Butler's unhappy youth.

A Russian friend of mine, who escaped the Soviet Union for America and who now lives in England, once told me that in his early years in the West he would always introduce himself at parties by saying, "Hello, I'm Alex, I hate my parents, don't you?"

Slightly taken aback, his interlocutors would consider for a split second and then say, "Well, as a matter of fact"--or "Now you come to mention it"--"I do." No one ever admitted to any other feelings about his parents than hatred or contempt: to have done so would have been to lose caste, at least in the intellectual circles in which he then moved. An unhappy childhood and tortured relations with one's progenitors were essential preconditions of a reputation for profundity. If a wise son maketh a glad father, a happy childhood maketh a shallow intellectual.

When, exactly, did filial piety cease to be (as it had been immemorially) a virtue, and become instead, if not a vice exactly, at least a character defect or a handicap in human life's constant race for self-importance? Like most social changes, it had no definite or definable beginning, but certainly one of the sacred texts of filial impiety was (and still is) Samuel Butler's autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh.

The spirit of this book, both marvellously liberating and dangerously destructive, has grown only stronger with the passage of the century since it was first published, and I have little doubt that its defiant spirit affected my growing-up. Until quite late in life, I felt I owed it to myself as an independent, autonomous person to cheek my teachers, albeit subtly, and raise sophistical objections to all their teachings. I thought myself very clever for doing so: but I have come to understand, alas too late to do anything about it, that had I had more of filial piety, in the widest sense, I should have been if not necessarily a better man, at least a better educated one. And I cannot now help recalling Mr. Venus's immortal expostulation, "Don't sauce ME in the wicious pride of your youth!"

Butler's book is a Bildungsroman, in which both the protagonist, Ernest Pontifex, and the narrator, Mr. Overton, are Butler. The literary device is a useful one, for it allows Butler to portray himself both as a young and as a mature man, the seed and the fruit. It also allows him to preach many lay sermons at the reader, for Butler's purpose was more didactic than artistic. He never entirely escaped his clerical origins: he became, in effect, a clergyman of rationalism.

The Way of All Flesh is perhaps the most devastating and relentless literary assault by a son upon a father ever written. The father, Thomas Butler in life and Theobald Pontifex in the book, stands accused (and of course convicted) of many odious sins. A vicar, he is a complete sententious humbug, utterly selfish, snobbish, mean, and avaricious, unfeeling about anyone except himself, a philistine who delights in cruelty to his own children in the name of supposedly necessary character-formation. He is an unctuous, sadistic, bullying hypocrite, all of whose learning is mere pedantry, and all of whose opinions are handed down to him by his ancestors and predecessors, which he was too lazy and self-interested ever to examine for their truth or otherwise. The slightest opposition or disagreement over anything is insupportable to him, and interpreted by him much as a general interprets a failure of soldiers to obey his orders.

Theobald's wife, Christina--modeled on Butler's mother--is a much weaker character, not without natural kindness, who nevertheless becomes cruel and hypocritical because of her subordination to her husband. Ernest's two siblings, his brother and sister, are odious sycophants of Theobald, pure toadies, though they hate him just as much as Ernest does. Ernest so comes to dislike his sister that he finds it physically nauseating even to give her a peck on the cheek when he meets her again after a long interval. Theobald's vile character poisons and embitters the atmosphere of the whole household and all who have ever lived in it.

The book is an account of Ernest's eventual escape from the malign influence of his father. Initially, he follows in his father's footsteps, first to Cambridge, then to ordination. He loses his faith, however, at his first encounter with rationalism; there is a happy ending when, after a series of disasters, including marriage to an alcoholic, he inherits a fortune left to him by an aunt, who is the only tolerant, decent member of his extended family.

