Friday
I’ve mentioned my father frequently in these Friday recollections but thought I’d write today about when I finally started to slip out of his orbit, which didn’t happen until my forties. Previously I had worshipped him, which meant to finding separation was difficult. I think of the observation that Athena, in the guise of Mentor, makes to Telemachus in The Odyssey:
Telemachus, you will be brave and thoughtful
if your own father’s forcefulness runs through you.
How capable he was, in word and deed!
Your journey will succeed, if you are his.
If you’re not his son by Penelope,
I doubt you can achieve what you desire.
And it is rare for sons to be like fathers:
Only a few are better, most are worse.
Perhaps Tennyson had this passage in mind when he wrote “Ulysses,” in which the Greek hero regards his son as an unimaginative bureaucrat rather than a wild and exciting adventurer:
This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the scepter and the isle,—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centered in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
The truth is that my father was a remarkable man. A translator during World War II, he ended up in Munich in 1945, where he conducted Germans on required tours of Dachau. When he returned to the United States, he finished up his education at Carleton College, earned his Ph.D at the University of Wisconsin, and had a stellar academic career as a world-class scholar, specializing in the poetry of French modernist poet Guillaume Apollinaire. He also gained a reputation as an accomplished poet of light verse; created eye-catching paintings that involved nails, hinges, and other forms of hardware; and played his own small role here in Sewanee in the Civil Rights, feminist, and LGBTQ+ movements. He was a major mover in a landmark civil rights case, funded by the NAACP, in which four Black families and four white sued our county school board for failing to comply with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. We won the suit—I was one of the plaintiffs—and for years afterwards the NACCP advertised the case as one of its signature accomplishments.
When I say “world class scholar,” incidentally, I’m not exaggerating. During his life, he was offered multiple positions, including at Indiana University, one of the premier public universities for foreign language study. He also once set Apollinaire world on its head with his original research into some of the poet’s more obscure poems. How was I to compete with all that?
As a child, I realized early on that I would never draw as well as he did—I got C’s in first grade penmanship—and I stopped writing poetry (except for occasional doggerel) after my efforts were mocked by fellow poets in high school. (I wrote a poem inspired by the fairy world in Midsummer Night’s Dream, which they saw as evidence that I was a fairy.) But I aspired to be the kind of literary scholar that he was.
Only I never succeeded. For one thing, I never fell in love with library research the way that he did. In some ways, this form of academic scholarship jumped a generation as my son Toby, also a literature professor, is far more accomplished than I am. For years, I felt an academic failure.
Where I differed from my father is that, where he loved to pontificate, I preferred to listen. I was far more attuned to my students’ concerns than he could ever be. Although we were both successful teachers, both winning teacher-of-the-year awards at our respective colleges, we taught in different ways, with him more of a lecturer, me as more of a counselor. This became clear to me when we co-authored an article on Citizen Kane, which was his favorite movie.
As we were exchanging ideas, I fell in love with the following account of why the movie meant so much to him:
When I first saw Citizen Kane with my college friends in 1941, it was in an America undergoing the powerful pressures of a coming war, full of populist excitement and revolutionary foreboding. But cynical Depression kids that we were, we had little hope for salvation through armed uprising. Nor did we believe any longer in America’s self-proclaimed values. Nevertheless, those values were still part of us, and it was America’s blind self-destruction that we instinctively recognized in the shattering experience of watching a little wooden sled go up in flames. From the moment the huge lips opened and said “Rosebud,” to the sled’s final immolation in the furnace of our desires, we were both thrilled and terror-stricken. It was the flaming consummation of sex and politics that we had been looking for in movie theatres all our young lives. We somehow knew that we had experienced our own flaming love-death and that it had taken place in the tragic heart of our country. Welles and Mankiewicz had revealed, in two short hours of perception, how energetically Miss America had been raped of her dream, of her promise, of her rose; and then how she had dutifully prostituted us, her own bastard children. We no longer had a place we could call home. Pessimistically, and yet with the hope of finding some sort of transcendence through great eschatological events, we let ourselves get drafted into the army…
He followed up these observations with some fantastic research: looking through the Welles collection at the Indiana University library, he came across Welles’s previous undiscovered adolescent diaries. You will recall that the reporter in the film is searching for the meaning of “rosebud,” Kane’s last word, and my father discovered that the diaries are filled with references to roses. Then I discovered that roses were also big in the life of publisher William Randolph Hearst, upon whom Kane is based. We figured we could add some insight into the meaning of the symbol.
My father generously told me I could frame the article however I wanted. As I started to write it, however, I started running up against some generational differences. Essentially my father was a modernist for whom the desecrated rose—blasted innocence—was central to his identity whereas I was more of a post-modernist, seeing the rose as a metaphor that Welles was manipulating. (Welles himself described rosebud as “dollar book Freud.”) As much as I tried, I couldn’t get our two interpretations to jell.
My solution, finally, was to explore why the film meant so much to him and people like him (since he wasn’t the only viewer in 1941 and 1942 to be blown away by the film). With this approach, I could both honor him and acknowledge that I myself had a different perspective and different set of concerns. Our college president and English professor Ted Lewis thought that I had used the article to gently kill my father—my Oedipal moment—and perhaps there was some of that. It felt more, however, as though I was forging my own distinctive identity.
It took me this long to stop using his career as my measuring stick. Only in my forties did I realize that the kind of teaching and scholarship he did didn’t interest me that much, in large part both seemed too detached from life. I was much more of a utilitarian in my approach to literature (even though I hated Jeremy Bentham when I encountered him in college). In this way, I was more my mother’s son, who kept our family grounded as my father went off on his intellectual flights.
I was learning that it was okay to be the Telemachus in Tennyson’s poem.
Yet I don’t want to deny that, in many ways, I am also my father’s son. It could be said of Scott Bates what poet Lucille Clifton once said of me when we were colleagues: “as if words only matter in the world they know.” Although this was truer of my father than it was of me, there are ways I too get lost in abstractions. I think of what Mentor/Athena says to Telemachus in a follow-up comment to the one above:
But you will be no coward and no fool.
You do possess your father’s cunning mind,
So there is hope you will do all these things.
I’m proud that I possess my father’s cunning mind and am grateful for the gifts that he gave me. He worked his work, I mine.
When I began blogging in 2009, I was able to express my gratitude by regularly sharing his poems, some of which are really fine. He, meanwhile, became my #1 fan and told everyone he knew about the blog. Up until 89—he died at 90—he held on to his keen intellect and held forth at dinner gatherings and with friends. When we gathered to honor his memory with poems and stories, Sewanee’s Convocation Hall was packed.
