Confessions of a Four-year Old

Yesterday’s musings on neighbours inadvertently threw up an old flame from my puerile fantasy world. Combine that with a bang on the head and suddenly I’m remembering the other influential women from my days of emerging consciousness. A four-year old surely does not have much to go on when it comes to the rational discrimination of beauty, so I offer you these four angels as pure forms, who appealed to me in an unmitigated manner, haunting my early childhood dreams. My wife says it is pretty clear what my ‘type’ was, but I had thought from a relatively young age that I could pretty much find a redeeming beauty in any face. I wonder now if those redeeming features in some way evoke the memory of a small part of these four faces. Looking at them now, together, for the first time in years, I realise that the primal attraction is undimmed. Looking at them in their current form, wearing the years most respectably, I think my four-year old self knew what he was doing. Anyway, with apologies for this bizarre turn (surely a result of a rattled brain), may I present Felicity, Agnetha, Deborah, and Olivia. Please bear in mind that I want to hear nothing whatsoever about Freud. If that’s your cup of tea, fine, but drink it somewhere else.

Then:

And now:

Being A Grown-Up

Are you an adult? I’m not asking for a declaration of age, but of intent. Not a license to drink, buy lottery tickets, smoke, drive, or vote, but the sense of responsibility that ought to come with the lattermost of that list. I’m given to ask because of an article in the Wall Street Journal, essentially plugging a book called Manning Up: How the Rise of Women has turned Men into Boys by Kay S. Hymowitz. Apparently, there’s a new phase in the life cycle called ‘pre-adult’, which falls after adolescence and before adulthood proper, and is a synonym for ‘idiot’. This extension of the puerile state is one that we have probably all encountered, but it might be worth looking in the mirror, just to make sure you’re not a jerk.

The basic diagnosis is that a large number of young men (a typical example will hold a university degree and a sense of entitlement) who have had opportunities unique to their generation, have turned en masse into Bertie Wooster. Alas, they have no Jeeves, and thus, no restraint. Blessed with a disposable income, and with access to all the trappings of childhood that have been re-designed for the affluent twenty-something, they blunder through life without checks and balances, without responsibilities or a sense of ever wanting them, drinking and playing video games, and generally behaving as if life is one long frat party. They are really a deplorable lot.

I have personal experience with this new ‘difficult age’, for it is without doubt difficult to define adulthood for the up-and-coming graduate. But difficulty does not excuse a lack of effort. As some of my good friends will testify, I positively sought adulthood for many years. The forces outside ourselves will keep us locked in unsavoury patterns unless we move to assert ourselves. This move begins with the question, ‘what is my purpose?’ and finds its answers in responsibilities and duties of various kinds: personal, familial, and civic.

One must first ask how one is to be seen in the world, and to strive to be the best one can be. There is an element of the Golden Rule here, which I see as essentially reflexive. When we exhort ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, we must first understand how we should wish to be done unto. If we set poor examples, and meander fecklessly through life, we can hardly be surprised if others treat us with aloof disregard. In order to serve others, we must first serve ourselves.

As the self is re-defined according to a model of goodness, the sense of relations to those dear to us take on a different aspect. The nature of friendship and family is slowly revealed for its true value. The importance of filial relations supersedes loose notions of fraternity, that essentially revolve around sexual conquest, alcohol and, these days, facebook gossip.

A sense of place is arrived at, and its context – the nation – comes into view. Define your nation as you will – the term has assumed a fluidity in recent times – but we shall not avoid a sense of civic responsibility that comes with a recognition of the value of that which we hold dear as adults. Understanding how we should be like to be done unto, and how we should like our friends and families to be done unto, requires a degree of striving and vigilance as a citizen lest the power structures of our reality threaten, or fall short of, our ideals of how life should be. The most appalling and dangerous symptom of the ‘pre-adult’ is his political apathy. As he happily rolls through life, he has no notion of the responsibility that comes with the freedom he enjoys. Be afraid of any young man who asserts that politics makes no difference to him.

Being a grown-up seems no longer to come naturally with age. If that is so, we had better start to think about what it takes.

On Bullies and Accomplices

Tom Brown’s Schooldays is not my favourite text, but it is full of educational and relational ideals that seem to endure, especially now, when they are so seldom observed. Not least among its lessons is the attitude towards bullying, a theme that recurs throughout the novel. I’ve been given to turn once again to these pages after having witnessed the video of the Australian bullying and the victim’s rather emphatic response to it. That young man has made something of a name for himself, but his notoriety saddens me to some extent. The idle idiots who shot the video, and who then presumably submitted it to the local news, succeeded in getting both boys suspended from school. And now he’ll spend the rest of his childhood being ‘the fat kid who fought back’. He did the right thing, but it should have been private. He should have been able to fight his own battles and have the satisfaction of prevailing. Now he has lost control. In joining the fray of commentators I realise I’m adding to that loss, but the example – since it is public – must now serve to assist the thousands of others undergoing his torment. Those idle bystanders who have brought Casey Heynes to international attention represent the silent culprits complicit in bullying everywhere. Whatever we think of Heynes and his bully, we must roundly scorn those who implicitly endorse bullying by their inaction.

