Fathers and Sons–II

BY KUMARA GURU

(i)

The trustfulness of the child in the father breaks on the rock of unbelief in the boy’s occupation and activities. Meredith’s wise observation in the ‘Ordeal’, “Farewell, my young ambition, and with it farewell all true confidence between father and son” should strike home every father. The cynical observation of Sir Austin, “No Feverel has ever written poetry” and the burning by the father himself, in cold blood, of the first manuscript of the adolescent, which subsequently led Richard to take the father to his room and consign all the manuscripts to the flames, should make every father pause and think. It is wise on the part of fathers not to hinder the work of the adolescent, as long as their activities are not anti-social or harmful to themselves, and the judiciousness required of every parent in dealing with the activity of his child is largely but indirectly stressed by the author.

The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler is another novel, bearing on the relation of parents to children for two or three generations. Here is brilliant wit and irony. The tyranny of Theobald, the father, over his son Ernest who is forced to take orders when his inner spirit is not for such a course, and the son’s subsequent reactions of suppressed emotions during childhood, are depicted in minute detail. In the novel are drawn the author’s bitter recollections of his own early childhood, and it is written very acrimoniously against the father. As I read it, the father in me rebels against such accusation. If either parent threw away the child with the water in the washbasin, without caring for it, how should ever society exist, or man talk of literature, art, music and such high-flown stuff? The father detects the lie of the son who hands over his presentation watch to a servant girl of the family, who is dismissed because of her misbehaviour with the butler. Both the parents suspect the son of misconduct, though it is only, late in the novel that the servant girl’s misconduct is attributed to the butler. Ernest, on the completion of his education, takes holy orders, insults a young woman whom he takes for a prostitute, and is sentenced to imprisonment for a term. His later disastrous union, on release from prison, with that servant girl leads him to a miserable life, and he is absolved of the marriage tie when he finds she was already married to the butler after she left the house. An inheritance from an aunt enables Ernest to devote the rest of his life to literature.

One particular incident, however, I should relate in detail. When the narrator of the story is a guest in the house, the boy is given a good thrashing because of the fact that poor Ernest, in singing a hymn, “Come, come, come to the Sunset Tree, for the day is past and gone, “was not able to pronounce the word ‘come’ correctly, and said it always as “Turn, turn, turn.........” The father tells Ernest that even his younger brother John says it correctly, and attributes the inability of Ernest to self-willedness and naughtiness. The poor visitor could also hear the screams of the boy from the next room, when he was given the thrashing. The father apologises to the visitor that he has sent Ernest to bed, and immediately addresses his wife to have the servants in for prayers. I should have hardly expected that this was a common feature of English life in the treatment of children in parsons’ families about the year when there was a certain amount of literacy and disciplined living.

Let us look, for instance, at what the Indian counterpart of such life offers us. The following saying from Tirukkural is almost a proverb in Tamil households:

“The flute is sweet and the harp dulcet,

So they say who have not heard

The babbling speech of their little ones.”

The Hindu is conscious that as time passes, the boy will speak correctly, and so does not worry about the defect.

An observation from Galton’s Hereditary Genius on ‘Divines’ on the apparent anomaly why the children of pious parents occasionally turn out very badly, might interest readers:

“The parents (i.e., the Divines) are naturally gifted with high moral character combined with instability of disposition, but these peculiarities are in no way correlated. It must therefore often happen that the child will inherit the one and not the other. If his heritage consist of the moral gifts without great instability, he will not feel the need of extreme piety; if he inherits great instability without morality, he will be very likely to disgrace his name.”

