I was perusing the Modern Library’s list of the 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century, and I noticed that most of the novels had been made into a movie or a television miniseries, as would be expected. One exception that stood out was The Way of All Flesh. There was a movie entitled The Way of All Flesh made in 1927 and remade in 1940, but it had nothing to do with the novel in question. And so, while it can be useful to compare a novel with the movie that was based on it, in this case it might be worth considering why no such movie based on this novel exists or ever will.
The author of this novel was Samuel Butler, who published it posthumously. He knew that many people would find it offensive, especially members of his own family, and he did not want to have to deal with that, for as the Modern Library indicates, the novel is semi-autobiographical.
Most discussions of this novel emphasize that it is Victorian, as if to say that its significance is restricted to England in the nineteenth century. In the description given by the Modern Library, it is said to be a “depiction of the hypocrisy underlying nineteenth-century domestic life.” While it is true that the story is set in England in the nineteenth century, it hardly follows that the import of this novel is limited to that place and period. In fact, regardless of the place or period in which a novel was written, if it is said to be worth reading, pains are usually taken to say that it transcends its setting, emphasizing the universal truths contained therein, assuring the reader that it has something to say to us today, though it was written long ago. But just the opposite is done with The Way of All Flesh. By narrowing its scope and relevance to a single century in a single country, those reviewing it give assurances that we today need have no concern that it applies to us.
The principal theme of this novel is its hatred of parents. This is the reason Butler never married. It is not unusual for someone not to want to have children, but in his case, it was more a matter of not wanting to become a parent, the thing he most despised.
We are not supposed to criticize our parents. It is a sin so grievous as to be forbidden in the Ten Commandments. Therefore, Butler’s fictional narrator, Edward Overton, has nothing bad to say about his own parents, except, perhaps, when his sisters give him a look, telling him not to disagree with their father, lest doing so lead to much unpleasantness.
Instead, Overton tells us about the Pontifex family covering five generations. As he does so, he is able to digress on the different ways parents can make their children miserable, including everything from thrashing them, belittling them, imposing expectations on them, reminding them of how much has been sacrificed for their sake, making them feel guilty when they fall short, and controlling them through will-dangling. Nor does he restrict himself solely to the Pontifex clan, but from time to time allows us a peek at other families whose relationships between parents and children are also less than felicitous. In so doing, Butler makes it clear that his novel is not about one bad parent in relation to one unfortunate child but rather is about parents in general and all the unhappiness they inflict on their offspring.
It is this that makes the novel unacceptable as material for a movie. By way of contrast, consider the movie Mommie Dearest (1981), based on the tell-all book by Christina Crawford, in which we learn what a terrible mother Joan Crawford was. Aside from the criticisms of the book and of the movie, one thing is clear: it is only about one bad parent, from which no inferences are supposed to be drawn about parents in general.
Furthermore, Joan Crawford was Christina’s adoptive mother, which is pretty much the same as a stepmother, the difference between the two being more a legal matter than a moral one. As with fairytales, so too with movies, it is acceptable to have an evil parent if he or she is a stepparent, as, for example, David Copperfield (1935), Double Indemnity, (1944), Peyton Place (1957) or, of course, The Stepfather (1987).
Biological parents in a movie might also be evil, provided their children are adults. Old Man Clanton (Walter Brennan) is a badman with children in My Darling Clementine (1946), but that’s all right since all his children are adults and just as bad as he is. But a truly evil person is usually not allowed to be the biological parent of a young child.
One reason for this is that it would ruin the good feeling we get when that evil person is killed in the end. Consider the movie Shane (1953). We are given to understand that the Ryker ranch is owned by the two Ryker brothers, who live there alone, except for the hired hands. Now imagine somewhat younger Ryker brothers, who have wives and young children at home. At the end of the movie, after Shane has killed the two brothers and ridden off into the mountains, there are widows and fatherless children back at the ranch, with perhaps a five-year-old girl asking her mommy, “What happened to Daddy?”
