Autobiography and memoir This article is more than 6 years oldReviewFathers and Sons by Howard Cunnell review – a poignant, poetic memoir
This article is more than 6 years oldLight and dark combine in this multi-generational account of abandonment, alcoholism and gender transition
There are several precursors nodded to in the title of Howard Cunnell’s light-filled memoir of childhood, parenthood and gender transition. One thinks of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, in which the author, finally cutting himself off from his pious and overbearing father, sets out “to fashion his inner life for himself”. There’s Turgenev’s tale of an ageing man unable to keep pace with his fast-living nihilist son. Then there’s Hemingway’s short story, “Fathers and Sons”, in which the Hemingway figure, Nick Adams, talks to his son about his own father, a man “both cruel and abused” who is dead now, and who was severe and distant in life. In all cases, the message is that parenthood is a different country, that the old are unable to speak to the young, that men are destined to harden with age and repeat the mistakes their fathers made.
This is a book of two halves, the first dominated by an absence – that of Cunnell’s own father. Jason Cunnell is a chancer and a fly-by-night who walks out on Howard and his brother, Luke, before Howard is born. The young Howard finds that he’s “terrified by how badly somebody that doesn’t exist can make me feel. My small hands turn to fists when I hear the word: Dad.” The boys’ mother moves to her parents’ in Eastbourne, where Howard and Luke grow up in a familiar muddle of art, literature, music and provincial violence. It’s a charming if well-trodden narrative path, redeemed from the commonplace by the flair Cunnell exhibits in his descriptions of the South Downs.
He close-reads the landscape like a poem. “We travelled in a wash of southern light that filled the car and seemed to push at and past the edges of the world,” he writes early on. Later, further west, the “sky is a blue wash. The green downland, silver sea and southern sky fold into one another in curves of limitless colour.” At one point a “sunflower stretches the full length of itself in light”, while at other times the light is “quince” or “lemon gauze”; cliffs are “distant, peachy slabs in the afternoon light”. Here Cunnell is writing in a proud tradition, summoning the paintings of Samuel Palmer and Eric Ravilious, and the prose of Richard Jefferies, who wrote of the “champagniness” of downland light, which “brings all things into clear relief, giving them an edge and an outline”. I also thought of Ann Wroe’s beautiful evocation of the luminosity of this Sussex landscape, Six Facets of Light.
There follows the inevitable escape to London and several bleak years drifting in an alcoholic haze around bedsits, as Cunnell attempts to drink away the emptiness left by his father: “The only thought was to have more to drink. For the missing layer of skin it put on me.” Then he meets Araba, a Ghanaian woman with a daughter, and another on the way. He helps her through the birth of Jay, a girl whose Greek father has also run off. There’s a further daughter – his own, this time, Rosie – and he proves himself a half-decent dad, only occasionally storming off after rows or drinking jags. He and Jay laugh and wrestle together, he takes her to football practice, he is her father in all but blood. Then Jay tells her parents she’s deeply unhappy in her own skin, that she is a boy, that she wants to transition.
Now there is only the darkness of Jay’s room, his black clothes, the blood that he carves from his wristsHere the second half of the book begins, and we see what all the light in the opening section was for. Jay’s despair threatens to swamp the family, and now there is only the darkness of Jay’s room, his black clothes, the blood that he carves from his wrists with filched kitchen knives. Cunnell writes that he remembers “going up to his room once – his bed a messed heap of stale and dirty bedclothes red with blood. Piles of bloody tissues on the floor and in the bed Jay’s arm bloody red and gaping with long cuts. His lovely face pale and blank with sorrow.” And yet, slowly, out of this misery, something hopeful grows. Cunnell speaks to Jay in a matey half-language that acknowledges the inability of words to cross the great barrier between them. Cunnell is able to be the father to Jay that Jason never was to him, and the very size of the task he’s faced with summons reservoirs of courage and kindness. We recognise that, for Jay, Howard’s unquestioning, dogged presence is the difference between coping and falling apart.
This isn’t a perfect book. Cunnell is a Kerouac scholar, and I blame Kerouac for the narrative tic that we find repeatedly here of rambling sentences that are followed by brief spurts of Beat banality. “Why am I living in this place and time? Why this skin and body and not another?” is given a paragraph to itself. There are other clunkers, and also several sections – about a trip to Mexico, a diving holiday in Cuba – that would have benefited from a more ruthless editorial pen. Any minor gripes fade, though, when we return to Jay and his tentative, courageous steps towards living and loving as a man.
In his 1972 book Sincerity and Authenticity, the critic Lionel Trilling argued that the idea of an absolute moral code had been superseded by the concept of authenticity, of “being true to yourself”. A third category might be added to this in our age of postmodern irony and disaffection: books that feel like they have neither. Fathers and Sons has both. It is one of the most good-hearted, big-souled books I’ve read, a memoir about what it means to be a man, but more importantly what it means to be a parent. I don’t cry easily, but I read the final pages through a luminous wash of tears.
Fathers and Sons is published by Picador. To order a copy for £9.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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