A Lie About My Father

Table of Contents

By the same author

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Epub ISBN: 9781409017097

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Published by Jonathan Cape 2006

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Copyright © John Burnside 2006

John Burnside has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

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First published in Great Britain in 2006 by

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This book is best treated as a work of fiction. If he were here to discuss it, my father would agree, I’m sure, that it’s as true to say that I never had a father as it is to say that he never had a son.

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss – we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this
our
cloud upon the precipice’s edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall – this rushing annihilation – for the very reason that it involves one of the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination – for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at
thought
, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and
therefore
it is, I say, that we
cannot
. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.

Examine these and similar actions as we will, we shall find them resulting solely from the spirit of the
Perverse
. We perpetrate them merely because we feel that we should
not
. Beyond or behind this there is no intelligible principle; and we might, indeed, deem this perverseness a direct instigation of the arch-fiend, were it not occasionally known to operate in the furtherance of good.

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Imp of the Perverse’

Where, during all these years, was my free will? From what deep and hidden place was it called forth in a moment so that I might bend my neck under thy yoke, which is easy, and take up thy burden, which is light?

St Augustine,
Confessions

BIRDLAND

Patti Smith

Every year, it comes as a surprise. The leaves flare, for a time, to crimson and butter yellow, the air shifts, in the early morning, from the damp greens of late summer to soft graphites and an occasional, miraculous quail grey. Everything brightens before it burns away, the way a dying man is suddenly filled with new hope, hours before they are laying him out to be washed and dressed for the last time in a cool side room. I was brought up, not necessarily to believe, but to allow for the possibility that the dead come back at Halloween; or rather, not the dead, but their souls: whether as individual wisps of fading consciousness or some single, aggregated mass, it didn’t matter. All I knew was that
soul
was there, in one of its many guises: ghost, or revenant, breath of wind, figment of light or fire, or just some inexplicable memory, some snapshot filed away at the back of my mind, a picture I didn’t even know I possessed until that moment.

So it is that, with the usual show of scepticism and something close to total conviction, I have celebrated Halloween all my life. Most years, if I can, I stay at home. I make an occasion of the day, a private, local festival of penance and celebration in more or less equal measure. I think of my own dead, out there among the millions of returning souls permitted, for this one night, to visit the places they once knew, the houses they inhabited, the streets they crossed on their way to work, or to secret assignations, and I remember why, in my part of the world, the living spend this day building fires, so they can light them all at once, all over the darkening land, as night approaches. It’s not, as mere superstition says, that they are trying to frighten off evil spirits. No: the purpose of these fires is to light the way, and to offer a little warmth to ghosts who are so like ourselves that we are all interchangeable: living and dead; guest and host; householder and spectre; my father, myself. One day we may all be ghosts, and the ghosts we entertain will live and breathe again. Perhaps, in the past, each of us knew what it was to wander home and find it strange, the garden altered, the kitchen full of strangers.

To make it work, Halloween has to be a collaboration. The dead have their part to play, but so have the living. The reason I stay close to home on Halloween – whatever
home
happens to be – isn’t just because I am conscious of, even dutiful about, my part in the ritual, but also because I know how vulnerable I am at such times. Halloween is an occasion, not just for visitations, but also for subtle, yet significant shifts and slips in the psyche, near-imperceptible transformations that, by the time they become visible, have altered the path of a life for ever. At Halloween, when the ghosts are about, I feel more open; more open, and more alert, but also more threatened. It’s best, at such times, to sit at home until the first light breaks, and send my personal spirits away satisfied.

There have been times, however, when I had to be away: out on the road, somewhere in transit, alone, exposed, capable of forgetting what I think I am. Ten years ago, for instance, I was driving in the Finger Lakes region of upper New York State, alone in a rented car, as the day of the dead approached. I had arrived in Rochester, NY, towards the end of October, and now I was searching for the little town where a friend lived, not far from Lake Keuka. I get lost easily – willingly, perhaps – and it was an easy place to get lost in, all the little roads leading off to places that were more beautiful and silent than any I had seen till then. So I was thoroughly lost that morning, when I stopped to pick up the clown. I didn’t know he was a clown when I picked him up, but I could have guessed as much from his looks, and from the way he stood by the side of the road, utterly indifferent to the absence of traffic, or to the question of whether I would give him a lift. Even though he didn’t appear to be a local, he looked like someone who knew the way.

It was the mid-nineties and I had been having a difficult year. I was stressed, tired, grateful to be alone and out on the road. I was tired of my work; tired of my history; tired, more than anything, of being
a person
(when St Paul tells us that God is no respecter of persons, he is saying more than we usually understand). I was tired of acting, tired of being visible. Driving around in that quiet corner of the world, passing through little townships where the children had set great grinning or mock-scary jack-o’-lanterns on the porches, I might as well have been invisible, a man from nowhere, as anyone is when he is passing through. I had been on the road for a while, and I was content just to drive around, stopping from time to time for a coffee and moving on, like a faint gust of wind that the local people, with their own dramas and hurts to enact, barely noticed, if they noticed it at all.

So I was happy being alone, enjoying the quiet of who I am when I am not with others, and I had no wish to change my situation till I stopped in a small town for lunch. I don’t remember where it was, or why it appealed to me particularly, all I recall is the narrow, sparsely furnished diner, and the fact that it was empty. Empty, that is, but for the woman who brought me the menu, a painter working as a waitress (I have never met a waitress working as a painter, or an actor playing Hamlet till the next busboy position frees up, but I believed her, that day, and I still do today). She was a very beautiful woman, which struck me as odd at the time, because I hadn’t thought of American women as beautiful till I met her. Pretty, yes; attractive, very often; but not beautiful. To me, they usually looked too new, as if they had just come off an assembly line. But then, I was more accustomed to California, where
everything
looks too new.