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

 

What Would the World Miss Without Your Story?

 

One man could sail around the world and not hold a single reader with his memoir.  E.B. White could describe a row across Central Park Lake and hold a reader breathless. 

It’s not the events of your story.  It’s the story of your events—in you.

 

Scene One

Location: a party at a house by the harbor.

The conversation: it might go something like this.

 

One of the men turns to me—about my age, getting grey—we’ve been chatting boats.  “You’re the one who’s just published that memoir.”

“Yes.”

“You retired?”

“Yes.  I enjoyed doing the book.  Lot of work.  I suppose not everyone could do it.”

“You know, I’ve tried to write a memoir.  People say my life is amazing.  Can’t seem to make it into a book though.  I could use your advice.”

“You’ve sailed across the Atlantic, right?”

“Three crossings.  Once solo in a 28-foot sloop. France—Azores—Cape Verdes—then downwind to the Caribbean.” 

“So what’s the point of your memoir?”

He looks puzzled.  “I just said.”

“I don’t mean to be argumentative, but no, you didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve told me what happened, not what the point is.”

“People say I tell what happened very well.”

“I expect you do.  There’s a lot to tell about, in all that sailing.  I’m sure you’ve done a good job at what is not the job.”

He looks, perhaps, offended.  “What do you mean it’s not the job?”

“What I mean is you’ve begun the job—to tell the story—but that’s not the real job.  You’ve got your story so one event flows into the next event.  That’s good.”

“Thanks.” And then, “I think.”

“But the real job is harder.”

“Why?”

“Because the real job is answering my question—what’s the point?”

“Why can’t I just tell the story and be done?”

“Because no one wants to read a sequence of your events.  ”

 

Scene Two

 

“I don’t understand.  Why do I do this then?”

“What someone wants to read is what that person needs to read.”

“How am I supposed to know what that person needs to read?”

“One thing everyone needs to read is the truth.”

“The truth about what?”

“About you, and about the point.”

“But the truth about me is what I wrote down already.” 

“No, it isn’t.  What you wrote down is a sequence of events, which you have ordered so they flow.  That’s not the truth.  That’s a sequence.  And nobody wants to read a sequence of your events.” 

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Tell the point.”

“What is the point?”

“Ah, that’s the big question, is it not?”

“Oh, come on.  We’re going around in circles.”  He steps aside and pours himself another drink.  I think he may have left the conversation, but he circles back.  “Anyway, the truth right now is that I hate my boat as much as I love her.  Maybe I’m too old.”

I pause then ask, “What’s the point of your life—let’s say of your nautical life—of this sequence you have written down?” 

“The point?  I’m just trying to tell my story here.  People say my life is amazing.  That’s what I’m trying to tell about.”

“You really want my advice?”

“Sure.”

“Write the sequence down, each chapter, just as it flows.  But then go back and write it again.  By the second or the third time you do that, a new conception of the story will emerge.  Your concept of your story will have matured.  That new concept is the point.” 

“Ah, that point thing….

“Yes.  That point thing leads to the truth about you.  The truth will be the reason why people need to read your book.  So they can have truth in their lives.  They need to have truth in their lives, and your book gives it to them.” 

He muses.  “It’ll take a lot of pages to write it again and again.”

“It takes a lot of days to cross the Atlantic.  What’s the point of doing that?  Just to get to the other side?”

“Yes—but really, no.”  He pauses.  “It’s being out there on the ocean and in tune with the ocean—for me, that’s in tune with God—and even more so when I'm alone.”   

“So that’s the truth you need to talk about.  Your focus needs to be on the truth, not on successive positions at noon.  People will read your book, if it contains the truth about you and about your soul, so they can have the truth in their lives.”

“But what do I do with this mass of paper?  By now, I’ve got maybe a thousand pages on my desk!”

 

                                                                    Scene Three

 

“Yes, you do have lots of pages.  Now cut every sentence from the thousand pages that is not about the point.”

“But what if I love those sentences now?”

“You will love them.  But your love is self-indulgent.  You’re in love with your love of your sentences.  Cut anyway.” 

“Not easy.”

“In the Caribbean, did you ever take on board a huge bunch of green bananas and hang them in the rigging and, when they ripened, need to eat them as fast as you possibly could before they rotted?”

“Yes.”

“What happened when they rotted?”

“Threw them overboard.”

“See?  Even though you loved them?”

“Even though.”  He smiles.  “Okay, I cut.”

“That’s what you’ll do if you want someone else to read your story.”

