Neither of us, my father or I, craved intimacy with the other. I wouldn’t have known how to respond to an invitation to intimacy from him. I would have been embarrassed if he had told me about any of his weaknesses or deep regrets. So far as I could surmise, he didn’t have any of either. Since I was a small boy I recall his invocation, often repeated, “Be a man.” A man, distinctly, did not reveal his fears, even to his father; what a man did with his fears was conquer them.
The generation of my father—men born in the first decade of the 20th century who came into their maturity during the Depression—was distinctly pre-psychological. In practice, this meant that such notions as insecurity, depression, or inadequacy of any sort did not signify as anything more than momentary lapses to be overcome by hitching up one’s trousers and getting back to work. My father and I did not hug, we did not kiss, we did not say “I love you” to each other. This may seem strangely distant, even cold to a generation of huggers, sharers, and deep-dish carers. No deprivation was entailed here, please believe me. We didn’t have to do any of these things, my father and I. The fact was, I loved my father, and I knew he loved me.
By the time I had children of my own, psychology had conquered with strong repercussions for child rearing. Benjamin Spock’s book Baby and Child Care (1946), said in its day to be, after the Bible, the world’s second-best-selling book, had swept the boards. Freudian theory was still in its ascendance. Under the new psychological dispensation, children were now viewed as highly fragile creatures, who if not carefully nurtured could skitter off the rails into a life of unhappiness and failure. As a young father, I was not a reader of Spock, nor was I ever a Freudian, yet so pervasive were the doctrines of Spock and Freud that their influence was unavoidable.
I was not a very good father; measured by current standards, I may have been a disastrous one. Having divorced from their mother when my sons were ten and eight years old, and having been given custody of them, I brought to my child rearing a modest but genuine load of guilt. I do not have any axiomatic truths about raising children except this one: Children were meant to be brought up by two parents. A single parent, man or woman, no matter how extraordinary, will always be insufficient.
Children, according to Dr. Spock and Dr. Freud, needed to be made to feel secure and loved. I couldn’t do much about the first. But I proclaimed my love a lot to my sons, so often that they must have doubted that I really meant it. “You know I love you, goddamnit,” I seem to recall saying too many times, especially after having blown my cool by yelling at them for some misdemeanor or other. Thank goodness I had boys; girls, I have discovered, cannot be yelled at, at least not with the same easy conscience.
Fortunately, my sons were fairly tough and independent characters. Neither of them as kids was interested in sports, so I didn’t have to attend their Little League games. I took only a modest interest in their schooling. (My parents took none whatsoever in mine, which, given my wretched performance in school, was a break.) Nor did I trek out to Disneyland with them. My sons spent their Sundays with my parents, and my father, who turned out to be a fairly attentive grandfather, took them to the Museum of Science and Industry, the Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, and other museums around Chicago. Raising children as a single parent, much of life during those years is now in my memory a blur—a blur of vast loads of laundry, lots of shopping, and less than first-class cookery (mine). “Dad, this steak tastes like fish,” I remember one of my sons exclaiming, a reminder that I needed to do a better job of cleaning the broiler.
My oldest son, unlike his father, was good at school. When he was in high school he took to playing rock at a high volume in his room. I asked him how he could study with such loud music blaring away. “I seem to be getting all A’s, Dad,” he said. “Are you sure you want me to turn the music down?” He went on to Stanford, my other son to the University of Massachusetts. I drove neither of them on what is now the middle-class parents’ compulsory tour of campuses while their children are in their junior year of high school. Nor did I tell them to which schools to apply. What I said is that I would pay all their bills, that I didn’t need to look at their course selection or care about their major or grades, but only asked that they not make me pay for courses in science fiction or in which they watched movies. I visited each of them once while he was in college. I pasted no college decals on the back window of my car.
Some unknown genius for paradox said, “Married, single—neither is a solution.” A similar formulation might be devised for the best time to have children: in one’s twenties, thirties, forties, beyond—none seems ideal. In my generation, one married young—in my case, at 23—and had children soon thereafter. The idea behind this was to become an adult early, and thereby assume the responsibilities of adulthood: wife, children, house, dogs, “the full catastrophe,” as Zorba the Greek put it. Now nearly everyone marries later, and women often delay having children, whether married or not, until their late thirties, sometimes early forties.
In one’s twenties, one has the energy, but usually neither the perspective nor the funds, to bring up children with calm and understanding. Later in life, when one is more likely to have the perspective and the funds, the energy has departed. In my own case, along with having children to take care of, I had my own ambition with which to contend. I worked at forty-hour-a-week jobs, wrote on weekends and early in the mornings before work, read in the evenings, picked up socks and underwear scattered around the apartment, took out garbage, and in between times tried to establish some mild simulacrum of order in the household.
