Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (30 page)

Why did I experience my book as a betrayal?

The lives of other people are unknowable. Period. I wouldn’t go as far as a poet colleague of mine who says that “representation is murder,” but I would acknowledge that to represent is to maim. When I go to describe the forces that shaped my mother as a girl, I am working from a combination of memory, intuition, evidence, family story; I can make reasonable interpretations and educated guesses, but the fact remains that I must create her as a character in my book, and I am making decisions about how that person — in this case complex, dramatic, haunted — will be presented. I simply can’t write a book in which she remains inscrutable, merely the kind of giant shadow on the wall our parents are to us in childhood — the whole
point
of memoir, in a way, is to make these people known. Yet, like any biographer, I sift through what I know and I choose emblematic moments, emphasize one strand over another, and must finally acknowledge that there are threads I can never recover. My picturing will distort its subject; it is, of course, a record and embodiment of a process of knowing; it is “about” the making of knowledge, which is a much larger and more unstable thing than the marshaling of mere facts. This would be true if I’d interviewed every surviving relative and wandered around my mother’s little Tennessee hometown like a detective stalking clues — and therefore how much more true if I make a book allegiant to memory, interested in the ways that a child made sense of those people, in how they look and seem “in the then now.”

This particular form of distortion — the inevitable rewriting of those we love we do in the mere act of describing them — is the betrayal built into memoir, into the telling of memories. But the alternative, of course, is worse: are we willing to lose the past, to allow it to be erased, because it can be only partially known? For many memoirists, the story we tell is all there’ll be of our characters, or at least all there will be of them
as we have known them
. My sister remembers my mother, too, of course, and so does my father, but the person they remember is not
my
mother, not exactly; there are a set of internal relations, a phenomenology, if you will, that only I can name, because only I have known them. This is what my sister meant when she said, charmingly, after reading my book, “The things you got wrong just make it that much more you!” Perfect, and a gift to the memoirist, that response.

My father’s response was not such a happy one.

In truth I must here, as Shakespeare says, “admit impediment.” I have, so far, been telling you a story — though you have doubtless recognized that the evocation of my visit to Memphis is relayed here in order to allow me to say some things about memory and about memoir. Narration is comforting; as readers, we feel reassured by the presence of a narrator, whose shaping voice assures that things are more or less in control, that there is some reasonable expectation of coherence.

But when it comes to talking about my father and my memoir, I have to choose between honesty and coherence; if I take the former course, then it seems almost inevitable that any sense of stability I’ve cooked up here will tumble into a morass of contradictory feeling.

He and I have an unsettled history when it comes to my written words. One difficult evening, after I gave him my first book, a slender chapbook of neosur-realist lyrics published in the midseventies, he threw it at me, saying it made no sense. It didn’t, save in the refined, oblique way of such poems, but I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of his reaction. What did it mean? That he’d spent money on my education only to have it lead to this useless and incomprehensible product? That he felt angry at being excluded from my inner life, whose text was unreadable to him? Or that he was annoyed that he
wasn’t
represented there, in the way that Oscar Wilde says that society’s rage at art is the rage of Caliban not seeing his face in the mirror?

As my poems grew in clarity, so did my reluctance to show them to my father — not surprisingly, I guess, after that unhappy evening! We maintained a distance around the subject of my work, aided by the fact that we lived on different sides of the country, and this distance only eroded when my work became more visible. When my father could buy a book of mine in Barnes and Noble at the nearby mall, his sense of the value of his son’s work shifted.

And that’s when he read my first memoir, a book about grief, a love letter to a dead man and a meditation on what the church fathers call “last things.” He wrote me a wonderful letter about his sense of emotional connection to the book, about times in his life when he’d felt something like what I’d described. By the time he read the book, he was a widower too, though his letter didn’t touch on that; I have no idea if the particular experiences of bereavement I wrote about resonated with his experience, but something did, and he had the forthrightness to say so.

This was partly the gift of prose — which, of course, far more people read, and read because of what it is about, than will ever see a poem. This may seem self-evident, in contemporary America, but I can testify that to a poet it still comes as a shock. Who expects to be read by strangers, much less taken to heart by them? If I’d seriously thought that one of those strangers was my own father, I doubt I could ever have written the book. I wasn’t accustomed to being seen by him, and like many gay or lesbian children, I’d protected my inner life from my parents’ scrutiny for fear of judgment — quite a reasonable fear, given the level of homophobia in our country and in my family. But that homophobia had simply been washed away, mediated by time and the ways age (and in my father’s case, remarriage to a socially liberal woman) rearranges one’s priorities and values. I think my father honestly felt that he gained a new kind of access to my life, and for a time we were closer.

Not, I hasten to add, close. There has been a sense of awkwardness between us since — I don’t know, the dawn of recorded time? — so it would have been absurd to expect that to shift entirely. But it was fascinating and odd to me to discover that the distance between us was not about sexuality, not really — unless you could say that a lifetime’s distance originated there and then we were powerless to revise it. There were some truly odd moments (I mean odd in the sense that they were nothing I could ever have predicted in my life) when my father and stepmother and Paul and I were two couples, going to lunch or for a walk on the beach together. If you’d told me, as a young man, that this could be possible, I’d have probably had some sort of cognitive meltdown; the structure of reality would have to shift first.

Perhaps it was also some element of this sea change that spurred me on to write
Firebird
. If I could be seen this far, if this much honesty were possible…? But early on, when the book was just beginning, I asked my father something about that childhood year in Memphis and heard the tone of his voice shift in his reply, “Why do you want to know?” Now I think he must have already been anticipating the day when I’d write about my growing up, when I’d put my version of the family romance in print. And he must already have dreaded it; every once in a while he’d ask me, “How’s that writing about Memphis going?” I never asked him any more questions, in part because I understood I wasn’t writing that sort of book, and in part because I knew that if I did so, I would simply inflame his fears.

