My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  The last time I played Hamlet

  releasing the fiction of my own madness

  was not enough. The ghost of my father

  would not appear, no matter my rage,

  and I praised my uncle’s best intentions.

  “The ghost of my father / would not appear.” Dana was right. The poem was not about Hamlet.

  57

  I felt alien in Montana and increasingly alien to broadcasting as a career, but I wasn’t thinking of a way out. After all, I had enlisted. Perhaps too much like my father, I was sticking with it, buckling down, doing the work I’d signed on for, ignoring the self within me that was capable of real joy, forcing it to lie sleeping throughout the day, then coaxing it awake late at night, feeding it crumbs as I hunched over my notebook and worried out a few lines of poetry.

  A year after I began working at KRTV, the other TV station in Great Falls tried to woo me away. Though I was only twenty-three and felt like an apprentice, the station manager of KFBB asked if I wouldn’t like to take the next step in my career. How would I feel about being his news director? I would produce and anchor the weekday evening newscast and manage the small news department: four reporters, a weatherman, and a cameraman. The new position would come with a hefty raise: I would earn fourteen thousand dollars a year. What choice did I have? I said I was thrilled to be asked and grateful for the opportunity.

  I still liked writing for television, working to craft clear—maybe even elegant—sentences that said much in few words. I liked editing stories, inventing ways for images and words and sounds to interact and make meaning. In my new job, I liked putting reports on the air that another news director—one keener to broadcast actual news—might not have. On one slow news day, I sent a reporter out to proofread the town; he came back with pictures of ungrammatical or misspelled billboards and an interview with the county sheriff about why, on the sign outside his building, the word sheriff appeared in quotation marks. (“Is this an actual quote? Or are you only a hypothetical sheriff?”) I liked appearing on the air, attempting to sound genuine and to speak substantively, attempting, in my chats on the set with the sports guy or the weather reporter, to sound as if I were engaged in a real conversation. As if: that was the problem. I was still Bick Bark. I was pretending. With television, everything seemed a simulation, a packaging of reality, and therefore always a step removed from it. I felt myself growing loyal solely to that secondary, circumscribed reality: the newsworthy one. If a report came over the police radio of a major pile-up on the interstate, I prayed for fatalities. That would be a story we could lead with. I wanted pictures, dramatic pictures: the murder suspect, shackled, being led away to jail; flames feeding on a family’s home and shooting into the night sky; a zoom-in to the widow’s tearstained face. Reality on its own was not enough: what mattered was its potential as fodder for a newscast. What mattered was what I could do with it, what it could do for me. I was nurturing my glibness and cynicism, surrendering myself to a smallness of vision. If I had a soul, I was suffocating it.

  Week after week, an advertisement appeared in the regional inner pages of TV Guide: a photo of me in my sharpest jacket and tie, posing at the anchor desk, smiling broadly, proclaiming my profound and abiding commitment to bringing the news to the people of north-central Montana.

  But that guy in the tie with the pancake makeup and the fixed, sprayed hair felt more and more like someone else, someone I didn’t trust. The person I trusted was the one who was already out of there, the one who, back home in Seattle for a visit, at a party, made wistful by wine, tried to harmonize with Kevin and Dana a rendition of the Roches’ song “Runs in the Family”—One by one we left home. / We went so far out there. . . . The person I trusted was the one who was writing poetry—or trying to write it. I sent my attempts to Kevin, mainly so the famished half of my divided self could be nourished by the words of someone who understood, of someone who knew—words such as these that my brother sent me just when I needed them:

  You clearly are a good, great enough poet to pursue the craft for your own reasons and be understood/excused by a good one out of every three thousand people, no matter what the results are. You’re already (or have always been, without my realizing it) as inventive and resourceful as I am, without being as obsessively weird, which bodes well for your future as a published poet. It’s inspiring to find someone close to me with a subterranean psyche. Isn’t that one way of saying it? I know what the workaday world does, subverting and weakening the notion that a man’s idea of what’s real in the world is flexible, adaptable, liable to constant scrutiny until he becomes less himself than a part of what is already established, a cog, and if this notion of resistance has become in itself a triviality, recognized and described until it has become in itself mundane, I still believe in the power of this kind of resistance, sitting in a crowd of friends or co-workers I still feel it, nothing I’ve experienced can match it, and a poem can show it! That’s the secret of why I’ve done what I’ve done for the last several years; my failures, at least, are my own.

