He didn’t like vegetables with a few exceptions such as beans (green ones and broad ones), but would relish any kind whatever as long as it was in a soup. He could never explain the depth of his attachment to a liquid first course. It didn’t go back to childhood. He couldn’t remember his first exposure but thought it must have been at a hotel. Soup carried no associations with the mother he had adored or the father he held up firmly as a model.
Until he died Dad spoke of his mother as the only perfect human being he had ever known. His voice went into a distinctive constricted register when he spoke of her. It throbbed with tears withheld. He had been twenty-one when she died and most sons, even the most devoted, have detected the odd flaw by then, but for Dad flaws were out of the question. His mourning, which had taken the form of being unable to sleep in the home she no longer occupied, so that neighbours had to take him in, exceeded the bounds of what was thought proper and became something of an embarrassment.
It seems terribly obvious that he loathed Gilbert Harding’s emotional devastation when talking about his mother on Face to Face not because it was unfamiliar but because it wasn’t. He wanted to share nothing with such a man, absolutely nothing, and to share the unhealed wound of his mother’s death was close to unbearable.
On the other hand the Dad I came to know after his retirement had no great love for his own father, and not much affection. He gave no account of how and why a mother’s boy, who had never fully processed her death (to the extent that death is something we process), should turn himself into a father who cracked down on any sign of unmanliness. He reproduced for our benefit the character, and the moral absolutism, of someone he claimed to admire but hadn’t actually liked.
It was a theatrical performance, in a way, which made sense given that as a student he had done so much acting. It was in fact his father who wouldn’t accept the idea of the theatre as a career for him. Dad’s theatricality found an effective outlet in court. Playing his own father backstage, as a role in the family drama, was a capitulation perhaps subtly edged with revenge, but the rest of us didn’t know that.
One of his favourite memories of his acting days was playing Hjalmar Ekdal in The Wild Duck as a student in Aberystwyth. He felt he excelled in the part, particularly at the tragic climax when Hjalmar finds his daughter Hedvig dead. During one evening’s performance, even so, he became aware that he was not exercising his usual casual monopoly on the audience’s attention. There seemed to be distraction, even tittering. He set himself to scale the tragic heights with ever more flair and boldness, climbing without ropes or oxygen.
What he didn’t know was that the distraction was caused by the actress playing Hedvig. Dad had carried her in and reverently laid her down, but in such a way that her slip was showing. Hedvig was a Scandinavian lost soul, dead by her own hand, but she was also a young Welsh woman of the 1930s who didn’t think such exposure was at all the thing. So the corpse’s hand inched towards the offending edge of underwear, and set about tucking it out of sight. The play is much concerned with the Livslognen or life-illusion. The actress’s Livslognen seems to have been that unrespectability in dress is a fate worse than death.
At this point Dad’s Livslognen was that he could reconquer the audience with technique and ardour. At the end of the scene he threw himself into a rocking-chair, as he did at every performance, but with so much force on this occasion that the chair fell to pieces under him. The chair abandoned its Livslognen of being furniture.
Dad’s only explicit complaint against his own father was that he never expressed approval, never offered praise. In his own role as father, Dad set himself to remedy this. Clearly he was less stern than his own father, though we weren’t in a position to make the comparison.
He certainly offered warm words for good academic results, though it was undermined by his anxiety that praise would go to our heads and lead to an immediate slacking off. After good exam results he might say that of course every schoolboy worked hard in an exam term — it was the term after an exam that was the test of the true student and scholar, as opposed to the diligent mediocrity.
He told us that we could achieve anything we set our minds to, so how did I hear this as ‘you’ll never be good enough’? Blame the babelfish of adolescence, the cochlear implant that simultaneously translates everything into Desesperanto, the mother tongue of falling short.
Desesperanto from a book of Marilyn Hacker’s poetry, too good a coinage to take over, in the manner of Ian Fleming, without an indication of its provenance. Babelfish courtesy of Douglas Adams, come to that, but in any case too well known to be passed off.
There was one episode of heroic parenting on Dad’s part during my schooldays, when he did everything possible to reverse my poor grade in one of my A-levels. The subject was Ancient History, and I had no aptitude for it, being hopeless at dates. I hadn’t actively chosen it as a subject: the only way you could do Ancient Greek was as part of the whole classics package with Latin and Ancient History. I enjoyed the languages but could get no grip on the history that underlay them. Dad asked me well before the exam if I felt properly prepared. I bluffed unhappily, gabbling about Alexander’s campaigns and my mastery of his battle plans, though my deficiencies in three-dimensional modelling drastically limited my understanding of the geographical aspect of strategy, Alexander’s or anyone else’s.
After the exam Dad asked me how it had gone. I had a sinking feeling, but it was no different from the sinking feeling I’d had the last time he asked. I talked about Alexander’s campaigns and my masterful battle plans until he went away.
I got a D, which was more of a blow to my pride than an insult to my knowledge of the subject. Dad didn’t reproach me, just asked me how I felt about the grade. I mimed incredulity, mortification, outrage, dismay, all (I feel sure) to a low standard of theatrical self-presentation. Dad was upset on my behalf but not reproachful. I felt I had got off lightly and was glad to hear no more about it, my dismal performance at A-level Ancient History.
It was a full fifteen years before I found that, actually, Dad hadn’t left it at that. I was rootling through the drawers of his desk, with permission, looking for my birth certificate (the Passport Office was on strike and I needed paperwork for a temporary document) when I came across a correspondence between Dad and my school. Dad was pressing forcefully for my papers to be re-marked, since an injustice had obviously been done to my keen grasp of the subject. He hadn’t kept copies of his side of the correspondence but drafts instead, since he wasn’t always fluent on paper and benefited from second thoughts.
The letters from the school shifted in tone from warm and concerned to politely exasperated. Finally my housemaster reported that he had talked to all my teachers and that though a C might have been hoped for a D was not a grade that misrepresented my standard of work. Dad replied that if he was being asked to choose between the versions offered by the school and by his son, he would of course choose his son’s. It was a magnificent crusade against injustice, spoiled only by the fact that no injustice had been done, since I had misled him at every point.