Memoir:Two different but wonderful books show how children refuse to give up on rotten parents
Edward Cooper was born in the US in 1906. His parents were Russian Jews. In the 1930s he married (his wife was from the same immigrant background) and went to California, where he flourished as a divorce attorney. As a professional, Edward was brutal, driven and desperate to surpass his goyim host community: as a father and husband, he was a toxic mix of the negligent and the overbearing, the mean-spirited and the controlling. There are many fathers like him in the Jewish-American literary canon, in the fiction of Roth and Malamud for instance, but to find his real equivalent one has to go to popular culture, to Ray and his father, Frank, in the US sitcom, Everybody Loves Raymond. What they are is what Edward was, a man who was unavailable emotionally, a man walled up inside the bedrock of his own certainty.
Edward Cooper had four sons: the three oldest, along with his wife, pre-deceased him. Son number one had no wife (Edward had paid his pregnant girlfriend to disappear) but sons two and three did marry (despite his opposition) and produce children. Initially, Edward grieved normally. Later, though, he sued the daughters-in-law for every cent he'd ever paid out for his sons, arguing that these were loans, not gifts. He also billed his surviving youngest son, Bernard, for $78,000 (€59,000), the cost, he argued (the bill was itemised) of raising him. The resulting lawsuits bankrupted Edward and alienated everyone (though Bernard, despite the bill, which he never paid, of course, stayed loyal). Edward lost his house and, at 86, moved to a trailer park with his live-in nurse (she had become his lover). Alzheimer's struck, his lover became his nurse again, and he died in hospital of complications arising from his condition.
Our witness, Bernard, a gay man in a stable relationship (the writer makes great play of this, which is why I mention it, and yes, Edward wasn't delighted with his son's sexual orientation) was a college lecturer who wanted to write. In his father's twilight years he was commissioned to write his father's biography. He started keeping notes. This book is the result, and it is very good indeed. Partly it's the extraordinary story, but mostly it's because of his literary virtues. His storytelling is deft, he's got a nice line in self- deprecation and he doesn't dwell on his misery. He's also genuinely interested in his father's behaviour and, by tirelessly trying to understand him, what might otherwise have been a common-or- garden misery memoir becomes, instead, the psychiatric case history of a paternal grotesque and the warped way he coped with pain.
Donald Antrim, writing his memoir, The Afterlife, faced the same problem as Cooper: how to avoid the piety that can result when a good child describes a bad parent. The subject here is Louanne Antrim, his mother, who married his father, a literature professor, and produced two children, the author and his younger sister, Terry, and then took to drink when her husband began an affair. Divorce and full-blown alcoholism followed: then Antrim senior, for the children's sake, remarried Louanne. This made a bad situation worse. Like George and Martha in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the professor and Louanne rowed horribly. A friend even offered them a gun so that one could kill the other and end their marital misery. They declined and divorced a second time instead.
For the balance of her children's adolescence, Louanne, besides being drunk, was depressed, violent, delusional, manipulative and chaotic. Not until Donald was in his mid-20s did she finally get dry, but alas, her other anti-social qualities remained. Thereafter, she spent her days designing weird clothes no one would wear (she had a PhD in fashion and was a master tailor - she'd always been a high-achieving alcoholic), making enemies and ruining her son's life.
When Louanne's elderly parents died she moved home to sort out the probate and also took the time to swindle her children out of what their grandparents had left them. On her deathbed she promised they'd get their due, but they didn't. Even after two dry decades she was still an alcoholic, and lying was at the core of her character.
Louanne was unappealing and, compared to Bernard Cooper's father, a much more damaging parent: however, despite her being its subject, this isn't a depressing book. It's engaging, well-written and intriguingly structured, but what makes it really distinctive is how fair-minded the author is. No, he never stints on his mother's awfulness: he shows us the whole squalid nine yards, the vomit, the blackouts, the horrible alcohol-fuelled rages. But he also makes us believe in her attractiveness and thereby he makes what would otherwise have been a self-aggrandising and self-serving narrative ("Oh, look how good I am") into the tragic story of a woman of great potential ruined by her addiction.
THESE ARE VERY wonderful as well very different books, but they share one thing that is common to all accounts by the children of rotten parents: Cooper and Antrim never gave up on them. Regardless of what happened, they went on trying to forge a relationship, because that's what the child always does. Children aren't picky. They'll take what they're given and run with it, and that is both quite extraordinary and something we should remember before we split dysfunctional families apart.
Carlo Gébler is currently a lecturer at Queen's University, Belfast. His new play, Henry and Harriet, which will performed in the streets and shops of old Belfast as part of the Cathedral Arts Festival, opens on May 4. His memoir, Father and I, is out in paperback from Little, Brown
The Bill from My Father: A Memoir By Bernard Cooper Picador, 240pp. £12.99 The Afterlife By Donald Antrim Little, Brown. 216pp £15.99