My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  One morning during my show, Dan called me. “Uh, yes,” he said, “I’d like to make a request.” He didn’t identify himself, but it was self-evidently Dan: the voice was unnaturally low and fake. This was another of Dan’s practical jokes, and a clumsy one. I called his bluff. “You want to make a request, huh?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “Forget it. We don’t need any stupid fucking listeners calling with their goddamn idiotic requests. No fucking way am I—”

  At the other end of the line, there was a tiny, muffled gasp. Then a click. Dan had hung up.

  No. A listener who’d called to make a request had hung up.

  I set down the receiver and stared at the phone. The song I had been playing was beginning to fade out. I was trembling. I turned toward the microphone. What could I say? I could tell the truth; I could be myself. I could say, “To the listener who just called, I apologize. You won’t believe the misunderstanding that led me to say what I did. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Please. Maybe even call back. I’ll explain.”

  Instead I said, “It’s twelve minutes in front of eight o’clock. Mild temperatures in store for us today, and a brisk wind. . . .”

  The next day, after classes had ended, I was at the station and was told I had a phone call. I picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Is this Chris Forhan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuck you, asshole.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  53

  Glib, oblivious, scared, practiced at fending off glumness with wisecracks and sneers, I was offered for an hour each day, in the class of Frances Myers, a glimpse of another way of being, a glimpse of a way out, of a way to use language to reveal—and wonder about—­unsettling truths, not to deflect attention from them.

  Mrs. Myers was a genuine teacher, a life-altering one. She had been Kevin’s English teacher three years before and, already past seventy by the time I was sitting in her classroom, might have been the oldest teacher in the school. She was among that generation of highly intelligent women who came of age in the 1920s and, with few other options for a way to use their minds in a career, went into teaching. She had a round, kind face and wore large glasses with black plastic rims. She was of modest height—shorter than most of her students—and was slightly plump; hers was the body, I imagined, of a woman who had devoted her life to sitting in comfy armchairs, turning the pages of fat eighteenth-century novels, sipping occasionally from a snifter of sherry. Her wardrobe was unassuming: flat-soled black shoes and simple dresses or skirt-and-vest ensembles—homemade?—in solid autumnal colors, usually some shade of russet. She brushed her gray hair flat on both sides and tied it in the back in a small bun. Everything about her appearance signaled that appearance is important only insofar as it does not suggest you lack dignity and seriousness. And everything that she said, always in a firm but calm and measured way, signaled that literature is worth being serious about, which means that our own lives are worth being serious about, the ones we ourselves are in the midst of experiencing and therefore being bewildered and terrified and delighted by, even if we are only eighteen—or maybe especially so.

  Nonetheless, at that age, we were still kids, which meant that our preferred method of showing respect for someone was to make her the butt of a joke. During class one day, it was necessary for Mrs. Myers to slip out of the room for a moment, perhaps to collect a stack of fresh mimeographed handouts about Hemingway or Conrad. After the door closed behind her, I proposed a plan to my classmates: when she returned, each of us would be staring at the ceiling, feigning interest in something peculiar up there. She would be bound to look up, too. We would have her! Without a word, we would have made her follow our lead; she would show herself to be merely human—perhaps in the same bumbly way that we were. For a moment, all of us, including our dear teacher, would be in on something together, something we students had created, something that we all, even she, might end up chuckling about.

  When Mrs. Myers returned to the room, every student in the class was peering upward at the perforated white ceiling tiles. She looked up, too. Then she lowered her gaze. “No, people,” she said flatly. Her eyes were narrow. “No.”

  There were no more jokes after that—just books. Good books. Great books. In my previous English classes, I had been assigned stories and poems and plays chosen not for their literary merit but for the ease with which an adolescent might comprehend them. Their syntax was simple, their plots broadly drawn, their symbols few or clumsily overt. Their subjects were phantom hitchhikers, friendly dragons, and plucky squads of Little Leaguers with can-do attitudes. Now I was being asked to read Kafka, Ibsen, Eliot, Chekhov, and Shakespeare. Mrs. Myers was traditional enough to require that we choose a passage from Hamlet and memorize it; four decades later, I still have a pretty good handle on the Dane’s droll, aggrieved graveyard musings about how our bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with them.

