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– KENNETH GROSS – often made and given to children by adults). These essays implicitly probe the seriousness of play, its inventiveness, which endlessly makes over the most ordinary objects. They evoke the truth and need of the child’s imagining of life in the doll she or he takes up, its importance in negotiating the child’s passage into a world of adult affections and demands and losses. They also carry the domain of play into a world of adult reverie, suggesting how it remains a part of our experience and consciousness. The thought of the doll becomes a test of memory, a means of taking stock of the writer’s present world, including the part which remains hidden. One glory of these writings is the intensity with which they imagine the doll’s life, a life that is at once like and unlike a life we know. All are in their own way letters from unknown dolls. The child’s doll – an object that is itself the scale of a child – becomes an object full of equivocal consolations. The violence as much as the care which the child lavishes on the doll is part of the story. Charles Baudelaire imagines a child hungry for its toy, also provoked by it to undertake his first metaphysical researches, player with dolls but also inchoate scholar: he shakes, assaults, knocks, and tears the thing apart in the vain attempt to answer the question, ‘Where is its soul?’ The doll has no answer, and it is a question that remains, for the adult poet, unanswered. (What kinds of souls, what en-souling stories, do we supply to dolls, looking at them in museums, mysterious and of- xii
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– Introduction – ten creepy as they appear? It was a soul at once old and young, resolute and wounded, that I sensed in a doll I saw in 2010, in an Edinburgh collection, a doll made from a ruined shoe, its eyes and mouth indicated by bent nails in the heel.) Rainer Maria Rilke writes movingly that, as children, ‘we took our bearings from the doll’, making it a lodestone or compass, a sign-post on a journey, a place-marker. The kindly doll, held tightly, might comfort the child in the face of those other objects that his imagination invests with dangerous being – Rilke’s fictive alter-ego, Malte Laurids Brigge, recalls from his childhood ‘the fear that a small woollen thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head, bigger and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter when it hits the floor’ (Stephen Mitchell’s translation). The doll was something that we as children ‘fed with false food like the “Ka”’ (the word refers to a person’s soul or double in Egyptian religion, surviving bodily death and fed even in the tomb). Dolls, Rilke writes, absorbed our love and care, consoling us in turn, ‘allowing themselves to be dreamed ’, despite the fact that they might, at another moment, be ruthlessly abandoned or thrown away. Yet in all their openness, dolls for Rilke also become our guides in entering into a universe where things turn away from us, conceal their origins and ­desires, speak to us of death and xiii

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– KENNETH GROSS –

often made and given to children by adults). These essays implicitly probe the seriousness of play, its inventiveness, which endlessly makes over the most ordinary objects. They evoke the truth and need of the child’s imagining of life in the doll she or he takes up, its importance in negotiating the child’s passage into a world of adult affections and demands and losses. They also carry the domain of play into a world of adult reverie, suggesting how it remains a part of our experience and consciousness. The thought of the doll becomes a test of memory, a means of taking stock of the writer’s present world, including the part which remains hidden. One glory of these writings is the intensity with which they imagine the doll’s life, a life that is at once like and unlike a life we know. All are in their own way letters from unknown dolls.

The child’s doll – an object that is itself the scale of a child – becomes an object full of equivocal consolations. The violence as much as the care which the child lavishes on the doll is part of the story. Charles Baudelaire imagines a child hungry for its toy, also provoked by it to undertake his first metaphysical researches, player with dolls but also inchoate scholar: he shakes, assaults, knocks, and tears the thing apart in the vain attempt to answer the question, ‘Where is its soul?’ The doll has no answer, and it is a question that remains, for the adult poet, unanswered. (What kinds of souls, what en-souling stories, do we supply to dolls, looking at them in museums, mysterious and of-

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