A Conversation with My Father

“I would like you to write a simple story just once more [...] the kind de Maupassant wrote, or Chekhov, the kind you used to write. Just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.”

The above passage introduces the central conflict in the story: the different ideas that the writer and her father have about narrative. The father’s definition of a good story draws on the realist tradition of Maupassant and Chekhov—writers who follow the stories of ordinary people struggling with “real” problems in “recognizable” societies. By contrast, postmodernists like Paley (and presumably the writer in the story) are less concerned with telling what the father describes as a “simple story” often because they view modern life as too layered and ambiguous to be represented in such a way. Instead, these writers tend to prioritize complexity, fragmentation, and open-endedness, sometimes (as the father’s criticism implies) by avoiding linear plot lines.

“I would like to try to tell such a story, if he means the kind that begins: ‘There was a woman…’ followed by plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” 

As she indicates here, the writer’s disagreement with her father isn’t a question of aesthetic preferences. Instead, it is rooted in how each character sees the world and (at least in the writer’s case) their moral obligations within it. According to the writer, conventional, linear plots rob characters of the chance to grow in directions not anticipated by the author. Like her father’s preference for tragedy, the writer’s sensitivity to the possibility of redemption or reinvention is very much tied to historical context. The writer has presumably (like Paley herself) grown up not only in America but also in an America undergoing rapid social changes. As a result, she has a more relaxed attitude than her father about things like drug use, and she generally sees more opportunities for social mobility in the world around her.

“Once in my time there was a woman and she had a son. They lived nicely, in a small apartment in Manhattan. This boy at about fifteen became a junkie, which is not unusual in our neighborhood. In order to maintain her close friendship with him, she became a junkie too. She said it was part of youth culture, with which she felt very much at home. After a while, for a number of reasons, the boy gave it all up and left the city and his mother in disgust. Hopeless and alone, she grieved. We all visit her.” 

The above passage is the writer’s first attempt at telling an “unadorned and miserable tale” of the kind that her father wants (Paragraph 6). Her father responds by claiming that she “misunderstood [him] on purpose,” which seems plausible given the way in which she has recounted the story (Paragraph 7). The tone of the passage is matter-of-fact, at least in the sense that it simply reports events without attaching any emotional significance to them. At the same time, it is vague to the point of containing almost no facts beyond the bare plot. Her remark that the boy got clean “for a number of reasons” feels especially out of place in a work of narrative fiction, which traditionally devotes a lot of attention to character and motivation. The cumulative effect of these stylistic choices is to prevent the reader from becoming emotionally engaged in the story. As a result, while the story might technically follow the tragic arc that the father desires, it doesn’t elicit the feelings of catharsis that tragedy is conventionally meant to evoke.

“‘Married or not, it’s of small consequence.’ ‘It is of great consequence,’ he said.”

The father’s insistence on knowing the marital status of the woman in the story reflects a generational divide in values. It isn’t simply that the father disapproves of sex outside of marriage, but rather that, in the world he grew up in, extramarital sex truly was “of great consequence” for a woman. Before the mid-twentieth century, having a child out of wedlock could ruin a woman’s entire life. What the writer sees as an incidental detail strikes her father as deeply connected to the woman’s ultimate fate. The father’s remarks are also significant in terms of storytelling and narrative sensibility. Broadly speaking, he is interested in stories that take their subject seriously, ones that treat their subjects as “consequential.” Therefore, he objects to his daughter’s story not so much because of its plot but because of the way in which she approaches it. The writer tells the story of a woman’s descent into drug addiction in a tone that undercuts any attempt to read it as tragedy.

“Actually that’s the trouble with stories. People start out fantastic, you think they’re extraordinary, but it turns out as the work goes along, they’re just average with a good education. Sometimes the other way around, the person’s a kind of dumb innocent, but he outwits you and you can’t even think of an ending good enough.” 

Although the writer’s primary objection to tightly plotted stories is a philosophical one, the above passage suggests that there are practical reasons behind it as well. As she describes it, the writing process causes characters to evolve in ways she didn’t initially anticipate. Determining a story’s ending in advance is therefore impossible because what might have made sense at one stage of drafting no longer makes sense as the writing process goes forward.

“He had been a doctor for a couple of decades and then an artist for a couple of decades and he’s still interested in details, craft, technique.” 

