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Tag Archives: fatherhood

Steve Martin on the Death of His Father

08 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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Biography, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, comedy, family, fatherhood, Fathers, memoir, Saturday Night Live, Sons, Steve Martin

Steve Martin

“My father… died in 1997 at age eighty-three, and afterward his friends told me how much they loved him. They told me how enjoyable he was, how outgoing he was, how funny and caring he was. I was surprised by these descriptions, because the number of funny or caring words that had passed between my father and me was few… When I was seven or eight years old, he suggested we play catch in the front yard. This offer to spend time together was so rare that I was confused about what I was supposed to do. We tossed the ball back and forth with cheerless formality…

My father…  was not impressed [with my comedy act]. After my first appearance on Saturday Night Live, he wrote a bad review of me in his newsletter for the Newport Beach Association of Realtors, of which he was president: ‘His performance did nothing to further his career.’… I believe my father didn’t like what I was doing in my work, and was embarrassed by it. Perhaps he thought his friends were embarrassed by it, too, and the review was to indicate that he was not sanctioning this new comedy. Later, he gave an interview in a newspaper in which he said, ‘I think Saturday Night Live is the most horrible thing on television.’… But as my career progressed, I noticed that my father remained uncomplimentary toward my comedy, and what I did about it still makes sense to me: I never discussed my work with him…

[Years later, just before my father’s death] I was alone with him in his bedroom; his mind was alert but his body was failing. He said, almost buoyantly, ‘I’m ready now.’ I sat on the edge of the bed, and a silence fell over us. Then he said, ‘I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry.’

At first, I took this as a comment on his condition, but am forever thankful that I pushed on. ‘What do you want to cry about?’ I said.

‘For all the love I received but couldn’t return.’

I felt a chill of familiarity.

There was another lengthy silence as we looked into each other’s eyes. At last, he said, ‘You did everything I wanted to do.’

‘I did it for you,’ I said. Then we wept for the lost years. I was glad I didn’t say the more complicated truth: ‘I did it because of you.'”

__________

A selection from Martin’s 2008 memoir Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life.

Related paths:

  • Peter Hitchens reflects on how the wish to please one’s parents can distort our relationship to the past
  • Calvin Trillin on the singular priority of good parents
  • Louis Simpson’s poem — A light is on in my father’s study…

Steve Martin 2

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Calvin Trillin on Parenting: Your Children Are Either the Center of Your Life or They’re Not — the Rest Is Commentary

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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About Alice, Biography, Calvin Trillin, Children, family, fatherhood, motherhood, Parenting, parents

Alice Trillin

“There was no doubt about [my wife’s] priorities. While our girls were growing up, she hated being separated from them; after a two-week trip to Asia, when they were about ten and thirteen, she decided that one week was her limit. Concerning children’s constitutional right to sit down to dinner with their parents every night, Alice tended toward strict constructionism. When it came to trying to decide which theories of child-rearing were highly beneficial and which were absolutely ruinous to the future of your child — a subject of considerable discussion among some parents we knew — we agreed on a simple notion: your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.

After both girls were out of college, there was a period when Abigail was living in San Francisco while Sarah was in Los Angeles. Alice said that if they remained where they were we would simply have to live in California for part of the year. ‘If we want to be convenient to both of them,’ I’d say, ‘we could find a nice little place in between — Bakersfield, or maybe Fresno.’ Alice would shoot me the look I associated with a catch phrase from a radio sitcom I used to listen to as a boy ‘’Tain’t funny, McGee.’ By then, though, her desire to be near them was no longer based partly on her need to influence what kind of people they would become. In her New Yorker article about the recurrence scare in 1990, at a time when Sarah was a sophomore at Yale and Abigail was in Teach for America in Los Angeles, Alice wrote:

In the days after that bone scan, I couldn’t find a hopeful way out… I did manage to imagine uplifting conversations I might have with my daughters about how it was O.K. for me to die this time, as it absolutely had not been when they were four and seven, and I had foreseen their adoring but occasionally absent-minded father getting them the wrong kind of sneakers or losing track of their dental appointments after I was gone. Now I was sure that I had told them everything of importance I knew; they had understood it all and figured out a lot on their own, and were as close to perfect as they could possibly be. Then it occurred to me that neither of them was married yet, and I would hate to miss the weddings and the grandchildren. I speculated about which of my friends I would assign to help them pick out their wedding dresses. Then I cried and decided that I really wanted to stay around.

