Memoir: 'Let me tell you a little bit about myself." Dreaded words, the "let me" being quite redundant, the "little" a forlorn hope.
Priests and doctors have no option but to be good listeners, or at least patient ones. The rest of us find it a problem since it can interfere with talking. The self is of course endlessly fascinating, but in most cases, sadly, only to oneself. So no, you don't have to be mad to visit a psychoanalyst, just desperately in need of an audience.
Alternatively, you could write your memoirs. Publishers often complain of the misery visited on them by the unsolicited autobiographical manuscripts of obsessives prey to the popular delusion that "everyone has a book in them". Yet one suspects that these are barely glanced at, so it is at least possible that for every few score Forty Years in Quantity Surveying or similar there is at least one unregarded Milton fated to remain mute and inglorious in a publisher's wastebasket.
Richard Wollheim, a distinguished British philosopher who died in 2003, had had many books published in his lifetime, so it probably came as a surprise to him that no one was willing to take on Germs, his scrupulously written memoir of an unusual childhood, which he thought the best thing he had ever written. The manuscript was apparently rejected by a number of major publishing houses, including Faber, both before and after Wollheim's death.
Finally, after large sections were extracted in the London Review of Books, it was published by Waywiser, a small press specialising in poetry.
Wollheim's book appears to have been the victim of current publishing industry wisdom, which holds that literary, introspective memoirs (even the word has an old-fashioned, Edwardian ring) are no longer saleable - and even less so perhaps when the author will not be around to promote them. This seems somewhat rigid. If a book is little short of a masterpiece a publisher must surely be able to find ways of selling it, irrespective of its genre. And a small masterpiece is indeed what Germs is.
Poets, it is said, are the same as other men and women, only more so: they may well perceive things more intensely than you or I but, more importantly, are also more noticing of what they see and feel, less inclined to shrug it off, more likely to remember it, tease it out, turn it round and make something precious of it. And of course they are not particularly noted for being happy. Though writing here in prose, Wollheim's sensibility is certainly that of a poet. The intensity, delicacy and precision of the act of memory in Germs have provoked comparisons with Proust. Just comparisons perhaps, but this is a Proust who can also make you laugh out loud.
Though not an only child, Richard Wollheim might as well have been, at least as far as his own perceptions of the matter go: his older brother is almost completely written out of the family story.
His father, Eric Wollhem, was a theatrical impresario of German Jewish origin, a cultured cosmopolitan, friend of Sergei Diaghilev and Kurt Weill, a kind man but frequently absent; his wife, Connie, was a former actress of whom her son does not have a good word to say. Vain and empty-headed, Connie is also a fanatical housewife, whose Prussian daily routine is dominated by her all-around-the-house vacuuming campaign against those germs which everywhere lie in wait for the delicate Richard, who does indeed spend many days and weeks savouring the pleasures of childhood illness and convalescence.
If Wollheim's mother is one comic grotesque in the household, the enfant terrible himself is the other. Clever, sickly, highly strung and bookish, he sees through children and chums from an early age. Having friends, he decides, is an admission of weakness. Little boys, with their rough games and obsession with excretion, are boring and frightening; books are a better investment, literary characters a surer source of uplift.
Some animal warmth does come Richard's way when he wins a Jack Russell terrier in a raffle. But Nobby, it turns out, is a born fighter, prone to long absences from home which torture his young owner with anxiety and from which he often returns seriously hurt. Years later, Wollheim's analyst, Dr S., suggests he has been suppressing the obvious fact that Nobby's fights were over female dogs to deny the facts of sexuality. But no, the patient insists, he simply thought of Nobby as "mysteriously involved with some part of the animal kingdom that was lower than that to which he properly belonged". Indeed, very interesting.
While Wollheim's account of childish misadventure can be hilarious, the significance of these events is often not trivial and sometimes lasting, in the most surprising of ways. He is given two teaspoonfuls of California Syrup of Figs every Friday evening to keep him "regular". If he kicks or screams, which he often does (his arms frequently have to be pinioned by a third party), the dose may be postponed to the same time on Saturday, or Sunday. On one occasion he lasts as far as Tuesday and on another he is stopped only at the last minute from squeezing through the bars on his bedroom window to throw himself out on to the ground below. And now, a lifetime later, he will see a hue of syrup of figs in a sunset or in the cheeks of a Giotto angel.
If this is largely an account of an unhappy childhood, why do we find it so amusing? Perhaps because, while we have little interest in hearing of others' pain, we are always open to their humour.
In this fine memoir, Richard Wollheim has transmuted his childhood hurt and loneliness into an artful, precise, self-deprecating detachment. It is a very English sublimation.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist
Germs: A Memoir of Childhood by Richard Wolheim, TheWaywiser Press, 264pp. £10.95