One night, when I was 16 years old, my father surprised me with a knock on my bedroom door. He lingered in the hallway a moment, staring down at a worn paperback as he turned it over in his hands, before he stepped into the room and presented it to me. “Here, I thought you might like this,” he said. I saw the words Loon Lake printed on the book’s front cover. The author—E. L. Doctorow—was no one I’d heard of, though the name certainly sounded like that of a writer. “The young man reminds me of you,” my father said. “The narrator, there’s something about him that makes me think of you.” He shrugged, perhaps a little embarrassed, and allowed me to accept or reject the offer.
Of course I accepted it. This was a rare, startling flash of intimacy from my father. He was a cardiologist who spent long hours at the hospital and routinely missed my Little League games and wrestling matches. The fact that he had considered me enough to make such a comparison—even to a fictional character—was an acknowledgment I found deeply moving.
No matter that my life barely resembled that of Loon Lake’s protagonist, Joe of Paterson. Joe is a hardscrabble young man who cheats, fights, cons a living, flees his New Jersey home for a brief stint in New York City, then finds his way to an industrialist’s secluded resort in the Adirondacks. The setting is one of beautiful women, gangsters, and forlorn poets. It is also a place where Joe’s dreams begin to merge with his reality. Though Loon Lake doesn’t dwell very long in Manhattan, Doctorow’s writing about the city still lingers for me. Joe describes New York before glass-and-steel high-rises dominated its skyline: “It had size it had magnitude, it gave life magnitude it was one of the great cities of the world. And it went on, it was colossal, miles of streets of grand famous stores and miles of streetcar tracks, great ships bassoing in the harbor and gulls gliding lazily over the docks.”
My father may have seen me in this character, but I saw just as much of my dad in him. My father had no greater passion—and showed no quicker nostalgia—than for the New York City of his childhood. In moments only semi-related, his mind would hook onto some totem of his youthful days, and next thing, he’d be recounting stories about the city’s elevated subway lines, its former baseball players, which movies he’d seen in which movie houses, which famous buildings and landmarks he’d visited—and exactly how old he’d been on each occasion. Animated by memory, his words would take on a stream of consciousness that matched both the tone and the enthusiasm of Doctorow’s protagonist.
I found Loon Lake to be a stirring novel, albeit with several bumps along the way. The book shifts point of view relentlessly, offers cryptic flashbacks, even contains long passages of verse. And yet the story always circles back to Joe of Paterson, the resilient young man who bears himself—by wit and instinct—through an increasingly suspenseful plot. After finishing the novel, I would hurry through several more of Doctorow’s books over the next few years: Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, World’s Fair, Welcome to Hard Times, The Waterworks, and Lives of the Poets. It was in this last book—which contains a novella and six short stories—that I read what would become my favorite work of short fiction, “The Writer in the Family.”
The story takes place in 1950s New York, where a teenage boy (coincidentally named Jonathan) has recently lost his father, Jack. To spare his grandmother the tragic news, Jonathan’s Aunt Frances makes up a story about Jack’s family moving to Arizona, and she enlists her nephew to write letters describing their new life in the desert. Jonathan obliges her. He talks about the unexpected beauty of the barren landscape, the great health benefits of the dry air, and the bright future he sees for himself—all in the voice of his deceased father. The authenticity moves his aunt to tears. “You’re so right, he loved to go places, he loved life, he loved everything,” she exclaims by telephone.
Each time I read that passage, I tear up as well. Part of this is due to Aunt Frances’s reaction, which makes it forgivable—or nearly forgivable—that she would demand her nephew write such a letter in the first place. But the real clincher is that Jonathan, still mourning with the rest of his family, somehow pulls it off. Jonathan looks back on Jack’s life in New York City—from his exploration of old neighborhoods to his exciting discoveries of “ships’ chandlers” and “exotic foreign vegetables”—and out of these memories constructs a living portrait on the page. Long before I’d ever read Doctorow’s story, I had already anticipated a similar role for myself, imagining a day when I would sift through my father’s past, arrange his life into a meaningful narrative, and try to perpetuate his voice after he was gone.
