My father, a study
Yet another essay that has nothing to do with neoliberalism.
In my early twenties, I bought an unusual necklace at a bohemian street market in London. It was a burnished ceramic oval hanging from a leather thong, about the size of my hand. It had smooth curves, as though it were an object weathered by time, and I wore it daily for years. One day when I was swinging it idly, it hit a bookshelf and broke in two. One minute, it was whole. The next, it was broken in pieces. I had never felt so strongly the direction of time’s arrow, the irreversibility of an act that could never be undone.
My father died 25 years ago, another act that can never be undone, and I still haven’t finished cleaning out his study.
Shortly after he died, my mother and I brought the chair of the UC Berkeley English department in to look through his books and take what he wanted for the departmental library. His adult life, both professional and social, had revolved around the department, so it seemed fitting that his books end up there. The English department claimed hundreds of volumes, but their departure left several thousand more in need of a home.
The books were neatly organized and alphabetized within categories. They were in mint condition. Every book had its dust jacket, some tidily mended with yellowing tape. Inside each front cover, my father’s bookplate was affixed with library paste: Ex Libris Jonas Barish. No pages were dog-eared. The only marks inside were tiny dots in blue pencil. A few passages were underlined, using a ruler. Any typos he came across had been corrected with a red pencil.
By the time I decided to clear out his collection to make room for my own, used books had fallen in value to almost nothing. Foolishly, I invited a buyer from a nearby used bookstore – one of the few still remaining in Berkeley – to acquire the collection. He pulled books from the shelves and flung them into piles. He said, “someone else has already been through here, haven’t they? I can tell. I don’t like collections that have been cherry picked.” Then he packed up a few dozen books and gave us a hundred dollars. The bookstore’s rare book buyer gave us a few hundred more, though I held onto some gems. My father had been in France in the 1940s on a Fulbright, and he had first editions of Henry Miller and Hemingway from those years, plus some Renaissance oddities he’d picked up in antique stores.
Two of my friends, former librarians, run the “Friends of the Berkeley Public Library,” which sells used books inexpensively to benefit the library. They are not picky. One liquor carton at a time, I packed up my father’s books and started leaving them on my friends’ porch in a valedictory ritual. Over several years, I gave away books on the history of the theater; books by his former professors, colleagues, and students, with inscriptions (“Dear Jonas, who has written much better books!”); great works of literature in inexpensive editions, bought when he was a Harvard undergraduate; books of literary criticism that traced the evolution of his field from the 1940s to the 1990s; concordances of the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, made obsolete by the computer; and travel guides from decades gone by of Athens, London, Rome, and Paris.
Into the recycling bin went six decades of programs from the theater, opera, and symphony.
And later, a huge collection of off-prints: articles and book chapters and essays sent to him by friends, all with hand-written notes, snippets of lifelong intellectual conversations. “For Jonas from Alex, 20 Sept 1983,” on an essay about Anger and Conciliation in Virginia Woolf by Alex Zwerdling. “To Jonas, who has read this argument in so many forms before, with best wishes, Michael” on an essay about Ben Jonson and Cicero by Michael J. Warren. A 1963 offprint from Studies in English Literature about Marlowe’s Faustus is inscribed by Joe Westlund, “For Jonas Barish: Who nourished the good and helped to prune the bad in this essay.” “I greatly enjoyed our lunch!” wrote Graham Bradshaw on the front of a reprint from Essays in Criticism entitled “Donne’s Challenge to the Prosodists.” Some of these reprints had been sent in response to articles my father had shared. “Compared to your Macbeth piece, this is merely a squib pro quo -- but it’s all I have at the moment. Don” on an essay by Donald Friedman from the Renaissance Quarterly about someone named William Alexander McClung and the Architecture of Paradise. My father received these essays in the mail, read them at leisure in the arm chair in his study, replied with measured praise and judicious analysis, and then filed them under the author’s name in a metal filing cabinet.
And after his death, his daughter threw them away.
It took me twenty years.
I had a good excuse: my mom was using the room as her home office, and since she was blind, it didn’t bother her that the shelves were still full of his books and there were boxes of letters and articles and files in the corners. But after she died, I decided to move into the study myself.
I repainted the room following a color scheme that matched the mid-century modern furniture. My father’s detritus had apparently become cool.
Then it was time to reclaim his bookshelves.
From my home office, two stories up in the house, I carried down some of my political theory books (Adorno through Foucault), making ten or twelve trips up and down the stairs. Standing on a step ladder, I carefully installed them on the top bookshelf. The shelf itself ran the length of the room, a single piece of wood sitting on brackets attached to the wall. As I placed the very last book on the shelf, something gave way. The top shelf collapsed, knocking out the shelf below, the shelf below that, and the one below that, all the way to the floor. Books went everywhere. The crash was enormous. As they fell, they tumbled onto me, and though I managed to cling to my step ladder, I was bruised, scratched, covered in splinters. Pages tore and spines cracked. The falling shelves scraped the new paint and gouged the woodwork on their way down. My father’s orderly bookshelves were reduced to chaos.
Even once my books were safely installed on the shelves, the office remained a memorial to my father and a museum of antiquated stationery. Blue and red pencils, carbon paper, typewriter ribbons, donut-shaped erasers with brushes attached, air mail letters, Manilla envelopes of various sizes, some of them with string closures, letterhead paper from the University of California, including a ream of paper listing Clark Kerr as the President of the University (1958-67). In one of his many file drawers, I found a memo he had written to a couple who stayed in the house one summer when my parents were in England. It was twelve pages long, typed, single spaced, full of minute detail about how to care for the house, with warnings not to put celery down the disposal or dental floss down the toilet.
Jonas had a unique relationship to the world of things. Born in the 1920s and formed during the Depression, he believed in acquiring objects of quality and caring for them with diligence. With proper reverence, they would last forever. He owned a collection of antique scales, appropriate for such a judicious man, carefully stored in crates and safe deposit boxes. His closet was full of beautiful clothes, many of them the same dark jackets and narrow ties he had worn as a dapper young professor in Berkeley in the late 1950s. His shirts, laundered at the Virginia Cleaners, sat in boxes with cardboard molds to keep the collars stiff. His wingtips and oxfords, which he polished regularly with a kit in the bathroom cabinet, had wooden shoe trees in them. Lesser things merited the same meticulous care: my father saved the plastic clips from bags of bread and the wire twisties from produce. In his office drawers were bits of string for future mailings and tiny booklets made from bits of spare paper, cut to miniature size with a guillotine, and stapled together for note-taking.
At his memorial service, my father’s friend Alex Zwerdling recalled, “Jonas was a creature of habit; the habits were exacting and died hard. Everything from tweed jackets to cars had to be replaced at the last possible moment by something as close to the original as the manufacturers were capable of supplying.” For my father, things were designed to be permanent, though he, alas, was not.
The paragon of this stewardship was our family’s beautiful antique dining table. Sitting on a massive, elaborate base of carved, curlicued wood, the tabletop was inlaid with diamonds of different colored wood. My mother polished it annually and then covered it lovingly with protective layers and tablecloths. Even at my parents’ frequent dinner parties, it never saw the light of day. Exceptions were made in case of catastrophe: if a guest spilled a glass of wine or a gin and tonic on the tabletop, all layers needed to be removed immediately to make sure the surface was rapidly dried. When I moved into the house, after my father’s death, I upheld the family habit of polishing it and hiding it beneath waterproof cloths. I longed to replace it with something that was mine, something resilient and modern, but somehow I had taken on the role of the table’s guardian, and my father wasn’t there to liberate me from it.
One day I was cooking in the kitchen when I heard banging from the dining room. My ten-year-old son Rafie had saved up his allowance for a slingshot, and now he was whacking the metal frame onto the table forcefully, trying to jam one part onto another. Pulling back the table cloths in horror I found a new set of dents on the antique table, notches inflicted by Rafie’s enthusiasm. There was no way to fix the table, which was so big that the workers who refinished the house’s hardwood floors, three times in my life, have always excluded the dining room, because without dismantling the enormous antique table, there is no way to remove it. Refinishing it would have been prohibitively expensive. Something precious had been damaged forever. I snatched away the slingshot and imposed my judgement. Rafie, I pronounced, would get his toy back only when he had completed twelve labors of my choosing. The only one I now remember was cleaning out the chicken coop. It took him months to accomplish them all. What I do recall is that by the time he got the slingshot back, my punishment (and the familial gloom surrounding the damage to the table) had so effectively sapped all joy from the toy that he never played with it. Within a few weeks it was abandoned, and we gave it away within a year.