The book, which Butler wrote between 1873 and 1885, was so obviously a roman a clef that he did not publish it in his lifetime. His father died in 1886, but his sister was still alive when he himself died in 1902. His refusal to publish until after his death was not to spare his relatives' feelings, however; his close friend and biographer, Henry Festing Jones, makes it quite clear in his voluminous memoir that Butler wanted the book published as soon as possible after his death (it was published in 1903, in fact), even if his sister were still alive. He wanted to spare not her feelings, therefore, but himself the embarrassment of having to face her feelings: thus he had not freed himself from his father's tuition as a selfish hypocrite quite as completely as he thought he had.

So powerful is the book that it is probable, when people speak of Victorian hypocrisy and the tyranny of the Victorian paterfamilias, from which liberation was so imperatively necessary, that they have Theobald Pontifex in mind--whether they know it or not. For within a few decades, he became the typical, the paradigm Victorian: humorless, moralizing, oppressive, and lacking all self-knowledge. It is hardly surprising that George Bernard Shaw regarded The Way of All Flesh not just as a good book, but as one of the supreme achievements of all humanity. This alone should be more than sufficient to put us on our guard.

In truth, it is very amusing, so amusing that one is apt to overlook its defects. Here, for example, is the scene in which the narrator, Mr. Overton, meets Ernest's headmaster at Roxborough School, Dr. Skinner, who is an an ordained clergyman. Mr. Overton plays a game of chess with him (Roxborough is Shrewsbury School, to which Butler was sent, and Dr. Skinner is Dr. Kennedy, who was later Bishop of Worcester), and when it is nearly over, his wife asks "in a silvery voice":

   "What will you take for supper, Dr. Skinner?"

   He made no answer for some time, but at
   last in a tone of almost superhuman solemnity,
   he said, first, "Nothing," and then, "Nothing
   whatever."

   By and by, however, I had a sense come
   over me as though I were nearer the consummation
   of all things than I had ever yet been.
   The room seemed to grow dark as an expression
   came over Dr. Skinner's face which
   showed that he was about to speak. The expression
   gathered force, the room grew darker
   and darker.

   "Stay," he at length added--and I felt that
   here at any rate was an end to a suspense
   which was rapidly becoming unbearable-"Stay--I
   may presently take a glass of cold
   water--and a small piece of bread and butter."

   As he said the word "butter" his voice sank
   to a hardly audible whisper; then there was a
   sigh as though of relief when the sentence was
   concluded, and the universe this time was safe.
   Another ten minutes of solemn silence finished
   the game. The Doctor rose briskly from his seat
   and placed himself at the supper table.

   "Mrs. Skinner," he exclaimed jauntily, "what
   are those mysterious-looking objects surrounded
   by potatoes?"

   "Those are oysters, Dr. Skinner."

   "Give me some, and give Overton some."

   And so on until he had eaten a good plate
   of oysters, a scallop shell of minced veal nicely
   browned, some apple tart, and a hunk of
   bread and cheese. This was the small piece of
   bread and butter.

Dr. Skinner is like all the clergymen in the book, a pedantic hypocrite who is obliged by his false religious doctrine to speak portentously and to deny his own nature and appetites (another clergyman later swindles Ernest out of his first, small inheritance). Of this gallery of ecclesiastical poltroons, of course, Theobald Pontifex is by far the worst, but mainly because he is the protagonist's father and therefore the one most closely examined and satirized (in The Way of All Flesh, description is satirization). Theobald's utter self-centeredness and tetchy self-absorption appear in the amusing passage in which his attitude to his own children is delineated:

   Theobald had never liked children. He had always
   got away from them as soon as he could,
   and so had they from him; oh, why, he was
   inclined to ask himself, could not children be
   born into the world grown up? If Christina
   could have given birth to a few fullgrown
   clergymen in priest's orders--of moderate
   views, but inclining rather to Evangelicism,
   with comfortable livings and in all respects
   facsimiles of Theobald and Christina themselves--why
   there might have been more
   sense in it.

