Notes Toward a Father's Blessing
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of the Union NOTES TOWARD A FATHER'S BLESSING BY RICHARD J. MARGOLIS It is the eve of my older son's graduation from high school. I am sequestered in my office attempting to write him a...
...Who can blame him...
...He is 16...
...They are building not a new world but a slaughterhouse...
...Thornton up in the organ loft played soft music, my father bestowed separate and secret blessings upon each of us quaking confirm-ands...
...Is this all a man can tell his son...
...He had a way with moral epigrams that must have annoyed his son Laertes: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be...
...What impresses me, though, is the way he sneaked in his facile recommendations under cover of a father's blessing...
...he began, and laid his hand on Laertes' head-lightly, I hope...
...Perhaps they signal the breaking up of the Ice Age...
...Whom was one to believe...
...Where is the greening of America in all this counsel...
...Prepare for weakness in yourself...
...Although my father and I felt deeply about each other, we had trouble expressing it-a routine problem between fathers and sons, not to mention the rest of the human race...
...None of which dissuades me from asking you to listen to the fidgety clinking of my small coins...
...When a father starts giving his son advice, he fears two things: first, that his son will not listen...
...Let's hear three cheers for the excellent old way...
...Some question...
...Personally, I mistrust such instant solutions ?especially the encounter groups, with their desperate huggings and programmed caresses-but I can see what they are getting at...
...Polonius, after all, offered his son many practical, time-saving tips on how to get ahead...
...beware, remember, rejoice...
...When Harry was three, we trundled him off to Brooklyn's Borough Hall where, before a large crowd and for the benefit of newspaper photographers, we had him hand over a petition to Borough President John Cashmore...
...Yesterday he rented a tuxedo?the apparel does not always proclaim the man-and tomorrow, with a girl by his side, he goes to the Senior Prom...
...I did not know which hand to address...
...But lately his political ardor has cooled-for the moment he has postponed considerations of Buchen-wald, Hiroshima and Mylai...
...The beginning of wisdom, one senses, lies not in the answers we invent but in the questions we pose...
...My own father once blessed me in the Polonius manner, not because he was my father but because he was my rabbi...
...In our time," Mann had written, "the destiny of man presents its meaning in political terms...
...For instance, he admonished Laertes to play it cool ("Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice"), and he cautioned Laertes to be finicky about his clothes ("For the apparel oft proclaims the man...
...I pray to the God within me," answered the beadle, "that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions...
...A father's hand can hurt...
...To thine own feelings be true, Polonius might have said, particularly when your feelings are laced with affection...
...In the slaughter of 30 million that followed, each murderer saw his victim not as a personal enemy but as an Enemy "in political terms...
...False start: Dear Harry: Advice, noted Ambrose Bierce, is "the smallest current coin," while a bore is "a person who talks when you wish him to listen...
...He could accuse me of unbridled sappiness...
...We are taught to suppress our tears, but I have gradually grown to honor mine and have shed them gratefully on three subsequent occasions: once for my dead father, once for my lost youth and once for the happiness of a friend...
...This above all-to thine own self be true...
...When we are young," observed Yeats, "we long to tread a way none trod before,/But find the excellent old way through love...
...One risks anticlimax, the moment of half-truth...
...We have fortified our children with few faiths, but I suppose we have burdened them with some characteristically Western assumptions, one of which is that of redemption through politics...
...Who knows what the petition called for...
...Why "the strength...
...He got out of there in a hurry...
...Alas, I kept getting the two mixed up...
...revolution...
...I find my Shakespeare and look up Polonius, to purloin his confidence...
...Weak and oblique...
...Farewell," intoned Polonius, removing his hand from Laertes' head...
...Few of us have the character for it...
...pray for strength...
...In any case, Harry was there, and he has been "there" ever since—petitioning, organizing, marching...
...Last night at a youth committee meeting I chatted with a boy who was holding car keys in one hand and a raspberry sucker in the other...
...A traffic light, maybe, or a new housing program...
...A passionate politician, one of the first senators of the Irish Free State, Yeats later retreated into a centrifugal privacy, a deep swirl of memories and regrets...
...What I remember most was the weight of his hands on my bowed, crew-cut head and the familiar, reassuring rumble of his voice in my ear...
...Beware of those who call their enemies gooks, kikes and pigs...
...Perhaps, Yeats replied...
...Alas, Yeats was charming but Mann was right...
...Yeats' inner disputes, the questions he asked himself, may be helpful here...
...but how was a man to fix his attention on politics with "that girl standing there...
...These were sensible suggestions, but not the kind Harry would be likely to accept...
...Read Yeats and rejoice: Arms were made for more than leafllets...
...He stood a step above us, before the open ark, blessing us in turn...
...second, that he will...
...Polonius' advice always scanned...
...May] my blessing season this in thee...
...They seemed to signify a conflict between the private man and the public man, between the seeking of self (my son's main concern at the moment) and the reorganizing of others: salvation vs...
...The reason I remember my father's hands on my head, aside from the supercharged solemnity of the moment, is that it was one of the few times during those last years of his life that we touched...
...Every father, it appears, is a natural reactionary, robbing his own past to shape his son's future...
...Okay," replied Polonius: "Remember to keep your shoes shined and your mouth shut...
...There, my blessing with you...
...suspect unique solutions...
...but have a care to enjoy long, tearless interims...
...I have finished before I have begun...
...My wife and I are children of Mann's decimated century...
...I don't recall many of his words, but the first two were "My son"-a powerful opener-and the last word was "peace...
...Thus far I seem to be telling my son to go through life spilling tears and hugging friends...
...Weep, then, when the occasion warrants...
...The odds are against me, tipped by the weight of my apologies...
...Weep, touch, pray...
...Raise old questions anew...
...To which I would add, "Touch them...
...The communes and the encounter groups that are all the rage now may be a reaction to this physical detachment, to aloneness...
...Polonius was probably the world's all-time champion advice-giver...
...I am sequestered in my office attempting to write him a fatherly letter full of wit and wisdom...
...My embarrassment was both understandable and unnecessary...
...We may have overdone it...
...The occasion was my Confirmation...
...Not long before he died, on the eve of World War II, he wrote a poem gently scolding Thomas Mann for his political obsessions...
...In the presence of the entire congregation, while old Mr...
...Read Micah, vote for McGovern...
...Well, it's a stern and lonely task, being your own inquisitor...
...I am startled by my fogyism...
...Father," said Laertes, in effect, "show me the way through life...
...He intimated as much when he told Laertes how to deal with old friends: "Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel...
...Being young, Laertes was probably seeking new and startling truths, while his father was spouting what passed for ancient wisdom...
...And maybe what they say is true Of war and war's alarms, But O that I were young again And held her in my arms...
...Harry was born a decade after the Holocaust-born remembering...
...They are defrosting devices...
...Where the revolution...
...Afterward, to my embarrassment, I cried...
...asked the boy Eliezer in Elie Wie-sel's first novel...
...And why do you pray, Moche...
...I am not sure Laertes accepted them either...
...Some answer...
Vol. 55 • July 1972 • No. 14
