September 2015
56 years, 11 months: Lapping My Father
09/22/15 Filed in: Moments
I have now lived as long as my father did.
Somehow this milestone did not touch me as much as lapping my mother about a year ago did. That may be in part because she struggled to keep going until the end, devoting herself to her various projects until the cancer and the chemotherapy made that impossible. Her life ended with her last, stertorous breath. We had been waiting for that moment through years of illness and remission, and we were there to see the horrible, unedifying end. Then came the packed funeral at the Episcopal church we only visited as a family once a year and the crowds at the cemetery. An epoch was over—mostly in my life and my brother’s, but even in the life of the city. My brother treasured (and squirreled away from me) tributes of all kinds, from simple letters to richly decorated documents that reported that the city council or the county board of supervisors or one of the houses of the state legislature had ceremonially adjourned in honor of her passing.
When my father had died six weeks earlier, everything was much more muted. The world would go on as it had. We would continue to live in a house where the focus of everything was my mother’s pain. My brother, the housekeeper, and the private nurses, tried to keep her comfortable, but what relief the Darvon gave didn’t last from one appointed dose to the next. If anything, a weight was lifted from me: I no longer had to fear living in a house where my mother would no longer be able to restrain the angry, drunken, unpredictable man who would be left as my only parent. That had been my greatest fear, and only our housekeeper was tactless or perceptive enough to suggest that I might be experiencing more relief than grief.
The funeral at the Catholic parish we attended every Sunday was full of people who were “there for Helen,” and my mother left the house—impeccably dressed, as always—for the last time to do her duty to her husband’s memory. But after we got her home from the cemetery, life became again a round of pills and shots and pain. If the city fathers adjourned in my dad’s memory, it was to comfort my mother—and I don’t recall my brother poring over any proclamations of sympathy at that point. Perhaps he was just too busy making sure the nurses arrived on time. Even in our little world, my father’s death had not really changed much at all.
The truth is, it seemed as if my father’s real life had ended long ago. He seemed to spend most of his time asleep: I think I saw him wearing a nightshirt more often than in anything else. At the time, I thought he was passed out drunk all the time, but as I have approached his age myself and found myself wearing a C-PAP every night and being prescribed drugs with names like Nuvigil and Provigil, I begin to think he also had a real sleep disorder that was never treated. Whatever medical problems he had, though, it still seemed that he was drunk more often than not.
I realize that my father during his periods of productive sobriety was less memorable than my father on the rampage from drink or withdrawal or in a stupor beyond all rousing. So, my most intense recollections tell against him. So do even the parts of his life I saw. He wasn’t at his best at home. Other people saw, though less and less, a skillful lawyer or a cheerful companion, while I saw the man they would not have cared to meet.
I have always been the one in the family credited with an accurate memory for everything but names. The odd corollary of that recognition has been that I am also the one kept out of the informational loop. My mother shared family lore with my brother, not with me. On the other side of the family, my guardian aunts were even worse: they went so far as to hide an uncle’s obituary from me lest I learn about something they didn’t like to talk about. I would say their care was pointless—I had already been clued in on that big secret—but perhaps it wasn’t: if I had seen the obit, I would have talked about it, and I can understand why they would have wanted to avoid that. In any case, my memories of my father lack much of the background detail that would soften the grotesque picture my memory foregrounds.
The Harry J. Ragen I knew best was a man damaged beyond repair. He had once, of course, been something else.
Evidently as a boy he had been one of the popular kids. We occasionally got calls even years after his death from old guys who found themselves in San Diego, recalled that they had heard that Harry Ragen had ended up there, and found the name in the phone book. After the disappointment at finding that another guy their age had died too young, there were stories of a happy Iowa childhood, with my father sounding like the gregarious, relaxed boy I never was. He did, as I understand it, have the advantage of having an uncle who owned the town’s movie theater—something that could give a kid a considerable social edge in a small Iowa town in the days before television—but that didn’t seem to be the root of his popularity. He was also, unlike me again, an athlete. He played basketball—he remembered most the Protestant kids on other teams trying to tear the scapulars from the Catholic players’ necks—and tennis. He, or perhaps his brother, may have been state tennis champ.
