Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers

Introduction. The Child’s Book of Parental Deception

1 Introduction The Child’s Book of Parental Deception When Mary Gordon sets out to learn about her long-dead father, whom she worshipped as a child and who imbued her with his devout Catholic faith, she makes a number of startling discoveries: he had a previous family of which she knew nothing, he was not Catholic at all but a Jew who had written encomiums to Hitler,and he edited and wrote for a pornographic magazine. When Mark Kurzem perceives his rueful father is plagued by a past untold for over a half-century, he gradually unearths a dark truth about him: as a Jewish child his father barely escaped being killed with his family in the Holocaust and was rescued by pro-Nazi Latvian soldiers , spending the war years dressed in a miniature SS uniform and gaining celebrity as a “Nazi child warrior.” When Bliss Broyard’s father lies dying, she finds out that he is a black man who has successfully concealed his race from his children and passed all his adult life as white. And when Germaine Greer decides to investigate the reasons for her father’s long depression,she uncovers the facts beneath his life-long secret identity and his lies about every important event in his life, including his origins. In powerful autobiographical narratives these adult children have dramatized the poignant and secret lives of their furtive fathers and their search to unearth those concealments. My book explores these and numerous other intensely human dramas of secrecy and deception in memoirs by children each of whose fathers maintained and perpetuated a clandestine existence. How the child learned about 2 INTRODUCTION the father’s covert life,the effect it had on the inquirer’s own sense of self,and the way the autobiographical writing investigates and reveals the entwined identities of parent and child are my subjects. In recent years autobiographies and memoirs have been preoccupied with secret lives. The life writing that has captured my interest recounts the uncovering of family secrets, especially in works in which a biography or reminiscence of the writer’s father is contained within the son’s or daughter’s autobiographical text. Such writing tends to focus not only on the facts of the father’s secret life but also on the writer’s active search, usually in middle age, to learn what was not known and could not have been remembered about him, given how he withheld information, absented himself from the family, deceived it, or generally maintained a false or covert identity. These autobiographical children are compelled if not consumed by a desire to know, frustrated when parental evidence is erased, reluctant to be condemned to uncertainty,tentativeness,doubt,or to a father whose identity is baffling, problematic, or inauthentic. What Paul John Eakin has called “the story of the story”—here not merely the exposure of the parent’s secret but an account of how the autobiographer brought that identity to light—is neither a supplement,an epiphenomenal narrative,nor an aide-mémoire,but an account of equal importance to what is discovered. Often the process of the unraveling is the main story, the tracking of secrets as central to these narratives as the nature of the secrets themselves, secrets that, when probed, shed light on both the parent’s identity and the child’s own. The writer’s frustration at having been subjected to uncertainty is palpable, particularly when the parent is dead and the child unable to ask directly the urgent questions that tend to motivate the search. The findings are often darker than initially expected, and as the child gathers unwelcome, even ominous material, we perceive how family memory has been directed, manipulated, and distorted to protect the secrets. Because the fathers are disconcertingly obscure or fraudulent, the autobiographers are often desperate to unearth what they suspect but cannot prove, or what has long baffled them, or what has come as a sudden shock of unfamiliarity that begs for investigation. There is enough in common in the texts I deal with to justify a designation of this subgenre of life writing. Let us call it “The Child’s Book of Parental Deception,” since these texts regard the fathers from the perspective of adult children who suffered parental mystery and equivocation. This rubric provides an initial logic for the study. Though I give the title “Deciphering Enigma Codes” to one of the chapters, this concept may stand for all the kinds of secrecy...