Table of Contents
Cover Page
By the Same Author
A Lie About My Father
Copyright Page
Birdland
Every year, it comes as a surprise.
Foundlings
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Nobodaddy
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Dobermann Days
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Lies and Dreams
A small fishing......
Acknowledgements
By the same author
FICTION
The Dumb House
The Mercy Boys
Burning Elvis
The Locust Room
Living Nowhere
POETRY
The hoop
Common Knowledge
Feast Days
The Myth of the Twin
Swimming in the Flood
A Normal Skin
The Asylum Dance
The Light Trap
The Good Neighbour
Selected Poems
A LIE ABOUT MY
FATHER
John Burnside
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Published by Jonathan Cape 2006
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Copyright © John Burnside 2006
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This book is best treated as a work of fiction. If he were here to discuss it, my father would agree, I’m sure, that it’s as true to say that I never had a father as it is to say that he never had a son.
We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall – this rushing annihilation – for the very reason that it involves one of the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination – for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.
Examine these and similar actions as we will, we shall find them resulting solely from the spirit of the Perverse. We perpetrate them merely because we feel that we should not. Beyond or behind this there is no intelligible principle; and we might, indeed, deem this perverseness a direct instigation of the arch-fiend, were it not occasionally known to operate in the furtherance of good.
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’
Where, during all these years, was my free will? From what deep and hidden place was it called forth in a moment so that I might bend my neck under thy yoke, which is easy, and take up thy burden, which is light?
St Augustine, Confessions
BIRDLAND
. . . fell on his knees and looked up and cried out, ‘No, daddy, don’t leave me here alone, Take me up, daddy, to the belly of your ship, Let the ship slide open and I’ll go inside of it Where you are not human . . .’
Patti Smith
Every year, it comes as a surprise. The leaves flare, for a time, to crimson and butter yellow, the air shifts, in the early morning, from the damp greens of late summer to soft graphites and an occasional, miraculous quail grey. Everything brightens before it burns away, the way a dying man is suddenly filled with new hope, hours before they are laying him out to be washed and dressed for the last time in a cool side room. I was brought up, not necessarily to believe, but to allow for the possibility that the dead come back at Halloween; or rather, not the dead, but their souls: whether as individual wisps of fading consciousness or some single, aggregated mass, it didn’t matter. All I knew was that soul was there, in one of its many guises: ghost, or revenant, breath of wind, figment of light or fire, or just some inexplicable memory, some snapshot filed away at the back of my mind, a picture I didn’t even know I possessed until that moment.
So it is that, with the usual show of scepticism and something close to total
conviction, I have celebrated Halloween all my life. Most years, if I can, I stay at home. I make an occasion of the day, a private, local festival of penance and celebration in more or less equal measure. I think of my own dead, out there among the millions of returning souls permitted, for this one night, to visit the places they once knew, the houses they inhabited, the streets they crossed on their way to work, or to secret assignations, and I remember why, in my part of the world, the living spend this day building fires, so they can light them all at once, all over the darkening land, as night approaches. It’s not, as mere superstition says, that they are trying to frighten off evil spirits. No: the purpose of these fires is to light the way, and to offer a little warmth to ghosts who are so like ourselves that we are all interchangeable: living and dead; guest and host; householder and spectre; my father, myself. One day we may all be ghosts, and the ghosts we entertain will live and breathe again. Perhaps, in the past, each of us knew what it was to wander home and find it strange, the garden altered, the kitchen full of strangers.
To make it work, Halloween has to be a collaboration. The dead have their part to play, but so have the living. The reason I stay close to home on Halloween – whatever home happens to be – isn’t just because I am conscious of, even dutiful about, my part in the ritual, but also because I know how vulnerable I am at such times. Halloween is an occasion, not just for visitations, but also for subtle, yet significant shifts and slips in the psyche, near-imperceptible transformations that, by the time they become visible, have altered the path of a life for ever. At Halloween, when the ghosts are about, I feel more open; more open, and more alert, but also more threatened. It’s best, at such times, to sit at home until the first light breaks, and send my personal spirits away satisfied.
There have been times, however, when I had to be away: out on the road, somewhere in transit, alone, exposed, capable of forgetting what I think I am. Ten years ago, for instance, I was driving in the Finger Lakes region of upper New York State, alone in a rented car, as the day of the dead approached. I had arrived in Rochester, NY, towards the end of October, and now I was searching for the little town where a friend lived, not far from Lake Keuka. I get lost easily – willingly, perhaps – and it was an easy place to get lost in, all the little roads leading off to places that were more beautiful and silent than any I had seen till then. So I was thoroughly lost that morning, when I stopped to pick up the clown. I didn’t know he was a clown when I picked him up, but I could have guessed as much from his looks, and from the way he stood by the side of the road, utterly indifferent to the absence of traffic, or to the question of whether I would give him a lift. Even though he didn’t appear to be a local, he looked like someone who knew the way.
It was the mid-nineties and I had been having a difficult year. I was stressed, tired, grateful to be alone and out on the road. I was tired of my work; tired of my history; tired, more than anything, of being a person (when St Paul tells us that God is no respecter of persons, he is saying more than we usually understand). I was tired of acting, tired of being visible. Driving around in that quiet corner of the world, passing through little townships where the children had set great grinning or mock-scary jack-o’-lanterns on the porches, I might as well have been invisible, a man from nowhere, as anyone is when he is passing through. I had been on the road for a while, and I was content just to drive around, stopping from time to time for a coffee and moving on, like a faint gust of wind that the local people, with their own dramas and hurts to enact, barely noticed, if they noticed it at all.
