Sallie and Jonathan
For the past four years, I’ve been chipping away at this complicated and difficult subject, relying on a bunch of letters, school reports, newspaper clippings and other miscellaneous bits of information, much of it kindly supplied by my sister, Eleanor Bingham Miller. I’ve also been greatly assisted by the four people in my writers’ group, started years ago in Taos, who have listened carefully to my manuscript, five pages at a time on Tuesday evenings, and offered most valuable insights.
My little brother, Jonathan, died more than sixty years ago. Most of the relatives and friends who knew him in that long-ago time are gone, and for the next generation, he is only a name, if that, and a blurred sense that something terrible happened to him.
For me, that is not enough. We are all forgotten within a few years of our deaths, but for those of us fortunate to survive till old age, there are tangible reminders: photographs, written records, even a few lingering memories because we have had time enough on this earth to leave an impression. But for Jonathan, who died at twenty-one, there are no such remainders and reminders. And the life and death of this brilliant, privileged young white man has much to tell us about the dark side of entitlement.
I have written the first drafts as his older sister, expected in the traditional way to take a great deal of responsibility for my brother, who was five years younger. These silent, powerful expectations were my first introduction to the rules society imposed then, and even to a degree now, on girls and women who may find their dreams collide with the demands of nurturing. Of course these demands are much heavier for mothers, but for a small girl, as I was, my never-expressed unwillingness to accept the role of part-time caregiver prepared me for the haunting ambiguities of my future.
This is a dead time in publishing, not only because of the pandemic but because of our increasing disillusion, as writers, with the limits imposed on our work by the big commercial publishers. This began decades ago when the independent publishers were bought by international corporations that always insist on the importance of the bottom line. As in all enterprises primarily devoted to making money, this now-ubiquitous point of view has seriously distorted the new books most of us have learned to take seriously, turning, always, the bestseller lists (no matter how contrived) and mainstream reviews for our choice of what to read.
Thank God for the small publishers and how vital it is that they survive these harsh economic times.
So, like almost all writers, I go to work without spending any time thinking about whether my memoir will ever be published. Simply, I must tell this story.
A poignant and heartfelt story that must be told.
I have one vivid image of Jonathan and it is recorded in a photograph I took. We were at the Boy Scout Jamboree at Valley Forge in the 1950s and 50,000 Boy Scouts were sitting on the ground in a large amphitheater waiting to watch Big Top Circus. For some reason I remember pushing the button on my camera thinking I was only taking a picture of the crowd. Jonathan was the only one standing. He had his scout uniform on and a hat, like Teddy Roosevelt’s, with one side of the brim pinned up. I will try to find the picture.