MEMOIR:
He That Is Down Need Fear No
Fall, By Bruce Arnold, Ashfield Press, 256pp. €17.99
Bruce Arnold's narrative sense prevents the reader being
bamboozled by the pace of events and the succession of women
through his father's life, writes
John S Doyle.
FATHERS HAVE BEEN having a hard time in memoirs since the early 1990s, when Blake Morrison published his book about an overbearing pater. Here and in Britain the books have tumbled out tediously to show what a burden the male parent is.
There are exceptional writers, whose art transcends the genre: Denis Donoghue and John McGahern, to name two. The commentator Bruce Arnold's memoir of his father, a quite extraordinary, not to say impossible, character, is also exceptional. The title is taken from the shepherd boy's song in The Pilgrim's Progress. "The words of that poem," writes Arnold, "served both my father and me well enough for a time": "He that is down needs fear no fall, he that is low no pride"; and its later lines, "I am content with what I have, little be it or much."
There was, in Bruce Arnold's childhood, little in the conventional sense of worldly goods, but much in the way of spiritual lessons. His father was an improvident man with many children and allegiances to various women. Disappointment in a promising naval career, and drink, had left their mark by the time the story opens in 1951, when the son was 14.
Providence had provided him and his brothers with a very good education at an austere boarding school in the Cotswolds for which the father did not have to pay. The recognition there of a good singing voice was an important part of his self-discovery. Two sisters, meanwhile, had been sent for adoption, and "home" was a different place each time Bruce returned from school. The father moved from job to job in the more genteel parts of England, mostly working as a gardener but never, for various reasons, staying too long.
The book's starting point is a box of love letters given to Bruce Arnold in 2003 by the nephew and two nieces of Barbara Young, the woman who received the first of the letters, from George Arnold, more than 50 years before. Bruce had had dreams of a family life with Barbara, whom he loved as much as his father did, and her sister's three children, the Lorings, but that was a road the father chose not to take.
Barbara and George never married, though the ardent letters continued until near the end of his life in 1975. Some of the story the author already knew, from his own close experience of his father - he had been chosen by his father to be "the spectator of his life" - but it is the layering of this new information on his own memories that gives the book its interest.
WHAT IS REMARKABLE is that George remained so cheerful in spite of all: a rogue, handsome and strong, a charmer of women, always hoping for the best though it never came. There is no doubt of the fondness the author feels for his subject, and he conveys a sense of shock and delight, even at this distance, at one of the most typical letters.
This man had separated from the wife with whom he had two children, met another woman who bore him five (including the author) and then died. He cultivated a passionate relationship with a third woman while tolerating the attentions of a fourth. He divorced his wife (number one woman) but for whatever reason did not then marry number three woman but instead married a fifth woman. He soon afterwards discovered an intense and requited love for number six, a woman half his age (he was then 63), but whom when the divorce from number five woman came through he again did not marry. Instead he wrote to his son, out of the blue apparently: "Marjory and I were married yesterday at St Giles Registry and are staying at the above address until Wednesday the 24th April when we go to Bideford". This was another woman altogether, who had not been previously mentioned.
It is a tribute to the author's narrative sense and elegant style that we are not bamboozled by the pace of events, the succession of women, the staggering energy of this elderly man, and the lengths to which the well-connected English middle class on their uppers went to to keep the show on the road.
These were indeed different times, and a different country. Bruce Arnold realises that what he got from his father was love, the greatest gift; he still feels its force, "hitting me like the waves of the sea".
John S Doyle is a freelance journalist