The next month I thought of something else that I could do. I began to cut out pictures I drew myself. This gave me considerably more flexibility. I had no longer to depend on what magazines offered me. I could make pictures that would embody my guesses, uncertain though they were, of what would be significant to Elly. I made a cardboard baby with movable arms and legs attached with paper fasteners. Elly watched passively but absorbedly as the baby took shape — as I worked my incredulous ears even heard her say ‘bay-bay’. But she soon lost interest; when I tried to clothe it with paper clothes she threw them away, casually but definitely. I drew our house and cut a door she could open and shut. She liked that, although she had never before responded to a picture of a house. I made an Elly figure dressed in Elly-clothes, and she seemed unusually interested, by which I mean that she held it and stared at it a while before putting it down. She dropped a father-figure on the floor. She did not even let me get beyond the outline of the head of what was to have been a mother-figure. Slow down, slow down, don’t push, always allow the one step back for the two steps forward. ‘Learn to labour and to wait.’
I had not thought of it, but as I drew more I began to realize that part of the power of this technique lay in the fact that drawing is a process and takes place in time. A completed picture is seen all at once. A picture that someone is drawing forcuses the attention by the very gradualness with which it takes form. The process is dramatic, it involves suspense. The head first, then arms, body, eyes, nose, mouth — not always in the same order. Each is an event. What is coming next? I drew slowly but without pause. Initially I drew careful, realistic outlines; I didn’t expect that Elly would recognize a representation that was merely schematic. When I cut pictures, Elly had merely looked. She watched when I drew. Her attention was a strange thing and a precious one — long for her own concerns, for other peoples’ evanescent or nonexistent. A dropped pencil might forfeit it. Sometimes, when I knew she was watching and the paper lay between us so that the figure I drew right side up would be upside down for her, I would try to draw upside down rather than change my position and risk losing her. It was June. Elly was almost four. More than half a year had passed since she had first seen the babies’ toes in the Treasury of Art Masterpieces. Yet she had no word for any part of the body. How much did she really know, I wondered, about this most basic factor in her experience? One day I was drawing with her, idly, nothing new in mind. As I often did now, I started the figure of a child, beginning with the feet. I drew toes, feet, legs, underpants. But this time it occurred to me that I might make use of the drawing process itself; I could find out what Elly would do if I did not complete the figure. If I stopped drawing now, perhaps I could enveigle Elly into replacing her passive attention with active collaboration.
I relaxed my hand. It lay limp on the paper, pencil in still fingers. I waited. A moment passed, and Elly pushed my hand to keep on drawing. I completed the trunk and stopped. Elly started me on an arm; I stopped when it was done. Elly touched my hand and I was beginning the second arm when I felt her correct me. She was no longer passively accepting, she had her own idea. She wanted the head next. I drew it, stopped at the neck, and prompted by Elly drew the second arm. The figure was complete, and I had determined that Elly, who had only recently learned to see a picture, knew as much as any child her age about how the human body should be visually represented.
But all this time it was I who was drawing, who was active, at work. Surely it would be better if Elly drew herself? That was very difficult to accomplish. Drawing meant pressure, meant holding pencil, crayon, brush, and Elly had no strength in her hands for that. I have told in Chapter i of the circles she crayoned when she was two and a half, and how she abandoned them. She abandoned crayons altogether — if one was successfully put into her fingers, the line she made was almost too faint to see. After those first miraculous circles and crosses there were no more drawings of any kind for almost a year, until Elly was a little over three.
An unusually active and imaginative baby-sitter had kept her while I was out, and instead of standing by while Elly did nothing, she had tried to engage her attention. I had told her that Elly recognized shapes, and Jill had taken paper and crayons and drawn her a sheet of triangles. She drew thirty of them before Elly herself made a faint, wavering, but unmistakable triangle. How did it happen? I was not there to see. But it was a doubly remarkable occurrence. Those circles and x’s of the past had been made, not in immediate imitation of a model someone had just drawn, but after a long delay. They appeared unexpectedly the next day or the next week, affording evidence, to the hopefully inclined, of intelligence, but also of that strange remoteness, the denial of interpersonal contact. The child would draw a circle, but it must not be an imitation of someone else’s circle; it must come out of nowhere. These frail triangles were different. They acknowledged not only hidden capabilities of eye and hand and brain, but a personal contact as well. The intensity and interest of this young girl had got through to Elly, who usually looked right through a stranger.
Perhaps she was reacting as normal children so often react — they are able to do for a stranger what they will not do for a parent, knowing it need not commit them. I acted as if that were the explanation, whether it was or not. I let it rest. Not until two days later did I get out paper and paint. Paint and brush might be harder to control than crayon, but Elly had no difficulty with control. The advantage of paint was that it required no pressure. Elly could be as weak as she liked and still make a mark.
This time Elly reproduced a triangle as soon as I made the model. (There are normal three-year-old children who cannot copy a triangle, but I did not know that then. ) During the next three months it was possible to get her to draw, at intervals. Always it was drawing; fastidious Elly never used paint as paint, never splashed, spread, or mixed it on the paper. She who could match colours spontaneously showed no interest in using them. Her drawings were monochrome — whatever colour she started with she stuck to. Magic marker came on the market that year and Elly soon preferred that, which requires no more pressure than paint and is easy to manipulate. For the weakness was still extremely prominent — it was about this time, after all, that I was working with her on flicking switches.
Elly drew rapidly and uninterruptedly, working for about twenty minutes at a time. (I noticed that, of course; attention- span is one sign of intelligence. ) She drew x’s, dots, lines, circles, triangles. She never scribbled at random, or even freely. Each line seemed weirdly deliberate, the product of a decision. I learned to take away one sheet as soon as she had drawn on it and substitute another; if I left a sheet in front of her, circles and triangles would disappear, carefully obliterated beneath a cloud of dots applied in close pointillism. Again, always, it was as if she did not want to commit herself — to assume the responsibility that admitting her new skill would imply.
Little of what Elly drew was spontaneous. They were copies of figures we had made. We made figures rather than pictures, since Elly at this time (about three and a quarter) had not yet recognized a picture. Seen without the significance we give them, letters are only figures. Somebody — I perhaps, perhaps one of the children — wrote Elly’s name in block capitals with the paints. The next time Elly drew, she made a rickety E. As of old, the act was delayed. She still retained her extraordinary ability to register impressions and bring them out, unpractised and unchanged, after an indefinite interval. About a week later she added an L — this three-year-old child who could neither speak nor comprehend.