in my father’s closet: reflections of a critic turned life writer

In My Father’s Closet: Reflections of a CriticTurned Life Writer

G. Thomas Couser*Hofstra University

Abstract

Relatively late in my career (in my early 60s), I began to write a biographical memoir of myfather, William Griffith Couser (1906–1975), based initially and primarily on documents, mostlyletters, that I found after his death. In doing so, after nearly 30 years of working as a critic of lifewriting, I became a life writer myself. The value of this memoir will lie in the letters themselves,partly because they are well written, partly because they are sufficiently numerous to allow me toreconstruct the web of my father’s significant relationships during a formative period. And that isbecause they come from an era and a social set in which letter writing was a significant mediumthrough which life was lived. In short, I have come to regard the materials not as the residue of alife but in a way as scraps of it, not an epiphenomenon thrown off by the ‘real life’ of which theyare the tantalizing written remains, but the actual stuff of life itself – preserved moments. I havebecome convinced that in his 20s, at least, my father lived a good deal of his life in and throughcorrespondence with friends and family. The letters I will highlight in this talk are from corre-spondence with an apparently gay man with whom my father had a ‘romantic friendship.’ Thenature of the relationship made the correspondence it evoked especially tricky but also revealing.

In June of 1975, 8 months after my mother died from ovarian cancer, at the age of 65,my father died of depression and drink, at the age of 69. A 29-year-old newlywed, I hadjust passed my PhD orals. As I lived not far from my family home in the suburbs ofBoston, Massachusetts, and my older sister lived on the West Coast, the task of cleaningout the house fell to me. During that summer, then, I gradually emptied the house inwhich I had grown up, and prepared it to be sold.

Disposing of the myriad items in the house was a dismal job. Erasing all traces of ourhabitation and history in the house compounded my sense of loss. It also involved facingrather painful recent memories. For example, I had to dispose of my mother’s deathbed.

One day, however, I discovered a substantial cache of personal documents in myfather’s closet. In addition to school yearbooks, passports, and so on, there were dozensof letters from his premarital life. In idle moments, I read through them. There were nobombshells, smoking guns, or skeletons (to mix metaphors), but collectively they illumi-nated periods of my father’s life of which I had known little, if anything. At the time Iwas too dazed by grief and shame over my father’s death to fully reckon with their con-tents. When I had finished reading through them, I sorted them by correspondent, putthem in a cardboard box, sealed it, and stored it. I did not look at them again for fully30 years.

Those 30 years comprise most of my academic career, beginning when I chose to spe-cialize in American autobiography in graduate school. It now appears ironic to me, andnot entirely fortuitous, that I spent much of those 30 years contemplating and analyzinglife writing – all while studiously ignoring the life writing in my own attic.

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ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

About 5 years ago, I heard my biological clock ticking. Then in my late 50s, andmildly depressed, I was approaching the age at which my father had fallen into deep,chronic, and finally fatal depression. I had recently begun taking an antidepressant, how-ever, and responded well to it. This relieved some of my anxiety about late middle age. Iwas at last ready to confront the documents I’d been avoiding for so long. So, somewhatapprehensively, I retrieved the box of paternal documents from the attic, where it hadfetched up after several moves, a divorce, and a second, happy marriage. This time I readthrough the letters more carefully, more systematically, and more appreciatively.

I had a new perspective – personally and professionally. Along with my biologicalclock, my biographical clock was also ticking. I had noticed recently that a good deal ofcontemporary American life writing takes the form of memoirs of parents by sons anddaughters. I’ve dubbed memoirs of mothers matriography, memoirs of fathers patriography.The latter include narratives of celebrity fathers, like Ronald Reagan (Davis, Reagan),Erik Erikson (Bloland), John Cheever (Cheever), and Orson Welles (Feder); of notoriousfathers, like Alger Hiss (Hiss) and Julius Rosenberg (Meeropol); of abusive fathers; ofmysterious and secretive fathers; of demented fathers; and of ordinary fathers of wellknown writers, like Paul Auster, Philip Roth, and Calvin Trillin.