Let us turn to Thomas Hughes. Tom and East dig in and beat off their assailant (the scene depicted above), but in return the bully Flashman sullies their reputations. The legacy outlasts his presence. It is easier to follow the bully than to strike out for what is right: 

If the Angel Gabriel were to come down from heaven, and head a successful rise against the most abominable and unrighteous vested interest, which this poor old world groans under, he would most certainly lose his character for many years, probably for centuries, not only with upholders of said vested interest, but with the respectable mass of the people whom he had delivered. They wouldn’t ask him to dinner, or let their names appear with his in the papers; they would be very careful how they spoke of him in the Palaver, or at their clubs… But… bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong; and that if you see a man or boy striving on the weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him. If you can’t join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight and suffer for, which is just what you have got to do for yourselves; and so think and speak of him tenderly.

Not every boy will have the power to overcome his bullies. Sometimes guile must serve in the stead of brute force. Sometimes reserves of fortitude must be drawn upon. But he must give no quarter; must not comply. He must know, deep down, however much it hurts, and however much the fear debilitates, that his tormentor is more afraid than him. The tormentor is the coward, the uncertain, the envious. However unhappy the boy, the bully is more so. The boy must dig deep, for right is on his side. And when he does fight his battles, he should fight them without the world’s attention. But he would be helped if his peers, knowing right from wrong, and being cognisant of his plight, did not follow the bully’s path of least resistance. If I were to suspend anyone in Casey’s case, it would be the girl with the camera on her phone. She had her chance to do the right thing, to do something, and she failed. The bully got what was coming to him, and may have learnt his lesson. That should have been an end to it. But what has she learnt?

What to Do with Bullies in Australia

Currently going viral: what to do with bullies. It speaks for itself really. I will probably have more to say about this though.

When To Fight And When To Take A Beating

The young man and his girlfriend had parted ways in acrimonious circumstances. It was always a mismatch, but the pressures of adolescence were such that the gulf between them was filled with the vile interpositions of their classmates, who voyeuristically saw the relationship as a kind of soap opera for which they might have a hand in the script.

Teenagers are cruel animals and, if left unchecked, will revel in the sight of another’s public suffering. This group had hungered to witness, and had therefore worked hard to orchestrate, the couple’s loss of innocence. The physical aspect of love is something that must come when all parties are good and ready, and certainly not at the behest of the salacious mob. The girl, being of an easily led disposition, caved to the peer pressure and made a demand of the young man, despite his protestations. She would be in an out-of-the-way spot at a certain time, but where the crowd would have a splendid vantage point. All duly assembled, but the young man did not attend. A posse of girls were sent to summon him, and to drag him there if necessary, but the young man was intractable. The mere suggestion was abhorrent to him, and he stood his ground. Then came the ultimatum: if he did not respond within five minutes, the relationship was over. And so it ended. The trysts and entanglements of young passions are ephemeral things, fiery and fraught, full of hormone-fuelled emotional difficulty. They are over quick, but linger long in the conscience. The young man had fought, however passively, the bestial urges of his cohort, and felt a pang at their lack of humanity. He had surrendered the girl to them as their willing champion. Pyrrhic victory was his, but it was hollow.

Image from toothpastefordinner.com

Then came the bitterness. An onslaught of insults and depredations poured in the direction of the young man, who had satisfied his principles but angered the mob. Egged on by their disappointment, the girl launched a volley of invectives that lasted for a week. The boy remained silent for as long as he could endure, but driven to breaking point his character gave way and he summoned the worst insult his soul could muster. The words were aimed not at the girl, but at her mother. They were cruel words, designed to crush. The name-calling of children is an unimaginative business, but the more intelligent youngster can devise words to pierce the heart. As they left his lips he knew he had lost the high ground. He had surrendered to the level of his peers. Whatever happened now, he realised he had defeated himself. The girl was demoralised and went away to charge her anger. There would be blood.

The next day the young man stood in line waiting for his turn to go into the school dining room. The girl approached, jaw set, fists clenched. The young man turned his back in shame and she punched, hard, like a boy, three times in the back of the head and neck. The young man took these blows and turned to face the girl. Hands by his side he looked her in the eye, and then she swung at his face, splitting his lip, and making a colourful show of it. He did not speak, nor react. Another boy led him away to be cleaned up.

Feeling rightly punished, but also recovering some of his sense of character and propriety, the young man knew that was an end to it all. The girl had lost any right to compassion, and also put herself out of the reckoning so far as other suitors were concerned. The young man had learnt a lesson. Pushed to an extreme, he had faltered, but then recovered. It is a common cliché that one must learn from one’s mistakes. Of course, the unsaid but essential element of this axiom is that one must make mistakes in order to learn.

On Companionship

…you’ll all find, if you haven’t found it out already, that a time comes in every human friendship, when you must go down into the depths of yourself, and lay bare what is there to your friend, and wait in fear of his answer. A few moments may do it; and it may be (most likely will be, as you are English boys) that you never do it but once. But it must be, if the friendship is to be worth the name. (Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 1857).

