My father's poetic fame began in the early 1930s and subsided after about 1985 or so. I was born in 1946, so I ran along with Dad’s fame through my school, college, and graduate years, and then during my early career.
As any child does, I emerged into consciousness in the middle of the parental tale and needed to catch up. As I ran, I grabbed scraps of what I could understand, and I molded them around big pieces of what I couldn’t, and that made me a pair of patchwork sneakers to kept my feet off the stones.
But were the sneakers…true?
Dad might say, with his twinkle: “What’s truth, really, after all?”
And if he were in a certain mood, he’d tell you about the times when he used to dine, as a young poet traipsing around Ireland, with William Butler Yeats, and AE, and Oliver St. John Gogarty, and that whole crowd. Especially he’d tell you of one particular one of those dinners, a long and exciting one, which was conducted entirely in Latin. Funny thing is, he’d then point out, biographers of Yeats have mentioned the man’s ignorance of Latin.
So what happened? Was Dad in a dream that night, in some Yeatsian trance, manipulated from…The Other Side? After all, he was enchanted, as a young acolyte must be, sitting at table and breaking bread with the Pope. Later, in the small hours of that morning after that particular dinner, walking the Dublin streets with Yeats, he was silent. They trod their way toward their turning, where one would go right and the other go left.
That night, after the Latin dinner, Dad couldn’t think of anything high enough to say to the master. As they approached their separation point, he longed for that one perfect line. Reverence? Gratitude? Jollity? The longing to be acknowledged as yet another who dreamt of the lost woods of Arcady?
The lamp. The corner. The streets, akimbo.
“Well, goodnight.”
“Yes, goodnight.”
It was done.
As described, this moment feels real to me. The Latin dinner? Well….
But I yearned to know: What is the mystery of men, and how do they make their lives work out?
*****
The men; our fathers.
I have an image that has remained with me since a young boy. It is Christmas, and the morning joy has been replaced with anticipation of the afternoon family gathering. We are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where my mother’s parents reside. Grandfather’s house is a three-story stucco classic with old-fashioned accoutrements, such as a conservatory, a maid’s quarters, a library, and a vestibule. The image in my head is located in the vestibule.
Grandfather’s front door is large and heavy and has a polished brass lion’s-head knocker in its center. It opens onto the vestibule, which is tiled and paneled in mahogany. Visitors hang their coats in the vestibule on one of several tall coat racks. Then they enter the inner house through a second door, which is set with glass panes in a pattern five across and eight high. The vestibule smells of eucalyptus, which Grandmother keeps in wide brass ewers set on a bureau on the other side from the coat racks.
Okay, it’s Christmas. I am six or seven. My pacifist grandmother has been kind enough to give me a set of new cap pistols and a double holster because I assured her I would only shoot people who are already dead. Things are going very well today.
It is early afternoon, and the men begin to arrive, complete with their families. I stand in the vestibule, wearing my guns. One after another, these tall men come through the outer door, smelling of cold snow and winter wind, their faces red. They all wear overcoats, which they doff as they trade greetings with my father and with Grandfather. The overcoats smell of the outdoors and swirl a cold air as they are swung off shoulders and hung among others already there. The men are well dressed, good-looking, competent. They chat with one another as though they were all members of that enviable club…the club of adult maleness. They notice me; they greet me. More than anything on earth, I long for membership in their club. I would give up my guns to be a man in an overcoat arriving out of the snow from a world in which I know how to make things happen. I would give up my guns to share what I see as their self-confidence.
To male readers, if your experience is like mine, here’s the situation you needed to master along your way up, or, if you have failed to master it, you might have been harmed by it, even crushed. You came up and needed to encounter the well-lived lives of your fathers. These were decent men, who tried, and who succeeded. How do we sons compete against the well-lived lives of our fathers?
Along the way, our fathers made their mistakes, of course. Eventually, all fathers display their weaknesses to their sons. However I believe that the sons already know what those weaknesses are, from the beginning. This is due to visceral sympathy which exists between the son and his father: a son knows his father in ways more intimate than intellectual knowing.
A son’s testimony is a testimony of the gut.
Some of us sons get angry at our fathers’ weaknesses, which anger may diminish our own lives for many years. Lucky sons have fathers who display their strengths as well, and whose strengths remain as the years go by, to counter the weaknesses, and to provide perspective against the anger. Especially lucky sons have time. I had time…to cool off.
I had the luxury to come back into Dad's presence—when he was a nice, round one hundred years old—and to say to him, “Well, Dad, it worked.”
“Good,”he said, acknowledging my effort at life building through the years. Then he twinkled at me, since he had his own satisfaction to report. “You know the critics?”
“Yes.”
“They’re all dead.”
“Yes?”
“And I’m not.”
A line in my father’s poem Flux has always stayed with me. “Life is stranger than any of us expected.” That’s true. Take the whole of my life today, and the details are scarcely what I should have predicted as an eighteen-year-old.
But, the real story is how my life has been exactly—as it turns out—exactly as it was supposed to have been, that amazes.
During many years in my thirties and forties, I conceived that it was I—I!—who was blasting my life along, fighting to stay without, or within, my father’s hands. But it wasn’t Dad who had the reins of me. It was another Father entirely.
For good or ill.
No. For good and ill.
Devil and angel.
Devil and angel.
Amen.
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