In reality, we know that evil people have children just like everyone else, but we don’t like to think about that, and we certainly don’t want to see it in a movie, where something deep inside us insists on the redemptive effect that a young child confers on his or her parent.
If the relationship between parent and child, especially that between father and son, is as awful as Butler would have us believe, can we imagine that the family as a whole could possibly be a happy one? Of course not. Butler also portrays marriage as something best avoided, along with the children that arise from it, although the requisite wisdom to do so is usually acquired only after it is too late.
This attitude of misogamy is fully expressed by the character Alethea, whom Overton refers to as a freethinker. She is perhaps the nicest person in the novel. She and Overton were friends as children. He says he proposed to her several times, but she refused to marry him or anyone else. She has nothing against men. She just doesn’t want to be married. Thanks to the money she inherited, she does not have to work for a living or depend on a husband to support her.
And how much money was that? Well, converting pounds in the middle of the nineteenth century to dollars in the twenty-first is a dubious endeavor, but Alethea’s net worth of £20,000 would be the equivalent of about $3,500,000 today. Invested as it was in sound securities, this provided her with an annual income of £900, or $150,000 per year today.
In fact, everyone in the Pontifex family is well off, financially speaking, so that those who are employed in one manner or another are so by choice. Like Alethea, Overton also appears to be well-fixed, although he presumably derives additional income as a playwright.
Alethea is very fond of her nephew Ernest Pontifex, the central character of the novel, and he is fond of her. In fact, the best relationship between an adult and a child in this novel is that between Alethea and Ernest, much in the way that the best relationship between a man and a woman in this novel is that between Overton and Alethea. Overton does not say so, but given the overall attitude about family relationships in this novel, we cannot help but suspect that Alethea and Ernest might not have gotten on so well had she been his mother, just as Overton and Alethea might not have gotten along so well had they been married.
Before Alethea died, she left the bulk of her estate to be held in trust by Overton on behalf of Ernest, his godson. The money was to be turned over to Ernest when he reached the age of twenty-eight. Ernest knew nothing of this. Alethea was wise in realizing that Ernest might foolishly fritter it all away were he to receive it at the age of twenty-one, as indeed he would have.
Overton speculates that life would be ever so much easier if the generations never knew one another personally, but rather parents died before their children were born:
Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?
The Way of All Flesh is also irreligious, which is not surprising since Butler was an atheist. However, Butler’s feelings about parents and his attitude toward religion are not two independent features of this novel, but rather are closely related, which is hardly surprising given the metaphor of God as our Father in Heaven. Talking about God is an indirect way of talking about man, and so it is that just as a father may feel he has the right to impose his will on his son, so too is God conceived of as having the right to impose his will on man. And just as that same father may be fully convinced that he is only acting in the best interest of his son, so too does God act with a complete sense of righteousness, regardless of what misery may have to be endured by those who are subjected to it.
Alethea’s brother, Theobald, father of Ernest, is a clergyman, and as such, he fully embraces the idea that instilling obedience to God in his son is the best way to ensure obedience to himself, and so it is, as Overton puts it, “Before Ernest could well crawl, he was taught to kneel.” Nevertheless, as the years go by, Theobald becomes so disappointed with the way Ernest has turned out that he is sure that if the little Egyptians had been like his own ungrateful child, their parents would have regarded the tenth plague as a blessing.
After several chapters covering the years of Ernest’s childhood, during which time he is made to feel bad about what a disappointment he is to his mother and father, he eventually comes to have a “cordial and active dislike for both his parents,” a sign that he has acquired the maturity of an adult.
When Ernest’s grandfather died, it was discovered that he had set aside £2500 for Ernest, which was to accumulate in the hands of trustees. When he came of age, it had increased to £5000 (about $730,000 today), providing him with an income of £250 per year ($36,500), enough to guarantee his independence from his father, financially speaking, that is. Psychologically speaking, that was another matter entirely:
So strong was the hold which habit and association held over both father and son, that the one considered he had as good a right as ever to dictate, and the other that he had as little right as ever to gainsay.
