Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [26]
As a kid I was absolutely terrified of clichés. My father forbade them in our home. It was like the way other people regarded cursing in their house. If you said, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink,” my father would go ballistic. Mom couldn’t control herself, apparently, because she violated this rule about every five seconds.
I was under the impression clichés could ruin you, ruin your life, your hopes and dreams, bring down your whole operation if you didn’t watch it. They were gateway language, leading straight to a business major, a golfy marriage, needlepoint pillows that said things about your golf game, and a selfinflicted gunshot to the head that your family called a heart attack in your alma mater announcements. Character suicide. Language was important, sexy, fun, alive, extremely personal, it was like food, you wouldn’t just pop anything into your mouth, why would you let anything pop out that hadn’t been considered and prepared for someone to enjoy? To ignore language was akin to ignoring the very person you were speaking to, rude, uncaring, unfeeling, cold. It was a way to connect and also to woo, to charm, to manipulate, it was a tool for love, for survival. Your words were you. To ignore language was to ignore Dad. To love words was to love Dad.
MY FATHER HAD EXTREMELY strong feelings about what was okay to read and what was not. I was completely intimidated by his literary standards and expectations and to this day it seems amazing and daring to me that other people will just read something without thinking much about it. “Oh, I found that book in my living room. I don’t know where it came from. My babysitter must have left it here.” Your babysitter? You just read whatever’s lying around? Are you crazy? You think you’re gonna make it to fifty living like that? My father asked in every conversation, “So what are you reading these days?” I always knew it was coming, I agonized over whether to lie or not.
He was like the Great Santini of the Strand. Few people could take him on; he was so well-read and had a memory that could retain every detail of everything he’d ever read, as well as jokes, lyrics, arias, names of store owners he’d met on his honeymoon in Paris, names of restaurants where gangsters were gunned down in 1924. He could quote lines from books he disliked better than you could quote lines from what you claimed was your favorite book of all time. The list of acceptable writers to bring up included: T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, Woody Allen’s humor pieces (and movies), Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, James Joyce, Yeats, Wordsworth, Marcel Proust, Joseph Conrad, H. L. Mencken, Norman Mailer, Murray Kempton, Edmund Wilson, Ring Lardner, Henry James, Shakespeare, Evelyn Waugh (I remember repeating “E-vlyn, E-vlyn” to myself around the house when I was about fourteen, terrified I’d slip and pronounce it like an American woman’s name), D. H. Lawrence, Dos Passos, Nabokov, Chekhov, Twain and Hemingway, and composers like Leonard Bernstein, Mozart, Cole Porter and Fats Waller. Contemporary writing was only for people who might live forever, otherwise, the point was the greats.
He was always letting you know, huh, huh, who was in charge. You think you can sit around reading what we read when we read Raymond Carver all summer? You’ve got another thing coming, baby. He wouldn’t let you spend too much time talking about popular writers. If I was really pissed at him I might mention this “amazing!” John Fante novel I was halfway through. If I was getting a kick out of the plays of Christopher Durang, he’d say, “Oh, well, if you’re getting serious about farce, you can’t beat Oscar Wilde. What about the French? Have you tried Feydeau?” Like most people I thought e. e. cummings was delightful, a poet