The Phantom Father: A Memoir
By Barry Gifford
Harcourt Brace, 257 pages, $23
Furthering My Education: A Memoir
By William Corbett
Zoland Books, 209 pages, $21.95
Barry Gifford was a lad of but 12 when his father died. Now, as a 50-year-old writer of considerable literary reputation, he recalls how he felt in the wake of that death:
“When I went to my father’s funeral I refused to ride in the family car. At the grave I almost smiled as the two cemetery workers lowered the coffin. . . . There was nothing to cry about. It was nonsense, this death. It was over, it went on. My tears were for someone else, I was never quite sure for whom.”
This is a scene from “The Phantom Father: A Memoir,” Gifford’s artful if often infuriating attempt to understand the kind of man his father was and, ipso facto, the kind of man he is.
The book forms an interesting daddy duet with William Corbett’s “Furthering My Education: A Memoir” in the already noisy chorus of literary memoirists.
If neither is as incendiary as Kathryn Harrison’s tale of incest, “The Kiss,” both books are born of that current publishing trend operating on the theory that–to paraphrase Tolstoy–happy families are all alike and every unhappy family is a potential book deal.
Certainly the business of sons trying to understand their fathers has been a literary staple (and later psychiatrists’ bread and butter) as long as writers have brooded. Fiction–think “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”–often provides rich ground for the imagination to explore and dismantle the ferocious familial machinery. The memoir relies heavily on dusty and emotionally mangled memory, the shoddiest of all collaborators.
The more problematic path is the one chosen by Gifford and Corbett with vastly different styles but, ultimately, the same empty result. Perhaps because Gifford’s book is partly fictionalized (a fact that he acknowledges), it is a superior, or at least more entertaining, effort.
Gifford is the author of the novel “Wild at Heart,” upon which David Lynch’s film of the same name was based, and he co-wrote the script for Lynch’s latest, “Lost Highway.” He is a literary light, able to fill a shelf with his fiction, non-fiction, poetry, a play and a translation. He is understandably sure-footed, taking many stylistic chances with “The Phantom Father,” in which he tries to evoke time, place and character by accumulated observations and anecdotes in a seemingly random and image-heavy way.
Gifford’s father was Rudy Winston, proprietor of an all-night liquor store at Chicago Avenue and Rush Street in the 1940s and early ’50s. He was a bright man, with a degree in pharmacology. He was also a flashy dresser with hoodlum connections. In part because of the location of his business, he knew a vast array of characters, from high society swells to cops, from the cardinal to politicians, entertainers to hopheads. He was friendly with the dollies who danced next door at the Club Alabam, and he was an intimate of some tough guys left over from the old Capone mob.
He was also a man who could be trusted; his store was a convenient and safe stolen-goods drop. And he was a man who was good with his fists and, perhaps, more-deadly weapons. Occasionally grilled by the police, Rudy Winston was never convicted of a crime.
Before and after his divorce from Gifford’s mother (when the boy was 5), father and son saw each other often, but the portrait that emerges of Winston is a sketchy one.
More colorful is the backdrop–the raucous Chicago of the 1950s–and some of the characters who populate it, from Winston’s cronies to his brother Buck; from Gifford’s mother to an old sailor forced out of Stalin’s Russia; from the neighborhood fortuneteller to the Clinton Elementary School tough guy named Big Arv.
These people come alive in short, vivid chapters.
But the mystery of who or what Rudy Winston was hangs over them and the book like a threatening sky. We are left with tantalizing hints at Winston’s character, none more tasty than this: “Walking home Vinnie said something that startled me: `Your dad was a killer, wasn’t he?’ “
In this fashion, the father, who died in 1958, remains a shadowy, even a romanticized enigma.
Corbett, a lecturer at the MIT writing and humanistic studies program and the poetry editor of Grand Street, examines his relationship with his father in a memoir more conventional in style and more prosaic in execution.
“(My father) loved to fish and to be with his men friends, but he never smoked, played cards or took more than an occasional social drink,” Corbett writes, “though in a swanky New York restaurant he once ordered a Pink Lady.”
But the story of Dr. William Tihamer Corbett begins with a bang, in the form of a note hastily written on a prescription pad and tacked to the doctor’s office door in 1965, and from which the book takes its title: “I have gone to further my education.”
Dr. Corbett was 50 years old, on the lam from a mountain of debt and in the company of a woman named Gloria, destination unknown. Writer William Corbett (“Little Bill” to his father’s “Big Bill”) was 23 at the time and, understandably, jarred by the event.
In examining life before the note, Corbett, now 54, takes us chronologically through the past, focusing most heavily on his life–prep school, academia, marriage and a nervous breakdown. It is a trip often hampered by dull anecdotes and dogged by mundane self-analysis, such as, “My self-confidence obscures, if it does not hide altogether, a vulnerability that few ever see.”
His father (and mother) come unattractively to life, flaunting their success in such garish trappings of “class” as big cars, fur coats, diamond rings, steaks for dinner and $1,000 bills the doctor carried in his wallet.
All was well–and relatively calm at home–while the doctor’s practice prospered. But he was greedy, investing wildly in real-estate and construction deals, a prescription-drug business and even the raising of guinea pigs. When he vanished, he left something in the neighborhood of $1 million in debts, hungry creditors and some 3,000 angry and anxious patients.
One aches for what Cheever, or better yet, that doctor’s son, John O’Hara, might have made of this suburban Connecticut nightmare. Eventually, but unsatisfactorily, Corbett “finds” his dad and discovers the details of, if never the reasons behind, his globe-trotting interlude.
Whatever their failings and flailings, Gifford and Corbett should be lauded for perseverance; they have been going over their fathers’ corpses for some time.
Much of the material in “The Phantom Father” can be found in slightly different clothing in Gifford’s 1992 “A Good Man to Know: A Semi-Autobiographical Fictional Memoir” (Clark City Press). There are whole chapters, in fact, in which not one word was changed.
Corbett self-effacingly admits to his previous efforts. A first stab, “A Boy and His Dad,” was so bad that even close friends called it “disjointed and difficult to follow.” A later, fictional version of that book, written after Corbett’s breakdown, was, in his words, “another dud.”
Finally getting it right enough for publication, Corbett stabs awkwardly at understanding the father-son relationship:
“(T)he notion of (my father) as a man estranged from all that he desired and unconsciously in rebellion against what he sought had appeal for me. In my own rebellion I aped the self-destructive behavior of fifties heroes Dean, Parker and Pollock.”
Gifford, standing at his father’s graveside with his own son, decides that “if forced to choose between revelation and mystery, I’ll take mystery every time.”
There is something desperate in both books: the need to connect with vanished fathers, to find the keys that might help unlock some of the secrets of self.
But speculation must necessarily substitute for knowledge. The two sons, and the rest of us, might have greatly benefited from books written by the fathers, had they been more inclined to contemplation than to living.
