Insights: Culture

Christopher Dickey
Published in: December 1, 1999

Published November/December 1999

CULTURE The Generation Gap Estranged fathers and sons yearn for reconciliation by Christopher Dickey Any writer who tours America's shopping-mall bookstores giving readings from his work soon discovers that "author appearances" have become a little like church services. First, you read a few passages. Then, instead of prayers, you take questions. And at the end, instead of passing the plate, you sell the books and sign them--and hear people confess. What I discovered, speaking to shoppers pausing on their way from The Gap to The Sharper Image, is that the more you reveal about yourself, the more people want to tell you about their own lives.   The last time I went on tour, I was reading from my book, Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son. The first passages were about anger and love and separation and, ultimately, reunion, and I was afraid at the beginning they might be too harsh for the audiences at the malls. I thought people might be coming to hear me talk about old movies. After all, my father, James, was the author of the novel Deliverance, which was made into something of a motion-picture classic starring Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight. But I didn't want to talk about Hollywood.   As folks sipped their iced cappuccinos, I told them, "My father was a great poet, a famous novelist, a powerful intellect and a son of a bitch I hated." The rooms always grew quiet. My father and I rarely spoke for 20 years. I went overseas to become a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post and Newsweek while my father remained in South Carolina and, eventually, let his fame and talent sink into an abyss of alcohol. But in 1994 he became sick and finally quit drinking, and I found my way back home. We felt our way delicately toward each other through fields of abandonment and anger, he and I. We remembered. We learned. We were so damned lucky. We saw that we had been given this tremendous gift--the chance to set everything right--and before his death in 1997, that is what we were able to do.   In the hushed bookstores, a few hands would inevitably go up. An older woman talked about her husband and son and asked me to "inscribe this book to my boy, who hasn't talked to his father in 18 years." Another woman told me she was giving the book to a brother "so maybe he'll understand he's not the only one." The women always raised their hands first.   But the men didn't lag behind for long. Slowly, tentatively, a few of them began to tell their own stories of alienation and longing. There was so much they wanted to say, and needed to hear. Fathers and sons all over America were trying to find their way back to each other. And if the boys were as old as I am--in their forties--and their fathers were as old as my father, who died at 73, they were running out of time.   The sons talked about how, when they were in their twenties, they left home and thought they'd never look back. They were out to change the world, which was, of course, the world of their fathers. In their thirties, many thought they'd just be better fathers to their own children and that would be as much as they could do and maybe all that was needed. They thought that maybe time would close the painful generation gap between sons and fathers. But while their backs were turned, that gap became a chasm. And some were beginning to discover it was not enough to be a good father to their sons and daughters. Somehow, they had to learn to be good sons to their fathers.   So how do you make that reunion happen? How do you go back?   I had no answers to give. My father was not theirs, and there was no way to promise them the luck I had. I wasn't even sure I could point them in the right direction. As I browsed the aisles of the stores where I read, I saw the shelves were full of books about mothers and daughters: memoirs, novels, movies and how-to guides about womanly reconciliation and redemption. But there were few works that could help fathers and sons--especially aging fathers and grown sons. Most of them didn't begin to answer the questions that had become so important to me. How do you make it mean something when you tell your father you love him? How do you convince yourself he means it if he says that to you?   The essential rituals of manhood involve endurance and forbearance. But those worthy virtues can translate as a refusal to show any emotion at all except, perhaps, anger. For the generation that fought the Second World War, that was especially true. When the father of novelist Pat Conroy was dying last year, Pat did everything he could to bring the family together. He wanted to hear his father say he loved them. But Don Conroy wouldn't say it. And the effusively, effulgently verbal Pat Conroy had to come to terms with that. He knew the "Great Santini" loved his family with his body and soul, yet no one ever lived who was less articulate in expressing that love.   