Cherry Blossom Salad

“Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.”

Sometimes I feel like I’ve read every book. This isn’t true at all, more like a bucket of water from the ocean, but I have read (or started to read and dismissed) most of the British and American “classics.” So I was surprised to find a Victorian I hadn’t read: The Way of All Flesh.

Train of thought – looking for The Forsyte Saga at Tsutaya, not finding it, deciding to go home and read The Forsyte Saga even though I reread it last year and it is really not that good, thinking about books in the same style, thinking oh have I actually read that?

“Yet when a man is very fond of his money it is not easy for him at all times to be very fond of his children also.”

Expectations: light satire and family drama, Galsworthy and early Forster. Reality: child abuse and barely repressed homosexuality. Its direct style felt modern, closer to Waugh than Dickens. Families, and the Society that is built on them, are held together by fear, guilt, and physical violence. The book’s “hero,” Ernest Pontifex, is abused by his father and by his religion until he finds a better way to live.

“Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.”

Literature is full of unhappy families, what surprised me was Butler’s solution to the problem. Ernest gives his children to someone else to raise and retreats to live with a small circle of unmarried men. Immediately after finishing, I hit wikipedia to see if Samuel Butler was gay.

“There is nothing an old bachelor likes better than to find a young married man who wishes he had not got married-”

Confirmed bachelor.