Unlike Byron

“He looks as unlike Byron as one can get.” 

This is how one reporter described my cheerful, can-do father during Dad’s first press conference.  Dad was newly appointed as the United States Poet Laureate, in 1959.  The reporter was referring to George Gordon, Lord Byron, the English Romantic poet par excellence, and the very type of flamboyant and excessive literary heroism.  

President Eisenhower had approved Dad’s appointment to our nation’s highest poetical post, and my father—a naval officer during World War Two—was delighted to receive this nod from the man who successfully planned, organized, and executed the Normandy Invasion. 

Mom said to Dad, “But I don’t think he knows much about poetry, do you?”   

“Of course, he does!  Look who’s standing at his podium!”

Dad was not shy about blowing his own horn.  Dad was not shy, really, about anything, except about sharing his feelings. 

What? 

That doesn’t make sense.  He was a lyric poet who published more than twenty books and who seemed, to me anyway, to knock down professional prizes as though they were bowling pins. 

Dad shared his feelings in his verse, of course.  He was a Romantic.  He believed that high emotion, the love of nature, and romancing the literary muse were the great avenues along which mankind could travel to arrive at the Palace of Truth. 

Dad was a man of the grand gesture when he was on stage, reading, or when he was among friends and admirers.  He was a man of the grand gesture—especially when he had time to prepare the lines that would produce the effect he desired.  Had he not been a poet, he might have been a fine actor or salesman. 

However, he was not a man to share his closest feelings with his son. 

He did love me with complete faithfulness.  Some of what I did, he admired.  Some of what I did, he did not admire.  It was difficult for him to chastise and to exhort, even when I needed it.  Instead, he dodged such a moment, and instead he poetized, patted my back, and poetized some more. 

I loved the guy.  Then here’s what happened. 

 

                                                            II

 

After our mother died, my sister and I began to be the parents of our father. 

Dad was ninety at the time, still going along pretty strongly but not being noticed as a poet as regularly as he had been before.  It hurt my feelings for him when he was not included in some important new anthology of poetry. 

“People ask me if you still write poetry.”

“I don’t go chasing after a poem anymore.  But I’ll write one down if it comes along on its own.” 

He handed me an envelope on the back of which was scrawled a poem.  His handwriting had never been legible.  I made my way through the first stanza or two and stopped.   “Here,” I said and leaned to show him.  “What’s this say?” 

            “I don’t know.  Read it to me.”

            I read what I could and then stopped.  Dad asked me, “What do you think I say next?”

            “I can’t tell.”

            “Yes, but what do you think?”

            “I think you talk about the leaves, their color.”

            “I think you’re right.”  He paused.  “Good poem, isn’t it?”

            One thing Dad taught me is that we lose things—things from our pasts—and that there is charm in un-remembering. 

 

                                                                                    III

 

            But what about the truth? 

Dad would twinkle and say, “What’s truth, really, after all?”

            And if he were in a certain mood, he would tell me again about the time when he was an ecstatic young poet striding the white lanes of Ireland beside its vivid green, all alive-o.  Then, he would dine with William Butler Yeats, the Nobel laureate, and with Oliver St. John Gogarty, and with that whole crowd of aesthetes and of literary adventurers.

 

Especially Dad would remember one of those literary dinners, a particularly long one, which was conducted entirely in Latin.  Funny thing is, Dad would then point out, biographers of Yeats have mentioned that man’s ignorance of Latin. 

 

So what happened?  Had Dad been in a dream that night, in some sort of 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 poetical Pope. 

 

Later, in the small hours of that morning, walking the Dublin streets with Yeats, Dad told me he was silent.  The two men trod their way toward their turning, where one would go right and the other would go left.  That night, after the Latin dinner, Dad couldn’t think of anything high enough to say to the master.  As the two approached their separation point, he longed for that one perfect line. 

 

He was, after all, a Romantic. 

 

Was it to be 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….

           

Numerous publishers asked my father to write an autobiography.  He never did.  He always told me it would be too difficult to tell the truth.  Not that the truth was unknown, he’d say; nor was there a scandal to hide.  To my mind, he never wrote his life down because he didn’t care to make the exercise. 

