The Autobiography of My Father

by Martin Edmond

  I was Agonistes in a cave alone choosing death to something to do with Mother and women. But not a real doubt.

  After Therapy

  The year of your breakdown was 1972, the same year you fulfilled a lifetime ambition and became President of the Post Primary Teachers’ Association. To the gratitude of teachers everywhere, you finally negotiated a pay rise which had been deferred for years. You went from that involvement into a psychiatric hospital. You were fifty-two.

  I forget when you came out again. It must have been during the summer of 1972–73. You would have attempted to resume your position as headmaster of Heretaunga College when the school year began in February. I know by Anzac Day you were back ‘inside’, because Frances took you to Dunedin and she told me how, the morning after your committal, she woke in her hotel room to the sound of a bugle playing the Last Post.

  The writing must have been done during your first stay there. I don’t think you were in for very long the other time. That was when you had shock treatment.

  You drove up to see me a few months after you came out of Ashburn Hall that second time. I was living at Pukapuka Road, near Puhoi, north of Auckland. Fleeing my own ‘over-education’, I had left university in order to write. I did write a lot that year. I also drank a lot, took a lot of drugs and went quite strange. You came at the end of winter, not long before Rachel made her first attempt at suicide. But this is not the place to recall the air of fatality that hung over us all then.

  I remember very little of your visit. There was the Friday night when I had your car, the ’66 grey and black Chrysler Valiant with red upholstery and, without you, went to the Kiwi with my friends. Afterwards, on our way to a party, we were stopped by the cops outside the Civic Theatre in Wellesley Street. I had driven down the hill from the pub with no lights on.

  I would have been in big trouble (drunk, no licence) had one of us not leapt from the car, shouting abuse, and smashed a bottle on the road. In their enthusiasm to get Chris down to the station and beat him up properly, the cops forgot all about charging me. We left him in their clutches and went off to the party. I never told you about this.

  We smoked some marijuana together. You said it had no effect on you. You certainly didn’t freak out. You would have been on heavy medication at the time anyway. We – my older sisters and I – had a vague notion that grass would be better for you than alcohol and so tried to turn you on. You laughed a bit. Stoned, you were just like you always were, but in a slightly more relaxed mode.

  When it came to be time for you to return to Wellington, however, you would not drive your car. You did not drive again for more than ten years. The brief freedom of your return to the world after therapy was gone. I drove you back down the island myself, you hunched on the passenger side, staring out the window, smoking, not talking. We broke the journey halfway and stayed the night with Stan Frost in Rangataua. His dark and gloomy house, huddled under Ruapehu, full of unused furniture, seemed like the inside of someone’s cluttered, neglected head. We drank Cointreau and, later, I wrote a poem full of melancholy foreboding about the experience.

  The therapy, whatever it was meant to do, clearly had not worked. This is perhaps because it is very difficult to alter behaviour merely by analysing what is wrong and wanting to set it right again. It is very difficult to change habits with thought alone. Exhortation only goes a little way towards modifying lifelong patterns. You need more efficient forms of mind control for that.

  I recall a comment of R. D. Laing’s. He said, if someone is in a dungeon, in a dark, dank, forbidding place and the door is open, there is no point in analysing the route by which they got there. The task is to find a way out. Then there may be some point to analysis.

  Your account is so uncritical. It reads like a confession from one of the show trials of the 1930s. You took it all on board. Studying Erich Fromm obviously made you feel guilty about feeling guilty and what’s the future in that? It seems to me there is not a right or a wrong way to be a person in the world, but many different ways, all more or less valid. It is surely more important to learn how you are, accept it and live accordingly than it is to try to mould yourself to an ideal.

  I mean, if it was a maternal embrace you wanted, why should you not have had it? Is it the desire that is wrong or its frustration by circumstances?

  Something that must be said: at the time of your writing, my mother had probably already begun the series of affairs she would continue to have as long as you lived together. Your attempt to become once again worthy of her love was already doomed to fail. She had gone.

  When you did become aware of these ‘infidelities’ – for that is always how you saw them – your sense of outrage was unremitting. You never accepted that she could have lovers other than yourself, just as you never took another lover for yourself, despite a number of opportunities to do so. That loyalty should be so misplaced and yet so fiercely honoured, still seems wonderfully strange to me.

  You hardly ever talked directly about sex. On a couple of occasions, you did make cryptic remarks about the breakdown of your marriage. ‘When Lauris turned me down,’ you said, ‘that was it. I never tried again.’ It seems incredible that your sensitivity was so great that one rebuff meant the end of all love-making. But, as you said, you were brought up the old-fashioned way, and it may have been so.

  After we made the tapes, you took me out to Woodside Station to catch the train. Almost the last thing you said before I left, was that you had not had an erection since 1975. Ten years. You said it was a relief. As if sexual desire were a kind of endlessly renewed torture like lawns and hedges, growing up only to be chopped down again.

  Yet you always got on well with women. Women always liked you. This is another aspect of your therapy I find odd – that you should have been warned against the ease with which you did strike up relationships with women. As if there were something wrong with that.