By the time I read that story, I’d already formed a strong connection to the author. Doctorow provided a point of contact between me and my father, an attachment made deeper by the many similarities they shared. These included New York City childhoods at roughly the same time (Doctorow was born in 1931, my father in 1936); families that consisted, at least in part, of Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side; a public education in the outer boroughs (Bronx High School of Science and Forest Hills High School, respectively); and—encapsulating all of the above—an abiding interest in the history and lore of New York. This last point was evident in much of Doctorow’s writing, which portrays a romantic sweep of the city in an era that bleeds into my father’s own awakening there.
The novel that best captures that awakening is World’s Fair. On the original cover, two mysterious geometric shapes—one round, one triangular—tower before a drawing of the city skyline. Those strange figures, which look like Egyptian hieroglyphs, are as emblematic of my father’s childhood as anything else. They are the Trylon and Perisphere, the two icons of the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park, Queens. My father described them longingly while I was growing up, and he later wrote about them—almost 60 years after the event itself—in an essay called “Cityscapes” for the Chicago Literary Club:
A generation after the Great War, I was fortunate enough to see the City of the Future. One of my early memories was of the World of Tomorrow. … The theme center, a 700 foot high tapered triangular pylon, and a 200 foot high perisphere, symbolized two representations of infinity. … One ascended to the perisphere by a series of long escalators and was swept seated above a large panorama of the city of 1960 by day and by night. Highways were ribbons of perfection, the city provided “an electric assurance of a better life.”
He’d been three years old when the fair came to town. Of the remarkable ascent he took, my father would lament that, “to many who experienced it, it has never been matched.”
This sentence came as no surprise to me. Long had I perceived that some crucial part of his life was anchored to that moment, when he’d caught a magnificent glimpse of the future. By the time he wrote about it, that version of the future would seem quaintly outdated—leaving my father stuck instead in a vision from the past. The tug of that past had never really slackened, and I knew that whatever else happened to him, nothing would ever live up to the glowing promise held out to him at such a tender age.
World’s Fair parallels “The Writer in the Family” in many ways, from the family composition and Bronx setting to the father’s past in the Navy and as a failed music store owner. In the novel, however, the father is still alive, and the boy feels like a younger version of Jonathan. His name is Edgar—Doctorow’s first name—just as the other characters take their names from the author’s real-life family. (In a 1986 Paris Review interview, Doctorow refutes any autobiographical claims by saying the book only “pretends” to be a memoir.) The novel is told mostly through Edgar’s observations, with the occasional narrative asides by other characters. It is a quiet story about his family’s day-to-day life during the Great Depression, but two dramatic moments stand out. The first is when Edgar gets confronted by a couple of large bullies on the street, who accuse him at knifepoint of being Jewish. Edgar firmly denies it, lies that his father is a cop, and afterward is left to live down his shame.
The second is when Edgar goes under the actual knife during emergency surgery for a burst appendix. As the doctors put him under the gas, he fights, kicking and screaming with the fury of someone being waterboarded. In recovery afterward, still under the effects of anesthesia, he floats through a dream sequence in which he’s visited by his deceased grandmother. The old woman cools his forehead with a damp washcloth and offers him a penny from her pocketbook. Then she tells him—in a Yiddish he somehow understands—that he’s a good boy and that God will protect him.
Just like Jonathan, Edgar turns out to be the writer in the family. He enters a World’s Fair essay contest—on how to define a Typical American Boy—and wins honorable mention. His name appears in the newspaper, and he receives free passes to the fair for his entire family. His greatest reward, however, may be when his father recites the essay aloud in the living room. Edgar is touched by the depth of feeling in his dad’s voice. He cherishes the gloss of approval it confers on him. The essay pays tribute to the economic sacrifices of his mother and father, and it states that an American boy not only “cooperates with his parents” but also “knows the value of a dollar.” If the boy is Jewish, Edgar asserts, “he should say so.” Such a boy, Edgar concludes, “looks death in the face.”
