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When All the World Was Young: A Memoir

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"Growing up is the process of learning how many things you can't do and how many people you can't be. When you've winnowed them out, what's left is you." - Barbara Holland

I've said before of author/essayist Barbara Holland that she has a remarkable talent for perceiving the small details of life and living. Or rather, a talent for remembering what she perceives and subsequently bringing it to the attention of the lumpish rest of us.

In mid-2006, Holland wrote a piece for the magazine AARP, "Being 70: The View from Up Here." So, published in 2005, WHEN ALL THE WORLD WAS YOUNG can perhaps be taken as Barbara's final word on the subject of her formative years. Somehow, I don't expect a sequel.

This volume is Holland's episodic narrative of her life from shortly before the beginning of World War II, at which time she was about six, to her first job in the display department of the Hecht Company in her (apparently) very early twenties. Measured against the comparatively happy memoirs of other female writers - Laura Shaine Cunningham (Sleeping Arrangements) and Doris Kearns Goodwin (Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir) come to mind - WHEN ALL THE WORLD WAS YOUNG is surprisingly bittersweet. The author is not reticent about her sternly authoritative stepfather, a self-absorbed mother disengaged from maternalism, her shoplifting phase, her high school abortion, and her wretched first marriage.

As in all of Holland's books that I've read to date, her wry, iconoclastic humor is a joy. She relates how, in the fourth grade, she was given the assignment of reading a passage from the Bible to the class every morning.

"I read my classmates a psalm a day, looking for the most rousing ones to hold my audience. ('Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies, that I might destroy them that hate me. They cried, but there was none to save them: even unto the Lord, but he answered them not. Then did I beat them small as dust before the wind. I did cast them out as dirt in the streets.' Psalm 18, perfect for the playground.)"

Because of her talent for perception, she comes across with unorthodox snippets of insight, such as: "Peculiar relatives make good stories in later life, but to a child they're a wobbly rudder." Or this: "Down below the grownup eye level, even the best-kept suburb seethed with action."

I wished WHEN ALL THE WORLD WAS YOUNG was two, three, four times as long. As a child, Barbara was an awkward loner who found companionship with only one or two really close friends, and who otherwise found escape in books. I soon realized that she and I, when growing up, were much alike. And my affection for her has grown accordingly.

A misfit, bookish, lonely child beset by terrors and bewilderment, Barbara Holland grew up to look back on her pre-mid-century childhood with wicked hilarity and affectionate humor, but not a shred of sentimentality. Growing up in the Washington DC suburbs during World War II, graduating high school in 1950, Holland, author of 14 non-fiction books, reanimates a bygone world when "the Father's chair" was sacrosanct and mothers never sat at all but fussed endlessly over their families. Except for her mother, who belonged in a category all her own: "Mothers and my mother."

Holland's mother is brilliant, attractive, talented, and about as unmaternal as a mother of five can be. A skilled carpenter and artist who believes her place is in the milieu she's least suited to - the home - she emerges as a complex, sympathetic character with dozens of quirks (not all of them endearing), who shuns housekeeping for murder mysteries.

Holland's stepfather, on the other hand, receives no such complex attention. He's a monster with only two dimensions, cold and brutal, and at long last Holland has her revenge on him. She calls him " `Carl,' since that wasn't his name." "Just thinking his name brings him back too vividly and I can even remember his smell, not noxious but sharp and distinct like a whiff of danger in the forest." Her real father was lost to divorce early on and nobody explained things to children in those days. Lucky for her, her grandmother anchored her childhood, a constant, if undemonstrative presence, with whom she spent most of her weekends.

Holland, writing as an adult, with an adult's horror and sympathy, appears comfortable with the elasticity and vagaries of memory. She conveys the immediacy of the child's world - the acuteness of perception, vulnerabilities and emotion - and accepts the large blurry patches from which islands of vividness emerge, inking the spaces with evocations of the daily round. Her chapter headings evoke the past with Dickensian humor, beginning with: "In Which the Chairs & Domestic Habits of Fathers Are Explored, & Nick Is Born."

