Which is as near to a moral as is likely to be drawn from the text and
illustration gathered in this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly. The topic is better addressed
with memoir and biography than with a manifesto or a sermon. But during the
forthcoming election year, we can expect repeated reference to “family values” in
the campaign speeches offering safe return to the real America down home in a
painting by Norman rockwell (page 76), and so it’s worth at least the hazard of a
guess as to what the words mean. Which families, and what values? The Kennedys
playing football in McLean, Virginia (page 51)? The Corleones contemplating a
murder on Long Island (Long Beach, NY, page 172)? Joan Crawford reading to her
children from A Day in Fairy Land (page 33)?
The familiar phrase tends to find me at a loss because the family values
that I take to be my own are four hundred years behind the times, more in line
with those espoused by Lord Bacon than with those that sustain the ratings
of television situation comedy. I was born into a family derived from ancestors
who had settled in New England in the 1630s,
brought up listening to stories told about the
risings and reversals of its fortunes with the
passing of the generations—of honor won at
Bunker Hill and Saratoga, reputation lost in
the War of 1812; of ship captains in the early
China trade, some of whom died safe and rich
at home in Maine, others reported missing at
sea somewhere west of Hawaii and east of Borneo. The great-grandfather for
whom I was named in 1935 had been a founder of what became the texas oil
Company, which supplied him with a store of wealth that his eldest son, a gambler
and a sportsman, managed to utterly destroy. During my grandfather’s term as
mayor of San Francisco in the 1940s, various members of the extended family
(never-before-seen in-laws, near and distant cousins) gathered for Christmas
at his house on Jackson Street to play cards and talk about City Hall politics
and the war. Instead of saying grace, my grandfather was given to declaiming
“The Wreck of the Hesperus” or “The Shooting of Dan Mcgrew”; the younger
children were expected to know, and if called upon to stand on their chairs and
recite, the verses of rudyard Kipling or Lewis Carroll. runs of bad luck were to
be expected, as it was to be expected that the Walrus and the Carpenter would
dine on oysters, or that at least one of the grandchildren would topple face down
into the fruit bowl or the soup. to my limited understanding at the age of ten,
family was simply the way things were, all present hostages to fortune, value
measured out in the uneven distribution of power rather than in a scale of justice
or by the degrees of sentiment.
I was fifteen before I saw any form of television, twenty by the time I was
properly introduced to the nuclear American family happily in residence on
network television—Mom and Dad, both white and presumably Protestant,
content in their love for one another, his steadiness of heart and mind matched by
her comforting spirit and competent managing of the household that was clean,
well-lit, above all nice; two children, both adorable and neither of them known to
the police; no crippling disease or black people anywhere in sight; nobody talking
about money.
The family is the test of freedom, because the
family is the only thing that the free man
makes for himself and by himself.
