Papa

I rolled over in my sleep this morning and was awakened by a sharp pain in my back. Reaching behind me I found a small car that had been left in the bed by my son Andy the night before. This is one of those incidents designed by God to remind a man that he is married with children: it means something else completely when a single man finds a hard plastic battery-driven toy in his bed.

Recently, it seems, my whole life revolves around these little reminders. Andy is sixteen months old, an age at which Dr. Spock recommends toilet training. The good doctor also says that for boys the best training is watching what Daddy does in the bathroom, so for the last month I’ve begun each day by carrying my sleepy son into our house’s smallest room so he can watch me pee. As an only child of a single parent I am by nature pretty private about these matters, but Andy seems quite interested in bathroom procedures, which is encouraging, and if I don’t let him pull the flush lever he’ll sulk for hours.

This morning I watched Andy’s face as he watched the intricate dance steps that men perform when they void their bladders, and I was struck again by how intensely children observe the world. For those few moments my son forgot about his thumb and his stuffed clown, and I swear he was holding his breath. On one hand I’m flattered by this attention, by my son’s evident belief that my actions are the template by which perfect behavior might be molded, but on the other hand I’m a little scared by the responsibility. For the next thirteen years (until Andy discovers, as all teenagers do, that his Dad’s an idiot) my every action will be a potential time bomb.

If he sees me smoking, will he start young, never quit, and die of emphysema before his 50th birthday? If I open his mother’s credit card bill and mutter an oath, will he grow up a vulgar tightwad? If he hears me call in sick to work when he knows I’m going to spend the day on the beach, will he become a lazy slacker?

Having never known my own father, I took my role models from the popular culture of the time. When I was seven years old I was obsessed with an American TV show called “Andy of Mayberry”, and for years I harbored the secret fantasy that I was a second, undiscovered son in this tiny family, and went each day with Andy and my imaginary older brother Opie to fish at the old fishin’ hole. This weird dream was one of the reasons that my son ended up with the nickname Andy.

As I grew I began to take my role models from literature. I journeyed around the world with Captain Nemo and Phineas J. Phogg, and I zoomed between the stars with the young men in juvenile novels by Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. I rode through the desert with just two bullets in my gun and one drink of water left in my canteen courtesy of Zane Grey and Louis Lamour. I wandered the cold, lonely frontiers of identity and geography with the two Jacks, Kerouac and London. But most of all, I took my lessons in How To Be A Man from Ernest Hemingway.

Even his nickname, “Papa”, points to Hemingway’s role as premier molder of American men in the latter half of the twentieth century, surpassing John Wayne, John Glenn and even John Kennedy. As a writer I’ve studied Hemingway, looking for the secret of how a man who wrote simple stories in simple English became the name most often mentioned when graduate students discuss The Great American Novel. As a man, I’ve studied him looking for the secret of what makes a man a man.

Professionally, I feel jealous of Hemingway because of how his years as an expatriate author compare to my own. A member of The Lost Generation, a group of expatriate American writers residing in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, Hemingway hob-nobbed with the likes of T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, Harold Loeb, Gertrude Stein and Hart Crane. Of course, these luminaries are no great shakes compared to my intimates on Phuket: Shaky Derek, Captain Rowdy, Ugly John and Mike the one-eyed Chinaman.

Hemingway and his soon-to-be-famous friends would meet over coffee and liquor at Shakespeare and Company, a small bookstore and lending library at 12 rue de l’Odeon. The American proprietess, Sylvia Beach, loaned books, money and inspiration to struggling writers, and is responsible for more than one great career. On Phuket we have Julie Hirunchai’s Good Earth Bookstore, where the island’s literati can enjoy herbal tea and bran muffins while staring at shelves full of Stephen King, Clive Cussler, Fredrik Forsyth and the other best sellers left behind by departing tourists. If you want three dozen copies of Valley of the Dolls, Julie can sell them to you cheap, but don’t ask to borrow any money.

In Hemingway’s day the biggest literary agents and publishers, men like Leon Fleischman, Ford Maddox Ford and Sherwood Anderson, came to Paris to seek out writers. If there are any literary agents on Phuket, they’re wearing swimming trunks and drinking beer on the beach and not interested in any undiscovered expatriate authors. Hemingway used to feed his family by catching pidgeons in the square in front of the Gallerie Fouchard. While my house is surrounded by jungle, I haven’t the vaguest clue what parts of it are edible. And one day, in the spring of 1922, Hemingway received a cable from the Toronto Star: “Go to Italy and interview Mussolini.” I don’t imagine that I’ll ever be asked to interview Pol Pot or Than Shwe.

And out of his time in the City of Lights Hemingway produced a literature of reality, one devoid of frills and trickery, that told honest stories in plain, American English. And since he was living in a Europe recently savaged by war, and with the next, worse war looming visibly on the horizon, he often took war as his major subject. Novels such as The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms portray war as a symbol of human life—savage, pointless and ignoble. His fiction took a realistic and antiromantic path, and American Literature has seldom strayed since.

And in this framework of the horrors of war, Hemingway hung his major theme: the place of men, (men, not Mankind) in a universe which is without logic or honor. His heroes find or lose their honor within themselves. Perhaps his most telling title is Men Without Women, but the essential Hemingway lesson is found in The Old Man and The Sea.

As simple as its title, this short book (which earned Hemingway both the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes) gives us one old man fighting one big fish in the middle of a completely empty sea. You don’t have to ask your analyst what these three things symbolize, because they only symbolize themselves: a man, a fish and the sea. The man fights the fish, he wins after excruciating pain and heroic effort, but then sharks eat his prize before he can get it ashore. Afterward the old man doesn’t curse his luck, he doesn’t complain that he did everything right and still the fates stole from him the greatest victory of his life. Tomorrow he’ll go fishing again.

What is probably the single most quoted line in the Hemingway canon comes from this novelette: “A man may be defeated, but never destroyed.” That is the only lesson that Papa had for us, his millions of foster sons. He told us that the reward comes with the struggle, that To Be A Man is to fight the good fight, bite the bullet, take the bull by the horns and give it all you got. And two generations of American men took the lesson to heart, pitching ourselves against each other in mock combat on the field or in the gymnasium, never allowing ourselves to exhibit pain or express love, killing ourselves with smoke and drink and fast cars and pointless wars. Maybe we deserved all of that, for taking as our role model a man who had a string of failed marriages, a bunch of kids he never knew, and who finally went mad and blew his brains all over the living room ceiling.

It is said, in the part of America that I come from, that a man only needs three things to measure himself: a calculator, a ruler and a bit of string. The calculator is to number his sexual conquests, the ruler and string to quantify the length and thickness of his “manhood”. But as a liberated man of the new millenium, and one raised by his mother, I believe that we should be measuring ourselves by those qualities that are most important to our wives and children. Are we good providers, protectors and peacemakers? Do we share our feelings, and do we listen when others share theirs?

These are very ambiguous areas for the logic-restricted, materialistic and rigidly linear thought processes of the average American male. We would still prefer the ruler and bit of string, or at least the calculator. But if we’re going to provide a world for our children that’s better than the one our fathers left to us, we’re going to have to learn, right along with our children. I hope that each morning as Andy watches me pee, and I watch him, we’re both learning something.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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