Like me, he grew up in a house dominated by illness. His father, a haberdasher in Oskaloosa, Iowa, developed pernicious anemia in the days when the only treatment for it was consuming massive amount of raw calves’ liver.* My father remembered with disgust how he would grind it and mix it with orange juice and try to get it down in that form, which I can’t imagine made it much more pleasant. All the same, Harry Ragen, Sr. was an invalid. Family lore had it that my father was even given a driver’s license when he was still underage so he could do some of the family errands, and as a boy I imagined him peeking through the steering wheel of something like our Chrysler Imperial instead of driving a model A. But my grandmother—a figure I knew only as a tiny woman everyone called Mamie—saw to it that the family continued its climb up the American ladder of success. She was eventually named Nebraska Mother of the Year in honor of having seen to it that, despite her husband’s illness and early death, every one of her five children not only went to college, but earned an advanced degree. That she did it during the Great Depression and in an era when few women received degrees of any sort was an achievement that deserves honor. (One daughter earned a Ph.D., two earned master’s degrees; my father and his brother earned degrees in law and medicine.)
Those five siblings formed a bond that was unshakable, even after behavior that would lead many people I know to “withdraw from a toxic relationship that I realized was really co-dependent.” The girls doted on the boys. His sisters, especially the two who never married, were my father’s confidantes and biggest fans and willing slaves throughout his life. Perhaps they acted as “enablers” of my father’s addiction, but I am not sure there is much use in casting real people in the restrictive roles of the 12-step puppet show. They certainly did try to lessen the damage he caused, and they played the same role in the lives of their other brother and of their nieces and nephews. I really don’t think there is any reason to blame them for doing their best to keep several men from hitting rock bottom at terminal velocity.
I wish I knew more about my father’s life beyond the family, but I have no sources. I only know that he earned a Ph.B. in English from Creighton University during what I think of as the heyday of Jesuit education in America. His life as a student? I know that, like other freshmen, he wore a beanie. That’s about it. He went on to earn an LL.B. from the same institution—though he traded it in for a doctoral degree later on so his younger brother with the M.D. wouldn’t be able to lord it over him anymore. (His elder sister, quite rightly, continued to remind them both that any doctorate not awarded on the basis of an “original contribution to knowledge” was merely titular.) Then he made a European tour, getting out of Germany on the last ship for America. (That’s how the story went.) And then he was drafted, in what was then a one-year contingency draft. After Pearl Harbor, he was in for the duration.
I have tried to discover what the war was like for my father. But I have failed. His stories more or less stopped after boot camp and some time he happily spent in a training camp with some of Walt Disney’s cartoonists. After that, next to nothing, though he spent most of the war in the European Theater of Operations, served for a time as encryption/decryption officer for General Eisenhower (he was in the Signal Corps), acted as a JAG officer on a number of cases, and won the Bronze Star for an act of heroism near Bergamo in 1945. (He was then scouting local phone lines in order to use them to connect front line troops with artillery support.) There must have been more stories, and my brother may have heard a few more than I did, but he would prefer me not discuss even what I do recall hearing.
I have procured what records I could from the Army, but much has been lost, and what is left tells me little. My father evidently shared some details of his experiences with my mother, which she was not above using against him during their quarrels. (His smart mouth had evidently lost him a promotion to captain—and telling my mother about it wasn’t a good idea, either.) In hope of understanding my father better, I have read many memoirs of the war. I think most of three books by people I have actually known—though one only at one remove—and genuinely admired: Flights of Passage by Samuel Hynes, Crossing the Line by Alvin Kernan, and Doing Battle by Paul Fussell. Professors Hynes and Kernan—I can’t think of them of as Sam and Al, no matter how often they have asked me to call them that—were my professors at Princeton. They intimidated me—though they did everything they could to be accessible—and as a graduate student I myself was still shyer than I am now. I hoped their memoirs of the war would help me understand my father. They didn’t. They didn’t even help me understand them better. I couldn’t really see how the cocky, exuberant flyboys so vividly depicted in the books could have become the courtly, gentle, intensely learned men I saw in the classroom.†
I did not know Paul Fussell personally, though his son Sam was a friend of mine at Pomona College. (Sam’s own book Muscle is one of the great memoirs—and so far as I can tell he doesn’t say a word that isn’t true, though he omits a great deal, such as his years at Pomona, for narrative effect.) I did hear the elder Fussell speak on several occasions and have loved many of his books, including Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, and The Great War and Modern Memory. I thought he was on the road to becoming one of the great American essayists until he let his bitchy persona get away from him. His book on the war may have given me a better idea about my father and the war than any other.
