When I was growing up, a huge disparity existed between my father as I knew him and his social image. To the world at large, he was an eminent historian of the United States, a perceptive social critic, and a professor at Columbia University. But as a dad he was playful and affectionate and irreverent. At bedtime he read to me from Dickens, Conan Doyle, Harriet Beecher Stowe, acting out the characters with suitable accents. He followed the exploits of the Brooklyn Dodgers and their star second-baseman, Jackie Robinson. He loved W.C. Fields and Jack Benny, and he doted on Pogo, the comic strip opossum.
My mother had died of colon cancer just before I turned two. I was farmed out to both sets of grandparents, but by the age of five I had rejoined my father, who was then in his early thirties and recently remarried, to a young Cornell graduate.
As a child I knew little about my father’s writing. He was just an amiable fellow sitting off to one side of our living room banging away at an old Underwood typewriter, with the voice of Red Barber, the Dodgers’ broadcaster, yammering over a nearby radio. He was strongly built, a sports fan and a dedicated tennis player.
Then in a flash the amiable professor became a household name across the country. After the publication of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, in 1963, and, the next year, an essay titled ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’, Richard Hofstadter’s ideas and, more broadly, his approach to political culture, passed into the vast, muddy lagoon of journalistic squabble and chitchat. It has stayed there ever since.
Not till I was twenty did I read any of his work. ‘But, dad,’ I said, ‘how can you call paranoia a style? Isn’t it more like a kind of craziness, a mental disorder?’ He smiled at me indulgently, delighted I think to discover that I might take him up on some debatable point. Of course I didn’t know what he meant by style, but I had also missed, inevitably, the depth of the impact he was making. In America the consumers of history books read about wars and battles, famous presidents and generals, captains of industry. That academic writing like my father’s might reach a general audience, that it might set them thinking and arguing, was almost unheard of.
Dick – that was his nickname – was well-read. He would offhandedly quote Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats; he told me to read Dreiser and Orwell and Edmund Wilson; year by year he followed Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Roth. He was steeped in Freud and contemporary American psychiatry; he could also rattle off long, purple sentences from Warren G. Harding’s speeches, reveling in their absurdity. In the kitchen, at supper, he would often flip on the radio to catch the evening broadcast of Fulton Lewis Jr., a vituperative rightwing extremist whom he loved to ridicule.
My father’s ranging sociological focus has been widely discussed. Yet what a family member was most likely to note in mentions of my father’s writing was the phrase ‘common climate of opinion’, used to sum up his approach to pervasive social attitudes. A common climate of opinion – a phrase he used in his book The American Political Tradition – set the tone for many social antagonisms, yet figures quite opposed on the political spectrum might actually, if unwittingly, share in that opinion. As a kid bemused by my dad’s shrewd statements, I once asked him how a historian could know what had caused something to happen. ‘Son,’ he replied, ‘I’ve never really felt that I understand what causes things to happen. One thing, though – I do know how they don’t happen.’
I was innocent (and still am) of any sense of how a serious historical thesis is crafted. Yet even I detected the irony in the popularization of some of my father’s ideas, especially those concerning popular sentiment. He had written on many aspects of American history, including social Darwinism, slavery, indentured servitude, and the chief historians of the early twentieth-century progressive movement. But the middlebrow press was aware of one thing only: his attention to the boobyish American susceptibility to conspiracy theories and to our native hostility to reasoned discourse, to science, indeed to fact. Talk about climates of opinion! His work had generated its own climate of opinion, a micro-climate if you will. Some in the press had even instrumentalized his brand of social criticism as a weapon of the left, but in fact my father, once a leftwing radical, had abandoned such views several years before my birth. He was the archetypal centrist liberal, a skeptical appreciator of FDR (whose voice he could perfectly mimic), a pro-Stevenson voter in the 1952 and 1956 election campaigns. He was an avowed foe of Senator McCarthy, and I well recall Joseph N. Welch stretched out on our living-room sofa, orating softly. Later, Dick marched in Selma behind Martin Luther King, Jr.
