Dad came into his computer room today, where I have been most of the last two days, apart from the hours spent in bed, near tears, with hydrocolator on abdomen and legs, cursing the day I was born with a uterus. He said he wanted to talk to me and gave me a few documents: a play he wrote about Christianity in Beowulf, an analysis of the distinction between tragedy and pathos, and an attack on C.S. Lewis's reading of Chaucer's Troilus (with a particular emphasis on Criseyde's character).
He said he would like for me to read them and give him my opinion. This deeply touched me. My mother was an English major at UCLA, but she is not overly intellectual, not in an academic sense. She worked her way through UCLA as her father was out of the picture and poor, and her mother was not very healthy and certainly not able to help financially. So Mom worked a lot. She's brilliant, truly genius IQ, so she did well, but she was not a Phi Beta Kappa graduate, which she surely would have been if she didn't need to pay for school and also support herself the minute she moved into a studio to go to UCLA.
My father was also an English major but he never finished college. Indeed, he did not even finish half of college at UCLA. The war began and he left UCLA after his third semester, in December of 1942. My father always says my mother is the smarter of the two of them, but that he has more discipline and a more orderly mind. I would agree with this. My father thinks in outline form. He does not ask questions; he cross-examines. And he doesn't write letters; he writes memos. This greatly amuses everyone in my life. Whether he is happy or not, he will write a memo and put it in the mail (he does not use email) and there is always a header with to, from, subject, cc...
Growing up, he was enormously proud not only of my academic achievement, but my true intellectual passion, my articulate understanding of texts and my exuberance in relating this understanding. But my father fears chaos and ambiguity, far more then than now but still has an intense need for order and control, and there were times when I did not wish to communicate with him about my intellectual life because I felt that if I could not explain a messy concept, especially by the end of high school but absolutely by the beginning of college, he was frightened and even threatened. I also felt this overwhelming burden, which I have learned since then is not at all unusual among overachieving children (well, underachieving as an adult but unquestionably an overachiever in school), to "bring their parents along."
I remember the week after graduation, I went to say goodbye to Dick Brodhead, who had taken an interest in me after my long Emily Dicksinon and Stanley Cavell paper, writing my Mellon Fellowship recommendation. He was Dean of Yale, and had been at Yale all his life from undergrad to grad to faculty. He is now President of Duke, which is somemwhat bizarre. He would make a mistake his first year or two and say Bulldog when he meant Blue Devil! He told me he remembered the day when he realized he has "surpassed [his] parents [intellectually]." For him it happened, I think, soon after college. For me , it happened much earlier, because my father had not really gone to college, and studied Plato on his own during flight training for the Air Corps. He had read The Republic at UCLA, been moved by the idea of universal forms of understanding, and been thrilled to find a fresh, clean copy at the Washington State, which he writes about in glowing terms in his memoir about WWII. But I will never forget sitting with Dick Brodhead in his beautiful office in SSS, talking about family and parents (both vexed issues for me in those years and for many years thereafter).
I had an emotional episode at the end of the first term in college, fall of 1990, which my mother called a "stress reaction." It was a bit more than that , but that too is a story for another day. I was the only kid in Berkeley (my residential college) to receive four As, no minuses. The episode was at the end of the term, when I came home for Christmas, eager to chill out after having written over 14 papers (when I was not even in DS, Directed Studies, which required a paper every Friday about classics), which I meticulously revised until I was satisfied. My family was sailing to Mexico for the usual Christmas trip on which I never went after 9th grade, I think. They didn't go every year after the started in 8th grade I think, but they went a number of times, and that was just not my idea of much-needed "time off" from school, even in high school, where I worked every bit as hard as a kid at Andover or Choate. I ended up not returning to Yale, and took three semesters off for analysis as well as AIDS volunteer work, Meals on Wheels, and Wellness Center (the Santa Monica cancer center founded by Dr. Harold Benjamin, upon which Victory Partners in thirtysomething had been modeled).
After that, my father and I never really discussed my coursework in college. Then we were estranged in graduate school, when he retired from law, and eventually after 51 years of service, resigned from the CA Bar. I remember that philosophy, The Character of Philosophical Thought, taught by my college idol , Carol Rovane, gave me the most intense pain that first term. I contemplated dropping it and just taking an easy course, because for me history and political science were a breeze, with no emotional side-effects, but I hung in there. He thought I should drop it and said that philosophy would produce internal conflict in me.
He was right, but I adored it. I also had difficulty with Spenser's Faerie Queene, in my view the most difficult poem or text in the English language before modernism, which I have studied almost not at all. Perhaps Ulysses is this hard, but I never took English 129, Yale's legendary course in the English department on the epic. I took 125, Major British Poets. For the English major you only had to take one, though many people took both. 129 begins with the Iliad and ends, after two semesters, with Ulysses. Spenser's poem about Red Crosse Knight and Una is written in Spenserian stanzas, and this is a wonderful , difficult aspect of the poem. But it's not even easy to make out the plot, and in college my mind was frenetic and often chaotic, far more so than it is now, or than it was in graduate school and I struggled mightily with this text. But I was not alone. There is a joke at Yale among English majors, that one begins to have a nervous breakdown the second week of October, when one finishes Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and begins Spenser's FQ.