  When you had your first breakdown, in 1963, you went to see a Jungian therapist in Wellington. Mrs Cristeller had studied under Carl Jung himself. She was aged, and died before your analysis was complete – with consequences that remain incalculable. This is the origin of Dr Bell’s reference to you being six months into therapy when you came to her.

  Maybe it was something to do with your anima. Maybe you were psychologically female to a degree that was intolerable, given the circumstances in which you grew up and the kind of aggressively masculine culture you lived most of your life inside. Certainly you became ambivalent later on. ‘Women …’, you’d say, in that resigned, despairing tone – the same one you used for pests you could not get rid of, like couch grass or ants. Resignation at the insouciance of nature, despair at your inability to control it. Though you could hardly be said to be alone in that. Half your generation of men seem to feel the same way, and many of their sons. Yet if there was an ambivalence there, I do not seem to have inherited it. So much of your character I find in myself, but not that.

  You wondered if you were two different people. Perhaps you were. It was your public persona that brought you success in the world. The public man, wearing a suit and glasses, with a clean masculine smell, stood up in front of assemblies of hundreds of children, addressed staff meetings, sat on committees, stayed (like your father before you) in De Bretts hotels, was headmaster of this or that school, President of the Post Primary Teachers’ Association, discussed education policy with politicians and bureaucrats, even appeared on TV.

  While all this important political and educational activity went on, the private person just withered away. Disappeared. Was left in the care of ‘my wife’. When she, too, stopped caring for it, you were left, as you say, adrift. You looked around for your self and it wasn’t there any more. As you correctly predicted, you lost both job and family. Only the private person was left. And this was, or had become, a cypher. You didn’t know who you were any more.

  The basic problem seems to have been to do with power. With the exercise of authority. You were dra
wn to it by the demands of your profession and by your upbringing, but you did not have the requisite strength of mind – should that be narrowness of mind? – to order others around. You never had problems with discipline or control in the classroom, probably because you were able to operate with the consent of those you were dealing with then. The kids liked you. And your anger, though rarely seen, was an awesome thing.

  As a headmaster you continued to try to be liked by all the pupils, all of their parents, all of the staff and the school board as well. You wanted everyone on your side. Which was impossible. You were the boss. You were it. They had to do what you said. And it drove you crazy. It drove you to drink.

  You did also have the misfortune, both at Huntly and at Heretaunga, to follow upon disciplinarians of the old school. At Heretaunga College particularly, you were viciously opposed. You felt there was a conspiracy against you because of your liberal ideas. They wanted to get you out of the job, and in the end they succeeded. One day you simply could not face going to school. You went back to hospital instead. And that was the end of your career as a headmaster.

  In one of our last conversations you said it was your own father’s death you never got over. You said that, although you hated him, as long as he was alive you felt that you would be all right. You qualified that by explaining you meant it in a financial sense, but it obviously went deeper than that. You seem to have been driven to exorcise, in your self and in the world, the authority he had had over you. And at the very moment when you achieved as much as you had ever desired of power in the world, some void rose up within you and you doubted everything you knew. I think you felt you had to learn, somehow, to stand in your father’s shoes. And he had, somehow, convinced you you would never be good enough to do that. You had to try and you had to fail.

  There was something terrifying about you in those years after Ashburn Hall, before you went to live on your own. You got up in the morning and went to work at a job you hated – marking papers in the Correspondence School first, later collating statistical research at the Curriculum Unit of the Education Department – then came home in the afternoon and started to drink. I remember you standing, rigid, your back to the room, staring into the glass, smoking incessantly, for hours on end. You would speak only when spoken to and sometimes not even then. Your whole body radiated resentment, disappointment, anger and fear. Family life, such as it was, skirted around the dark ambiguous cloud you made in the room. There were periodic explosions in these years. My younger sisters have told me of the fear they felt of your rages, which would erupt without warning.

  Even after you left, this behaviour recurred if you ever went back to my mother’s house for any time longer than a few hours. It was the pattern your marriage had fallen into, from which it had become irretrievable. You drank and she hectored you about your drinking. You ‘behaved badly’ and she criticised your behaviour. It was as if, on her territory, you had no option but to become this snarling, cornered, disappointed, angry man, no other self but the one rejected by her. To be anything else you had to be away from her.

  She, meanwhile, over the course of that decade after therapy, bizarrely, became the custodian of your illness. She would explain in detail what had happened, what it meant and how we, the children, should behave. Egged on by her, each of us at one time or another tried to persuade you to stop drinking. It made no difference. You became even more defensive than you already were, more intent upon the next drink, more defiant and more aggressive. We were on this side, the right side, the good side, the healthy side. You were on that side, the wrong side, the bad side, the sick side. It was your own perversity that kept you there. All you had to do to come and join us was stop drinking. Then you could cross that unimaginable distance back to righteousness.

  To be quite fair – the phrase is your own – to be fair to my mother, she tried to pull you out of the spiralling vortex of alcoholism and depression. She spent long hours over the years hearing your confessions and offering her counsel. Those sessions behind closed doors that began when you turned down your first headmastership and continued, with increasing intensity and a barely concealed hysteria, when you did take the job at Huntly, must have worn her down to the bone.