The bulk of such narratives have been written by members of my own generation,baby boomers born in the aftermath of World War II. As we enter late middle age andcontemplate our own mortality, we are inclined to review and narrate the lives of ourparents – especially those of our fathers. As I began to sketch out, research, and write abook on this new form of life writing, it occurred to me that my cache of documentsmight allow me to write a patriography of my own. I have been working ever since onthese two interrelated projects: a memoir of my father and a book about such memoirs.

Patriography is, obviously, one form of what we now call ‘relational life writing’ –narrative that emerges from an intimate relationship between the writer and the subjectand which is thus a kind of hybrid of biography and autobiography. (Hence another termfor it: auto ⁄biography.) As it happens, though, patriography (at least in North America)greatly outnumbers its counterpart, matriography. This raises the question as to why thatis so, especially in the wake of women’s liberation. One of my findings about patriogra-phy is that it is often written in response to a frustrating or unsatisfactory relationship:ironically, but understandably, when adult children choose to narrate the life of a parent,they usually choose the parent who is less present – physically, geographically, and ⁄oremotionally. And for various reasons, that parent has historically been the father. This hasto do in part with the structure of the nuclear family, in which fathers are more likely towork outside the home. Thus, while patriography may not be inherently patriarchal, itdoes seem rooted in a patriarchic family structure. (Interestingly, a number of famousfeminists have contributed to the genre: Germaine Greer, Naomi Wolf, and now JillJohnston.)

My own case illustrates the pattern that privileges the father. My mother’s documen-tary legacy to me and my sister consisted primarily of over a decade’s worth of engage-ment calendars. In them, she would record (in advance) cultural and social events – trips,vacations, visits from friends, visits to friends, trips to plays or museums, illnesses and doc-tors’ appointments, and so on. These are bare-bones records – names and dates only, nocommentary. Nevertheless, collectively they provide an invaluable, detailed chronicle ofour life as a family. I am immensely grateful for them and moved by their self-efface-ment.

In sharp contrast, my father left a trove of intensely personal documents, some quiteintimate. Most had to do with his premarital life – a period of his life about which I had

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ª 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Literature Compass 8/12 (2011): 890–899, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00847.x

become quite curious. After his marriage to my mother, of course, he had little occasionto write letters to her. The exception was his naval service in the Pacific during WWII,during which he wrote numerous letters home, which my mother carefully preserved.(Presumably, she also wrote numerous letters to him, but they did not survive. I havealmost no correspondence in my mother’s hand.) So the family archive, so to speak, ishighly asymmetrical. It is strongly tilted toward patriography and the more remoteparent.

The earliest set of documents pertains to my father’s mid-20s, when he taught Englishand coached athletics at Aleppo College, a school run by Christian missionaries. At thetime, his students were almost all Armenian refugees from the Turkish genocide duringWorld War I. I had been aware of this experience, in part because several of those stu-dents had emigrated to the United States, settled in New England, and become lifelongfriends, with whom we exchanged visits as I was growing up. With the help of the inter-net I was able to research this period of his life and produce quite a full account – thefirst chapter of the memoir.

The other materials were more intriguing because they illuminated less familiar aspectsof his early life: letters from a mysterious woman who beseeched my father to see hermore often, and reproached him for keeping his distance; letters to and from three closemale friends, all of whom seem to have been gay; the letters Dad wrote home to mymother during World War II. Obviously, I had known of his naval service during theWar. And I had met or heard of the male friends, but I had never heard of his femalefriend. All of these materials furnished tantalizing glimpses into my father’s premarital life.

I call my narrative a biographical memoir. It’s a memoir because it concerns my father,whom I knew (more or less – and as I’ve already suggested, it is impelled by my sensethat I knew him less well than I knew my mother, who was more emotionally availableto me). It’s biographical because I am emphasizing periods of his life before I was born andbecause I am therefore necessarily basing my narrative on documentary evidence. As withthe Aleppo chapter, I need to do some research to flesh out what the documents reveal.But as much as possible, I am choosing to let the documents tell the story. This reflectsmy sense that they do it quite well on their own and my reluctance to intrude too muchinto events of which I have no direct experience.

My career of scholarship on American life writing has brought me back, ultimately, tothe primal scene of its conception: the death of my father and my discovery of his lettersin his closet. My scholarship and my life writing, then, have been very much bound upwith each other. The deaths of my parents in quick succession helped to spur my aca-demic interest in the writing of life – and death. (One of my first publications was ‘TheShape of Death in American Autobiography.’) And my scholarly career has prepared meto write this narrative.

Using the particular materials I discovered has in turn shaped my current thinkingabout life writing, in two major ways. The first has to do with the fact that I am neces-sarily writing a biographical memoir. Thus far, I have focused on a period of his life whenI did not exist and therefore of which I have no memory. Working in this fashion, Ihave been very careful not to pretend to have knowledge that I do not – and cannot –have. While I do not want to make the memoir an edited version of his letters and docu-ments, I want as much as possible for the reader to have access to the documents that Iam working with. As a result, I quote them at some length. This makes for relative trans-parency. When I come to the limit of what is knowable, I admit it. The reader is then inas good a position to speculate as I am – as, for example, about my father’s sexual orien-tation as a young man.

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For me, the goal of this project is primarily to advance my understanding of my father– I write to come to know him better. Writing to know, one may wish to know all, butthe process of writing this memoir has reminded me how much about anyone else’s lifemust remain inaccessible and therefore mysterious.

This is a somewhat roundabout way of saying that writing this modest sort of memoirhas made me all the more wary of the tendency of contemporary memoir to privilegescene over summary, narrative over reflection. (In literary theory, these are referred torespectively as mimesis and diegesis, terms derived from classical rhetoric.) I certainlyunderstand the readerly appeal of scene and narrative, of the sort of highly detailed writingwhich I call HDAB (high-definition autobiography) or hi-def memoir. Such writing isnovelistic, and the narratives can be page-turners. Sometimes written in the present tense,these memoirs promise – or pretend – to put readers in the scene; they offer a sense ofimmediacy. But, ironically, contemporary memory research suggests that so-called ‘flash-bulb memories’ are very unreliable and with regard to ordinary events, memory favors typ-ical actions over discrete episodes. So summary is perhaps truer than scene to thefundamental nature of memory, which distils (and distorts), rather than records, our pasts.

For me, my father’s letters give me the sense – which I realize is illusory – of beingpresent in the past, eavesdropping on – in the case of the Aleppo letters – a transconti-nental epistolary conversation. Were I to flesh out the scene of my father’s finding a letterfrom his friend Edgar upon his arrival in Aleppo, it might gratify a reader’s taste for tell-ing detail. (Aleppo is an extraordinary place, as I discovered for myself in a visit lastspring.) But it would not advance my understanding, my knowledge, of my father.Rather, I would risk confusing what I can know with what I may imagine.

So while I don’t want to condemn the use of scene in memoir – it’s not going to goaway – I do want to suggest that there’s often less to it than meets the eye. The sense itoffers of immediacy is, upon examination, the product of artful mediation – novelistictechniques and devices. It does not – perhaps cannot – advance the project of knowinganother. So my undertaking this biographical memoir has reinforced my sense that someof what makes contemporary memoir so appealing to readers is, in the long run, not verysubstantive. In depicting what cannot be remembered, in ‘representing’ what it cannotknow, it may even be counterproductive.

In any case, I have come to value good summary over good scene. It makes differentdemands on the writer, and it offers different rewards to the reader. By nature it requiresa degree of reflection and self-awareness on the part of the writer. Scene requires techni-cal skills, such as pacing, that I certainly appreciate (and probably don’t have). And inmemoir, as in the novel, scene can come across as perceptive and smart in its observationsof character and behavior. Description can be gratifying for its own sake. But byacknowledging the mediation of memory, which HDAB pretty much elides or denies,summary may require writers to be more responsible – to their readers, to those theywrite about, and to the larger world that they are supposed to be faithfully representing.And we may gain from summary things scene does not yield: wisdom and self-knowl-edge. (I say more about these matters in my forthcoming Memoir: An Introduction.)

