Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

I have to talk about another matter we didn’t discuss, father and son, while we were both alive — all right, it was my fault, maybe you’re right, as I’ve said, times were different. . Women. I must bring this up because — my poor boy — marriage was ‘the greatest terror’ of your life. You write that. You say your attempts to explain why you couldn’t marry — on these depends the ‘success’ of the whole letter you didn’t send. According to you, marrying, founding a family was ‘the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all’. Yet you couldn’t marry. How is any ordinary human being to understand that? You wrote more than a quarter of a million words to Felice Bauer, but you couldn’t be a husband to her. You put your parents through the farce of travelling all the way to Berlin for an engagement party (there’s the photograph you had taken, the happy couple, in the books they write about you, by the way). The engagement was broken, was on again, off again. Can you wonder? Anyone who goes into a bookshop or library can read what you wrote to your fiancée when your sister Elli gave birth to our first granddaughter. You felt nothing but nastiness, envy against your brother-in-law because ‘I’ll never have a child.’ No, not with the Bauer girl, not in a decent marriage, like anybody else’s son; but I’ve found out you had a child, Brod says so, by a woman, Grete Bloch, who was supposed to be the Bauer girl’s best friend, who even acted as matchmaker between you! What do you say to that? Maybe it’s news to you. I don’t know. (That’s how irresponsible you were.) They say she went away. Perhaps she never told you.

As for the next one you tried to marry, the one you make such a song and dance over because of my remark about Prague Jewesses and the blouse, etc. — for once you came to your senses, and you called off the wedding only two days before it was supposed to take place. Not that I could have influenced you. Since when did you take into consideration what your parents thought? When you told me you wanted to marry the shoemaker’s daughter — naturally I was upset. At least the Bauer girl came from a nice family. What I said about the blouse just came out, I’m human, after all. But I was frank with you, man to man. You weren’t a youngster any more. A man doesn’t have to marry a nothing who will go with anybody.

I saw what that marriage was about, my poor son. You wanted a woman. Nobody understood that better than I did, believe me, I was normal man enough, eh! There were places in Prague where one could get a woman. (I suppose whatever’s happened, there still are, always will be.) I tried to help you; I offered to go along with you myself. I said it in front of your mother, who — yes, as you write you were so shocked to see, was in agreement with me. We wanted so much to help you, even your own mother would go so far as that.

But in that letter you didn’t think I’d ever see, you accuse me of humiliating you and I don’t know what else. You wanted to marry a tart, but you were insulted at the idea of buying one?

Writing that letter only a few days after you yourself called off your second try at getting married, aged thirty-six, you find that your father, as a man of the world, not only showed ‘contempt’ for you on that occasion, but that when he had spoken to you as a broad-minded father when you were a youngster, he had given you information that set off the whole ridiculous business of your never being able to marry, ever. Already, twenty years before the Julie Wohryzek row, with ‘a few frank words’ (as you put it) your father made you incapable of taking a wife and pushed you down ‘into the filth as if it were my destiny’. You remember some walk with your mother and me on the Josefsplatz when you showed curiosity about, well, men’s feelings and women, and I was open and honest with you and told you I could give you advice about where to go so that these things could be done quite safely, without bringing home any disease. You were sixteen years old, physically a man, not a child, eh? Wasn’t it time to talk about such things?

Shall I tell you what I remember? Once you picked a quarrel with your mother and me because we hadn’t educated you sexually — your words. Now you complain because I tried to guide you in these matters. I did — I didn’t. Make up your mind. Have it your own way. Whatever I did, you believed it was because of what I did that you couldn’t bring yourself to marry. When you thought you wanted the Bauer girl, didn’t I give in, to please you? Although you were in no financial position to marry, although I had to give your two married sisters financial help, although I had worries enough, a sick man, you’d caused me enough trouble by persuading me to invest in a mechulah asbestos factory? Didn’t I give in? And when the girl came to Prague to meet your parents and sisters, you wrote, ‘My family likes her almost more than I’d like it to.’ So it went as far as that: you couldn’t like anything we liked, was that why you couldn’t marry her?

A long time ago, a long way. . ah, it all moves away, it’s getting faint. . But I haven’t finished. Wait.

You say you wrote your letter because you wanted to explain why you couldn’t marry. I’m writing this letter because you tried to write it for me. You would take even that away from your father . You answered your own letter, before I could. You made what you imagine as my reply part of the letter you wrote me. To save me the trouble. . Brilliant, like they say. With your great gifts as a famous writer, you express it all better than I could. You are there, quickly, with an answer, before I can be. You take the words out of my mouth: while you are accusing yourself, in my name, of being ‘too clever, obsequious, parasitic and insincere’ in blaming your life on me, you are — yet again, one last time! — finally being too clever, obsequious, parasitic and insincere in the trick of stealing your father’s chance to defend himself. A genius. What is left to say about you if — how well you know yourself, my boy, it’s terrible — you call yourself the kind of vermin that doesn’t only sting, but at the same time sucks blood to keep itself alive? And even that isn’t the end of the twisting, the cheating. You then confess that this whole ‘correction’, ‘rejoinder’, as you, an expensively educated man, call it, ‘does not originate’ in your father but in you yourself, Franz Kafka. So you see, here’s the proof, something I know you, with all your brains, can’t know for me : you say you always wrote about me, it was all about me, your father; but it was all about you. The beetle. The bug that lay on its back waving its legs in the air and couldn’t get up to go and see America or the Great Wall of China. You, you, self, self. And in your letter, after you have defended me against yourself, when you finally make the confession — right again, in the right again, always — you take the last word, in proof of your saintliness I could know nothing about, never understand, a businessman, a shopkeeper. That is your ‘truth’ about us you hoped might be able to ‘make our living and our dying easier’.

The way you ended up, Franz. The last woman you found yourself. It wasn’t our wish, God knows. Living with that Eastern Jewess, and in sin. We sent you money; that was all we could do. If we’d come to see you, if we’d swallowed our pride, meeting that woman, our presence would only have made you worse. It’s there in everything you’ve written, everything they write about you: everything connected with us made you depressed and ill. We knew she was giving you the wrong food, cooking like a gypsy on a spirit stove. She kept you in an unheated hovel in Berlin. . may God forgive me (Brod has told the world), I had to turn my back on her at your funeral.