(no subject)

[proximoception]

Father situations for deceased Am. Lit. luminaries, based on cursory glances + my often scant prior knowledge:

Dead (before the writer reached puberty) and/or alcoholic fathers for Hawthorne, Melville, James, Twain, Faulkner, Ellison, for Emerson (& obviously William James), for Whitman, Poe, Stephen Crane, Robinson, Frost, Moore, Bishop, for O'Neill and Williams, maybe for Hemingway(?). Apparently largely absent fathers for Porter, Hart Crane and Merrill. O'Connor's had the lupus, Dreiser's was a religious nut. Those of Thoreau, Dickinson, Wharton, Cather, Stevens, Eliot, Fitzgerald, West and Welty seem to have been around and more or less sane & sober--though Dickinson does speak of her father as too deep in his Briefs to pay attention to anything his children might do. So that's about a 3 to 1 margin for obviously major father/fatherlessness problems during childhood. Not sure how far any of that departs from population norms for those several generations.

I find that first run, of our six (probably) most acclaimed novelists, to be the most fascinating: dead fathers for all but James and Faulkner, whose fathers were known to be not just drunks but very critical and sarcastic ones.

Comments

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

If you're interested, the author of Affluenza also wrote a book called They F*ck You Up about parenting styles and child behavior. Overall the book is not so good, but he has some sharp sections on exactly that, the effect of early parental death on a number of artists, in terms of what the kids are struggling with, and how that feeds into their Work.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I'll look for it.

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Fitzgerald's father was around but he had some Daddy issues. This is really interesting. I wonder how it traces out for other generations. Like what on earth was Vollmann's father like?

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

I'm sure Fitzgerald had issues of some kind--drinking yourself to death that young almost necessitates parental poison, and a bad marriage is a symptom rather than a root cause of problems like that.

Stevens and his had a falling-out over who he married, Eliot's had him in his mid-40s, West's was from the Old Country. But everyone deals with something like that, surely? I'm not sure how you'd gather info on living people.