Life with Father

I make it a practice to try to finish what I start, but the book I am currently reading has broken me of that aspiration. There have been books that took me years to get through for one reason or another, like Wuthering Heights, Anne Sexton's Biography, Empire of the Czar, and Ancient Evenings, to name a few; I always went back to them, because I found some merit in those books. The same cannot be said for Life With Father.

I bought Life with Father because the description on the back cover describes the story by Clarence Day, as "a classic American tale" and says that they are humorous stories about a father by his son set in the 1890's. Life with Father is made up of a series of stories that were serialized in The New Yorker in the 1940's. The more I read the book (I am a little over half way through it now), the more I see Father as an ogre. He bellowed and berated everyone in the family ad naseum for not anticipating his every whim, and not living up to his impossible standards.

This is not just some bleeding-heart liberal rant. The author, Clarence Day Jr., tells the "humorous" story of how his father decided that he must take violin lessons. Several months into the training, he was no better than the day he started. As he put it, "I had no ear for music." In addition to his lack of innate ability, he and his music tutor discovered that he was near sited, so he could not see the notes on the sheet music. Rather than tell his father that he needed glasses, he (and the tutor) chose suffer through the lessons and share the tutor's eyeglasses. They reasoned that Father would not accept that his son had a need for eyeglasses, because it was a sign of weakness (i.e. no son of his could possibly be weak). They both knew arguing with Father would be pointless, because Father suffered from the delusion that he was never wrong. Consequently, he never gave up or altered his position on anything, regardless of how ridiculous it was. His inflexibility and his arrogance caused the whole family to develop ways to work around him, or else they had to face his wrath.

The humor in these stories is supposed to be that in spite of all of his yelling, screaming, and throwing of dishes, Father cannot bend the family or the world to his will. I have a hard time imagining that these stories were ever funny, but I realize that in the context of their time, the wives and children who were bound by the culture of the times could find humor in the manipulations that the family contrived to avoid being subjected to his rage. He berates everyone from family and servants to merchants for not living up to his expectations. He was a bully. He was childish and clearly narcissistic and probably had some degree of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He breaks things in his fits of rage, which leads me to believe that he probably became physically at some point because he threw the ridiculous tantrums for many years.

I think that Clarence Day Jr. must have written the stories to exorcise the demons of his childhood, but it galls me to think that this book honors such a awful man. My final word on the subject is I am not going to finish reading the stories, because I don't like the man that they are about.