The author of his being

Hugo Williams

AND WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER? by Blake Morrison

Granta, £14.99, pp. 219

Fathers have had a good run for their money in this age of biography and confes- sional writing; as the generation gaps keep getting bigger, we are propelled further and further from our origins, and com- pelled to go back and look for them. 'I feel guilty for ever having grown up and away,' says Blake Morrison, literary editor of the Sunday Independent, who has moved a long way from the Yorkshire country practice where he grew up. He actually sought help to get over the death of his beloved doctor father and the results are discernible: 'I wanted my father to hurry up and die . . . Luckily, he also sat down to help himself, and what he has produced is a classic of family literature, a book to set beside Father and Son or Cider With Rosie.

It starts in a queue for the car races: 'A hot September Saturday in 1959 and we are stationary in Cheshire.' Morrison Senior, a buccaneering GP, given to 'minor duplicities, little fiddles, money-saving, time-saving, privilege-attaining fragments of opportunism', doesn't like queueing. He opens the glove compartment and pulls out a stethoscope, which he hooks over the rearview mirror. Thus defined, he pulls out into the on-coming lane and proceeds to bully his way into the race-track through a more expensive ticket entrance. 'Point to the stethoscope, Pet', he tells his wife, but she has slid down sideways out of sight, as have his children. 'He is not with us, this bullying, shaming, undemocratic cheat. Or rather, we are not with him.'

No, but the reader is. All the way. The charm is denied and there is no charity in the physical descriptions — 'the flabby waist, the vast ribcage, the blunt head', but Morrison knows very well that we will love the idea of this obnoxious, childlike trick- ster and that we will feel instinctively that he is a good doctor: a death cheat as well as a ticket-swindler. Give us more, we want to say, as we wonder if 200 small pages is going to be enough with this reprobate.

It is clear from this sparkling beginning (he gets his 12-strong family into the enclo- sure on one lapel badge) that Dr Morrison is imbued with more, not less life than the rest of us, but in the next chapter he gets his instant comeuppance in a jump-cut to his death-bed. Thus we are given two life- brackets between which to string the full character as the information becomes available, able to refer each new scrap for- ward to the end as well as backwards to the way things were.

The book circles around his father's death-bed like an ambiguous angel, taking advantage of the heightened memories and feeling of that time to recall other, better times. The fully alive master alternates with the faded and reformed patient. 'Now I'm being the parent, the doctor, the one with the bedside manner,' says Morrison, and part of the fascination of the book is divin- ing the love under the harsh treatment meted out (which is always reciprocated). In the very next chapter his two healthy septuagenerian parents are driving to someone's 80th birthday party in their dor- mobile with a sticker in the rear window saying, 'Get even, live long enough to be a problem to your children.'

The book is built around a series of set- pieces. Each willed accumulation of detail is a self-contained autobiographical essay: tonsils, dogs, washing the car, camping, a holiday in Switzerland are some of the trig- gers he uses to flush the wildlife of memory into the open. In the process he looks into his family's past and finds it very different from family legend:

Where are all the doctors and businessmen I'd been led to think lay behind us? The talk here is of deck-chair attendants in Blackpool, idlers of the dance-hall or ice-rink, chanters joining the US Gold Rush. I'd have been cheered once to discover these departures from stolidity. But not today. It isn't just (just!) that my father is dying. Where he came from is dying too.

A bonus of the book is the autobiography it inevitably offers of its author as he feels his way clear of his roots:

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.

The concluding chapter pulls all the strands together and asks various questions inspired by the eponymous painting, a Vic- torian tableau of a Cavalier boy being questioned by Roundheads: 'And when did you last see your father?': . . . The 'And' is important. It lets us know how cunning the interrogator is, how uncasu- al his casual-seeming inquiry: the more inno- cent the boy is, the less he understands the rules of the adult world, the more he will give away. And to judge from his posture, the boy is as guileless as the interrogator requires: we know he will blab the truth out, betray his father to the enemy, expose his secret place ...

This is knowing stuff, but Morrison is as good as his word: he blabs his own secret places, and for that we must be grateful.

In case anyone thought the father thing had had its day (I think of James Fenton's cautionary, 'If I hear one more poem about Daddy standing in the door of the wood- shed . .9)And When Did You Last See Your Father suggests he may only now be coming into his own: a sort of personal God the Father, a household deity who is really oneself, an X-ray looking-glass. 'Maybe I am him,' muses Morrison, and he certainly treats him as his own. Writing this book an absolute Bible on how to do it — will have brought him one step nearer. After all, it was what his father wanted:

Dr P. B. Morrison it says on the envelope: he is the only person in the world to address me as Doctor; it's been the sole purpose of my PhD to allow him to believe I've followed in his path after all.

No one's father is ordinary, but this one is an absolute collector's item, a writer's precious heirloom, born to be in the book his son was born to write. More than any novel could be, And When Did You Last See Your Father is the once-only, all-or- nothing book of a poet: the life held up so close to one's face that one can smell it, touch it, marvel at the power of words to unlock and unravel, then pour helter- skelter over our heads this magical brain- storm of memories.