{"id":267,"date":"2014-09-07T22:34:56","date_gmt":"2014-09-07T22:34:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=267"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:57:24","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:57:24","slug":"a-mans-life-my-fathers-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2014\/09\/07\/a-mans-life-my-fathers-voice\/","title":{"rendered":"My Father’s Voice"},"content":{"rendered":"

by David Gessner<\/strong><\/p>\n

My father died more than 15 years ago, but\u00a0I hear his voice every day.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t mean that I hear its exact tone or timbre, of course. But I do hear, echoing in my own mind and voice, his bluntness, his way of not pussyfooting around but going directly at a thing. \u201cNo more bullshit\u201d and the even shorter \u201cEnough bullshit\u201d were two of his favorite phrases.<\/p>\n

In appearance he was a no-nonsense, balding bulldog of a man with full cheeks and hanging jowls, and when I first saw a picture of Churchill in my schoolbook, I momentarily believed that my father and the Allied leader were one and the same. (Not that it would have surprised me to find out that the man I sat next to at dinner had also led Great Britain through the war.) When I, as a young writer, whined to him once about the difficulties of my chosen profession, he spelled out this single word of advice: \u201cW-O-R-K.\u201d Of course this infuriated me at the time, though it aptly summarizes my attitude toward my own job today.<\/p>\n

\u201cI spit on the grave of my 20s,\u201d wrote H. L. Mencken, who, in wit at least, reminds me of my father.<\/p>\n

My own 20s were spent railing against my fate, feeling misunderstood, unclear on why the world didn\u2019t appreciate my genius. To support myself while I wrote my big, clunky (and ultimately unpublished) novels, I worked as a carpenter, bookstore clerk, and substitute teacher\u2014jobs that left my father scratching his simian head, unable to see a reflection of himself in my stubbornness to succeed on my own terms. We began to reconcile after I turned 30, but then, at the much-too-young age of 55, he learned he was terminally ill. He cut even that whopper of a diagnosis down to size in his characteristic manner. He spent his last weeks writing letters to friends, settling his business affairs, and making sure my mother would be taken care of. And when she tried to get him to slow down, he barked, \u201cI\u2019ll have plenty of time to rest soon enough.\u201d He brushed aside the efforts of well-meaning friends to comfort him with religion, ranking God fairly high on the list of illusions he didn\u2019t have time for.<\/p>\n

Near the end of his life, he hadn\u2019t said anything coherent for days, lost in the fog of morphine. He was lying in the hospice bed in the living room with a view of the bird feeders, and I was sitting in a chair by the foot of his bed doing what writers do: taking notes on what was happening in my life. No doubt there was something seedy, and possibly immoral, about writing about my father\u2019s last moments. But there I was, a habitual chronicler habitually chronicling. Lost in that activity, I didn\u2019t notice when he woke up, until he barked at me: \u201cMake sure you get the facts down.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which I did and have continued to try to do.<\/p>\n

The book I was working on at the time of his death was a nature book, leaning heavily on Henry David Thoreau. But as his death began to dominate the pages of that book, my father kicked Thoreau out the door. That book, which would become my first published work, began flowery and full of quotations, but grew more blunt as it went on. The central irony of my literary life is that I made my name on his dead body, and that I found my voice just as he lost his forever. That my mature writing voice carries echoes of his is hardly a surprise.<\/p>\n

As I grow older, closing in on the age he was when he died and now a father myself, I think more and more about this gift my father gave me. In some ways I still define myself against him. He had plenty of flaws: He was incapable of navigating any complex emotional terrain, his temper could be wild, and he too often reached for the bottle when not W-O-R-King. There were deep reasons for this, among them the fact that his own father died when he was six, and he had no model to help him along. I was luckier than that. I had a good, if far from perfect, model.<\/p>\n

We are very different men: He was a businessman who sold textile machinery, and I am a writer and professor. But when I take a break from professing and the long-winded sentences that go with it, I find myself returning to his blunt ways. \u201cNo More Bullshit,\u201d says the sign that hangs over my desk as I type today.<\/p>\n

This attitude permeates my reading as well as my writing. The writers I admire tend toward the common-sensical and direct, not the lyric and airy. While I had a youthful infatuation with Dostoyevsky, and still have long-standing relationships with Thoreau and Montaigne, the other group of writers and politicians I admire are blunt men of action, foregoing the theoretical for the actual. These qualities are embodied in the 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson, who, when frustrated by a philosopher\u2019s argument against the possibility of motion, stood up and kicked the man\u2019s chair and said, \u201cI refute it thusly.\u201d Johnson also had little tolerance for fancy language, like those who called fish \u201cthe scaly breed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two 20th-century writers\u2014Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto\u2014also shared this hardheadedness, as well as a tendency toward workaholism, the former once comparing the latter to a beaver that needed to keep chewing lest its teeth grow so long it self-impaled. Like these men, and like my father, I have found something close to satisfaction, if not salvation, in W-O-R-K.<\/p>\n

