Second Half First

  I didn’t dream Rothian dreams after Patrick died, but back in Sydney at the table that had moved with me from the house on the corner to the flat on the hill behind Bondi, when I talked of his death I’d recall the first time I saw him cry. We were watching Churchill’s funeral on TV in the sitting room of his house by the river, and I can still muster the sensation of shock as silent tears rolled down his cheeks and were wiped away as they emerged beneath his glasses. The only other time I saw him cry was the evening I sat at the table in his kitchen while Betsy watched Days of Our Lives in another room and I told him how Poppy had died, how she’d asked for Janey, and soon after she’d arrived had surprised the nurses and us by opening her eyes with a slight turn of the head as her breathing slowed. There was no line to mark the end of her life; the final breath became the final breath only when long enough had passed for there to be no other. For Patrick, too, the end, the very end, came quietly. When I returned to Sydney after his death, there were no tears. The tears were done. The death was done. Ambivalence was not banished, the story was not elaborated; it was as it was; and ambivalence, at least in regard to Patrick – father and mortal being both – was also as it was. Maybe analysis had done its work. I mourned him, of course I mourned him, but I was not undone; it did not leave a festering wound. When I woke with a start thinking, Who will rescue me if I end up in some foreign jail? I could recognise this late-night horror for what it was: a spectre of the protecting Father, now dead, who in his mortal form, for all his experience with English law, would not have been able to rescue me from a jail there was no reason to think I’d find myself in. I came to understand that it had been his absent presence, this ideal of the Father, that had freed me to climb those mountains into the moss forest, to cross the world and re-create myself not as the daughter nor, as it turned out, a wife, but as myself, whoever that person ‘I’ was who emerged through the tries, the stories, the testing. Of course those letters to Patrick were veiled; what else could they be? I was performing for him as I was for myself, as if auditioning for a play, testing a role that might be mine, or for which I could – and did – prove only an understudy. I couldn’t perform for Poppy, but for Patrick I was another storymasta, which was what the Duna of New Guinea called us long-haired ones who were neither church nor government. Storymasta, psychoanalyst, anthropologist, writer.

  I did write an essay called ‘The Death of the Good Father’, but not until many years later, prompted into it by reading a 2008 collection of essays and stories from Granta called, simply, Fathers.40 Many of the contributors were young enough to have fathers my age, or not much older; not all of them were bad fathers, but many were: drunk, self-regarding, irresponsible, sometimes outright criminal; at best inconsistent and inadequate. Nor were all the writer-children angry, but many were; not all the angry children were sons, but again many were. And with good reason. Since then there’s been Breaking Bad and if ever there was an ambivalent portrayal of a twenty-first-century father, it’d have to be Walter White. Good father or bad? How come it’s even a question? The categories collapse around this anti-hero father, and I can’t be the only one who, despite it all, longed for Walter’s son to turn back towards him before the inevitable end. Is it only a case of clever filmmaking, of narrative control? Or does it (also) touch some desire in us? What’s going on in our crazy upside-down world?

  ‘What is it that we’ve done to make so many children’s hearts so hard,’ Obama asks in Dreams from My Father when he returns from Kenya to Chicago’s ‘decaying’ South Side, ‘and what collectively might we do to right their moral compass?’41

  A little over a century ago, in 1907, when Edmund Gosse published Father and Son, his friend Henry James felt its ‘audacity’ had gone too far; ‘not too far, I mean, for truth, but too far for filiality, or at least for tenderness’.42 To read it now, audacity, or lack of filiality, is as nothing compared to the angry twenty-first-century sons. As to tenderness, there is a painful twist of love – if that counts as tenderness – to the story of Gosse’s ruin of a father. Edmund was eight years old in 1857, the year Philip Gosse, his devout, scientist father, was crushed by the humiliating response to the book he’d laboured over for many years. As a bible-reading Christian and also a respected (until then) naturalist, he had made it his task to reconcile two irreconcilable rivers of thought: the theory of evolution – the evidence for which, as a scientist, he couldn’t ignore – and the creation of the world in six days – which he understood, literally, as six days each of exactly twenty-four hours. He called this book, the great work of his life, Omphalos, the word for navel or belly button in ancient Greek – chosen for its symbol of the dilemma. Adam had no need of a navel, being born of God not woman, and yet he surely had one. Why? To give him the appearance of a human past. Fossils were part of God’s creation; like everything else, they came into being during those six momentous days. Why? So that the world, too, would appear to have a deep history. Certain that ‘he alone possessed the secret of the enigma’, he offered Omphalos, his son wrote, ‘with a glowing gesture, to atheists and Christians alike’.43

