Quoters of Precedents

FATHERS TO SONS edited by Alan Valentine. 237 pages. University of Oklahoma. $4.95.

It is the destiny of growing sons, as Baudelaire pointed out, to suffer stoically if not gladly those "quoters of precedents," their fathers. In later life they are free to roast the old man in novels--and frequently do. Fathers, on the other hand, have the advantage of letters. They may not noticeably influence their sons, but instruction is not the prime purpose of a father-to-son letter: its real business is to justify a father to himself--and sometimes to his society--in what Alan Valentine justly calls "the most demanding and least apprenticed" of professions.

Piety and Expedience. In this lively collection. Valentine, formerly president of the University of Rochester, offers a sampling of paternal advice, reproach and exhortation from the 14th century to the present day. At their most fascinating, the letters sketch whole chapters of social history in a few lines. "You ought to aim at being a good ecclesiastic," writes that arch-politician Lorenzo de' Medici in 1492 to the teen-age son he has just seen made a cardinal, "nor will it be difficult for you to favor your family"--thus suggesting the marriage of piety and expedience that so corrupted the Roman Catholic church and led at last to the Reformation. "Practice all the arts that ever coquette did, to please," writes the Earl of Chesterfield to his son Philip in 1752; "be alert and indefatigable in making every man admire, and every woman in love with you"--and the lines might serve as a maxim for all the ambitious nobles insinuating themselves to favor in the British court of George II.

In pre-Freudian days, Author Valentine points out, fathers were often considerably freer and franker with their advice than they are today. He includes Benjamin Franklin's famed advice in 1745, listing the advantages of an elderly mistress: "The pleasure of corporal enjoyment with an old woman is at least equal and frequently superior, every knack being by practice capable of improvement." The Earl of Pembroke, anxious to see his son restore the family fortunes by settling into a good marriage instead of a military career, writes with Georgian bluntness: "I wish you would draw, not your sword, but your precious member . . ."

A Bad Low Animal. It is a rare father who appreciates a son with a talent better than his own. The Scottish Alexander Boswell, annoyed with Son James's apparently aimless career, writes in 1763 barely two weeks after James's famous meeting with Samuel Johnson: "Be more on guard for the future against mimicry, journals and publications, and endeavor to find out some person of worth who may be a friend." Heinrich Marx, a prosperous lawyer, rebukes his son Karl in 1837 for turning into a drone at the university and sadly agrees with the boy's mother that "if Karl, instead of writing a lot about Capital, made a lot of Capital, it would be much better."

The days are gone when a father could write to a 19-year-old son to "form no plans; your mama and I have been thinking and planning for you" (from the Rev. Jedidiah Morse in 1810). Nowadays, says Author Valentine, fathers are simply too unsure of themselves to write really rattling letters to any son past the age of twelve. Significantly, the best letters toward the end of the book are the ones written to small children, including the notes from Kenneth Grahame to his four-year-old son Alistair that were the genesis of The Wind in the Willows. "My Darling Mouse--Have you heard about the toad? He has vanished and everyone is looking for him, including the police. I fear he is a bad low animal."

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