Finding a Kind of Peace

...His views evolved (if that's the word for a downward movement) from mandarin to xenophobic .The Spanish Civil War repulsed him, and he took special note of the Jewish Americans who were moved to become involved in it...

...He was, in other words, not only deliberately insensitive but overtly hostile to the fate of the Jews, from whom he distanced himself apparently without conscience...

...We are implicated, though we did not know him, either in person or by reputation...

...He had a wife and a stepson whom no one in his later life knew existed...

...Is it easier to say he is mad...

...Is it even possible to acknowledge that "he did other things than love me...

...she faces the person that, in his absence, she will never become, interrogates it, cannot decide whether her losses outweigh her gains...

...This is the kind of writing that elevates The Shadow Man toa level memoirrarely reaches...

...Yet as she herself notes, it was probably a good thing that her illusions about her father were not shaken earlier, when disappointment and anger could have been disastrous to her sense of what was valuable and worthy of pursuit...

...where she and her father occasionally window-shopped, and the dour practicality of Grant's, where her mother brought her to face such realities as the "serviceable...

...Mary Catherine Gordon, the only child of a not-so-young couple introduced by their priest, grew up in a close-knit Roman Catholic parish in Queens...

...Who would she have been had he lived...

...His reinterment is the only "plot," in the other sense of the word, that she can control...

...Much worse, it is full of hate...

...Most appallingly, David Gordon espoused political views that sicken his daughter: He was an admirer of Mussolini and an apologist for Hitler (whose worst sin appeared to be closing Catholic schools in Bavaria...

...In our private pantheons, our parents are victims of revision as we grow and change and dare to question...

...I love you more than God," her father told her...

...Hers is a case of secrets newly unearthed...

...The "truths" Mary Gordon discovers about her father are desolating...

...Every inch of ground shifts...

...Latin, by this man of serious intellectual accomplishment (or so it looked to her), a Harvard- and Oxford-educated writer who once edited his own magazine...

...I remember once encountering a Southern businessman, a Greek Orthodox immigrant searching for the best way to get a leg up socially, who wandered through Baptistism, Methodism and Catholicism before he determined that becoming an Episcopalian would give him the most secure perch...

...leaving her to wonder if he meant that he loved her more than God did or more than he loved God...

...are invited to glory in the ruins...

...A disconnected object is always noble, unless it seems ripped out of human context: a single shoe, a photograph on the pavement, a sofa left for the trash...

...Surprisingly, she never wonders why he chose not to become a wasp when that would seemaless problematic path to power and a sense of belonging...

...Like Mary Gordon, we persevere in the face of a great many mysteries, and create ritual shapes to contain our confusion...

...Paul de Man, Simone de Beauvoir, et al.—and political leaders of every persuasion seem fated to fall before the relentlessness of public scrutiny...

...Its earnestness notwithstanding, this is the one part of the book that abounds in familiarity and stereotype...

...It takes us on a painful journey whose outcome, once begun, the author herself cannot begin to imagine...

...What an amazing conundrum to entangle a small child in...

...Readers of memoirs, more often than not...

...The book is a long, unabashedly intimate poem about death and memory, about loss and the obliteration of every kind of certainty...

...If the parent is famous enough, the unmasking can be sensational as the bills are finally levied for the abuse some icon—remember Bing Crosby?—visited on his children...

...Of what are our memories made...

...Desperate to escape, he started work as a railroad clerk at age 16 and never graduated from high school...

...But the question remains, and it's a large hole Gordon is too honest to think she can fill with her limited knowledge of her father's childhood: Why was he so disloyal to his past and his people when the vast majority of others, raised in similarly bleak circumstances, subject to the same maulings of radio hell-raisers like Father Coughlin, stayed faithful, stayed honest, and were not led to repudiation and vicious defensiveness...

...To which of our dead are we in debt, and who owes us an apology we will never hear...

...This is not the question an adopted child must ask—not Who, except for genetics and the fact of leaving, didn't stay to shape my personality...

...She also makes a rather feeble pass at holding H. L. Mencken, Ezra Pound, Henry Roth, and Bernard Berenson responsible for the casually intemperate anti-Semitic rhetoric of the time her father grew up in, as if their presence made them what the law calls "attractive menaces...

