On Their Own ORPHANS: REAL AND IMAGINARY

By Otto Friedrich

What does Art Buchwald have in common with Leo Tolstoy? Samuel Taylor Coleridge with Mary McCarthy? Not to mention Tom Sawyer, Oliver Twist, Tarzan, Superman and Little Orphan Annie. Right: they all lost parents at an early age and had to confront the world more or less on their own.

It is a hard fate at the best of times, and the best of times have been rare. In imperial Rome, orphans were commonly sold into slavery or simply killed off. Although the Roman Catholic Church forbade infanticide, Pope Innocent III was dismayed by the number of children's bodies he saw floating in the Tiber. With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, one chronicler reported that orphans "swarmed the streets like locusts," and locusts do not live very long either.

Eileen Simpson, who wrote Poets in Their Youth (1982), an admirable memoir of her marriage to the poet John Berryman, was an orphan too, but what she calls a "lucky one." Some luck. When she was eleven months old, her mother succumbed to tuberculosis; her father later put her and her older sister in a Catholic convent school, and she learned at the age of six that he had suddenly died of ptomaine poisoning. Convent life was benign but austere. Three winters in a row she suffered pneumonia so severe that a priest administered Extreme Unction.

When a doctor finally persuaded her uncle and guardian to find a healthier place, she was installed in a New Jersey "preventorium," an institution where pretubercular children were supposedly toughened up by studying and sleeping in the open air, even in midwinter. Eventually pronounced "cured," the child was first taken in by a white-haired aunt who taught school and believed in iron discipline. And then by her stiff-necked guardian, who lectured her on her father's improvidence and insisted on a budget for her 25 cents weekly allowance: 5 cents for school supplies, 5 cents for the church and 15 cents for savings. Not until years later did Simpson learn that her father had left her an ample bequest, that her guardian had not only hidden it but had dipped into it himself, and that he had gone to court to keep this spiritually starved child separated from her mother's side of the family.

Simpson calls herself one of the lucky ones because she had an older sister to help her survive the crippling emotional deprivation of orphanhood. And so she grew up and got married and became a psychotherapist. It was only when her second husband died of cancer that the sense of loss suddenly reawakened, that the "black ink of anxiety spilled and spread, saturating the fabric of my life."

In comparing herself to other orphans, real and imaginary, Simpson tells many touching tales: how Rousseau was so devastated by his father's disappearance that he abandoned his own children; how Jane Eyre was scorned by Mr. Rochester in the cruel words "Who in the world cares for you?" Simpson's efforts to sketch from these case histories a kind of psychology of orphanhood, however, do not get much beyond repeated cries of suffering and loss. Thus Bertrand Russell: "The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain -- a curious wild pain -- a searching for something beyond what the world contains."

She also extends her portrait, somewhat misguidedly, to include people who were not orphaned but simply separated from their parents, like Charlie Chaplin or Rudyard Kipling. She even argues that America itself is to some extent an orphaned society because its immigrants, from the Mayflower colonists to the latest Chinese mathematician, had to abandon their homes to come here. But the theorizing is not very persuasive. Simpson's best story is her own.