Life Without Father

byHARRY LEVIN

1

WHEN a play runs for several seasons, we may justifiably assume that it performs some kind of public ritual. Thus Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which scored the longest run in the annals of our stage, re-enacts the tensest issue in our history. Comparably, within much narrower precincts, the appeal of Abie’s Irish Rose was grounded upon its stage-managed relaxations of racial tension. More recently Tobacco Road has been sending its audiences home to their kitchenette apartments with renewed confidence in the metropolitan way of life. And Oklahoma/, seen through the other end of the opera glass, has revived the city dweller’s pastoral dream —1 hat sempiternal urge toward folksiness which produces royal milkmaids in one age and drugstore cowboys in another. In realistic drama the only escape, known as catharsis to Aristotelians and Freudians alike, comes at the exit to the theater. A more popular formula, neatly achieved in the Guild’s horse-operetta, uses the proscenium to frame our fantasies. The question is whether we are escaping from, or escaping to, ourselves.

Now there is an escapism in time as well as place, and it is most effective when it carries us back to the period where our memories begin. This may fluctuate anywhere between Only Yesterday and the Gay Nineties. (What, by the way, was so terribly gay about them? To one who cannot judge them except by their works, they seem rather pessimistic and consciously decadent.) Out of the past half century there can scarcely be a corny song or a gingerbread gadget, an eccentric character or an outmoded costume, that has not been resurrected on stage, screen, and radio, re-exploited in fiction, non-fiction, and advertising. Few epochs can have sentimentalized their immediate predecessors so fulsomely. Why? Because Prohibition created a cultural gap which Repeal filled in with beery reminiscence? Possibly. Because the Second World War re-created the emotional atmosphere of the First? To some extent. But the elemental reason is that we now look back — through both wars and the intervening crises — toward our lost youth, our native innocence, our unchallenged security.

Hence Life with Father has gradually reached the proportions of a national institution. Several generations of child-actors have outgrown their parts; a whole dynasty has mugged its way through the title role; and, although the play itself has not yet faded into retrospect, it is being gloriously reprocessed by the nostalgia mills of Hollywood. Crowds will long continue to apply at the box office for admission, as it were, to the family circle. There they will enjoy a twofold satisfaction, not less intense because it is self-contradictory. The first response is not unlike the condescending reception that we sometimes vouchsafe to dime novels or oldfashioned melodramas: it reinforces our sense of superiority, superficially confirms our belief in progress. At last, after all these years, we have grown up. Father is dead, and we can laugh at all the things he used to take so seriously. How small the world is, and how big we are! Yet we cannot claim to have profited from the discovery that there is no Santa Claus.

The second response is touched off somewhere within the deeper recesses of our experience. Here is Father again, larger than life and more opinionated than ever, making up our minds for us with the same irascible gusto, sheltering us from the world with all the old substantial comforts! Blending the professional sophistication of the New Yorker school with the childlike sensibility of a chronic invalid, Clarence Day was specially endowed to attain and sustain this highly ambivalent mood. His adapters, Messrs. Crouse and Lindsay, by concentrating upon the episode of Father’s baptism, follow the most deeply rooted of dramatic traditions; for the mystery plays too were based on the sacraments, and Father’s relationship with God — like Abraham’s is peculiarly direct and personal. Life with Father therefore transcends our crazy domestic drama. The walls may fall down in The Skin of Our Teeth, but Father’s house is still standing. The family may go dizzily to pieces in You Can’t Take It with You, but Father remains untouched by the Depression.

For Father, all-wise and all-powerful, was above all a good provider. If he has become the culture hero of our time, it is because—like the Fool in King Lear — he lived before our time. Hounded on every side by doubts and insecurities, we posthumously venerate him because we very poignantly miss him. But we must admit that his apotheosis has come too late to help us. In earlier and more hard-boiled repertories, we must remember, he played an ignominiously comic role: the cuckold, the heavy, the pantaloon, deceived by his wife, defied by his children, defrauded by servants and parasites. It must have been his success in business which, sooner or later, earned him a more respectful treatment: in Molière’s comedies, even as in Bringing Up Father, he is the bourgeois spokesman for common sense, sturdily resisting the affectations of his bluestocking wife and his social-climbing daughters. Here, as Voltaire pointed out, was a man of tremendous potentialities: “Un père de famille est capable de tout . . .”