I hung on and went on to get an A in Rovane's class (I was in the writing intensive section and had a wonderful TA named Carol Freedman, who funnily enough, got her Ph.D. the year I graduated, which I knew because at Yale when you get your doctorate, they publish the title of the dissertation in the graduation pamphlet with everyone's name, how cool is that!)
My sister told me that it pained my father to be shut out from my intellectual life because of his three children, I was the intellectual one, though my brother went to UCLA and studied political science and economics and likes Shakespeare better than I do. But I was the one who had gone to private school from K to 12, while they had gone to public school. And I was the little scholar in the family from a pretty young age.
The difficulty with connecting with Dad about literature or philosophy is that he was afraid of ambiguity and demanded, as I experienced it, to have all concepts reduced to his intellectual system, which was impossible for me, and also, quite frankly, repugnant. So we didn't really talk about my papers. The other part, of course, was that Dad didn't really go to college, just three semesters at UCLA. And then the GI Bill paid for USC Law, and he went to work.
My sister has also told me that it deeply pained my father to be out of contact with me during his UCLA years. She said that the desire to talk to his estranged daughter about literature he could not even discuss with my mother was absolutely overwhelming. He earned an honorary B.A. and even got a diploma from the English department, which hangs over the fireplace in his living room. My father taped every single lecture and now has 16 binders, three-ring binders, with typed up transcripts from ALL lectures! It is a remarkable thing and he will certainly give them to me one day. He became friends with his professor, often taking them on the boat for what we used to call "sewer cruises," little powers around the Marina or perhaps, out of the breakwater for half an hour or so.
So it moved me, this morning, when he asked me to look over his documents. I read Beowulf in high school for AP British literature which I took as a junior because I had skipped ahead in English. I have not read it since, and I am so sad I lost a coffee table book given to me by this short , very sexy and handsome Jewish Yale School of Drama student , with a father who was VP at Paine Webber. I met him at an A and A party (Yale Art and Architecture school) and we dated for a couple months in the spring term of 1993. He later wrote for Single Guy, the Jonathan Silverman sitcom and he was a talented writer who probably made money in TV after SG as well. He bought me a Yale Press book of Beowulf, and that's the last time I have thought about this great Anglo-Saxon text.
I told him I remembered so little of Beowulf, and that of all of Chaucer (which is also quite fuzzy, with the exception of Wife of Bath tales (both the tale and the Prologue, and House of Fame, an early autobiographical poem about which I wrote an award-winning paper), the Troilus was the work I knew least. It was the last poem we read for the Robert Watson seminar which he held in his apartment on the top floor of Ezra Stiles College, and I didn't even read the Middle English. I just skimmed the modern translation and there was no final exam in the course. This is shameful but I will admit it: no one does all the reading for every seminar at Yale. I was in psychoanalysis for the better part of Yale and I will admit, that even for me, with what is acknowledged to be a formidable mind housed in a disciplined body, it was impossible to do all the reading, primary and secondary. (When I took six courses at UCLA in my senior year of high school, I did pretty much do all the reading. I am not sure how it is now. But back then, Yale was just a lot more work.)
He said it did not matter and I just thought it was so touching than he wanted me, his "kitty cat," to read his work. It is , with the exception of the play about Beowulf and Christianity all in outline form. One of the essays is twenty or thirty pages and it is all an extended outline with many footnotes. This is how my father thinks and he will be the first to acknowlege, I believe, it has to do with a profound need for order and control in all areas of life, a need which clearly originated with his mother who embodied chaos. He used to call her "the chaos that was Bebe." (This is the grandma, Jewish, who cut me out of the will, but that is a story for another day. The short version is that my half-brother and half-sister cut me back in, something I learned only last year. I call my sister my sister but she is not a full sister; we have the same father and (vastly) different mothers.)
I only skimmed a bit of it as he wanted to xerox it all for me. And then he found his essay on Wycherley's The Country Wife about which my father feels no more positively than The King's Speech or Julia and Julie (the first of these holds the title for the world's "longest, dullest fucking movie"). He wrote a scathing piece about this and it so impressed his professor , that he was asked to lunch to discuss it. Professsor Batten, I think is his name, said that Wycherley, along with Congreve, represents the very best of English dramatic comedy (I don't know if he was speaking of the whole tradition, or simply the post-Shakespearean comedies). Dad said, "Shaw represents the best of English comedy." And Batten, Dad has told me more than once, replied, "There never would have been a Shaw without Wycherley." I must say, I'll take Restoration comedy--Sheridan, Congreve, Wycherley--over Shakespeare's comedies anyday (or even Beggar's Opera, which I taught for my beloved professor at UCSB, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, and remember not at all).
My mother, quite honestly, hardly remembers all she studied in English at UCLA. My mother wanted to be an actress and only went to law school as a backup because she wasn't getting any parts. Her plan had been to enter entertaiment law and then work her way into the business that way. I don't know how many people think of doing this, much less how often this plan works, but of course, law turned out to be her calling and she never looked back. So my intellectual temperament and aspirations absolutely derive from my father, not my mother. And I am so blessed to be able to share this with him now, late in his life.
No comments:
Post a Comment