Thoughts of a belated father
PERSONAL COLUMN ANTHONY BURGESS
I have just married again and my Italian bride's dowry consists mainly of a four year old boy called Paolo Andrea. He is monoglot. meaning he speaks only modified. East Anglian, so the only communication difficulties are such as might be expected to subsist between a boy of his age and a man of mine, me being fifty and never till now having had any experience of fatherhood, whether true, spiritual, step or foster. On the whole, I find we get on surpris- ingly well, and he is releasing in me whole cage- loads of too long suppressed infantility. I am confirmed in the view, that communication is at its most human when at its most Malinow- skian, meaning you don't have to bother too much about meaning (let's bring in, to be fashionable, Levi-Strauss as well, and say that language is primarily a matter of structures). I will sit happily for as long as he will (sitting at his age being, anyway, a highly athletic busi- ness) and make such conversational ploys as The wort fulderbill in spurgeeus plumchucks spries most corpily when fritched on its nether- wise frimtip.' He accepts this as a reasonable statement and responds sagely with 'Not always' or 'You did but I didn't' or 'That's rude,' chil- dren being hypocritically good at behaviour- judgments. This is very restful, and I can take at least half an hour of this every morning.
I find it harder to take the chaotopoeia, the astonishingly skilful construction of instant squalor where I was used to tidiness and order. There is also the demented creativity : he makes sugar by mixing salt, cigarette ash and sputum and warming all this by the fire; there is also a surrealist compound made out of lemon shampoo, nail-polish remover, beer and, float- ing on the surface, grubby curlicues of best butter. Parents who have had their children the hard way know all about _this, so I give no further examples. But as a writer I have certain natural fears, not perhaps known to lorry drivers who have written their one and only book, and there is no real means of obviating them. Children will find anything they want to find, and, getting up in the night for one pur- pose or another, I have been worried to see a small naked form darting from some forbidden corner back to bed. If a grown woman could make pie-bottoms out of Carlyle's French Revo- lution, a boy of four can reasonably be expected to micturate silently on a near-finished novel, carbon copy and all. And a typewriter is as good a toy as a yellow plastic submarine.
I am wrong, of course, to expect a sense of responsibility from so young a child, but I can't help responding to his misdemeanours- florescences of bare ego—with loud and per- haps trauma-inducing anger. I swear a good deal at him, arguing to myself that he will learn the obscenities anyway, and he might as well learn them right. I don't smack, for I fear I may enjoy it too much, and I don't want to sink tc his level altogether. Besides, there's the ques- tion of his getting to accept me as a father (so far I am called 'Antonio,' but soon we hope to be in on `Babbo,' which will do well enough). The whole business of establishing a special rela- tionship involves mutual exhibition, mostly of posteriors, but other children on the street— whom he must have told about this—want to come in and play the same game, and I don't want garbled stories in Nos. 26, 32 and 38 (re- tailed at teatime, when real daddy comes home) about the perversions of a jobbing author. One of the parents is a child welfare officer.
Since I now have a child in the house all day—or working with the Gas Board's debris en the road outside—I have to have these other children in, too. They are varied in colour, and one West Indian boy is just as horrible as some of the white ones. The worst is a white boy of seven who boasts that they have three telephone extensions in their house, inevitably bigger than mine since his father works on the local news- paper and does his work in an office. He gets all the furniture in the middle of the living room and makes a fairly elaborate ship out of it. He also speaks posh, sounding his aitches even in unaccented positions. I think I hate this child as much as I've ever hated anyone.
And, to be quite honest, I can do without Paolo Andrea. The duty of getting to know him is, as I said, proving easier than I had thought possible, but I sometimes wonder if there is anything in all this that lies beyond duty. My life isn't being Wordsworthianly en- riched by contact with a recent arrival from Platonic eternity. A child is just something that has to be turned into an adult, and the quicker it's done the better for everybody. Presumably the joys of fatherhood have as solid a biological base as those of maternity, nature kindly con- triving a sort of anaesthesia to enable natural parents to enjoy bed-wetting, entreacled hair, mannerless shouts for money for ice cream, in- ane pronouncements, concrete made with faeces and yoghurt. I once knew a girl with whom I carried on a delightful intellectual correspon- dence. Such wit, such taste, such treasurable mots. Then she had a baby and became an idiot. This was biology at work.
It isn't that children are just naughty or, under the influence of Mr Golding, innocently evil. They're bores. They're ineffable, unutterable crashing bores. When they're entertaining, it's because they've unwittingly (and this is very much the mot Piste) touched an area of sudden adult sense, just as a dripping tap will very occa- sionally play the opening theme of a Chopin prelude. I recognise that everything children do has a purpose in terms of their becoming genu- ine human beings—lalling becomes articulate speech and play is a deadly serious business and so on—but I don't see why .I should be charmed by their slow lumbering along the road to rationality. It's the finished state I want; there's no substitute for adulthood. I can sympathise with Samuel Butler's Theobald Pontifex, who wanted his sons to be born as ordained curates inclining to latitudinarianism. I want some- body who's already borrowing my razor •and planning to bring in good money to help the domestic finances, his father or stepfather being only a poor author.
It will be a long time before Paolo Andrea has a shavable flue. When he is fourteen I shall be sixty. When he is ready to earn a living I shall probably be dead. Meanwhile, very be- latedly, I have to assume the attitudes of a young father, shouting down the street for him, carrying him home asleep,—a dead weight in my unhandy arms. At the same time I have to admit a growing awareness of an itch of soli- clarity with other parents, whether true or step. I'm already resenting something that, in all my fifty years, never once entered my head, and that is the fact that this country doesn't really like children. It does its duty by them, but it's scared of their naked egos. It prefers the tamed animality of dogs. You can take a dog into a pub, but not a child. These cold dull summer evenings, we—mother, stepfather and Paolo Andrea—have been wandering round London looking for some place where we can all be together, and we've blessed those very rare pubs which have little gardens or seats on the pavement. But passers-by who see him downing his orange squash seem to assume there's gin in it and give us lemony looks. They want him to be at home for the good of his soul—duty but no love.
So sometimes I. am on the side of Paolo Andrea, who wants things but can't always have them (beer, for instance, or a nice warm in the public bar), and there are times when I am sorry for him, chained as he is to a large roaring ego which he doesn't know how to control. It's not his fault that he's only four years old and en- gaged in the long barbarity of childhood. I want him to be at least fourteen, but he refuses to be hurried. There's a lot of boredom still to come, so I must contrive a pretence that this boredom is really interest, concern, and some- thing that may as well be called love.
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