  Instead of accolades, Gosse was lambasted by both scientists and Christians, lampooned and humiliated. God the liar! God the trickster! Planting fossils to test man’s faith! Even his friend Charles Kingsley, from whom he’d been sure of support, wrote to him saying it was the first book that had made him doubt, and he feared many others would doubt with him. ‘Shall I tell you the truth?’ Kingsley began. ‘It is best.’ For Philip Gosse, truth was the bitterest blow; he left London that year, ‘closing the door upon himself’, and his colleagues at the Royal Society. Recently widowed, he took his young son to live on the cliffs above the sea in a remote part of Devon. It’s quite a story, and the son’s account, Father and Son, is said to have ushered in the modern memoir, published at that turning point – Virginia Woolf put it at 1910 – between the Victorian age and ‘modern life’. It is the portrait of the fallen Father, a ‘noble’ figure of the past whose ‘soul was on its knees’. Certain that his terrible failure was the result of having displeased God, the father was determined to save the son from a similar fate; he remained solicitous, a word that is frequently used of a good father and that too often merges with censorious. Like Walter White destroying his family in the process of saving it, Gosse the father, thinking to protect his son from the wrath of God, precipitated the bitter break between them. Edmund closed the door on his father’s house and left for ‘modern life’ in London.

  ‘God the father, land of our fathers, forefathers, founding fathers,’ Siri Hustvedt writes in an essay on her father, ‘all refer to an origin or source, to what generated us, to an authority. We fall into the paternal line. Patronymic as identity.’44 How do any of us, she asks, find our own shape in the shadow of the father? She was born in 1955, midway, more or less, between Father and Son and the Granta anthology in which her definitely-not-angry essay first appeared. Her father was much like mine: kind, attentive, reticent. Why are fathers so hard to talk to? she asks. Her dance between steering her own course and wanting the approval of her father, between resisting and complying, is a story I recognise, the story of our generation of clever, post-war, educated daughters; she had a breakthrough of tears, as I had, right at the end, in her case when she showed her father the manuscript of her novel The Sorrows of Men. No, Siri Hustvedt is not angry: maybe such fathers were ‘good enough’ for daughters like us; maybe it is the way of daughters to protect rather than confront the fathers whose wounded nature they know; at least for daughters of our era, or some of us. I don’t know, but I knew I had nothing to add – she’d said it; and so had Sharon Olds in her poem sequence The Father, an almost perfect rendition of the turning that comes when the daughters who have revolved around the father, the sun to their lives, sit beside the dying man.

  Maybe his terror is not of dying,

  or even of death, but of some cry

  he has kept inside him all his life.45

  Our fath
ers kept the cry in. The fathers the men of our generation became let the cry out. Was it better, or worse? And when the fathers departed their posts, and Fathers too, often enough, or never even knew there was a post, what then? It’s the trajectory I’m interested in. A friend of mine became pregnant just as she turned forty; it was a surprise both to her and the man with whom she was in a relationship she thought good enough for the raising of a child. He was thrilled at the prospect of being a father, but not, as it turned out, by the reality of a dependent child and a mother who worked. The child was barely two when he left the house, and not much more than three when he left the country. No more pick-ups from preschool, no more baths and stories while the mother, my friend, worked late. His inner child, this man said, couldn’t handle a real child; the choice, he explained, had to be for his own growth and a time of travel – was that so hard to understand? Truly. It’s a good thing there are gun laws, or there could be a lot of dead men on our streets. This is not an isolated story; extreme, I admit, but wind it back a bit, substitute a reason less laughable, and who cannot bring up examples?

  I was in a bookshop not so long ago, and there on the table of new fiction was Dave Eggers’ Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? What a title; I saw it almost before I was through the door. I bought it, of course, drove home, made a pot of tea and started reading. If I were ten or fifteen years younger I’d have read all night, but I’m not and an hour after midnight I turned out the light. Written entirely in dialogue, which is impressive enough, Dave Eggers answers the question I’ve pondered off and on this last decade or more – longer really, right back to Poppy’s work with her boys. What happens when the fathers are missing, the actual fathers, and the Fathers? What becomes of the sons? Well, Eggers tells us. Thomas, a fatherless boy-man, takes six hostages over six days and shackles them to posts, each in a separate building on a disused military base. Crime? Yes. Crime novel? No. The helicopters come, inevitably, and there’s no mistaking what Thomas’s fate will be when the book closes with the SWAT teams outside the door. This is not a story of clue and chase, that satisfactory tale of order restored. It is the social cure in savage form. Thomas is killed and nothing is solved. It is the story of why a young man, who thinks of himself as moral and has no intention of hurting his hostages (despite the shackles), wants answers to the question: what’s happened? What’s gone wrong? You follow the rules and the rules change; or there are no rules, and no one to explain them. You want a reason to live, a mission, something to bring you meaning, or praise, and there is just the blank tedium of nothing. You want something grand, a big proper war, and instead there’s only the small everyday war against the fate of being discarded. ‘There are millions like me,’ Thomas says to the hostage congressman – a Vietnam vet with both legs blown off in a stupid accident, not even in combat. He’s the Father of the story, shackled and legless. ‘This’ll keep happening,’ Thomas, discarded and superfluous, tells him. ‘If you don’t have something grand for men like us to be part of, we will take all the little things. Neighbourhood by neighbourhood. Building by building. Family by family.’46 A twisted logic, true, but should we not listen? Angry sons like Thomas can do a lot of damage.