Was Butler's experience of the ecclesiastical milieu in which he grew up really as bad, as thoroughly wretched, as he portrays? There are reasons to doubt it. Was he exaggerating, in order to make further his subversion of Victorian society? There are reasons to think so.

First, Butler's letters to his mother contain nothing of the unadulterated misery that he describes in the book. Second, he once admitted that the conflict between him and his Father was one of irreconcilable temperament, and that the fault was as much on his side as on his father's. Third, when Theobald dies in the book, he is mourned by everyone except his family, as a generous, decent, and selfless man of the cloth, in tact as a moral exemplar.

   "He never spoke an ill word against anyone,"
   said the village doctor after his death. "He was
   not only liked, he was beloved by all who had
   anything to do with him."

While the phenomenon of a man behaving quite differently at home and in the world outside is far from unknown--captured in the expression "street angel, home devil," popular in the British slum in which I work--it is difficult to credit that Theobald could have been quite such a monster at home (for example, beating his children unmercifully if they mispronounced a word), without any murmur of it reaching the outside world and affecting his reputation. But for Butler, the fact that everyone loved his father was a condemnation of everyone, not of himself, and no reason to reexamine his attitudes. Fourth, Butler allows that Dr. Skinner, the headmaster of his school, was loved and admired, even revered, by the majority of his pupils, suggesting that Butler's intense dislike of him was once again the result of a clash of temperaments rather than of Dr. Skinner's horribly defective character. In other words, Butler is finding fault because he wants to, and the wish precedes the offense that allegedly gives rise to it.

According to Henry Festing Jones, Butler was in any case well aware that not all fathers were as Theobald Pontifex was, or allegedly was. In The Way of All Flesh, Butler was writing a satirical tract and not reportage. The very fictional name that he gives his father is satirical. He is vicar of Battersby, a name that conjures up violence; his wife, the daughter of another clergyman, came from the village of Crampsford, a name that suggests narrowmindedness and bigotry. Butler has many axes to grind.

Although The Way of All Flesh is a fictionalized (allegedly but slightly fictionalized) account of one man's relationship with his father, we are clearly intended to take it as being in some way typical or at least emblematic of a whole society and its way of life. It is, in fact, a parable, a literary form with which Butler's religious upbringing must have made him more than familiar, intended to get us to change our ways. This is proved by the frequent interjection of explicit lessons, or little sermons, in the book that Butler--both as Ernest Pontifex and as Mr. Overton, the narrator--preaches at us.

The book is, or at least could be, a manifesto for virtually all the social pathology that I have seen in my medical practice in a British slum at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Every intellectual presupposition that has gone to the creation of misery in the midst of plenty is not only contained, but trumpeted, in The Way of All Flesh.

"For most men" says Butler-Overton, "and most circumstances, pleasure--tangible material prosperity--is the safest test of virtue" I recall the puzzled parents of a delinquent adolescent, who consult me about the conduct of their offspring. They believe that they have done all that they could possibly have done for their child. I asked them what they mean by "all," to which they reply that they have given their child a television in his room--his very own television, all to himself!--and have always bought him the latest and most expensive designer clothes. Yes, they have been good parents, they have provided tangible material prosperity for their child, so how is it that he has turned out so bad, so ungrateful, destructive and dishonest, taking drugs and drinking to excess, greedy and demanding, aggressive when thwarted? For did not Butler-Overton write, "Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide [to conduct] than either 'right' or 'duty'. For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, 'right' and 'duty' are harder to distinguish still ...." The only sense that can be given to the word "duty" in fact is as follows:

   If a new edition of the work is ever required I
   should like to introduce a few words insisting
   on the duty of seeking all reasonable pleasure,
   and avoiding all pain that can be honourably
   avoided.

The destruction of the family as known to Butler would have pleased him no end. Butler-Overton asks near the beginning of the book, "Could any death be so horrible as birth? Or any decrepitude so awful as childhood in a happy united God-fearing family?" These are the words of a man so utterly certain of the stability of his society that he cannot imagine anything worse than that society.