As is true with many businessmen, the vernacular of the military and of sports often leaked into my father\u2019s words. Words like attack, charge, and blast constantly cropped up. A history major, he enjoyed the language of great battles, of trumpets, and smoke. It was a tendency I sometimes mocked. By the time I was a teenager I could do a pretty good impression of him, huffing up my chest and deepening my voice. Later, in college, while hunting through the stacks of the library, I stumbled upon Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s most famous essay, \u201cThe Strenuous Life,\u201d and reading it recognized exhortations that peppered my childhood:<\/p>\n

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success that comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.<\/p>\n

This ultimate triumph can\u2019t be gained without \u201cvirile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life.\u201d To the modern ear, Roosevelt can sound pompous, comical, sexist, racist, dangerous, even psychopathic, but there is still no denying the bristling energy\u2014a contagious energy, an energy like the tide or, more accurately, like a waterfall. When I first read the words, I, of course, heard them spoken in my father\u2019s gruff voice.<\/p>\n

One thing that would have saddened my father, and that saddens me, is that the mantle of bluntness has been seized by the conservative right, many of whom fancy themselves straight-shooting truth-sayers. Of course no party or wing has a monopoly on this quality, and my father was that anachronistic thing, a true independent who voted for, among others, Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, Michael Dukakis, and Ross Perot. Hemingway wrote that every writer needs a \u201cbullshit detector,\u201d and it\u2019s a device that comes in handy in the nonliterary world as well. My father was wary\u2014not just of bunk, but of all parties, sects, certainties, and answers, anything pat and settled, anyone unable to adapt.<\/p>\n

DeVoto believed that the only honest attitude toward life was an ad hoc one, that each and every situation should be judged not by some stiff and preestablished philosophy, but on its particulars, which will, of course, be different than every other situation. \u201cKeep your options open\u201d was one of my father\u2019s few pieces of advice to me. He wasn\u2019t suggesting that I not commit to things\u2014hardly!\u2014just advising me to be aware of the way that the world is always shifting, the way that, as soon as you say \u201cthings are this way,\u201d they turn another.<\/p>\n

This skepticism was balanced in him, as it is in me and in most of us, by other more exuberant qualities. He loved birds, booze, and the Red Sox, and so do I. But the helium of enthusiasm was always anchored by something solid, heavy, and hard, and today it is that anchor, or foundation, which I celebrate. While he believed that the world is moving, and that therefore we must move with it, he also knew there were times for staying still, times when the self was to be trusted no matter what the world said. To accomplish this requires seeing through the shams, delusions, opinions, and, yes, bullshit that so often passes for truth. To accomplish this requires planting one\u2019s feet solidly on the ground and saying a thing directly.<\/p>\n

My father taught me to be skeptical, and that includes being skeptical of a merely reflexive bluntness, a tendency to cut others down while cutting to the quick.\u00a0I will watch for that. But I will also continue to appreciate the joy of going right at a thing, of brushing cobwebs aside and charging ahead. I will never actually hear his voice again, I know that, and even if I could\u00a0I would understand that it is not flawless. But while that voice provides no answers and no certainty, I will take its counsel nonetheless. It may not be a perfect voice, but it\u2019s a good one. And I plan on listening to it until I, like him, lie quiet.<\/p>\n

\u2014from A Man’s Life: An Ongoing Conversation About What it Means to be A Man in the 21st Century,\u00a0<\/em>WM Fall 2011<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"David<\/a><\/p>\n

David Gessner is the author of six books, including\u00a0<\/em>Sick\u00a0of Nature, T<\/em>he Prophet of Dry Hill, and\u00a0<\/em>Return of\u00a0the Osprey, which was chosen by the Boston Globe as\u00a0one of the top 10 nonfiction books of the year. In 2006 he won a Pushcart Prize; in 2007 he won the John Burroughs Award for Best Natural History Essay; and in 2008 his\u00a0essay \u201cThe Dreamer Does Not Exist,\u201d was chosen for\u00a0<\/em>The Best American Nonrequired Reading. He is currently\u00a0an associate professor at the University of North Carolina\u00a0at Wilmington, where he edits the national literary journal, Ecotone.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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