I once asked an estate liquidator about selling the table, but he told me no one wanted “brown” furniture any more.
My father wasn’t all serious. He had an exuberant laugh. He charmed small children by using his fingers and mouth to produce the sound of a bottle being uncorked and then poured. He adored his friends and doted on me and my sister. A boyfriend once commented that my father lit up when I entered the room. When I was in high school I once came home with a friend on a Friday evening to find a loud dinner party in full swing. My parents and their English department friends were doing some kind of wine tasting. My father opened the door, grinned at us, and announced, “we’re potted!” As one of the subjects of the famous Harvard Study of Adult Development, which tracked him and other classmates from teenage years until death, Jonas embodied the pillars of a healthy life documented by that research: altruism, optimism, humor, a career he loved, and a dense thicket of relationships, from family and childhood friends to colleagues and mentors.
He loved wordplay, the sillier the better. He told dirty limericks, like the one about the woman from Ealing. He would turn any two-word phrase into a spoonerism, allowing meaning to dissolve in the sounds of the words. About a writer who scribbled for Newsweek, the man “nibbled for screwsweek, noobled for scrizzweek, nookled for scrizzweeb.” Whenever my mother cooked rhubarb, he would proclaim, “with rue my barb is laden!” If something was just a little bit sad, he might lament, “boo hairless hoo!” a line from an absurd book, The Bald Twit Lion, by the British humorist Spike Milligan, about a lion whose hair falls out. After his death, I found a list in his desk, on a tiny scrap of paper, with the headline, “One-syllable English rivers:” Wye, Tyne, Nene, Aire, Don, Dee, Ouse, Dart, Exe, Esk, Cam.
Neither his gentle sense of humor nor his commitment to order protected my father from misfortune. During a vacation in France, the summer I was thirteen, after a day of eating baguettes and cheese on a picnic blanket and swimming in crystalline swimming holes whose curving rock walls had been worn smooth by the flow of water, my mother fell asleep at the wheel of the family car. She’d had one too many glasses of wine on the sunny afternoon. It was one of those beautiful French country roads, quiet, dusty, tree-lined. Our car hit a tree. My father’s ribs and sternum were broken. My brilliant younger sister sustained a head injury that has affected her cognition and functioning for forty years now. My mother was permanently blinded when her head hit the steering wheel. One minute our happy family was whole. The next it was broken into pieces.
Jonas was an incredibly embarrassing father. First of all, he was really old – forty-four when I was born. My friends had cool dads who played frisbee and listened to rock music. There was literally nothing cool about my dad. He didn’t know the names of sports teams. He wore skinny ties and wingtips. The only music he listened to was classical. The only TV he watched was the news and Masterpiece Theater. The only contemporary movie star he had heard of was John Travolta (from his Saturday Night Fever days), whom he called John Revolta, a joke he made for decades.
He'd been uncool since he was young. An army friend recalled that when their platoon was stationed in Paris during World War Two, the soldiers headed for the brothels in Montmartre on their day of R&R. My father tried to persuade them to stop off at the Louvre on the way.
My father loved old men, and planned assiduously to become one. He was loyal to his Harvard mentor Harry Levin and his friend Leo Lowenthal, the last of the Frankfurt School intellectuals. He tried to follow all medical advice for longevity, from flossing his teeth to reducing his sodium intake. Clad in an undershirt and boxer shorts, on a small piece of carpet that resembled a prayer rug, he performed daily calisthenics as prescribed by the Royal Canadian Air Force. But neither prayers nor exercise guaranteed longevity.
Arriving at his 50th college reunion, age 70, he tripped on a doorstep, knocked out a tooth and broke his nose. He went through the buffet lines with a brace around his neck and bandages on his face, dulled by painkillers and prematurely aged. A year later, when taking a gentle hike with some younger colleagues, he was unable to walk up a hill, and someone had to bring him home. “He was leaning backwards strangely,” reported the grad student who delivered him to our house. He had begun to have tiny strokes that ate away at his coordination and eventually other capacities. He wasn’t up to spoonerizing the phrase “transient ischemic attacks.”