  We are not permitted to say these things. It’s a shock to realize that our greatest thrill and accomplishment, to ourselves the most important achievement, is in this revelation of ourselves by degrees.

  I see nothing but mystery everywhere. I refer to my failures because I’m not up to my own standards. Intuition has led me to feign weakness to escape triviality. And yet triviality is real; triviality is the Devil. The Devil wins in the end. Today I went to the airport to send some seafood, air freight, to California. It’s my job. And, Chris, they were mailing a body out, somewhere, on the airplane! They weighed this cardboard coffin on the scale, while I watched, to determine the shipping charges. I sneaked a peek at the airbill: the human remains, it said, of Charles H. Smith, one hundred and ninety pounds, with the cardboard. And all of us, the man from Republic Airlines who laid the body to the scale with a forklift, the funeral parlor worker who stood and whistled—I swear to you, whistled!—as the work was done, and I, waiting with my thousand pounds of freshly killed seafood for my turn at the scale, were reduced in my mind, with the picture of the fresh corpse, in the posture of sleep, impossibly vivid in my imagination, to the status of dumbfounded pallbearers, with everything held dear to ourselves in our lives made pointless and stupid by the hopelessly awkward presence of the dead man. Triviality; mystery! I must not allow the overwhelming stupidity of persons and places and things to make me insensible to that moment when everything I believe can be called into question. None of my questions has been answered.

  None of my questions were being answered, either. Except. Except: I met Rebecca—an artist. An artist! A painter. She knew; she was aware of the enduring, unsettling, glorious mystery one could sense if only one were silent long enough to listen. When witnessing some drunken lout acting stupidly—trying to climb a telephone pole, beer can in hand, or shouting provocative inanities at a pretty woman—Rebecca had a habit of remarking sourly, “Doesn’t he know he’s going to die?”

  She had recently earned an MFA and was making a living by teaching in the Great Falls artists-in-the-schools program. Meanwhile, alone in the studio, she was devoting her life to her work; combining pastel drawings and glued pieces of tissue paper, she was making image after image after image of human torsos, the mindless and unmoving part of us, all inscrutable throbbing feeling. It was the fact of her being an artist, certainly, that drew me to Rebecca—and her kindness, and her beauty, which she had the habit of obscuring beneath sweatshirts and army pants. I met her first at the local arts center, where I was reporting on a story—the kind of artsy feature I preferred. I overheard her speaking seriously, unironically, to another woman about astrology. Under my breath, I said something sardonic, and Rebecca pounced. “And what’s your sign?” she asked. Hearing that I was a Scorpio, she said, “I’m not surprised.” A half-serious, half-teasing debate about the merits of astrology ensued. Astrology, I
proposed, is superstition. Its premise contradicts the laws of physics. And it’s reductive; it pretends that life is not as bewildering as it is. No, she argued: astrology works. It has worked for thousands of years. It’s mysterious but nonetheless has an internal logic—it can be a trusted guide to those who want to understand this strange, anguish-filled life.

  That first conversation hinted at what was to come: a powerful and long relationship, a marriage, eventually, that lasted fifteen years but ended mainly because, regarding what mattered to us most—our sense of ultimate reality, our metaphysics—we could not converse freely and sympathetically without frustration and defensiveness and injured feelings. As our marriage progressed, instead of figuring out another, more tender and generous way to talk about it, I fell into the habit, like my father, and like myself as a child, of staying silent when I might have spoken, of trading a confrontation with a difficult truth for the relief of keeping my feelings concealed—for the relief, I told myself again and again, of keeping the peace. As the years went by, and Rebecca and I stayed together, we nurtured the artist in each other but felt an essential gap between us. We each grew lonely.

