M E M O I R
THE OLD MAN
A writer remembers his father
I
n America, being serious is often
seen as being aloof, my old man
said, once, years ago, when he was
talking about his father, my Grandpa
Means, who was quiet most of the time,
reticent in a Midwestern way, or so I
thought, think. The old man was sit-
ting on the dock, holding the cork
handle of an old fishing rod, raising the
tip high to test the line from time to
time, smoking his pipe and looking out
at the red-and-white plastic bobber in
the water, which was thin and glazed
with a cruel, late-day sunlight. He was
rambling to me—I was home from col-
lege, drinking a beer—in his lecture
mode, his voice theoretical-­sounding,
and making, from time to time, his
usual so ons and so forths, and he went
on to talk about how easy it was, in the
Midwest, for people to take your seri-
ousness for snobbishness. I remember
those words, exactly. He drove his point
home by giving an example of a man he
knew at the paper mill, who began to
read the great books, Shakespeare,
Dante, to make a study of the classics,
turning again and again to Dickens,
and then back to Shakespeare, going
off to work—the roar of the presses and
pulp separators and the men on the
window ledges eating their lunches (I
remember, the old man described all
this). This friend of my father’s kept this
new knowledge to himself as much as
he could, joshing with his buddies in
David Means is the author of four story col-
lections and the novel Hystopia, published in
April by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. His
story “The Mighty Shannon” appeared in the
February 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine.
48    HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2016
By David Means
the same way, in survival mode because
all the men at the mill had to find a way
to negotiate the noise and the stench
and the tedium of the tasks, not as bad
as the tedium of the line at Fisher
Body, where they made car bodies, or at
Checker cab, but close. Then one day
during lunch—my father took a puff on
his pipe, a Dr. Grabow, I’m sure, with
the paper filter inside—­this guy had let
something slip, a reference to Hamlet,
or perhaps, in response to something
another guy said about his elderly
father-­in-law, to Lear—and from that
point on this guy was tagged as a
snob, as standoffish, and was eventually
forced to quit and begin working a dock
job down in Toledo.
I don’t remember the rest of that sto-
ry, but I do remember that my old man
opened another can of beer and then
grew silent while the sun set across the
lake. He sat there perfectly still and
with sad silence, and I now see that the
way I was thinking about it at the time,
which had to do with filtering my im-
age of him through the sense that he
was a sad professor, that he had some-
how grown weary not only of teaching
but of processing so much knowledge,
just a fragment of what was out there,
while having to present himself to the
world as a full-blown know-it-all; the
way I saw him then was probably total-
ly wrong. When he was alive I saw him
and focused my thoughts on his years
of dedication to professing, to teaching,
to his scholarly endeavors, and I
thought of the time-­stillness of the
classroom, the cycling in and out of
students who remained the same age,
with the same youthful inclinations,
while he, for his part, went from a
whip-smart standout at Cornell to a
threadbare but beloved member of the
sociology department at a small Mid-
western college. (It wasn’t that simple.
He began as a minister, a chaplain at
Cornell, where he went on to get his
Ph.D., and when he retired from pro-
fessing he went back to preaching, as
an interim minister at various churches
around southwestern Michigan.)
His sorrow at that moment on the
dock—or whatever was inside that
silence—­came from his inability to in
some authentic way be both the profes-
sorial type and the rough, solid, hard-
boned type of man who would never be
mistaken for some kind of snob by other
tough men, just as I, as a writer, felt
sometimes—­­and got quiet and sad in
the same way—the paradox that came
from the subjects that I loved to write
about, to imagine my way into, the
lonely sad men and women who have
been eaten alive by this country, one
way or another, or betrayed by the cir-
cumstances of their lives, being so dif-
ferent from me, now. This silence, this
sorrow that comes from not being some-
one else, is what you hear, I now think,
when you read, or rather when you listen
to, the music that David Foster Wallace’s
later stories create, a sorrowful lament at
feeling fundamentally fraudulent in an
age that is holding you up, one way or
another, to the deepest scrutiny, testing
you for authenticity. It’s not a sound you
hear in the work of Saul Bellow, who
wrote in a time when the line between
real and imagined wasn’t held to such a
brutal standard. Bellow was a man who
could wear a hat and move around the
world with purposeful brilliance, un-
afraid of being seen as fraudulent.
I
called him Dad, or, on occasion,
Father, until he was dead, and then
a few weeks after his death, in ca-
sual conversations, mostly at dinner
parties, telling the story of his death, I
began to refer to him as my old man,
saying things like: My old man wasn’t
a bad guy, but I couldn’t see him, I
mean really see the soul whom I called
Father, until he was gone, and then it
was too late. He was bound to a small
Midwestern city in a way I didn’t see
until he was gone, I
said, and I still say on
occasion, when I re-
tell his story, not re-
ally a story but rather
a sequence of facts,
usually in order—I
now think—to spark
pity, a few com-
ments of consola-
tion; as time goes on
I’ll probably contin-
ue to call him my
old man, or on occa-
sion the old man,
giving him now that
he’s dead a some-
what anachronistic-
sounding reference,
but also knowing
full well that those
listening will think,
hearing it, not only
of him but of me,
and they’ll hear in the endearment the
slight, faint edge of sarcasm, and of
course the older world too, an age and
time that have slipped away.