...David Gordon was handsome, authoritative, playful, profoundly dedicated to his adopted religion, and extremely flirtatious with his darling daughter who believed he would be pleased if she grew up to be a saint...

...raising still other questions about memory and its destruction, the depredations of age rather than the "normal" unreliability of the young brain...

...But set them afloat in a sea of stories and their certainty melts...

...and "why not...

...I am not the person I thought I was...

...She remembers, with a remarkable lack of sentimentality, the exact spot where she lay her head on his chest...

...Objects afloat in narrative give me no certainty...

...and have always been, entirely alone, and will be until my death...

...Isn't this implacable "me, me...

...The ring, the hairbrush...

...What she learns about his life turns The Shadow Man into a shattering portrait of his desperation that implicates all of us in its central questions: Can a parent we worship, who treats us in an exemplary way, be evil if his dealings with the world are...

...Who am I," she asks, "if my father is not himself...

...I understand the word 'lingerie': it was a thing of the moment only...

...Like a character in a novel undergoing the kinds of unpredictable changes we expect in fiction, she truly casts herself into the canyon of ignorance, free-fal ling until she arrives, alive but fearfully bruised, at the bottom...

...These stories, baring old secrets, aim outward toward an audience, not inward toward the teller, who presumably has suffered in silence for many years, awaiting the appropriate moment for disclosure...

...She speculates about whether it was the esthetics of Catholicism that served his truest needs or the extremity of its distance from the ordinariness, and to him ugliness, of his background...

...She is implicated in her father's story...

...But oh, the paradoxes he left her, having given her the tools to examine and judge him and find him wanting: This is memoir as Mobius strip...

...Her least kind relatives mock certain qualities in her (chiefly her sensitivity and literary bent) as the legacy of "the Jew" her father had remained in their eyes...

...Of need and longing...

...Including my father...

...Left alone, they can only give us hope...

...Of course, it is her own soul she is excavating alongside David Gordon's...

...It is the doubts reflecting back on her, and from her to us...

...There is a nearly unbearable poignancy in seeing the grown woman reaching with a child's hands toward the place where her father can never be, from which he disappeared when she was so young...

...What are we to make of a world that existed before our birth and will continue after our death—what to do with the pain of not knowing...

...It is only our connection to objects that weakens them...

...And she writes with candor about her moods, her snappishness under stress, her impatience with her aging mother, who is slowly blinking out now...

...It is hard to decide whether the most compelling part of The Shadow Man is the astonished daughter's actual account of her immigrant father's falsifications, deceit and construction of a new American self far more emblematic than Gats-by's, or the fluent, painfully honest investigation she forces herself to make of what she herself—her own ego—was fashioned from and what the disintegration of her father's myth leaves her...

...Mary Gordon has always had an interesting mind, partly because she finds most things interesting...

...The Shadow Man, does something quite different and far more chancy...

...author, "Before and After," "Cora Fry's Pillow Book " WE ARE LIVING in the Age of Disillusionment...

...Here is what she says about a series of objects that she knows "once touched [her father's] body," among them a silver ring with the imprint of a miraculous medal, a reproduction of Holbein's Sir Thomas More and a hairbrush: "None of these objects are pathetic...

...grown...

...the essence of the plaint grown children bring to their therapists...

...Once taking up her "vocation as a mourner," it is many years before she puts it down and, after a variety of suspicious hints that she may be remembering a man who never was, assumes instead the vocation of detective...

...The somewhat strained evocation of shamed poverty, and a subsequent chapter that has her "confronting" her father with her accusations, actually supply little we can't surmise...

...He was a man sufficiently enthralling to plant in his daughter such ambition, confidence and habits of seriousness and intellect that they would in fact (no matter what else was taken from her by his death and, later, by the collapse of his very identity) serve to make her the fine and respected novelist she is today...

...She was the single star in his sky, adored, instructed, taught to read at three, and sent love letters in Gentian, French, Greek...

...his daughter's search for answers to her devastating questions speaks to all of us and our tenuous hold on what we casually call "reality...