Doing Battle is in some ways an embarrassing read. The author shares too many details. He admits to feelings that are not to be mentioned by either the hip or the stoic. He paints a picture of someone uncomfortably like the person one is trying not to be. In all that Fussell’s book is a great contrast to the memoirs by Hynes and Kernan. Fussell’s is also a much grimmer and more cynical picture of war theirs are. And while the two future Princeton professors seem to feel primarily affection for the Marine Corps and the Navy, Fussell simply despises the Army. I think there are several reasons for these contrasts. First, while Hynes and Kernan came to the service from more or less straightened circumstances, Fussell was a child of privilege: he was the son of a lawyer in wealthy Pasadena, where he had the best possible public education. (Pasadena expected everyone to complete at least junior college.) He had plenty of money, and went on to an elite college—my own Pomona. While Kernan especially sees the U.S. Navy as a true home and doesn’t mind being an enlisted man, Fussell finds the army a place of exile and resents being ordered about by his intellectual inferiors. While Kernan appreciates the well-made uniforms and the ample food, Fussell finds everything either substandard or, frankly, tacky. Of course, the three men are also fighting very different wars. As fliers, Kernan and Hynes risk death, but they kept fairly clean and comfortable while they do it. Between missions there are showers and square meals. As an infantry lieutenant, Fussell sees death face to face, and, perhaps worse for him, lives for days on end with mud and filth and exhaustion. And while the fliers work with men selected for their aptitude and technical skill, Fussell deals with both soldiers and officers who serve where they do because of their lack of specialized skills. He not only suffers more but does it in just the company he would not have chosen.
My father did not come from as privileged a background as Fussell did, and he did not spend as much time being shot at. But coming from a protective and devoted family and having already earned the professional qualification that was much rarer then than it has since become, he may have shared Fussell’s feelings of resentment about the army and his military superiors. He certainly seems to have behaved much as Fussell did. Fussell reports that his responses to his superiors became more and more “snotty.” (That is not a word one often finds in military memoirs.) The same sort of discourse lost my father his captaincy. While I think my father had done more to earn his sense of entitlement than the young Fussell had, they both clearly felt what they were forced to do as a profound affront, one that may have changed the very conception they had of themselves.
But Fussell made a success of his life after the war, and my father did not. He was older than the men who became great English professors and didn’t have the joyous experience of education on the GI bill some of them recount. There were other things that darkened his life. Perhaps the addiction—and while I would not apply that term to most people who drink too much, I think it fits his case—explains it all. But perhaps not. Perhaps the war experiences wounded him psychically. Perhaps he just lacked the faculties that would have allowed him to flourish in the roles he found himself asked to play.
Between the war and the point where my memories begin, he had a life that I can’t find a way to imagine. He never went back to live in Iowa or Nebraska, but after he joined his mother and sisters in California, he built a successful life. He became partner in a law firm. He married an heiress who had a career in journalism. He was active in civic affairs. And then, just as I was becoming old enough to form memories, the collapse came. He left the firm, and his private practice withered. He was unreliable on boards and committees and lost his place on them. He became the man I knew. Was it the war? Was it his brother’s public disgrace? Was it something to do with the upheavals in his nation’s culture? And might he have recovered at least a bit if he had not died suddenly when he was not quite 57?
And what do I take from my father’s example now that I am older than he would ever be? I have already stopped drinking. (I started rather late but caught up to him to a greater extent than I imagined possible.) Having neither wife nor children, I am not hated by them. I get out of bed every day. I never use foul language or call people names. I rarely miss a board meeting. I still may accomplish more than I have yet done. I have not become him. I have not.
* A later note: I have now been diagnosed with pernicious anemia myself. I give myself a shot of Vitamin B12 once a month. When I am tempted to think that progress is a myth, I think of my shot and the scene my father witnessed in the Omaha kitchen with the liver, the grinder, and the orange juice.
† Their subsequent memoirs give a fuller picture. Kernan’s In Plato’s Cave is one of the best memoirs of a life in scholarship I have ever read. And Hynes’s Growing Seasons tells the story of the boy who would become the Marine bomber pilot.