I like to believe I made the shift
from calling him Dad to my old man in
the graveyard just a few weeks ago,
standing amid the stone markers,
which were flat to the earth, in need of
weeding, with the weeds around the
older ones growing over the markers,
creeping into the engraved letterings,
and here and there a brass urn with
flowers. The sky was seething with heat
and there was a brittle mid­summer
cricket noise and around his stone the
earth was tamped down with a slice of
sod too green, too bright, over his cas-
ket. (I did not see it but assumed that
Illustrations by Jen Renninger. This page: Source photograph of the author’s father courtesy the author
the gravediggers had done the job, laid
it to rest, dropped it in or forklifted it or
whatever.) I was praying to him, or at
least speaking aloud, not sure if it
meant anything, aware that I was going
against my nature. (I’m not a big
speaker-­to-the-self type. I’m not the
type prone to lonely monologues. I’m
not the kind of man caught mumbling
to myself on the street, for the most
part, although I’ve been known from
time to time to wander along the river
with my mouth open around a word
that refuses to be articulated, and folks
have said, on occasion, that I seem to
want to say something but seem unable
to say it. Those near to me, and they
are very few, understand that on occa-
sion I want badly to articulate some
thought, or some idea, to put it into
words, but find myself unable to do so.)
But this day in the graveyard—­he’d
call it a cemetery, my old man—I began
to address the fresh stone, dark black
granite with the newly carved words
clear, sharp, and I said something along
the lines of, Hey, old man, it was a good
ride, or something like, Old man, I miss
you, keeping it trite, simple, and, I’ll
admit, embarrassingly plaintive, and
then I began to speak to him honestly
and openly (perhaps for the first time)
about his function in the world as it had
existed when he was alive, as it related
to me, his son, and how it felt to be his
son when he was alive and I was alive,
unable to see his function in my life as I
would see it when he was dead, but at
least able, I thought at the time, to imag-
ine what I might think if he were
gone—in particular when he was old,
dying, near the end—and adjusting my
attitude accordingly, it seemed at the
time, adding more consideration and
softening my words; whereas when I was
young and he was young and his death
seemed far, far off in some remote region,
beyond consideration, I had been
brusque, sharp, angry, striking a
position—­it seems to me now—far away
from him, pushing away in the tradi-
tional manner, but always with an
awareness—­I like to think—that I was
playing a role, on
those summer Mid-
western afternoons
as we sat outside be-
neath the big tree
and drank beer,
fighting it out.
When he was near
death, or seemed
close, I adjusted my
stance as much as I
could, knowing that
at some time in the
near future I might
be speaking to a
void, an emptiness; I
tested my words to
him against the
void, I now think, so
that when I spoke in
the graveyard it was
in a practiced man-
ner not that differ-
ent from, say, in the
hospital when I was at his bedside, hand-
ing him cups, listening to his grunts
and groans, watching the light in his
eyes receding. It did indeed recede. His
eyes were deep in his skull, and when
they looked at me they were emptying,
wayward, scared, slightly loose in orbit
but still focusing, still alive—­all the lit-
erary conceits, all the clichéd metaphors
seemed true. (For example, there really
was a sparkle in his eyes when he woke
up deep in the night, the hospital cor-
ridors quiet, with the exception of the
occasional beeping or a nurse scuffling
past in the hallway, and I was on my
computer, listening to music, and when
I looked over he had his mouth open
and seemed to be dead, and then when
I shook him he looked up at me—in the
MEMOIR   49
light from the doorway—­and said, I’m to do with the reality of my own life As a way of keeping myself focused
not dead, and smiled while his eyes right now but somehow everything to on creating fiction, I told myself for
twinkled slightly with some inward joke do with the truth of my concerns and years that memoirs were for those who
and then settled back into oily darkness my past. Others fly right into the hot had a grand sweep to look back on, a
and slightly loose focus. I saw in his eyes core and write something and then con- vista with great views and things of
an infinitely small bit of light and life tinue to burn away into it because they great importance, and even then they
glinting like mica in a void, a small spark have a false humility—­or so it seems— often seemed somehow suspect and
in the depths of eternal darkness ahead.) that protects them, perhaps, but doesn’t self-­indulgent. (Of course, like most
So when he was near death I felt near it, allow them a way into true humility. I self- ­imposed, slightly delusional
too, and adjusted accordingly, I suppose, said something about writing around ascetic—­more than aesthetic—­dicta,
and then I suppose I began to think— your shame, not through it, to my friend this was easy to break and I broke it and
and this was a few days after he died, in
the funeral parlor, picking out stones,
making decisions with my sister, signing
papers—­of him as my old man. But I
spoke it aloud for the first time when I
was up in the graveyard, after the inter-
ment, alone, to pay my respects (saying
to myself that I was paying my respects,
liking the sound of the phrase, not sure
what it meant), and I spoke to him and
called him my old man. Hey, old man,
it’s me, your son paying his respects, not
sure what to say, old man, I said, and then
I went into internal prayer so deep and
sad, a lamentation that was wordless, or
beyond words (I’ll never know), and was
manifest in the form of a few visions of
the past, images of bygone days at the
lake on the boat with the fishing rods in
hand and the cheap plastic reels zipping
and rattling on the cast, and his figure
in the chair reading with a pen in hand,
and a silent afternoon sleeping with him
in the bed upstairs, taking a nap to-
gether and the sound of his breath
through his nose, a soft whistle-­­wheeze
that I could never forget, and then the
great eternal dark with p­ ulses of light
that I imagined he was floating in, and
then I was looking down at the freshly
turned soil and the gravestone, sinking
slightly, it seemed, into the earth already,
and his name carved into the stone. I
turned away and stared vacantly into the Jonathan Franzen years ago, and he made exceptions for a number of books,
milky summer sunlight and imagined quoted it in one of his essays. I felt hon- including This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff,
that I would call him my old man from ored that he got the gist of it, that I Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife, Black Boy
that point on, and I imagined that I’d say helped him in some small way. Jonathan by Richard Wright, Nabokov’s Speak,
it in a particular, endearing way. is like a brother to me, and we, too, oc- Memory, Janet Frame’s An Angel at My
casionally butt heads, and when we do Table, Henry Green’s Pack My Bag, Mid-

Y
ou build stories around the hot
core of shame that you can’t
touch. To touch it is to die, you
think, and so whatever you do, you find
a way to bend narratives around the
gravity field of shame, instead of going
through, or into, shame; for years I did
not talk publicly about family, and I
built, and intend to keep building, sto-
ries that one way or another have little
it seems we are hugely (a David Foster
Wallace word: the other Dave, as
Franzen sometimes called him) differ-
ent in our approaches, mind-sets, in
our ways of thinking and writing, but
then we always unite again, bonded by
a love for the word and our shared
history together. I won’t go into it
here. I’ll save that for a real memoir I
probably won’t write.
