before my mother, my father had another wife; an American woman called Leatrice with whom he had a child. And before my father, Leatrice was attached to my father's best friend. Her switch from the best friend to my father caused some friction. All this happened in Dublin in the early 1950s.
Spool forward to 1983. I lived in London. At a party in west Hampstead, given by a friend who was a composer, I bumped into my father's sometime best friend. He lived in London now, he had a family, and he and my father had long since made up.
"If you want to know about your father," said the best friend at the end of the party, "come and talk to me."
Of my father and his life before my mother I had only a few crumbs of information. Now I had the chance to find out more. I wrote the best friend's details in my filofax. Then I left the party. It was cold outside. The paving stones glittered with frost. I found my car, an old Morris Oxford and put my filofax on the roof. I fished in my pocket for the car key, opened the door and hopped quickly inside. It was good to be out of the cold. Then I drove off. Somewhere on the Finchley Road, my filofax flew off into the darkness. It was only when I got home that I realised what I had done. The next morning I went back to the Finchley Road and scoured the gutters. I didn't find my filofax and so I never contacted the best friend.
Time passed. I came to live in Northern Ireland. My father was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's. I put him in a residential home in Dublin. I had a yearning to write about him. I had plenty of misery to recount, but I needed an event or two to put at the end. I did not want to write just a catalogue of complaints. I wanted to write a book with a trajectory. Then, out of the blue, the child my father had with Leatrice, my half-brother, Karl, came from Los Angeles to Belfast and found me. Ah ha, I thought, the end.
I sat down to write the book. I remembered the best friend. He knew my old man in the dirty 1930s and the cheery 1940s, long before I came along. I decided I must find him. He was ex-directory. I tried the composer who gave the party. He couldn't help. Then I remembered the best friend once worked for the Labour party. I rang Millbank. They knew where he was but they wouldn't give me his address, or forward a letter, or anything. I gave up.
Then my father died. The best friend read the obit and wrote to me. (He found me in the phone directory.) I wrote back. Letters were exchanged. He told me much about my father I didn't know.
I wrote my book, called Father & I. When it was finished and printed, I asked the publisher to send a copy to the best friend. He wrote back at once, chiding me gently for some infelicitous assumptions. In the book I had said my father was a Stalinist. It was not always so, said the best friend. In the 1930s he wrote pro-Franco and pro-Salazar pieces for right-wing Irish Catholic rags. My father's left-wing friends in Dublin were appalled. My father reminded them that he was paid a guinea for his efforts and that he needed the money.
My father was poor. I could understand him taking the money. But he was also psychologically predisposed to do as he did. It was all to do with his own father. My grandfather, Adolf, was a deracinated Jew and a full-blooded socialist. Relations between father and son were terrible. What better way, I thought, to infuriate Adolf than to cheer on the Catholic right, as my father did.
However, the father I knew from the 1950s onwards was on the left. I wasn't wrong about that. I wrote back to the best friend to explain what I thought had happened. I said that after Leatrice, his first wife, cursorily divorced him in a family court in Reno, Nevada, my father became a Yankee-hater. All his juvenile right-wing posturing went out of the window, and Joseph Stalin, so to speak, came in through the door. (And this was 1952: the Georgian was still alive and he had, after all, just won the second world war and saved the world from fascism.) In my childhood, I continued, nothing cheered my father like news of the US getting a bloody nose. Stalin, Castro and the Vietcong were his especial favourites in this respect. By hurting the US, they indirectly hurt the woman who hurt him.
I posted off this letter to the best friend blithely; but, driving home, I began to fret. My book hadn't hit the bookshops and already I knew it was lacking something. Then I thought, hang on. We were only talking a nuance here. The details of my father's right-wing salad days, had they been in the book, would have added to a reader's appreciation of his character; but not including them did not make the portrait I had painted untrue.
Humph. I didn't convince myself. All I could think was that Graham Greene was right in A Sort of Life where he wrote that every writer's life ends in failure. He didn't mean failure as commonly understood-poor sales or rotten reviews. Greene was speaking of aesthetic failure. No book is ever finished and no book is ever right, either. n
