The Wit’s Guide to Parents

Or, coastal shelf help

Jun 13, 2024

*Portrait of the Artist’s Parents, Perhaps Without Consent?, Philipp Otto Runge, 1806*

The horrible thing about parents, as devoted non-breeder Philip Larkin memorably pointed out, is that they tend to pass their suffering down through the generations. “Man hands on misery to man,” he laments. “It deepens like a coastal shelf.”

“The first half of our life is ruined by our parents and the second half by our children.”
― Clarence Darrow

If you buy that diagnosis, then in Alexander Waugh’s excellent 2004 memoir Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family, there’s a cure: Pass the misery back, not forward. Throw the bad apples up the family tree. Don’t blame your parents; blame your parents’ parents’ parents. And make fun of them with your kids.

“Parenting has a lie built right into its name: we should’ve called it childing, because that’s who is in charge.”
― Agnes Callard

The Waughs certainly can’t claim any parenting awards and they rarely consider any ancestor without a Y chromosome, but they excel in (male) genealogy. At an early age Alexander memorized a list of his ancestors (“...James begat Alex, the ‘Brute’; the Brute begat Arthur; and Arthur begat Evelyn; and Evelyn begat Auberon who (besides better begettings) begat me”) and he insists that knowing your lineage is the only real way to know yourself.

“My theory is, children should be born without parents — if born they must be.’”
― Langston Hughes

On the same tack, his tremendously witty father Auberon described people who didn’t want to know anything about their ancestors as evil — extreme but understandable for the heir to a tremendous literary legacy, calculated at 180 books produced by nine Waughs since his great-grandfather’s first publication in 1888. The Waughs have a wealth of material to work with, and they bond by ripping it apart, together.

“The incomparable stupidity of life teaches us to love our parents; divine philosophy teaches us to forgive them.”
― George Moore

Evelyn Waugh believed his horrible father to be “ineffably silly”; Auberon called the same man rubbish and would read aloud a particularly bad passage of his writing at the dinner table; Alex calls this work “the feeblest, the most inane, and the most irredeemably second-rate paragraph that any man has yet committed to the pages of an autobiography.” Son, father, and grandfather unite in piling on great-grandfather. As Auberon wrote, “Nobody can hope to control what is written or said about them after they are dead. Far better that people should at least be writing or saying something.”

“Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents’ shortcomings.’”
― Laurence J. Peter

The Waugh family’s love of ancestral knowledge really comes down to understanding that we were all imperfectly parented because that’s the only kind of parenting there is. That same logic animates a whole family of quips born by flipping the parent-child role, as follows:

“If one is not going to take the necessary precautions to avoid having parents, one must undertake to bring them up.’”
― Quentin Crisp
“Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfill the promise of their early years.’”
― Anthony Powell
“Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.’”
― Muriel Spark

“To understand how a man behaves as a father it is useful to know how he was treated as a son,” Alexander Waugh writes, though he admits that a thorough understanding would require going back to either “the greedy apple-scoffer of Genesis” or “the first protoplasmal, primordial, atomic globule of the paternal line.” Most of us lack detailed family histories to consult, but happily there’s a shortcut: Only when you’re an adult can you realize your parents are children.

In last week’s Wit’s Guide to Bumper Stickers, we celebrated the sublimely adhesive work of Evan Doherty. The artist behind ArcaneBullshit.com admirably answered my questions as follows:

How’d you get into the bumper sticker business?
It was kind of by accident. I ran a Kickstarter for some shirts I had designed, and as one of the extra rewards I made some bumper stickers. They sold really well, so I just kept making more.

Are we living through a bumper sticker renaissance?
It seems like it! For me it kind of feels like all the apocalyptic sentiments out there have folks saying "fuck it, you only live once, I'm going to make my car as ridiculous as I feel." I think it's also an extension of meme culture—people are looking for little bite-sized bits of media that make us look at things in new ways.

What’s your all-time favourite bumper sticker? Best classic and best new wave?
I'm a big fan of some of the modern ironic twists on classics, like “my other car is an honor student” and "Keep honking, I'm listening to honking.” I’m not sure who to credit for those, since they've been ripped off so much. The more a joke gets removed from its original context, the funnier it is for me.

If people don’t have cars, where should they put bumper stickers?
They work great on guitar cases, guitars, skateboards, the old fridge you keep in your garage, the weird crate you keep under your floorboards that contains an ancient evil, etc.

When you see a car with bumper stickers, what does it say about the owner?
Like I said, I think it says that they are just tired of the status quo—a dull, empty bumper, and they just want to fuck things up a little. Having said that, I do not have any bumper stickers on my car. Mainly for the same reason I don't have any tattoos, because I can't decide on anything I like enough to commit to for that long.

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“All children alarm their parents, if only because you are forever expecting to encounter yourself.’”
― Gore Vidal

Or in the words of Martin Amis, notable child: “He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.” So, next week?

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That was issue 258 of Get Wit Quick, timed for Father’s Day only by accident, I promise.

ken whyte

led me to read Fathers and Sons with a great issue on that book a few months back. The last pages of that book feature a letter from Alexander Waugh to his six-year-old son, in which he offers these three nuggets of advice: