Rainbow Before Storm

A CHILDHOOD--Hans Carossa--Cape & Smith ($2).

"The Child is father of the Man," said Poet Wordsworth. Author Carossa, a lung-disease specialist since 1903, seconds Wordsworth. "The things one has loved and done in the first ten years of life one will always love and always do." What he himself loved and did, told with classic deftness and grace, makes up a fairy tale that everybody, even psychoanalysts, will find strangely beautiful and true.

Born in Upper Bavaria in 1878, he has first-memories of the views from his bedroom window, from the frame of which swung a large bead of clear blue glass. "I could swing it from side to side as I pleased, quickly in short jerks or slowly and largely, and its motion seemed always to have a mysterious correspondence with whatever I desired and undertook." Whenever, across the street, the pageant of a funeral procession wound its way up to the cemetery on the hill, with incense burning, bells ringing, people singing and wailing, the child was filled with glee. "I used to sing, whistle, and yell as loud as I could, letting the bead swing as far as it would go."

Of his granduncle Georg, who had once been a conjurer, he lived in thrilling awe. Though the old man was dying of heart disease, he put on many a magic show to please the child. Afterwards, when his uncle was lying on his deathbed, he stole the magic paraphernalia, put on a show of his own at the village inn. Only the quick wit of his goddess, Eva Veeders, who could turn cartwheels in & out of rooms without brushing the doorposts, saved him from disgrace.

His adventures in childish asceticism, giving away all his toys, pricking his cheeks with oleander leaves, ended when his father made him give some strips of his skin to graft on a peasant's arm. From the family attic he stole a mummified arm, scared a schoolboy into fits with it. Childhood came to an end when he was sent off to learn from a priest. On his way home after the interview he passed a dead willow, with a hollow branch that looked like a snake's head. Into the hollow he stuck the contents of his pockets, crystallized almonds, nuts, Eva Veeder's ring. Lacking more, he picked little red hips from wildrose shrubs, stuffed them into the serpent's jaws. Going away he looked back, saw some magpies flying around the place; one was perched on the serpent's head, seemed to be pecking into the jaws. "A feeling of boundless joy descended on me. I did not know why."

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