Lighting up the Present

MORE REGRETS ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES

If I do ever get to buckle down to paying to buy New York Times stories online, it will be primarily for the human interest stories and not for the economic and political commentaries.

And, if I need an example, I can’t find one that is more personal, in making me suck back a deep choke of tears, than the review by Susan Cheever of Robert Darnton’s recent book about his father ‘Almost a Family’ (see below).

It is not that Susan’s writing is particularly profound – it is the subject. A subject that Robert Darnton and I know very well – and one that we have paid for many, many times over during the years of our lives – the loss of our fathers in World War II.

I trust that Susan will enjoy the career fruits of her byline though she would be foolish in that regard to be too trusting of her editors and the newspaper’s owners over the longer term, given their commitment to commercial returns. After all, she notes that it was the NY Times, which employed Robert’s father Barney Darnton, which ‘failed again and again to provide professional or emotional support’ for Robert’s widowed mother Eleanor.

I started on publishing my family history online in no small part because I wanted to honour my own father Cyril ‘Jay’ Johnson who died in the RAF on 14th October 1943, some seven months before I was born. Like Barney, Jay was the victim of a wartime accident – in his case he was a member of the crew of an Avro Anson trainer bomber that disintegrated over Whitehaven in Northern England.

Reading even the review of Robert’s book has me stumbling again around the misty, jagged shoreline of reflected grief. It is very hard to grieve for someone that you never knew – but hard though it is, it hurts the more.

So what are the parallels in my own case in coming to terms.

Well, I have never ever looked for villains. I suppose that I could have sought to blame the mechanics who serviced the planes at Millom airbase, the Base Commander who insisted on yet another practice bombing run, or the Germans who caused the bloody war in the first place. For some reason I have never done that.

On a trip back to London once many years ago, I called in to St Martin’s in the Fields in Trafalgar Square. Quite by chance, I started to talk to a late middle-aged German woman who was visiting England and the conversation drifted onto WWII. Both of us came close to tears in exchanging our sorrows.

Well, I have already written up a good deal about Jay in earlier stories and I won’t repeat the material. Suffice to say that the story is sufficiently sad – it seems that it even made one of my ex-wives weepy.

I was struck though in Robert’s case with the emphasis on the emotional disintegration of his mother Eleanor. And it raises the issue of how my own mother coped.

Well, to Meg’s eternal credit, she did not take to the booze though she very much enjoyed a Scotch or two, along with a ciggy.

But while Eleanor went about creating a Barney myth that embodied ‘a noble aspiration and provided a source of courage and moral sustenance’, Meg by contrast seemed to see Jay’s death as a betrayal. And like a spouse wronged by infidelity, she sometimes set about undermining any affections or ideals that her children might have with respect to their lost father.

In part, this can be understood I think in terms of her reaction to the death of her own father Captain David Clarke in a WWI shipping accident, when she was three years old. She just could not forgive the two most important men in her life for deserting her.

But if growing up with a myth “is a dangerous business, because fiction is not a solid foundation on which to build a family’s life”, growing up without a myth can be even more problematic. I had to backfill and create my own myth before I could move on.

Like Robert, I was always been a bit of an outsider as a young man. I travelled widely and threw myself into relationships and adventures, partly because I had little confidence in surviving past my mid-30s, given the early deaths of my father and grandfather (though there must always have been some measure of hope as I joined the Army Cadets, thinking that his might be luckier than re-runs with the navy and the air force).

But part of my healing has been to try to get some balance between the stories surrounding my father, my stepfather and my mother.

The dream that my mother in part ‘concocted’ was not the dream of a cozy house with Jay, it was of the farm where she fought with her ‘tensions’ and where I started to grow up. Turbulent desperation saw her cling tightly to her new role as a farmer’s wife in the Cheshire countryside, in the quaint and partly grand old house that had plum trees trained against the wall near the front door.

And having a son who grew up to be quite a lot like his dead father, created a particular stress for Meg, stirring again the ebb and flow of unresolved grief.

So I survived I think by getting away, and looking back to my lost land – a mythologized farmstead and its acres, with the diesel engine chugging away in the dark wintry afternoons to power the milking lines.

‘Each of us wrestles with the past — miserable or not — and each of us finds our own way to heal’.

The shadow of the past does not have to darken the present. We can’t change the subject but we can change the presentation of the picture, not least by reframing it and holding it up to the light.

Nowadays I have two fathers who happily co-exist – and with a bit more refocusing I might just be able to get my mother to stay still long enough smile properly at the camera – and resist that annoying squint that both of us are prone to.

A JOURNALIST INVESTIGATES A FATHER LOST AT WAR

[by Susan Cheever, New York Times, March 18, 2011]

We are all familiar with the five stages of memoir: myth, trauma, revelation, redemption, book contract. In his wonderful memoir, “Almost a Family,” John Darnton has taken this modern form to a new level.