Later in the novel, Overton quotes Ernest bemoaning the hold parents have over their children:
“There are orphanages,” he exclaimed to himself, “for children who have lost their parents—oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?”
Ernest at first intends to be a clergyman like his father, but in his religious enthusiasm, he allows himself to be swindled out of all his money. Furthermore, his belief that he should be celibate rather than marry is eventually too much for him. When his faith is weakened by a few comments from a freethinker, he makes advances on a young woman whom he imagines is a prostitute, only to alarm her so much that it all snowballs into a charge of sexual assault, for which he is sentenced to six months hard labor. In the end, he becomes an atheist.
The attack on religion throughout this novel would, by itself, have been enough to preclude the possibility of The Way of All Flesh being made into a movie when the Production Code was in force, but censorship still exists informally, as the profit motive makes producers loath to offend a potential audience. As Overton puts it, in another context, a lot of people would dislike seeing Christianity despised just as much as they would dislike seeing it practiced. Nevertheless, Butler’s hostility toward parenthood remains the greater obstacle to there ever being a movie version of this book, as much today as in the past.
Speaking of which, once Theobald learns of Ernest’s imprisonment, he disowns him, telling Overton he never wants to hear from Ernest again. When Ernest and Overton discuss this while he is still in prison, he begins to gather that Overton does not like his parents. Overton says he not only does not like them, but thinks they are horrid. It is a great relief to Ernest on hearing this. Overton goes on to say that except for Ernest and Alethea, the entire Pontifex family is horrid. But lest we think that this is the full extent of Overton’s willingness to generalize about familial relationships in this derisive fashion, he continues: “The greater part of every family is always odious; if there are one or two good ones in a very large family, it is as much as can be expected.”
Back when Ernest was still living at home, the family had a maid named Ellen, who was quite pretty. When it became obvious that she was pregnant, Theobald fired her. She is not heard from again until after Ernest gets out of prison and runs into her in the street. One thing and another, he falls in love with her, and they get married. It never occurs to Ernest to inquire as to the child she must have had, and the novel is silent on the matter as well. In any event, the marriage at first seems to be a good one, but after she has two children by Ernest, it turns out that she is an alcoholic and becomes impossible to live with. Ernest thinks he is doomed, but it happens that it was John, the Pontifex coachman, who got her pregnant and eventually married her, thus rendering her marriage to Ernest invalid. She takes off to America with some guy with whom she intends to live in sin and is never heard from again.
At this point, Ernest is less than two years away from receiving the money Overton is holding in trust for him, which by now has increased to £70,000, roughly equivalent to $10,000,000 today. Needless to say, this would have been sufficient for Ernest to take care of his two children, either by himself, since there would be no need for him to have a job, or by hiring a governess, if he didn’t want to be bothered.
But even that would not do, as far as Ernest is concerned. He decides that his children, being illegitimate, will be better off being brought up among the poor, so he decides to pay a couple that already has children £1 a week, the equivalent of $145 today, and they “jumped at the offer.” His ultimate reason for not wanting to have anything to do with his children, as he explains to Overton, is the following:
“I shall be just as unkind to my children,” he said, “as my grandfather was to my father, or my father to me. If they did not succeed in making their children love them, neither shall I. I say to myself that I should like to do so, but so did they. I can make sure that they shall not know how much they would have hated me if they had had much to do with me, but this is all I can do.”
If someone were to offer such an explanation for abandoning his children in real life, we should doubtless regard it as specious reasoning to a self-serving end. But in the context of this novel, we are supposed to take Ernest seriously. He does not want to be a parent because it poisons the soul.
At any rate, now that Ernest has made a clean break with his parents, been freed of marriage to Ellen, and is rid of his children, it would seem that the path is now clear for him to live a happy, carefree life. But then he receives a letter from his father saying that his mother Christina is dying and he must come to see her. When he arrives, she is glad to see him, but his father, brother, and sister all do what they can to make Ernest miserable again.
Early in the novel, Theobald, as a clergyman, visited a woman that was dying. One might suppose that her religion, promising the hope of a future life, would be comforting to her. Instead, her last few days are made even more miserable by her fear of spending eternity in Hell. Theobald utters some platitudes about her being forgiven of her sins, but far from reassured, the woman fears otherwise.
“Can’t you tell me, Sir,” she exclaims piteously, as she sees that he is preparing to go away, “can’t you tell me that there is no Day of Judgement, and that there is no such place as Hell? I can do without the Heaven, Sir, but I cannot do with the Hell.” Theobald is much shocked.
“Mrs. Thompson,” he rejoins impressively, “let me implore you to suffer no doubt concerning these two cornerstones of our religion to cross your mind at a moment like the present. If there is one thing more certain than another it is that we shall all appear before the Judgement Seat of Christ, and that the wicked will be consumed in a lake of everlasting fire. Doubt this, Mrs. Thompson, and you are lost.”
And now it is Christina who is filled with the same dread. Although no longer believing in Christianity himself, Ernest reassures her that she has been the most “devotedly unselfish wife and mother that ever lived,” that she has done all that was humanly possible.
At these words Christina brightened. “You give me hope, you give me hope,” she cried, and dried her eyes. She made him assure her over and over again that this was his solemn conviction; she did not care about being a distinguished saint now; she would be quite content to be among the meanest who actually got into Heaven, provided she could make sure of escaping that awful Hell. The fear of this evidently was omnipresent with her, and in spite of all Ernest could say he did not quite dispel it.
Such are the consolations of religion.
Notwithstanding all that Ernest does to assure his mother that she is a saint, she nevertheless suspects that if she does go to Heaven, he will be the only one of her children that she will not meet there.
After a few more days, she dies.
During his stay, Ernest can see that of the remaining members of the household—his brother Joey, his sister Charlotte, and his father Theobald—none of them like one another, much as they do not like Ernest. Years later, when Theobald dies, none of his children are sorry.
And so it is that, except for an occasional bad dream in which Ernest is bothered by some member of his family, either still living or now deceased, he is finally free of the lot of them, and given his wealth, he can at last “afford the luxury of a quiet unobtrusive life of self-indulgence.”
It often happens when someone becomes an atheist that he begins to attach a secular significance to what had previously been understood as having a supernatural meaning. As Schopenhauer said, strictly speaking, all religions are false; allegorically speaking, all religions are true. After Ernest got out of prison and decided to break away from his parents, Overton made the following observation:
When I think over all that Ernest told me about his prison meditations, and the conclusions he was drawn to, it occurs to me that in reality he was wanting to do the very last thing which it would have entered into his head to think of wanting. I mean that he was trying to give up father and mother for Christ’s sake. He would have said he was giving them up because he thought they hindered him in the pursuit of his truest and most lasting happiness. Granted, but what is this if it is not Christ? What is Christ if He is not this? He who takes the highest and most self-respecting view of his own welfare which it is in his power to conceive, and adheres to it in spite of conventionality, is a Christian whether he knows it and calls himself one, or whether he does not. A rose is not the less a rose because it does not know its own name.
So, whereas for a Christian, “Christ” refers to the Son of God, whose death on the cross makes possible the salvation of mankind and eternal life in Heaven, for Overton, Butler’s atheistic narrator, “Christ” denotes a secular salvation, the good life here on Earth. This would also be the meaning that Ernest would attach to it, had his conversion to atheism not been so recent.
The passage in the Bible that Overton alludes to is Luke 14:26: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”
Now that we have reached the end of this novel, it would seem that the secular meaning Butler would attach to these words is the following: to be completely rid of one’s family is the surest path to a happy life.
disinterestedspectator 