  And yet it still seems so very strange, the way your fall and her rise coincide exactly. As the power that had been yours flowed away from you, it seemed to feed directly into the current of her life. As your strength, your self-confidence and your optimism waned, hers increased. You could plot it on a graph.

  Does it mean anything at all, beyond the simple fact that it happened? If it is true that her allegiance made you strong, what does that mean about the strength she found during your decline? Why did you go on living together for nearly ten years when the marriage was so obviously over? Was that because she needed your economic support to continue to build her career? Or was she paying you back for the humiliation she felt she had suffered at your hands all through the fifties and the sixties, when you wore the smiling public face of success and she was stuck at home with six kids and all her frustrated ambitions?

  She told me she thought you could not survive without her. She said it is one of the regrets of her life that the marriage did not end sooner. Had you parted earlier, when you both probably knew it was over, would you have put yourself back together quicker and better than you did? Would you have had more of a chance if you’d gone out on your own then?

  Your way of describing the separation was always the same: ‘When I got out from under Lauris …’, you’d say. This was because the house in Oriental Bay, which you bought together after Rachel died, had been divided horizontally, and you lived in the converted basement downstairs. This was a daily humiliation you never did quite forgive her for. Yet it was only when she went overseas that you found the strength to go.

  Even so, you continued to see each other after you separated. You gave her financial and emotional help; she would come to your aid during your increasingly frequent illnesses. She even used to stay with you at 129 Main Street sometimes. She always used the upstairs. As at Oriental Bay, you remained downstairs. It was another part of the pattern that did not change. Another bizarre reprise of your married life.

  Essentially, what you were doing in those last ten years, was learning to change. You left a wife who was no longer a wife and who refused to be a mother either, and went away to look for the self you had lost. You looked for your self and learned how to look after it, the bits you found. You had, for instance, to learn to cook. To shop. To do housework. To manage your own time and run your own social life. All things conventionally understood as women’s work. They were very difficult for you to do and you showed a lot of courage in the attempt. But, contrary to what I said at your funeral, you didn’t ever really find the whole person again. You remained impaired, less than complete, damaged.

  I cannot forget the way you took your food, for instance. You ate very quickly, as if in a hurry to get it over with. At the edge of your plate you’d construct a salt mountain and then cover it with a sprinkle of pepper. Each forkload of food was dipped in this before making its way to your mouth. You’d be gathering the next forkful before you had even chewed, much less swallowed, the last.

  This habit had devastating results once you lost your teeth. The false ones you got never fitted. Or, if they did, age soon shrank your jaw so they fitted no longer. They hurt you, and they were extremely uncomfortable. Mostly, you went without them, but you usually put them in to eat. Despite their obvious inefficiency, you ate as fast as ever, with the consequence that you often choked. The food would get caught in your throat and, as you attempted to clear it, you would begin to cough from your ruined lungs as well. Coughing, choking, spitting, eyes full of tears, in the midst of your distress, you would still attempt an apology.

  When calm returned, you’d explain that you knew you had to eat slowly, but always forgot. It must have been something that went back to early childhood. It was ingrained and you seemed unable to alter th
e pattern, unable to adapt to the fundamental change in your circumstances.

  Nor can I forget the way you sat. With your shoulders held high around your ears, and both arms extended, you clasped with your hands each thigh just above the knee. In this posture, the length of your back, your neck, shoulders and arms were all locked, held quite rigid. I used to suggest that you try sitting in a more relaxed way, with your shoulders down and your arms folded or just hanging. You would do it; but within a matter of minutes, up would go the shoulders again, out would go the arms and you would lock yourself back into that bow of tension which apparently could not be loosed.

  You never did stop drinking either – not until the very end. There were times when a doctor’s warning would scare you enough for you to try to moderate it, or even kick it for a little while. After your third spell in a psychiatric hospital, in the winter of 1986, you cut out both smoking and drinking. You remained a non-smoker after that but, inevitably, the drinking started again. You tried Alcoholics Anonymous, but about the only tangible thing you got from them was the satisfaction of being able to quote the words of St Francis of Assisi which are their motto. ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference,’ you’d say. Then you’d pour yourself another drink.

  This was how you did it: you were an all-day sipper. Using a small glass, like a sherry glass, you filled it to the brim with whatever it was and then consumed it in tiny sips. You could sit on a drink for hours, and only when the glass was nearly empty would you allow yourself the luxury of tossing off the dregs. Then the whole process would begin again. This way you could drink all day and into the night without ever seeming to get drunk. I guess alcoholics don’t. Your words might begin to slur and you could become unsteady on your feet. Sometimes, when you were older and more frail, you would fall down. No other effect was detectable – no excess of emotion, whether joy or despair. I suppose you drank to kill the pain. It was the release you were after – from the torture of your thoughts and from that massive tension you carried in your neck, your shoulders, your back. A rictus so great my attempts at massage caused you to cry out in agony.