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Wednesday
Literary Hub had a fascinating article this past week looking at trauma through the eyes of (1) Ted Larkin’s most quoted (and infamous) poem and (2) the television series Ted Lasso. As Catherine Buni points out, the poem actually gets quoted in one of the series’ last episodes.
First of all, here’s the poem, which you may know already (at least the first line). Reader discretion advised:
This Be the Verse
By Phil Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
After observing that Larkin’s parents were problematic (his father was a Hitler admirer and emotionally abusive husband, his mother a depressive) and that he himself could be “an asshole” (a racist, sexist, alcoholic recluse), Buni goes on to assess whether what the poem says is true. If it’s not is it good, she asks, applying Elizabeth Bishop’s observation that accuracy is one of poetry’s best qualities (along with spontaneity and mystery).
Larkin, Buni says, gets certain things wrong about both inherited trauma and coastal shelf geology. Apparently coastal shelves, which consist of “bedded layers, discrete and discernible when extracted for view,” don’t build up the way Larkin thinks they do, with one layer of silt after another drifting down and hardening. Rather, they are the product of underwater sediment routing systems which sometimes add and sometimes take away.
Likewise, childhood trauma is more dynamic than Larkin lets on. Although it’s true that adverse childhood experiences can lead to chronic physical and mental health conditions, it’s also the case that a number of these conditions can be reversed. Checking with several child trauma experts, Buni quotes former California surgeon general on how the cycle can be broken:
She has identified seven granular, research-based strategies that prevent the human-to-human hand-off of misery: sleep, exercise, time in nature, nutrition, mindfulness, mental health care, and healthy relationships. The tool she uses most? “Walk and talk. Exercise combined with talking with someone.”
Now to Ted Lasso, a show that provide a regular workshop in healthy intervention:
The show’s communities are cooperative and inclusive, with characters who step up against bullies and bigots, who do not tolerate abuse and harm, of anybody, regardless of identity or position. There’s a men’s group that aims to nurture healthy relationships, she observed, the juxtaposition of one dad who is verbally abusive to his son with another dad who lifts his son up, and all sorts of people who decide to try therapy, including Ted. “It feels so different than what we would have seen even ten years ago,” Burke Harris said. “It’s beautiful.”
And then the poem makes its entrance, quoted by Ted’s mother as she visits her son:
Hugging serving tray to chest, Mae approaches Ted, her nimbus of white hair glowing.
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad./…,” Mae begins, no introduction, no title. “They may not mean to, but they do…/.” Her voice dusk-low, the poem unfolds. “But they were fucked up in their turn/ By fools in old-style hats and coats,/…” Mae lands Larkin’s final lines as clear as a crack to the head. “Get out as early as you can,/And don’t have any kids yourself.”
Buni observes,
But, as anyone who’s watched the show knows, it’s too late for Ted. Ted was fucked up in his turn, he knows. He drank up all the faults they had, those fucked up fucks, his mum and dad. And he might fuck up his son, too. He lives an ocean away, and Ted anguishes over the question of whether to return. It won’t be until the last episode that Ted tells his Mom to fuck off, for burying the facts of his father’s death, and then suggests that she, too, might find therapy helpful.
Quoting Ted Lasso’s Peabody Award citation, Buni says that it provides
the perfect counter to the enduring prevalence of toxic masculinity, both on-screen and off, in a moment when the nation truly needs inspiring models of kindness.
She adds that, while the show may not represent a tectonic shift, nevertheless
it has in its own small way pushed towards a new conversation, one aimed at slowly dissolving America’s bedrock violence and banding us together instead. In light of ascendent white nationalist ideologies and communities, increasingly mainstreamed threats of political violence, an unprecedented mental health crisis for kids, and growing partisan hostility, why not create more templates for change? Together, we bear misery, shifting and roiling, riverine.
All of which is to say that we have tools for saving our kids from our misery so that they will not be inevitably doomed by our hang-ups. Indeed they are (I speak from experience here) the greatest gift imaginable and an enduring sign of hope.
So don’t take Larkin’s poem as the last word. Sure, it’s a fun poem to quote when one is feeling frustrated. But if it convinces people not to have kids, then it does more harm than good.