Bar Sinister

 

            The abrasive metal file is an ancient tool, the ancient English name of which (feol) has changed little since the days of the Anglo-Saxon bards who in their search  for involuted and ingenious ways to denote the deadly weapons of their warriors would call a sword “the leavings of the file”—what was left of the iron when the file had done its work.  Long before I learned that, though, I learned in a metal shop class in school another strange philological file fact.  Our teacher, an old guy who had once been a lathe machinist turning parts for Model Ts, introduced us to something called a flat bastard, a heavy hand file of medium coarseness suitable for lots of ordinary jobs.  The tool’s name, first recorded in 1677, is very racy, as this guy knew.  The word bastard was ordinarily serious profanity, unutterable by the civilized.

 

            That was probably seventy years ago.  Since then the very concept of serious profanity has disappeared from our culture.  No Hollywood movie has even a chance of success without drowning its audience in a cesspool of former obscenities now so commonplace as to have lost any shock value.  This once forbidden vocabulary is but  imperfectly replaced in daily speech by a few political shibboleths and unutterable verbal thought crimes.  The anecdote can serve to introduce today’s subject, however, because it can suggest just how recently the topics of bastardy and illegitimacy, along with others relating to sexual matters, were often considered taboo.  Recent figures suggest that each year about a million American children are born out of wedlock.  It is hardly any longer a matter of notice from the ethical point of view, except to the extent that children of single mothers are, from the statistical point of view, alarmingly threatened by poverty and its associated social pathologies.

 

            The revolutionary character of the shift in social attitudes would be difficult to exaggerate, as becomes apparent from reading almost anything in our older literature.  Think of the bastard Edmund in King Lear.  His bastardy is not merely a social awkwardness or family embarrassment: it is an essential, malign moral state.  Even today, to the extent one hears the word bastard at all, it is as a generalized term of moral opprobrium having nothing to do with the marital circumstances of parents.  If there is a dangerous social myopia in contemporary attitudes—as I think there is—things were hardly better in the good old days of penitentiaries, orphanages, workhouses, and orphan trains.

            Last week, more or less by accident, I found myself praising Fielding’s Tom Jones.  I don’t know if I ever persuade anybody else to look at books I talk about, but I am great at persuading myself.  So I took it down from the shelf.  The opening chapters are especially good.  At the same time winter is really setting in.  We are pretty well locked down.  We go practically nowhere and don’t do much that is memorable.  Instead of just walking, I now spend my exercise hours gathering and processing firewood Carpathian-peasant style, so we enjoy supper around a blazing hearth most nights.  Joan suggested that we revive an old custom: reading aloud at the fireside some good poetry, or a chapter or two of a Dickens novel.  But which novel?  There are so many good ones.

 

            In the background through all this there is in our household, as probably in most in the country, a disquieting undercurrent of political anxiety exacerbated by the uncertainties of the pandemic.  For us, the anxiety is easily expandable to England where friends, and one in particular, keep us abreast of the perceived high crimes and misdemeanors of the embattled British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.  In one blistering critique forwarded to us by our friend, Mr. Johnson was somehow brought into comparison with Oliver Twist in one of his more hapless phases.  That was the sign from heaven we were looking for.  The next night’s fireside reading had been chosen for us.

 

            Such were the circumstances in which I was re-encountering, more or less simultaneously,  two classic English novels—one from the mid-eighteenth and the other the mid-nineteenth century—which both open with essentially the same situation.  That  situation is the fallout in proper society from the perplexing and scandalous imposition of a presumably bastard baby.  The actual title of Fielding’s novel is The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.  A foundling was just that, an abandoned newborn that somebody found dumped on a trash heap or in a wicker basket at the scullery door or (the best case scenario, but still not all that great) secretly delivered to the Foundling Hospital.  In Tom Jones, Squire Allworthy finds the infant in his own bed!  Such things, though not unknown today, are no longer commonplace.  They once were, and until surprisingly recently.  We actually witness the birth of the luckless lad who would become Oliver Twist—a birth fatal to his mother—in a hideous charitable institution recognizable from its current heirs in the  “Family Services” lineage.  For both these babes the question is the same: Who is the father?

 

            This is a wonderful device to kickstart any narrative.  Readers know from the beginning that there is somewhere they will eventually have to go.  The journey is a long one, especially in Tom Jones.  Both Fielding and Dickens were Christian humanists who seldom disguised their own moral perspective.  Both were unsparing in their satirical treatment of hypocrisy and self-righteousness, of which there is plenty on display in both their books.  Dickens can be downright brutal.  Yet at the same time you know from the start that somehow even for these great-hearted writers these babes will not be allowed to be what they seem—two more bastard children among so many others.  From Sophocles to Shakespeare, through epic, through romance, through our folklore, “good” blood will out.  The princeling raised by shepherds will eventually reaffirm his majesty.  The birthmark, barely noticeable, is irradicable. 

 

            I lack the space, and certainly the competence, to deal with the serious studies of family structure to which so much of the attention of anthropologists has been devoted.  The variety of  human experience may seem nearly infinite, but for most of the world for most of recorded history the prevailing attitudes toward human procreation have been dominated by long established and long-lasting concepts of legitimacy, a word invoking both laws man-made and those thought to be revealed in Nature.  If the societies of the West are fundamentally abandoning that view, that is real news.  History is a patchwork of stasis and change.  Change itself can be minor or major, gradual or abrupt.  It can involve material reality or mental constructs.  I doubt that metal shop still exists in any high school today.  Nor is much industrial machining done in this country, especially with the use of hand files.  A flat bastard might amuse a teen-ager these days, but would hardly shock or titillate one.  Now Heaven knows, anything goes.