Somehow this milestone did not touch me as much as lapping my mother about a year ago did. That may be in part because she struggled to keep going until the end, devoting herself to her various projects until the cancer and the chemotherapy made that impossible. Her life ended with her last, stertorous breath. We had been waiting for that moment through years of illness and remission, and we were there to see the horrible, unedifying end. Then came the packed funeral at the Episcopal church we only visited as a family once a year and the crowds at the cemetery. An epoch was over—mostly in my life and my brother’s, but even in the life of the city. My brother treasured (and squirreled away from me) tributes of all kinds, from simple letters to richly decorated documents that reported that the city council or the county board of supervisors or one of the houses of the state legislature had ceremonially adjourned in honor of her passing.
When my father had died six weeks earlier, everything was much more muted. The world would go on as it had. We would continue to live in a house where the focus of everything was my mother’s pain. My brother, the housekeeper, and the private nurses, tried to keep her comfortable, but what relief the Darvon gave didn’t last from one appointed dose to the next. If anything, a weight was lifted from me: I no longer had to fear living in a house where my mother would no longer be able to restrain the angry, drunken, unpredictable man who would be left as my only parent. That had been my greatest fear, and only our housekeeper was tactless or perceptive enough to suggest that I might be experiencing more relief than grief.
The funeral at the Catholic parish we attended every Sunday was full of people who were “there for Helen,” and my mother left the house—impeccably dressed, as always—for the last time to do her duty to her husband’s memory. But after we got her home from the cemetery, life became again a round of pills and shots and pain. If the city fathers adjourned in my dad’s memory, it was to comfort my mother—and I don’t recall my brother poring over any proclamations of sympathy at that point. Perhaps he was just too busy making sure the nurses arrived on time. Even in our little world, my father’s death had not really changed much at all.
The truth is, it seemed as if my father’s real life had ended long ago. He seemed to spend most of his time asleep: I think I saw him wearing a nightshirt more often than in anything else. At the time, I thought he was passed out drunk all the time, but as I have approached his age myself and found myself wearing a C-PAP every night and being prescribed drugs with names like Nuvigil and Provigil, I begin to think he also had a real sleep disorder that was never treated. Whatever medical problems he had, though, it still seemed that he was drunk more often than not.
I realize that my father during his periods of productive sobriety was less memorable than my father on the rampage from drink or withdrawal or in a stupor beyond all rousing. So, my most intense recollections tell against him. So do even the parts of his life I saw. He wasn’t at his best at home. Other people saw, though less and less, a skillful lawyer or a cheerful companion, while I saw the man they would not have cared to meet.
I have always been the one in the family credited with an accurate memory for everything but names. The odd corollary of that recognition has been that I am also the one kept out of the informational loop. My mother shared family lore with my brother, not with me. On the other side of the family, my guardian aunts were even worse: they went so far as to hide an uncle’s obituary from me lest I learn about something they didn’t like to talk about. I would say their care was pointless—I had already been clued in on that big secret—but perhaps it wasn’t: if I had seen the obit, I would have talked about it, and I can understand why they would have wanted to avoid that. In any case, my memories of my father lack much of the background detail that would soften the grotesque picture my memory foregrounds.
The Harry J. Ragen I knew best was a man damaged beyond repair. He had once, of course, been something else.
Evidently as a boy he had been one of the popular kids. We occasionally got calls even years after his death from old guys who found themselves in San Diego, recalled that they had heard that Harry Ragen had ended up there, and found the name in the phone book. After the disappointment at finding that another guy their age had died too young, there were stories of a happy Iowa childhood, with my father sounding like the gregarious, relaxed boy I never was. He did, as I understand it, have the advantage of having an uncle who owned the town’s movie theater—something that could give a kid a considerable social edge in a small Iowa town in the days before television—but that didn’t seem to be the root of his popularity. He was also, unlike me again, an athlete. He played basketball—he remembered most the Protestant kids on other teams trying to tear the scapulars from the Catholic players’ necks—and tennis. He, or perhaps his brother, may have been state tennis champ.