Though baptized and reared in his mother’s Protestant faith – as a boy he sang in his church choir – Dick, like his father, a Jewish furrier who made a tidy living during the Depression mending women’s furs, was outspokenly anti-clerical. (In truth, nobody in our family had any religious feeling.) Dick the homebody wore soft, baggy clothes, tweed jackets, clip-on bowties, and tortoise-shell glasses. His appearance was cherubic. My mother, who was Jewish, addressed him in her letters as ‘Shefele’, meaning Little Lamb in Yiddish (in response he called her Fegel, or Little Bird). He was never flirtatious but he did tend to grow very fond of his female friends, and many women said that on meeting him they instantly loved him – he seemed, they said, so sweet-natured. A girl I was involved with told me, ‘Your dad has kind eyes.’
Yet a great perplexity hung over me: why did this sweet-natured man, whose chosen role it was to recall and interpret the memories of a nation, never seem to remember my mother? I knew that her name was Felice Swados, that she’d been a novelist and journalist, but what had she looked like? What were her interests and opinions? What had caused him to fall in love with her? For my father declined to share anything about her. Virtually no trace of her – no photos, no letters, no mementos – could be found anywhere in our home, and all members of her family were tacitly banned from our household. Her entire life had been as thoroughly ‘scrubbed’ from ours as the faces of those fallen from grace were airbrushed from photos in the Soviet press.
It is nowhere written that the world will offer a vivid portrait of an infant’s deceased mother. What is passed, people say, is passed, but I wanted for all that to reclaim her. I have read most of Felice’s surviving journals and letters, but I cannot to this day summon a clear vision of her being. Above all, the question nags: why had my father participated in the erasure of her memory?
The criminal code of New York prohibits something called ‘the concealment of a corpse’. My mother’s mortal remains had not been hidden exactly, but their burial place was unknown to me, and the story of her nine-year marriage to my father had certainly been concealed. Yet for this I had myself partly to blame: much like her father and her brother, I always shied away in distress from any discussion of her horribly painful death.
So, I, too, had failed to acknowledge the woman who had brought me into the world. But then, when I was fifteen, on our family’s return from Cambridge, in the UK, where my father had been a visiting fellow at Gonville & Caius College, I asked his permission to enter the conjugal bedroom. It was late summer in New York: the standard green-and-white striped awnings of the day shaded our French windows from the sun, and I could feel the overheated air, smelling of car-exhaust and parched sycamore leaves, rising from the street below. Standing there, I announced my intention to lay a bouquet on my mother’s grave, and I asked him where she was buried. Bewildered, he replied that he didn’t know. He had forgotten. He offered no further help, and I left doubting his candor. With one stroke, he had drawn a veil over my origin, while also denying any retrospective sympathy to his first spouse, who had died at twenty-nine. It was a summary and abdication from his role as a father.
By fifteen I did possess a sort of synoptic history of my mother’s life, stitched together from anecdotes, letters, and photos given to me by her brother. I knew, for instance, that like my father she had grown up in Buffalo, and had met him at the University of Buffalo. As a student she had dark eyes, dark hair; she was tall, and in the photos, she had a winsome expression. She graduated summa cum laude; was active in left-wing student politics during the thirties; and obtained an MA in philosophy from Smith College. She worked for a while as a counselor at a reformatory for girls, then as a medical journalist for Time. She wrote a study for the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, put out by Johns Hopkins University, disproving the canard that slaves in the South, being valuable property, had received good medical care. In her mid-twenties she finished a novel, House of Fury, published in 1941 by Doubleday, Doran, a house that championed John Steinbeck, Booth Tarkington, and Daphne du Maurier. The book was well reviewed by the critics. She gave birth to me, and then, a year and a half later, she died.
In time I began to collect the letters exchanged between Dick, Felice, and her younger brother Harvey, himself a novelist and essayist. These oddments cover the roughly ten-year period of Felice and Dick’s engagement and marriage during the Depression, and tail off with Felice’s death in 1945. Whereas the press tends to portray my father as an arid intellectual, a compact bundle of ideas, the three-way family correspondence conjures up a picture of a group of passionate and convivial but often bewildered young people. They are frank about sex; they exchange tips about classical music concerts; they are angry about the breadlines and mass unemployment, and they subscribe (for the moment) to various leftwing theories. Most striking to me, however, are the frequent references to Felice’s father’s aversion to Dick and bitter opposition to their marriage. My maternal grandfather was a doctor who wore three-piece suits and fob watches and liked to quote Goethe in German. Born in Lithuania, speaking with an unplaceable foreign accent, he had come to America as a child and later won a reputation as a perceptive diagnostician. In his view, Dick, had a ‘weak character,’ and Felice never managed to disabuse her father of this brutal opinion. Nonetheless, the word ‘weak’ reminded me of her own nickname for my dad, Little Lamb.
