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Fathers and sons and daughters on the NYR Daily In our Saturday newsletter, the NYR Daily editors ty
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Fathers and sons and daughters on the NYR Daily
In our Saturday newsletter, the NYR Daily editors typically talk to one of our contributors about an article published during the previous week. This weekend, for Father’s Day, we instead take a look back at several recent pieces in which writers consider their relationships with their fathers.
The novelist Anna Shapiro’s father was a painter, and in [“My Father’s Art”]( she takes us on a tour through his life’s work, exploring along the way her complicated feelings about his career and success, or lack of it. A self-portrait in oil made when he was just sixteen is her favorite painting of his; about some of the later work she is more ambivalent. She wonders whether he might have gotten more recognition if he had continued painting in the style that she herself preferred. “I yearned for his work to succeed—for him to have what he needed—and I sometimes thought I could see why it wasn’t being snapped up,” she writes. “Though my heart might bleed for the causes Social Realism represented, in the 1960s, when I came of age, the style was embarrassing. It was unironic. It was square. His pain, as he failed to achieve the career he’d been led to expect by early successes, became mine.” While looking back gives Shapiro a clearer understanding of her father’s artistic motivations, her personal associations with the work are impossible to avoid: “There was never a time I didn’t know these images, and know them as an aspect of him. As it is, even coming across a piece of paper with his handwriting sends pangs through me, a wrenching longing to see him again, to talk to him.”
When her mother died, thirty years ago, Sylvia Poggioli inherited a trove of her father’s papers, but it was only recently that the NPR correspondent finally “decided to stop telling other people’s stories for a while and look into my own family’s.” In [“How My Father Made Landfall”]( she writes about her father, the translator, editor, and literary critic Renato Poggioli, who was tragically killed in a car crash when Sylvia was a teenager. She remembers her literary childhood, in which Robert Lowell would drop by to chat and Vladimir Nabokov once rolled her up in a carpet. But in going through her parents’ papers Poggioli learns a great deal more about them—about their friendships, their personal sacrifices and political commitments, their struggle against Mussolini’s regime (which surveilled her father as a student), the Italian Communist Party (which objected to his translations of Russian poets condemned by Stalin), and the FBI (which suspected him of harboring un-American ideas). Tracing her parents’ journey through their letters and documents, Poggioli realizes “the stories they had told me about their experiences in pre-war Europe were not simply distant, exotic tales but turned out to be useful tools for understanding the history-making events I witnessed as a radio reporter years later.”
“Like many people born in the 1980s, I first heard Paul Simon in a car with my dad,” writes Daniel Drake in his marvelously subtle essay [“Paul Simon: Fathers, Sons, Troubled Water.”]( “Graceland was the album for boomer parents on road trips with their children. In my case, it was a little on the nose: my dad would play Simon’s albums, suffused with second marriages and children, as he picked up my brother and sister and me for his custodial weekend.” Drake follows Simon’s “voyage through maturity” in his solo albums and considers how the lyrics have woven themselves into his own life and memories. He ends with the story of going to hear one of Simon’s final concerts at Madison Square Garden last fall with his Trump-supporting father—setting aside their political differences, at least for the evening. “Don’t give up,” Simon implores the audience. “I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered / I don’t have a friend who feels at ease / I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered / or driven to its knees,” he sings. But to Drake the lyrics sound hollow, “in the center of a stadium concert venue among a crowd of happily vaping boomers. Who has lived so well so long?”
Music also forms a bond between father and son in Édouard Louis’s [“The Pain Never Went Away,”]( an excerpt from his book Who Killed My Father. In it Louis addresses his father directly, remembering their impromptu duets in the car: “Those times I got in the car to ride along with you when you went to buy cigarettes, or something else, but usually and very often cigarettes, you’d put a pirated Céline Dion CD on the stereo—you’d written Céline on it in blue marker—you’d slip in the disc and you’d sing at the top of your lungs. You knew all the words by heart. I’d sing with you, and I know it’s a cliché, but it’s as if in those moments you could tell me things you could never tell me at any other time.” Louis excoriates the French politicians he blames for destroying his father’s health after a factory accident. In taking on his father’s anger at the ruling class, he finds his sympathy reflected back: “You used to say the problem with France was the foreigners and the homosexuals, and now you criticize French racism. You ask me to tell you about the man I love. You buy the books I publish. You give them to people you know. You changed from one day to the next. A friend of mine says it’s the children who mold their parents and not the other way around.”
Elsewhere on the NYR Daily, you’ll find [Allen Hershkowitz](’s essay about finding his father’s Auschwitz file, [Aminatta Forna]( on her father and his generation, “to whom the task fell of creating new countries” in post-independence Africa, [Debbie Bookchin]( on how her father’s work helped inspire a Kurdish independence leader in his vision of democratic society, and [Anastasia Edel]( on how her grandfather commissioned Shostakovich to write perhaps his most-played piece of music.
As always, let us know what you think at daily@nybooks.com.
Matthew Howard
Editorial Director, Digital
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