My problem in 1976 would have been much more serious than sneakers and dental appointments, I realized, when I finally allowed myself to dwell on what would have happened if Alice hadn’t survived. The real problem would have been that I couldn’t imagine trusting anyone else to be involved in raising our girls. I not only thought they needed to know everything of importance that Alice knew; I also thought, I suppose, that she was the only person who knew it. When I’m asked how both of our daughters came to be involved in the sort of work they do — Abigail is a legal-services attorney for children, Sarah is a clinical social worker — I, naturally, deny having anything to do with it. ‘I want to assure you that I tried to instill in them the value of selfishness and even rapaciousness,’ I say. ‘When Abigail came down to breakfast during her years in high school, I would tell her the temperature and the starting salary for an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore.’ But they had Alice there as a model. Because she survived, they were exposed every day to someone who (as a friend wrote after Alice died) managed to ‘navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.’ Sneakers and dental appointments are the kind of things you can figure out, or find someone to figure out. Exemplars are hard to come by.”

__________

Excerpted from chapter seven of Calvin Trillin’s 2006 book About Alice.

In a recent interview with Olivia Gentile, Trillin offered a few simple words that illuminate the above point, only this time from the perspective of grandfatherhood:

Do you feel [your daughters are] raising their kids with pretty much your values and techniques?

Yeah. Alice used to say that we were easy about the small things and strict about the large things. By large things, she basically meant values…

I’ve always believed that parenting essentially boils down to one thing: Your kids are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.

So, the question of which childrearing book you read or something like that is really not relevant. It doesn’t make any difference because, in the first place, you’re not going to act against your own nature anyway, and the kids see you in so many different situations that you can’t put in some kind of artificial system.

Trillin dedicated About Alice to those grandchildren. Picture above: Trillin and Alice.

Read on:

  • As she sends her son off to college…
  • Inside the marriage of Martin Amis and Isabel Fonseca
  • “To My Mother” by Wendell Berry

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The Last Gentleman on the Titanic

17 Tuesday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

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Article, Chicago Record-Herald, Courage, Crash, Daniel Guggenheim, family, fatherhood, history, Honor, Husband, integrity, James Etches, Jay Henry Mowbray, Life Boats, newspaper, Sink, St. Regis Hotel, The Sinking of the Titanic, Titanic

Benjamin Guggenheim

“‘If anything should happen to me, tell my wife in New York that I’ve done my best in doing my duty.’

This was the last message of Benjamin Guggenheim, of the famous banking family, dictated to a steward only a short while before the banker sank to his death with the Titanic. It was was not until several days later that the message was received by Mrs. Guggenheim.

It was delivered by James Etches, assistant steward in the first cabin of the Titanic, to whom Mr. Guggenheim communicated it. Etches appeared at the St. Regis Hotel and inquired for Mrs. Benjamin Guggenheim. He said that he had a message from Benjamin Guggenheim, and that it had to be delivered in person.

Mrs. Guggenheim was in the care of Daniel Guggenheim, whose apartments are at the St. Regis. The steward was admitted, but was not permitted to see Mrs. Guggenheim, who is prostrated with grief. He insisted that he must see her personally, but finally consented to transmit the message through her brother-in-law.

‘We were together almost to the end,’ said the steward. ‘I was saved. He went down with the ship. But that isn’t what I want to tell Mrs. Guggenheim.’

The Titanic Launch

Then the steward produced a piece of paper. He had written the message on it, he said, to be certain that it would be correct. The message was as given.

‘That’s all he said’ added the steward, ‘there wasn’t time for more.’

Little by little Mr. Guggenheim got the account of his brother’s death from the steward. It was the first definite news that he had received of his brother.