night Oil by V. S. Pritchett, Didion’s The
Year of Magical Thinking, Tim O’Brien’s
If I Die in a Combat Zone, and a few oth-
ers, and I hold dear several memoirs by
writers who devoted themselves purely
to the memoir form.)
I told myself over the years that the
problem with memoir is that the form
often demands that the reader not only
respect and admire the author but also

50    HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2016

 fill in the cracks of a deficient imagina-
tive experience with that respect, mak-
ing something out of what seemed to
me to be nothing. Fiction, I told myself,
should be everything to a fiction writer,
and when a good fiction writer turned
to memoir it almost always seemed
(again to me, personally, as a reader) a
form of self-­promotion. But here I am,
I think to myself this afternoon. It’s
bitterly cold outside, but the sun shines.
Why am I writing this? Because the
idea that I have to write around my
shame still seems central, somehow,
and I believe that most fiction writers
do the same, one way or another. Bel-
low was a skinny runt of a kid, the son
of a Jewish immigrant father who had
been a failed bootlegger, Russian by way
of Canadian, and he, Saul Bellow,
built himself a fictional empire of
ideas and an empire out of
­C hicago— ­a grand construction
around some shame, some initial
need to fit into the system, as he
might call it; he was a major
operator—­like all novelists, like all
fiction writers.
I met Bellow in the flesh, years
after I started reading him—I had read
The Adventures of Augie March in high
school, sitting on the back lawn in the
sun, getting bored as soon as Augie got
to Mexico—­at William Morrow, the
publishing house where I worked as an
assistant for an editor named Lisa Drew,
who published Alex Haley’s Roots for
Doubleday and was friends with people
like Barbara Bush and Jackie Onassis.
(Jackie called from time to time. We
were on a first-name basis. I still remem-
ber her sing-soft voice that always
seemed to be filled with pain and his-
tory.) One day it was announced that
Bellow would be coming in to visit his
editor, Harvey Ginsberg, and the pres-
ident of Hearst books, Lawrence
Hughes, who had an office down the
hall from my cubicle. His secretary was
a big fan of Bellow and keyed me in to
the exact time of his arrival, so I made
a plan, and waited. We had been told
in a memo not to bother the great
personage, the Nobel laureate. (A few
years later, when my wife and I were in
Spain, in Agua Amarga, a small fishing
village, I met a friend of hers, Renate,
who told me that she had caught a
glimpse of Bellow at the market in
Carboneras, the next town over, and
that he approached her and struck up
a conversation and then invited her to
lunch with him, so for the next several
weeks I sat around reading, smoking
cigars, drinking beer, hiking up to the
meseta, with an awareness that Bellow
was nearby, not far away, perhaps down
the long road that snaked through the
desert rambla.) But that morning, a
young kid with only a few poems to my
name, I staked out the hall and waited
until Bellow walked down on his way
to the bathroom—­­or perhaps he was
heading out to lunch—and button-
holed him, told him I was a big fan and
then, knowing that he’d simply thank
me and move on, explained I was from
his neck of the woods, from Michigan,
not far—and this was strategically
WHY AM I WRITING THIS? BECAUSE
THE IDEA THAT I HAVE TO WRITE
AROUND MY SHAME STILL SEEMS
CENTRAL, SOMEHOW
planned—from Ring Lardner’s home-
town. Bellow was thin and dapper in a
bespoke gray pinstripe suit, and he was
wearing one of his trademark hats, a
Tyrolean, with a small feather—­and he
came to my cubicle and leaned in, with
his hand on my desk, and we talked for
a few minutes about Lardner. His face
was slightly elfin, his eyes playful but
respectfully attentive. In any case, to
me in my cubicle at William Morrow
publishers he was, that morning, an
actual presence, and his kind words of
advice—“Keep writing, kid,” he said at
the end of our conversation, “you sound
like you have a good head on your
shoulders”—remain with me. I might be
imagining it, in retrospect, but I think I
felt, that afternoon, up in an office on
Madison Avenue—­surrounded by that
round-edged, slightly delayed, slightly
sloppy-­sounding splat, tat-tat of Selec-
tric typewriters—­a distinct sense of ca-
maraderie that a man who was so clear-
ly Midwestern in style, dignified but
uptight in that nasal way, so much like
my grandfather who bought his Chicago
suits tailor-­made in the city, could estab-
lish himself as a great literary eminence.
