We, the Living

I’VE just been watching my baby make hash out of a piece of paper, He turned it a hundred ways; he tried it in one hand, then the other. He tried dealing with his feet and lost. Then he wanted my assurance that it had been well done. I said: —

‘There is total war. You were born the day Chamberlain pronounced the war to end wars. In eight months, there is nothing but war. And still you, with ten million like you, are more important than diplomacy, than guns, than fear. You are life.’

I went out to look at the day-old chicks. I planted a row in the garden.

In the house I tore a map from the wall as one would the sheet of last mouth’s calendar.

I wondered if the baby bed would hold together under the bouncing onslaught of this fourth tenant.

‘Our only duty to the coming generation is not to beget them,’ says Richard Aldington.

In my desk was a letter saying, ‘I can’t understand you reckless people who bring innocent souls into this dreadful world. Such tragic faith as you must have!’

Faith? Yes.

I thought back thirteen years to our first decision to have a child. I was running for honorable mention in the Lost Generation at the time.

JMy friends said, ‘I shouldn’t have thought this life was good enough to give to another.’ It’s not at all a new idea. I suppose the world has never been good enough for itself. It has probably never deserved its children. But I wonder who is to believe in humanity if not human beings.

I didn’t know exactly why we wanted our first child. Like our friends, we thought there was a faint bourgeois odor about babies. Anyway, we went out to meet the reason.

The rhythm of being parents didn’t come easily. We still wanted to be separate from our child; we still wanted to sit on the fence with the holdouts. This was in spite of the fact that the first labor pain had taken care of that separateness. It pitches you into a sea you didn’t make and can’t control. A sudden end to separate and arrogant ego.

When the marginal twenties came, we were no longer lonely pioneers in the field. So we endowed a second daughter from stockmarket gains.

During 1929 and 1930, our isolationist policy got scrapped. The children were half of ourselves. Yet our outside world, the one which Mr. E. M. Forster so neatly labels ‘the world of anger and telegrams,’ was nothing to them. They were exploring the limitations of the word ‘no’ and learning what a joke was. The life within our relationship was inevitably quiet and solid, so that we might communicate with one another. We laughed a great deal. First, I think, because what children do is funny, and second because of a release. It didn’t seem necessary any longer to pick at life. We were part of the stream, and there we found entity.

Since then we have had two more children, not recklessly, but ‘soberly, advisedly, and in the fear of God.’

We talk about the war and the end of civilization.

People say, ‘Aren’t you afraid, because you have children?’

I say, ‘ I am not afraid for the reason that I have children.’

They will not all get through college without waiting on table or working in the college laundry. Worse than that, not one of them will grow up without a broken heart.

Maybe they can’t make a living.

Maybe they will die in the trenches.

Who knows what kind of state they will live in?

They will know injustice, force, human meanness — much human meaninglessness.

Our world may be changed, but it is their world they are going to meet.

We have to remember there are many kinds of lives.

To be afraid makes no contribution to the ending of fear. And surely the greatest cowardice is to fear something for somebody else. If our children cannot take it straight and find it somewhere good, we shall have failed with them.

But we cannot fail with the statement we so earnestly desired to articulate by having children. We believe in life. We believe in the goodness of living.

When death is everywhere, denial and negation are just not important enough.

They say, ‘This is the end.’

I live with the refutation of that rumor.

Daily, as events get blacker, I am grateful for the immediacy of giving food and rest to growing children. (Their own certainty of a future is manifest in every lusty demand.) I am nourishing something for the world that suffers, in return for the sustenance I draw from it. I am paying off something of what was behind me and goes ahead of me.

I take courage from the ferocious concentration with which children go about trying to belong — the large acceptance value which they have. Even their happiness reflects.

I welcome the necessity of sorting out my own values in order to offer them for consideration to my children. It is not a frayed or worldly trust which they give you. It is an absolute of rare quality that cannot be sidestepped by the excuse of your own inadequacy. Nor can you pull yourself together into a heap of worthiness tomorrow. They have asked the question today. No time is left over for disenchantment.

I couldn’t have the jitters even if I thought they were anything but destructive. I believe a preoccupation with construction is a more effective answer to horror. Shall we accuse the earth of having her head in the sand because she goes about her business of renewal?

I understand why I bring innocent souls into this world which is, after all, made by us who are in it. Whether these four will, themselves, help to make it better, I don’t know. But I do know that to make a pledge of active faith in living is what I as a citizen of a democracy can do.

HELEN EVERITT