Victorian Father & Son

SAMUEL BUTLER (242 pp.)--Philip Henderson--Indiana University ($3.75).

"A man first quarrels with his father about three quarters of a year before he is born. It is then he insists on setting up a separate establishment." With this provocative generalization, written 80 years ago in The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler not only supplied the main clue to his own character but set hissing the long fuse at whose other end stood that grand, portentous chunk of dynamite, the Victorian father. But Butler's masterpiece was only published after his death (1902), and it was not until the rebellious '20s that his Way of All Flesh became the model for hundreds of novels by other Pa-baiting young authors.

Today, the trend has turned again, this time in favor of the Victorian way. People are beginning to miss Father. Denizens of a shaky world, they wish they could hear again the decisive tread of his square-toed boots, glimpse once more his stern and hairy visage. Gone is the old belief that when father and son come to blows, all right is on the son's side.

Philip Henderson's new biography of Samuel Butler expresses perfectly the new trend in paterology. It is also the first book on Butler in which the father-son relationship is examined coolly, justly and with malice toward none.

Love as Blackmail. Butler was born in 1835, two years before Queen Victoria was crowned. His father, Canon Thomas Butler, was himself a bishop's son--a man who took for granted that his own filial piety would be duplicated in his children. Samuel's mother was also typical of her class and times, i.e., everything a mother of the 19503 tries not to be. It was mother Butler's custom to treat little Sam to "sofa talks"--long, cozy, heart-to-heart, during which he was made to "feel guilty for not being sufficiently grateful for all his parents had done for him." It was also mother Butler's habit to extract confidences from Sam and then pass them on to her formidable husband. If the canon disliked what he heard, and he usually did, Sam got a thrashing. He grew up with the unshakable convictions that 1) all male authority is brutal and despicable, and 2) all female love is a form of blackmail.

Sam quickly learned to hold out against his mother. He had a good ear for unintentional humor, and when mother Butler urged him to have "his loins girt about with the breastplate of purity," she made herself ridiculous in his eyes. But the canon was much too tough to be soluble in comedy. Young Sam would have liked nothing better than to win him over and impress him, but he always failed. Sam disappointed his father by refusing to become a clergyman; the canon infuriated Sam by pestering him mercilessly about his future intentions. As Sam had no idea what these should be, his numerous suggestions only made the canon more cantankerous. Cotton-farming in Liberia, bookselling, homeopathic medicine, farming, the army, schoolmastering and painting--all passed in review, until the canon blew up. "Not one sixpence will you receive from me," he wrote, "till you come to your senses."

Milk as an Economy. Butler never forgave his father for using the power of money to force him into submission. Financed by the canon, he emigrated to New Zealand, bought a sheep farm, doubled his father's capital in a few years and returned to England. Unfortunately for the canon, it was while sheep-farming that Sam stumbled on a new and revolutionary tome entitled On the Origin of Species. Evolution became Sam's creed, because he interpreted it to signify "the new form of life struggling for survival against the strangling grip of the old."

"He talks of writing," the canon once wrote scornfully, "but ... he has not that in him that will be read. He is too bumptious." If the canon was wildly wrong in this, he was no more so than his son, who believed that once he became a success his father would love him. When he wrote Erewhon, that classic satire on the Victorian commingling of money and religion, he expected his father and mother to shower him with congratulations. He was furious when the canon wrote: "We should heartily rejoice to find [your success] as ephemeral as I am yet disposed to hope and believe it may be."

Butler's London life was organized to be as much unlike the canon's as possible. He and his lawyer-composer friend. Festing Jones, kept and shared a Frenchwoman named Lucie Dumas, and for 20 years Butler visited her every Wednesday, Jones every Tuesday. There were no "sofa talks" with Lucie. Butler went 15 years without telling her his name and address.

The ludicrous side of Butler's father complex came out in a host of naughty-boy antics and pranks. At venerable scientific meetings, he and Jones would sit in the front row and ostentatiously unfold The Sporting Times. Because Beethoven and Michelangelo ranked as fathers of music and sculpture, Butler and Jones despised them both. Even on his carefree travels abroad. Butler carried the detested image of supreme authority, ridiculed it at every opportunity. Asked by a bachelor Turk if marriage was a desirable thing. Butler firmly said no. He added that "a friend in England had asked the Archbishop of Canterbury the very same question, and the archbishop had replied that . . . it was cheaper to buy milk than to keep a cow." Deeply impressed by the archbishop's wisdom, the Turk cried: "Ah! Ah! That is a most true word."

The canon's death in 1886 was an unmitigated pleasure to Butler. It brought him a handsome income and mysteriously relieved him of a chronic swelling in his neck and inexplicable "noises" in his head. It also gave him a chance to mellow, and people who met the notorious scoffer were astonished by his gentle manner, his patience and industry, his devotion to cats. He did not consent to die himself until he had arranged, glossed and edited every collectible scrap of his correspondence with the canon.

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