I see now, sitting here this after-
noon, that what I recognized in Bel-
low, in his style, in his posture, in his
manner, was what Herzog—his
creation—­­might’ve seen as a Calvinist
(or Jewish) stance that arose from a
time when each man, “feeling fearful
damnation, had to behave as one of
the elect.” If Saul Bellow was going to
confess and spill the beans, it was go-
ing to spill into his fictive creations, I
think I thought, or felt, that after-
noon, I think right now.
I
n his last few years, my father’s in-
tensity seemed to increase as his
flesh decreased; his weight went
down, his skin tightened around his
skull, his eye sockets deepened, and his
eyes, watery, rheumy—­he had a cataract
in one—looked forward with a blunt,
accusatory stare even when he was
watching television or sorting mail.
As his body betrayed him, his mind,
at least the part of it that scanned
the landscape for threats, the part
that was tactical and strategic, as-
sessing potential harms, sharpened
in response, it seemed, tightened the
way his joints tightened. His
thoughts seemed to be passing
through a smaller window of intellect,
like wind whistling through an aper-
ture in a castle wall, increasing in speed
but not necessarily increasing in
volume—­­something like that, and I
became aware, during those visits, that
he had lost some capacities (a quickness
with his wit, the ability to retain facts)
as he gained others in equal measure, a
sharpness in the thoughts he did have,
an intensity that seemed to come from
his will to live and a need to outwit not
only the physical forces against him but
the possibility that someone might
sneak around his weakened state, his
sickness, and take advantage of it—
even someone he loved as a son. If my
body can betray, why not another mind?
I was aware, on those visits, before
he really began sliding downhill, that I
was somehow, at least in his eyes, the
long-­­suffering son—­with what Bellow,
in Herzog (or Herzog himself, really,
turning back to his memory of his old
man, who threatened him with a gun
when he asked him to underwrite a
loan), called the “Christianized
smirk of the long suffering son.”
This isn’t really a stretch, because
he read and loved Bellow, and he
was an ordained minister who had
MEMOIR   51
internalized Christianity into a deep
structure, a crystal lattice of mental
metaphor—­­or maybe not, perhaps his
belief had formed a real neurological
structure, the brain shape-­shifting year
by year, locking into an orderly shape
through which the electrons of his
thoughts could dance, as I thought of
it on the train back to Chicago after
one visit, the snow still blowing
outside—­the air bitter and clear until
we got stuck on a siding in Gary and
waited for two hours for freight traffic
to clear, the landscape an array of rust-
ed tracks out to the stark but mas-
sive remains of the Inland Steel
plant. I think it was the remains of
Inland, a vast tangle of half-bent
superstructure—stark bones of brit-
tle steel absurdly rusting, an old
stack defiantly reaching into the
sky—capturing sunlight into itself. I
was actually rereading Bellow, having
started Herzog on the way out, listen-
ing to an audio version and turning to
the book on the way back, so it wasn’t
a big leap to go from the cerebral
thoughts of one character to thinking
about my father’s mind and the nature
of his character. The way I looked out
at the old steel mill, I now think, and
scrutinized it for meaning was the way
he taught me to look, not only at the
landscape—­the bristle of weeds in
snow, the delicateness of the steel—
but at the world (the stifling silence in
the train car; fans shut down, the mut-
ed sniffs and coughs absorbed by the
upholstery). He saw the remains of the
mill and saw something fallen, be-
trayed; he saw in such scenes the waste
the country could produce, not only the
buildings, the abandoned post offices
and churches and schools and libraries,
but also the people, the souls cast aside.
He taught me to see through images
to the other side of them—I told myself
on the train, cradling my Penguin edi-
tion of Herzog, dog-eared, the pale,
powder-­blue cover curling, the binding
glue flaking away on the ends like
chapped skin. See through them with
love, with pure love and with a sense of
history that goes from the beginning to
the end, not just the end of life but of
the great cosmic dance that includes
Christ and the cross and his death and
resurrection and all of that along with
the individual narratives of suffering
locked into acute, sharp stories. He
52    HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2016
taught me all that, I thought on the
train, by teaching me to listen for
stories and by pointing out stories
when he pointed out people in land-
scape, so that even when I saw the
mill—­b eautiful, lonely, desolate,
grand—I saw the men who had worked
there, toiled, their visions and their
hopes and the sense most of them had,
at least in theory, that the work they
did was for the betterment of some fu-
ture for others. My father lectured me
on such things; he knew the social
theory along with the realities of the
working­man, as he called them, who
pinned hope on somehow making a
better life—through hours of repetitive
tedium on the line, through the hot
smoke of goggles, through pouring liq-
uid fire—for the next generation. Yet at
the father/­son level that vision nar-
rowed as his body betrayed him, and
the great dance stopped, the floor
cleared, and social theory—­it seemed
to me, on the train—went out the win-
dow and into the crapper, as my father
might call it. Eventually the train shud-
dered back to life and we dragged at an
absurdly slow speed above East Chica-
go, high up over the casino and then
Comiskey Park, as I thought of it, refus-
ing to use the new corporate name, and
the strip malls and the body shops and
the long streets of the South Side that
ran straight out from below the tracks
and the lonely-­looking homes with
shades drawn against the view and the
trees that in the summer had seemed
absurdly hopeful amid the ramshackle
desolation of the city—­those long do-
mestic streets, with wide front yards,
and then into the tighter switch arrays,
the narrowing matrix of track as it
passed over the city proper, first the
Chicago River, and then close in
along the tracks more upscale apart-
ments, the roof decks caked with
snow, and in the windows elegant
curtains, and then into the low-
roofed, bulb-dim—but wonderful
nonetheless and somehow reminding
me of the glory and grandeur of the
industrial age, when covering tracks
and allowing stations to be built in
the center of cities was a bow to the
power of capital, to a vision beyond
the particulars of not-in-my-back-yard—
cavernous
­ rail yard, narrowing still more
to the concrete platforms; then I was
inside the stale, half-baked Amtrak par-
lor and out through the old Union Sta-
tion, the arched ceiling overhead, and
into the streets to catch a cab to O’Hare.