‘Mr. Guggenheim was one of my charges,’ said the steward anew. ‘He had his secretary with him. His name was Giglio, I believe, an Armenian, about twenty-four years old. Both died like soldiers.

‘When the crash came I awakened them and told them to get dressed. A few minutes later I went into their rooms and helped them to get ready. I put a life preserver on Mr. Guggenheim. He said it hurt him in the back. There was plenty of time and I took it off, adjusted it, and then put it on him again. It was all right this time.

‘They wanted to get out on deck with only a few clothes on, but I pulled a heavy sweater over Mr. Guggenheim’s life belt, and then they both went out. They stayed together and I could see what they were doing. They were going from one lifeboat to another helping the women and children. Mr. Guggenheim would shout out, ‘Women first,’ and he was of great assistance to the officers.

Titanic Propellers

‘Things weren’t so bad at first, but when I saw Mr. Guggenheim about three quarters of an hour after the crash there was great excitement. What surprised me was that both Mr. Guggenheim and his secretary were dressed in their evening clothes. They had deliberately taken off their sweaters,’ and as nearly as I can remember they wore no life belts at all.

‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

‘We’ve dressed up in our best,’ replied Mr. Guggenheim, ‘and are prepared to go down like gentlemen.’ It was then he told me about the message to his wife and that is what I have come here for.

‘Well, shortly after the last few boats were lowered and I was ordered by the deck officer to man an oar, I waved good-bye to Mr. Guggenheim, and that was the last I saw of him and his Armenian secretary.'”

__________

The full text of an article published on Sunday, April 21st, 1912 in the Chicago Record-Herald, later reprinted in Jay Henry Mowbray’s The Sinking of the Titanic.

Titanic

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The Light in My Father’s Study

15 Sunday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

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Father, fatherhood, Louis Simpson, Poem, Poet, poetry, Son, Working Late

A Light in the Study

A light is on in my father’s study.
“Still up?” he says, and we are silent,
looking at the harbor lights,
listening to the surf
and the creak of coconut boughs.

He is working late on cases.
No impassioned speech. He argues from evidence,
actually pacing out and measuring,
while the fans revolving on the ceiling
winnow the true from the false.

All the arguing in the world
will not stay the moon.
She has come all the way from Russia
to gaze for a while in a mango tree
and light the wall of a veranda,
before resuming her interrupted journey
beyond the harbor and the lighthouse
at Port Royal, turning away
from land to the open sea.

Yet, nothing in nature changes, from that day to this,
she is still the mother of us all.
I can see the drifting offshore lights,
black posts where the pelicans brood.

And the light that used to shine
at night in my father’s study
now shines as late in mine.

__________

“Working Late” (edited) by Louis Simpson.

The picture was taken on a rainy day last summer in my study in Houston, Texas.

Louis Simpson

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Theodore Roosevelt on Setting the Right Example as a Man

26 Monday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

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Tags

Alfred Henry Lewis, Brother, Brother's Keeper, Christian, Christianity, Courage, ethics, Father, fatherhood, Holy Name Society, Honor, Loyalty, manhood, morality, Oyster Bay, Son, speech, Strength, Teddy Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Trust, virtue

Teddy Roosevelt

“Every man here knows the temptations that beset all of us in this world. At times any man will slip. I do not expect perfection, but I do expect genuine and sincere effort toward being decent and cleanly in thought, in word, and in deed… I expect you to be strong. I would not respect you if you were not. I do not want to see Christianity professed only by weaklings; I want to see it a moving spirit among men of strength. I do not expect you to lose one particle of your strength or courage by being decent.

There is always a tendency among very young men and among boys who are not quite young men as yet to think that to be wicked is rather smart; to think it shows that they are men. Oh, how often you see some young fellow who boasts that he is going to ‘see life,’ meaning by that that he is going to see that part of life which it is a thousandfold better should remain unseen!