The above passage adds further depth to Paley’s depiction of the father. Although he has previously shown himself to be familiar with major figures in literature, he apparently regards reading as more than a pastime, thinking critically about narrative and the writing process. Meanwhile, the reference to the father’s career provides more evidence that his character is based on Paley’s own father, who was himself a doctor.

“In order to keep him from feeling guilty (because guilt is the stony heart of nine tenths of all clinically diagnosed cancers in America today, she said), and because she had always believed in giving bad habits room at home where one could keep an eye on them, she too became a junkie.”

The above passage is a good example of the way in which the writer uses tone to undermine the potential tragedy of the story that she is telling. The writer’s account of the mother’s reasons for becoming a drug junkie seem implausible. This is partly because we don’t normally view drug addiction as a choice and partly because the motivations themselves seem trivial. It is strange to begin doing heroin just to alleviate someone else’s guilt over the same action. The writer’s matter-of-fact delivery only underscores this strangeness, ultimately giving the passage a comedic tone. 

“Although she was often high herself, certain good mothering reflexes remained, and she saw to it that there was lots of orange juice around and honey and milk and vitamin pills.”

The description of the woman’s kitchen being stocked with “honey and milk” is an allusion to Exodus’s description of Israel as a land “flowing with milk and honey.” It therefore serves as an extension of the ironic religious imagery Paley has previously used when titling the son’s periodical. The woman’s kitchen appears to be a kind of paradise but only because everyone within it is high on heroin. 

“Poor woman. Poor girl, to be born in a time of fools, to live among fools. The end. The end. You were right to put that down. The end.” 

Although the father isn’t satisfied by the story his daughter tells, he does approve of the way it concludes—namely, with the words “the end.” Over the next few paragraphs, it becomes clear that the father’s approval stems from his belief that life is tragic for the precise reason that it does end. He therefore sees the story’s conclusion as symbolic of the human condition at large. The above passage also touches on the theme of intergenerational conflict, with the father attributing the woman’s fate to the time in which she was born. As he sees it, the world his daughter writes about, in which practices like drug use are normalized, is a world of “fools.”

“In your own life, too, you have to look [tragedy] in the face.” He took a couple of nitroglycerin, “Turn to five,” he said, pointing to the dial on the oxygen tank.”

The juxtaposition of details of the father’s illness with his demand that his daughter recognize tragedy in “her own life” suggests that he thinks the writer is trying to avoid facing the reality of his impending death. It is worth noting, however, that the frame story does not evade reality in the way the father describes. Paley reminds her readers that the father is dying, and she therefore incorporates an element of the tragedy that her father prizes into her own work.

“I’m sorry for her. I’m not going to leave her there in that house crying, (Actually neither would Life, which unlike me has no pity.)” 

Although the writer bases her story of the drug-addicted mother on a neighbor of hers, it is unclear what the ultimate fate of the character is. At one point, the writer seems to indicate that the woman finally did manage to get clean, saying, “She’s the receptionist in a storefront community clinic in the East Village” (Paragraph 46). A moment later, however, she says that the story “could really happen that way,” implying that the woman’s fate is still up in the air and that she herself has simply chosen to give the woman a happy ending in her own retelling. The above passage helps to explain why the writer might have made that decision. The writer is not, as her father seems to believe, so naive that she can’t see the possible tragedy of the woman’s story. In fact, she is deeply aware that “life” may not treat the woman with “pity,” and that is precisely why she decides to show compassion to her own characters.

“She did change. Of course her son never came home again.”

Although the writer insists on giving a happier ending to the mother’s story than the one her father envisions, it is noteworthy that the woman and her son never reconcile. The “happier” ending is therefore not quite the denial of tragedy that the father sees it as, but rather bittersweet in tone. It also emphasizes one of the story’s major themes—namely, the gap between different generations and the difficulty of bridging it. The mother has permanently lost her son not so much because of her drug use but because he has moved on as all children ultimately do.

“No, Pa, it could really happen that way, it’s a funny world nowadays.” 

As the above remark demonstrates, the different attitudes of the writer and her father towards the story she tells are partly a function of generation. The father grew up in a time where social mores were rigid and social mobility was limited. As a result, he can’t believe that a woman who became addicted to drugs could ever hope to find work again, even if she managed to get clean. By contrast, the writer insists that this kind of reinvention is possible “nowadays” since she has grown up in a relatively tolerant and flexible era.