“I thought I wanted that.”

“Don’t back away now.  Now people will read your story—and will value it—because now you are telling the truth.”

“Anything else?”

“Just go through and make every paragraph a pleasure to read—vivid, humorous, whatever it takes to make each paragraph a pleasure to read.”

He rolls his eyes.  “Then am I done?”

“Oh, sure,” I smile. “Then you’re done.” 

We shake hands. 

As he turns away, I say, “But when an editor gets a hold of it, and you’ll have three or four more rewrites yet to do.”

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015

A Book in the Hand

Exciting—soon, I’ll receive my finished book; I’ll hold it in my hand!

The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told will be on bookstore shelves in June, but I get it first.  Yay! 

The last time I was this excited to hold a new book of mine was many, many years ago, when my second novel, Paradise, was about to come off the press.  I was a young man then and believed that Paradise would be for me what The Sun Also Rises was for Hemingway. 

Of course, Hemingway was dead when Paradise came out.  I regretted not meeting him through my poet father.  Though Dad had encountered Hemingway at literary events, he told me he would not have crossed the road to shake his hand.  Dad considered the man a popinjay.

Nevertheless, Dad understood my regret, so he took me over to meet Hadley Hemingway, the man’s Paris wife.  An afternoon spent with her satisfied my desire to be cloaked—however lightly—in the robe of the Lost Generation. 

The last time I was this excited to hold a new book of mine, therefore, was when I believed I was writing as a literary competitor, partly, because I was young, as a competitor to my dad, partly, because I was young, as a competitor to that other of my literary heroes. 

This time, now, it is different.  I am older—a lot older.  I have achieved some successes of my own outside of the literary world.  I am a husband of nearly forty years (though I am still a “work in progress,” being drafted ever more finely—with careful re-writes—to glorify the Lord); I am the father of four; I was for many years a productive, relationship-based salesman in the marketplace of the law. 

My memoir project began on Dad’s 100^th birthday, when I watched him accept the congratulations of scores of admirers, and when I realized that my wife’s and my grandchildren—not yet born—would not understand the full context of their great-grandfather’s centenary event unless I wrote down the funny stories and the poignant stories and the redemptive stories for them to read later. 

So I did. 

Those of you who write know that writing is a difficult process of trying, ever more precisely, to get the work done correctly.  This applies to fiction, to non-fiction, to memoir, to any serious word-smithing endeavor. 

While placing words on paper, the work takes on its own life.  It generates its own requirement of correctness, which supersedes the correctness that the writer had understood at the beginning as the level of correctness toward which to strive.  That initial level of correctness was a standard only of the writer’s.  That level had not yet attained the higher and tighter level required by the words themselves. 

The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told contains funny and poignant stories of my growing up in a literary family.  Our droppers-in were probably famous but their fame meant nothing to me since they were just people verbally glittering around Dad and Mom. 

As for the redemptive story, my tale becomes more complicated when I sought to find a standing place of my own—read the book. 

 

                                                            ***

Of course, everyone should buy and read my book.  Of course, not everyone will do so. 

But if you are one who does buy my book, you will discover in my book just where all of these events were leading, and you will discover why I was moved by the greatest story ever told. 

Meanwhile, soon, I will have my book in my hand. 

I’ll hold onto it for you, until you can get your own copy, in June. 

 

 

 

Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015

 

 

 

Dare to Find

Perhaps you are a religious seeker, unaffiliated, or, if affiliated, unconvinced.  Perhaps what happened to my wife and to me will interest you. 

 

Like us, figuratively, you’ve been hiking a long dry road.  You are caked with dust and sweat.  Perhaps you are sore of knee and low on water.  Me, when we were in our desert of discontent, I had no idea where our next water should come from, we were so parched. 

 

Here’s what happened. 

 

We came upon a religious river, and now we are on its other side.  Over here, it is a green and pleasant land.  It is satisfying over here—difficult, too. 

 

If you believe that you have been called to set out into the unknown, then, I say, stick with it, sore and dry as you may be.  Up ahead—just around the next bend—you’ll find a river flowing past. 

 

Turn aside.  Slip off your pack.  Crick your back.  Walk a step or two. 

 

Feel that breeze?

 

It’s good, isn’t it, to strip off your boots and your hot, damp socks.  Dip your toes in the river and then wade out deeper.  Wade until the water is above your knees, until the current presses against you, and until the water’s coldness shortens your breath.  Wade farther still, to where the sand melts under your feet, and to where you need to make swimming motions in the air with your arms in order to keep yourself in balance.     