Like me, he grew up in a house dominated by illness. His father, a haberdasher in Oskaloosa, Iowa, developed pernicious anemia in the days when the only treatment for it was consuming massive amount of raw calves’ liver.* My father remembered with disgust how he would grind it and mix it with orange juice and try to get it down in that form, which I can’t imagine made it much more pleasant. All the same, Harry Ragen, Sr. was an invalid. Family lore had it that my father was even given a driver’s license when he was still underage so he could do some of the family errands, and as a boy I imagined him peeking through the steering wheel of something like our Chrysler Imperial instead of driving a model A. But my grandmother—a figure I knew only as a tiny woman everyone called Mamie—saw to it that the family continued its climb up the American ladder of success. She was eventually named Nebraska Mother of the Year in honor of having seen to it that, despite her husband’s illness and early death, every one of her five children not only went to college, but earned an advanced degree. That she did it during the Great Depression and in an era when few women received degrees of any sort was an achievement that deserves honor. (One daughter earned a Ph.D., two earned master’s degrees; my father and his brother earned degrees in law and medicine.)
Those five siblings formed a bond that was unshakable, even after behavior that would lead many people I know to “withdraw from a toxic relationship that I realized was really co-dependent.” The girls doted on the boys. His sisters, especially the two who never married, were my father’s confidantes and biggest fans and willing slaves throughout his life. Perhaps they acted as “enablers” of my father’s addiction, but I am not sure there is much use in casting real people in the restrictive roles of the 12-step puppet show. They certainly did try to lessen the damage he caused, and they played the same role in the lives of their other brother and of their nieces and nephews. I really don’t think there is any reason to blame them for doing their best to keep several men from hitting rock bottom at terminal velocity.
I wish I knew more about my father’s life beyond the family, but I have no sources. I only know that he earned a Ph.B. in English from Creighton University during what I think of as the heyday of Jesuit education in America. His life as a student? I know that, like other freshmen, he wore a beanie. That’s about it. He went on to earn an LL.B. from the same institution—though he traded it in for a doctoral degree later on so his younger brother with the M.D. wouldn’t be able to lord it over him anymore. (His elder sister, quite rightly, continued to remind them both that any doctorate not awarded on the basis of an “original contribution to knowledge” was merely titular.) Then he made a European tour, getting out of Germany on the last ship for America. (That’s how the story went.) And then he was drafted, in what was then a one-year contingency draft. After Pearl Harbor, he was in for the duration.
I have tried to discover what the war was like for my father. But I have failed. His stories more or less stopped after boot camp and some time he happily spent in a training camp with some of Walt Disney’s cartoonists. After that, next to nothing, though he spent most of the war in the European Theater of Operations, served for a time as encryption/decryption officer for General Eisenhower (he was in the Signal Corps), acted as a JAG officer on a number of cases, and won the Bronze Star for an act of heroism near Bergamo in 1945. (He was then scouting local phone lines in order to use them to connect front line troops with artillery support.) There must have been more stories, and my brother may have heard a few more than I did, but he would prefer me not discuss even what I do recall hearing.
I have procured what records I could from the Army, but much has been lost, and what is left tells me little. My father evidently shared some details of his experiences with my mother, which she was not above using against him during their quarrels. (His smart mouth had evidently lost him a promotion to captain—and telling my mother about it wasn’t a good idea, either.) In hope of understanding my father better, I have read many memoirs of the war. I think most of three books by people I have actually known—though one only at one remove—and genuinely admired: Flights of Passage by Samuel Hynes, Crossing the Line by Alvin Kernan, and Doing Battle by Paul Fussell. Professors Hynes and Kernan—I can’t think of them of as Sam and Al, no matter how often they have asked me to call them that—were my professors at Princeton. They intimidated me—though they did everything they could to be accessible—and as a graduate student I myself was still shyer than I am now. I hoped their memoirs of the war would help me understand my father. They didn’t. They didn’t even help me understand them better. I couldn’t really see how the cocky, exuberant flyboys so vividly depicted in the books could have become the courtly, gentle, intensely learned men I saw in the classroom.†
I did not know Paul Fussell personally, though his son Sam was a friend of mine at Pomona College. (Sam’s own book Muscle is one of the great memoirs—and so far as I can tell he doesn’t say a word that isn’t true, though he omits a great deal, such as his years at Pomona, for narrative effect.) I did hear the elder Fussell speak on several occasions and have loved many of his books, including Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, Samuel Johnson and the Life of Writing, and The Great War and Modern Memory. I thought he was on the road to becoming one of the great American essayists until he let his bitchy persona get away from him. His book on the war may have given me a better idea about my father and the war than any other.