Do boys know any longer how to be friends? What about men? It is odd that in an age that might be described as ‘the emotional turn’, men succumb to the worst inhibitions of macho culture and have lost what was formerly a delight in the company of another man. Nineteenth-century novels abound with examples of schoolboy friendships that were defined by devotion, love and respect – the complete confidence of boys who saw each other and the world as if through one set of eyes – that matured into lifelong relationships of trust and affection, regardless of political, geographical or occupational obstacles. The romance of these narratives no doubt exaggerated the commonplaceness of such amiable entanglements, but they were nevertheless expressions of an ideal. Such friendships – such implicit contracts of trust – were positively desired and encouraged.

Even if one removes the fulsome rhetorical honesty of the English public-school boy, replacing it with a more stoic or taciturn working-class nature, history still supplies plenty of real and fictional examples of genuine loving amity. Old friends, ‘sat on a park bench like bookends… waiting for the sunset’; young friends confiding their hearts’ desires, lost in play that forecasts future realities, like the ‘two little boys’ of the Napoleonic era.

I think I had friendships like this. Wonderful hours that became days that became whole summers of infatuated indulgence – of football and card games, of cricket bats that were machine guns when they weren’t cricket bats, and of talk about important things (marble collections, Star Wars, and puerile fantasies of this girl or that) – in complete and blissful ignorance of a judgemental world. One boy’s company was always sufficient, and where larger numbers met, two boys remained when the other boys went home. I think it was the same for most boys: like juvenile lions looking for their own pride. Alas, these friendships have not quite stood the modern tests of geography and occupation. The modern ‘social network’ is too easy to be meaningfully pursued. And somehow I feel the beauty and strength of childhood alliances is no longer encouraged. I cannot think why. Perhaps we feel it fosters weakness, but really we should identify the strength it engenders.

‘What a time it was… a time of innocence; a time of confidences’.

Boys versus Men; Or, the School Match Debacle

The boy had kept score the previous year when the fifth formers had taken on the teachers at cricket. It seemed to him a privilege accorded to those about to be ushered into adult life. In the final summer of school, two teams met on a level playing field and played for the honour. The teachers would win, of course, for they outgunned their rivals in strength, experience, and skill. But there was pride in every wicket taken, and valiantness in every run scored. The boy looked forward to his final year, when he might take his chance.

The following spring the young man – for that is the status he felt he had attained – raised the issue with the teachers. He should like to play them at cricket, as had his forebears, and he should like to raise a team for the purpose. Were they willing? Answers were received in the affirmative. The young man set about organising his eleven.

On the day in question the eleven, feeling a certain pride in representing the budding manliness of their peers, took to the field. And then something untoward happened. Half a dozen or more fourth formers appeared in kit, ready to play. Who were they? What did they think they were doing? And then the teachers arrived: eighteen of them. The young man made enquiries. Apparently the Young Turks had protested at being left out, and the teachers had invited them to play, without informing the fifth-form eleven. It had been decided, unilaterally, that it was to be eighteen-a-side, and that the fifth form were to share their moment with these boys. There was indignation in the ranks. The privilege had been besmirched. The teachers’ equation of one group of boys with another group of young men had emasculated them before a ball had been bowled. It was dispiriting, and guaranteed the worst of defeats.

To make matters worse, the teachers condescended to bowl with a plastic ball that robbed the young men even of the satisfaction of feeling leather on willow. At the change of innings, tea was taken in the school library. The young man did not go. He could not, in his rage, break bread with these men. He sulked, cried foul, and malingered in the field.

As we grow, we learn

At a certain age a boy wants to be treated like a man. If, under such circumstances, he fails as a man, he must face his responsibilities, and take his punishment like a man would. If, however, you treat him who would be a man like a boy, then you must not be surprised when he behaves like one.

The Butcher

One of my earliest memories is of the local butcher’s shop. I’d press my nose on the refrigerated glass and look at what to me was a smorgasbord of delight. Black pudding, lambs' kidneys, fresh sausages, streaky bacon and back, pigs’ trotters and sows’ ears, and so on and so on. I never was much of a one for sweets or toy soldiers. These cuts were my heart’s desire but, much like the child who never owns the toy of his dreams, it was the visit to the shop that I cherished more than the things themselves. On the back wall, which was covered in shiny blue and white tiles, was a row of meat hooks upon which hung a variety of larger carcases. In those days things weren’t pre-cut and packaged; the butcher waited for you to order your joint before hauling down the whole hunk on his shoulder and pouring it out onto the block. He sharpened a gloriously large knife with a long steel that was kept in a leather belt, moving with such speed but miraculously never cutting off his hand. The joint was cut to size, but still attached by the bone. Out came the clever: the moment I always anticipated most. My local butcher was a wiry, tall man with glasses. He’d raise the cleaver right above his head – a good seven feet above my gaze – and bring it down with clinical accuracy upon the bone, making the most delicious crack, immediately followed by the dull thud of blade in block. For many years as a child I really wanted to own a cleaver. All of this took place in a uniquely cool atmosphere – like walking into the fridge to choose your dinner – but with a warmth of conversation that taught me to recognise that butchers are (sadly, were) pillars of the community.