The fathers who came back from the Normandy beaches and Guadalcanal might be, as Tom Brokaw wrote, "the Greatest Generation." But taken one by one--as fathers have to be--many were deeply scarred. They suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder before anyone knew what that was. Then our fathers put all their emotions and energy into building the future, only to have it blighted by a new conflict, Vietnam, that risked turning their sons against them or taking them away. And through all that, nobody convinced our fathers that they could--that they should--talk about what was happening to them. In Laura Palmer's 1986 book Shrapnel in the Heart, about the thousands of messages left at the Vietnam War Memorial, she says, "I never encountered one that was written from a father to his son. Sometimes a man would write 'Love, Dad' on the bottom of a note from his wife, but rarely was there anything more."   Silent fathers bred neglectful sons. "It seems so strange to people when you tell them you haven't talked to your father for 25 years. So dysfunctional," a New York lawyer told me one afternoon outside a Barnes & Noble. "It is so dysfunctional. But time, I measure it in decades now. And they're just gone." The lawyer said he'd been lucky. When his father had had a heart attack, he decided at last to go back to California to be at his father's bedside. "We spent four days together, talking," he said. "I left. There was another attack, and he was gone. I don't know what I would have done if I hadn't had that time with him."   Some men look for mystical keys to reconciliation. W. P. Kinsella found in baseball the magic incantations for his novel Shoeless Joe, which became the movie Field of Dreams. "If you build it, he will come," the voice in the cornfield tells Kinsella, and when the baseball field is built amid the cornstalks, and the spectral players appear there, it is the catcher--the father--who has come. "I think of all the things I'll want to talk to the catcher about," says Kinsella. "I'll guide the conversations, like taking a car around a long, gentle curve in the road, and we'll hardly realize that we're talking of love, and family, and life, and beauty, and friendship, and sharing..."   That's not a bad start. Most fathers and sons had things that pulled them together before the things that tore them apart, and words were only part of what was going on. It used to be work that united fathers and sons, on the farm or in a trade. Today, what remains to join the generations is leisure: the shared experience of fishing or hunting, or any of a hundred other pastimes. When men watch sports on television, many women don't get it. But among men the spectacle of known teams and familiar players creates a sense of continuity, history and roots. Start talking about sports, if that's what you share with your father, and you can start to move around that gentle curve from the moments that brought happiness to those that wrought pain, and start to understand why.   Maybe the most important thing to know, however, is that the process of reunion can go on even after a father dies. If you're open to your own memories, you can find yourself learning things from your father when he is gone that you might never have allowed him to tell you when he lived.   At a book fair in Miami, where I had just about finished my reading tour, I met Homer Hickam. He was reading from his memoir, Rocket Boys, which seems in places as richly detailed and thoroughly sentimental as a Norman Rockwell cover on the old Saturday Evening Post. When I asked Homer later how he came to terms with the fact that his father never wrote to him once during the two years he served in Vietnam, his answer came easily.   "I believe he was proud of me, although he never said so, and I also believe he was frightened for me, although he never said it aloud to me, either," Homer told me. Years after his father died, Homer discovered a notation in one of the diaries his father kept at the coal mine he managed in West Virginia: "Oct. 29, 1967: Sonny called to say he was going overseas. All that really means anything to me are my boys and it really hurts to have Sonny go so far and be in such danger."   "I was back from Vietnam for nearly 30 years before I read Dad's note, but I still savor it because it confirmed what I already knew," Homer said. "I loved my father with all my heart and I am convinced he felt the same toward me. I didn't say it aloud to him nor he to me, but it was there, tangible, hanging in the air, too strong, perhaps, to attempt to describe it to one another.   "I don't know if there's a heaven, or if the soul continues after death to care about those of us left behind on this planet," said Homer. "But I do know that my father is alive inside me. In times of stress or burden, when I must find strength, or courage, or even anger to accomplish the task, I find that I am suddenly my father with all his stubborn tenacity and fierce determination. He'd like that most of all, I think."   After writing my own memoir, and reading it to many others, and listening to their confessions and reading their letters, what I discovered was you can try to close the book on your father, but you always carry it inside you. And you can always learn from it.   Christopher Dickey is the Paris bureau chief for Newsweek.