Butler-Overton's questions are not the result of a sudden rush of blood to the head: they arise from his innermost conviction. Butler-Ernest believes the same thing:

   It seems to me [he preaches] that the family is a
   survival of the principle which is more logically
   embodied in the compound animal--and the
   compound animal is a form of life which has
   been found incompatible with high development.
   I would do with the family among
   mankind what nature has done with the compound
   animal, and confine it to the lower and
   less progressive races. Certainly there is no inherent
   love of the family system on the part of
   nature itself. Poll the forms of life and you will
   find it in a ridiculously small minority. The
   fishes know it not, and they get along quite
   nicely.

Forty million species can't be wrong, is Butler's argument here. It would take some effort to dissect all its shallowness in any detail, and is probably best grasped whole: close analysis would be to break a butterfly on the wheel.

As for fatherhood--which has been abolished in the area in which I live, with the most horrible consequences, both for the persons involved and for society as a whole--Butler-Ernest is against it, not only in the particular instance of Theobald Pontifex in particular, but in general:

   A man first quarrels with his father the
   reflects] about three quarters of a year before
   he is born. It is then that he insists on setting
   up a separate establishment. When this has
   been once agreed to, the more complete the
   separation forever after the better for both.

Working as I do in an area in which Butler's advice has been followed almost to the letter, and fathers abandon their children at or before birth, I have observed that things do not always turn out well for the children, to put it very mildly. In this, Buffer was a clever fool, rather like his great admirer, Shaw.

This was not his only foolishness. He believed in the superiority of youth, in child-centered learning and the doctrine of the Real Me, all of which have done so much to trivialize culture and turn adolescence into the permanent state of man, with dire social effects. Here, for example, is Butler-Overton on youth:

   I believe it lately has been maintained that it is
   the young and fair who are truly old and truly
   experienced inasmuch as it is they alone who
   have a living memory to guide them....
   When we say that we are getting old, we
   should say rather that we are getting new or
   young, and are suffering from inexperience.

These sub-Wildean paradoxes may arrest our attention for a fraction of a second, but they are surely not true. They can appeal only to those who think that shocking the conventionally minded is the main purpose of intellection, and that an ounce of bon mot is worth a ton of truth: in short, those who are themselves of an adolescent cast of mind.

Child-centered learning and the doctrine of the Real Me are, of course, intimately connected: for the child is born with inherent wisdom, the Real Him, and is corrupted only by the myrmidons of formal education and social convention. The child is the best judge of what it should learn. According to Butler-Overton:

   It never occurred to him [Buffer-Ernest] that
   the presumption was in favour of the rightness
   of what was most pleasant [to learn], and
   that the onus of proving that it was not right
   lay with those who disputed its being so.

Nevertheless, Butler-Ernest eventually got the message:

   Never learn anything [he said] until you find
   you have been made uncomfortable for a
   good long while by not knowing it ...

The self, pure and uncontaminated by any training or education, is the fount of true wisdom--as Buffer-Ernest continues:

   Obey ME, your true self, and things will go
   tolerably well with you, but only listen to that
   outward and visible husk of yours which is
   called your father, and I will rend you to
   pieces ... for I, Ernest, am the God who
   made you.

And, as Aunt Alethea (Butler-Ernest's only kindly, un-Victorian relative) says on her deathbed, clearly with the approval of Buffer-Overton: "nothing is well done nor worth doing unless, take it all round, it has come pretty easily."

The gate is no longer strait and the path narrow: virtue is easy, it is vice that has become difficult. The pursuit of happiness, which is to say pleasure, is not merely next to godliness; it IS godliness, according to Buffer-Overton. When Ernest decides to break all contact with his parents, Butler-Overton says:

   He was trying to give up father and mother
   for Christ's sake. He would have said he was
   giving them up because he thought they hindered
   him in his pursuit of his truest and most
   lasting happiness. Granted, but what is this if
   it is not Christ? What is Christ if it is not this?
   He who takes the highest and most sell:
   respecting view of his own welfare which it is
   in his power to conceive ... is a Christian
   whether he knows it and calls himself one, or
   whether he does not.