The butcher used to know everyone and, in all probability, everyone’s business too. The single-most important quality for a butcher was discretion, and that made him a great listener. Yet history has been unkind to them. By precedent they did not serve on juries because their work was thought to harden their hearts. I never could work out how a butcher was any more likely to be callous than a surgeon, a veterinarian, or a funeral director – those pillars of middle-class life who might have been thought ideal candidates for duty at court. But butchers were working class, and concomitantly thought to be unrefined, unpredictable, and already somewhat hardened by life. Their singular quality of being able to listen without prejudice was overlooked because of other doubts.

Gillray, The British Butcher supplying John Bull with a Substitute for Bread, 1795

Still, not everyone maligned these men. Representations of John Bull, the stalwart freeborn Englishman, had a forerunner in the caricatured form of the butcher, and William Hogarth left no doubt about the importance of beef (and implicitly, those who provided it) in his idealization of a content and fulfilled society. He was the pivot point around which local life gathered, for everyone had to visit him, and most probably would meet each other at his shambles. In wartime the butcher became a man of great power, able to do unto his neighbours that which they had done unto him. It became a matter of great importance to respect the butcher if one was to feed a family in times of ration. Mr. Jones the butcher of Dad’s Army fame is the archetype: friendly, eager, courageous, and with a heightened sense of justice.

Hogarth, Beer Street, 1750 (hunk of beef to the left)

There aren’t many left. My mother still has a good one – actually a husband and wife team – but they are knocking on, and soon the supermarket will have won. My Hungarian butcher in Montreal is the salt of the earth, but he too is getting long in the tooth. In Berlin things are a little brighter, but I don’t quite yet have the hang of the experience yet. I’m working on it. In any case, I thought I’d share a thought or two on these rare men, for they are not long for this world, and we may not yet realise just how much we shall miss them.

 Rembrandt, Carcass of Beef, 1655

Scotch Myths

A boy of twelve, fair-haired and freckled, essentially innocent but with suspicions, went to the Highlands of Scotland. He lamely fished for salmon in river and loch, and later saw them spawning in their thousands. Fat-bellied monsters threw themselves against rocky waterfalls, and he was impressed by their determination. He gathered mushrooms in the woods, and learnt which ones not to pick. He went all the way to the Northern coastline, to eat a fish supper with the gulls, and over to Skye to see that there really was nothing there. Winding through glens on narrow roads, craning over dizzying precipices, noting eagles and ospreys, he discovered a hallowed trail. It has stayed with him since, although he does not appreciate it. The amber reward at the end of this trail that thrust him into adulthood is with him yet.

It was the distillery trail: a marked route that networked the producers of the stuff of libations since time immemorial; the noble spirit that Scotland may consider its most worthy contribution to the world. Nestled in heady country, higher than any other, was the Tomatin distillery. The boy looked around at row upon row of barrels of oak, some of which once contained Spanish sherry. A dram was passed around, of their standard twelve-year-old single malt, and he was not overlooked. Two things the same age, one mature, the other fresh, met. The moment of imbibing brought blood to the lips and the cheeks, a momentary numbness, a rush of aroma – malt, apples, pears, bonfires – and then sheer joy, followed by a molten feeling of the generation of internal heat, as if he had swallowed an exothermic elixir. The moment passed; the world began again; the boy had taken a step towards manhood.

It is many years later. The boy is a man. He has not thought of these things for a long time. He is in a foreign land, surrounded by unfamiliar things, and he is walking. It is winter; a harsh winter. He passes a liquor store that seems to have an air about it. He stops in his tracks, agog, and presses his nose against the plate. When the fog of his breath clears he sees what his mind had told him must surely have been an apparition: a row of bottles labelled Tomatin. There are twelve-year-old and fifteen-year-old varieties. He is transported; connections are made; synapses in the brain tripped. He is twelve again, taking steps into an incipient manhood. How came he here? By what route? The man enters the establishment and purchases a bottle. It feels like buying a memory, but somehow more substantial than that.

The man writes to all his friends. ‘If you can find it, I strongly urge it upon you. It makes men of boys’.

Of Baseball and Bowties

On game nights, I used to be able to see Fenway Park from my apartment. The floodlights and the blimp were unmistakeable signs that Americans were playing baseball. I used to pass the ballpark on my way to work sometimes, but that was as close as I came to entering that hallowed arena. You see, despite baseball’s storied past and its penchant for the poetic, most Europeans simply don’t get it. The standard questions – I can imagine a continent getting set to roll its eyes – go like this: why are these so called athletes overweight and chewing tobacco? When does something happen? Why does the atmosphere have to be manufactured by an old woman with an organ? And what’s with the ‘World’ Series anyway? I don’t see too many non-American teams taking part.

So much for the clichés. The real reason I didn’t much take to the thing – and I have tried, mind you – is that its men didn’t strike me as being particularly worthy of emulation. The sport’s leading lights do tend to carry too much weight in the gut; the spitting is ugly; there are rumblings about drug abuse and cheating; and the game is not rich in articulate speakers. In the main, there is not a lot of obvious joy in the game, and what grim determination there is tends to be concealed beneath an arrogant nonchalance. Whereas the game itself will richly reward the devotee in its surprising complexity, the playing staff simply do not reach comparable depths.

