later years. This was the side I was aware of as a kidâthe curse of the writing life, the way it seemed to leave you in a tough spot in your old age. I didnât see lawyers suffering like this in their later years. And I worried that my dad might be headed down the same road as his mother. When I read Death of a Salesman, I saw my father so clearly in Willy Loman, clinging just a little too tightly to some importance he had known in St. Louis to keep himself going, peddling graphs no one wanted. Knowing that we had no health insurance, let alone life insurance to cash out like Willy, helped me sleep at night. My fatherâs slipping grip on his dream showed itself in various ways. He insisted you look at him while he talked. If you dropped your fork at dinner and your eyes dropped to locate it while he was theorizing on âThe Waste Land,â heâd bark, âLook at me while Iâm talking to you, God damn it.â Youâd find yourself groping for your bread and trying to butter it like a blind person never taking your eyes off him lest his ego catch you taking five. But Willy Loman was suicidal. My dad doesnât have an iota of the depressive in him. He just depresses other people. Nothing brings him down. But this canât be true. I think it just comes out when absolutely no one else is around. It always seemed that while I knew he loved us a lot, my father actually needed nothing to be happy except books. There was enough in literature to challenge, entertain, amuse and inspire a man for a lifetime. Books and music were simply enough to sustain anyone was what he radiated. Humor, love, tragedy, it was all contained therein. And if all he needed was books, then he probably wouldnât mind if he lost the house and the wife and the whole life. Because the story was more important than the family. The story being that he was going to write the Great American Novel and finally be important, and in being important, he would be loved. Willing to lose his family to be loved by his family. Oh, the tragic blunder of this. It could almost drive someone mad. Wait, it did drive someone mad.
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WHEN HE WASNâT IN his office, my dad hung around the kitchen, talking about Fitzgerald and reading aloud to my mother from a book of poetry by Keats, pointing out what Fitzgerald had stolen from Keats. I really think it was this kind of undergraduate behavior, lolling about reading poetry aloud and listening to Don Giovanni during lunch, that drove my mother into the arms of people like Barbara Taylor Bradford. She wanted to be left alone to flip through Jacques Pépin cookbooks and smoke and nap. My dad used to lament his predicament to me. âJean-Joe, if I could do anything else I would. In a second.â He was letting me know the deal with writing and by extension, my lunch money. And maybe his relationship with Mom, his marriage. You didnât write because you wanted to, you wrote because you had to. Mom was âlivid, absolutely lividâ six days out of seven. She had been supportive when they had four babies on a reporterâs income, when he moved us all to New York to write a novel, when the job at CBS ended and he didnât get another one but started a second novel. She was running out of encouragement. I would worry about it at night, trying to fall asleep. âWhat the hell is going to happen to Dad?â
DUMBENTIA
M OMâS SUMMA CUM LAUDE routine got a little old after a few hundred mentions, and sheâd never really had a job. Dad was a really good writer but he hadnât written the Great American Novel. The stories about who we were, who they were, didnât seem to match anything I saw. If weâre such longtime Catholics, if our ancestors built cathedrals, why do we go to church only twice a year, bombed out of our minds? If writers are so goddamn fascinating, why do they monopolize conversations and talk about their
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WHEN HE WASNâT IN his office, my dad hung around the kitchen, talking about Fitzgerald and reading aloud to my mother from a book of poetry by Keats, pointing out what Fitzgerald had stolen from Keats. I really think it was this kind of undergraduate behavior, lolling about reading poetry aloud and listening to Don Giovanni during lunch, that drove my mother into the arms of people like Barbara Taylor Bradford. She wanted to be left alone to flip through Jacques Pépin cookbooks and smoke and nap. My dad used to lament his predicament to me. âJean-Joe, if I could do anything else I would. In a second.â He was letting me know the deal with writing and by extension, my lunch money. And maybe his relationship with Mom, his marriage. You didnât write because you wanted to, you wrote because you had to. Mom was âlivid, absolutely lividâ six days out of seven. She had been supportive when they had four babies on a reporterâs income, when he moved us all to New York to write a novel, when the job at CBS ended and he didnât get another one but started a second novel. She was running out of encouragement. I would worry about it at night, trying to fall asleep. âWhat the hell is going to happen to Dad?â
DUMBENTIA
M OMâS SUMMA CUM LAUDE routine got a little old after a few hundred mentions, and sheâd never really had a job. Dad was a really good writer but he hadnât written the Great American Novel. The stories about who we were, who they were, didnât seem to match anything I saw. If weâre such longtime Catholics, if our ancestors built cathedrals, why do we go to church only twice a year, bombed out of our minds? If writers are so goddamn fascinating, why do they monopolize conversations and talk about their
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