Yet the father-image is ultimately a tragic conception. It centers upon a protagonist who, owing his position to his seniority, stands closer to death than those whose lives he dominates. Their tragedy commences where his leaves off. Once his rivals, now his heirs, they temper their grief with a certain degree of relief, which in turn is mingled with consciousness of guilt. Reproaching themselves, they trace a whole grim train of consequences to the destiny that Œdipus so vainly tried to avoid — the murder of a father. The classic myth, in which psychoanalysis would discern the very pattern of children’s attitudes toward their parents, grossly exaggerates the situation. Such impulses can fortunately be cushioned in private life; the function of drama, however, is to bring them out. Synge’s poltroon cannot be a hero, in The Playboy of the Western World, until he has “destroyed his da.” Thereupon his triumph is short-lived. Nemesis soon reappears in the shape of the indestructible old man, a battered god in a tragicomic machine.

2

THESE ties and conflicts, which originally assert themselves within the bosom of the family, are repeated by society at large, thereby setting the larger patterns of loyally and disaffection. Periods of social stability, of feudal hierarchies or Chinese dynasties, rest upon a substructure of filial obedience. Beneath the restless individualism of the moderns, the accelerating effort of each new generation to outdistance the last, lies a fundamental questioning of paternal authority. A hundred years ago Balzac, diagnosing this trend as a consequence of the French Revolution, illustrated it with his unforgettable portraits of old men in decline and young men on the make. Appropriately in 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species, Meredith’s Ordeal of Richard Feverel depicted the breakdown of a rigidly paternalistic system, frustrated by the perennially youthful forces of nature. Two or three years later, in Fathers and Sons, Turgenev brought the antagonism to a head by arranging a duel between an oldfashioned liberal and a callow nihilist. That issue, never settled, is fought again on an international scale by the rival ideologues of Mann’s Magic Mountain.

Movements and manifestoes, revolutions and counterrevolutions, are thus propelled by the cycle of crabbed age and youth; the juniors repudiating their elders, then waxing middle-aged and academic, and being repudiated by ever brighter juniors. Generation succeeds generation with mounting rivalry as the twentieth century succeeds the nineteenth. The unfilial impiety of Samuel Butler supplies a posthumous postscript, The Way of All Flesh, which Bernard Shaw described as “patricide and matricide long drawn out.” Matricide is perhaps the best description of our retrospective attitude toward the age of Queen Victoria. Lytton Strachey, by immolating the eminent Victorians, inaugurated the debunking of the twenties. Today the enfants terribles who survived that decade are older but not yet mature. The characteristic heroes of English literature, from A. E. Housman to P. G. Wodehouse, have been golden lads, mamma’s boys, playboys who never grew up. On the playing fields, they seem to have acquired, not the humanistic wisdom of their forefathers, but the paradoxical whimsey of their bachelor uncles — the Lewis Carrolls and Edward Lears.

It is life with Mother, apparently, that obsesses our British contemporaries. They no longer even struggle against it as D. H. Lawrence did in Sons and Lovers. The fatherly refugee of Prater Violet tells the narrator, Christopher Isherwood, that too many Englishmen are in love with their mothers. Cyril Connolly, in his intimate journal, tells the public that his notion of happiness is “a womb with a view.” This is, to put it mildly, a retrogressive position; this is second childhood with a vengeance. Whereas paternity is largely a cultural influence, which should lead via education toward independence, maternity is the explicit symbol of the child’s dependence on the parent, since it embodies their biological connection. But that is another story, closely related and perversely complicated — a long-drawn-out story which Proust would call “the profanation of the mother.” And Proust, whose most revealing essay is called “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide,” was himself the most devoted of sons. Such devotion, transferred from his family to his art, remains the one absolute in his world of shifting appearances and corrupted values.

Our sketch of the artist as a parricide, killing the things he loves, finds its most impressive model in Dostoevsky, whose own father was actually murdered by rebellious serfs, and whose lifework is consequently overcast by the mood of self-accusation. Transferring his sense of guilt from a personal to a political sphere, he repented in Siberia for having conspired against — whom but the Little Father of Russia, the Tsar? It is this abrupt transition from revolution to reaction, from rationalism to mysticism, from Western to Eastern ideals, that makes his fiction a casebook for our times. The skeptical Ivan assumes the moral responsibility for the murder of old Karamazov, while the youngest brother, Alyosha, seeks another father in the saintly Zossima and another home in the Orthodox Church. The Satanic, the Titanic, the Byronic archetypes of intellectual rebellion — theirs is the tragic pride that goes before a fall. After the fall — which is accompanied, in Dostoevsky’s case, by symptoms of “‘the falling sickness” — comes a humility too abject to be elevated by anything short of Divine Grace.