I am always, as I have oft noted, open to change, given a convincing enough argument. It strikes me that famous sportsmen are, first and foremost, role models. When I was a child I did not want to be like my heroes; I wanted to be my heroes. Since I don’t count myself as being particularly unusual in this regard, it ought perhaps to make all parents alive to the question of who it is their children wish to be. In baseball’s recent past, are there heroes that, without qualms, we would introduce to our offspring? Well, perhaps now there might be. I was really taken by the image of Tim Lincecum arriving for the final game of the World Series besuited and bowtied. That is a most welcome change. Having done a little digging, I found he had this to say:

But who doesn't want to believe their kid is amazing? I'm going to be hoping the same thing for my kid when I get older. What better feeling can parents have than when they brag about their own kids?

So, a man with an eye on the future; a man with an eye on being the best at his job; and a man with style. Oh, and he also does Sinatra. Baseball, I’m interested.

Mum's the Word

I have neglected you. I do apologise. England was as it has always been: vibrant, exciting, damp, a germ-breeding ground. I’m afraid it rather got the better of me this time, and something had to give. Now back in the land of the mullet and the sausage, things will settle down again. The motherland keeps a hold on me, nonetheless.

It is apropos that I mention mothers. Lest we forget, chaps, gallantry begins at home. For many a budding man, the chief experience he will have had with a woman will be with his mother. Please don’t allow your imaginations to run away with you here, but instead pause for a moment to consider how it is that a gentleman learns to treat a lady. The corrections and encouragements offered by one’s mother in early life – providing one’s mother knows how to be polite – become the model of acceptable behaviour for our later relations with the fair sex (for a moment I will bury the alarm wrought by the image of the mother who does not know how to be polite). I confess to be fortunate in this regard, and I dare to suppose that Mrs. VB is the happier for it.

I had the rare opportunity lately to return to the source, and dine out with Mother on a sort of date, if you will. Champagne a-plenty, five splendid French plates, and a dinner service that legitimately lasted for three hours. There was elegance, decorum, decency, and the kind of conversation that Brits can only have once the wall of inhibition has been razed by alcohol. The art of conversation is verisimilitude, but there is rare real truth to be mined under certain conditions, and why should we scruple to shun it when the opportunity arises? One’s own mother is a wealth of history in the autobiographical mode. I fear we seldom ask about it, and therein we risk a terrible loss. For what goes in to fashioning us came, in part, from what made her. To know these important influences is to better know oneself, and we can scarcely be the worse for that. So, dear readers (if you are still reading after I have treated you with such carelessness), I recommend you call your mothers and offer to take them out. Treat her like the lady who made you, give her a drink, and allow her to talk. You (probably) won’t regret it.

Missing Pieces

I used to be somebody’s boss. I was a friend too, in that mitigated way that befalls the manager and the managed. He said I was the best boss he’d ever had. He was ten years older than me. He was clinically depressed. He was probably a genius. For one reason or another, he came up in conversation recently, and I was given pause to think why this man was, in most respects, an abject failure as a man. Let us call him Sebastian.

Sebastian had somewhat miraculously survived a rain of arrows, but the course of life had left him scarred. His father left in early childhood, occasionally reappearing to open up old wounds. At thirteen or so his mother committed suicide, and the ensuing years were dogged by shadowy thoughts and dark depressions. Institutionalised for a time, he never again could entirely break free from the shackles of guilt, anguish, and deep pain. Lacking a father figure, or any strong character to guide him, he floundered through adolescence, emerging as a peculiar and singular adult.

He was educated, by virtue of a scholarship, at a famous Northern English public school (for North American readers, that means he was among the elite). Without much effort, he mastered the classics, and saw life as the endless re-telling and re-working of those fundamental ideas and plotlines. Existence, for him, lacked the joyous sense of the discovery of the new. Everything had already been said. The creative instinct had died shortly before he was born, and this was to him the tragedy of his timing. He obsessed about the lives of Picasso and Bob Dylan, as if they were the last humans to signal new directions. When he experienced their art, it was not to him a joy, but a lament. Humanity had peaked, and he had missed it.

Most people found him impossible to engage in conversation, for he could not abide small talk, and he heard little else. If you could engage him, you would find him in deadly earnest, and should you approach him intellectually he would stop in his tracks at the wonderment of a mind worthy of his contemplation. On the whole, he was an intellectual recluse, unfit for society as he saw it (essentially an uncivilised place). He had a pathological fear of the exhaust fumes of motor vehicles, causing him to cross all roads with wanton abandon for his life and limbs. He could not enter parts of the city where cars went, and would not wait on the kerb for anything. Our walks together were curious, for he knew every route that kept him out harm’s way. And yet he smoked incessantly. He told me he was aware of the inconsistency, and that it was his problem.

His home was a scantily furnished hovel, bedecked with books and LPs. The sky-rise towers of tomes, on every seat and every square inch of hidden carpet, were interleaved with scraps of paper, marking his place in each. For all of these books were being read and re-read. He wrote songs lamenting lost love – he had loved only once, and she had absconded with a Welshman – and sang them to himself. I told him, jokingly, that his was the pyrrhic victory, since the reward for her cruelty had been the Welsh. He took me very seriously, and brightened for a moment.

