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137 Chapter 4 Becoming One’s Parent One of the most intriguing statements about secret lives is made by the narrator of Anton Chekhov’s well-known story, “The Lady with a Dog.” He speaks of a character who lives two lives, the first of them “open to view by—and known to—the people concerned.” This life is public and overt, comprised of banalities and stereotyped ideas, some true some untrue, but a life much like that of others. The second life “proceeded in secret,”and this hidden yet more genuine and profound life is, ironically, the more sincere one: “everything which made up the [authentic] core of his life...took place in complete secrecy, whereas everything false about him, the façade behind which he hid to conceal the truth...all that was in the open” (19). I mention this paradoxical distinction because the writers of the texts discussed in this chapter tend to find their parents’ secret lives more engaging and compelling than an ordinary and less problematical life would have been, however frustrating, even anguishing it was for the children when they were young. As for sincerity, here is where the greatest incongruity occurs because in several cases the secretive fathers seem most “true” and “real” to their children when they are most concealed and resistant to social convention and the demands of “normal” life. The works in this chapter also stress a father-child resemblance despite an initial assumption that the two could not have been more dissimilar. The 138 CHAPTER 4 urge to see oneself as not so different from the parent becomes implicitly a strategy to recover a lost closeness. It also allows the adult child to connect to a figure who might otherwise appear too formidable, threatening, or alien. Though there may be a kind of thrill in outing a parent, there is a different pleasure in discovering an unexpected likeness, one that explains what was previously mysterious,and that may affirm a surprising entente cordiale. These works resist what an exposure of parental secrecy often asserts; namely, a triumph in uncovering the elder’s subterfuge or a desire for revenge. J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself narrates the author’s delight in perceiving and revealing the ways he is like his father, each of them having led a covert, even clandestine existence. Ackerley, who was gay at a time when English laws practically demanded that one conceal a demonized and illegal sexuality, makes tentative stabs at openness about the fact. But he is most ready to speak about his gayness as he gathers circumstantial though never definitive evidence of his father’s similar sexual orientation. While the framing of this hypothesis does not occupy the same space that revelations of his father’s secret second family do, the bond of the son with his father coalesces around that putatively shared experience. As such,the tentative assumption of their similarity subverts the old image of the father as a threatening, hypermasculine figure whose disapproval of his son’s weakness ends only with the father’s death. Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception is an account of his complex attitude toward his father: both admiration and vilification. The father’s compulsive falsifications for a while got him jobs he hardly deserved, and his conning others had a breathtaking recklessness that arouses Geoffrey’s horror as well as awe. But the heart of the work lies in the son’s admission that he has learned his father’s wiles and for a while imitates, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently, the older man’s virtuosity. Feeling bound to his father qualifies if not prevents judgment. Modeling his life temporarily on his father’s suggests the seductive power of dissimulation, even when the son suffers from his father’s bravado. Clark Blaise, whose French-Canadian father had a criminal past and constantly abandoned his family, veers between discomfort and acceptance in acknowledging their similarities despite the disturbing secrets the older man maintained and the grief he caused his family. While less delighted than Ackerley by his discoveries, and less ready than Wolff to forgive his father, certainly less eager to admire the father’s daring inventiveness, Blaise resists insisting on the evident differences between a respected arts administrator and novelist on one hand and an addictive lawbreaker on the other. Not unlike Wolff, Blaise the fiction writer understands how he may have inherited or at least absorbed his father’s ability to make up...

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