Highcastle: A Remembrance

Lem is a weirdly two-sided writer: he can be a stuffy, high-flown intellectual or a playful, quizzical fumbler. Reading this memoir of his childhood, the deep foundations of his playfulness are clear. He was a strange, unbridled child, with a penchant for destruction and desecration–which reminds one of Hogarth from “His Master's Voice”–that the adult author finds horrifying but is by no means willing to disown.

The book was written in 1965, when Lem was 45 and becoming well-established as an author of science fiction. He claims in the opening that it was an attempt at letting his child-self speak for himself, and that he feels he failed to do this, but while there are certainly adult ruminations scattered throughout, he seems at least to an outside observer to do a tolerable job of showing us scattered fragments of his childhood, which are likely all that remain. There is less coherent narrative than he seems to think, and that's just fine: memory is a series of glimpses of the past seen through the guard-rails of the present.

One odd missing feature, though, is religion, which gets almost no mention. He was of Jewish descent, had some Jewish education, but once said he was raised Roman Catholic... it may be that opening that box would have resulted in something impossibly complex in the context of a relatively short memoir, but it would have been fascinating to see it, never-the-less.