Fears of? Well, my family never wanted to deal directly with anything, really, and I grew up with the sense that to name a problem was to invite mighty trouble.
The
problem, if there was such a thing, was my mother’s alcoholism, the reputed source of which shifted variously: my homosexuality, my sister’s misbehavior, my mother’s own back pain or loneliness or thwarted creativity or mismatched marriage. None of these “causes” were directly addressed, not quite; they simply floated in the air of our household, or were blurted out in drunken and agonized moments, or were overheard, or were offered as whispered, confidential explanations. I guess that my father was scared that his adult son would do the naming, for all the world to see, and that this revelation of our story would not be told in his favor.

Or afraid that I would say the unspoken thing between us, that I felt he’d failed to protect me? The truth of my high school years is that I was pretty much on my own while my parents were entirely absorbed in the drama of my mother’s spectacular collapse. There was about a three-year period when no one remembered, for instance, to buy me shoes. I tried to kill myself, at fifteen, and sometime in there, I can’t remember exactly when (who would want to?), my mother tried to shoot me with my father’s revolver. In other words, he did fail to protect me. Having left home at seventeen to marry an alcoholic myself, I paid the tough dues necessary to learn childhood’s impossible lesson — that you cannot save anyone, not mother or spouse, and the most powerful child in the world, which is surely what I must have imagined myself to be, cannot fix anything, no matter how good or smart he is, or how he disguises himself to try to be who he thinks he’s supposed to. No matter how loyal he is to his drunken mother, or how loyally he later behaves toward his father by acting just like him.

No
wonder
my father didn’t want me to write another memoir!

But write it I did, holding at bay the awareness that he and my sister would be reading the book. In order to work freely, I needed to behave as if, in the composing process, I was in an arena of pure freedom, of irresponsibility; here I could say anything without consequences. That’s the sort of permission the imaginative life requires, and I could allow myself that — increasing, actually, my sense of freedom in successive drafts of the book, which each time seemed to grow riskier and to probe farther. Sometimes I’d catch myself saying, Oh, you don’t have to write that, who wants to read it? And then realizing that in projecting these doubts outward onto readers, I was actually protecting not the potential reader but myself; I was the one who didn’t want to read about whatever it was that troubled me. And then, once I understood that, I did want to read it, and to write it.

The time came, of course, when I had to show the book to the two living people most implicated therein. I gave it to my sister with some eagerness; I wanted to know what she thought. And I didn’t know what she’d told her children and grandchildren about her wild old days, and I certainly didn’t want them to learn these stories from my book! Her response — much laughter — was gracious and tender and lovely.

To tell the truth, I simply avoided giving the manuscript to my father, though I told myself I would. I didn’t do it and didn’t do it, and then my publisher’s lawyers told me I had to. Not a wise plan on my part: now my private trepidations about his response were twinned with an external, legal concern. The lawyers asked me to present him with a release to sign, saying he wouldn’t sue them, but I declined. I just couldn’t imagine handing him the manuscript with a note that would suggest he might want to file a lawsuit!

So I sent the thick pile of pages that comprised my book, an autobiography from the ages of six to sixteen, along with a letter explaining that I understood it might not be the easiest thing to read, and that if there were things in it that he couldn’t live with, I wanted to talk about them. I don’t know what I would have done had he identified things he wanted me to change; it’s difficult for me to imagine, now, what that exchange might have been like, because it never happened. My father simply never answered me at all.

When I wrote to him, a week or two later, my letter came back with a stamp from the post office on the front of the envelope:
Refused, return to sender
. My response to the words was visceral; I felt they were stamped on my face, burning a little there, like a slap or the sensation of rushing air when a door slams in your face.

I tried again, with the same result, and then I didn’t try anymore. I didn’t want to keep knocking at that door. And I began to feel, justified or not, melodramatic or not, that
Refused, return to sender
was in fact a motto I could have worn on my skin my whole life; it was, in some unspoken way, inscribed upon my childhood, and the ink had never really faded.

My father, who is now in his nineties, hasn’t spoken to me for five years. There has been no contact of any sort between us. I ask my sister how he’s doing; I don’t know if he asks about me. She told me that he once said he thought the book “had an agenda against him,” and that she’d said to him that it shouldn’t be taken so literally, that things might be shaped “to make a better story.” But then I think they had to stop talking about it.

Because my father never talked to me about the book, I have devoted a considerable amount of energy to imagining the specifics of his response. What didn’t he like? (Maybe what he
did
appreciate about it would be a more challenging question!) Was it simply that I had told the family secrets, exposing our shame to the neighbors? Was it that he was embarrassed that I talked about how many times we’d moved because he’d shifted jobs again and again, something I’d always understood had to do with government transfers he couldn’t control — until he told me that actually he couldn’t ever get along with his supervisors or his coworkers, and that was why we’d never stay anywhere long? It is quite possible that my father has told people — my stepmother, for instance — very different versions of the stories I’ve told.

Was it because I told the darkest moment in the family story — how, when my mother was dying of cirrhosis, my father made a concerted attempt to allow her to die at home, without medical intervention. He said he didn’t want her to suffer at the hands of doctors. The physician in the hospital where she died told me he’d never seen a patient brought into the hospital in worse condition. If my father thought he was being heroic, it was a heroism of a profoundly perverse sort — the ultimate codependent’s gesture.