 

Truth-finding can bring tough self-criticism.  And, God knows, Dad was never his own most clear-eyed critic.

 

                                                                        IV

 

            So I wrote a book instead. 

 

My book is a memoir, not a biography.  There’s a difference. 

 

My book is an effort to testify to the way my relationship with my father affected my relationship with my Father. 

 

Dad and I are both different and the same.  For me to understand both our difference and our sameness, first I needed to look into Dad’s past, before me.  To accomplish that, I opened doors wide, which, when I was younger, I only peeked through.  These are doors into rooms in the mansion of the early 20^th century. 

 

I walked around in those rooms, I sniffed the air, and I heard the floor creak beneath me.  Nowadays, those old rooms are set up with velvet ropes as exhibits of period furniture, but I pushed past the ropes—since I had a guide—and I sat on the chairs and I conversed with the ghosts of the passers-by. 

 

I had three guides, really.  One guide is Dad’s poetry.  Here, in these words, is what he actually said at those actual times.  A second guide is memory.  I re-encountered dozens of conversations that had been stored away in closed memory cabinets.  The third and final guide is viscera.  A boy knows his father in ways that transcend intellectual knowing. 

 

The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told is the testimony of my gut—written that I should better understand why I got this way. 

 

As any child does, I emerged into consciousness in the middle of my parents’ tale and needed to catch up.  So, 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? 

 

And did they honor my father and glorify my Father?

 

I pray that the answer may prove to be yes. 

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015

 

Men in Christmas Overcoats

My father, my uncles, my grandfather, adult male cousins—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 at Grandfather’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

 

My pacifist grandmother has been kind enough to give me two shiny cap pistols and a double holster because—I was always a salesman, even from the first, ready to address the objections of my customer—because I assured her I would only shoot people who are already dead.  It seemed to me a perfect compromise, and, by charming my grandmother, it worked. 

 

Things are going very well today. 

 

            So, it is early afternoon, and the uncles begin to arrive, complete with my aunts and my cousins.  My mother’s brother Charlie is one of the uncles, along with my Aunt Aggie, and their two daughters, Kate and Susan, who are my pals.  (Cousin Susan went on to distinguish herself athletically—she won the Iditerod sled dog race four times.)

 

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 uncles are well dressed, good-looking, competent.  They chat with one another as though they are 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. 

 

            If you are a woman, you will have had much to consider about men.  We men, I can tell you, mull a lot over women.  But first, when we are six or eight—and at later times, too—we mull a lot over men. 

As we boys come up, we encounter the lives of our fathers.  Most of us, we encounter the well-lived lives of our fathers.  Our fathers are decent men, who tried, and who succeeded.  Along the way, our fathers made their mistakes of course.  Eventually, all fathers display their weaknesses to their sons.  However we sons already know what those weaknesses are. 

When I was six or eight, I imagined I knew Dad’s weaknesses because of visceral sympathy between the generations.  I felt soulful accord with Dad.  Here’s what I thought.  I know Dad (comforting and cozy); he knows me (sometimes, not so comforting and cozy). 

Anyway, we know one another’s weaknesses because we are father and son

There’s a sager explanation of this communion—sin. 

 

At six or eight—even at ten or twelve—I probably knew that word, but it had no context for me.  In our family, we were Episcopalians, after all, as high as could be.  More to the point, my father was a poet, worshipping, really, the muse.  Sin had nothing to do with anything that had to do with us—or with me, for that matter. 

 

Yes, a shaft of jabbing badness cut at my guts and made me keep secrets.  But—I crouched inside myself in confusion—perhaps keeping secrets is just the way things are.  

 

Jabbing badness could not be in my uncles in their Christmas overcoats, nor in Grandfather and Dad.  How could there be jabbing badness in Grandfather, who was so kind to me, or in Dad, who was Dad, or in Charlie, who knew how to play, or in any of the others who swooped through the door? 

 

I was the only one who kept secrets, and I would stop doing that soon. 

 

After all, now I had my guns. 

 

After all, I was strong enough to stop keeping secrets.

 

 

 

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015