But Dostoevsky is peculiarly dynamic because he embraces extremes; he juxtaposes the icon and the iconoclast. Before we agree with the many discerning critics who maintain that his twentiethcentury successor is Franz Kafka, we must make one significant reservation. Where Dostoevsky’s heroes both act and suffer, Kafka’s merely suffer; where the former are ruthless experimentalists, the latter are sleepwalking masochists. This means, of course, that the forces of opposition have increased; that the opposing authorities have become more unfathomable and overwhelming than ever. Though Kafka is likewise preoccupied with family matters, his diffident scions no longer dare to oppose their stern progenitors. In a typical story, “The Judgment,”a son informs his father of his engagement, is thereupon ordered to kill himself, and ends by dutifully complying. All of his stories, Kafka said, could be summed up as an attempt to escape from his father. Yet he never completely escaped, for his apologia takes the form of a “Letter to My Father.”Life without him was quite as impossible as life with him.

As a consumptive Jew, a German writer in a Slavic country, an uprooted artist among entrenched burghers, Kafka was well qualified to represent the displaced person, to present the Central European nightmare. Few of his fragmentary writings were published during his brief career; most of them, dating from the First World War and its aftermath, prophetically foreshadow the causes and effects of the Second. Homeless, his characters wander through abandoned streets; helpless, they are shunted into prison camps. Officers, officials, detectives, judges, domineer at every level of the bureaucracy — from father to Führer. A salesman, suddenly turning into an insect, worries chiefly about his boss’s disapproval. An educated ape congratulates himself on escaping from the intolerable freedom of the jungle to the restrictions of civilization. A telephone rings, but somehow communication is never established. A prisoner is summoned, but the charge against him is never specified. The ironic parable that consummates The Trial has many meanings: one of them, surely, is that we are weak-kneed fools to let an officious doorkeeper prevent us from entering an open door.

3

IN the face of augmenting combinations of circumstance which seem to defy all rational human control, the stature of the individual has shrunk pathetically. This process of attrition is reflected throughout modern fiction — most powerfully in the novels and stories of Kafka, perhaps, but not less ubiquitously in the little magazines and the comic strips. Albert Camus has suggested that we model our composite hero upon Sisyphus, the classical prototype of ineffectuality, rolling his absurd stone up an endless hill. Whatever his name or disguise — Leopold Bloom, Miss Lonelyhearts, Caspar Milquetoast — he is recognizably the Little Man. Fatherless and father-ridden, childless and childlike, he is old enough but not wise enough for parenthood; he carries into his adult years the frustrations and hesitations of adolescence. Against a sea of troubles, on his own initiative, he is incapable of taking arms; but he can muddle through his appointed task, like the Sad Sack, whenever the Sergeant stands in loco parentis.

Turning from war to religion, he discovers that the theologians have already debated his problem. The controversy that most sharply divided the churches of the East and the West involved the filial-paternal relationship under its most universal aspect. Characteristically the Patriarchate insisted on the primacy of the Father, while Catholics upheld the doctrine of filioque, which implies an equal status for the Son. Though Protestants rejected the cult of the Madonna, and attacked the Mariolatry of the Roman Church, the central tradition of Western Christianity has been its humanized conception of Jesus Christ; the Son of man to whom a heavenly Father has given “authority to execute judgment.”Latter-day religious thinkers, however, have reemphasized the concept of fatherhood — not so much the benign providence of the Paternoster as the terrifying and inscrutable Jehovah of the Old Testament. In Fear and Trembling, a book which profoundly influenced Kafka, the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard envisages man’s relation to God in Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. But Isaac is happily saved by divine intervention; where in Oriental versions of the theme, notably in the story of Sohrab and Rustum, the son is fated to be slain by the father.