  It was Crime and Punishment that hit me hardest. What a thoughtful, tortured soul Raskolnikov was, and how like him I was! I had never encountered someone so desirous and doubtful, so dream-haunted and wounded, so eager to experience what was genuine and so ill-equipped to do so, someone whose work, as he explained it, was “thinking.” Just like me! The fact that he murdered two people in cold blood was no impediment to considering him my twin. And why? It was a matter of point of view; from the first page, Dostoevsky asked me to see the world through Raskolnikov’s eyes, to contemplate it with his mind, so a lack of identification with him was impossible. It was a literary device, a mere trick of language, but one that made me feel deeply and strangely alive—or that reminded me how deeply strange it is to be alive. I couldn’t get over it.

  This feeling, in my most satisfying experiences of reading, of being overwhelmed by an essential truth and therefore of completely identifying with a work of literature, of losing myself in it and, paradoxically, of finding myself: this was my sole understanding, at that point, of what makes literature matter. The idea was crude and circumscribed, but it was not false. In Mrs. Myers’ class, I fell in love again and again, and I began, in earnest, clumsy fashion, to try to articulate that love.

  When we read A. E. Housman’s collection of poems A Shropshire Lad, I fell hard, willingly, happily, for its mournful, bitter, and witty pondering of youthful love and death. Assigned to write an analytical paper, I chose as my subject the poem that begins “Look not in my eyes, for fear / They mirror true the sight I see”—a poem about a young man lost in love. Just like me!

  At a desk in my bedroom at night, in the small glow of my reading light, I went at the poem with diligence and patience and a detective’s squinting, avid eye. In my essay, I mentioned the poem’s use of iambic tetrameter—I had that much of the technician in me—although I probably didn’t say much about why the meter matters; I did not note how, in the statement “But why should you as well as I / Perish? gaze not in my eyes,” much of the emotional power can be attributed to the way the line ends in mid-thought and, when the next line picks up the thought again, it does so with a trochee, letting the word perish break in like the blow of a sledgehammer. Though I felt that sledgehammer, I did not know how to talk about it.

  Concerning Housman’s use of the term star-defeated, I was on solid ground, having encountered “star-crossed lovers” in Romeo and Juliet. But the poet spends the second half of the poem talking about a “Grecian lad” who turns into a jonquil. I guessed that a jonquil is a flower. To confirm this, I opened the dictionary, and I read that a jonquil is otherwise known as narcissus. Supposing that I’d better look that up, too, I discovered the Greek myth that explains the reference to the “Grecian lad,” and I heard the click of connection. I felt like a dogged scholar, an unearther of meaning, a discerner of subterranean connections. Something else about the poem intrigued me, something oddly askew about the speaker’s plea. He is overcome wi
th love and therefore, if he were anything like me, must desire to be loved in return, yet the desire he expresses to his beloved is that she turn away from him, that she not look in his eyes. (I blithely assumed that the poem addresses a she. The author was a man, wasn’t he? I knew nothing of the homoerotic nature of much of Housman’s writing, and it wouldn’t have crossed my mind to wonder why the beloved is implicitly compared with a young, pretty Greek boy.) This passionate desire not to be desired is, as Mrs. Myers would have reminded me, a paradox; it might be how a certain kind of pain—the sweet pain of unrequited love—can be enacted, and there is an interesting hint of aggression in it, too, or of passive-aggressiveness. The lover expresses his own pain through the pretense of protecting the object of his love from a similar pain. He is not entirely ingenuous. “See what you have done to me, however unwittingly?” he might be saying. “My suffering will not end. You clearly are uninterested in loving me, but at least I can warn you against loving yourself too much.” All of this is there—the yearning, the tenderness, the helplessness, the petulance. And it’s only words, only words. I was wildly in love myself, with a girl who would not have me, and her disregard served as further fuel for my love, so finally it was perhaps only the love I was in love with. I ended my literary analysis with a single-sentence flourish: “About this poem, all I can say is, ‘I wish I’d written that.’ ” Mrs. Myers forgave me the dopiness and awarded me an A.