The essay makes his mother cry and his father draw out his handkerchief—and how could the reader not succumb to emotion as well? But Edgar’s dad has one more gift to give. As he consoles his son for not winning first prize, he states what the reader has already figured out long ago: that Edgar is “not a typical American boy and that’s all there is to it.”
Beyond the similarities between Doctorow and my father, I also felt a kinship with Jonathan’s dad in “The Writer in the Family.” Not all the details of his life correlate with my father’s, of course. A store owner–turned–appliance jobber, Jonathan’s dad neither made “the great journey from the working class to the professional class” nor followed his well-married sister to the leafy suburbs of Westchester. My own father, however, joined the ranks of medicine and eventually left New York City for the northern suburbs of Chicago. Thankfully, also unlike Jonathan’s dad, my father didn’t pass away prematurely. Even in that respect, however, an interesting parallel exists. Jack floats through Doctorow’s story as a relatively distant figure, someone defined more by his absence than by his proximity to his family. Only through snippets of memory is he revealed, especially as Jonathan tries to compose each letter. He recalls a man who never traveled but loved New York unceasingly; a man of great vigor who “moved with a bounce,” “always wanted us to go someplace,” and “was always eager to see what was around the corner.”
In my own father, who was often remote and difficult to access, lay the same kind of excitable attitude. He spent most nights secluded in his bedroom study, where he read echocardiograms, gorged on fat baseball encyclopedias, pored over history books and political biographies, or examined chronicles of old New York. At family gatherings, he lacked the stamina for long interactions, and in other social settings he invariably turned inward and retreated to a more comfortable solitude.
Occasionally, he would spring forth from isolation and go looking for company. I’d hear him humming from the top-floor bedroom, and next thing, he’d take to the staircase with a resounding gait—one-two, one-two. A nimble energy flowed from him. He was a shorter man who rarely exercised, yet he owned the strongest grip of anyone I knew. Even during my years as a wrestler, his handshake would overpower mine. A favorite game of his was to hold one of his palms face up, encouraging me and my brother to take turns hitting it as hard as we could. “Harder,” he’d command, until one of us, after an exaggerated windup, would stop short of an actual slap, and softly, barely touch his hand. “Owww!” he’d scream, jerking it away as if he’d been scalded by a hot poker, sending us into a fit of laughter.
If his devotion to the past sometimes put him on an island, it also infused our lives with stories, gags, and amusements. On Sundays, as our parents dismantled The New York Times and Chicago Tribune and we kids went straight for the funnies, my father would launch into a favorite impression from his childhood: Mayor Fiorello La Guardia reading Dick Tracy on the radio during the 1945 New York City delivery drivers strike. “Ahhh, here’s Dick Tra-cy,” my dad would say in an old-fashioned newsreel lilt. On reaching the end of the strip, he’d ask, “And what does it all mean-n-n, children? It means that Dir-ty Mon-ey never brings any luck!” If we were out driving and he spotted an antique car, he would break into song: “He had to get UN–der, get out and get UN–der … to fix his oh-old machine,” his take on a spry, silly 1913 tune about a man whose automobile keeps breaking down. If one of us saw the antique first and started singing, my father’s voice would quickly overtake ours, spreading an infectious glee through the car.
A few years after reading my father’s “Cityscapes” essay, I applied to NYU’s creative writing program—a highly respected program where E. L. Doctorow happened to teach. As part of my application, I submitted a memoir about my suburban Chicago childhood set against my father’s stories of growing up in New York City. The piece must have caught the right person’s attention, because the program took a risk and accepted me.