Could the cult of the self ever have been carried to greater lengths, at least intellectually? Here is the manifesto of the Me generation, decades before its actual appearance. Butler was the first satirist whose satires were prophecy.

Butler-Ernest is an early convert to the benefits of psychobabble. He says:

   If people would only dare to speak to one
   another unreservedly, there would be a great
   deal less sorrow in the world by the time a
   hundred years from now was over.

Suffice it to say that unreserved speech has never done much to resolve the petty/quarrels in which I have sometimes been engaged, rather the contrary; and its contribution to the diminution of human sorrows in general is likewise to be doubted.

Butler's highly prescriptive opinions were a response to his personal experience, and based on a sample of one. There is no evidence in the book that he considered matters from a wider perspective, sociological, historical, economic, or cultural, in order to give his personal animosities that sense of proportion which comes with maturity (he was fifty, when he finished the book). Butler-Ernest explains:

   "One great reason why clergymen's households
   are generally unhappy is because the
   clergyman is so much at home or close about
   the house. The doctor is out visiting patients
   half his time; the lawyer and the merchant
   have offices away from home, but the clergyman
   has no official place of business which
   shall ensure his being away from home for
   many hours together at stated times."

Butler-Ernest can thus conceive of a world in which it is possible to be only a clergyman, a doctor, a lawyer or a merchant: 5 percent of the British population of his time, at the very most. His satire (like that of so many satirists since him in the western world) is very, much that of an uppermiddle-class man, who does not deign to notice the 95 percent of the population seething beneath him.

He appeals to the clever adolescent, the naught, boy, in all of us, especially if we have--or believe we have, which is not quite the same thing, as history has amply attested--a sate and secure place in society. Butler's literary judgments, expressed in The Way of All Flesh, bear this out. Butler-Ernest had

   devoured Stanley's life of Arnold, Dickens's
   novels, and whatever other literary garbage of
   the day was most likely to do him harm.

As for Shakespeare, he goes to a burlesque of Macbeth, in which "Macbeth had said he could not kill Duncan when he saw his boots upon the landing" and "Lady Macbeth put a stop to her husband's hesitation by whipping him up under her arm and carrying him off the stage kicking and screaming" "What rot" [Ernest] exclaimed, "Shakespeare is after this" Butler-Overton heartily approves of Butler-Ernest's opinion.

Finally, there is Milton, who was paid only 5 [pounds sterling] for Paradise Lost: "'And a great deal too much money,' rejoined [Overton]. 'I would have given him twice as much myself not to have written it at all.'"

These are iconoclastic adolescent jibes, not considered judgments; and this applies to practically all the opinions Butler expresses in The Win, of All Flesh. He hates his father so memorably, however, so irresistibly, bitterly, and funnily, that the average unwary reader thinks that so memorable a portrait must be allied to wise and profound thought. Butler's silly and shallow opinions go by default because of the dazzling literary artifact in which they appear. Whether the climate was ripe for Butler, or Butler created the climate, is a question that can never be answered definitively. But the Win, of All Flesh is nevertheless an illustration of a law of propaganda--that the better it is, the worse it is.

Butler was an exemplar before his time of the tendency of modern intellectuals to take their personal experience, magnify it out of all proportion, generalize it, and use it to draw vast and often destructive conclusions about the whole of human existence. Is a hypocritical and domineering father really a good enough reason to destroy not just an individual family, but family structure as such, the family as a social phenomenon? The publication of The Way of All Flesh was an important moment in the rise of mass solipsism, and of the beatification of the victim as the only bearer of wisdom. In Samuel Butler, not measured truth, but a certain glittering, brittle cleverness, and earnestness without seriousness, has become the cynosure of literary endeavor.