The second way in which writing this memoir has affected my understanding of lifewriting is that it has forced me to reckon, for the first time, with correspondence as one oflife writing’s most common forms. As a relative novice in grappling with letters, I cannotclaim any original insights – certainly nothing that hasn’t already been said by specialistslike Liz Stanley (202–3). What I can say is that reading these letters has given me a newappreciation of epistolary life writing – and not merely, as I’ll suggest, as sources of bio-graphical data.



Liz Stanley has characterized letters as having three major attributes. First, correspon-dence is not merely relational but dialogical (202). That is, correspondence involves –indeed, enacts – actual back-and-forth communication within the context of an ongoingrelationship. It has the unique feature, then, of displaying subjects responding to oneanother over time; its meaning lies not in either subject’s utterances but in their responsesto one another and in the trajectory of their discourse. At its best, the process is synergis-tic; the subjects meet in a zone where both become someone different to who they areoutside the zone. Each must in some sense imagine (or invent) the other to whom s ⁄ hewrites. The correspondents thus constitute each other in a reflexive process.

Second, correspondence is perspectival (203). That is, it varies with the addressee and thetime of composition. It is constantly adjusting itself to its recipient’s current status and that ofthe relationship in its changing temporal context. Granted, other serially composed forms oflife writing, such as journals and diaries, vary with the time of composition, but correspon-dence is also shaped by each writer’s sense of a particular evolving addressee. So, taken singly,as well as in sets, letters are more thoroughly relational than most forms of life writing.

Finally, correspondence has emergent properties (203). Not only does the correspondenceas a whole change over time because it is serially composed; so do individual texts. Thatis, since letters are relatively spontaneous, they may change direction, tone, and shape inrevealing ways. In the next section of this essay, I’d like to demonstrate some of thesequalities by sampling one particularly significant set of my father’s letters.

When I first read through them, I organized the letters not chronologically but by cor-respondent. And I have decided to organize much of the memoir the same way; I recon-struct his early life one correspondence at a time, rather than narrating it in a seamlesschronological progression – even though the fact that letters are dated would permit sucha scheme. My biographical form is, then, more or less dictated by my materials: for thisperiod, the ‘data’ suggest that it would be appropriate to organize my ‘narrative’ (I usethe word loosely) around discrete sets of correspondence, writing his life one relationshipat a time. At the same time, I have had to reckon with the fact that these relationshipsnot only overlapped in time, but sometimes competed with one another for his time andattention; I have to guard against the tendency of my form to give a false sense of his lifeas compartmentalized.

In considering my father’s rather mysterious decision in his mid-20s, to leave southernNew Hampshire, where he grew up, for the Middle East, I say in my Aleppo chapterthat he seemed free at the time of emotional entanglements. This was not actually true,and I should have known better. But in writing that chapter, I had confined my researchto letters exchanged with his family while he was in Aleppo. When I moved on to theletters to and from other correspondents, the picture changed dramatically. For one thing,there were the letters from his female love interest, whom he finally spurned after hisreturn from Syria. For another, there were letters from the three close male friends.

Perhaps the correspondence most gratifying to me was that with Edgar Hawthorne, anantiques dealer in Concord, New Hampshire, where my father taught high schoolEnglish in the late 1920s after graduating from Wesleyan college in Connecticut. Edgarwas nearly 20 years older than my father, and they seem to have met only in the springof 1930, a few months before my father departed for Aleppo, but their friendshipdeveloped quickly. And my father’s imminent departure for Aleppo must have given therelationship some urgency and poignancy. This correspondence manifests all of theabove-mentioned features of letter writing as life writing; in addition, I think it suggeststhat, more than many kinds of life writing, correspondence is itself the stuff of life, ratherthan a mere literary residue or provider of ‘facts.’