Because of this hectic life, my sons got less attention but more freedom than those of their contemporaries who had both parents at home; and vastly more freedom than kids brought up during these past two decades when the now-still-regnant, child-centered culture has taken over in American life in a big way.
I have a suspicion that this cultural change began with the entrée into the language of the word parenting. I don’t know the exact year the word parenting came into vogue, but my guess is that it arrived around the same time as the new full-court press, boots-on-the-ground-with-heavy-air-support notion of being a parent. To be a parent is a role; parenting implies a job. It is one thing to be a parent, quite another to parent. “Parenting (or child rearing) is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood. Parenting refers to the aspects of raising a child aside from the biological relationship,” according to the opening sentence of the Wikipedia entry on the subject. Read further down and you will find dreary paragraphs on “parenting styles,” “parenting tools,” “parenting across the lifespan,” and more, alas, altogether too much more.
Under the regime of parenting, raising children became a top priority, an occupation before which all else must yield. The status of children inflated greatly. Much forethought went into giving children those piss-elegant names still turning up everywhere: all those Brandys and Brandons and Bradys; Hunters, Taylors, and Tylers; Coopers, Porters, and Madisons; Britannys, Tiffanys, and Kimberlys; and the rest. Deep thought, long-term plans, and much energy goes into seeing to it that they get into the right colleges. (“Tufts somehow feels right for Ashley, Oberlin for Belmont.”) What happens when they don’t get into the right college, when they in effect fail to repay all the devout attention and care lavished upon them, is another, sadder story.
I began by talking about “fashions” in fatherhood, but I wonder if fashions is the right word. I wonder if cultural imperatives doesn’t cover the case more precisely. Since raising my sons in the hodgepodge way I did, I have become a grandfather, with two grandchildren living in northern California and one, a granddaughter now in her twenties, living in Chicago. My second (and final) wife and I have had a fairly extensive hand in helping to bring up our Chicago granddaughter, and I have to admit that, even though there is much about it with which I disagree, we have d
one so largely under the arrangements of the new parenting regime.
When this charming child entered the game, I had long since been working at home, with a loose enough schedule to allow me to bring up my granddaughter in a manner that violated just about everything I have mocked both in person and now in print about the way children are currently brought up. I drove her to school and lessons and usually picked her up afterward. I helped arrange private schools for her. I spent at least thrice the time with her that I did with my two sons combined. I heartily approved all her achievements. Yes—I report this with head bowed—when she was six years old, I took her to Disneyland. Worse news, I rather enjoyed it.
Not the “debbil,” as the comedian Flip Wilson used to say, but the culture made me become nothing less than a hovering, endlessly bothering, in-her-face grandfather. (Pause for old Freudian joke: Why do grandparents and grandchildren get on so well? Answer: Because they have a common enemy.) The culture of his day condoned my father in his certainty that his business came before all else, allowing him to become an honorable if inattentive parent. The culture of my day allowed me to be a mildly muddled if ultimately responsible parent and still not entirely loathe myself. The culture of the current day dictated my bringing up my granddaughter, as I did with my wife’s extensive help, as a nearly full-time job.
The culture of the current day calls for fathers to put in quite as much time with their children as mothers once did. In part this is owing to the fact that more and more women with children either need or want to work, and in part because, somehow, it only seems fair. Today if a father does not attend the games of his children, he is delinquent. If a father fails to take a strong hand in his children’s education, he is deficient. If a father does not do all in his power to build up his children’s self-esteem—“Good job, Ian”—he is damnable. If a father does not regularly hug and kiss his children and end all phone calls with “love ya,” he is a monster. These are the dictates of the culture on—shall we call it?—“fathering” in our day, and it is not easy to go up against them; as an active grandparent, I, at least, did not find it easy.
Cultural shifts do not arrive without reason. Kids today, it is with some justice argued, cannot, owing to crime in all big cities, be left alone. They need to be more carefully protected than when I, or even my sons, were children. Getting into decent colleges and secondary and primary schools and, yes, even preschools is not the automatic business it once was. The competition for what is felt to be the best in this realm is furious; thought (and often serious sums of money) must go into it. Children are deemed more vulnerable than was once believed. How else to explain all those learning disabilities, attention deficits, and other confidence-shattering psychological conditions that seem to turn up with such regularity and in such abundance? The world generally has become a more frightening place, and any father with the least conscience will interpose himself between it and his children for as long as possible. One can no longer be merely a parent; one must be—up and at ’em— relentlessly parenting.
As a university teacher I have encountered students brought up under this new, full-time attention regimen. On occasion, I have been amused by the unearned confidence of some of these kids. Part of me—the part Flip Wilson’s debbil controls—used to yearn to let the air out of their self-esteem. How many wretchedly executed student papers have I read, at the bottom of which I wished to write, “F. Too much love in the home.”
