Panel: Autobiographical Practices and Self-Disclosure
Copanelists: Suannah Mintz and Maria Ng
In this autobiographical essay I explore the experience of first infatuation as I experienced it at the age of twelve. It consisted of the shock of becoming fully conscious of the physical beauty and the mysterious allure of the opposite sex incarnated in a particular girl overwhelmingly there in the flesh and the blood. By happenstance it also coincided with my move to a different country (from Austria to France), family (from my parents to my much older sister and her American husband), school, and language (the English I had to learn in the American school on the US army base in Fontainebleau).
As an erotic awakening of the senses, first crushes are sentimental clichés, but there is also, as Goethe observes in his autobiography, something spiritual about them. They are as assertion of the world out there making an indisputable and irresistible claim on us; they are a wake-up call suspended between our hormones and our soul. First crushes are not meant to turn out well, and certainly mine did not. Indeed, it didn’t get far enough to even have a chance of turning out badly. It simply came to nothing, but in the process it cost me something, because it made me guilty of a deceit that came literally at the expense of the Catholic Church. In a perverse sort of way, that deceit demonstrated that I was capable of thinking and acting for myself in a new world, no matter how surreptitiously, and to put my desires, even in the secrecy of lying, above the teachings or ethical demands of that church. I am also tempted to think that in this covert rebellion or betrayal, the seeds of my adult identity were planted.
Eugene Stelzig, Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the State University of New York at Geneseo, was born in Austria and grew up there and in France before coming to the US permanently in 1961. He holds degrees in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University, and Harvard University. In addition to many articles, he has published books on Wordsworth (1975), Hermann Hesse (1988), and Rousseau and Goethe (2000). He has recently published a volume of poetry (Fool’s Gold: Selected Poems of a Decade, 2008), as well as an autobiographical essay in Life Writing, and he has creative nonfiction essays forthcoming in Auto/Biography Studies and Lifewriting Annual.