Strike the Father Dead by John Wain

First published: 1962

Type of work: Bildungsroman

Time of work: 1942-1959

Locale: London, Paris, and an unnamed provincial university town in England

Principal Characters:

• Alfred Coleman, a professor of classics
• Eleanor Coleman, his sister
• Jeremy Coleman, his son, a jazz pianist
• Percy Brett, a trombone player and a friend of Jeremy
• Tim, a likable rogue and a friend of Jeremy

The Novel

Strike the Father Dead is the story of a son’s rebellion against the moral values and way of life represented by his father and his assertion of his right to determine his own destiny. It covers a period of approximately seventeen years, from the time that Jeremy Coleman, as a seventeen-year-old boy, runs away from home to live his own life. The novel is told principally from three different first-person points of view, those of the father, Alfred Coleman, his sister Eleanor, and the son.

The novel opens with Alfred reflecting on the humiliating situation of having a son who has rejected him. His colleagues have been kind, but he feels the odor of scandal settling about him and the family name. The narrative is then taken up by Eleanor, as she recalls the fateful Sunday when an article appeared in a cheap newspaper, showing Jeremy playing the piano in what the paper described as a den of vice in London.

The narrative now passes to Jeremy, looking back as a mature man on his feelings and his actions just before he ran away from home. He tells of one eventful evening in which he made his first visit to a dance hall, became drunk for the first time, attempted to seduce a woman, and got involved in a fight. He came home late, bruised, to his aunt’s sympathy and his father’s stern but reasoned disapproval. The rift between them had for some time been wide: Alfred lived according to strict standards of duty, hard work, and service to others and could not understand his son’s waywardness. After this episode, Jeremy goes through a temporary phase of self-pity and self-disgust, coupled with intense religious emotion.

His decision to run away from home is precipitated by an adventure at a local farm, where he had cycled one summer afternoon while playing truant from school. The exhilaration of this burst of freedom changes him irrevocably, and instead of returning to school he travels to London and finds a job as a dishwasher and later as a piano player, in a seedy club. He makes friends with an amiable and amusing con man called Tim, whose free and easy lifestyle he tries to imitate. His musical ambltlons recelve a boost when he meets Percy Brett, a black American serviceman who is an expert trombone player. Percy inspires Jeremy’s own playing to heights he had never before reached. He begins to live only for jazz.

Back at home, Eleanor makes herself ill with distress, but Alfred sees no best to rear Jeremy wisely, but if his son chose to tread the wrong path, that was his affair. Eleanor, however, manages to send Jeremy a message, and Jeremy, stung by his conscience, makes a brief but unproductive visit home; father and son are so entrenched in their respective positions that no communication between them is possible.

Jeremy’s life continues in the artistic, boozy, twilight London world he has chosen. His career advances, he travels to Paris, and his band eventually gets a chance to visit the United States. At this moment, Tim’s wife and two children, whom Tim has callously deserted, turn up on Jeremy’s doorstep. Jeremy is furious with Tim, and their friendship ends in a bitter quarrel.

This event has a traumatic effect on Jeremy. He loses interest in going to the United States and returns to London, believing that everything he has been doing up to that point has been a lie or a mistake. For the next ten years, his life stagnates, and he recovers only through a chance meeting with Percy, who in the intervening years has formed his own band and established a reputation in the United States. They resume their partnership.

One final event leads to the climax of the story. Percy is attacked by white thugs, and Jeremy, coming to his aid, is also injured. Eleanor persuades Alfred to visit his son in the hospital. When he enters the ward and sees Jeremy bandaged and in plaster, he is immediately taken back to the horrific experiences he had had to endure in World War I, and for the first time in his life he communicates his emotions to his son. Although the moment of contact is brief, Jeremy later believes that it is impossible for them to slip back to their former mutual incomprehension.

The Characters

The technique of having four first-person narrators alternating with one another (the fourth is Percy Brett, who briefly has his say toward the end of the novel) gives multiple perspectives on each character and reveals some carefully balanced structural motifs.

Jeremy consciously shapes his life in opposition to his father’s values. He views himself as a rebel, deliberately experimenting with a new way of life. Yet occasionally he realizes that he is closer to his father than he thought: “I saw the right path, and therefore I must follow it.... I suppose I’m the son of my father, deep down.” When he is in Paris, working devotedly at his music, he comments, looking back: “And all the time it never struck me that I was providing a copy-book example of one of the old man’s maxims. I was happy because I was working hard and forgetting about myself.” Like his father, he was rigorously pursuing an ideal. Even his girlfriend Diana reminds him (to his irritation) how much he remains influenced by the very values that he claims to have renounced.

