The fathers have eaten sour grapes . . .
Raymond Carr
FATHERS: AN ANTHOLOGY edited by Louise Guinness Chatty, 116.99, pp. 354 This anthology comes out at the right time. Families are back in fashion. The British public is exhibiting what Macaulay called 'the ridiculous spectacle' of one of its periodical fits of morality on the subject. Fathers are back centre stage, as great cor- porations, concerned in becoming 'father- friendly', grant 'paternity leave' to their employees. Politicians, engaged in a race to capture the public mood, might learn more about the moral economy of the family by reading this book, rather than the Guardian, on the evils of corporal punish- ment. It should be prescribed reading for all fathers.
Of the hundreds of hooks I have reviewed over the last half century, none has touched or troubled me more deeply. I am reminded of my many injustices to my children. Like Evelyn Waugh I could take no interest in them until they were capable of intelligent conversation. Even more have I brooded on my troubled relationship with my own father. Too late, I see that he loved me deeply; but his capacity for overt affec- tion was inhibited by the customs of the time and the severely puritanical elements of his low-church Anglicanism that saw respectability as a sign of grace. The last times he raised his hand against me in anger were when he discovered that I had been playing the saxophone in a sleazy nightclub on the night King George V died, and when I had 'tempted' my mother to play cards on Good Friday. Yet he never mentioned the great sacrifices he must have made to help me through Oxford. As J. S. Mill wrote of his father, 'the ele- ment that was most deficient in his moral relation to his children was that of tender- ness'.
Mill's description of his father is one of the classic set pieces in this book, as it moves, in well organised sections, from the delight in the newborn to the sorrow at the loss of the beloved, from sheer brutes to the excessively indulgent. Evelyn Waugh's gross selfishness and greed over bananas is another such classic; his shortcomings as a father of overpowering presence are attributed by his son to his incapacity to relax with his children. Beverly Nichols' father was a disgusting, whinging drunkard whom his son made two bosh-shots at mur- dering — one wishes he could have suc- ceeded. Rousseau comes out as the greatest hypocrite of the lot. 'He who can- not fulfil the duties of a father', he wrote in Emile, 'has no right to become such.' He fathered five, sent them off to foundling hospitals and never saw them again. There is an abundance of model fathers. Jane Austen's was one such. On his death she made the odd comment: 'The serenity of the corpse is most delightful.'
These examples may be familiar to most readers, but they concentrate the mind wonderfully. What gives this book its spe- cial flavour and makes it so compelling a read is the inclusion of the less familiar, taken from letters, diaries and autobiogra- phies, always better evidence than fiction. Dickens, like Balzac, pushes passions to breaking point. Old Goriot and Dombey are unforgettable, but imaginable in real life. My only grouse is that Louise Guin- ness has not given us more Trollope. His common sense hits the nail time and time again: (OK chocs away, chaps.'
The father, anxious only for his son's good, looks into that son's future with other eyes than those of his son himself — and so there is a quarrel.
Some of the unfamiliar instances are shocking. Ann Fleming's description of John Barrymore's abuse of his daughter is cast in language I do not wish to repeat here. Some are comic. Here is the great Lord Salisbury, a model father:
He found it hard to recognise his fellow men, if he met them in unexpected circumstances. Once, standing behind the throne at a Court ceremony, he noticed a young man smiling at him. 'Who is my young friend?' he whispered to a neighbour. 'Your eldest son,' the neigh- bour replied.
Some are tragic. Here is Christine Keeler on her brutal father: Once I brought a fieldmouse home. I held it out in my cupped hands, very pleased to have such a warm, living thing to play with. But Dad took it away from me. He threw it on the floor and crushed it under his foot. It squeaked.
Most difficult of all to manage success- fully is the relationship of a famous man to his sons. It is almost unbearable to read Winston Churchill's pathetic pleas for a line from his adored father. Darwin records every reaction of his baby to light and noise objectively as a scientist, but his observa- tions are suffused with what Louise Guin- ness calls 'a helpless tenderness'.
There are fathers who have made a suc- cess of the whole business, from Cato, who watched his son being bathed, something I have never done, to John Betjeman, who comes out as a loving, funny and relaxed father. Less gifted fathers- make a mess of things by trying to avoid their own fathers' mistakes. 1 learned, alas too late, much from the superb selections of this antholo- gy. Occasionally I felt like Glubb Pasha: `The relations between fathers and children are one of the tragedies of life.' The moment when a child leaves home and sets out on his own in life is a traumatic experi- ence for every father. It is not, as Bertrand Russell claimed, that he wants his child to be a credit to him in a competitive world. It is that he remembers the maxim of Charles James Fox's father: 'Let nothing be done to break his spirit. The world will do that busi- ness fast enough.'
Later the vanities of old age bring their discomforts. My second son, who has become a successful portrait painter and man about town, was once known as my son. Now I am known merely as his father. I see at parties pretty girls drifting away from my chatter about Proust or the last run of the Dulverton West Foxhounds towards. the embraces of my handsome youngest son. I swallow my pride and slink away home.
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