M
y father cursed one after-
noon, a few years back, and
said he wanted a joke on his
grave, something funny, something off
the cuff, and when I asked him what it
should say he said, I want the stone to
say: I’m here and you’ll be here soon, and
then he gave a deep chuckle, bent over,
coughed, sat up, and wiped the tears
from his eyes. We were on the back
porch having a beer when the sprin-
klers in the trees came on abruptly and
began misting the warm afternoon air
until it was scented with pine and
something else—I can’t define it now,
the dust and pollen and milkweed be-
ing settled down along with the scent
of the spice farm across the street from
his development, a smell that was bit-
ter and sweet at the same time, a tinge
of something like licorice and nutmeg.
My father can joke about death, I think
I thought, and it seemed unseemly,
somewhat perverse to joke about death,
but also typical of his character, which
sometimes seemed deep and primal,
wet stone, the terminal Beckettian
ping arising out of the end of his life
on earth, which seemed, even then,
on the porch, to be near at hand, not
far off—and when he laughed and the
blood squeezed into his face and the
broken capillaries around his eyes be-
came more distinct, along with the
deep crevices in his furrowed brow and
his thinning hair, I think I noticed
something I would notice again, later,
in the hospital. Set in the abrupt quiet
of his face, when he stopped laughing
his eyes were stunningly alive—­­again,
twinkling—­­and dancing with a joy at
his own cynical comment. He was
right, I’m sure I thought.
He didn’t say it, but I know he be-
lieved that the joke he had made was a
way of wrapping up a fundamental truth
of his existence, or something like that,
and then I remembered (or perhaps I
just remember now) that Bellow men-
tioned in an interview that jokes were
more important (to him at least) than
philosophy; a person’s life could be
summed up in about ten jokes, I think
Bellow said, and the joke my father told
on the back porch that afternoon, a few
years before his death, was now ap-
proximately one tenth of his life, give or
take. There were other jokes he made
that I can’t remember, and will never
remember— not standard jokes but
quips about life that were inward-
turning, somehow, and yet outward in
projection, off the cuff, dark and seem-
ingly cynical to most, but to me, his son,
not at all, because I laughed right along
with him and told them myself, carrying
on the tradition. Oh, another thing I
remembered from the Bellow interview.
He said that groaning was monotonous.
I try not to overdo it, he said, and then
his eyes had the same kind of twinkle
in them as my father’s, but in his face, a
lean, thoughtful, considerate face—not
at all like his voice, I remember think-
ing, which was booming and all-
encompassing and full of ideas that
seemed persnickety and yet also, para-
doxically, hopefully encompassing.
Later my father would begin his per-
petual groaning, but that afternoon on
the back porch he was making jokes
about his gravestone (he continued riff-
ing, giving me ideas), and the sprinklers
were misting in a mindless manner—
they went on, even in the rain, I’d
noticed—the afternoon air. In the same
interview Bellow had said that a writer
was a person who lives by his imagina-
tion, a godlike, or perhaps he said godly,
response to the weird fact that we ap-
pear out of the blue from where we don’t
know, for how long we don’t know.
T
here are times, my father said,
when I think the key to life is to
stick with only asking questions
that you can answer. The problem
comes when you ask a question you
simply cannot answer. But then the
deeper problem, he said, turning to look
out at the flat, somewhat desolate,
weedy old lake that was in a eutrophic
death spiral, suffocating itself, sprouting
huge lily-pad structures, murky and dark
in the late-afternoon light. We were at
the end of the dock again, fishing,
throwing out the line with lazy, occa-
sional casts, not at all dedicated to the
task, barely watching the bobbers, to-
tally aware, both of us, that at that time
of the afternoon—or almost any time—
the fish were seeking deeper, cooler
pockets, if there were any left. He put
the handle of the rod between his knees
and lit a cigarette. (My father had a
complex life and career, starting with
Boston University seminary, where he
met, at least once, his fellow student Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. The old man
was kicked out of BU for theological
disagreements—his words—and moved
to Colgate seminary. He was a chaplain
at Cornell when he began taking sociol-
ogy classes—with a focus on race Panama Fedora
relations—and left the ministry to pur-
Classic sun protection hand woven in
sue his Ph.D. His interests were
wide-ranging, and he was at the fore- Ecuador from toquilla fiber. Water
front of the civil-rights and environmen- resistant coating, grosgrain ribbon band.
tal movements. After he died, I found a Reinforced 4½" crown, 2½" brim.
letter to him from Rachel Carson, in Finished in USA.
which she spoke of her book, Silent S (6¾-6⅞) M (7-7⅛) L (7¼-7⅜)
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tragedy, one that this essay can’t ad-
dress.) To continue my thought, he said
grandly, the deeper problem comes, Son,
with the fact that as an intellectual, or
someone who at least poses as one, I’m
obligated to ask questions that I can’t
answer, and in doing so I look, from time
to time, some would say often, like an
idiot before these questions.
