Review of Memoir by Blake Morrison

 Blake Morrison, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (Granta, 1993)

Blake Morrison is a widely published award-winning English poet and author who is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL).  Among his many books, he has written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If (Granta, 1997) and a memoir about his mother Things My Mother Never Told Me (Chatto & Windus, 2002). Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

And When Did You Last See Your Father?, the book reviewed here, exudes a refreshing honesty, a quality which is the hallmark of any good writing per se.   The title advances a question concerned with what we in psychotherapy call the quest for father, one of our archetypes. Early in this memoir, Morrison outlines very well his father's way of playing the game of life -

This is the way it was with my father.  Minor duplicities.  Little fiddles.  Money-saving, time-saving, privilege-attaining fragments of opportunism.  The queue-jump, the backhander, the deal under the table.  Parking where you shouldn't, drinking after hours, accepted the poached pheasant and the goods off the back of the lorry.  (p.13)

Next, like all wonderful writers, Morrison juxtaposes a second chapter of contrast with the first where we get this strong character reduced to his polar opposite.  This chapter portrays the physical weakness of the same man as he approaches his death from terminal cancer at 75 years of age.  The following quotation finds Morrison and his mother in his father's hospital room during his final illness:

It's seven-thirty, and my mother and I are saying goodnight.  It seems odd and cruel to be leaving him.  But he doesn't want us there, will be happier thinking he's 'not a nuisance'.  He hugs me longer than he usually would, and sits holding my mother's hand, the kind of tender, quiet thing he never does, something I want to feel touched by but which seems so untypical it's almost offensive: a late bloom, another man's flower.  I've always imagined him dying in character - overtaking impatiently on too short a straight or collapsing with a heart attack while rotavating an obstinate corner of the orchard.  This new gentleness, his slow drained face above the bedsheets, seems a sort of death already.  (p. 29)

The task of every writer, it seems to me, is to make some sense out of whatever life means for him or her as depicted in this or that novel, autobiography, memoir or biography or poem or play; to give some shape to the multifarious experiences of life; to forge connections between random experiences and events; to impose patterns upon the apparent randomness of our existence; in short to give life form or shape in literary genre.

Blake Morrison's book And When Did You Last See Your Father pulls no punches.  The character of his father leaps off the page.  The reader can easily visualise this confident, outgoing, extravert and competent physician strutting across the pages or rather the stage that is life.  Indeed, one can see his father Arthur Morrison thereupon, his particular stage being the town of Skipton, Yorkshire. Doctors have a power in the life of ordinary people that very few other professions have today.  The roles of teachers and priests have long ceased to have public prestige.  The doctor is still seen as having the power to cure some illnesses at least.  The ordinary punter is often quick to place trust in his physician's knowledge and advice.  Hence a doctor can become a "fixer" of life's problems.  Blake's father Arthur saw himself as such, a "fixer" of life's problems, both big and small.  For him the Ego loomed large.

The book opens with his father's skipping a long queue of cars to gain entrance to a Formula One Race in Cheshire and going in a more expensive gate for which he had not the correct tickets.  The "Doc” hooks his stethoscope over the mirror on his windscreen to give him more clout - after all doctors may be needed at car races.  Dr Arthur Morrison is painted as a man who likes to do things and do them quickly and immediately, that is right now!  He sees no reason why anything he desires might not be achievable or forthcoming.  It's as if his motto were:  "Where there's a will, there's a way."  Blake Morrison uses the technique of flashback - every alternate chapter is an episode from the past followed by one from the present and so on until the end of the book.  This is an excellent technique as we have two images firmly before our eyes at all times: - the image of the young strong and determined Doctor as parent striding across the stage of life contrasted with the weakened and bravely dying old decrepit man.  Blake pulls no punches when he describes his father's painful and undignified ending from painful cancer.  Only a son of a doctor could write this in his father's words:

"My penis is engorged: it's like elephantiasis, I tell you"..."There's more piss coming out of my arse than my prick." (p. 19)

"I went to the gents and had to dig the shit out by hand, horrible, but there was no other way." (p. 27)

I am reminded here of St Augustine's powerful, if somewhat crude, observation, "inter faeces et urinam nascimur," namely that we are born between faeces and urine.  I might add an equally sombre observation that "inter faeces et urinam etiam morimur."  We die the same way, too, I should imagine. And so, this sequence of contrasts brings us face to face with human mortality.  Umberto Eco has said that one of the chief functions of literature is to help us die.  I believe that I have read and heard this from other sources before reading it in one of his books.  I think Eco hits the nail on the head here indeed.  Morrison's book illustrates this contention admirably.  No faint-hearted reader could possibly read it.  I love the author’s and his parent's ability to cope with life's pain and indignities and call a spade a spade.

Morrison laments the form of his father's death - a slow piecemeal dying from the indignity and the putrefaction of progressive and terminal cancer.  He goes on to state that his father deserved to die as he had lived - an adventurous, outdoor, active, social man who gloried in doing.  Death from a heart attack would have done nicely, thank you very much.  However, life is not neat and tidy.  It is decidedly random and often horribly messy!  Morrison does not spare us the randomness nor the messiness. (p. 29)

The author quickly realises early in his writing of this memoir of his father and of his relationship with him that his book is about that and much more. It's about his inherited experience of fathers down through the many generations of his family.  Here is Morrisons's expression of this revelation:

Telescoped, edited, misremembered, any family's past seems a catalogue of grief and dispersal.  But so many early deaths, and between the lines the other stories of alcoholism and madness and miscarriage and venereal disease and haemorrhages and mining disasters - For my father to be facing death at seventy-five begins to seem, in such a family, not a tragedy of cut-shortness but a miracle of longevity... It isn't just (just!) that my father is dying.  Where he came from is dying too...  (p. 41-42)

Then we get this beautiful passage about the passing of time:

Later I lay on my back beneath the trees, and heard the wind in them like a stream, and pretended I was listening to the sadness of passing time, and I knew one day I'd come back and the sadness would be real.  Now I am here (p. 44)

The real repression is not that of sex, the psychologists say, but rather the repression of the reality of death and dying.  Modern humankind represses this stark though obvious reality because it sets to nought all that this same humankind aspires to - accumulated wealth, possessions, achievements of all types, even knowledge itself - for in the passing of an individual it is all blotted out, wiped away for that person.  Hence humankind has learnt not to face up to its own finitude in a realistic way and prefers to believe in the capitalist myth of wealth and unlimited wealth.

In conclusion, I highly recommend this memoir for describing so honestly and so insightfully the father-son relationship and how as we grow older we all wish that we had spent more time getting to know our fathers.  It might also help us in our own self-development, and in unravelling some of the strands of what Freud might have meant by the Oedipus Complex.