LYRICAL ACCOUNT OF A SAD 'CHILDHOOD'
Author: By Robert Taylor, Special to the Globe
Date: Wednesday, November 27, 1991
Page: 27
Section: LIVING
"Not many children have survived a mother who saw her son as a kind of
laboratory animal for behavioral studies and a father who did not conceal his
contempt for the being he and his wife brought into life," observes Harrison
Salisbury in his foreword to this remarkable book.
The parents -- Alva and Gunnar Myrdal -- were 1930s symbols of progressive
thinking about the family. Architects of the modern welfare state, they both
received the Nobel Prize (he for economics, she for peace). They never
understood or sympathized with their children, and their son Jan barely
survived their glacial relationship. Antagonisms not only involved the
emotions but, as time went by, politics: In 1953, during the McCarthy witch
hunts, Alva informed on Jan to immigration officials in New York. His US visa
was subsequently revoked under provisions of the McCarran Walter Act.
Sissela Bok's recent "Alva Myrdal: A Daughter's Memoir" (Addison-Wesley)
sought filial understanding, but Jan is alienated from his parents and
sisters. He dislikes Sissela, about whom he is caustic. He regards Alva and
Gunnar with unadulterated loathing. Yet, oddly enough, if the atmosphere of
''Childhood" sometimes evokes an Ingmar Bergman film, passions congealing into
icy solitude, the overall mood is tender and lyrical. The account traces
formation of a self from early consciousness to puberty, and is not an
autobiography in the ordinary sense but an unsentimental story about
childhood.
Jan Myrdal at 64 has devoted much of his career to challenging Eurocentric
distortions of Asia (his books were banned in Eastern Europe during the 1950s
when he reported the suppressions of minority cultures in Soviet Asia); still,
his upbringing was in many ways profoundly Swedish. He lived with his
grandparents during his parents' frequent absences and the grandparents
provided him with the warmth and affection otherwise denied. The evolution of
the family name from the old-style peasant Pettersson to the fancier Myrdal
symbolized Sweden's own shift from a 19th-century agrarian society to a small
20th-century industrial state.
The viewpoint of the child with its contrasts of vast space and the
intimate detail of familiar rooms, its casual schoolyard cruelties and chance
epiphanies (a Zeppelin glittering over the Alps, telephone wires singing), its
web of prohibitions and fantasy systems, is acutely rendered. A chapter that
begins, "One late winter day I drowned," blends hair-raising reality with the
visionary. The boys of Stockholm play a dangerous game, leaping from ice floe
to ice floe across the Karlberg Canal, and, when he was 5, Jan slipped out of
the house at dawn. A reddish moon still hung over the canal; he jumped; the
ice was porous and he went under. Even now he cannot say how he got out, nor
how he could prove himself alive to parents for whom he was already invisible.
However distressing it may have been to grow up in a fractured,
overachieving family like the Myrdals, Alva and Gunnar from a narrative
standpoint are an abundant source of tension and suspense. Jan presents his
mother as a woman with utopian solutions to every problem in the world save
her own. Gunnar, overtly hostile, looks at 11-year-old Jan's thumb (caught in
a car door) and tells him to hide the injury at American customs or the
authorities will think him syphilitic and send him home.
In Sweden, where "Childhood" appeared 10 years ago in a small edition,
publishers at first shunned the book. Jan Myrdal then read it on radio, and
newspapers picked up the story. Eventually "Childhood" and its successor,
''Twelve Going on Thirteen," sold more than 300,000 copies in a country of 8
million. Although his "Confessions of a Disloyal European" (written in
English) attracted attention here, Myrdal is an author who deserves further US
translation. He is a noted Strindberg scholar and gave last year's opening
address at the International Strindberg Conference; an art historian
specializing in social caricature and the Romanesque; and the author of 60
books. "Childhood" grants no concessions; the past still makes Myrdal angry.
Once your mother has betrayed you to the inquisition, you don't forget.
KERFOO;11/21 NKELLY;11/27,14:33 BOOK27
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