Now I trace my desire to be a fiction
writer to that moment on the lake, I
think, and the awareness I had, as a
fourteen-year-old kid in Converse All Darwin Panama
Stars, that to think too much in the A warm weather hat with Australian
realm of ideas alone was to be doomed
styling, hand woven in Ecuador from
to a life of looking like an idiot, or pre-
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think that right at that moment, just braided kangaroo leather band.
before the fish bit, because it did bite, Reinforced 4½" crown, 3" brim.
taking the bobber down once lightly, Finished in USA.
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derstood something intimately deep XL (7½-7⅝) XXL (7¾)
about my future path. I instantly forgot #1649 Darwin Panama $125
it. Only when my father was dead and
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MEMOIR 53
he did to make ends meet, while his real
pleasure, his joy, was simply to take what
he was seeing and to locate the deeper
mystery—­and faith—along with the
absurd humor in it, as he did that day at
the lake.
O
ne winter morning, at the
crack of dawn, heading back to
Michigan again, to see my fa-
ther before he had a major heart proce-
dure, I got on the train and sat back and,
as we pushed out of Chicago, with Bel-
low in my lap, I recalled that in Hum-
boldt’s Gift, another favorite of my fa-
ther’s, there had been some mention of
the afterlife, or of the dead. (Now, here,
at my desk, with a copy of the book be-
side me, I locate the section, on page 141
of my edition, and in it Charlie Citrine,
the central character and narrator, says
that he cannot accept the “view of
death taken by most of us, and taken by
me during most of my life—on esthetic
grounds therefore I am obliged to deny
that so extraordinary a thing as a hu-
man soul can be wiped out forever. No,
the dead are about us, shut out by our
metaphysical denial of them. As we lie
nightly in our hemispheres asleep by the
billions, our dead approach us.”)
I now see that on the train, barely
remembering this passage, just catching
the gist of it, I was somehow retroac-
tively aware that in getting up in the
middle of the night and packing in the
dark and heading downstairs in an Am-
bien stupor to catch the earliest train
possible, I was, somehow, knowingly,
joining the dead who haunted the
nighttime places between sleep and
waking. I didn’t know at the time but I
was following in the tracks of Charlie
Citrine’s logic, preparing myself some-
how not only to travel to my father, who
would die a few days later, but also for
the state I would be in when he was
gone. I was feeling it in the cab, sensing
it in the sweep of streets—­Chicago
streets, against logic, rise and fall more
than expected. Call it wishful thinking
or sweet delusion or whatever you want,
but I know now, here, writing this, that
the sensation I had was of communion
with the dead around me. On the train
that morning, I was aware—­without
knowing it, admitting it fully—­of the
shadow-­space, partly because, of course,
on a train in that transitory state be-
tween one place and another, between
54    HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2016
Chicago and my hometown, Kalama-
zoo, I was suspended between a sense of
the life behind me and my father ahead,
something like that. It’s high time you
admit, I say to myself now (and said on
the train), that you have a full-blown
belief in a certain communion with the
dead, one that you feel, strongly, must be
sustained, if not in argument then at
least in the fiction you write. A man
stands alone along a stream in upper
Michigan casting his line in a curl be-
hind him, feeling it, sensing the gor-
geous loop, the play of gravity and air
and swing and motion, and then lays the
line down perfectly along the stream’s
surface so that the fly, far out at the end
of the leader, which is invisible, makes
just the right splash—the same splash a
mayfly would make—and he takes a
split second to look away from his task
and to sweep his eyes from one end of
the scene to the other and feels himself
to be utterly alone with nature itself,
folded into the place and the moment,
while also aware somehow that he is not
at all alone but subsumed in his own
essential eternity along with all those
who came before him. In his own viola-
tion of the rules of physics, he exists and
doesn’t exist, and that sensation allows
him—I’m pushing here—a vital link
with those who are gone, because he is
gone, too, as far as reality is concerned,
and no one can prove that he made such
a beautiful cast because no one knows
they have to prove it, and when he has
left that spot, along the Au Sable River,
he will purposely avoid making mention
of the moment and will answer ques-
tions from his friends with vague pleas-
antness. That’s what I feel about that
moment on the train; that I’d be much
better off not even trying to articulate
it, or would be better served to simply
say I felt strange in the cab on the way
to the train, and then on the train itself;
whereas inside I’m saying, I had a com-
munion with the dead and readied my-
self to have a different relation with my
father, one that would be between a
dead man and myself, retroactively,
without knowing I was doing so.
Bellow and my father met in Chicago,
at a conference on social thought, I like
to think, when my father was a younger
man with a mustache—­­before his white-
beard attempt—­and he dined with him.