In these letters radical political opinions often crop up, but in an increasingly faded or dismembered form as time goes on. Felice, at college an ardent socialist, writes less about politics and more about the domestic details of her marriage and personal friends, some of whom begin to resemble characters in a short story. Dick meanwhile grows disgusted with the Soviet Union after the Moscow show trials of 1936–8, and his pragmatism also comes to the fore. ‘If I refused to associate with everything I disapprove of,’ he told Harvey, ‘it would be absolutely impossible for me to function in this society.’ The University of Maryland hired him in 1942, yet it was, he said, ‘a Jim Crow [sic] university and I have no business there at all. But . . . I say what I want to say about race equality . . .’
This much, then, I knew about Felice. But I still did not know where she was buried.
How had my dad forgotten this, as he claimed? Well, I possessed part of an answer to the question. Dick’s own mother had died of intestinal cancer when he was ten, and it was reported in the Swados family that as an adult he had never consented to talk about her, indeed that he claimed to remember nothing about her death or anything about his early childhood. At home, Dick discussed illnesses, both his own and ours, with the hypochondriac’s agonized superfluity of knowledge, so that all minor complaints invited jittery prognoses. Once a small wound on his hand led him to inform me that sepsis surely loomed and might shortly put him in the hospital. His anxiety felt comical sometimes, but the comicality masked a dread we all shared.
We lived in an ornate, eleven-story apartment building, but we were only renters – New York was then a city of renters. My father lined the walls of our place with books in their thousands, so that it was virtually upholstered in paper. Our kitchen was tiny, suitable only for a hired family cook, a type of servant we could not afford; across from the range, a small door opened on a dumbwaiter, so that a child, sticking his head inside, could peer up and down the dark, boundless shaft where hand-drawn ropes shuttled briskly in both directions.
Absence and loss haunted my childhood, so that much of it seemed empty of meaning. Despite my father’s gift of sympathy, I never had a single genuinely personal conversation with him. When touching shyly upon people’s feelings, he would bandy psychiatric terms, as if nothing were real or graspable unless turned into an abstraction. Yet one incident stands out in my memory with a sort of precise metaphorical aptness.
I had been sent to a local ‘progressive’ school attached to a teachers’ training college, but by the middle of second grade I still could not read. The predicament appalled my parents, and I overheard feverish late-night discussions of the situation. Nowadays a learning disability like dyslexia would likely be diagnosed, but perhaps it was not easily recognized – not there, at least, not then. Feeling that I was not up to scratch, I would restlessly wander about the school halls during free periods, and after the last lesson I would dart outside with a coin in my hand. That year my stepmother had granted me an allowance of five cents a week, a shiny nickel bestowed on me every Monday. It could buy almost nothing, she knew that, but in the society of other nickels it might offer a child his first edifying experience of ‘saving up’ and, eventually, of choosing something to buy on his own.
I had another use for the weekly nickel. Around the corner from the school, and thus strategically situated, was a candy store that also sold soda pop, cheap toys, and magazines. Inside were tall glass jars piled high with various kinds of sweets, among them a tiny, banana-shaped biscuit, costing a penny apiece. In my mouth it tasted vaguely like banana and turned into a doughy mucilage between my teeth. It was disgusting, and I loved it.
Each Monday, I would head down to the candy store. Once, with five candy bananas in my pocket, I was climbing back up the stairs to the sidewalk when I saw over me the black mass of curls and beady eyes of my stepmother. The candy bananas were angrily confiscated and the allowance docked forthwith.
Even at age seven, I had enough presence of mind to perceive the absurdity of the situation. Like a private eye in a movie, this woman had shadowed me, staked out the candy store as a likely crime scene, waited for half an hour or so, and then performed her triumphant arrest. All on account of a nickel.
