Tuesday, May 13, 2008
In "Cries Unheard," Gitta Sereny wants to prove that children are not monsters. She only partially succeeds.
Apr 14, 1999 | A few days before Christmas 1968, 11-year-old Mary Bell sat in a British courtroom and listened as the jury foreman pronounced her "guilty of manslaughter because of diminished responsibility," first for the killing of Martin Brown, a blond and "sturdy" 4-year-old, and second for the killing a few weeks later of Brian Howe, who was just 3 years old, still pink-faced and cherubic when his life met its grisly, unprovoked end.
Mary was a pretty girl, slight of frame, with blue eyes and a heart-shaped face. Unlike Norma Bell, the anxious, cowering 13-year-old neighborhood friend (no relation) who was accused but not convicted of the crimes, Mary had given a bewildering performance in court -- keeping her back straight and her face alert; yielding to paroxysms of delight when, for example, the judge appeared in his formal red coat or the barristers bowed solemnly in their funny wigs. Two toddlers were dead, two families were shattered, a neighborhood grieved openly, and there sat Mary Bell with her perfect posture and her brightly lit eyes, hardly showing a flicker of remorse. She was a monster, in the minds of most. A bad seed. Evil incarnate. She was sentenced to detention "for life."
Among those present in the courtroom that day was Gitta Sereny, a reporter who did not then and would not ever succumb to the opinion that Mary Bell was a soulless freak. "From day one," writes Sereny, "with her obvious lies and fantasies, her puzzling but indicative movements with her hands and fingers, her strange intelligence, her stillness and isolation, she appeared to me nothing so much as a horribly confused child to whom something dreadful had at some time been done." Sereny went on to write a book about the trial, then acclaimed biographies of Nazi war criminals Franz Stangl and Albert Speer. She became known for her decidedly anti-Augustinian (and certainly anti-Judith Harris) view that human beings, at birth, are intrinsically good, that they are pure vessels that subsequently become whatever their environments (and parenting, to Sereny, is crucial) conspire to make them. Three decades passed, but Mary Bell continued to haunt Sereny's mind.
In 1995, Sereny was given the chance to do what she had longed to do for 27 years: sit down with the notorious child killer. Mary was 41 years old and a mother by that time, a woman in a stable relationship with a man. She'd lived through 12 years of detention - first in a locked educational establishment (where she was the only girl among some 20 boys), then in a maximum-security women's prison. At 23, "like most adolescents sent to adult penal institutions," she was granted conditional freedom, subject to a recall upon re-offending. Sitting down with Mary, Sereny believed, would bore a beam of light through the thick wall of darkness that the trial had not penetrated. It would give not just the writer but society the evidence that is needed to change the way children accused of terrible crimes are both perceived and treated.
"Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill: The Story of Mary Bell" could have been just another titillation on an already burdened shelf of crime-as-spectacle books. But this is Sereny at work, and she has a purpose -- and as absolutely abhorrent as her subject is, she reels you in. Not with fancy language, and not with subtlety, not with much more than transcript juxtaposed against fact. Sereny reels you in by bringing Mary -- her horror, her revelations, her torment -- to life, by putting you right there with the inexpiable thing that she did. How did Mary kill, why did she kill, what could have saved the children she murdered? What did she become in the aftermath of her crime? How does she live within the knot of guilt and shame? If you want to know, Sereny says, listen and listen well, as the child killer bares her soul.
"Cries Unheard" quickly became both a bestseller and a hugely controversial book in England, not just because Mary was paid an undisclosed sum for her participation in the book's making but also because any book that delivers a victimizer's monologue necessarily silences the victims and their families. As Sereny's book sweeps us into Mary's sordid childhood and her mutilated psyche, taking us across a threshold into Mary's aching adult self, we are brought closer and closer to the stuff of Mary, until Martin Brown and Brian Howe and their incurable gone-ness somehow fade from view. One has to wonder if reading this book and thereby entering Mary Bell's mind is a betrayal of the very children whose voices can no longer be heard.
Still, as adults in a world in which childhood violence spirals ever upward, we are accountable -- are we not? -- for wrestling with the confounding issues that Mary's story raises. How profoundly does a child understand the finality of death? At what age, and by whose teaching, does she acquire the concepts of right and wrong? How much should we know about the criminal herself before we stand in judgment of her crime? Sereny doesn't just leave us with these questions. She answers them, with near-alarming assurance: "For children, for whom there is a wide separation between what they should know or are believed to know and what they do feel and understand, the evidence that proves their crimes, once obtained, should become almost irrelevant. The only thing that should count is human evidence -- the answer to the question 'Why?'"
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