Shoes to fill

Commonweal, Jan 30, 2004 by Rand Richards Cooper

My Father's Footprints

Colin McEnroe

Warner Books, $23.95, 198 pp.

There's a short story by Ethan Canin in which a young man complains about how hard his father is to get to know. "You don't have to get to know me," the father retorts." And you know why? Because one day you're going to grow up and then you're going to be me."

A longtime journalist, humorist, and contributor to national magazines, Colin McEnroe co-hosts a Connecticut AM radio talk show that dispenses his signature mix of manic-depressive standup comedy and left-liberal political insurrection. Moody and mordantly funny on the air, McEnroe has a restless mind that seems never to stop turning. He seems to know something about everything. To paraphrase A. J. Liebling, McEnroe thinks broader than anyone who thinks deeper, and deeper than anyone who thinks broader. He's that brilliant, tormented, and enigmatic kind of person who makes you wonder, How does someone get like this?

My Father's Footprints provides a deeply engrossing answer. Colin McEnroe's memoir charts his initiation into what he calls the Dead Fathers Society--that cohort of men "clobbered in their forties when their fathers died." These are men, he writes, who "didn't anticipate the lists of unspoken truths and unanswered questions that would sprout, fast as June radishes, in the space where their fathers once stood." And McEnroe's father planted a lot of radishes. A researcher at United Aircraft in Hartford, later an ineffectual real estate agent, Bob McEnroe dreamed of being a writer. For years he cranked out plays nonstop, and got two of them produced in New York, but further success eluded him. Eventually, carelessness about money put his family at risk, a semisecret alcoholism sapped his health, and mental illness culminated in a suicide attempt and lengthy institutionalization. My Father's Footprints is a son's searching look back at a brilliant, troubled man who never fit in--"a polymath, a voracious reader, and a grandiose dabbler with crackpot tendencies."

Bob McEnroe left a big paper trail, one that assists his son's project of getting to know him posthumously. Paging through his father's old date books, McEnroe fils finds descriptions of dinner alternating with ontological ruminations, pasted-in clippings about Tennessee Williams, geographical notes, and jotted facts of a Supreme Court case. A novel his father labored endlessly over turns out to contain an encoded attempt to refute Godel's incompleteness theorem. It's an unsettling picture of an obsessive mind, crowded with junk, prone to mania and delusion, perpetually busy "assembling some kind of Grand McEnroe Unified Theory of Everything."

With mixed laughter and shudders of old dread, McEnroe recounts the impact his father had on his childhood: the sudden moves caused by financial setbacks; the brief exaltation of success on Broadway; the embarrassments occasioned by his father's eccentricity. Having repudiated his own Catholicism, Bob McEnroe accommodated his son's interest in religion by taking him around to various churches--then barging in to argue theology with the ministers. "He always claimed to be an atheist," writes McEnroe, "but he was way too engaged for that. He secretly wanted to be a heretic." (Years later this is confirmed by a priest who visits the dying Bob McEnroe. "I've seen the type before," he says afterward. "'I'm an atheist, praise be to God.'") His father's long, gradual breakdown tinges McEnroe's teen years with insecurity, and turns him toward the shelter of books and school, so that at sixteen he is "the world's foremost six-foot-tall, 128-pound French-speaking American history expert."

Colin McEnroe's humor can seem flippant--the result, perhaps, of years spent as a newspaper columnist, where hyperbole, wit, and noise are Darwinian adaptations designed to lure grazing readers to your pasture. Still, levity also helps him muster the courage to confront loss. McEnroe recalls his father regaling him with legendary Irish-American wakes of yore: one group getting so drunk, they hauled the deceased out of his casket and propped him up in a chair, placing a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other ("The whole idea," his father told him, "was to make sure the son of a bitch was really dead"). It's an evocative glance back at how ethnic group ritual afforded an emboldening horselaugh in the face of death. McEnroe himself, however, grew up amid what might be called postethnic Irish Catholic life; in the Dead Fathers Society he has to summon his own horselaughs. When his father, bewildered by Alzheimer's, tells the staff at his new convalescent home that he's Santa Claus, and a nurse asks, "Is he joking or disoriented?" McEnroe quips: "That's sort of the basic question I've been asking myself for thirty-five years." This is a book that resolutely keeps dark and light together.

Amid this chiaroscuro, My Father's Footprints conducts a running inquiry into fatherhood and fate. McEnroe's meditations on nature-versus-nurture veer between a bright agenda of hopes for his son, Joey, who is adopted, and an ominous sense of inheritance from the late Bob McEnroe. "I try to be nothing like him, even though I am exactly like him," McEnroe confesses. "I am dreamy, moody, fond of alcohol, uncomfortable in my own skin, furtive about emotion. I am a writer. I am Bob McEnroe." Happily--to his amusement and relief--his own son steps in to correct these brooding confusions of filial identity. When Joey asks what he means by "becoming something greater" after death, and McEnroe fumblingly answers, "Well, when we're in these bodies, we suffer from sorrow, need, guilt, hunger, pain, fear," his son interrupts: "Dad, that's your life!"