Let me illustrate and elaborate. For the most part, I have only Edgar’s side of the cor-respondence. But my father seems to have saved all of Edgar’s letters, and the sequencepermits quite a full reconstruction of their relationship during my father’s time in Syria.Edgar wrote regularly and at length throughout my father’s 3-year absence. In all, he sentDad more than two dozen letters; all were at least a single page long, and some went onfor well over a thousand words. Perhaps as telling as this quantitative measurement is thecare with which they were composed; Edgar was a skillful writer, and the correspondenceseems to have given both men a good deal of aesthetic pleasure. Indeed, their commonpleasure in art was one of their significant bonds. Writing well was a way of sustainingand enriching this bond while apart.

What I know of Edgar’s life I know solely through his own references to himself inhis letters. He came late to his vocation and was largely self-educated in antiques and inculture generally. After graduating from grammar school (in 1898, which would put theyear of his birth in the mid-1880s), he worked for 3 years as a mill greaser, taking timeoff to study bookkeeping at a business college. His life changed when he began workingin a book and art store in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1901, while he was still a teen-ager (and my father had not yet been born). When he was young, his family life wasapparently unhappy; his mother died when he was just a boy, and he says that his fathermight as well have. He was apparently an only child and had no close relatives; he spent‘family holidays,’ like Thanksgiving and Christmas, either by himself or with friends. Inany case, I am quite certain that, as a ‘confirmed bachelor,’ he has no descendants, director otherwise, who have any interest in his life.1 And I am persuaded by the nature of hisletters that although they were initially intended only for my father’s eyes, there can beno harm in their publication. On the contrary, it may serve to illuminate not only hisand my father’s lives but a kind of male friendship that is distinctive of a certain historicalperiod.

The vast majority of the correspondence is in a decidedly subjective, even romantic,mode. Each man says that the other is often in his thoughts and that the letters representonly their verbal communion. For example, my father declares to Edgar, ‘Often it’s partof an experience at even the oddest time or place to think of you.’ Edgar takes this lineas the occasion for an excursus on his almost hallucinatory sense of their presence to oneanother:

Frequently … my mind has been instantaneously directed to thoughts of you. Again I wouldbe surprised to hear myself speak your name and my mind would then carry on a sort ofconversational monologue. At other times I have had the impression of hearing my namespoken.… Through these experiences I feel that we can have moments together without thestimulus of a stated schedule of letters on your part.

Below Edgar’s signature appears the following, apparently in my father’s handwriting:‘Spring days in Concord. It was you who took me away. Such days they were – like theappeal of love.’ In a sense, then, the letters represent only the occasional verbal distillateof a relationship that was of constant concern and value to both men. But in another,important sense, the letters themselves constitute the friendship: for the duration of myfather’s stint in Aleppo, they were the medium through which the friendship was notonly maintained but deepened.

The distinctive and unifying note of Edgar’s letters is his affection for my father. Hisfirst epistle was timed to precede my father and to welcome him on his arrival at hisunfamiliar, even alien, surroundings:



Dear Grif:-

I want a few words from me to be here in Aleppo, waiting to greet you upon your arrival….

I have trailed you across the ‘Big Pond.’ You must have had some wonderful moonlight nights.The first few evenings after you had sailed, I saw the moon come up out of the East and won-dered if recently you had been appreciating it.

… In your mail you will find this ‘God Bless You’ from me – not in stentorian bass but whis-pered like the last, soft mute of the organ.

He ended the letter with what became his characteristic signature: ‘And now good night,Grif, Edgar.’

Edgar’s next letter opens with a poignant account of the arrival of my father’s firstletter:

There has been a particular sweetness in the past few days. It will linger for days to come. Yourletter brought it….

Your letter! I have read it many times. The first few times – yes, through tears – with an acheto see you mixed with the joy of having you talk with me.

Edgar was circumspect about the nature of his emotion, and he was wary of seeking anykind of reciprocal assurance from my father:

It is always difficult to write to you for with my post-Victorian background, I sometimes hesi-tate to express my thoughts to you on paper. I have wanted you to know the depths of myregard for you. I think you are aware of it…. That you may know that it is the deepest regard,I am asking you if you recall one evening early in our acquaintance. At that time you asked ifthere should not be some one of whom one could ask everything. Do you remember? – Atthat time I was laboring under a mistaken sense of loyalty, obligation or what you may term it[presumably to another man]. I have cancelled that indefinable something. When you return,Grif, if you care to, I offer you the freedom to ask anything. Need I say more?