I had come at last to the city of my father. My excitement at studying under Doctorow was doubled by the prospect—I couldn’t help imagining it—that he and my father would meet one day and hit it off like old friends. My own meeting with the author, however, would have to wait, as his teaching load had been reduced to the occasional craft class and master’s thesis supervision. When he returned from a sabbatical in the spring of my second year, I finally enrolled in his craft of fiction course. Thus began my semester-long effort to make him a mentor—and bring my father along for the experience.
Doctorow wore round spectacles, had a trim gray mustache and jawline beard, and combed his remaining threads of hair over his crown. His eyebrows were his chief means of expression. Sometimes they would furrow with skepticism or arch ironically; other times they split farther apart with confusion or disbelief (a dry smile softened the effect). On the first day of class, he boasted that the writers on his syllabus all possessed a single attribute: what he called a “fevered imagination.” The headliners included Heinrich von Kleist, Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woolf, and—to everyone’s surprise—Dante.
Unfortunately, the fever he alluded to spiked less frequently in the room. Most of our sessions consisted of student presentations, a number of which left something to be desired. And yet, every so often he would interrupt the presenter to ask a pointed question or, even better, to chime in with his own thoughts. In these moments, as his gaze turned from the student speaker to the students at large, all of us in the room sat up straighter in our chairs.
Almost by accident, it seemed, he would slip into the role of raconteur. Doctorow’s voice was hushed but mellifluent. It would climb in scale and then drop to a low, throaty pitch. Many of his tales he’d told previously at readings or in interviews, but no matter. We’d all signed up to hear the great writer speak, and we eagerly snatched up whatever morsels he threw our way. One favorite anecdote involved a profile he’d written for a high school journalism class—of a doorman at Carnegie Hall who, as I recall, was a survivor of Nazi Germany. His teacher found the piece so moving that she insisted on inviting the man to class. Doctorow deflected, saying the man was a recluse who preferred his solitude, but when his teacher wouldn’t relent, he finally came clean. The man didn’t exist; Doctorow had made the whole thing up. (His grade, he admitted, was subsequently lowered.)
The author spoke candidly about his own frustrations with writing and his many stare-downs with failure. These included one dark moment when he’d been so disgusted with the early draft of a novel that he threw the whole thing away. The book was based on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—convicted Soviet spies and former front-page tabloid news—and he told himself that if he could make that story seem dull, then he had no business being a writer. Into the trash can it went, and in a fit of anger, Doctorow began pounding out a parody of his own chucked draft. It was the best thing he could’ve done. What began as an exercise in self-mockery would eventually lead him to the very voice he’d need to make the novel work. That voice belonged to the son of his fictionalized spies, and so The Book of Daniel was born.
The point of this, and his other anecdotes, was to underscore the importance of the imagination. Once ignited, it would liberate the writer and disperse his story in unforeseen directions. Doctorow said that every novel he’d ever written had begun with a creative accident—more precisely, with what he called “a private excitation of the mind.” A private excitation of the mind! What writer wouldn’t want that? As an example, Doctorow offered none other than Loon Lake. He’d seen those two words on a passing road sign while he was driving through the Adirondacks, and as the phrase rolled around mysteriously inside his head, he began to envision a private train traveling through those same woods, only 50 years earlier. The train, he realized, was on its way to a lavish retreat owned by some wealthy industrialist, a man who took up with mobsters and beautiful women. The author put one of those women aboard his train, made her visible to a young man observing from the woods, and from there he rode the rails all the way to the end of his novel.
