There is something very reassuring about Calvin Trillin’s non-fiction. In the UK I think he is best known, if at all, as the author of Tepper Isn’t Going Out. That was my first encounter with his work, after Thomas/Hogglestock correctly thought I’d love it and kindly gave it to me. Since then I’ve only read one more novel from his limited fiction output, but have gradually been reading my way through his much more prolific non-fiction.
What makes it reassuring is that he is such safe, steady hands. Whether he is writing about his poetry, an old Yale classmate, or his late wife, he seems to approach them all with the same thoroughness – and the same restrained emotion. You might expect a portrait of his father to lead to greater angst or joy, but Trillin has a certain depth of emotion that he is willing to show you and stays at it. Which is quite deep, I should say. It’s just very consistent and controlled, and will never give way to anything approaching hysteria.
He starts Messages From My Father (1996) by telling us how stubborn his dad, Abe, was. ‘Stubborn’ is his choice of word, and he returns to it often:
He didn’t drink coffee because at some point in his childhood he had sworn that he never would. My father had sworn off any number of things. As a young man, he smoked for a few years and then swore off cigarettes. He swore off liquor before he was old enough to taste any – supposedly because of his disgust at the smell of stale beer in the tavern where he sold newspapers as a boy. As far as I can remember, he never gave any specific reason for swearing off coffee. It may be that coffee just got caught up in the boyhood oath against liquor, tossed in because it was something grownups drank. I think he also must have sworn off swearing; if you ran him out of patience, his strongest expression was “For cryin’ out loud!” I sometimes imagine my father as swearing off things just to keep in practice – the sort of person who looks at himself in the mirror after shaving one day and, for no particular reason, says to the image he sees, “You have hit your last bucket of driving-range balls” or “No more popcorn for you, young fella.”
Having established a keynote in his character, Trillin then looks at his father’s career – specifically his years as a grocer, getting up at 4am every day to market. He traces back through the previous generations, who had lived in Kiev, and the ways in which being Jewish immigrants in the country had developed his father’s sense of identity – and his mother’s, who gets quite a large share of a book without her name in the title. It isn’t always the easiest to find because, though his father’s conversation is peppered with Yiddish and they observe the most popular Jewish festivals, it seems that their Jewish identity wasn’t overwhelmingly significant – and, thankfully, Trillin doesn’t seem to have experienced much antisemitism growing up. As he says, ‘he didn’t raise me to be a Jew; he raised me to be an American’.
But there is one telling moment, on a Yale campus tour together:
My father asked if Yale had any sort of Jewish quota that could keep me out even if qualified in every other way. (The representative said that he knew of no such quota. A decade later, it was revealed, to my great surprise, that the percentage of Jews in Yale College was not only the lowest in the Ivy League but also suspiciously consistent from year to year.) Although I had heard of quotas, which I associated with medical schools, I had never heard my father bring up the subject. I had never heard him acknowledge any limitations on what was available to me.
You get the sense that there is plenty unspoken in Abe’s mind, and Trillin can no longer delve very far into what was never expressed. He seems to believe that their loving reticence is typical of all father/son relationships, and perhaps it does characterise many of them. In parallel, the relationship between his mother and sister is much more open and certainly much louder. There is no sense of regret in what could have been, though: it is an affectionate portrait that doesn’t stumble into hagiography, but also is absent of reproach. Anything negative is described with near-total objectivity, and the positive sections are only mildly more personal. Abe’s determination that Trillin would go to Yale is portrayed as something representative of his determination, single-mindedness, and limited worldview – not as something draconian or pressuring. Trillin did go to Yale and so, Trillin’s conclusion is, it clearly worked.
Messages From My Father is a patchwork of other memories and incidents, spun together in a way that seems to use each one to prove a point – the point being that, yes, here is my father. I have understood his character. These attributes are illustrated by these words and actions, and they build a man that I like. Trillin seems to recognise that he can describe a character, and draws the line at understanding his father’s thoughts, motivations, passions, regrets.
I enjoyed reading the book, and there is a definite fondness throughout. It is a tribute of love, even though it is curiously journalistic. How does he combine the loving and the dispassionate into one successful whole? I don’t know, but it’s something that feels quintessentially Trillin. And I got the sense that his dad would have totally approved.