Toward the end of my relationship with Sebastian, just prior to circumstances throwing me upon the world in a new way, he broached the topic of his father. He said that he had come to the conclusion that his father was a bastard while he was shaving. Nobody, he reflected, had taught him how to shave, and in his mid-thirties he was only just realising that he had always done it badly: trivial, perhaps, but also the thin end of the wedge. Here stood a man, broken in spirit and suspicious of his fellow man, acknowledging that he was only partly formed. Formal education had opened to him the power of thought, but the lack of informal guidance had left him stranded, and all too aware of the impossibility of recovery.

Sebastian had been the innocent victim of the lives of others, and the aloofness of the safety net. He had not fallen and failed as a man, but he had been failed as a boy. In my naiveté I had tried to find ways to direct him, to encourage him, to thrust him into the light. But I was no antidote for a fear instilled in formative years, and I was not then a teacher. The manly man is never timid, I have said, and so say again. We must also, however, be the enemies of fear, and guard against its installation. Without shaping, without careful guidance, without ideas of the men boys should come to be, we risk the emergence of men like Sebastian: men whose heads knew of the good, but whose hearts had never felt it.

A Robust Diversion

My friends, I am still without a reliable internet connection in Berlin, and in any case I have been tied up with the coarse twines of bureaucracy. It is to be expected after such a move. All will be functioning somewhat normally by the middle of next week, I hope. In the meantime, allow me to direct your attention to a growing repository of film reviews that take a more serious tone than the genre typically allows. In particular, I was struck by this four part review of First Blood, seen through the eyes of a man who was not born at the time of the film’s release. I grew up drawing pictures of Stallone, having found something in his characters that reached the incipient man in my boyhood imagination. In Rocky and Rambo, Stallone created emblems respectively of the American dream and the American nightmare, and I would humbly suggest that whatever sins the man later committed in the world of film, these two pictures stand as masterpieces. Each holds rewards that surely makes them worth revisiting.

Go Climb a Rock

Climbing is the best possible physical developer of nerve and muscle and endurance. A good rock climber cannot be a weakling (Baden-Powell, Rovering to Success).

We could dwell for many an hour on the life and works of Lord Robert Baden-Powell of Gilwell, founder of the Scout movement, hero of Mafeking, and teacher of youth. Strange to say, but Baden-Powell’s book detailing the rocks that will hinder the boy’s passage into manhood has not lodged so firmly into the popular consciousness as his Scouting for Boys. Sure, it sold a canoe-full of copies, but I suspect not many fathers will be giving Rovering to Success: A Guide for Young Manhood to their budding sons. More is the pity, for despite its antiquated style, it still has much to offer.

The ‘rutting season’ was a principal concern of Baden-Powell’s guide to becoming manly. Of course, his image of young stags with warm blood seems far removed from anything we might connect with the adolescent sweat boxes of today, but the metaphor is not so far-fetched. His prescription was a tried and tested mix of active participation, hard work, team work balanced by self-reliance, and, perhaps above all, temperance in all things. Baden-Powell pointed to rock climbing as the exemplary activity to instil these qualities. He exhorted teams of rutting stags to club together and support each other up some craggy edifice in order thereby to learn the lessons of life. They would reap ‘the moral effect of learning to face a difficulty, even when it looks like an impossibility, with calm determination and good cheer’. They would thereafter ‘face the difficulties of life in the same spirit, and by sticking to it and trying the different ways round or over the obstacle [they would] get there in the end’.

We don’t all have to go climb a rock, but the example is a good one. One way or another, young men must get a foothold on life.

On Becoming Manly, Part III

Allow me to resume this thread, with increasing trepidation. I have been uncertain whether to put the how before the why or vice versa, but decided that method should precede what may well be madness on my part. Of course, any attempt at prescription is bound hopelessly to fail, for men being men, and boys being boys, rules will be dismissed peremptorily. All I may offer, therefore, is a sketch (something sketchy?).

Unburdening responsibility upon a greater mind than mine, let us hear what Carlyle has to say (when he unburdens responsibility upon his own fictitious inventions):

In all the sports of Children, were it only in their wanton breakages and defacements, you shall discern a creative instinct: the Mankin feels that he is a born Man, that his vocation is to Work. The choicest present you can make him is a Tool; be it knife or pen-gun, for construction or for destruction; either way it is for Work, for Change. In gregarious sports of skill or strength, the Boy trains himself to Cooperation, for war or peace, as governor or governed… (Sartor Resartus).

Boys, in short, must play at being men if they are to become men. This is not to say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but then again, men will be incomplete without having sensed victory and pleasure, and, perhaps more importantly, defeat and pain. Furthermore, they must be given the freedom to build and fashion, to be frustrated and to bleed. We wrap our boys in cotton wool at their peril, for the adult world will not cushion their falls. The chips of life fall in much the same way in childhood as in adulthood, but the stakes are not so high. A boy needs to learn to win with magnanimity and to lose with humility (and to resolve to win the next time) before the blinds become too big.

