Jonathan Franzen - How to Be Alone - Essays

Fortunately, my mother was a great writer of letters. My father’s passivity, which I regarded as regrettable but not really any of my business, was a source of bitter disappointment to her. As late as the fall of 1989—a season in which, according to her letters, my father was still playing golf and undertaking major home repairs — the terms of her complaints remained strictly personal:

It is extremely difficult living with a very unhappy person when you know you must be the major cause of the unhappiness. Decades ago when Dad told me he didn’t believe there is such a thing as love (that sex is a “trap”) and that he was not cut out to be a “happy” person I should have been smart enough to realize there was no hope for a relationship satisfactory to me . But I was busy & involved with my children and friends I loved and I guess, like Scarlett O’Hara, I told myself I would “worry about that tomorrow.”

This letter dates from a period during which the theater of my parents’ war had shifted to the issue of my father’s hearing impairment. My mother maintained that it was inconsiderate not to wear a hearing aid; my father complained that other people lacked the consideration to “speak up.” The battle culminated Pyrrhically in his purchase of a hearing aid that he then declined to wear. Here again, my mother constructed a moral story of his “stubbornness” and “vanity” and “defeatism”; but it’s hard not to suspect, in hindsight, that his faulty ears were already serving to camouflage more serious trouble.

A letter from January 1990 contains my mother’s first written reference to this trouble:

Last week one day he had to skip his breakfasttime medication in order to take some motor skills tests at Wash U. where he is in the Memory & Ageing study. That night I awakened to the sound of his electric razor, looked at the clock & he was in the bathroom shaving at 2:30 AM.

Within a few months my father was making so many mistakes that my mother was forced to entertain other explanations:

Either he’s stressed or not concentrating or having some mental deterioration but there have been quite a few incidents recently that really worry me. He keeps leaving the car door open or the lights on & twice in one week we had to call triple A & have them come out & charge the battery (now I’ve posted signs in the garage & that seems to have helped). . I really don’t like the idea of leaving him in the house alone for more than a short while.

My mother’s fear of leaving him alone assumed greater urgency as the year wore on. Her right knee was worn out, and, because she already had a steel plate in her leg from an earlier fracture, she was facing complicated surgery followed by prolonged recovery and rehab. Her letters from late 1990 and early 1991 are marked by paragraphs of agonizing over whether to have surgery and how to manage my father if she did.

Were he in the house alone more than overnight with me in the hospital I would be an absolute basket case as he leaves the water running, the stove on at times, lights on everywhere, etc. . I check & recheck as much as I can on most things lately but even so many of our affairs are in a state of confusion & what really is hardest is his resentment of my intrusion—“stay out of my affairs!!!” He does not accept or realize my wanting to be helpful & that is the hardest thing of all for me.

At the time, I’d recently finished my second novel, and so I offered to stay with my father while my mother had her operation. To steer clear of his pride, she and I agreed to pretend that I was coming for her sake, not his. What’s odd, though, is that I was only half-pretending. My mother’s characterization of my father’s incapacity was compelling, but so was my father’s portrayal of my mother as an alarmist nag. I went to St. Louis because, for her, his incapacity was absolutely real; once there, I behaved as if, for me, it absolutely wasn’t.

Just as she’d feared, my mother was in the hospital for nearly five weeks. Strangely, although I’d never lived alone with my father for so long and never would again, I can now remember almost nothing specific about my stay with him; I have a general impression that he was somewhat quiet, maybe, but otherwise completely normal. Here, you might think, was a direct contradiction of my mother’s earlier reports. And yet I have no memory of being bothered by the contradiction. What I do have is a copy of a letter that I wrote to a friend while in St. Louis. In the letter, I mention that my father has had his medication adjusted and now everything is fine.

Wishful thinking? Yes, to some extent. But one of the basic features of the mind is its keenness to construct wholes out of fragmentary parts. We all have a literal blind spot in our vision where the optic nerve attaches to the retina, but our brain unfailingly registers a seamless world around us. We catch part of a word and hear the whole. We see expressive faces in floral-pattern upholstery; we constantly fill in blanks. In a similar way, I think I was inclined to interpolate across my father’s silences and mental absences and to persist in seeing him as the same old wholly whole Earl Franzen. I still needed him to be an actor in my story of myself. In my letter to my friend, I describe a morning rehearsal of the St. Louis Symphony that my mother insisted that my father and I attend so as not to waste her free tickets to it. After the first half of the session, in which the very young Midori nailed the Sibelius violin concerto, my father sprang from his seat with miserable geriatric agitation. “So,” he said, “we’ll go now.” I knew better than to ask him to sit through the Charles Ives symphony that was coming, but I hated him for what I took to be his philistinism. On the drive home, he had one comment about Midori and Sibelius. “I don’t understand that music,” he said. “What do they do — memorize it?”

LATER THAT SPRING, my father was diagnosed with a small, slow-growing cancer in his prostate. His doctors recommended that he not bother treating it, but he insisted on a course of radiation. With a kind of referred wisdom about his own mental state, he became terrified that something was dreadfully wrong with him: that he would not, after all, survive into his nineties. My mother, whose knee continued to bleed internally six months after her operation, had little patience with what she considered his hypochondria. In September 1991 she wrote:

I’m relieved to have Dad started on his radiation therapy & it forces him to get out of the house every day [inserted, here, a smiley face] — a big plus. He got to the point where he was so nervous, so worried , so depressed I knew he had to make some decision. Actually, being so sedentary now (content to do nothing), he has had too much time to worry & think about himself — he NEEDS distractions!. . More & more I feel the greatest attributes anyone can have are (1), a positive attitude & (2), a sense of humor — wish Dad had them.

There ensued some months of relative optimism. The cancer was eradicated, my mother’s knee finally improved, and her native hopefulness returned to her letters. She reported that my father had taken first place in a game of bridge: “With his confusion cleared up & his less conservative approach to the game he is doing remarkably well & it’s about the only thing he enjoys (& can stay awake for!).” But my father’s anxiety about his health did not abate; he had stomach pains that he was convinced were caused by cancer. Gradually, the import of the story my mother was telling me migrated from the personal and the moral toward the psychiatric. “The past six months we have lost so many friends it is very unsettling — part of Dad’s nervousness & depression I’m sure,” she wrote in February 1992. The letter continued: