SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS is a typical life-span. So when my father (b. 1916) became ill with cancer in 1991, I ought to have seen what was coming. But the disease was more advanced than anyone knew. And nothing can ever prepare you. I was, to misquote C. S. Lewis, surprised by grief.
In the few weeks between diagnosis and death – as I shuttled by train from London to Yorkshire, or lay unsleeping in the spare bedroom of my parents’ home – I kept myself going by keeping a journal. But after the funeral, and the cold hearth of Christmas, I sank into depression. The only solace came from childhood memories of my father in rude health. I began typing these into my Amstrad, as though to resurrect him. It was done blind, from a black hole, as catharsis, without an eye for publication. But at some point I must have said something to Bill Buford, then editor of Granta , who bullied me to show him what I’d written, liked what he read, and convinced me there was a book here.
The draft typescript began with my dying father in hospital, then flashed back thirty years to him jumping a queue of cars. Bill liked the alternating time-frame but suggested I switch things round – first the past (so readers got to know my father at his most domineeringly energetic), then the present (so they could share my sense of loss). Most of his suggestions were good ones, and even without them the writing, by my standards, came quickly Fifty-one weeks after my father’s death, the book was finished. My working title was A Completely Different Story , a phrase my father had used when informing his GP of his cancer. Among the alternatives was And When Did You Last See Your Father ?, from the Victorian painting by W. F. Yeames, which shows a son on the verge of – in Roy Strong’s words – ‘inadvertently betray [ing] his father through his own truthfulness’. Much more apt, Bill decided, and said he would be printing 3,000 hardbacks. It seemed a forbiddingly large amount.
A worldly friend told me to relax, that reviewers were bound to go easy on the book because of the subject matter, a son grieving for his father. He was right. They did. Even more surprising, the book found readers. Translations appeared as far away as Japan and Syria, and there was talk of a film for BBC2. For a poet, this was big stuff – though as ever the credit was due to my dad. In life I’d been in his debt, and here he was again, helping me out from beyond the grave with royalties, options, serializations, foreign rights.
Looking back again, recently, at the notebook in which I wrote my journal (stitched, unlined, with hard blue covers – I bought a dozen of them at a stationery shop in Skipton in the 1980s), I was shocked to find that the story of my father queue-jumping came before the descriptions of his illness. Rather than writing that passage in mourning, after his death, I must have set it down while he was still alive. Perhaps, with a splinter of ice in the heart, I saw my father as ‘material’ all along. Certainly, towards the end of the journal, I set myself an agenda: ‘To write about dying and not be deadly To write about sickness and not be sick. To write about my sick and dying father and not be merely “sensitive”.’
The mantra of every Creative Writing programme is: revise, revise and revise. It’s a good principle. But the alarming thing about the notebook is that the words I set down when insomniac, griefstruck and half-mad are much the same words as those in the final draft. One entry was originally laid out as a poem:
On a day trip to see me down in London,
you left your orange drophead Fiat in the place
where they unload the postbags on Leeds station,
illegally, you knew, but you were rushing,
just how illegally you saw on your return
by a posse of mail vans enclosing it
in a tight, red, get-out-of-this-one circle.
Improvising quickly, you asked at Enquiries
‘Has anyone seen my orange Fiat?
My son was supposed to leave it in the car park.
But I’ve looked and I can’t find it anywhere.’
Oh Christ, you agreed, when the angry guards
escorted you to it, what a daft sod.
What a prize fathead I have for a son,
until they laughed, and slapped you on the back,
and cursed at Bloody students, and let you go.
You rang that evening, with this story,
who’ll now never pick up the phone again.
This wasn’t poetry, I later realized, but chopped-up prose. It is as prose – fleshed out – that it appears on page fifty-two of the book, without that portentous last line. Prose seemed to suit my father: his life was too cluttered, and he too larger-than-life, to be contained within verse-forms. It also seemed to suit me: my poetic persona had been covert, but the role of family amanuensis, transcribing stories already burnished from repeated telling (‘Do you remember the time when …?’), seemed to release something.
I knew the book couldn’t be fiction. Whatever small virtues it might have would come from readers believing it to be true – the story of an ordinary-ish family, told by a reliable narrator. The risk was how the real-life characters in it would react to being (the word favoured by accusers) ‘exposed’. My father wasn’t around to care. But others were, including the three women who’d been most important to him: my mother, my sister Gillian, and ‘Auntie Beaty’, the woman with whom he had an intense, decade-long relationship, the true (sexual) nature of which was never admitted – not by him, nor by her, nor by my mother. Around the time of publication, terrible things happened to all three women. First my sister’s eyesight, already poor, suffered a catastrophic deterioration, literally overnight (she woke with a black land-mass the shape of Australia obscuring all but the edges of her vision). Then Beaty’s infant grandson was found to have cancer and seemed likely to die – she used to phone me late at night, asking me to join her in saying prayers. And one night my mother fell asleep in front of the television, awoke confused, stood up too quickly and toppled into the hearth, breaking her arm – the shattered humerus had to be pinned in several places and left her in a lot of pain.
‘It’s as if once my father died,’ I told a friend, at lunch, ‘all the women he loved were struck down.’
‘That’s not what you’re saying, is it?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You’re afraid it’s your book that’s done it, aren’t you?’
He was right. I felt guilty I’d written a book about my father falling apart, and now those closest to him were falling apart, myself (suddenly paranoid) included. The book was praised for its honesty. But did honesty exact too steep a price? I’d a memory of a book in The Name of the Rose that poisons whoever touches it. And of Leonard Bast being killed by books in Howards End .
By the time of the paperback, the sense of crisis had passed. Beaty’s grandson was cured. Gill’s eyesight stabilized enough for her to borrow large-print books from the library. And the pins were removed from my mother’s arm. ‘So stupid of me,’ she said, ‘If I’d stayed in bed reading your book rather than watching television, I’d never have broken it in the first place.’ I reproached myself for superstition and narcissism. But I never quite got over the guilt.
What did my mother really think of the book? There are two stories I tell myself about this. The upbeat version is that she was fine with it and that I’d not have gone ahead if she hadn’t been. Most widows would hate having to relive their husband’s last weeks. But she was a doctor, and knew about death, and understood my motive for describing it in intimate detail. When I sent her the typescript, she suggested only minor amendments. There were sections she couldn’t see the point of, especially those relating to Beaty, but she recognized the portrait of my father: ‘I can’t add to it.’ she wrote to me, ‘It was him.’ I have her letter beside me now. ‘I hope you will not be too upset by my nit-picking,’ it begins. Most of the nit-picking reflects a worry about what neighbours will think: a passage about me masturbating will ‘shock the village’, she says, and she dislikes the ‘modern writing – piss & shit & fuck and screw’. But all she asked was that I change a name or detail or two, nothing more drastic.
On the other hand – this is the bleaker, self-accusing version – in the weeks before the book came out she felt depressed enough to talk (not to me but to my sister) of ‘topping herself.’ She also fretted that ‘Sandra’, her long-time housekeeper, would be so upset by my revelations that she’d quit – the book includes an account of the sex we began having when I was fourteen and Sandra, no less of an innocent, four years older. These fears weren’t realized. Sandra’s only complaint when she read the book was that I’d bothered to give her a pseudonym: ‘I’d rather have been myself’, she said. Nor did my mother, who outlived my father by six years, come close to suicide. Even so, I tell myself, she obviously disliked the book. Why else would she have buried it in her wardrobe, instead of displaying it in the living room along with my other books?
There’s no great mystery about these conflicting versions. My mother, always a chameleon, felt ambivalent. She told some people one thing, and other people another; felt one thing one day, something else the next. She’d probably have preferred the book not to exist; in allowing it to, she may well have been indulging her only son. But she was pleased when friends told her they liked it, advised those who found it fruity to treat it as fiction, and never so far as I know used the word ‘betrayal’. Her chief feeling towards me wasn’t anger but pity – pity that I lacked her own equanimity in relation to Beaty. ‘It’s over twenty years ago now and I have forgotten it,’ she said. ‘I wish you could too.’ My relationship with her continued much as before. But her health was blighted by osteoporosis, back pain, dizzy spells, migraines. Weighed against these, and the huge grief of missing my father, the publication of And When … was a trivial matter. My ‘saga’, she called it. It was only a book.
And Beaty? By 1991 her affair with my father was long over and she had moved to another part of the country. Convincing myself she’d never get to hear about the book, I chickened out of telling her of its existence. She found out soon enough, because of a salacious article in the local paper, sent to her by a friend. She called me in a panic, assuming I must have used her real name. I posted her a copy by return, to show that I hadn’t and that other giveaway details (including her hair colour) had also been changed. She called me again, after she’d read the book, angry with me for quoting one of her letters and saying she was sending the book back. It never arrived. In time she resumed phoning, and wrote friendly letters. I still have them. I have photographs of her, too, dating back to the 1960s. It was easy to see why my father fell for her. She died a couple of years ago. We were closer at the end than ever before.
She also drew closer to my mother, phoning her twice a week and coming to visit. Once their love for the same man had been a source of pain and friction; now it united them. ‘Oh, why don’t you move next door’, my mother would say to her, ‘then we can talk all the time.’ On one occasion Beaty asked: ‘Have I been the cause of your depressions?’ to which my mother replied: ‘Don’t be silly, love, I’ve had them for as long as I can remember.’ Beaty needed to hear that. She still felt guilty and worried that people ‘hated’ her. Her final verdict on my book was ‘well written but God how sad – and you are so, oh so wrong about thinking you have a (you know what) …’
The you-know-what which I was wrong to think was that her daughter ‘Josephine’ might be my half-sister. The physical resemblance was striking, and so was my father’s paternal attentiveness, but Beaty strenuously denied it. A couple of years ago Josephine called me herself. She’d just got round to reading the book and had seen through the disguise. I was afraid she’d be angry and affronted. ‘Not at all,’ she said, in the same bright voice as Beaty, ‘since childhood I’ve had the same suspicions.’ She reminded me that my mother had delivered her, which is quite a thought: a woman doctor delivering the child of her husband’s mistress.
Once the book was published, letters began to arrive. There were letters from family, and letters from writers I knew, but above all there were letters from strangers. Most were from people who’d lost someone close to them, invariably a father, often a father resembling mine. I got to know a lot of fathers – from much-loved octogenarians who’d been swimming across the bay only a month before their demise to dimly recalled thirty-year-olds killed in road accidents. And I discovered how many of my father’s idiosyncrasies – jumping queues, tinkering with cars, asking ‘How much for cash?’ – weren’t idiosyncrasies at all. Many readers took up the challenge of the book’s title and told me when they’d last seen their fathers. One or two from Yorkshire also told me when they’d last seen mine. The Walker art gallery in Liverpool sells postcard reproductions of the Yeames painting; I bought a large supply and tried to answer each letter that came. Most correspondents were apologetic – for writing to an author at all (was it allowed?), for the presumption of using my first name, for being ‘death bores’. They just wanted me to know the book had been therapeutic – ‘which at £ 14.99 is cheap at the price’, one wrote, while another talked of feeling ‘plagiarized – these are my thoughts, from the darkest corners of my life’. I felt like an agony aunt, when I’d once dreamed of being T.S. Eliot. My father used to carry a bag – a panic bag, he called it – full of pills and panaceas. Now I was a healer, just like him.
There was a downside. People seemed to think they knew all about me, just because they’d read my book. Whereas I was aware of things I hadn’t said (and still can’t). For the sake of balance, when so much about the father was being exposed, I’d made a deal to embarrass myself – but not to drag every skeleton from the closet. So when audiences at book festivals greeted me like an old friend, I felt a fraud. ‘And how’s your mother doing?’ they’d ask. ‘And your sister? And Nikki the dog?’ I couldn’t complain this was intrusive. It was me who’d thrown the door open. But the story outside the book – the life still being lived – wasn’t public property.
Most of the fallout from And When … was genial. Even the postcard from an author whose biography I harshly reviewed (‘Obviously losing your father has made you bitter and twisted’) seemed forgivable. The book became my equivalent of friendsreunited.com. My first girlfriend wrote from Australia, the one who’d broken my heart at sixteen by emigrating. And other old friendships were resumed or new ones begun. I didn’t forget that the allure was really my dad’s. Putting him in a book, when he didn’t read books, had been my revenge on him. But his revenge on me was sweeter. I’d taken up writing to escape his influence. But the only half-decent thing I’d ever written – the only occasion for admiring letters – was a book about him.
I still have the letters. They fill a large filing cabinet. On bad days I slide the drawer open to remind myself that this is why I write: in the hope of prompting responses as articulate and deeply felt as these. I used to think it was reviews that mattered. But reviews don’t share their lives with you. Reviews don’t tell you their stories.
By the mid-1990s, critics were identifying a new wave of narrative non-fiction, of which works as diverse as Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans were said to be part. Some said the genre went back to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood , a book which at the time I hadn’t read. Capote wasn’t the only gap in my knowledge. I’d written a father-son book without having read Gosse, Turgenev, Ackerley or Geoffrey Woolf, and without seeing John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father . Ignorance is sometimes enabling. My awareness of several unsurpassable poetic elegies for fathers – by Tony Harrison and Michael Hofmann, for instance – was part of my reason for not attempting poetry. What I had attempted, now I was asked to put a name to it, was hard to say: not autobiography (I wasn’t the subject), not memoir (traditionally written by someone grand and old), and certainly not, despite what reviewers said, confession. The term Life Writing wasn’t in use then – and anyway Death Writing was nearer the mark. The one influence I could think of was Philip Roth’s Patrimony – a very different book to mine (American, and by a major author, and about an already much fictionalized father), but which I read the year my father died.
‘When a writer is born into a family,’ Roth once said, ‘that family is dead.’ It’s true. But so is the opposite. When a writer is born into a family, that family has an afterlife. In And When … I’d invited people who never knew my father to get to know him. ‘I suppose you’ll be doing your mother next’, people joked, and eventually, in Things My Mother Never Told Me , nine years after the first book, I did. A full-length book about each of your parents: how weird is that? But wouldn’t doing the one and not the other be even weirder? (So you don’t love your mother enough to write about her?) More and more of my generation are performing acts of filial homage – among them Martin Amis, Hanif Kureishi, Andrew Motion, Graham Swift, Craig Raine and Alan Jenkins. Perhaps a midlife need for reparation underlies it all. When young, we were impatient with our parents: now we want to atone for our callowness, and to acknowledge what they were and all they did.
Writing a book about my father hasn’t stopped me thinking about him. I live among his stuff still – the stethoscope he waved at policemen when he was speeding, the pacemaker removed from his chest before the cremation, the desk, the blazer, the RAF squadron tankard, the chandelier we fixed a month before he died. There are always further surprises. I’d no idea, for instance, till Beaty told me in a letter, that he’d a thing about not revealing his age (a trait I’ve inherited). And I’ve only just turned up the letter he wrote to his local MP in August 1967, demanding to know how copies of Soviet Weekly had found their way into the local Youth Club. His voice is silent but I still hear him. And when I look at my children, or in the mirror, I sometimes see him, too.
April 2006