The Playing Fields of Eton, by Edmund Bristow (1822)

What does this mean in practical terms? Nothing more than the rough-and-tumble, active life, indoors and out, that some of us took for granted. I wonder, nervously, how many boys now enjoy this kind of experience. There is so much fear, and so few playing fields, that kids are cloistered, attached umbilically to their video games and gadgetry. Perhaps the most fundamental step, therefore, is to unplug.

On Becoming Manly, Part II

In the first part of this thread, I noted that the questions of when, how, and why to become a man are of pressing importance. I propose now to deal with each in turn, insofar as a humble blog such as this can treat such weighty subjects. I shall begin with the when of the matter, although I already find myself somewhat at a loss...

In 1746, or thereabouts, the Earl of Chesterfield wrote to his then eight-year-old son the following:

Everybody has ambition, of some kind or other, and is vexed when that ambition is disappointed: the difference is, that the ambition of silly people is a silly and mistaken ambition; and the ambition of people of sense is a right and commendable one. For instance; the ambition of a silly boy, of your age, would be to have fine clothes, and money to throw away in idle follies; which, you plainly see, would be no proofs of merit in him, but only of folly in his parents, in dressing him out like a jackanapes, and giving him money to play the fool with. Whereas a boy of good sense places his ambition in excelling other boys of his own age, and even older, in virtue and knowledge. His glory is in being known always to speak the truth, in showing good-nature and compassion, in learning quicker, and applying himself more than other boys. These are real proofs of merit in him, and consequently proper objects of ambition; and will acquire him a solid reputation and character. This holds true in men, as well as in boys… (Earl of Chesterfield, Letters to His Son, 1746-7).

The last clause holds the key. The spark of becoming manly occurs when the interests of boys and men begin to align. This entails that men know what their own interests are or should be, and recognise when boys become receptive to them. Fathers need to recognise their importance! We are wont to let boys be boys for rather too long, so that the vigorous, playful, unserious youth is never given a sober check, or a manful duty, until he is already physically a man. ‘Don’t let them grow up too fast’ is a phrase you’ll hear often. I would like to have parents add another clause to the imperative: ‘Don’t let them grow up too fast, but do let them grow up’. Before you know it, if you’re not careful, your boy will become just another undergraduate who does not know that it is rude to talk and chew gum in the library, with his girlfriend (rather than a book) sitting provocatively in his lap.

It is unthinkable, today, that a child of eight would receive such a letter from his father, extolling the virtues of a serious intellect, decency of character, and hard work. So when should it come? It seems to me that we rather underestimate the capacity of children, with school curricula increasingly spoon-feeding watered-down knowledge into the gaping mouths of perennial babes even up to the University years. Little room is given for initiative, for individual expression, for self-reliance, or for self-education. Since children are not given the responsibility to do anything, they do not learn that there are consequences to actions, and that they must take ownership of them. In most schools, there is no scope for building character at any point up to the age of eighteen. I suggest that, from the age of eleven or so, boys be given increasing freedom to act, within certain boundaries: to succeed and take the honour; to make mistakes and pay for them. There is no fixed point at which the boy of good sense will emerge from among his silly peers, but when he does he will likely serve as a positive example, if he can bear his exceptional status with courage. Becoming manly takes time, but at some point the process must begin.

On Becoming Manly, Part I

‘My spirits were divided pathetically between the wish to stay on, a guarded child, and to proceed into the world, a budding man, and, in my utter ignorance, I sought in vain to conjure up what my immediate future would be’ (Edmund Gosse, Father and Son, 1907).

Few of us, I can only surmise, have to undergo the kind of wrench borne by Gosse (pictured left with his father) in his formative years. To break out from under a puritanical yoke and give full play to the inner voice of oneself, so long enshrined in suspicion and sin, is not any longer the kind of thing the ‘budding man’ has to accomplish. Children, at least in the West, are at full liberty to indulge in all manner of innocence-losing experiences, that we may wonder if there remains anything traditionally ‘child-like’ in them at all. Yet, all this to one side, Gosse’s dilemma, quoted above, strikes me as one more pertinent than ever for today’s youth. The issue is scarcely ever raised by anyone, and I doubt it arises so articulately within the minds of teenagers, if it arises at all. But the questions of when, how, and why to become a man are of pressing importance, lest we find ourselves among a generation of perpetual half-way houses. We shall not be surrounded by a multitude of Peter Pan figures, for innocence will be lost; but the passage into manhood does not follow effortlessly. The idea of a society of enduring adolescents should horrify us all.

I have written before on the rites of passage that I feel we have mislaid. In some respects, these have been inadequately replaced by the notion that university is a universal coming-of-age ritual that should be available to all. We should be wary of derogating the word ‘university’ to the point where it becomes a mere synonym for ‘party’, for I remain convinced that university is only for the intellectually able, rather than existing simply to boost alcohol tolerance and sexual experience. Still, I understand that the idea of university as a rite of passage has arisen precisely because of the general paucity of other opportunities in this regard. Boys and girls ought to want to grow up, or at least sense that they cannot go on in a puerile state. I am not sure that university fosters the right kind of attitude, but rather provides a space where the ‘spirits… divided pathetically’ are permitted to persist. It is, by all accounts, a space outside of the real world; an extension of adolescence; a not-so-pregnant pause. From this ‘curriculum’ (devoid of its character-building elements of old), why should we expect adults, apparently automatically, to emerge?

