‘Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.’ Philip Roth
I grew up in a family of writers and stories, and from an early age I understood that myth and memory can be blurred, and the facts of any situation can show many different faces. I learned that every event, no matter how shocking or dramatic, eventually becomes part of the legend of the family, and that in writing about events, everyone who does will tell it differently, uniquely, and sometimes opaquely. This diversity feeds the magic of fiction.
In a family of writers, the children read a lot, and in reading fiction as much as non-fiction they discover truths, both personal and universal. I was 17 when I first read ‘By Grand Central Station I sat Down and Wept’. Our childhood had not been conventional, we had many half-siblings who, along with some of my father’s previous wives, appeared without explanation in the kaleidoscope of our lives. As the youngest batch of my father’s 15 children, we made up our own version of who they all were and how they fitted in. We too created our own realities.
Elizabeth Smart’s novel, at a time before the internet and Google made such discoveries easy, was an eye opener for me. A cult book, a page turner about a love triangle, a scream of sexual guilt and yearning, and it was about my father. Not ideal.
In my family, where myth and reality danced together, it was taken with a pinch of salt. One of my half-siblings told me our father had written a book about it too. Very short. We agreed this was a good thing. I picked up ‘The Dead Seagull’. If I was hoping for something a little less overblown, I was in the wrong place. It sounded like someone talking from a long way off, another lifetime, it didn’t sound anything like the father I knew, but the sense of bewildered youth in lines such as these moved me:
‘I used to walk through the damp avenues of Richmond Park thinking life would never happen to me’, or ‘I cannot say that I knew anything about Theresa when we married, I can only say I knew nothing about anything.’
My father was a very young man when he became a poet, he was 19 when he became a father and married his childhood sweetheart. His love life and his work are inextricably woven in the fabric of his myth. That has always felt to me like part of the deal of being an old-fashioned bohemian. ‘The Dead Seagull’ carves the same wounds that Elizabeth Smart described. They both went for truth scarred with guilt.
At the beginning he writes, ‘Each of us, I suspect, has his own epitaph to earn, but the life upon which it will stand, that is our own responsibility.’
This book illuminates a part of that life. On his grave, George Barker’s epitaph is the word ‘Resurgam’. I think he earned it.