At that time we were fresh home from our year abroad. As we had anticipated and hoped, Elly had been thrilled to return; there was a real surge of interest and alertness in rediscovered things, even people. But by ill luck, the college revarnished our floors before we had been home two weeks. Chaos came again as furniture was piled in hallways. The home that had been lost and found was lost again. Elly, who had settled in so joyously, did not complain. She solved the problem her own way. She went into her room and shut the door, and for weeks she would remain only in a room whose door was closed.
Although she accepted companions on her side of the door, she still shut out in this way a great deal of the life we wanted her to share. So I talked about this to the psychiatrist, and he was glad to see the picture of the open door; he thought of what it might mean when I had not. And in fact, she did begin to allow the door to stand open. But she produced no more drawings that could tell us things, and I think her paintings might have baffled more skilled and ingenious interpreters than we. At five and six, she might go for four months making a picture every day, and never a representation among them. If she did draw something recognizable, as once or twice she drew a house, it seemed a mere object, no more expressive than the ones I drew for her at her request. Once — it was six months after the figure at the door — I broke in on her pattern series and asked her to draw a girl. (Always it is in one’s mind that she has forgotten how. ) Efficiently, carelessly, wholly without interest, she sketched a figure — head, body, arms, legs. ‘Put a hat on,’ I said, and in a single stroke she did so. Nothing could have been plainer. She seemed to say, ‘You wanted a girl and you’ve got one. Now let me paint my way.’
Her way was nonrepresentational. Yet did we really know that? How could we be sure her pictures represented nothing? Might not the patterns she repeated so often have significance beyond themselves, significances we could not see? Parallel zigzags, a circle, a square — pure and abstract as they might seem, there are such things as symbols. Why should we assume we would recognize such representations as Elly drew?
We could not, and to this day we cannot be sure. We could only wonder, and try to fit things into the totality of Elly’s experience, and our experience of it. And we could check: before some bright, balanced pattern, ‘What’s that, Elly?’ I would ask, pointing to the picture. ‘Green,’ Elly would answer, or ‘pink’ or ‘brown’, depending on what area my finger had inadvertently been directed towards. And green it was.
Should I have been taken in? Perhaps this nonrepresentational, matter-of-fact objectivity was merely a cover for her true preoccupations. [30] That might be true. It might also be false. We could only watch and guess. ‘A primrose by a river’s brim/ A yellow primrose was to him,/And it was nothing more.’ There are people like that. I remembered one of Kanner’s differentia between schizophrenic and autistic children: that schizoid children lived among fantasies and even hallucinations, whereas autistic children did not seem to hallucinate at all. As Elly never seemed to; I had never seen any sign that she related, negatively or positively, to anything that was not objectively there. It fitted with all I knew of Elly that to her a red circle should be a red circle — only that. On the rare (though increasingly frequent) occasions when she departed from pattern- making, the departure was evident. It was unnecessary to ask ‘What’s that?’ We could see what it was. But if we did ask, after the idiotic manner of grownups, Elly did not answer ‘red’ or ‘peacock blue’; she said matter-of-factly, ‘stairs’, ‘bed’, or ‘girl’. She could draw, if she pleased, people and objects, or she could draw patterns. The two realms were not confused, nor, apparently, did they overlap. Real things were not patterns, and were not treated as such. Her representational drawings were markedly less ordered than the great body of her work; figures, objects, did not repeat, and they might be clustered at the bottom of the page or to one side. It was as if she knew that the world of reality and the world of pure form were distinct — and knowing this, preferred the world of form.
I write surrounded by scraps of paper on which I have jotted down Elly’s ideas of order. The problem of selection here is severer than anywhere else. Elly has the kind of mind that given the series 2, 4, 6... will spontaneously supply 8 and carry the series to 100. She will do the same thing with a progression by 5s, 10s, 11s, 100s. She will do it with 3s and 4s, but with more difficulty; though she can add 9 plus 3, she may make a mistake on 49 plus 3. What is illustrated is not her ease in performing arithmetical processes, but her grasp of an ordering principle. The grasp is more remarkable because we do not ask her to supply the next number, any more than the psychologist who tested her at three and a half had to ask her to pile five cubes in order of decreasing size. It is simply apparent to her that that is what is there to be done — that the system itself demands it.
