Monday, May. 27, 1996
DAD REVISITED
By John Skow
This anguished memoir by novelist Mary Gordon is a desperate search for her father, a self-created enigma who died when she was seven. Perhaps inevitably, the search fails. The father a seven-year-old knows--her hero, her first Prince Charming--does not really exist. But dying, he is frozen forever in a child's adoring perception. At 10, the author recalls, she began to write her father's biography with the words "My father is the greatest man I have ever known."
David Gordon, however, was a far more complicated case. His daughter's recounting, The Shadow Man (Random House; 274 pages; $24), is well titled; Gordon's shadow was profoundly deceptive. The intellectual who talked of riotous years at Harvard in fact never finished high school. The erudite essayist who had written for the Nation and the Jesuit magazine America was also a literary name dropper and vituperative anti-Semite. The right-wing pamphleteer apparently did write speeches for Senator Joe McCarthy, as he claimed, but the speeches may never have been used. The jaunty, confident head of the family most often, it turns out, lived off his wife's salary as a legal secretary (when he managed occasionally to earn a bit of money, he did so by editing a not very successful soft-porn magazine called Hot Dog). The super-American, his daughter learns, was born not in Ohio, as he claimed, but in Vilna, Lithuania, five years earlier than his supposed birth date. The Jewish convert to right-wing Catholicism, Mary finds, was never accepted as anything but a Jew by his wife's Irish Catholic family. Most pathetically, perhaps, the father remembered as young, dashing and handsome--her Jimmy Stewart, the daughter says--is toothless, potbellied and old in the snapshots she digs up.
In Catholic International, a magazine he published briefly toward the end of the 1930s, David Gordon praised Mussolini's Italy and raved that Jewish soldiers were being sent to Spain "to help murder nuns in Lincoln's name." Can this be the loving, lighthearted man who taught Mary Gordon to value reading above all other things? "I am losing my father. He is disappearing," she writes of her researches. But she also finds she is losing herself. She had reached adulthood as a fallen-away Catholic intellectual (the thoughts of such a person are the themes of her novels Final Payments and The Company of Women). But now, in middle age, she wonders--not with her father's anti-Semitism, but simply with profound confusion--whether she is, in fact, a fallen-away Jew.
Without much success, she searches for her father's family in northeastern Ohio. But the clever immigrant boy who taught himself to speak English without an accent (and who spoke several other languages, though never Yiddish) left little trace. His daughter's book turns frantic, and to some extent loses direction, as it becomes clear that she is not going to find David Gordon at the precise point of shame and bitterness when the immigrant experience persuaded him to construct a disguise. There are two great losses here. A little girl loses her father's hand in a swirling crowd. And a boy loses his way as he tries to transform himself as that American ideal, a New Man.
--By John Skow