  When a visiting poet came to the school for a day, Mrs. Myers selected four or five of us—the high achievers in the class—to spend a class period with him in a conference room in the library. This was a real poet, and a living one. So such a thing existed! From looking at him, you wouldn’t know he was a poet; with his jeans and sneakers and cursorily combed hair, he did not seem so unlike us. We sat with him around a Formica-topped table. After reminding us that poetry communicates through metaphor, he asked us to come up with a single image that might serve as a metaphor for ourselves. I thought for a minute, jotting down a few possibilities. When my turn came, I announced that I was a windmill, flailing my arms while being unable to budge. It struck me as pretty good, a single emblem of multiple contradictory feelings: a yearning for freedom and a simultaneous sense of obligation to that which prevented me from being free—to that, in fact, which might define my essential identity in the first place. One of the other students, Margaret, whom I admired for her emotional steadiness and her supple intellect and her bold decision to enroll, the next fall, in an experimental, arty hippie college without traditional majors, stifled a laugh and declared that it might be the dumbest thing she’d ever heard.

  Mrs. Myers, however, was not so dismissive of my poetic potential. She chose me to represent the school in a nationwide poetry competition sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English. I composed a cryptic poem whose references were almost entirely private and whose few understandable lines were mawkishly sentimental. It was a loose collage of thoughts about darkness and mournful solitude and futile love, requisite topics for my writing at the time. The poem’s meter and mood were inspired by a doleful Supertramp song about a man’s shadow speaking difficult truths to him. On my way out of class one day, I stopped at Mrs. Myers’ desk and presented her with my handwritten manuscript.

  She studied it for a moment, lips pursed. “This is what you’d like to enter in the contest? This is the poem you’ve chosen?”

  “Yes.”

  She paused, then slid the paper into a manila folder. “Okay,” she said, and looked up. “Fine. Thank you, Chris.”

  Months later I received a form letter, an impersonally worded announcement that the poem had been read by the judges and would not be receiving recognition.

  I would not be deterred, though—not by that rejection notice nor by the hundreds I received as the decades slid by. I could not, would not, stop writing poems.

  A year after graduation, I returned to my old school for a visit, in search of Mrs. Myers, especially. I was coming back in glory, was I not? I was in college and still writing poems, going at it like gangbusters. I wanted to thank Mrs. Myers but mainly to surprise and delight her with my return—one of her favorite students, one of her truly gifted writers, swaggering back to chat about old times.

  The final bell of the school day had rung a half hour earlier. The halls, nearly empty, echoed with my footsteps and with a locker clanging shut far away, around a corner. Mrs. Myers’ classroom door was open. I stepped inside. She was sitting at her desk, a paper in her hand. “Mrs. Myers?” I said. She turned her head toward me. “It’s Chris.”

  She squinted.

  “Chris Forhan. I was in your class last year.”

  She smiled. “Ye-e-e-s. Kevin’s brother. How is he? Is he still writing?”

  – Part V –

  Silence and Song

  54

  Yes, Kevin was writing. It was all that mattered to him, it seemed. Was there something about our being the sons of a father who killed himself that caused us both to turn to poetry? The relationship between the two things is covert, but it exists. For millennia, a father’s job has been to show his sons how to live; our father neglected that job—or he unintentionally took on the opposite task, teaching us that the value of life is questionable. If life had value, if life was worth living, that value and worth were surely present in our own lives, present within us. Poetry, we were discovering, was a way to let those things have their say.