She was five when Nick, her younger brother, appeared. "I was horrified....He howled when Carl was trying to read his paper; he howled at night when Carl needed his sleep. He fouled his diapers and made outrageous demands on Mother's time and attention, even during dinner. He was totally ignorant of the danger he was in; how could he know? He just got here." It was her job to save them both from being cast out of the house into the street. "Apparently Mother didn't understand the danger either. She had, as I said, a great capacity for refusing to notice."

School was the bane of Holland's existence, second only to Carl: "School & I Struggle with Each Other, Plus Hard Times with the Old Testament." The social maneuvering baffled her, numbers were a threatening mystery, each day was a looming dread. Reading, however, was a miracle, and she read voraciously, "shucking the self gladly like a shirt full of fleas."

In elementary school she was called on to read the Bible to her class each morning. A methodical child, unfamiliar with the Bible, she prepared herself by starting at the beginning. The "sheer meanness of God" shocked her. She cried hardest at the fate of Lot's wife: "Struck down for a moment's homesickness." "I wanted no more of God. He was Carl on a cosmic scale. When He put His foot down, everyone died."

Then came war, a time of change. A girl from California came to class wearing Bermuda shorts, a Northern family descended with a white housekeeper, Republicans moved into the neighborhood. Food deteriorated but children, just as they had before the war, "ate what was put in front of them, without comment, and barely noticed." Mother went to work. "Fathers, by definition, came home from the day's work exhausted and surly. Mother came home sparkling all over as if from a light fall of snow."

In school there were air raid drills and in Florida, where she spent summers, German submarines prowled the waters, sinking oil tankers, and fighter planes practiced offshore. "In Washington the war, though great fun, was largely imaginary; on Florida's east coast it was actually happening."

After the war there was Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which put the fear of State into many of their friends and neighbors, though not Holland's socialist grandmother, who resigned from teaching rather than sign the loyalty oath. There was also polio and the nuclear threat, which progressed from backyard shelters to evacuation to the end of life on earth.

"The Long Dark Night of Junior High School," ended with the blossoming of a wonderful, intense friendship, her first with a soul mate, and high school brought a succession of bad-boy boyfriends, then after graduation she fell into a stultifying depression. But Holland leaves us on a high note, "In Which I Am Saved Again & Live Happily Ever After:" saved by a job - nothing special about it, except the independence of a paycheck, no small thing, then or now.

Holland draws us into a time when big families were the norm, mothers stayed home and had black household help, children roamed at will, and people ate creamed chicken and pineapple upside down cake. In school history was male, girls weren't expected to do math or allowed to take shop and Latin was still offered. Funny, poignant, even savage, Holland's memoir will inspire you to seek out her other books, which cover a wide range of subjects from the irreverent presidential short takes of "Hail to the Chiefs," to "They Went Whistling," a wry and lively account of history's forgotten females, and "Gentleman's Blood," a sharp-witted history of dueling.

An absolutely delightful book that brings back so many memories. I've often wondered how any of us survived child hood. I had about as much trouble with school as she did, as she called it "The Long, Dark Night of Junior High School." We didn't have a junior high school, but I certainly thought high school was a bitch.

I was struck by her story of wanting to ride on the back seat of a bus. She was in the South at the time, and this forced the African American women to stand. But she didn't know. There weren't any signs, just 'everyone' knew. Where I lived there were signs. I remember riding on a bus with our "negro" (the word at the time) baby sitter. She sat behind the sign, my brother sat just in front of her, with the sign in the middle. My brother and I played with the sign until the ultimate authority in the world, the bus driver came back and said, "leave the sign alone kid." We sat perfectly still for the rest of the trip.

This book is not a typical autobiography. It's a series of little stories from a time when the world was different. It wasn't as easy a world as one would have liked, but she made it through.

My life was much the same, I wish I could write like she does.

