Dad was a great reader and took pride in getting stuck into what he deemed proper literary fiction, typically thick doorstoppers of which one of his favourite authors was Anthony Burgess, whose works Dad would always read with a pencil close to hand, for making notes in the margin. Other notable English authors which Dad enjoyed were Julian Barnes and William Boyd, and Dad was very proud when he met William Boyd at a book show, I think it would have been Frankfurt or London.
I was reading Dad the latest William Boyd (The Romantic) when he died. I will write about that one day when I can, if I can.
Dad also had a big thing for Post-Second World War American fiction principally John Updike and Philip Roth, but also Cormac McCarthy, Tom Wolfe, Richard Ford and Jonathan Frantzen.
I have read and enjoyed all these great authors with one exception: Philip Roth. I tried one of his novels once but could not get on with it, I think I found it all a bit too specifically Jewish in its depiction of American life and I gravitated more to the likes of Wolfe and Frantzen.
But I have always been aware that I really need to rectify this omission and even more so when I read an article in The Times by one of my favourite contemporary authors David Nicholls (a fellow graduate of Bristol albeit a couple of years ahead of me). In the article Nicholls recommended Roth’s 1991 memoir Patrimony, noting that reading about Roth’s relationship with his dying father helped him make sense of a lot of things during his own personal grief at losing his dad.
So I took the plunge. David Nicholls was right, and I am glad I am finally acquainted with Philip Roth, or at least one book. But it was a hard read and sentimental it was most certainly not.
I think the chapter that spoke to me the most was when Roth visits his mother’s grave at a point where he was caring for his dying father, and muses on the peculiarities of visiting a grave, outlining the “pretty crazy things” people use to bridge the gap, such as sharing news and bulletins on recent events or just pulling weeds, tidying up, placing new plants and flowers, rearranging mementos and artefacts etc. before concluding that all these futile gestures only make the dead feel more distant:
“What cemeteries prove … is not that the dead are present but that they are gone. They are gone and, as yet, we aren’t”
It is unflinching shock and awe stuff, for Roth being graveside generates no comforting sense of communion or connection whatsoever and a true legacy resides not in a cemetery but in active human memory “To be alive is to be made of memory”.
But even here Roth resists a slide into comfort because he views memory not as a source of sentiment or nostalgic escape, but as a duty to remember, and in so doing, as a vital anchor of identity and existence, the true “patrimony” as per the title of the memoir.
Did the book help me? Yes. It touched a lot of nerves. But it also felt like it was protesting too much in places, with more than a hint of an unreliable narrator, notwithstanding its subtitle A True Story.
Because whilst I am being driven by a desire to remember which is no doubt existential, my memories of Mum and Dad do not feel like a duty and are a source of comfort to me. It is why I am writing again.
And being graveside, for all its peculiarities, is a comfort too, at least for now.
So I am back at New Milton Cemetery and Dad gets an update on all matters Bashley, where I just come from a meeting with the new chairman. The subject is of course Dad’s legacy. There is much to report.
And I can’t leave without a good tidy up and on this occasion, the laying of a sunflower, one for Dad and one for Sue, with one for their close neighbours too, Lucy and Bill & Doris xxx.