Our range of awareness extends from the first man we know, whose impact ordinarily determines our relations with our fellow men, to the ultimately unknowable, which we anthropomorphically drape with paternal attributes. At historical intervals, like the names of begetters in Biblical genealogies, our horizon is peopled with quasi-paternal figures: prophets and priests, sages and saints, captains and kings, emperors and popes. To the extent that they receive our veneration and reward our prayers, they satisfy our tribal need for an intercessor. On the political plane, in a somewhat oversimplified form, the patria potestas is known as “the leader principle,”and is equally valid for ward bosses and Roman Senators. His clients or heelers, whom he calls “the boys,” refer to their leader as “the old man.”His fatherland, if he happens to be its eldest statesman, proudly salutes him as the Father of his Country. If he has taken part in the-framing of its constitution, his fame is enshrined among the ashes of the Founding Fathers.

Much of the greatness of the late President Roosevelt was due to his superb interpretation in the sympathetic role of Paterfamilias. This was evident, not merely in his own large family and fatherly presence, but particularly in his mastery of radio technique. That reassuring voice, at every crisis for more than a dozen years, penetrated millions of homes, dominated millions of firesides, left millions with the feeling that their personal interests were not being neglected. The most widespread response to the shock of his death was: “I feel as if I had lost a father.” Winston Churchill, admirably performing a similar part, combined the inflections of his eighteenth-century ancestors with the conventional gestures of John Bull. Significantly, those Great White Fathers of wartime have now been replaced by two incarnate Little Men. And, if Messrs. Truman and Attlee are less authoritative than their precursors, they are also more democratic, since they more directly represent our uncertainties and weaknesses. In a house divided, lacking domestic supervision, the Boy Debaters emerge, the Deweys and Stassens, aping the mannerisms of the departed sire.

Where in this scheme of things can we place the Hitlers, the Mussolinis, the fascist dictators. Obviously, they are the Wicked Stepfathers of folklore and legend. Originally the black sheep, the scapegrace sons, they become the heads of households through some default, and retain the uneasy psychology of the interloper. They press their authoritarian claims without fulfilling their parental responsibilities; instead they seek broader and ever more destructive channels for their adolescent aggressiveness. Without quite daring to apply their own genetic theories, we might declare them unfit for fatherhood. At the other extreme we encounter the clinching case of Stalin, who — whatever he isn’t — is indeed a patriarch. Hence he is the one effectual ruler in the world today. Doubtless his priestly training and Tsarist backdrop have served to accentuate the paternalism of his regime. Certainly his icon has pervaded Russian I bought as the views of the iconoclastic Trotsky could never have done. Behind them both looms the Marxist tradition, parricidal in its revolutionary origins, patriarchal in its social consequences.

It is scarcely a coincidence that the socialist, movement and the psychoanalytic school should follow the same pattern of development: an initial revelation, an apostolic succession, division among the disciples, revision of the master’s teaching. Freud may look darkly backward toward Moses while Marx looks hopefully ahead to the Messiah, but each attains his particular comprehensiveness by treating all mankind as one big unhappy family. Both are increasingly influential because, in an epoch of collective irresponsibility, they stress the bonds between men as well as the barriers. May we not conclude, in the light of these comparative patristics, that every man is potentially a father-slayer and a father-seeker? Whether he proceeds in a radical or conservative direction will depend upon the repulsions and attractions that authority exerts for him. Wherever he confronts vested interests, strained prerogatives, undue repressions, he welcomes change. Wherever he meets scanted obligations, crumbling institutions, maladjusted efforts, he longs for permanence. He thereby reduces the ups and downs of history to the dimensions of a family quarrel.

4

EVERY moment may he unique in its way, just as every age is an age of transition; but there are certain factors, converging upon the present moment, which make it uniquely transitional. The impetus of liberalism, strengthened during the nineteenth century by science, seems to have spent itself in the period of critical realism between the two wars. The recent war, with its temporary dictatorships, has established a far from stable equilibrium; still another could start a chain reaction which would end in total explosion. Totalitarianism, far from being extinguished, comes closer to home than before. Meanwhile a so-called failure of nerve has been driving prodigal sons back to their respective hearths and sanctuaries. The air is heavy with conversion and recantation. In the absence of original artistic creations, reprints and revivals flourish. We reread the novels of Trollope, and relive the warmth and comfort of the Mid-Victorians. Only a literary businessman, who had to live down his mother’s radicalism and his father’s improvidence, could have conjured up such substantial fantasies.