Her name was Beatrice. Clever, talkative, and passing for unusually good-looking (I had no sense of such things), she had married my father about two years after my mother’s death. Having worked in publishing, she flaunted an air of literary sophistication, reviewing his galleys with him and beginning sentences with expressions like au contraire or entre nous. Though my father had taught himself to write long before meeting her, he took pains to confirm her claim to be the true source of his prose style, while also admitting to me, in the wary tone of a guard fraternizing with a POW, ‘She is, you know, so terribly insecure.’
At first the new menage proceeded smoothly enough, but soon a sourness crept into my stepmother’s speech that differed greatly from my grandparents’ fond way of addressing me. Like certain schoolteachers, she had decided that sarcasm offered a witty way to keep a kid ‘in line’ while concealing one’s own asperity. This was especially noticeable at mealtimes.
‘Might his excellency deign to finish his supper?’ was one of her standard gambits.
Or, ‘Would it be an imposition to ask you to help clear the table?’
And in this tense psychological environment the years passed fretfully. Now and again I would visit my Swados cousins in the country, who let me know that it was Beatrice who had declared their brood unwelcome at our door.
There were also the many times when my stepmother scolded me with shrieking fervor, her face purple, unaware that the scoldee had no awareness of his crime. By degrees her irritation would mount to a tearful paroxysm of rage, her face purple, her beady eyes ready to shoot out of her head. Such tantrums (accented by frequent slaps, humiliating though not painful) often grew so extravagant, in a way so hammy, that they seemed – to borrow from the lexicon of theater criticism – less realistic than expressionistic. Much later, thinking back, I concluded that despite my cold, unrepentant stares this woman didn’t even genuinely dislike me; what she hated was simply my being there, the presence in the house of the upshot of my father’s union with another woman. All the while, my dad maintained, always, a mysterious absence. He did not back her up, or, for that matter, come to my defense. Implicitly, however, he was ratifying her behavior, just as he had meekly subscribed to her blanket repudiation of my mother’s family.
Yet once, later, in the midst of a fierce dispute between Beatrice and myself – at twelve I was as tall as she and a walking cornucopia of backtalk – my father emerged from nowhere, hulking, distraught, and began to wail at us to stop quarreling. Wretchedly he lurched up and down the main corridor of our apartment, tearing all the history books from the shelves until they lay, hundreds of them, in piles on the floor.
Shielded by his work, my poor father – our poor father, I should say, since I had meanwhile been joined by a little sister (technically half-sister), eight years younger than myself – continued to produce. In 1970, however, having contracted leukemia, he died, at age fifty-four. He did not now seem like a hypochondriac, no, more like a sort of medium, a seer full of medical premonitions. Famous and well-off by then, he left me nothing in his will, no heirlooms, manuscripts, letters, or photographs, not even five cents. And had the mystery surrounding my mother’s gravesite been solved, at long last? It had not.
Not that the urge to find it had dissipated. One of Harvey’s sons, my cousin Robin Swados, had long cherished a curiosity about his aunt Felice. An actor and playwright, he possessed, as I did, a copy of her novel House of Fury, whose bizarre afterlife began to claim his attention. Based on her experience working at the euphemistically named New York State Training School for Girls, in Hudson, New York, the book belongs to the rather dated genre of testimonial fiction, in which the author tells an illuminating story, either true or roughly plausible, about a group of impoverished or downtrodden people. In a direct, heartfelt way, equally devoid of self-conscious literary effects and left-wing moralizing, the tale relates the vicissitudes of several young inmates, focusing at length on two Black girls, called Bluebell and Orchid, who escape during a riot and run off toward Harlem. Reviewers praised House of Fury as a highly creditable first effort, suggesting the influence of John Steinbeck, though Felice’s letters to her brother reflect a deeper immersion in James T. Farrell.
Robin discovered that Felice’s novel had been snatched up by the girlie-pulp industry. The idea of a set-to in a prison for girls excited the imagination of purveyors of dime novels, with the result that numerous pocket editions of the text began to appear with deceptive, salacious covers. What Robin did not yet know, however, was that a teenaged Ella Fitzgerald, ‘guilty’ of running away from an orphanage in the Bronx, had been interned at the upstate ‘training school’ a few years before my mother arrived there; and in fact the character of little Bluebell in the novel (of whom her friend Orchid complains that ‘she only want to sing’) bore a stunning similarity to Ella. The person to notice this was a New York Times reporter named Nina Bernstein, a veteran investigator of incarceration, who had written a magisterial, book-length account of a historic conflict in the foster-care world, titled The Lost Children of Wilder.