Will all the attention now showered on the current generation of children make them smarter, more secure, finer, and nobler human beings? That remains, as the journalists used to say about the outcomes of Latin American revolutions, to be seen. Have the obligations of fathering made men’s lives richer, or have they instead loaded men down with a feeling of hopeless inadequacy, for no man can hope to be the ideal father required in our day? How many men, one wonders, after a weekend of heavily programmed, rigidly regimented fun fathering with the kids, can’t wait to return to the simpler but genuine pleasures of work? Only when the cultural imperative of parenting changes yet again are we likely to know.
“He that hath wife and children,” wrote Francis Bacon, “hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.” Yet many centuries earlier, when Croesus, the richest man of his day, asked the wise Solon who was the most contented man in the world, thinking Solon would answer him—”You Croesus, of course.”—Solon surprised him by naming an otherwise obscure Athenian named Tellus. The reason this was so, Solon explained, is that “he lived at a time when his city was particularly well, he had handsome, upstanding sons, and he ended up a grandfather, with all his grandchildren making it to adulthood.”
Fathering children puts a man under heavy obligation and leaves him vulnerable to endless worry, not only about the fate of his children but of his children’s children. This being so, the most sensible thing, one might think, is not to have children. But one would think wrong. Not to have children cuts a man off from any true sense of futurity and means that he has engaged life less than fully. Fatherhood, for all its modern-day complications, is ultimately manhood.
Death Takes No Holiday
(2014)
“I am, upon the whole, a happy man, have found the world an entertaining place and am thankful to Providence for the part allotted to me in it.”
—Sydney Smith
On a bookshelf near the desk on which sits my computer are a number of Penguin Classics, black bindings with yellow trim: Montaigne, Pascal, Stendhal, Cervantes, lots of Balzac, Turgenev, a two-volume edition of War and Peace. Am I likely to be around long enough to read War and Peace again? I have to wonder. My mother lived to 82, and my father to 91, dying of congestive heart failure, a fairly easeful death I think of as congestive heart success. So I hold decent cards, genetically speaking, but the Fates, as everyone knows, often deal off the bottom of the deck. People nowadays hope to make it past 80, at which point, honest people will acknowledge, they are playing on house money. If I were to peg out next month at 77, no one would be much surprised or remark that it was untimely.
In their development, human beings first grasp the concept of time, and not long after the certainty that it is running out. We are granted the mixed blessing of being the only species with foreknowledge of its mortality, an advantage in so many ways and yet one that complicates everything and, if allowed to get out of hand, can spoil nearly all one’s days.
Homer held it was best not to be born at all or to die early. Most of us beg to differ, and long for life to be prolonged forever and perhaps just a bit beyond. (What else, after all, is all that running and healthy eating about?) Others, reconciled to death, wish to get the most of the time allotted to them, and feel, as the old blues song has it, “you’re so beautiful, you’ve got to die some day / All’s I want’s a little lovin’ before you pass away.”
In reprinted versions of his best-known poem, “September 1, 1939,” W. H. Auden omitted the stanza containing the most famous line he ever wrote: “We must love one another or die.” We can love one another all we like, Auden concluded on further reflection, we’re going to die anyway. The Persian King Xerxes, Herodotus reports, witnessing his more than 2,000 troops massed for the battle to conquer Greece, wept at the thought that “all these multitudes here and yet in 100 years’ time not one of them will be alive.” Then, as now, the mortality rate remains at 100 percent, with no likelihood of dropping soon.
Best not to ignore the most famous passage of Pascal in his Pensées:
Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.
Everyone will have had a different introduction to death. For some it comes by way of the death of a pet, or, more tragi
cally, of a parent, or of a young friend. Once death is on the board, the game is never quite the same. Some people from a fairly early age are able to think of little else; others, gifted with a short attention span, are able to hold the crushing fact of death at bay for long stretches. I am in the second group.
“Death is an old joke,” wrote Turgenev, “that comes to each of us afresh.” Death is nothing if not democratic. We try to remove the sting of it through euphemism, so that people do not die but “pass away,” or “expire,” or “go to a better place.” All religions have had to accommodate the fact of death, some making more specific promises about its aftermath than others. Physicians are sworn to fight it off for as long as possible, though the phrase “pull the plug” by now qualifies as one of H. W. Fowler’s “Vogue Words.” The great writers have understood that it provides the most serious theme in all of literature. No philosophy is complete without an explanation of the meaning of death, not excluding that it is a brute fact of nature and might have no further meaning than that.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE) provided a four-step program that, in one swoosh, eliminates any anxiety about death itself and worry about the prospect of an afterlife:
1. Do not believe in God, or the gods. There is no good evidence for their existence, and worrying about them and their judgments is therefore a waste of energy.
2. Do not give any thought to what happens after death. Oblivion follows death, in which you will return to the same state in which you existed before you were born.
The Ideal of Culture Page 4
