I was going to start writing my projected book on secondary characters, but then I realized that since it is not exclusively focused on English-language literature but on a selection of European novels in different languages, I might have problems presenting it in my next research assessment exercise (the board might value negatively my straying away from my area). Yes, this is how academic creativity is curbed down. I have decided, then, to start the other book I was planning.
I had already decided that this book would deal with journalistic narrative non-fiction, from the point of view of genre theory, but it turns out that I’m now preparing a volume on how sons represent their fathers in memoirs about their relationships. This has three justifications: 1) I’m now teaching autobiography and reading plenty of secondary sources for the course, so basically I already have a bibliography of the main names; 2) I’ve worked on diverse books on masculinity as represented in diverse genres and it makes sense to follow the same productive line, tired as I am of Gender Studies; 3) this is very personal: my father passed away about fifteen months ago, and I’m processing my (mostly negative) feelings towards him by reading the corpus of my future book.
I have not chosen to write about daughters and fathers because I’m interested in how men deal with the legacies of their fathers, having seen my brothers reject my father’s model to build a completely different kind of masculinity. I believed that the central conflict of my life was the bad relationship with my father, but I’m beginning to see, once he is gone, that this central conflict is actually how to avoid following my mother’s model of inescapable submission. I could have chosen to work on mothers and daughters, but I don’t want to work on conflict among women, as this type of study tends to undermine sisterhood and increase misogyny. I’d rather work on intergenerational change within masculinity and/or patriarchy, addressing men readers. I’ll solve my own issues with my mother (who is, as anyone who meets her knows, a very good person) in other ways, if I ever can.
I’m now in the process of reading a list of about 50 memoirs by men about their fathers, of which I’m aiming to select around 15 for the book. So far, I’ve come across one academic monograph entirely devoted to the same subject: Stephen Mansfield’s Australian Patriography: How Sons Write Fathers in Contemporary Life Writing (2014). Mansfield claims that the seven books he focuses on (beginning with Edmund Gosse’s quintessential Father and Son, 1907) are enough to cover the spectrum that runs from memoirs dominated by the father’s presence to memoirs dominated by the son’s authorship. Mansfield also speaks of an ‘eulogy-denouncement’ continuum. These two axes (character/author, praise/dislike) are indeed very useful, but in my books I have always tried to strike a balance between different identities. Mansfield, himself Australian, sticks to what his nation has produced, but not being attached to any Anglophone area, I’m free to roam as I want. As I read, I’m careful to select different identities and, above all, different experiences.
Although my focus is, as usual, the 21st century, I can’t really ignore previous memoirs, such the already mentioned book by Edmund Gosse, J.S. Mill’s Autobiography (1873), or the one I’ve read this weekend, J.R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself (1968). The prestigious TLS Ackerley Prize for autobiography and memoir is named after this author and literary personality (and to say that I was very much surprised by Ackerley’s candid memoir is the understatement of the year). In fact, I started my reading for my future book with Philip Roth’s 1991 Patrimony, which I had read ages ago (like Gosse’s memoir) when I was a doctoral student, and had not impressed me very much. I have enjoyed it much more now, if only because I’m much older and have a better understanding of the issues Roth raises about ageing parents. I must say that, as memoirs of writers go, Patrimony seems to me much better in its focused concision than Martin Amis’s Experience (2000), which I had already read and recalled with fondness. I don’t know why, since in this re-reading I found it so unbearably rambling and narcissistic that I have already decided not to write about. Amis junior doesn’t really say that much, besides, about the fraught rivalry as writers between his father and himself, unlike what criticism usually suggests.
The process of selecting material for a book is always very tricky because no matter what you decide to write about the field is always immense and so is the potential corpus. Going back to my decision to read around 50 books, I find that this is for me the least I need to make sense of any topic I address in books, though, as I have noted, Mansfield comments just on seven, and I’ve reviewed monographs based on just three novels. I don’t know what it’s like for other scholars writing monographs, but I seem to have integrated in my head a reviewer who is constantly finding fault because I have excluded this or that. (My inner reviewer is warning me, for instance, that excluding Amis might be a serious mistake). I think that my inner reviewer must be Spanish to the core, because in the Spanish critical tradition we tend towards the encyclopedia rather than close reading (as I know from my own doctoral dissertation). In the Anglophone tradition, scholars take it for granted that when facing a vast field, you don’t have to justify yourself for choosing a limited sample for study, perhaps because productivity is awarded above thoroughness.