I ask that every man here constitute himself his brother’s keeper by setting an example to that younger brother which will prevent him from getting such a false estimate of life. Example is the most potent of all things. If any one of you in the presence of younger boys, and especially the younger people of our own family, misbehave yourself, if you use coarse and blasphemous language before them, you can be sure that these younger people will follow your example and not your precept…

I have told you that I wanted you not only to be decent, but to be strong. These boys will not admire virtue of a merely anaemic type. They believe in courage, in manliness. They admire those who have the quality of being brave, the quality of facing life as life should be faced, the quality that must stand at the root of good citizenship in peace or in war… I want to see each man able to hold his own in the rough life outside, and also, when he is at home, a good man, unselfish in dealing with wife, or mother, or children. Remember that the preaching does not count if it is not backed up by practice. There is no good in your preaching to your boys to be brave if you run away. There is no good in your preaching to them to tell the truth if you do not… We have a right to expect that in your own homes and among your own associates you will prove by your deeds that yours is not a lip-loyalty merely; that you show in actual practice the faith that is in you.”

__________

Teddy, speaking to the Holy Name Society at Oyster Bay, New York, on August 16th, 1903.

In his original compilation of Teddy’s speeches, Alfred Henry Lewis includes with this text the following worthwhile footnote:

President Roosevelt belongs to the Dutch Reformed Church. His freedom from religious prejudice, however, never fails to stick out. He would no more dream of quarreling with a man because he was a Methodist or a Catholic than he would of quarreling with a man in the car ahead or the car behind on a railway train because of the car he saw fit to travel in. There are many churches just as there are many cars in a train; but he is as tolerant of one as of the other, since they are all going to the same place.

There’s also this old joke, which expresses, in so many words, something of Roosevelt’s point about the gap between preaching and practicing:

A man is driving his five year old to a friend’s house when another car races in front and cuts them off, nearly causing an accident. “Douchebag!” the father yells. A moment later he realizes the indiscretion, pulls over, and turns to face his son. “Your father just said a bad word,” he says. “I was angry at that driver, but that was no excuse for what I said. It was wrong. But just because I said it, it doesn’t make it right, and I don’t ever want to hear you saying it. Is that clear?” His son looks at him and says: “Too late, douchebag.”

Read on:

  • ‘The Light Has Gone Out of My Life’: Young Teddy Roosevelt in Love and Grief

Teddy Roosevely and the Rough RidersTeddy Roosevelt Riding a MooseTeddy Roosevelt

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John Updike on Making Peace with Our Past Selves

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on John Updike on Making Peace with Our Past Selves

Tags

Aging, Biography, consciousness, Ego, F. Scott Fitzgerald, fatherhood, Growth, Haven Hill, High School, identity, Ipswich, John Irving, John Updike, marriage, Maturation, memoir, Mortality, Parenting, Philosophy, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Selves, Shillington, Writing

John Updike

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

It is even possible to dislike our old selves, these disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot: without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not now be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill. And my Ipswich self, a delayed second edition of that high-school self, in a town much like Shillington in its blend of sweet and tough, only more spacious and historic and blessedly free of family ghosts, and my own relative position in the ‘gang’ improved, enhanced by a touch of wealth, a mini-Mailer in our small salt-water pond, a stag of sorts in our herd of housewife — flirtatious, malicious, greedy for my quota of life’s pleasures, a distracted, mediocre father and worse husband — he seems another obnoxious show-off, rapacious and sneaky and, in the service of his own ego, remorseless. But, then, am I his superior in anything but caution and years, and how can I disown him without disowning also his useful works, on which I still receive royalties? And when I entertain in my mind these shaggy, red-faced, overexcited, abrasive fellows, I find myself tenderly taken with their diligence, their hopefulness, their ability in spite of all to map a broad strategy and stick with it. So perhaps one cannot, after all, not love them…

Writing… is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial study of the internal life, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Apart from his consistently masterful (and often playful) use of language, the real charm of Updike, at least in this reader’s view, can be boiled down to several factors that don’t exist in another American writer — or at least not in another one of Updike’s caliber. Like his style itself, which constantly bears the marks of a mind at serious play, these attributes exist in relationships that are, in some essential sense, oppositional. His intellect, weighted with a heavy dose of classical philosophy but buoyed by a boyish inquisitiveness; his well-bred WASPiness, clothed in the pastels of New England sans the starch you can smell on the pages of a Fitzgerald or John Irving; his fixation on women, tempered always by the guilt of consistently looking (and usually pursuing) the ones who are — in some sense, and for one reason or another — wrong. Tack all of this atop a Christianity which comprehended doubt, and a cheeriness that could face deep questions, and you have a mind that will always give you something worth seeing – if you can only keep up with such an agile pen.