(I remember years after that, when I was
teaching on Long Island, I had dinner
with Bellow’s agent, Harriet Wasserman.
I can’t recall how it was arranged, but I
sat at the table and listened to her talk
about Bellow, about his high jinks, about
his seductions, his wit, and I thought
back to my own meeting with him in
the office, and then back further to a
tiny flick of memory, a bit of information
filed deep, that my father had had some
kind of contact with Bellow back in the
days when he went to conferences at the
University of Chicago.) I can image my
father and Bellow making some connec-
tions at the intellectual level, sharing
theories, talking about the theologian
Paul Tillich. (Martin Luther King Jr. did
his P
­ h.D. thesis on Tillich, my father did,
too, and Bellow snarked on him in
Humboldt’s Gift.) I asked my father on
his deathbed if he remembered meeting
Bellow and he ­grunted—­a bit of spittle
from the side of his mouth—and said he
couldn’t remember but he knew he had,
and then he paused and closed his eyes
and his brow furrowed and he opened
his eyes and looked at me with a long,
penetrating stare and said that he could
only remember that Bellow was wearing
a red bow tie, and he shook his cuffs a
lot and had long, nimble fingers, and
that the two of them had eaten breakfast
together (not lunch) at Valois, on the
South Side, and I lay back in the bed
and looked up at the ceiling because I
had eaten at Valois just a few months
before that—the church crowd, dressed
in hats, men and women, coming into
the old cafeteria-­style diner with the
photograph of President Obama on the
wall, along with his favorite orders—­with
my daughter, who was a student at the
time at the University of Chicago: I had
thought that morning, cutting into my
pancakes, about Bellow, just briefly. And
then again later in the day when I saw a
banner flying with his face on it in the
U of C quad.
D
eath isn’t really an abstraction,
I thought, walking along the
Hudson a few weeks after my
father died, not in sorrow at that
moment—­with the Palisades looming
to my left, cutting high into the blue sky,
and in the cracks up there, hidden, nest-
ing hawks—but in a kind of blissful
reverie, trying to put it together, not to
make sense of the loss—brutally true,
nothing to be done—but to rethink the
fact that it was somehow relevant to me
that in those last days, as I lay in bed
with my father, I read a little bit to him
from Bellow, the book open on my knee,
trying to read slowly. My father had
stopped me by raising his hand. He
opened his eyes and said something
along the lines of: Bellow lost his moth-
er at a young age, and everything he
wrote, everything he did as a man, was
about mourning that loss. By that I
mean (he paused, licked his lips, sat up
a little bit, took a sip of water from a glass
on the side table, and then continued),
by that I mean his mother was the cen-
tral figure in his life. He saw her as he-
roic, an immigrant woman, strong, bath-
ing him in love as a boy, a young man.
No other woman could replace her, or
come near, my father said, and then he
rambled on about the powerful (he said
Jungian) shadow of the mother, about
the Virgin Mary, about The Feminine
Mystique—the book, not the idea—and
about how his views on the matter, ever
since he learned the story of his own
in Columbia-Presbyterian, and you stood The Neck and
in the hallway—the window at the end
revealing a rectangle of the Hudson River, Shoulder
in the streets down below, powder-blue
police barricades set up in front of the re- Heat Wrap
mains of the Audubon Ballroom where
Malcolm X had been shot, tension in the air
due to a police incident—as you stood in
the hallway waiting, the moment charged
because it was an emergency C-section,
preeclampsia a possibility, you were reading
Kafka, The Castle, holding it and inten-
tionally thinking to yourself: I’m here with
Kafka in my hands while my children are
being born, while my status in the world
shifts to that of fatherhood, I thought as I
walked along the river, stopping to gaze
at Westchester, taking it in, gazing with
intent, well aware that my thought about
intentionally staging my life in relation
to books—so to speak—was also staged,
I think now remembering that morning,
less than a year ago, walking the path
along the river, at Hook Mountain.

mother, my grandmother, had shifted
and changed, and then, as I listened, it
began to feel cheap to me (right then,
on the bed) that this central fact—his
response to Bellow—would be, or rather
was, inserted into our time together,
time that was, to me at least, hugely
valuable because, as we both silently
agreed, death was ahead one way or
another and it would come soon, even
if the procedure (the next morning)
worked. The fact that he was mention-
ing something about Bellow’s mother,
and that because he did mention it and
I’m putting it in here now, and that these
words feel wedged in here, forced in,
placed by me, as some sort of—what? a
tribute? a literary game? an attempt to
find a sophisticated pattern?—gave me,
as I walked along the river, a sense of
literary destabilization.