  At the top of a narrow, creaky back staircase, in his cramped apartment above a garage, Kevin was staying up through the night, sipping cheap booze, smoking, thumbing through books of poems, and clacking away at his typewriter. Like Keats, like Rimbaud, he breathed poetry, or bled it. This was not a pose; he was not pretending. He was young and in love with what language could do. He was reading Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Whitman, Stein, Stevens. He was giving himself over to impossible projects—devoting months and months, for instance, to the composing of nine-line stanzas in which each line contained exactly nine syllables. He was getting a music into his mind and into his muscles. He was trusting a hunch: if he followed poetry into the dark, followed it as far as it could take him, it might illuminate that darkness—providing a temporary light, perhaps, but a true one. Fiddling with syllables until they sang, turning a line just right to make a sentence’s rhythm and sense dance, causing a word to knock softly, like a billiard ball, against another it had never encountered: these might be the means of an alchemy by which he could create something new in language, something that breathed a pure breath, something that could sustain his life or deepen it.

  And he was only nineteen, only twenty, twenty-one, and he was my brother, he was good, he was on to something, and the feelings in his poems were ones that I felt, too, and the thoughts were those that, dimly lit, flitted within my own skull but that I could not articulate. He wrote a poem that began “I’m head bent dreaming on the keys / Of any way I might approach you.” Who was that “you,” that someone “scraping a thick grudge” off his walls? That sounded familiar. And that house with “an ambulance parked outside,” someone “sleeping locked in his car,” the glass “all fogged up inside”—I knew that house. I knew the person in that car.

  Before my eyes, my brother was making poetry out of life, out of his life, out of mine, making a life that mattered by making poetry—by trying to get at the truth, however murky, and put it into words. It didn’t seem such an odd and lonely thing for me to try to do the same.

  Perhaps, had our father grown old, he would have spoken to his adult sons of his doubts about God and about himself. Perhaps he would have shared with us his sense of uncertainty and unease about the choices he had made, and about the choices he was making. Perhaps there was some poetry in him. But the father we knew, if he had such feelings, kept them to himself. Outwardly, he remained a man who followed a path of unwavering certainty—of duty and hard work, of belief that such things bring the rewards of m
aterial comfort and social acceptance, and maybe belief that duty and hard work are their own reward: that they are, in themselves, an unquestioned good.

  Following such a path, however, can distract a man from himself, from desires and fears and misgivings that, ignored too long, might destroy him. Kevin was taking the opposite path: one of loyalty to his own ambivalence and uncertainty and to his suspicion that the tentative truths he stumbled upon through his own experience had more merit than the rigid ones he had been instructed to believe. He would not follow custom out of fear or courtesy, as our father might have done; he would try to let his own intellect and curiosity guide him, even if they guided him into difficulty and mysteries. He cherished wonder and possibility, and he understood that they are nearer cousins to skepticism than to faith. As I was beginning to do, he was finding in poetry the satisfactions that were not present for him in religion. If poetry and religious faith are similar in attempting to comprehend—or at least frame or point toward—eternal mysteries, poetry could be of use in a way that religion isn’t: it is fluid, shifting; its images and forms change; its instinct is to move in order to hit a moving target.

  Like my brother, I was addicted to the intoxication that came—occasionally, unexpectedly—in the writing of a poem: the feeling of being outside of time, of floating amid scatterings and fragments of thought that, if I was sufficiently patient and self-forgetful, might suddenly cohere into a shape that surprised and delighted me with its rightness. Sometimes, in a few lines, I felt that I had pinned existence to the mat and it had given up its secrets. The feeling was fleeting, but it did not seem untrue for being so. Maybe it was true because it was fleeting, the quick glimpse of a fact that would blind me if I stared at it too long. What mattered most to me about the poems I was reading—and, I hoped, those I was writing—was a sense of the strangeness and mystery and beauty of our being here in the first place, of this place itself being here.