  When we asked Poppy why she was working with men, why she was putting so much of her time and herself into ‘her boys’, who were often angry, she’d say, Because it matters, because men are the problem. The petty cash would go, tables would be overturned, some of them resenting having to be at the centre all day when they used only to have to show up for an appointment once a week. But most came, most stayed, and reoffending rates dropped. When she was first diagnosed with the cancer that killed her, some of her ‘boys’ from the day centre turned up at the hospital with limp flowers picked over fences from gardens, a fitting gift for the dying woman for whom their eyes turned red as they sat beside her bed.

  Back in the 1990s, when the conversation at my Bondi flat turned to the problem of men, it was not always to our lovers, or lack of them, but to the social problem that was becoming apparent around us: rudderless young men who drove in from the western suburbs and smashed the windscreens of cars parked along the beach, or near the Opera House – random revenge against those of us who were eating in the brasseries above the beach, or sitting in the audience of plays and concerts, the satisfied classes, who inhabit the beautiful part of a city that is a lot less beautiful as you move west, away from its harbour. One evening an anthropologist friend said that if she were to generalise, which anthropologists are reluctant to do, she’d say that in any society you look at, going back in time, anywhere in the world, chances are you’ll find that attention was given to the problem of how to turn boys into men – until, that is, our industrial, post-industrial world, in which we don’t articulate it as a problem at all. We are shocked when there are riots and disaffected young men travel to war zones in search of a cause; we toughen sentences and build more jails as if that will solve the problem. Girls, my friend said, speaking anthropologically, become women through menstruation and childbirth. But boys, what marks their transition to men? And if they do not become men, if they do not take their role in the group, the tribe, the village, the town, the consequences can be severe for everyone. Men are necessary; they can also be dangerous. So, to continue the generalisation, societies find ways of marking – easing? forcing? – the transition: initiations, quests, wars, sacrifices; the methods are many – some brutal, some less so – but always emphatic.

  When I returned to Papua New Guinea a decade or so ago, it was to visit the barkcloth painters of Ömie, high on the mountain the maps call Mount Lamington. The initiations had stopped after the Second World War, but we heard the stories, still told, of underground ‘nests’ built for the initiation of their not-yet-men boys, caves dug into the mountain. The boys would live there for a year or more, with the senior men camped on the ground above them. They’d learn the history and traditions and knowledge of the tribe handed down from the ancestors; they’d endure the rigours of this long separation from the life of the village and the company of women; they’d learn the skills they’d need as men, and prepare their bodies for the tattooing that would mark them as men. The word for this initiation is ujave, meaning egg, and when the elders considered the boys fit to return to the village as men, the smallest boy-man, wearing a headdress shaped like a beak, would sit on the shoulder of the tallest boy-man and peck though the woven leaves that made a roof for their nest. Boys hatched as men, tattooed and resplendent in their feather headdresses, returned to the village, welcomed as ready to marry and to fight. In 2004 we were shown a deep, dank hole far in the bush, an old nest where once the ujave had taken place. One of the old men looked doleful. Time before, he said, as we looked down; it was lined with leaves and grasses. It was comfortable, he said, not like this. A long time ago, the young guide said. No more.

  The bookshop where I bought Dave Eggers’ novel is in Newtown, not far from the house on the corner where I used to live. It’s a suburb where you see fathers with babies strapped to their bodies, or pushing children in strollers. You see men in the supermarket comparing brands, or sitting in the cafés with a book, or with a friend and his child. Is this the other side of the coin? The new-style, new-age, good-father home makers? What hatched them? Also in the bookshop, alongside the novels and memoirs of hopeless or absent fathers, were piles of the latest volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s vast memoir-novel My Struggle. I was in London when the first volume came out in English in 2012, and like everyone else I was swept along by the energy of his prose, the audacity of the pages of details that held my interest even when they bored me, which they often did, the point being that most of daily life is boring, but still worthy of our attention. It was summer and I’d sit in the square near where I was staying and read under the chestnut trees, or lie on my bed with the windows wide open. One evening with friends, the talk turned to Knausgaard. Was he a genius or a narcissist? Both, or neither? In the first volume, A Death i
n the Family, he gives us in excoriating detail what it was to have been the son of an inadequate father, growing up with little guidance, and then to watch him die an alcohol-sodden death. Early in the book there are pages about the first time a girl, Suzanne was her name, lets him see as well as touch her breasts, and then the soft hair beneath her pants. He was fourteen years old, and he transports you there, to the girl’s bedroom where they are lying on the bed while her parents are out. And he takes us into the mind and body of a boy mesmerised by the astonishment of it, until he ejaculates, though he doesn’t realise it, a pain in the groin he thinks might be the death of him, and the breasts, so recently all his world consisted of, become as nothing, just skin and nipple; and afterwards, the confusion and the shame, and no one he could ask whether what had happened was normal or some terrible pathology. To a woman, though maybe not to a male reader, it is a revelation, not boring at all, even as the pages go on and on.