What am I to make of the strange
facts of those last days, the literary con-
ceits, the fact that Bellow—oh, God, of
all writers—was one of the central fig-
ures in my father’s life? What would
readers make of it? As I walked I won-
dered: Did you know that by taking Saul
Bellow with you on those trips to
Michigan—books the old man had years
before foisted on you—you were inserting
into the story those final few days, some-
thing that might become useful to you in
some future creative efforts? Just as, years
before that, when the twins were being born
B
ut then it had occurred to me in
the car, gazing out past the re-
taining wall at the Hudson,
which was picking up a riffling, a quiver-
ing quality—still morning light, still
placid—from the wind, which was start-
ing to gust down from the north; it had
occurred to me suddenly—and it felt
like a eureka moment, a flash of connec-
tive insight—that Bellow had been
treated for TB as a young boy, or a child,
and had spent months, maybe a year, in
a sanatorium, where he read the New
Testament, and that Kafka had suffered
and died from TB, which he got, I’d read
somewhere, from drinking unpasteur-
ized milk—on a health kick, an early
form of health hipsterism—and then it
occurred to me that my father’s other
favorite writer, Walker Percy, had suf-
fered from TB and had an inspired ex-
perience in the hospital that eventually
turned him to writing, and I sat and
thought about that until my own favor-
ite writer, Chekhov, came to mind, and
of course his death from the disease,
which made me think of the fact that
Raymond Carver had written about
Chekhov’s last day, his last hours, in a
story called “Errand,” and that both men
had died of a sort of consumption of the
lungs, of a loss of breathing capacity—
Carver with cancer, Chekhov with
TB—and both men, I assumed, had one
way or another coughed blood into
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handkerchiefs, and both had felt the
terror of the inability to breathe (just as
my father, when his congestive heart
failure was filling him with fluid, and the
Lasix was purging water but not enough,
had coughed and spit into folded Kleen-
ex, piling them up beside the bed).
In the car, with the wind actually
shaking the car slightly as it came down-
river in bursts—bringing with it heavy
clouds—I turned my thoughts to myself
and my own lonely asthmatic solitude
as a kid, before the sprays and the med-
ications became available, when I
wheezed deep into the night until my
father came into the room and stroked
my head and made me sit up and gave
me water, as he did one night that is
deep in my memory, pure and clean and
vivid, when he took me downstairs and
held me in his lap because I breathed
better sitting up, and we were in his
study in his leather chair and the moon-
light was coming through the windows
and I felt myself held, safe and warm as
if floating in a dark moonlit sky, and I
filed the memory away—not intention-
ally, I was too young for that, and that
would come later—but somehow knew
to remember it, and in the car as I wept
quietly, my head against the wheel, my
eyes closed, I felt the shudder and the
sweep of wind as it came down from
Canada, from the tundra lands, and I
imagined it was the earth itself shaking,
vibrating with the all-knowing grace
that filled me as all of us, those writers
of the past, along with Bellow, huddled
together against the consumption of
time as it swept past, I think I thought.
But no, I thought about something else,
as soon as the gusts of wind began to
make the car shake. I thought of an-
other time, five years ago, when on Cape
Cod I wanted a break from the kids,
wanted to get out of the house, so I drove
down Campground Road in the wintery
gray, the wind howling, cold rain falling,
and parked at First Encounter Beach,
where the town workers had, for some
reason, piled up mounds of sand, most
likely to replenish the beach in the
spring, and I took out the hardcover
copy of T. S. Eliot’s collected poems that
I’d taken from my father’s shelf on the
last visit—he said, Take what you want,
so I took what I wanted—and I began
reading “The Hollow Men” while the
wind shook the car and the sand gritted
it, hissing, and I saw that my father had
56 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / JUNE 2016
marked—because he was a big, big
marker of text, messy, loops, under-
linings, strange symbols, and almost il-
legible notes—one passage:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow.
—and written, to the side of it, in shaky
block letters, death. In the car that
afternoon, on Cape Cod, I felt a fore-
boding sense of doom, exactly what
Eliot wanted me to feel, and a deeper
perplexing sense of being completely
alone in a new kind of solitude that
included time itself, flexing outward in
front of me into the future when my
father would be gone while at the same
time, not far down the street behind
me, through the dune grass and the
boarded-up houses and the houses that
were year-round, warm with winter
light in the windows, snug and safe, my
own family sat around the television or
in their rooms, unaware that I was even
gone, or at least not thinking about it.
For them and for me, for a split second,
sliced off, we were parted for eternity. n
June Index Sources
1 Annette Kim, University of Southern
California (Los Angeles); 2 China Labor
Bulletin (Hong Kong); 3 Kerem Altiparmak,
Ankara University (Turkey); 4,5 Embassy of
Turkey (Washington); 6 European Commission
(Brussels); 7 The White House (Washington);
8 Federal Bureau of Investigation; 9 SeaWorld
Parks & Entertainment (Orlando, Fla.);
10,11 New York Times; 12 Office of Senator
Lindsey Graham (Washington)/Harper’s
research; 13 National Conference of State
Legislatures (Denver); 14 Brennan Center
for Justice (N.Y.C.); 15,16 Pew Research
Center (Washington); 17,18 Brown Center
on Education Policy (Washington); 19 Bureau
of Transportation Statistics (Washington);
20 Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, Brennan Center
for Justice; 21 Louisiana Public Defender
Board (Baton Rouge); 22 Executive Office
for Immigration Review (Washington); 23
Doctor’s Associates (Milford, Conn.); 24 Law
School Admissions Council (Newtown, Pa.);
25 American Society of Addiction Medicine
(Chevy Chase, Md.); 26,27 Division of Alaska
State Troopers (Anchorage); 28,29 Governors
Highway Safety Association (Washington);
30,31 American Insurance Institute for
Highway Safety (Arlington, Va.)/Damien
Saunder, Esri (Redlands, Calif.); 32 David
Christensen, Stanford University (Stanford,
Calif.); 33,34 Pew Research Center; 35,36
Hillary’s (Nottingham, England); 37 Newzoo
(Amsterdam); 38 Amazon.com (Seattle);
39 YouGov (N.Y.C.).