So I was happy being alone, enjoying the quiet of who I am when I am not with others, and I had no wish to change my situation till I stopped in a small town for lunch. I don’t remember where it was, or why it appealed to me particularly, all I recall is the narrow, sparsely furnished diner, and the fact that it was empty. Empty, that is, but for the woman who brought me the menu, a painter working as a waitress (I have never met a waitress working as a painter, or an actor playing Hamlet till the next busboy position frees up, but I believed her, that day, and I still do today). She was a very beautiful woman, which struck me as odd at the time, because I hadn’t thought of American women as beautiful till I met her. Pretty, yes; attractive, very often; but not beautiful. To me, they usually looked too new, as if they had just come off an assembly line. But then, I was more accustomed to California, where everything looks too new.
As is the way of quiet days, I spent a little time talking to this beautiful woman – I’ll call her Frances – then I paid my bill and left. It had been one of those brief encounters that happen in transit, of no significance to either party beyond the level of pleasant, courteous exchange. She hadn’t seen me as anything other than a friendly face – an outsider, someone she could relax and chat with, on a far from busy day – and I hadn’t planned for anything other than a light but leisurely meal, to break the tedium of driving; after a few miles, however, I realised that Frances had shocked me out of my solitary mood and I found myself thinking about her, wondering, speculating, as it is possible to do when there is nothing but road ahead, no home, no obligations, no basic facts of existence. I was annoyed, I was charmed, I felt silly, and I was a little touched by my own silliness. I imagine the mood would have passed after an hour or so, with some country music on the radio and the not at all pressing, even faintly amusing problem of finding the way to my friend’s house, but I had been feeling more than geographically lost for a while when I came upon a hitch-hiker and stopped to pick him up.
I’m going to call him Mike. He had come up from the city, he said, on his way to visit his father. We got talking about New York, about the Lakes and, eventually, about his father who, according to Mike’s account, was a rare, living example of those men who had come to seem, for me at least, a matter of myth: competent, quiet, broad-minded, solitary, he had run a building supplies store in a nearby town, but was now retired and, ever since his second wife died, living alone in a simple house out in the woods, among the red and golden trees, not far from his nearest neighbour, for all practical purposes, but far enough to afford him real privacy.
At the time, I had no idea why it mattered to me, but I immediately decided that Mike’s father – whose name, in this story, is Martin – was one of those people who liked to wake alone in the early morning and stand on his porch looking out at the woods, or at the little dirt road that ran to his door, to see what he could see. A man – I can imagine him so easily in the telling – for whom every sighting of the local deer, or the woodland birds, was a significant event, no matter how common those sightings might be. A significant event for him because, every time a human being encounters an animal, or a bird, he learns something new, or remembers something old that he had forgotten. This is one of the four or five things Martin has learned in life, and he is one of those men who understands that knowing four or five things is more than enough. I could imagine him allowing himself a good half-hour or so to stand outside with a warm coffee cradled in his hands, watching the day begin, before he went indoors and made breakfast. The rest of his day would be spent in patient work: the good work of daily maintenance, the odd task that had been waiting for the right moment or season to be carried out, the sudden emergency repair.
I don’t mean to say that Mike told me all – or any – of this about his father, but I knew, from what he did say, that Martin was just such a man. I could see him married, then widowed: self-sufficient all along, and no less so when he was bound to his wife and children – and it wasn’t even a matter of time before this man, this father, merged with the ideal I had grown up expecting to find, a man like Walter Pidgeon, say, in his best movies: a creature mostly removed from the world inhabited by others, sitting alone with his paper, or musing over his pipe. My childhood dream of a father had been just that conservative-seeming type: a man who willingly accepted his imposed silence, his easy invisibility, and lived inside himself, in a self-validating world that had gradually become richer and quieter,
like a pond in the woods that goes undisturbed for years, filling with leaves and spores, becoming a dark continuum of frog life and the slow chemistry of generation and decay. By the end, I could imagine, everything would have been internalised. Others would think him reserved, even withdrawn; they wouldn’t see the faint smile that played about his face or, if they did, they would think of it as self-effacing or conciliatory, or even slightly embarrassed, the smile of a man who had nothing to say for himself. Nothing to say, nothing to show, nothing to prove. But it might as easily be the smile of someone who has seen through all the usual aspirations: the wry, mocking expression of someone who had learned, early on, that being a successful man, in worldly terms, is the ultimate in pyrrhic victories.
Mike was a different kettle of fish. He was tall, perhaps too tall, a rather gangly boy-man who looked ten years older than I guessed he was. He had sandy, already receding hair and oddly dark eyes, as if he had dyed or tinted them in some way. He told me he had gone off to the city at nineteen, to study acting, but what he really wanted to do was become a clown. Now he was in clown school – I had no idea, till then, that people actually studied such things – and even though his father had been a practical man all his life, he had been supportive, if not always clear about what it was Mike wanted to achieve. ‘My dad never disrespected me for doing what I wanted to do,’ Mike said. ‘He was always there for me.’ He spoke in that way, like a character on television, but I recognised the shorthand he was using. ‘I got to hand it to him.’ He shook his head in appreciation. I imagined he might be a good clown: everything he did was exaggerated, every phrase he uttered was picked out of the great treasure trove of received ideas. ‘I can do other stuff,’ he added. ‘I made sure of that, for his sake.’ He looked out at the trees. ‘I’m a pretty fair carpenter,’ he said, with a hint of pride.
I nodded. I wondered, if these lines had come up in a script he was learning, whether he would recognise himself in them. Not that I mean this as a criticism. I liked Mike. As he talked, I drove along, trying to find a suitable place in his story to interrupt him, and find out where we were going. Before I could, however, he gave me the kind of interested look that is so arresting in Americans. ‘So. John. Tell me about your dad,’ he said.
A Lie About My Father Page 1