What I didn’t obtain from Doctorow in class, I sought instead through office visits. Based on our mutual interest in Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner, on the similar background between him and my father, and on the many books of his I’d read, I persuaded myself that I’d earned an extra share of his attention. The author received me cordially enough, but he didn’t unlock any hidden drawers to his personality or dole out any extra anecdotes in response to my own. I shared with him, for instance, what I took to be an astounding coincidence: on the same night that he read a passage from his novel City of God—a flashback that encompassed both World Wars and involved a pilot parachuting into a boneyard in France—my father presented a talk at the Chicago Literary Club on three British war poets (Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves). The parallel didn’t seem to register as powerfully for Doctorow. Later, when I brought a first-edition copy of World’s Fair to be signed for my father, I didn’t expect him to remember the particular story I’d recounted, but it saddened me that he made no reference in his inscription to the 1939 exposition he and my father had both attended—an event that had made such a lasting impression on them both.
It was the same disappointment when I brought him a first-edition Lives of the Poets. This time the inscription was for me, and I very nearly asked if he would sign it, “To Jonathan Liebson, the writer in the family.” But I wasn’t sure I’d earned that title yet, and part of me wanted his comment to be self-generated, a personal token based on our many discussions. It was not to be. Doctorow inscribed the book, “to jonathan liebson, nyu alum, all best”—and in that moment, I realized how unrealistic my expectations had been all along. I’d aspired to build a three-way bridge between Doctorow, myself, and the man who’d introduced me to his work, somehow believing it would strengthen the bonds between father and son. Instead, I had only briefly entered—and would soon retreat from—the author’s orbit, while the bonds I’d anticipated would remain what they had always been: a private excitation of my own mind.
Several years later, on a fall afternoon when I was teaching at The New School, I spotted Doctorow near a small post office on West 10th Street and Sixth Avenue. From a few doors down, I instinctively raised my arm to say hello, but he didn’t see me, and something kept me from calling out his name. Perhaps I believed he deserved his privacy, but another part of me feared the author might simply not remember who I was.
And yet, I still had Doctorow’s writing. In the years after taking his craft class, I turned away from his newer novels but went on reading his earlier books. At the same time, I continued to teach my favorite short story to my undergraduate classes. Whenever it reappeared on my syllabus, I would mention the story to my father, who would perk up momentarily, affirm his memory of it, and express his affinity for the author. To this day he still does, though the conversation has lost the steam of our previous talks and no longer touches on our shared connection to the writer.
The scene in which Aunt Frances cries after reading Jonathan’s first letter still brings me to tears. So, too, does the story’s remarkable ending. By then, Jonathan seems stuck in an unwinnable feud between his mother and Aunt Frances. His mom resents the lie of Arizona, just as she resents the many obligations her in-laws used to impose on her late husband. “He can’t even die when he wants to!” she yells in protest, which makes Jonathan’s task ever more difficult. What’s perfectly obvious to her, to Jonathan’s older brother, and to every last one of my students, is the way Jonathan has let Aunt Frances manipulate him. It was she who dubbed Jonathan “the writer in the family”—a note of praise that came with a hefty price tag, since his aunt convinced him that unless he wrote the letters she wanted, he would bring dishonor upon himself and his father’s memory.
Fortunately, Jonathan wises up by story’s end. In his final letter to his grandmother, he not only calls their move to Arizona a mistake, he also bluntly breaks the news of his dad’s terminal illness. Speaking for his father one last time, Jonathan offers what may be the story’s most profound insight: “As for the nature of my ailment, I know that I am simply dying of the wrong life.” The words are a subtle jab at his Aunt Frances, while they acknowledge a man who was so beholden to the wishes of everyone else that he never got to fulfill his own.
And who else, besides Jonathan, is capable of laying his father to rest? Who else looks beyond Jack’s business failures, financial setbacks, and economic shortcomings to reveal what truly mattered to him? Thanks to Jonathan, we see a man who thrilled at everyday discoveries, a man who noticed the curious and unusual where most others never bothered to look, and a lifelong New Yorker who loved his city with an unrelenting passion. In the end, what started as a burden for Jonathan turned out to be a blessing in disguise. The letters transformed him into the most authentic version of what a writer should be: someone who not only describes but inhabits the very individual he’s trying to portray. For those of us still hoping to understand our fathers, can there be any reward more profound?
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