When she was first learning to count verbally, at five and six, she still had difficulty with new words. Two words for the same thing confused her and I avoided them where possible. Consequently I anticipated difficulty with ordinal numbers (for ‘first’ and ‘second’ are very different words from ‘one’ and ‘two’), and also with the verbal shifts as she must move, for example, from ‘...twenty-eight, twenty-nine’, so orderly and easy, to ‘thirty’. But she grasped ordinals at once, even making the effort necessary to put a slight noise on ‘fifteen’ to adumbrate ‘fifteenth’. And though she did initially say ‘twenty-ten’, she knew without being told that twenty, thirty, etc., were different from other numbers and like each other, and in a day or so was spontaneously correcting her seventy- or eighty-tens to ‘eighty’ and ‘ninety’. Not only were numbers readily available to her, but words as well, if only they reflected an ascertainable order.
Elly’s natural grasp of ordering principles seems to tell her what defines a system and consequently what is needed to make it complete. I had deferred teaching her zero; I knew it was a sophisticated mathematical concept, and what the Greeks had lacked, Elly, I thought, could do without. But Elly picked it up somewhere, at kindergarten perhaps, and brought it into common use. I had not forced numbers on Elly; she was seven and a half before I suggested that 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 1= 3. She intuitively added larger sums for years, and I made sure to associate the abstract symbols with blocks or objects. She was now in kindergarten and it did not seem too much to teach. I was, however, unprepared for her critical reaction: ‘No zero!’ She wanted 0+1 = 1 and I supplied it. Then, ‘Oh, we forgot! Zero plus zero equals zero.’
Similarly, she could grasp the principles behind the verbal representation of numerical order. A few months after she was eight, at a time when she had been able to count correctly for years, we found her making numbers on a sheet. ‘One-ty nine, one-ty eight, one-ty seven. one-ty one, one-ty zero, zero-ty nine’… all the way down to zero-ty zero. What could be a clearer verbalization of the way our notational system works? If 29 is represented as ‘twenty-nine’, the word ‘two’ buried in the ‘twenty’ (as of course we had never even thought of teaching her), then ‘one-ty nine’ will be the equivalent of ‘nineteen’, and ‘zero-ty nine’ of ‘nine’, and when one gets at last to zero-ty zero there’s reason to shout out what had become Elly’s new cry of triumph, ‘Yo ho!yo ho! yo ho!’[31]
30
At seven and three-quarters she made, all on one day, a most interesting series of drawings that showed she well understood die process of visual abstraction from a human situation. She began with a picture of a birthday party, represented as a rectangle surrounded by recognizable heads — not the full figures she had drawn occasionally before. These she identified verbally as ‘girl, lady, boy, lady, boy’ around the table in strict order. A second picture showed the same rectangle, but the heads had turned to simple spots of colour, still identified by the same words. Later pictures in the series show members of her family, identified by name, as mere blocks of colour. But this series remains unique. It is no longer uncommon for her to draw members of the family, and she even labels them herself in writing. But only this once have human beings ever been hidden by abstractions - or, rather, not hidden, but represented, since the whole process was conscious and deliberate. It was also accompanied by considerable gaiety.
31
The reader will by now have noted how many of my transcriptions of what Elly says carry exclamation points, and wonder why. To appreciate the tone of Elly’s speech, it is important to realize that (requests aside) it consists largely of assertions, made with varying degrees of emphasis ranging from simple underlining through enthusiasm to transported delight. A musing or inconclusive tone is rare. Anxiety almost always leads to a questioning rise in intonation, and question marks or exclamation points could really be put after almost everything she says. A ‘no’, for example, that she is sure will be honoured is ‘No.’ One that she suspects I may not accept but which is still important to her will be edged ‘No?’