William Borman is away on paternity leave, and so once again I, the editor, find myself sitting at the publisher’s desk. The small staff of The Lamp is now only one child away from being able to field a football team.
For reasons I have discussed in a previous issue (“Deep Blue Air,” Septuagesima 2021), I am not very interested in the literature of demographic scaremongering. Behind a lot of the talk about birth rates and such, there is often a quiet but unmistakable element of self-aggrandizement. Those of us who have what these days pass for large-ish families should be wary of sounding like the Pharisee in Saint Luke’s Gospel, who thanked God that he was “not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican.”
When Billy writes this column, he is good at gradually teasing out fortuitous connections between the various pieces he is introducing. I am less clever. As this issue was going to press, I realized that without intending to do so, we had put together a magazine full of pieces about the relationship between parents—especially fathers—and their children. David Womersley (page 33) revisits King Lear, perhaps the finest meditation on the subject in the whole of literature. Merlin Holland (page 11) writes about his grandfather Oscar Wilde, whose sons were told that their father had died years before one of them learned of his actual demise by reading the newspaper. And Christopher Caldwell reviews a new biography of Tennyson (page 43), whose father was a vicious drunkard who today would almost certainly have been prosecuted for child abuse. But of course for some of us the great poet of childhood misery will always be Philip Larkin, even though he eventually became sick of hearing people quote “This Be the Verse.” For my own part I have always preferred Adrian Mitchell’s delightful parody:
They tuck you up, your Mum and Dad.
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.
They were tucked up when they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.
Man hands on happiness to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.
Thank goodness, then, that Bethel McGrew’s recollections of her father’s library (page 39) are much more in this spirit.
