The devil only knows what sort of nonsense it all is! Every man hangs by a thread, an abyss can open up beneath him at any moment, he can create all sorts of unpleasantness for himself, spoil his whole life.” -Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons
At least once during every phone conversation I have with my father, he quotes a line from the Cheech & Chong movie Up in Smoke. Strother Martin’s character is arguing with his middle-age, burnout son, played by Tommy Chong. Martin desperately wants his son to find a job.
“When, boy? When?” Martin says. “When are you going to get your act together?”
Since I started writing and chose to embark upon the first prolonged period of unemployment in my life (in order to pursue this degree, and who knows beyond that), my father and I act out this scene weekly. I laugh, and I have a few rejoinder lines about picking strawberries and bananas, and my dad finds this exchange uproariously funny. He never tires of it.
But however lighthearted his joking is, disapproval lurks nearby. Hidden beneath the surface humor is my father’s confusion, concern and probably a touch of shame. He wants to understand what I’m doing, but can’t seem to grasp it. He wants to be able to answer his friends when they ask, “What’s Richie doing these days?” but right now, he can’t. He doesn’t have an answer that makes sense, anyway.
My father worked 30 years for Ford Motor Company. Work was and is important to him. He retired a few years ago and took a job driving airport vans in and out of Logan. He’s always worked. He doesn’t have a college degree and he thinks people hide-out in academia. He’s scornful of graduate school. He cuts his own grass, stains his own fence, and hardly ever takes a sick day. He also reads, on average, one book every other year. I must look pretty absurd from his perspective. I must look a lot like Tommy Chong. I certainly feel that way at times. This path often makes no sense, and I was on a different path once, too. That’s probably the other part of this that drives him crazy. When I graduated from the Naval Academy almost twenty years ago, I remember what he said to me. He said, “You’ve got the world by the balls.”
What does it mean to be a writer? What does it mean to call oneself a writer? How do you arrive at a point when you can answer the question, “What do you do?” with the unabashed response, “I’m a writer.”?
The poet David Rivard talks about “an on-going betrayal” of his roots, his “original class,” in his essay “Paint Brushes vs. Rollers.” In this essay, Rivard explores the theme of fathers and sons with respect to writing. He describes his own process of becoming a poet this way:
All this (writing poetry) involved a betrayal, one that was both pleasurable and guilt-laden. I was doing something that had no place in the community from which I came. No standing in the pragmatic world of shop stewards and cops and tillermen. So there seemed no use in calling attention to myself. I hardly spoke of it with my family, never called myself a poet (I said vaguely that I was interested in ‘writing’.)
Rivard says that he feels like an outsider in two communities, the working class roots of his home and family—the class he has betrayed by writing, by not becoming a doctor or lawyer—and the more privileged, elitist class of academia and poets. “I still imagine myself as a usurper, a spy under the mill-owner’s son’s bed, an impersonator who has stolen a privilege to wear poetry, as if it were a frock coat.” He speaks of a divided self, half-connected to his working class roots and half-drawn to the world of poets and writers. Continue reading »