Edgar’s characteristic obliqueness is such that I can’t be sure what he is offering, orrequesting. He seems to be saying that he is available, emotionally, at least, in a way thathe was not when the subject was first broached. In any case, he follows up in a reveal-ingly self-effacing way:

This note calls for no recognition and for no remembrance of it after it is read, if it is yourwish. If it is something to be dismissed from your mind, there will be no embarrassmentbecause of it when we are together again.

As for my father’s side of the correspondence, only one letter and scraps of a draft ofanother survive. The complete letter is a brief but significant note announcing that hewould, after all, return as scheduled at the end of his third year in 1933, rather thanextend his stay by a year. It concludes, ‘To you, I shall return a Prodigal,’ and is signed,‘Your worthless, Grif.’ The biblical allusion was presumably meant as an apology for hav-ing been a neglectful correspondent. In his response, Edgar rejects the analogy and assuresDad, ‘If there were anything to forgive, Grif, you would be freely forgiven. There isnothing that needs forgiveness: so let your soul be at rest.…’ He goes on,

Grif, there is no way to tell you what joy it is to know that you will soon be home! … If youhave nothing better to do why not come in with me and we will eke a living (or a starving)together? At least there would be the happiness of going places and doing things together.…What boat? And When? A happy landing, Grif!



In addition to the single complete letter from my father to Edgar, I have drafts of one inwhich he struggles to communicate something of his feelings for Edgar. The drafts areundated, but they seem to have been written in anticipation of his return to the States.Their very existence suggests how important Edgar was to Dad, in two ways.

First, the multiple drafts show that my father took great pains with his side of the cor-respondence. Thus, I must emphasize the ‘relatively’ in my earlier characterization ofletters as ‘relatively spontaneous.’ Obviously, correspondence may be rehearsed andrevised. But I think that its being directed to a single party (usually) in response to com-munication from that party – as part of an ongoing dialog – may mean that it lends itselfto changes of direction and tone. Dad seems to have agonized over this one especially,seeking not only to find the appropriate words – a matter of style – but also, apparently,to calibrate the nature and the degree of his emotion. Second, his retention of the draftssuggests how precious the correspondence – and the relationship – was to him. Perhapsthe key to the entire correspondence as biographical evidence about my father is that hisside of it remains either entirely inaccessible or hard to read. Even when, as here, there isexplicit expression of his emotion, the evidence is literally fragmentary – characterized byfalse starts, cross-outs, and dead ends. Moreover, just when it appears that Dad willdeliver something direct and confessional, the letter takes a new direction.

This is one of the few points in all of his correspondence at which I find Dad inarticu-late, and I acknowledge that I, like any other biographer, must guess at his meaning.There is no way to know what he was about to – or trying to – say when the letter trailsoff.

Often I wish that I might get to an absolute knowledge of what causes my wishes and my hap-pinesses. But I do not think this pleasure came from pride of anything that you said. It must begratefulness, I think, because I know too well that much of it is undeserved. I was not thefriend I might have been. It’s my turn to be confessional. You will not do me the injustice ofthinking me homesick, will you? The truth is I am happy here. It’s devilishly hard to get thisout, Edgar. It’s just that I am not the same, and just how that is true is more than I can say.Though not because I am unwilling to tell you. If we could have a talk, but because a letter…

Partly, he seems to be saying that he feels he has not deserved Edgar’s outpouring ofemotion. And while he may seem to be indicating that he does not reciprocate it, I thinkrather that he is trying to suggest that, though he very much appreciates Edgar’s affection,his stint in Aleppo has changed him in ways that may necessarily change their relationshipwhen it is resumed face to face. He may be trying to lower Edgar’s emotional expecta-tions in anticipation of seeing him again in the flesh.