He had a more major stroke, and I dashed to the ER. Every nurse and doctor who entered the room asked him the date and the president’s name. Apparently after strokes, people get unmoored in time. I asked my learned father to tell me the first play Shakespeare wrote. He paused. “Was it Romeo and Juliet?” He looked thoughtful, serious, and said that no, he was pretty sure it came after Romeo and Juliet.
He was declining at my wedding. He ordered two new suits, one in navy wool with tiny stripes, one in yellow seersucker. I am ashamed to say that I instructed him not to wear the yellow seersucker, because it seemed so unfashionable. In the wedding photographs, his grin is lopsided.
I called to tell my father that I was pregnant. “Guess what, dad?” “You’re infanticipating!” he retorted with delight. A few weeks later he had a larger stroke and ended up on a ventilator.
My mother went to see him at the hospital every day. He was so heavily sedated that he was unconscious. She would read him poems, play him music, or offer him flowers from our garden to smell, but he didn’t respond. One day she brought a lemon from our lemon tree and handed it to him. To her amazement, he picked it up and held it to his nose. She was overjoyed. Then the nurse came in. The patient in the bed wasn’t my father at all, who had been moved to another room, but an elderly lady, mystified that some blind woman was forcing her to sniff a lemon.
I wore a beautiful maternity dress at his memorial service.
We named the baby Alexander, my father’s middle name.
That baby is now 24. This fall he took a job as a teacher of Latin and Greek at the Horace Mann School in New York City, the prep school my father attended in the 1930s, where he was editor of the newspaper and a member of the chess club.
For two years I thought about my father constantly. By day I wept unconsolably. By night he visited me from beyond the River Styx, and every night I told him I loved him.
In the final pages of Wolf Hall, about ambitious and conniving characters who could not be more unlike my father, Hilary Mantel writes that it’s not the dead who haunt the living: “It's the living that turn and chase the dead. … We edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.”
My mother outlived my father by almost twenty years. After fifteen years, she went mad, an archaic phrase that is more accurate than any medical diagnosis. Her memory remained sharp and her cognitive reasoning good, but her world filled up with imaginary visitors. Though blind for decades, she could see just enough to conjure up unseen intruders. One night she came into my room, convinced a man outside her window was shining a flashlight in. Then she thought there was someone inside her room. She would call the police in terror in the middle of the night. She explained to them that she had persuaded one intruder to leave by telling him she had AIDS. During the daytime, she sometimes thought there was a man under the piano and would ask me or one of my kids to take a look and let her know if there was anyone there.
You would think these men would be menacing, but sometimes they were friendly. Millie became convinced that a college boyfriend named Max (whom she hadn’t seen in fifty years) might get in touch with her. She would hear a noise outside and ask me to check if Max was there. Some days she thought Max was under the piano. Jesus was another regular visitor. My mother hadn’t been a believing Christian since her childhood, but now Jesus came and sat on her bed. She said his feet were bloody and she gave him clean socks.
My teenage son wrote a play entitled “The Man Under the Piano,” which won a prize and was performed at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. By this time my mother was in a nursing home. I went to see the play wearing dark glasses and hoping no one would recognize me; I have never less wanted to attend a performance involving my kids. There seemed to be very little art involved in the playwriting; basically, my son seemed to have taken notes as my mother talked about the man under the piano and I tried to argue her out of her delusions. I was not a sympathetic character.
After my mother died, we ordered pizzas to feed the guests who came to sit shiva. We had eight left over. A few weeks later, when my youngest son invited friends over to celebrate his 14th birthday, I pulled the pizzas out of the freezer and the boys made short work of them. The funeral baked pizzas did coldly furnish forth the birthday party.
With this feeble witticism (which my father would have enjoyed), it occurred to me that Hamlet’s lamentation about his mother’s remarriage isn’t just a protest about the hasty courtship of Claudius and Gertrude. In some ways, it’s not even about the plot of the play. It’s a fist shaken at the great cosmic injustice that life and love and birth and growth keep on going, even when the one we love is gone. Even as the beloved father recedes into the past, growing dimmer like a ghost. Even as time’s arrow moves on.
Hi friends. I really will go back to writing about economics, but I wrote this for an amazing class on the essay, taught by James Wood, and I wanted to share it. Thanks for taking the time to read it.
what a powerful and moving piece Judith. Thank you for sharing it with us. xo
Very moving essay, Judith. A lot of pain but also a lot of love.