Leaving the Father’s Shadow
I was leaving our flat in North London on the way to school. I was thirteen and vaguely understood that on this day my father would be going to America. He was in the bathroom shaving with the door half ajar. He caught my image in the mirror and turned while wiping shaving cream off his face. He hugged me roughly, gave me a shilling and said, “Take care of your mother.” We joined him in the States nine months later. He set up a modest house for us in Pittsburgh, PA, and then shortly after he died of throat cancer. He was buried in a pauper’s plot in a nearby Catholic cemetery.
It doesn’t take much for this memory to return. A glance at his photo as a London cop, a conversation with my son about what a great father he is, and my Jungian studies about “father as archetype” will invariably bring me home to my father, who was often absent and violent when around: a displaced Irishman who turned his back on his family and country and seemed without mooring at his death.
To be sure, my father is a shadow I have carried for most of my life, often unconsciously. I remember visiting my sister in Oxford, England, years ago and on reaching her front door I heard the “voice” of my father in tone, syntax and pitch, threatening his daughter. My sister had heard him well and absorbed his psychology and complexes. So had I. And it takes a lifetime of work to recognize this shadow and keep it from infecting future generations.
I have been reading “Absent Fathers, Lost Sons, The Search for Masculine Identity” by Guy Corneau, a Jungian analyst who writes about his own father and clinical observations of his male patients, appropriately disguised. A central, introductory point Corneau makes is about the law of silences that rules the world of most men: “All men live more or less in an hereditary silence that has been passed down from generation to generation, a silence that denies every teenage boy’s need for recognition — or confirmation — from his father. It is almost as through our fathers are subject to a rule of silence that decrees that fathers who speak are a threat to male solidarity.”
The author is particularly concerned with the absent father, both physically and psychologically, and how this condition can contribute to the fragility of masculine identity. And this “absence” is infectious and contaminates the family unit. Corneau writes that if a mother is dominating, overprotective and repressive, it “almost inevitably indicates that the father was absent.”
On the other hand, the “present” father usually represents the first significant other outside the mother’s womb. This father becomes the third person in a love story, introducing an element of separation between mother and child, a process of differentiation. For this to happen, he must spend time with his children.
I think many fathers, on reflection, live between these two zones, especially when their own fathers provided no accurate “mirroring” of what constituted fathering. My father decided, without consulting me, that I would become a priest, a jockey or an accountant. I later understood the priest thing; my father had been raised by Jesuits. And he often bet on the horses. An accountant might have kept him from the risks he took with the family budget. But he died before I could assume any of these fantasy roles which were his projections on his son.
I have always felt a little guilty about my father’s death because I sensed that a weight had been lifted from the family. In a way the time was celebratory; I had never seen such exotic food as the neighbors brought to our doorstep. And I actually felt a twinge of teenage passion. A neighbor family who had befriended us included three young attractive daughters who were very charming and solicitous. My first crush! Over the years my brothers and I have joked about eating the wonderful Italian olives and salami for the first time but not, on my part, without feeling a little guilty.
According to my mother, my father’s last words were, “At least the boys will be better off.” I believed her. On reading his letters to my mother fifty years after they were written, he seemed to believe that he had given his three sons a gift — America. If he had lived, he promised to return to Dublin where he was born.
I have never forgotten that gift and that responsibility. His words have guided me. But his death was a gift in others ways. I was able to get out from underneath his shadow. Psychologist Corneau writes that “It is interesting to note, however, that sons whose fathers have died are exceptions to the general rule. In spite of the complete absence of their fathers they show fewer difficulties in adaption.” This process is often aided by the mother if she remembers her husband fondly and projects a positive image of him.
And my mother did that. For thirty years after his death, she spoke glowingly of my father when he was a London cop and about his heroics during World War II. She often said that when she met my father she had a 24” waist and he loved to wrap her with his hands. And she loved his hands, pleased, I think, that she had married a man who worked in an office rather than outside in the harsh sunlight. My mother softened my father for me.
Three years after my father’s death I was in the Pacific with the U.S. Navy, working on a ship’s navigation bridge with officers from Annapolis who became my guides, mentors and father figures. This was a dangerous adventure on an ammunition ship during the Vietnam War. This was a crash course in Asian languages and culture. This was my body and soul at sea.
Psychologist Corneau writes that “masculine identity needs, at least on a psychological level, to be constantly reinforced and regularly supported by other masculine presences in order to remain stable.” Maleness remains undeveloped unless it is awakened through ritual.
I recall when first crossing the International Dateline that there was a ceremony to indoctrinate pussies like me in the ways of the sea creatures from the world of Neptune. On my ship a boatswain’s mate named Butts, who was at least three hundred pounds, played the role of Neptune but with a Hawaiian twist, wearing a grass skirt and flowers in his hair. He sat on one of the hatches and his helpers rubbed a concoction of discarded food, seaweed, and treats from the bilge pumps on his belly. We initiates had to approach him on our knees and take a mouthful of this sludge.
I’m not sure if this was the kind of ritual Corneau had in mind, but it seemed to work, with the initiation across the Dateline becoming more important than the bitter taste in our mouths. We were now ready to punish the next wave of new recruits.