The homelessness of this post-war generation is not confined to the spiritual realm; it is a desperately practical problem. Small wonder that treelined vistas of pre-war villages, back yards and front porches, Burchfield houses and period pieces, should harbor such elusive charm. Our nostalgia culminates in the homage we pay to Clarence Day’s only begetter. Orphaned like David Copperfield, our world is torn between competing foster-fat hers: between the grim efficiency of an autoeratic Mr. Murdstone and the genial incompetence of a democratic Mr. Micawber. The plight we share with Kafka’s waif-like characters, the avoidance of responsibility at all costs, has been well analyzed by Erich Fromm in a volume suggestively entitled Escape from Freedom. If our escapes to the past were purely imaginary, they would simply be harmless escapades. But we have lately been reminded that Greece, though newer able to get along with its king, has been unable to get along without him. And we have educators who solemnly aver that, since Saint Thomas Aquinas could answer the questions he himself propounded, he offers a solution to all of our perplexities.

The demand for an up-to-date universal doctor is variously supplied (Father Divine, “Pappy" O’Daniel, Mr. Anthony). It’s a wise child that knows, in this pandemonium of free advice, whom to listen for. The filial instinct seems so deeply ingrained that it is bound to find some expression or other. Even in tribes where mother-right prevails, anthropologists inform us, the father’s perquisites are accorded to the maternal uncle. In more complex societies, church and stale organize the means of appeal to higher authority. Roman Catholicism and Soviet Communism, perhaps because both are constructed on the bedrock of paternalistic discipline, are among the few institutions that command much devotion today. Conversely, each turns out its unfilial quota of heretics and rebels. But apostasy is usually the beginning of a private quest for confessors or commissars. Samuel Butler, having committed his symbolic patricide, made a tutelary deity of Darwin, whom he later discarded in favor of Lamarck. Stendhal, having disinherited his natural father, deified Napoleon; and, forswearing politics when his idol fell, set up a new pantheon of artists and writers.

Since we must look up toward something, our constant effort is to discover objects worthy of admiration; other men’s fathers if not our own, heroes if not divinities. The pitfalls of indiscriminate hero-worship, in the Century of the Common Man, hardly need to be pointed out. Wistfully we contemplate the elderly demigods of the schoolroom, the bearded poets and side-whiskered statesmen. What sort of confidence can our household gods, our boyish crooners and beardless pitchers, inspire? Our actors — those who perchance do not play Father — remain juveniles until late in life. Our copywriters bask in their golden legends of eternal youth. Only our whiskey advertisers seem willing to recognize the capabilities of middle age. Most precocious of all, however, our atomic scientists, appalled by the results of their latest mischief, show sudden promise of accepting the leadership their guilty knowledge imposes upon them. Their humanistic colleagues, gathering the experience of countless generations of fathers, must bring it to bear upon our contemporary needs.

Every dilemma has two ways out. Thus the continuous path that leads through adolescence to maturity is education. We like to recall, as we revise our curricula, that the teacher is the traditional surrogate for the parent. Yet there is another consideration which, since it invokes a law of nature, is still more fundamental, Children do grow up; sons in their turn become fathers; and cultural changes revolve with the biological cycle. Literature offers few more striking illustrations than the career of James Joyce. A rebellious young artist, he portrayed himself as Icarus, the son who presumptuously tried his father’s wings. When his trial flight succeeded, the rebel identified himself with the creator, Dedalus, who devised among other things a notorious labyrinth. Ulysses expounds the heresy that every son should become his own father. Assuming gigant ic stature in Finnegans Wake, Joyce could still express childish bewilderment: “Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair!" But the dominant image is the father comforting his child at night (and, incidentally, the exile remembering Ireland): “Sonly all in your imagination, dim. Poor little brittle magic nation, dim of mind!”

The search is predestined, then, to guide us to ourselves; and for this conclusion we are not altogether prepared. Schools have prolonged our infancy, sports have promoted our infantilism, publicists have kept us in a state of arrested development. Our own novelists, from Hemingway to Steinbeck, have dealt with problem children rather than adults, with while mice rather than men. While there are youth and experiment, there ought to be hope — hope for what Van Wyck Brooks, before he became an ancestor-worshiper, called “America’s Coming-of-Age.”But the rites of passage cannot be delayed much longer; no indulgent father stands ready to bear the responsibilities we shirk; and we ourselves are old enough to know better. The king is dead, long live the king! The armored figure that stalks across the battlement, after all, is only a ghost. The young prince, if he would come into his kingdom, must learn to make his own decisions, to think and act for himself. And, unless he acts quickly, his vacant throne may be occupied by some usurper.