RICHARD FORD
IN UPDIKE’S RABBIT AT REST, THERE’S AN AGITATED SCENE between Janice Angstrom and her bumbling adult son in which she tells him: “You shouldn’t sit in judgment of your parents. We did the best we could while being people too.” The best we could. That’s weak reprieve for any loving parent: our best is rarely good enough. We damage our children one way or we damage them another. Many return to indict us for it. Some write memoirs, and every serious memoir of mom and dad, like it or not, is an indictment.
Richard Ford’s new memoir, Between Them, makes clear the enormous difficulty of truly knowing that enigmatic pair who invented us. Arkansans, Ford’s parents brought him up in Jackson, Mississippi. Parker Ford was a traveling salesman for a starch company, Edna his loyal on-the-road love and lover. Their life together took shape just prior to the Second World War, in time-stuck nooks of Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas. An only child, Richard arrived, unplanned but half hoped-for, in 1944. Part of the intermittent charm of this memoir is its restoration of that deleted era, a contemplative delving into what now seems antiquity: the traveling salesman, the town square and Main Street, a doctor’s house calls, the tingling novelty of the new model of American car. At eight years old, Ford glimpsed the great Eudora Welty at the local grocery.
Throughout Ford’s childhood his father was usually gone, “a force largely unseen,” and then one morning he was gone for good. His heart had final say and it said no more. Ford was sixteen years old. Parker Ford’s absence had been “the ordinary, identifying dimension of everything,” and at his death, “of course, everything changed—many things, it’s odd to say, for the better where I was concerned.” Odd is certainly one way to put it. He means he’d been granted the liberty to do as he pleased, to assemble his own selfhood, away from the flare of that “combustible” man, a flawed father who was unable or unwilling to tutor his son in the masculine arts. Parker’s death, Ford writes, “handed me a life to live by my own designs, freed me to make my own decisions.” He must have been a preternaturally resilient and resourceful sixteen-year-old.
At such an age, “a boy could do worse,” says Ford, “than to lose his father.” Well, not by much. It’s hard to dodge Freud’s inkling that the death of the father is the most psychically disruptive event in any male’s life, and yet Ford manages to dodge it here. He’s unaccountably incurious about his sixteen-year-old self and the rip his father’s death must have caused at the hub of him. From either fear or forgetfulness, he’s chosen to skip that damage, though fear and forgetfulness are the first two crutches every memoirist must throw down. The memoirist forgets only until he goes in search of what he must remember. Though I doubt Ford has actually forgotten. He’s only grafted his well-advertised adult machismo onto his teenage psyche.
Ford saves the bulk of his understanding and insight for his mother, whose life after Parker’s death played in anguished slo-mo: the resigned quest for an occupation and identity, the tedium punctuated by boredom, the cancer that erased her in her seventies. She never remarried, hardly dated. There’s a startling scene in which she fails to come home one night from her hospital job, and so Ford drives through town looking for her. He finds her drinking, relaxing in a rooming house with a man, and pleads with her to return. She does, and whatever relationship she might have developed with that suitor is lost.
“Her life,” Ford writes, “never seemed fully lived”: it’s the saddest line in the book. Hers was a manner of uncomplaining integrity, the everyday “quiet desperation” Thoreau lamented. After he left Mississippi, Ford loved her as he could, from faraway places, while laboring to create what he would become, yanked between vying loyalties. Guilt is a given. With an ailing and alienated parent, guilt is always a given, though Ford never admits to it. Perhaps he’s too macho for the guilt that follows around the rest of us.
At just 175 pages, spattered with “I don’t know” and “I’m not sure” and “I don’t remember,” Between Them is a mere wisp of a book. It “might seem incomplete or lacking,” Ford says, and it certainly does, though he claims he has “excluded nothing for discretion or propriety’s sake, but only because one recollection or another didn’t seem important enough.” That might be true, but a memoir isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a conveyor belt of recollections; its importance will reside in whatever mosaic emerges from a life’s morass, and in how searchingly one considers one’s own founding and formation. “Incomplete understanding of our parents’ lives is not a condition of their lives,” Ford writes. “Only ours. If anything, to realize you know less than all is respectful, since children narrow the frame of everything they’re a part of. Whereas being ignorant or only able to speculate about another’s life frees that life to be more what it truly was.” That’s a cop-out, a renunciation of the memoirist’s essential investigative task.
At its strongest, with simply etched sentences and slow jabs of wisdom, this memoir conjures Rock Springs, Ford’s faultless 1987 story collection: “Most everything but love goes away”; “the persuasive power of normal life is extravagant”; old photos are “scalloped black-and-whites.” About his mother’s dying, Ford writes: “Witnessing death faced with dignity and courage does not confer either of those—only pity and helplessness and fear,” which has an accidental echo of Larkin’s famous lines from “Aubade”: “Courage is no good: / It means not scaring others. Being brave / Lets no one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than withstood.”
At its weakest, Ford’s prose mopes with at-hand utterances—“part and parcel,” “pride and joy,” “this and that”—and tautology: “at no time was there a moment,” “thought to herself,” “each and every day.” There’s also a clutch of erroneous sentiments. “An only child absorbs a great deal—possibly more if his parents are older. An only child’s imagination is strummed melodically by the things they say and don’t say.” As any parent can tell you, all children absorb a great deal—that’s their first job, to absorb—and all children are affected by the sentences and silences of their parents, not only those without siblings. “All first children, certainly all only children, date the beginning of their lives as notable events,” but please do point the way to the child who doesn’t consider the start of his life a notable event.
Tauntingly childless—“I hate children,” he once said, and that reveals about half of all you need to know about Ford the man—he admits: “What I know of children and childhood and of being a parent, I know almost entirely from being my parents’ son.” Which of course won’t do, if knowledge of parenthood is what you’re after. And there’s something else: in his memoir Experience, Martin Amis suggests that the childless never really comprehend their parents, are never able really to forgive them for their influential inadequacies. One wonders how the vista of Between Them would have been widened if Ford had kids to clue him in to the essence of his own parents, or if he’d been more interested in how the trajectory of their lives plotted his own. In his gentle reckoning, his own exertion of mercy and mourning, Ford has forgotten to answer the crucial question: What did his parents’ lives mean?
—The Washington Post, MAY 1, 2017