Robin had compiled a substantial sheaf of information about House of Fury when, by chance, in February 2009, an airplane crash near Buffalo that killed forty-nine people led to an on-air discussion of the major cemeteries in the area. This grisly coincidence led him to telephone the superintendents of these graveyards, one of whom, reviewing his records, informed him that the suburb of Cheektowaga, near Buffalo, held a large, tightly packed array of burial grounds, mostly Roman Catholic and Jewish. There a small plot was dedicated to the Swados family.
We flew to the city, and before heading to our destination visited – it had to happen – Niagara Falls. There, amid the crowds of awestruck honeymooners, we – or I, at least – tried to indulge in the required reverie about the magnificence of nature and the paltriness of man. But as I contemplated the vast cottony blur, I found my thoughts straying.
One memory stubbornly haunted me, for it seemed to offer some explanation as to my father’s willful oblivion. I had asked Dick once what he had done during the war, aware that many adults I knew, despite their pacifist inclinations, had been drafted or volunteered to serve. My Uncle Harvey, for example, Robin’s father, had served in the Merchant Marine; another Swados relative had been awarded a Purple Heart for wounds sustained in Italy. ‘Well, I realized,’ Dick told me, ‘that I didn’t have the courage to join up. But I also came to the conclusion that just doing my job’ – he then had a teacher’s draft deferment – ‘required its own sort of courage.’
Not very convincing, really. Dick never had the nerve to stand up to threats or bullying, much less to battlefield contests. But memories, like prairie-dog tunnels, are all interconnected, and this train of thought led me to another. One of Dick and Felice’s favorite authors was the literary critic Edmund Wilson. Felice told her brother that he absolutely had to read Axel’s Castle, and when I asked my father for an explanation of how Lenin had triumphed in Russia, he gave me a copy of To the Finland Station.
But that wasn’t all I remembered. I had never met Edmund Wilson, but once, on Cape Cod, a couple who were renting his summer cottage, near Truro, asked me to babysit their children. The old place sat near the bay in the sandy soil beside a woodlot redolent of pitch-pine and Indian-grass; in the musty interior the children were already asleep, and I wandered around examining Wilson’s many bibelots and well-used books.
I picked up The Wound and the Bow. I had not read it, and would not do so for another ten years, but my dad had mentioned it many times. The title referred to Philoctetes, a play by Sophocles about an archer marooned on the island of Lemnos who is afflicted by a wound so foul-smelling that the Greek army cannot tolerate his presence in their midst. Yet Philoctetes is needed, because he carries the bow of Hercules, prophesized to bring about the capture of Troy. Wilson’s theme here was that many creative people have suffered a terrible psychic wound, usually in childhood, but that they compensate for it, and eventually overcome it, with their mystical poetic skill, like the Greek archer with his bow.
And what of my father? Was it possible that the trauma of losing his mother and then his wife to cancer had opened a wound so deep that it prevented him from confronting certain memories? And was it possible that what he forfeited in the strength to face such blows he made up for in his formidable tenacity behind the typewriter? That, perhaps, was the bargain he had struck, consciously or otherwise, to maintain his mental equilibrium. Yet something else, more melancholy, also occupied my thoughts. Why had he left me nothing in his last testament? Had I merely slipped his mind? Or did he secretly resent me for being born just as his wife began to die? For a while I weighed the two possibilities against each other but soon saw that I was not of two minds but ten. There were so very many explanations of what had happened, of everything that he had done and not done, and neither he nor Felice were alive to comment upon them. I had no choice but to forget it all, to embrace my ghostly parentage.
A bit of a hike lay before us when Robin and I arrived at the cemetery. It was uneven ground, now uphill amid granite urns and obelisks, now downhill amid clumps of ornamental yews. We had first to trudge up Pine Ridge Road, then make a left past a dour chapel, then make two more turns, until at last we found Lot 128. There the modest, mossy headstones of six Swadoses studded the ground, including those of Felice and her mother. Felice’s monument was the smallest of the lot, a block of stone with her name inscribed in it, almost covered by the ragged turf. It was scarcely larger than a common brick.
Featured image of Richard Hofstadter courtesy of University Archives, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York
