of mind, occurred, according to my best calculations, in
the summer of the year in which I was six years old, and brings back to me my
mother’s voice calling through the kitchen window . . . calling
across the fields, over the hedges, through the trees . . . calling
desperately to whatever place I was lost in and could not be found
. . . calling in the poignancy of a beautiful tone over-pitched in
its anxiety . . . calling with the uncertain tremor that is
attached to the airing of one’s private shame to the other open windows of
the neighborhood, behind which halting housewives listen suspiciously and are
anxious, in their jungle maternity, to gather little trickles of evidence
that will establish flaws in their neighbors’ children and magnify virtues in
their own . . . calling once, twice, a half a dozen times, into the
indefinite spaces of the hot noon hours . . . calling plaintively
with a combined crescendo of fatigue and alarm which the light vocal powers
of a slender girl are not strong enough to support in an appropriate key: “Len
. . . errrrrrd! If you don’t come in now for dinner, you won’t get
any pudding!” The
voice — or its echo — at last reached me. I stood where I was and listened.
And something in my mind snapped, and awoke. And for the first time, standing
in a field at the age of six, in one, wild, rapturous act of reasoned
reflection, I knew that I had a mother! I knew that she was young, and was
beautiful, and was my own. I knew that it was her business — and had been
hitherto, though I had not consciously noticed it — to feed me, clothe me,
and spend her life in my service. I knew that she worked too hard. I knew
that she hated to call through the open window in this fashion and to make
herself conspicuous for the open gossip of the street, for she had great
pride. I also knew, with a startling realization, hitherto unappreciated,
that we were poor. Pudding was only a piece of stale cake with sauce on it,
yet this was to be my reward or punishment. Pudding for the poor! These
were the apocalypses of my early childhood. |