  And there was this: Rebecca was not instinctively enamored of existence. She had suffered and seen suffering and was not fully persuaded that life was worth the pain. She sometimes complained that life on this planet was too cruel, too difficult. “Compared to what?” I would ask. “It’s cruel, yes, but it’s joyful and beautifully strange, too. Anyway, it’s all we have. Shouldn’t we embrace it? There’s nothing else to embrace.” I was being glib, perhaps—speaking in platitudes. But I believed them. Some of the distance between Rebecca and me, I realized, was that she was drawn to death. It made a kind of sense to her as a relief from suffering. Not long after our marriage ended, I heard a poet friend and teacher of mine, Gregory Orr, speak of the trauma at the center of his own childhood: when he was twelve, on a morning hunting expedition, he shot and killed his eight-year-old brother. It was an accident. Certain that the chamber in his .22 was empty, he casually waved the rifle backward over his shoulder and fired, not seeing that the barrel was pointing at his brother. Out of the horror, guilt, self-hatred, and meaninglessness that rushed into his being, he discovered the consolation of poetry. He also discovered a fact about his father: when he was a boy, while skeet shooting, he, too, had accidentally shot and killed someone—his best friend. Although a pulled trigger scorched his life and his memory, he later, as a grown man and father, filled his house with guns and taught his own young boys to hunt. He did not speak to his children about his accidental boyhood crime, but he re-created its circumstances; he built a life in which a rifle could easily find itself in the hands of an impulsive, reckless boy. It is a common thing, probably more common than not: we never shake the essential emotional experiences of our childhood; in fact, we create a life in which we oblige ourselves to revisit them. I had always assumed that my relationships with women were somehow shadow versions of my relationship with my mother. When I heard Gregory speak, it did not seem to me that his family being traumatized by two accidental shooting deaths was a coincidence. Instead, it struck me that his father had, perversely and unconsciously, found a way to re-create his childhood trauma, as if it were so essential to his being that he could not put it completely behind him. And another thing struck me: I had not married a version of my mother. I had married my father. I had created a circumstance in which my job was to try to persuade a person I loved that life was worth living.

  But two decades before that recognition, as Rebecca and I were starting—in a series of small moves, a series of little risks—to merge our two lives together, a new way of conceiving of my life seemed possible. Unambivalently loyal to her desire to be an artist, Rebecca had gone to graduate school. Why couldn’t I do the same? It was evident by now that if I were to be happy, if I were to be true to myself and not subsumed by a life I did not completely believe in, I would have to put poetry at the center of my attentions, not at their periphery. I had been letting my consciousness be shaped by television, by the tidy packagings of reality, the continual partial lies, that it required. I felt most exhilaratingly alive in the midst of writing a poem that felt true. My work in TV news could not provide such sensations. It was their enemy.

  I would apply to graduate schools. I would quit my job, quit my career. Rebecca and I would marry, and, since her contract with the school district was expiring, we would move wherever I was accepted. After that, who knew where we would live or what we would do. For now, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that I would devote myself solely to poetry; I would go where it led me.

  58

  Like my parents, Rebecca and I were married in Seattle. Unlike them, we asked a judge, not a priest, to preside. Like my parents, we had a two-day honeymoon in Victoria. Unlike my father, I was awake for most of it.

  Back in Great Falls, we packed up a U-Haul, then drove across the country to the University of New Hampshire, where I would study with Charles Simic. I had seen his poems in anthologies, and they seemed wholly unlike any others: they were deeply strange, imaginatively free. He wrote about going inside a stone, about building a “strange church” with his shoes as the altar, about looking at a fork as if for the first time and imagining that it “must have crept / Right out of hell.” His were the kind of poems one might write in a dream or scrawl on a cave wall to be discovered by happenstance centuries later and understood.

