A stirring, disturbing portrait of children who kill.

This is a book made to order for anyone who is feeling sorry for himself: a couple of hours with the true stories of some ten benighted human souls told by a prison psychiatrist should put one’s little miseries into perspective. Tom, one of the “deadly innocents” of the book, who was starved, whipped, and isolated first by his parents and then by his uncle and aunt who took him in after he was jailed for stealing food, finally acted. He was 14. “Tom went into the furnace room. He picked up one of his uncle’s guns, and, pausing only to make sure it was loaded, went upstairs to where Harry, Bertha, and Catherine were sitting at the breakfast table. Tom raised the gun, and carefully shot his uncle, then his aunt, then Catherine.” The provocation? His uncle’s strangling of Tom’s beloved pussycat and the desecration of its grave. The cause? Dr. Gardiner seems to know that psychiatry is not an Aristotelian science: “Why did it happen? Why did any of these crimes happen? What made this particular boy or girl commit a crime? Without a much deeper study of the unconscious drives, there is no definitive answer.” Oh, those convenient “unconscious drives,” which save appearances for the behavioral scientist even if little else is saved! I mean things like classical Western doctrines about the Fall of Man, the curing power of religion, the human thirst for God, the vanity and emptiness of animal satisfactions, etc. These truths have been lost, or rather abandoned, by most behavioral scientists because they are “unproved,” and the promised Eden of the behaviorist’s blurb has degenerated into something closer to an Hieronymus Bosch nightmare.

What Dr. Gardiner gives us, then, is a very modest narrative which, as Stephen Spender points out in the preface, is “not so much concerned with explaining why young people commit homicides as describing the conditions in which some of them have done so.” At this important task she has succeeded: the stories are as compelling as a strong astringent on the morning throat. Who can read the tale of Gloria, the talented, doomed black girl; of Rose, unloved by her own family and denied adoption by a Gentile family; of Peter, driven to rage by a mother consumed by thrift—each of whom killed within the family—without pity for the victims or gratitude for a self-favoring Providence? One meets over and over again in these pages the mystery of the truly luckless individual, wretchedly spawned and programmed for tragedy, unwanted, unloved, damned by unrelieved circumstance to pain, waste, frustration, crime and punishment, and there arises spontaneously the question that secularism in vain prohibits, bearing on the goodness, on the very being, of God. Why them? Why this focusing of misery on these, our hapless brothers and sisters? For, to quote Spender again, “Muriel Gardiner’s achievement is to make us feel that we ourselves could have lived the lives of these young offenders. She makes us understand them and their circumstances. The reader will often feel, ‘There, but for the grace of God (or for my privileged social and family circumstances), go I.’”

JK

About the Author

John Kiley

This is a book made to order for anyone who is feeling sorry for himself: a couple of hours with the true stories of some ten benighted human souls told by a prison psychiatrist should put one’s little miseries into perspective. Tom, one of the “deadly innocents” of the book, who was starved, whipped, and isolated first by his parents and then by his uncle and aunt who took him in after he was jailed for stealing food, finally acted. He was 14. “Tom went into the furnace room. He picked up one of his uncle’s guns, and, pausing only to make sure it was loaded, went upstairs to where Harry, Bertha, and Catherine were sitting at the breakfast table. Tom raised the gun, and carefully shot his uncle, then his aunt, then Catherine.” The provocation? His uncle’s strangling of Tom’s beloved pussycat and the desecration of its grave. The cause? Dr. Gardiner seems to know that psychiatry is not an Aristotelian science: “Why did it happen? Why did any of these crimes happen? What made this particular boy or girl commit a crime? Without a much deeper study of the unconscious drives, there is no definitive answer.” Oh, those convenient “unconscious drives,” which save appearances for the behavioral scientist even if little else is saved! I mean things like classical Western doctrines about the Fall of Man, the curing power of religion, the human thirst for God, the vanity and emptiness of animal satisfactions, etc. These truths have been lost, or rather abandoned, by most behavioral scientists because they are “unproved,” and the promised Eden of the behaviorist’s blurb has degenerated into something closer to an Hieronymus Bosch nightmare.

What Dr. Gardiner gives us, then, is a very modest narrative which, as Stephen Spender points out in the preface, is “not so much concerned with explaining why young people commit homicides as describing the conditions in which some of them have done so.” At this important task she has succeeded: the stories are as compelling as a strong astringent on the morning throat. Who can read the tale of Gloria, the talented, doomed black girl; of Rose, unloved by her own family and denied adoption by a Gentile family; of Peter, driven to rage by a mother consumed by thrift—each of whom killed within the family—without pity for the victims or gratitude for a self-favoring Providence? One meets over and over again in these pages the mystery of the truly luckless individual, wretchedly spawned and programmed for tragedy, unwanted, unloved, damned by unrelieved circumstance to pain, waste, frustration, crime and punishment, and there arises spontaneously the question that secularism in vain prohibits, bearing on the goodness, on the very being, of God. Why them? Why this focusing of misery on these, our hapless brothers and sisters? For, to quote Spender again, “Muriel Gardiner’s achievement is to make us feel that we ourselves could have lived the lives of these young offenders. She makes us understand them and their circumstances. The reader will often feel, ‘There, but for the grace of God (or for my privileged social and family circumstances), go I.’”