Stories for Boys: A Memoir
by Gregory Martin
Hawthorne Books
274 pages, $16.95
I’M a violent reader. I throw books across the room and enjoy watching them land helplessly, half-opened, their pages curled inward like a dog’s humiliated tail. I rip out pages with lust, gloating at their mangled carcasses. Rarely, however, do I want to slap an author. But Gregory Martin is just the kind of well-meaning straight guy that I’d like to beat some sense into. Except it probably wouldn’t do any good. Stories for Boys is a classic example of the memoir as unreliable narrator. Martin looks into the mirror and allows himself to see almost nothing.
Stories for Boys is ostensibly about Martin’s father, who in his early sixties attempts suicide. This comes as a surprise, since the father had always seemed the rock of the family while the mother, who suffers from bipolar disease, has occasionally been hospitalized. What triggers the father’s attempted suicide is his wife’s discovery of gay pornography on their computer. It turns out that all through their marriage of 39 years the father has been having anonymous, furtive gay sex in parks and rest stations. Over the years, the number of assignations has mounted up, and one of the facts that haunts Gregory Martin is that his dad estimates having had sex with about a thousand men. Although the son expresses horror at this profligacy, he seems actually a little envious. His milquetoast dad has had an alternative life, filling his nights with wild adventures under the stars, while the son has remained relatively celibate.
Of course, one reason the father has had so many sex partners is that he made a rule never to have sex with the same person twice. He has excluded any emotional attachment so as to devote himself to his family. And his sacrifices for his family are enormous. Martin’s mother is an ambitious economist. She is constantly changing jobs. For a period of time she joins the Reagan White House. Later she becomes a dean of a business school, one of the few women to hold such an honor. With each move, her husband leaves his job and starts over. For months he might be unemployed. His careers go nowhere, but he doesn’t complain. He seems to enjoy driving the kids around, showing up at their ballgames and other activities, giving them support without pressure. He is loving without being demanding, respectful without being indifferent.
Martin’s reaction to his father’s sacrifice is not gratitude, but disdain. He is embarrassed by a father who isn’t like other fathers, someone who lacks ambition. His father’s great failing is that he isn’t competitive. This a bizarre offense, and what is striking about the book is that Martin barely explores why he is so competitive, and why competitiveness is so important to him. (Freudian alert: despite Martin’s years of therapy, he never addresses any Oedipal issues.)
Still, competition rules his life. This comes to a head in an episode involving a tree house. Martin wants to build a tree house for his children, just as his father had built him one when he was a boy. (We are reminded several times that the father’s wasn’t a real tree house, but a building raised from the ground beside a tree.) Martin seeks advice from the neighborhood dads about how to build one. Dan, an engineer, offers to give Martin blueprints. But Martin can’t read a blueprint, and he leaves the discussion “demoralized”: “I couldn’t even pretend to be an alpha male of the neighborhood. Not with guys like Dan in the pack. Or Steve, an E.R. doctor with a beat up truck and motorcycle. … Mark was a teacher, like me, but he’d climbed a bunch of the fourteeners in Colorado. You didn’t get points toward alpha male by coming up with the best similes.” The passage goes on and on about not being an alpha male. I suppose it’s meant to be funny, but the humor disguises a real anxiety about Martin’s own masculinity, an anxiety that he never honestly explores. When his father suggests that some of Martin’s hostility is based on being uncomfortable with homosexuality, Martin gets all huffy: he’s all for gays; he believes that gay rights are the civil rights challenge of his generation. But the fear that he won’t admit is that, since he’s not an alpha male, he may end up being some guy’s bitch.
Martin’s hostility toward his father is all the more shameful and pathological because he learns that for years his father was sexually abused by his own father, a drunken sociopath. The father repeatedly tries to make his son understand that he’s a survivor, a man who, despite suffering years of childhood trauma, helped to raise two successful children, gave emotional and practical support to his ambitious and disturbed wife, cultivated as honest and loving a relationship with his family as possible. The son will have none of it, and finally the father tells Martin that he doesn’t want to hear from him, that he can’t take the bullying any more.
The family treats the father shamefully. As the family drives the father back from the hospital after his suicide attempt (which had left him in a coma for days), the mother—whom he had nursed through several psychotic episodes —gives him three days to get out of the house. Then the son is surprised that his father rents the first dreary apartment that he looks at. What did the son expect? His father is deeply depressed. He’s losing everything that he worked so hard to obtain. He’s been met with anger, resentment, and misunderstanding. Was he supposed to hold out for parquet floors and Kohler fixtures?
There is a reconciliation, of course. Martin needs his father too much to make a permanent break. Yet even then, I wanted to club Gregory Martin. He and his wife Christine feel that they need to tell their sons, who are mere children, why grandma and grandpa are divorced. They feel that they must tell the kids what has motivated this split, but they’re not sure what to say. Not once does it occur to them to ask grandpa what he would like his grandchildren to know, or how he might explain it to them. As far as Martin is concerned, his father is a problem that must be dealt with, not a person worthy of kindness.
The best that Gregory Martin can do—and it is indeed progress—is wish “to free [his father]from the burden of my judgment. He has had enough burdens for one lifetime.” What’s sad about this for both Martin and his father is that the judgment is still there. The father is still an object of unjustified hostility and resentment. But perhaps his father has already figured out that this son is a sad weakling and a poor writer, without much insight into either himself or those around him. This is a cautionary tale about the failure of a son to face the truth about his father and his own inadequacies as a son and a man.
David Bergman, poetry editor for this magazine, is professor of English at Towson University in Baltimore.
