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
‘In some of the most affecting passages of the book, he reveals his own pain and even murderous feelings in the face of grief and mortality. At his saddest he asks what consolation art can be. With writing as beautiful as his, he answers the question’ The Times
‘A masterpiece of devotion, wit and poetic grace’ Mail on Sunday
‘Morrison’s humanity shines through this marvellous memoir’ New Statesman
‘An extraordinary, moving account of a son’s relationship with his father’ Marie Claire
‘Blake Morrison has written a moving tribute for the living as much as the dead in compelling prose, untinted by sentiment’ Time Out
‘A fine and courageous book’ Sunday Independent
‘More than any novel could be, And when did you last see your father ? is the once-only, all-or-nothing book of a poet: the life held up so close to one’s face that one can smell it, touch it, m
arvel at the power of words to unlock and unravel, then pour helter-skelter over our hands this magical brainstorm of memories’ Spectator
ALSO BY BLAKE MORRISON
Dark Glasses
The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper
Selected Poems
The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry
(co-editor)
The Yellow House
As If
Too True
The Justification of Johann Gutenberg
Things my mother never told me
South of the River
About the Author
Blake Morrison was born in Skipton, Yorkshire. He is the author of two collections of poetry, a novel, The Justification of Johann Gutenberg , a children’s book, The Yellow House , two opera libretti, and a study of the Bulger case, As If , published by Granta Books. He lives in London.
Copyright
Granta Publications, 12 Addison Avenue, London W11 4QR
First published in Great Britain by Granta Books 1993
This ebook edition published by Granta Books 2009
Copyright © Blake Morrison, 1993
Blake Morrison has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84708 161 2
And When Did You Last See Your Father Page 21