If heredity were to count as anything in the metal make-up of an individual, it is said George Meredith owes much to his Welsh blood which came to him from his father, his mother being Irish. It is well-known that Meredith never cared much for his father August Urmston Meredith, and to his old age there was no softening of his judgment; and his father has been satirized in the character of Evan in Evan Harrington. It may not be out of place to quote from S. M. Ellis’ biography of George Meredith, to depict the father’s feelings towards his renowned son:

“Mr. B. T: Lawton of Rondebosch, a customer and friend of August Meredith, when the latter had settled down in Cape Town, South Africa, one day entered the shop and found the father in very low spirits. As a rule Augustus was very uncommunicative, but on this occasion, with an obvious desire for sympathy, he departed from his usual reserve and asked Mr. Lawton if he had seen the new story appearing serially in Once a Week in 1860. ‘I am very sore about it,’ said Augustus, ‘I am pained beyond expression, as I consider it aimed at myself and I am sorry to say the writer is my own son.”

Mr. Lawton added that the father ‘was then a handsome man of medium stature, well educated and exceedingly obliging in business.’

The Rev. Dr. James Cannon once said to the father, “I am much interested in the career of your distinguished son,” whereupon the father turned hastily away and made no reply.

In both these novels it is the son writing about the father’s attitude. I wish that a father writes of his own reactions to the son’s conduct, as evinced in human life.

In these days of the renaissance of India, the youth are aflame with the spirit of patriotism. The creative spirit is taking the channel of literary expression to rouse up the suffering masses of India, the writing being both in the native languages of the land, and in English, to gain the hearing and sympathy of the other nations of the world. Though the common English language of the educated has unified the country to a mutual understanding among the peoples of India who speak several languages, the imaginative youth is giving vent to his restlessness in literary expression owing to the inner urge of emotion and the sight of woeful inactivity, disorganization and disease, prevalent in the land. Here a conflict may arise between the father and the son in the choice of the latter’s profession. The father may insist on a life of security, while the son desires the spirit of adventure and precariousness.

(ii)

Here is a record by a friend, of a dream or nightmare, call it what you will:

“One night, more than a dozen years after my wife’s demise, I dozed away, after a perusal of Guy de Maupassant’s story of ‘Useless Beauty’, wherein a beautiful woman created a rankling jealousy in the husband, after she had borne him seven children, by solemnly swearing that one and only one of the children was not his, but she would not say which child it was, or of whom it was born. The reason was that she desired to be admired by the public, and not to lose her beauty by more child-bearing. The paintings of Rubens in the Munich gallery also came to my mind then.

“It seemed my spirit was passing out of my body. I met my wife in the form of a yellow halo, with all her features visible as on this earth, and we conversed thus:

Husband: ‘Dear, have you come to call me to yourself? Just before your losing consciousness, you asked me to sit on your bed, and called aloud each of your ten children, one after another, in the order of their birth. You said that you had nothing to say to me in the way of advice, and that knew too well of the path of duty; and you prophesied the future of each of your children. What have you to say to me now?

Wife: ‘I have come to warn you. You will soon be with me, since your work for the children whom we have brought into this world is over, and they can look after themselves; but–’

Husband: ‘Why do you drag on the sentence and stop? Have I not been true to your love? Have I not discharged my trust in the proper manner?

Wife: ‘You have been unfair to my son, the prospective poet, whose lyrics may be sung in this land. Do you recollect when I conceived him?’

Husband: ‘Yes. In the North Indian town of.........sometime before winter set in. It was just warm, and we went up to the terrace as the four children, we had then, were asleep in the room. I had been away on tour for some weeks. It was a moonless night, but finely starlit enough to see even forty feet away on the top of neighbouring houses. I wooed thee, but you were at first unwilling. You said it was too soon to bear another child, the last was but a year old, that you had just left suckling the son and that you had run dry of milk. (I observed to myself in the dream it was not three months only since the last baby was born, as in Maupassant’s story.) That is why I said, you were so attractive to me as the physical needs of the son were over.’

Wife: ‘Yes, I succumbed to your wishes. While I was later reposing on your strong left arm, you drew my attention to a meteor trailing from the sky, and I exclaimed, “A bright star has entered my womb!” Do you remember the words? ‘

Husband: ‘Yes, only too well. What of that? You have not yet told me how I have been unfair to him. Have I, like Sir Austin Feverel, torn up his early outpourings in English prose? You passed away when he, barely sixteen years of age, had written a long English essay on one of our Sanskrit poets, with a versified translation in English of a few stanzas. I knew of his literary inclinations even from his school days. You showed me the prize which he had won for the best English essay of his class.’