Rather, I suppose that some notion of what adulthood is and why it is necessary should be let loose somewhat earlier in life, and that emerging men should be aware of the choices and imperatives in bringing it about. It is no use, so I think, for a child to try to conjure with the future apropos of nothing at all; it is yet worse merely to proceed through life on a pre-determined course. A sense of responsibility, knowledge of the virtues, ingrained good habits and manners, a stout character: these things are to be built. We are not entitled to them, but must shift for them. If we merely wait until graduation ceremonies end before we inform the incipient citizenry of their roles as adults, we shall hardly be surprised if the alumni fail to live up to expectations. If, as I have said before, we are to give credence to the old adage that the child is father to the man, then we must make sure that our children are given a map, a compass, and the sage advice of those experienced in the lay of the land. Left to fumble through the uncharted territory of their adolescence alone, we must not wonder if they fail properly to emerge at the other side.

On Fathers

The child is father to the man, or so they say, but what kind of man the child becomes depends on the kind of father he happens to have. In these days of ‘fathers for justice’ and paternity leave, does anyone stop to ask what justice for fathers might mean, or what fathers ought to do on their paid break from work? What is the role, the duty, of the father after his biological deed has been done? What should he be to his child, for childhood’s duration?

There were times when the answers to these questions were understood, responsibilities acknowledged. There are obvious differences according to time and place, but a common core of fatherliness emerges. Fathers were to be exemplars of virtue to their children, especially to their sons. They were to demonstrate, either through their actions or through their knowledge, the appropriate models of courage and physical prowess. A delicateness of touch and a gentleness of demeanour were to be married to a robustness of spirit when the moment commanded it, and sons were to understand that the former without the latter would not a man make. In many periods, the father was the moral teacher, ensuring the next generation of citizens understood what citizenship meant, and why it was worth fighting for. Some people have misunderstood this as all tiger shooting and rugby, but as we might expect, it was richer than that. The boy was to respect his father and treat his mother with the courtesy that his future wife might expect. Here, the father would lead by example, as also in the cases of piety, temperance, and fortitude. The son would learn from the father that in the family lay life’s treasure, and its sanctity would provide the motivation for its defence.

A way of life, in a free state, is perhaps reducible to this unit. To challenge a state so constructed is to challenge the core element of the family. A call to arms, therefore, would not be an appeal to an intrinsic masculine attraction to blood and guts, pomp and circumstance, and glory. On the contrary, the image of the thing to be defended – the gentleness of family life – will serve to ensure that the boy-becoming-man attends the roll call.

Justice for fathers in our world might then begin with the education of fathers in matters manly. While courage, strength and indefatigability have been watered down in our world, we have almost failed to notice that fidelity, courtesy, patience, civility, temperance and loyalty have virtually disappeared. If fathers do not know, or cannot pass on these things, then justice for certain children may well be to leave certain fathers out in the cold. But where these things can be salvaged, and where the correct spirit can be divined, then the least we can strive for is to allow fathers the freedom and the time to do their duty to their children. And if inspiration is required, a father may find it in the eyes of his new child. For surely in this, what is needed is implicitly understood.

Sweet Interlude

I shall be writing in the next week, but I cannot guarantee to be posting. For the first time in fifteen years I shall be returning to my holiday stomping grounds in beautiful Cornwall, and in a way I shall be sorely disappointed if there are such modern contrivances as the internet. After the activities of recent months, a week’s repose is going to seem strange indeed. Cornish ale, ice cream and pasties are to be consumed, as well as an inordinate amount of local fish. I hope it will be a good old-fashioned change of air, and a chance to take stock.

Over the years I have wondered what to do with boyish memories, hankerings and nostalgia. Whether your childhood was good, bad, or indifferent, it is doubtless good to reflect from time to time. Part of manhood is the knowledge of how it differs from boyhood, and theoretical musings are useless without some introspection. How did I get here from there? I was reminded of the importance of a realistic approach through facebook, of all things. Discovering the grown-up shadows of youthful faces from the past, replete with biographies of maturation, joy and lament, really altered my impressions of what happened all those years ago. There was a coming-to-terms moment; a sense of distance travelled and demons diminished.

I anticipate the coming week to be something similar, but in reverse. I can visualise my own tiny footprints in the sand, the thickness of summer air, and the exuberant innocence of childhood. Probably most of us had a juvenile paradise, removed from our ordinary world and utterly joyful. In memory, the sun always shone. No doubt my revisit will come with realities not formerly noticed: cloudy days and costly diversions. A week will seem like seven days and not an eternity, and I shall probably not be satisfied to spend the days variously playing beach cricket, jumping breakers, and foraging in rock pools. Contemplating the sea as a child, my mind travelled to America – an impossibly distant and enchanting idea – and the world was just wonder. Having come back from that unfeasibly close and disappointingly familiar place, to where will my mind go now?

I will settle for a little peace. In case I cannot communicate in the meantime, I wish for you the same.