As it happened, my father did not join Edgar, professionally or domestically, on hisreturn home. Within a decade he had met, courted, and married my mother. But he andEdgar remained on friendly terms, and my sister and I remember visits to his shop whenwe were quite small and still resided in New Hampshire. He would always let us pickout something as a gift. (Jane still has a cloisonne pin from his shop.)

What I take away from my work with these documents is a new appreciation that let-ters are extraordinary biographical evidence because they are a kind of frozen dialog, giv-ing us access years later to moments in the process of unfolding – in slow motion, as itwere. At the same time, I hasten to add that they are not merely ‘evidence.’ There’s asense in which, in this case, at least, ‘life writing’ is life itself: the letters are not mere epi-phenomena – thrown off by relationships to which they are secondary; rather, they arethe very stuff of relationships, which they constitute and enact. My father and his corre-spondents were men of letters in quite a literal sense.



It has not been lost on me that I have been able to undertake this memoir onlybecause my father and his friends wrote their lives as they lived them – or that they livedthem by writing them. My life writing is parasitical on theirs; it quotes, contextualizes,interprets, extends, and publishes it. But in writing this biographical memoir, I believethat I have come to know my father better in death than I knew him in life. I haveentered a kind of posthumous dialog with him. This is of enormous value and impor-tance to me, and it could not have been accomplished by any other kind of writing. Ifeel that I am making use of what has proved to be my real patrimony – the letters them-selves. And I feel that I am honoring my father in a way that I did not, and could not,when he was alive. So in addition to immortalizing and memorializing its subject, writinga memoir can acquaint its author with its subject; it can bring the two parties together inrelationship. Thus, I would say that memoir can affect – or even effect – a relationshipbetween its writer and its subject, even when that subject is deceased.

Short Biography

G. Thomas Couser has just retired from Hofstra University, where he was a professor ofEnglish and Disability Studies. He is the author of American Autobiography: The PropheticMode (Massachusetts, 1979), Altered Egos: Authority in American Autobiography (Oxford,1989), Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (Wisconsin, 1997), VulnerableSubjects: Ethics and Life Writing (Cornell, 2004), and Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contem-porary Life Writing (Michigan, 2009), as well as about fifty articles or book chapters. He iscurrently writing a book about contemporary American ‘patriography’ (memoirs offathers by sons and daughters) and a memoir of his own father. Memoir: An Introduction,will be published by Oxford University Press in 2011.

Notes

* Correspondence: Hofstra University, P. O. Box 227, Quaker Hill, CT 06375, USA. Email: [email protected]

1 I would welcome any information regarding the copyright holder of Edgar’s letters.

Works Cited

Auster, Paul. The Invention of Solitude. New York: SUN, 1982.Couser, G. Thomas. Memoir: An Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2011.——. ‘The Shape of Death in American Autobiography.’ The Hudson Review 31.1 (Spring 1978): 53–66.Greer, Germaine. Daddy, We Hardly Knew You. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989.Johnston, Jill. England’s Child: The Carillon and the Casting of Big Bells. London: Cadmus, 2008.Roth, Philip. Patrimony: A True Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.Stanley, Liz. ‘The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences.’ Auto ⁄ Biography 12.3 (2004): 210–35.Trillin, Calvin. Messages from My Father. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.Wolf, Naomi. The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom from My Father on How to Live, Love, and See. New York: Simon and

Schuster, 2005.

Further Reading

Bloland, Sue Erikson. In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson. New York: Viking, 2005.Cheever, Susan. Home before Dark. Boston: Houghton, 1984.Couser, G. Thomas. ‘Posted to (and from) Aleppo: My Father in Syria, 1930–33.’ Lifewriting Annual 2 (2008): 141–

71.



Davis, Patti. The Long Goodbye. New York: Knopf, 2004.Feder, Chris Welles. In My Father’s Shadow: A Daughter Remembers Orson Welles. New York: Algonquin, 2009.Hiss, Tony. Laughing Last: Alger Hiss. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.——. The View from Alger’s Window. New York: Knopf, 1999.Meeropol, Robert. An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003.Reagan, Maureen. First Father, First Daughter: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 1989.



in my father’s closet: reflections of a critic turned life writer

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