Wife: ‘You have left him very poor. With your new-fangled ideas, you have, despite the cost of the education of the girls, and their costly marriages, given an equal share of your savings, without distinction, to all the sons and daughters. So you have left him practically destitute.’

Husband: ‘Have I not given him sufficient education to earn his livelihood? If you loved the sons, I had compassion on the daughters. The son can pull a cart, or bear burdens and make a living. Do you expect the daughters to do so? Their need to live in comfort with ample nourishing food is all the greater, since it is they who bring the next generation into being. Modern young men are not inspired by a sense of duty to their wedded wives. They have neglected them, to my knowledge, when bereft of the charm and grace of youth, as they learn of the behaviour of man to woman in English society, as depicted in European novels. Have your Hindu lady friends had their own way in spending their husbands’ money? Well, poets have been poor ever since the beginning of the world.’

Wife: ‘Why did you send him for a medical education, and not foster his literary talent?’

Husband: ’You address me like your son in his teens. He often told me that I had wasted his life for seven years in medical education. You may recollect that there was not one doctor who would go over to see you, when they felt that you had not long to live; I thought the doctor’s profession a noble one, to alleviate the suffering of humanity, aye, to wrest from Nature her secrets for the healthy living of man, and I wished one of the sons to embrace that profession.’

Wife: ‘Do you recollect, his saying that an ambition to earn fame and to shine in the world like Rabindranath Tagore stirred him?’

Husband: ‘Yes I told him that he knew blessed little of his mother tongue, as Tagore wrote in the first instance. Hence he mis-spent all his time in his medical course, reading up vernacular literature from the alphabet which you taught him. He cursed me so many times, when warned him that he should soon try to support himself by his medical knowledge. He went somehow through his course with half-heartedness, since he vaguely realized that writing as a profession in India, where illiteracy is so paramount, is not even a crutch for support but a gaudy walking stick!’

Wife: ‘Has he not now turned to his mother tongue?’

Husband; ‘Yes, but his literary expression in English developed because of my teaching it to him in early life. Do you know that he has changed his name from K. Guru to Valadi Guru, dropping the initial K of my name, and instead, taking the name of my paternal village which he has never seen? He disowns me thus before the world!’

Wife: ‘He is born of my spirit. We have been students of literature for generations. In your blood there run three currents of intellect–mathematics, music, and chemistry as a tool for medicine. Had not your grandfather been preparing decoctions and extracts from vegetable drugs for treatment of sores piles etc.? Did he not bring back to life a man, whose pulse was falling fast, by some globules of a medicine ground over a stone? Yes, he is of my spirit and not of yours. Have you not always thought that you were more good-looking and illustrious than myself, though you said you loved the bright look of my eyes? After my death, you visited the art galleries of Europe and gazed at the paintings of beautiful women. Yes, you are only a clown, as Man is painted by Rubens, to beg of my embraces.’

Husband : ‘Is he not of my blood ?’

“The vision of my wife disappeared all of a sudden, with no answer. In my dream I was torn with jealousy. I ran after her and wanted to strangle her. I awake in terror, for I had never before doubted her chastity, in thought or deed.

“In broad daylight, I became aware that intense love and hate are allied, that love can be transformed into hate on trivial grounds. The ranking jealousy of a wife, dead more than a decade, was wrought in the dream by a son’s disowning, for his literary work, under a childish resentment, the father’s initials associated for ages with a son’s name in this land. I prayed to Lord Siva, ‘Let me not lose faith in Thy goodness at least!’ I must grow, as the Gita

says, to be beyond love and hate.”

From that day onwards, as I surmise, my friend talked only in monosyllables. A son may indeed, in subtle ways, injure the sensitive personality of a father. Guru may solidly protest now that a medical education is the best preparation for a literary career and cite the examples of Canon Doyle, Somerset Maugham, A. J. Cronin, Anton Chekov, and the poet Robert Bridges.

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