His story is excruciatingly personal, with painful drama and dreadful sorrow, but as a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize when he was reporting for The New York Times, he calmly researches the narrative of his life detail by detail. His heart was broken, but his focus is on the facts.

There are many villains in the story: the Japanese who are pushing against the Allied forces in World War II on a remote coast of New Guinea; the American pilot who mistakenly bombs a friendly ship in October 1942 and kills Darnton’s father, Byron Darnton, known as Barney, who was also a respected writer for The Times; the misogynistic editors at The Times who fail again and again to provide professional or emotional support for Barney’s widow, Eleanor Darnton (known as Tootie), herself a brilliant and innovative journalist.

But the real villain of the story is alcohol: the booze, the drink, the sauce, the hooch. From the glamorous cocktails of the Roaring Twenties, when Barney Darnton was living the sweet, adventurous, womanizing life of a swashbuckling newsman, to the warm, sad gin drunk by a disintegrating Tootie Darnton in the 1950s, alcohol is the destructive force against which each character is measured.

The book begins with a notation made by Barney in the margin of the copy of Mark Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi” he was reading while waiting for the birth of his second son, John. “Dr. Heaton came into the waiting room and said: ‘You’ve got another boy,’ ” he scrawled.

The story continues through the heartbreaking facts of Barney’s death, after a piece of shrapnel hit his head; John was less than a year old. It details the increasing desperation of the family as Tootie tries, and fails, to raise two sons the way their father might have wanted — or the way anyone might have wanted.

One night the 14-year-old John sleeps with a spoon nearby so that when his mother’s withdrawal seizures strike, he can force her tongue down and keep her from asphyxiation.

The story ends on the same New Guinea beach where, 65 years earlier, Barney Darnton’s body was brought after he died:

“I felt a tug on my shirt and turned. It was Alexander, the old man who had witnessed the bombing. He gestured for me to follow and we walked down the beach until he stopped. He pointed to a spot in the sand. We did not have a translator — and besides, there was nothing to say — so we just looked in silence for a long while at the place where my father’s body had lain.”

In some ways this book is an hommage to the father John Darnton never knew — a double portrait of the hero his mother talked about and the careless man who set aside family obligations when the war called and neglected to wear his helmet on the morning of his death.

“When I was growing up, I learned about fathers through my friends, but I don’t believe I ever envied them,” Darnton writes. “The reason was simple. I couldn’t imagine having a father any better than the one I didn’t have.”

The father Darnton didn’t have was a handsome devil with a heart of gold and a will of iron, a man dedicated to the right and the good but also able to make everyone laugh. In short, a myth.

Created by Tootie Darnton, this myth was the father she provided for her boys as she went about raising them on her own.

“There is, of course, a problem with a myth, any myth,” Darnton writes. “While it may embody a noble aspiration and provide a source of courage and moral sustenance, it is, by its nature, founded on a kernel of fiction. And so living a myth is a dangerous business, because fiction is not a solid foundation on which to build a family’s life.”

As the Darnton family’s life without father spirals downward, as Tootie loses job after job, as they move to ever smaller and more squalid houses, Darnton struggles to make sense of all this awfulness. At the time, as a kid, he can do little more than refuse to go along.

After he is expelled from Andover for drinking, he feels a sense of exhilaration. “My expulsion would complete my résumé — I was now typecast in the role I coveted: the rebel, the troublemaker, the outsider.”

Now, half a century later, as a veteran journalist he can express his grief and rage by doing what he does best: reporting the story of his ruined family down to the last detail. “Finally I ¬mourned for the whole dream they had concocted together,” he writes of his parents, “the cozy house in the country and the Tom Collins under the tree and the jeep to drive to the railroad station, the loss of it all, so ¬unimaginable.”

History becomes personal in this story, which is made richer by the many men and women who generously share their experience of Barney Darnton, from the old newspaper guys who worked with him to the New Guinean who shows John Darnton the beach where his father’s body lay.

There is also the historian Robert Darnton, a generous and loving big brother who turns over amazing notes on a book he was thinking about writing, so that John can write his own book. There are the friends from Alcoholics Anonymous who visit Tootie and help her stop drinking permanently.

There is the passage of time, time that makes it possible for an older man to understand and forgive the angry young kid who managed to blow off his opportunities. Most of all, there is the possibility of some kind of redemption through research and knowledge.

Each of us wrestles with the past — miserable or not — and each of us finds our own way to heal. John Darnton, happily married with children and a new profession as a novelist, is evidence that the shadow of the past does not have to darken the present. Luckily for us readers, Darnton’s way of coming to terms with his life and his family’s life was to write a gripping, moving and fascinating story about it.