Doing Battle is in some ways an embarrassing read. The author shares too many details. He admits to feelings that are not to be mentioned by either the hip or the stoic. He paints a picture of someone uncomfortably like the person one is trying not to be. In all that Fussell’s book is a great contrast to the memoirs by Hynes and Kernan. Fussell’s is also a much grimmer and more cynical picture of war theirs are. And while the two future Princeton professors seem to feel primarily affection for the Marine Corps and the Navy, Fussell simply despises the Army. I think there are several reasons for these contrasts. First, while Hynes and Kernan came to the service from more or less straightened circumstances, Fussell was a child of privilege: he was the son of a lawyer in wealthy Pasadena, where he had the best possible public education. (Pasadena expected everyone to complete at least junior college.) He had plenty of money, and went on to an elite college—my own Pomona. While Kernan especially sees the U.S. Navy as a true home and doesn’t mind being an enlisted man, Fussell finds the army a place of exile and resents being ordered about by his intellectual inferiors. While Kernan appreciates the well-made uniforms and the ample food, Fussell finds everything either substandard or, frankly, tacky. Of course, the three men are also fighting very different wars. As fliers, Kernan and Hynes risk death, but they kept fairly clean and comfortable while they do it. Between missions there are showers and square meals. As an infantry lieutenant, Fussell sees death face to face, and, perhaps worse for him, lives for days on end with mud and filth and exhaustion. And while the fliers work with men selected for their aptitude and technical skill, Fussell deals with both soldiers and officers who serve where they do because of their lack of specialized skills. He not only suffers more but does it in just the company he would not have chosen.
My father did not come from as privileged a background as Fussell did, and he did not spend as much time being shot at. But coming from a protective and devoted family and having already earned the professional qualification that was much rarer then than it has since become, he may have shared Fussell’s feelings of resentment about the army and his military superiors. He certainly seems to have behaved much as Fussell did. Fussell reports that his responses to his superiors became more and more “snotty.” (That is not a word one often finds in military memoirs.) The same sort of discourse lost my father his captaincy. While I think my father had done more to earn his sense of entitlement than the young Fussell had, they both clearly felt what they were forced to do as a profound affront, one that may have changed the very conception they had of themselves.
But Fussell made a success of his life after the war, and my father did not. He was older than the men who became great English professors and didn’t have the joyous experience of education on the GI bill some of them recount. There were other things that darkened his life. Perhaps the addiction—and while I would not apply that term to most people who drink too much, I think it fits his case—explains it all. But perhaps not. Perhaps the war experiences wounded him psychically. Perhaps he just lacked the faculties that would have allowed him to flourish in the roles he found himself asked to play.
Between the war and the point where my memories begin, he had a life that I can’t find a way to imagine. He never went back to live in Iowa or Nebraska, but after he joined his mother and sisters in California, he built a successful life. He became partner in a law firm. He married an heiress who had a career in journalism. He was active in civic affairs. And then, just as I was becoming old enough to form memories, the collapse came. He left the firm, and his private practice withered. He was unreliable on boards and committees and lost his place on them. He became the man I knew. Was it the war? Was it his brother’s public disgrace? Was it something to do with the upheavals in his nation’s culture? And might he have recovered at least a bit if he had not died suddenly when he was not quite 57?
And what do I take from my father’s example now that I am older than he would ever be? I have already stopped drinking. (I started rather late but caught up to him to a greater extent than I imagined possible.) Having neither wife nor children, I am not hated by them. I get out of bed every day. I never use foul language or call people names. I rarely miss a board meeting. I still may accomplish more than I have yet done. I have not become him. I have not.
* A later note: I have now been diagnosed with pernicious anemia myself. I give myself a shot of Vitamin B12 once a month. When I am tempted to think that progress is a myth, I think of my shot and the scene my father witnessed in the Omaha kitchen with the liver, the grinder, and the orange juice.
† Their subsequent memoirs give a fuller picture. Kernan’s In Plato’s Cave is one of the best memoirs of a life in scholarship I have ever read. And Hynes’s Growing Seasons tells the story of the boy who would become the Marine bomber pilot.