AND ANOTHER THING
Parricide is awful and matricide is a sin against the Holy Ghost of literature
PAUL JOHNSON
This spring, at a literary gathering by an Italian lake, I heard Lorna Sage read a fragment of autobiography. It was an enter- taining, at times shocking, sometimes mov- ing account of her childhood in the house of her grandparents, an adulterous clergy- man and his vengeful wife, who had stolen his compromising diary and threatened to show it to the bishop. Ms Sage is a lady of strong but tender sensibilities, a former beauty, as all can still see, who has been knocked about by life and bears the bruises; but, as one of our leading professors of English, she upholds triumphantly the high- est standards of letters. Her memoir, Bad Blood, has now appeared and discerning critics hail it as a masterpiece. I imagine it will still be read in a hundred years' time as casting a piercing light on the mores of mid-20th-century England.
But one thing worries me about this work. Sage's grandparents are, I suppose, fair game and her presentation of them is memorably hilarious. But she also includes a devastating portrait of her mother, a vacuous lady whose one skill, amateur dramatics, is stripped of all its pretensions and held up to ridicule. I read these passages with revulsion and shame at myself for enjoying them — Sage writes like a recording angel — for I strongly dis- approve of writers who use their literary talents to attack their parents. And so many do. Parents are easy targets, observed with all the privileges of the clos- est intimacy, and the requisitoire is often made horribly effective by the pent-up frustrations of childhood and the resent- ments of adolescence.
I do not wish to push my case too far. Parents should not be no-go areas for writ- ers, especially novelists. If so, we would be without Mr Micawber, a character clearly based on the elder Dickens, though trans- muted by genius and apotheosised into the god of improvidence. Jane Austen, whose literary taste (with one or two minute exceptions) was faultless, used fragments of her mother time and again, without offence. Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh is a serious novel about heredity, and the portrait of his father, though harsh, is justified by the artistic intention. Nor can one possibly quarrel with Evelyn Waugh's portrait, in his wartime trilogy, of his father as the innocent and ineffectual Crouchback Senior. Indeed a straightforward presenta- tion of a father is sometimes justified, as in Edmund Gosse's Father and Son, because of its value as the record of a struggle between two temperaments embodying vio- lently conflicting epochs.
What I object to is patricide purely for effect. As for matricide, it is the literary sin against the Holy Ghost. Philip Larkin com- mitted both in his hateful poem about his `mum and dad', which is all the more objec- tionable because it is neatly contrived, has a wounding splinter of truth in it, and is above all memorable — it is one of the few bits of modern verse people can actually repeat by heart. The more surgically precise the parricide, the greater the cultural crime. I have never been happy, to give an outstanding example, with Nigel Nicolson's presentation of the sex lives of his parents. I do not dispute that it is well done, and I take into account the argument that a son's tender hand has dealt more sensitively with a celebrated couple whose secrets were bound to be revealed sooner or later. But I recoil with distaste all the same.
There have been many other cases in recent decades, as the fashion has spread. J.R. Ackerley was kinder to his pet in My Dog Tulip than he was to his parent in My Father and Myself. Some think that Martin Amis was too critical of poor old Kingsley in Experience. I thought that he got it about right, but why could he not have waited until the years had produced a perspective and, possibly, a resolution not to do it at all? There was a particularly bad case in Ludovic Kennedy's attack on his mother in his autobiography. And the worst of all was John Osborne's savage caricature of his old mum in his two volumes of memoirs. 1 got to know Osborne in the closing years of his life and found him a man of infinite kind- ness as well as wit. It was impossible to rec- oncile the person I knew with the author of this cruel portrait, which deprived the woman who bore him of her last shreds of value or respect. She was alive, too, at the time, and knew about it. But as a rule the victim is dead and cannot comment or counter-attack. So it is a case of disinter- ment or body-snatching for a show-trial and posthumous execution, rather as the venge- ful Cavaliers dug up Cromwell's body in 1660 and performed nasty acts upon it.
But of course sometimes the parricide is more complicated, where more than one child is a writer and wants to get a word in. Thus there was sibling strife between the two daughters of Antonia White about their mother's merits. And now we are threatened with a showdown between the sharply competing literary sisters, Margaret Drabble and A.S. Byatt, over the novel Drabble has written in which their mother figures. Oh dear! I like and admire both these hugely gifted ladies, find it painful that they cannot respect each other as they should, and dread them quarrelling about, of all people, the woman who cherished them both.
I loved both my parents to the point of idolatry and my admiration for them was, and is, almost without limit. In the north, where I come from, if people do not like their parents they keep their feelings to themselves. I often say (though it is not absolutely true) that I had never heard a parent criticised until I came south of the Trent. My father died when I was 13, just at the point when he was beginning to talk to me seriously and take me into his confi- dence. It was the one really shattering experience of what has been a fortunate life. I remember how kind the Jesuits at my boarding school were, and the unex- pected sympathy of the other boys, no doubt prompted by superstitious fear that the same catastrophe might overwhelm them too. My mother lived into her nineties and died in my arms. We always spoke our minds, but we never exchanged a bitter word. I think of her, quite literal- ly, as a saint. Recently, a biographical essay she wrote about herself in old age, which describes her childhood and youth, came to light. To read it was a powerful experience, for all the force and tender- ness of her personality are recreated by her simple words. Well, we cannot all have good parents. But if we writers feel that our parents failed us, were rather less than we deserved, let us resist the tempta- tion to proclaim it to the world in the hope of getting a cheap round of applause.
Anyone who makes the heartless reader — who does not really care a damn either way but merely wants to be amused sneer at those who conceived and gave them birth is a traitor to nature. I do not advocate ancestor-worship, but let us writ- ers be seemly about those who bring us into the world. Literature is always the finer for a touch of reticence.
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