...The least successful chapter of the book, I think, is the one where the author attempts to recreate, in poetically charged prose, what poverty and a conviction of his inferiority must have felt like to an avid "yearning, furtive," self-educated boy, and how his sense of unworthiness might have sent him in search of sanction to a faith that played itself out in the high drama of great cathedrals with all their palpable physical grandeur...

...Not surprisingly, more avidly than most children, she constructs her personality around her great loss, so it becomes a chronic condition: "I always said his death was the most important thing that could be known about me...

...And yet, how can she not feel pity for the man in his desperation to hide his origins and to ally himself with something he saw—and taught her to see—as beautiful, transcendent...

...Of the narrowness and imprecision of a child's perspective...

...When she turns her intensity on a subject she can illuminate it thrillingly, without pretentiousness...

...Mary Gordon's skill is greatest in descriptions of the things she knows best from her own life, such as her marvelous-ly precise anatomy of contrasts between the glamour of "stores on Fifth Av enue...

...She is, in other words, her father's daughter in spite of it all...

...As if she were a character in a Bronte novel, the proud child now had to go with her mother to live in pinched circumstances at her grandmother's house...

...And though her father is unique, not only does his storytell us (or rather ask us) something about American life and those who hunger to be a part of it...

...Is a man who espouses hateful ideas himself hateful...

...This forces an angry, humiliated Mary Gordon to ask herself if her father was evil or insane...

...Nor do they come close to solv ing the mystery that is the unsolvable in most human behavior: Why this boy...

...Narrative corrodes objects' inherent truthfulness...

...The whole world...

...interchangeable here...

...Mary Gordon's brilliant memoir of her father and herself...

...An autodi-dact, he plied his aristocratically snobbish essays and reviews to conservative literary journals while editing a sleazy, sexy magazine in the 1920s and '30s...

...aside from its private implications, insofar as any minor critic's writing has an influence, it casts a shadow on history...

...Out of which parts of their living and their death do we create ourselves...

...Why this alternative to the painful truth...

...When she brings him home to her "own" family, she finds a kind of peace...

...In spite of her unassuageable anger at him, in spite of her doubts and revisions, the daughter, almost 40 years after his death, exhumes and reburies her father, with a great love that will never be extinguished by facts, in a plot where she thinks he belongs, far from his wife's relatives who derided him for their version of the truth, this snobby Jew—ever a Jew to them—who was a splinter in their sides...

...For at the end of years of sleuthing—of reading old magazines and documents, of trekking to Lorain, Ohio, her father's ostensible birthplace, and checking records as well as speaking with some family members and neighbors—she learns that her father, the urbane Harvard graduate, was in fact born in Vilna, Lithuania, came to Ohio as a Yiddish-speaking child, and lived behind his parents' store...

...Her mother was an Irish-Italian-American, her father a fiercely Catholic convert from Judaism...

...What would this extraordinary man, willful and deceiving, have said to his daughter had she had a chance to confront him...

...That I am...

...Are "why...

...it beautifies or perverts...

...First of all, his writing is not very good, a judgment painful for her to render...

...It distorts...

...What was bought at Grant's was meant to last...

...She has managed to make an existential inquiry out of an intimate family tale in which her father—enormously intelligent, cultivated, affectionate—turns out to have been his own fabrication, and a dangerous one at that...

...Heroes and heroines—Hannah Arendt...

...Why can't he stay in a place where it is easy to love him...

...The entire conflict at the heart of The Shadow Man lies in such embodied insights...

...that give the book its weight and its sorrowful, inconsolable quality...

...David Gordon died of a heart attack quite suddenly, stricken in the New York Public Library—that irony would not pass muster in a work of fiction—when Mary was seven...

...durable" stuff called ladies' lingerie...

...I placed what I called my memories of him at the center of what I called myself...

...root themselves, durable and stoic, in the solid world...

...Her impoverishment is cosmic, a cruel joke...

...They are proof against my greater fear, that I have invented everything...

...It is not the peace of forgiveness, exactly, or ownership, but rather of acknowledgment that whoever we are, we are responsible for those who—however tainted—have loved us and whom—however innocently—we have loved...