 

Stop there. 

 

Shall you plunge? 

 

My wife and I stood just exactly where you are standing right now. 

 

We—we, all of us—we all of us stand right there, do we not? 

 

Often we stand right there in our lives, and we wonder, shall we plunge? 

 

 

                                                            ***

 

Here’s what you’ll need to make it to the opposite shore.   

 

You’ll need more than thinking to make it across.  Brain power won’t cut it.  You’ll need to go beyond that marvelous brain of yours.  You’ll need to do what the Israelites did at the edge of the deep Red Sea.  You’ll need to tap into your heart and your soul.  You’ll need to get out of God’s face and stop yelling at him—“The Egyptians are coming!  The Egyptians are coming!”—and, prayerfully, to give him time to perform His miracle for you. 

 

You will need to dare. 

 

You will need to dare.   

 

Here’s the fundamental story, and the fundamental promise of the ages—if you dare, then there is Someone on the other shore who will leap to bring you in.  

 

           

                                                                        ***   

 

Friends and family were curious when my wife and I crossed to the other side—Judaism to Christianity, law to grace, caterpillar to butterfly, in Shakespearian terms, Acts One, Two, Three, and Four to Act Five. 

 

We did our best to answer their questions, and, satisfied, some have cast speculative glances at the river themselves, thinking long thoughts. 

 

There were those among our friends and family whom we worried might be alarmed for us at our crossing to the other side, or who might be angry that we adopted a new country when oughtn’t it to have been enough to keep a deprecated or a moderated religion, at least for comfort’s sake, as some of them may have done?

 

Indeed, what was striking to us in most of these encounters is the genuine kindness and curiosity with which almost all of our friends and relations blessed our conversions.  This surprise ought to be taken as good news by any other seekers, similarly anxious.     

 

We remain grateful for the solicitude shown to us about a theological convulsion over which we had little control.

 

                                                            ***

 

 At the moment of our conversions, my wife and I were relieved of wandering.  We were relieved of contemporary anxiety.  We were relieved of our culture’s famous loneliness and narcissism.

 

We were relieved, not of sin, but of the compulsion to sin. 

 

Most deeply, though, we were relieved of the horrid and the fearsome existential burden that it might be only we ourselves—we negligent and stumbling humans—who are the purpose of it all.

 

For if it should have turned out, in the end, that only we negligent and stumbling humans are the purpose of the universe, then…. 

 

Well, then…

 

Well, then, it is very cold out there. 

 

The stars are very strange. 

 

Guttural grunts tiger the night. 

 

And the powerless will be—as they always have been—devoured by the powerful…yum, yum.    

 

But it is not so.

 

THE UNIVERSE IS NOT ABOUT US.

 

That’s what Channa and I were relieved to find out, thank God.    

 

 

                                                         ***

 

This thing that happened to my wife and to me is an actual, real, true thing.  It happened right here, right now.  It is not a metaphor.  It is not an intellectual caprice.  It arose neither from a crochet nor from a mood.  

 

We didn’t control it.  When it came upon us, instead we gave in to it. 

 

The thing that happened to us is a thing that has happened to legions of humans, down the ages, and, having happened to us, it changed us as it changed them. 

 

We are different now.  We inhabit the other shore. 

 

Skeptics today have invented nothing new.  

 

God’s creation and purpose has been on display before a world of skeptical skepticism since God’s glory, itself, began. 

 

Skeptics today are the worshippers of the Roman Emperor of old, who found themselves astounded by Christianity and by its calling to succor the insignificant, the poor, the downtrodden, the ill, the widows, the slaves, the children. 

 

Skeptics today are the go-along-to-get-along worshippers of the Emperor of old and of the State long ago, who were nevertheless abashed—when they could bring themselves to notice it—at the lyricism with which the martyrs met the lions. 

 

Skeptics today are the worshippers of the Emperor of old, who, upon encountering this new concept of a transcendent, a universal, and a redemptive God, were compelled to climb up into His lap, and to punch Him in the nose. 

 

“You are not the boss of me!” they shouted at Him—and they shout at Him today.  

 

Goodness, what a tantrum. 

 

I’m sorry, but God’s purpose is. 

 

Be our time A.D. 100 or A.D. 2000, God’s purpose can’t be gotten rid of. 

 

 

                                                            ***

 

Seeker, be bold! 

 

Dare!

 

Plunge!

 

            There is—indeed—Someone on the other shore who will leap to bring you in. 




Copyright, Dikkon Eberhart, 2015