  I assumed that I knew nothing about poetry and gladly gave myself over to Charlie’s influence. When he helped me improve my poems, he didn’t do so by telling me that he could not understand them; he did so by telling me that they were not interesting enough. He taught me to put pressure on my language, to ask of every line, of every image, that it delight or enchant or meaningfully mystify. The first week of class, he put it this way: “You want to write poems that will break people’s hearts, make them jump off roofs, join monastic orders.”

  I had come to the right place.

  One of the first poems I wrote in New Hampshire was an account of a dream I’d had in which my father returned from the grave and, to my frustration, avoided speaking about the fact of his death. Instead, he told me that he had witnessed an interesting incident—the demise of someone else: a little boy who plunged off an overlook into a deep canyon. The child had walked too close to the edge. In the poem, as in the dream, I was befuddled and angry. Why could my father not speak to me for once, directly, candidly, and emotionally, about himself? Was I merely a stranger to him, someone who might only accidentally catch his eye, as if I were the poor nameless boy who had tumbled to his death? I accused my father of making superficial pronouncements, of not taking his own suicide as seriously as I did—“as if you thought / you could / still change your mind,” I told him, “as if you’d the right / to talk to me / about dying.”

  Too late, I was pleading with him to speak with honesty and fullness, pleading with him to reveal what he truly felt, to admit that his death was real. And his life.

  EPILOGUE

  Silence is the sound of inwardness, of a solitude essential for the making of the self, or the discovery of it. Silence is a cave, a comfort: it is safe. And it is dangerous: the sound of he who would make himself known by speaking, and create himself in the world by doing so, but who hasn’t the courage—or, not having been instructed in candor, hasn’t the skill. His silence is a white screen onto which others project their shadows. Silence signals unspoken questioning or signals unquestioning assent—a surrendering to notions of who to be, and how to be, that are aswirl in the culture’s chatter or inherited from long-dead faceless ancestors tilling some hillock in the old country. Silence is the sound of someone preparing to speak in his own time, when he is ready, or it is the sound of he who, whatever he has of import to reveal, has long since forgotten what it is.

  * * *

  I choose not to be silent. This book is the consequence of that. I have lea
rned—I am still learning—how easy it is, out of fear or out of habit, not to speak directly and honestly, how easy it is to evade conflict by addressing it sideways or not at all, to slide by on bleak and easy humor, as my father did. In poetry, especially, I have found a way to let what would otherwise remain hidden speak. Decades after his death, long after my few graduate school efforts to write about him, my father would not leave me alone; he began again to appear in my poems. I worried about how my mother would react to these excavations of my memories of him and of my childhood home. Would she think of the poems as indiscretions, a reckless publicizing of the family’s sadness? Would she think of them as needlessly reopening a wound? I was concerned about a poem that referred directly to the morning of my father’s suicide—but my mother wrote to me that I need not worry: “It is all true and I recall those feelings myself.”

  When the poems weren’t enough—when I knew that my investigation into my father would deepen and expand, taking the form of this book—I went to my mother for help. I wanted to know everything. Would she tell me her story? Would she trust me with it? A writer’s selecting and shaping of memory, his searching for something true in it, is a dangerous, maybe partially futile business, particularly when the memory is someone else’s. He risks glibness, a cheapening of feeling: the simplifying, and thus falsifying, of a life because that life’s evanescence and intricacy cannot be rendered adequately on the page. But my mother agreed to speak with me. She sat for hours, answering candidly and thoughtfully every question I put to her, even if the answers brought her to tears, even if she knew her words could end up in a book.

  Once, when I was sharing with her an early draft of this manuscript, the whole project suddenly struck me as outlandish and impudent. She had wondered whether I might delete from the book a certain questionable theory about her father, and she had quibbled about the exact phrasing of something she’d said in a quarrel with my father over forty years before. “I can imagine,” I wrote to her, “most people by this point saying, ‘Can’t you just take me entirely out of your silly book? That was my dad, my marriage, my argument. I’d like to keep them to myself.’ ”