Looking close at the above paragraph, you’ll recognize all of these attributes. If you do yourself the favor of exploring deeper into Self-Consciousness, you’ll get a better sense of each of them and how they shape the man and his understanding of the conscious and subconscious life.

Read on:

  • Paul Newman reflects: “Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.”
  • Updike explains why he was skeptical as a young man
  • Updike ruminates on how religious belief is ‘a part of being human’

John Updike

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Meet Thomas Jefferson’s Father

22 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, History

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

American History, Biography, Dan Zevin, family, fatherhood, history, Jon Meacham, Mark Twain, Patriarch, Peter Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

Peter Jefferson -- Thomas Jefferson's Father

“He was the kind of man people noticed. An imposing, prosperous, well-liked farmer known for his feats of strength and his capacity for endurance in the wilderness, Peter Jefferson had amassed large tracts of land and scores of slaves in and around what became Albemarle County, Virginia. There, along the Rivanna, he built Shadwell, named after the London parish where his wife, Jane, had been baptized.

The first half of the eighteenth century was a thrilling time to be young, white, male, wealthy, and Virginian. Money was to be made, property to be claimed, tobacco to be planted and sold…

As a surveyor and a planter, Peter Jefferson thrived there, and his eldest son, Thomas, born on April 13, 1743, understood his father was a man other men admired. Celebrated for his courage, Peter Jefferson excelled at riding and hunting. His son recalled that the father once singlehandedly pulled down a wooden shed that had stood impervious to the exertions of three slaves who had been ordered to destroy the building… The father’s standing mattered greatly to the son, who remembered him in a superlative and sentimental light…

Jefferson was taught by his father and mother, and later by his teachers and mentors, that a gentleman owed service to his family, to his neighborhood, to his county, to his colony, and to his king. An eldest son in the Virginia of his time grew up expecting to lead—and to be followed. Thomas Jefferson came of age with the confidence that controlling the destinies of others was the most natural thing in the world. He was born for command. He never knew anything else.

Thomas Jefferson grew up with an image—and, until Peter Jefferson’s death when his son was fourteen, the reality—of a father who was powerful, who could do things other men could not, and who, through the force of his will or of his muscles or of both at once, could tangibly transform the world around him. Surveyors defined new worlds; explorers conquered the unknown; mapmakers brought form to the formless. Peter Jefferson was all three and thus claimed a central place in the imagination of his son, who admired his father’s strength and spent a lifetime recounting tales of the older man’s daring. Thomas Jefferson, a great-granddaughter said, ‘never wearied of dwelling with all the pride of filial devotion and admiration on the noble traits’ of his father’s character. The father had shaped the ways other men lived. The son did all he could to play the same role in the lives of others.”

__________

From Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power.

Today marks the birthday of my dad, a reader of this blog and the guy I thought about as I first flipped through these pages.

Now on the quotes page:

“Lately all my friends are worried that they’re turning into their fathers. I’m worried that I’m not.” – Dan Zevin

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” – Mark Twain

In case you don’t come here often, there’s more Jefferson-related stuff to see.

Thomas Jefferson

Meet Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson engraving after painting by Rembrandt Peale.

How Jefferson Fostered Compromise on the National Debt

Thomas Jefferson Randolph

Jefferson’s Advice to His Teenage Grandson

Top: Peter Jefferson; below: Thomas.

Thomas Jefferson

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“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden

11 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Childhood, family, fatherhood, Poem, Poet, poetry, Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

__________

“Those Winter Sundays”by Robert Hayden. Put it on your shelf along with more of Hayden’s best in his Collected Poems.

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