Conducting interviews for this paper over the past 20 years, I’d say I’ve developed only one relatively fail-safe “technique”. If the interviewee, famous or otherwise, is batting questions away, refusing to open up at all, I’ve come to believe that there is one question always worth trying in order to turn things around. It’s this one: “What kind of a man was your father?” At worst, this question elicits a flinch and a look of sadness or puzzlement; at best, it proves immediately revealing of the way an interviewee thinks or feels or defines him or herself. Either way, it changes the mood, generates some ease or discomfort. It’s tempting to imagine that while mothers, at least to begin with, nurture our emotional development, dads offer us our first real opportunity to employ our critical faculties: everyone has a strong opinion about their old man.
It’s this well of judgment and inquiry and reminiscence that the magazine features editor and writer Ted Kessler tapped into when he first began a blog about his own father, three years ago, and invited people to add their own memories. Some of the people who wrote about their fathers were famous – Chris Martin, Rod Stewart, Florence Welch (Kessler works at the music magazine Q) – and some were sons and daughters of famous fathers – Adam Cohen, son of Leonard; Jemima Dury, daughter of Ian. These are collected in this poignant and often moving book, alongside pieces from writers and journalists in the same vein.
The occasion for Kessler writing about his own father, Felix, was a family get-together in Paris, to celebrate Felix’s 80th birthday. Kessler had gone to that dinner trying to get a grip on what he really thought about his old man, trying to equate the “intense, pensive” figure of his childhood “breaking 100mph in the driving seat during explosive in-car rows with my mother…; typing furiously through the night at the living room table” with “the gently eccentric old moose of today, pottering around New York doing his dry cleaning in the spring and tending his yard in Florida in the winter”. Were these men really one and the same? Kessler hoped to use the birthday dinner to find some answers. As usual, though, the opposite happened: there was only opportunity for chitchat. “So, obviously, I wrote something about him on the internet when I got home instead.”
Some of that brief memoir was concerned with Ted Kessler’s difficult early teenage years when, apparently on a whim, his father had moved the family from London to a soulless Parisian suburb that Kessler, who knew no French, hated. Once there, just as abruptly, his father left him and his brothers with their mother, and went off to pursue another life for himself (one, Felix later confessed, that involved a second family that he had already started with a girlfriend in central Paris). In blurting some of this out to the unknown readers on the net, Kessler found not only a bit of catharsis, but also that his own adolescent paternal complications were comparatively quite tame: others quickly raised the stakes with stories of violent men and fraudsters and suicides.
Some of those, reproduced here, are painful to read. The artist and musician Billy Childish is able to write about his father John, now 81, only after many years of therapy. “A complex, sociopathic narcissist”, as well as a prospective Tory MP, womaniser, alcoholic, abusive husband and father, John Hamper was imprisoned in Childish’s teens for drug smuggling. On his father’s release, Childish’s mother threatened to divorce Hamper and he became violent toward her. Childish, then 20, punched him down the stairs and to his alarm, his father reverted to a five-year-old and started bleating in a child’s voice: “I wouldn’t hurt Mummy.” They have hardly spoken since, though fathers being what they are, Childish claims to love Hamper still.
In this case, and many others here, absence of one kind or another does not make memory any less present or jagged. Fatherly silence opens up gaps to be filled with art or music or words. Uncut editor John Mulvey dwells on the reticence of his dad, who seemed a kind of précis of a character, “a heavily redacted man” even before he was lost to Alzheimer’s. The journalist Amy Raphael writes beautifully about still yearning 30 years on for her dad who died of cancer when she was 17. Some fathers are complex and unknowable. Others seem still to fill the sky, just as they did in our infancy. Uniformly, of course, they are not only examples to follow or react against, but also often the purveyors of advice. Rod Stewart recalls how his dad always offered him two nuggets of wisdom. The first was “look after your legs”: he says he took that one to heart. The other was “keep it in your trousers”, which goes to prove another consistent theme here: dads can only do so much. Eventually you are on your own.
My Old Man: Tales of Our Fathers is published by Canongate (14.99). Click here to buy it for £11.99
