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