It is Tim, not Jeremy, who is Alfred’s true opposite. Tim is the pleasure-seeker, always “fast-talking, full of gags, the ideal person to make a party go.” Jeremy admires him at first because he “seemed to enjoy life so much, and to live so vividly from one minute to the next.” In spite of his charm, however, Tim is selfish and without deep feeling. Jeremy observes that he seemed only two-dimensional, not like a complete person (“you couldn’t imagine him working, or doing any of the routine things that make up two-thirds of life”), and indeed, Tom soon turns out to be both a liar and a sponger. Jeremy’s break with him is inevitable and marks a key stage in his own growth.

The man from whom Jeremy learns most is not Tim but Percy Brett, the black musician. Powerfully built, Percy is a commanding figure, and Jeremy feels the force of his presence immediately when he meets him. He sees him as a “great barbarian war-leader” possessing “imperial dignity.” Percy, who is always good-natured, fair-minded, and modest, exudes a quiet assurance and strength, and Jeremy even feels awed in his presence: “. . . all my little bits of feebleness and falsity seemed to show up like stains on a cloth.” It is Percy, more than any other character, who helps Jeremy to grow.

Alfred is seen through three pairs of eyes. To his son, he is a pathetic figure who has allowed other people to do his living for him, with the result that his emotional life has withered. To Eleanor, who as the self-effacing younger sister has lived in his shadow all of her life, he is the aloof, unapproachable elder brother to whom she defers. In his own mind, Alfred sees himself as a cultured and reasonable man, who knows that self-respect and happiness are to be achieved only through duty, hard work, moral uprightness, and self-denial. John Wain is anxious to avoid presenting him as narrow-minded and self-satisfied, and he allows Alfred to reveal, in the stream of distressed thoughts which run through his mind when he hears of his son’s defection, the half-buried events which shaped his life and attitudes. He recalls the terrifying experience of being on the battlefield in World War I, and the brave example of his commanding officer, Major Edwards, whose memory he reveres. The role that Edwards played in Alfred’s life, as a surrogate father, is the counterpart of the role played by Percy in Jeremy’s life. Yet the war had broken Alfred, as it had thousands of others, and he was left to put together the pieces as best he could. The values by which he had learned to live constituted his way of creating a structure which would stand firm against despair. His failure lies in his inability to adapt that structure to accommodate the uniqueness of other people, to recognize that people build their defenses against chaos in vastly different ways, each way having its own validity.

Critical Context

Strike the Father Dead was Wain’s fifth novel. It resembles his early work in that its hero is a young man who rebels against a rigid social order and a class system which does not allow him to be himself. It goes beyond the earlier novels in range and depth. The structure is more complex and unified than, for example, the picaresque tale of Charles Lumley’s adventures in Born in Captivity (1953). The multiple points of view conveyed by different first-person narrators give the characterization a depth that Wain had not achieved before. Each character possesses a distinct voice: Alfred’s long, well-formed, carefully balanced sentences contrast with Eleanor’s simplicity of tone, and both contrast with Jeremy’s direct, humorous, slang-filled honesty of expression.

Although it met with mixed reviews when first published, Strike the Father Dead is a powerful and impressive novel. Not the least of its achievement is its brilliant evocation of the delight of the jazz musician in his art. Yet perhaps more central to its value is the fact that it does not simplify human experience to make it digestible or intelligible, and it offers no pretentious or sentimental conclusions. The plainness of Jeremy’s final comment, “You live by doing what you have to do,” is not banal but the product of experience and reflection. He has come to an understanding of himself and of life’s processes, and even of his father’s attitudes. The relative optimism of the conclusion is in contrast to many of Wain’s later novels, particularly the two novels which immediately followed, The Young Visitors (1965) and The Smaller Sky (1967).

Bibliography

Allen, Walter. Review in The New York Times Book Review. XLVI (September 23, 1962), p. 4.

Burgess, Anthony. The Novel Now: A Guide to Contemporary Fiction, 1967.

Mellown, Elgin W. “Steps Toward Vision: The Development of Technique in John Wain’s First Seven Novels,” in South Atlantic Quarterly. XVII (Summer, 1969), pp. 330-342.

Price, Martin. Review in Yale Review. LII (December, 1962), p. 266.

Rogers, W. G. Review in Saturday Review. XLV (December 29, 1962), p. 39.

Salwak, Dale. John Wain, 1981.