I wish it hadn't ended -- but it ends, just the way it begins, with the perfect sentence. OH my gosh, where to begin. I can only say that I adore Barbara Holland's phrases and analogies. This is memorable stuff, turning me right into an annoying cheerleader along the lines of "You HAVE to read this book!" I feel it's my duty, as a friend and relative, to recommend it to others, especially my three sisters. We were born in Washington, D.C. (post-war), raised in the Virginia suburbs, and frequently visited our aunts in Maryland, in what's now a neighborhood more dangerous than Fallujah, so "When All the World Was Young" has the added allure of familiar nostalgia. But mainly, it's just a perfect memoir: rich, comic, dark, fearlessly honest, revealing, highly comforting. With two children in public high school in the much-touted Fairfax County School System, I feel great heaps of despair over the whole shebang (for lack of ability to better describe our personal education woes and utter lack of "school spirit"). Just reading Ms. Holland's reminiscences about school has bucked me up enormously, really more than anything else ever has. For this alone, I owe her much gratitude, but I'm also thankful for laughing my head off over subjects like the 1950 government's instructions on dealing with nuclear attack. I don't want to give anything else away; incidentally, be forewarned about reading Lynn Harnett's review because she basically gives the whole book away - yikes! For me, "When All The World Was Young" is right up there with Betty MacDonald's memoirs and Cornelia Otis Skinner's "Our Hearts Were Young and Gay", and that's high praise. Highly recommended; thank you, Barbara Holland! (Please keep writing)

What a terrific read! Here is a girl who slayed many a dragon, surviving to become a brave, funny and rocky-smart lady who writes like a dream. The fascinating personalities who people Barbara Holland's world are portrayed with precision and compassion. A noble work, highly recommended.

Unlike many autobiographies, this one avoided two frequent mistakes. First, it did not read like a boring recitation of events which plaques so much nonfiction. Barbara Holland is a gifted and interesting writer. But more importantly, she does not make excuses for, sugercoat, or gloss over her sometimes none too stellar behavior. She avoids the mistake of portraying herself as a heroine, always right, at the mercy of the mistakes of others. Her hobby of shop lifting as a young child is described and explained forthright, not excused. Even at the end of the book as life whirls out of control, she never whines. She always accepts responsibility for her behavior. Although she explains why she was misunderstood or why she was just plain acting badly, she never (like so many autobiograhers) blames anyone and everyone else for her troubles. This is an insightful look into the disturbed life of a sometimes happy, but mostly unhappy childhood, and a brilliant portrayal of the times. Growing up in the late fourties and fifties myself, this book jogged my memory over and over. It truly was a time like no other, an atmophere in American that our children and grandchildren, unfortunately, can never experience. Kids went out to play without supervision and had free rein of the neighborhood. We did not wear bike helmets and knee pads and globs of suntan lotion, and we certainly didn't carry music and cellphones. An innocent (and, as one reviewer says) a not so innocent time, when the world was neither more glorious nor less evil, but truly simpler, quieter, and incredibly, gloriously different.

She beautifully captures life as a misfit child in pre and post World War II. I came away wanting more.

WHEN ALL THE WORLD WAS YOUNG is an immensely readable book. Barbara Holland's story kept me interested from start to finish. She left me wanting to know more about her writing career, her marriages and mostly her children. The story had added interest to me because, like Barbara, I also grew up in the Washington, D.C. area.

I could also identify with the distress that she experienced during her school years. So many children are happy until they start school. I guess it's a major awakening when the world intrudes into our lives for the first time. We're on our own with opinionated teachers and other children who may not like us for reasons that we don't understand.

This is a memoir and so not everything is answered, but the true measure of any good story is not wanting it to end.

I did not know of Barbara Holland's work until I saw this book advertised in a catalog and decided to order it. I was charmed and immediately became a fan. Having grown up during approximately the same decade(s) I can closely identify with the feelings and emotions that made her the fascinating charachter she has become. I am online right now to order the rest of her books and am looking forward to many hours of enjoyment.

I loved this book, in part because of the author's reminiscences about my hometown of Bethesda, Maryland. (Holland grew up there about 23 years before my time.) Her perspectives on reading, nature, romantic love, and finding oneself dovetail perfectly with mine. Interestingly, Holland is a prolific author who has never been recognized by academia. Finding literary criticism about her work is nearly impossible. I've since enjoyed sampling many of her essay collections but none is as good as this memoir.