I’ve read so far about half a dozen memoirs and look forward to reading the rest along this year. I already know that some memoirs will be discussed in my book, whether I like them or not because they are important volumes that have called much attention (Richard Flanagan’s Question 7), but I also know that I’ll write about less important memoirs that say something unique (The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit by Asian-Canadian author J.J. Lee). Apart from Amis, I have discarded Terry Jenning’s Waylon: Tales of My Outlaw Dad, co-written with David Thomas, because I found it to be very poorly written and, anyway, I have on my list other memoirs by non-famous sons about their celebrity fathers (a favourite of mine is Juan Thompson’s Stories I Tell Myself: Growing Up with Hunter S. Thompson, a book I like much better than any written by Thompson himself). I know that it’s habitual to dispense with one’s own literary taste and opinion in cultural analysis, but I have problems dealing with books below par. In my book on SF and masculinity there is chapter that made me truly uncomfortable because I needed the author (a member of a significant minority) to be present in the book, but I disliked his novels. He ended up being a tokenistic presence, which I regret.
In the concluding paragraph of his memoir, Ackerley writes: “A good many questions have been asked, few receive answers. Some facts have been established, much else may well be fiction, the rest is silence. Of my father, my mother, myself, I know in the end practically nothing.” I may have started with a set of memoirs that, accidentally, also lack a sense of closure, but this may be the main pattern. The memoirs I am interested in are technically called auto/biographies, since they are both an autobiography of the son and a biography of the father, constituting together the memoir. What they reveal is that living persons are much harder to handle as constructs than characters, who are, by definition, partial persons. Any autobiographical author faces the same challenge: it is hard enough to give an account of oneself that makes sense to the reader, imagine trying to portray another person. The close-up portraits I’m reading are, so far, blurry, a fact that sons acknowledge in their books, commenting on the difficulties of portraying somebody whom they thought they knew and on the impossibility of being fair to their fathers.
Pat Conroy’s memoir The Death of Santini establishes a singular paradox. Conroy grew up suffering the physical and psychological abuse of his Marine father and, once a novelist, he fictionalized his childhood in The Great Santini. His father was, apparently, shocked out of his violent ways against wife and children when he saw his portrait in this novel, but also enjoyed being known for it, to the point that he often accompanied his son in book presentations, even signing more copies than him. The father rationalized this bizarre situation by claiming that, as a fiction writer, his son only told lies in the novel. The son responded by writing the memoir, fusing in the title his fictional and his real father. He also uses the memoir to stress that the violence which the father always denied was very real, and that it was hardly altered in the autobiographical novel The Great Santini.
In any case, not even the best memoirs of the type I intend to study can do justice to the father in them, either for good or for bad, because the distance between him and the son is not enough. Sons are very poor biographers of fathers, being too close to be minimally objective, and, so, the portraits that emerge are biased and twisted. This is, naturally, what makes these memoirs so interesting, for by articulating their opinion of their fathers, these men must consider who they themselves are as men and as human beings. I must note, by the way, that whereas there are quite a number of daughters writing about their fathers, I have not seen so far memoirs of sons about mothers (maybe I need to look harder).
As I read, inevitably, I wonder how my brothers or myself would write about our father. My youngest brother used to say that we missed the chance to make a fortune by not writing books about my father’s obnoxious behaviour and preposterous opinions, and he may be right. This same brother, when I reminded him of the first anniversary of my father’s death, quipped that he no longer thinks ‘about that person’, which is possibly the healthiest attitude. We don’t need Freud to understand that fathers can cause very deep wounds, and it’s easy to see that the memoirs I’m reading are therapeutical.
In this I’m split: I understand the need of sons to process their memories of bad to indifferent fathers, but I believe that as a decaying, deeply patriarchal world civilization we need more memoirs by men of good fathers (warts and all). Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Beautiful Struggle, a memoir which pays homage to his father W. Paul Coates for his efforts to provide his children with a solid education, strikes me as the kind of memoir men need now. A memoir about disastrous fathers like mine may have therapeutic value but is hardly the inspirational discourse we need to progress.
I might change my opinion as I read, I’ll keep you posted.