Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir
by Alan Cumming
HarperCollins. 394 pages, $26.99
WHEN WE FIRST meet Blanche Dubois, she’s enveloped by a fog that we soon come to realize represents her clouded mental state and the impending revelations about the truths and falsehoods of her life. The actor Alan Cumming recounts in his achingly poignant memoir Not My Father’s Son of being immersed in smirr, something in Scotland that “comes off the sea and it’s not quite a rain but it’s thicker than a mist,” and “it’s miserable.”
Although Cumming is recounting an episode of “smirring” when he was a mere lad of thirteen and afraid that he’d been abandoned by his father at a showground in a town distant from his own, we come to realize that even now, as a fifty-year-old man, the Scottish actor remains fearful of that particular weather condition. By the book’s end, however, conditions have cleared, and while emotional storms remain a possibility, Cumming knows the way to a safe home and harbor. He has learned to shelter himself from his tumultuous and even potentially lethal past.
We’re accustomed to seeing the actor Alan Cumming immersed in the drama of other people’s lives at the movies and on TV. He has had starring and award-winning roles as Macbeth; as Eli Gold, the campaign strategist in TV’s The Good Wife; as the dashing, arch host of PBS Masterpiece Mystery; and as the Master of Ceremonies in Broadway and West End productions of Cabaret. But in his book, we follow the real-life role he has played up until now, one that deserves on Oscar for most original story with a lifetime achievement award thrown in.
Without giving away any of the endings, Cumming has fashioned a book about himself that involves simultaneous, overlapping plot lines in a way that only a first-rate novelist might be expected to accomplish. These threads could be formulated as a series of questions: Why was his father so unremittingly violent to his sons? How did his revered war-hero grandfather really die? Did his mother commit an indiscretion that could affect Cumming’s very position in his family? And is there any merit to what his father is now claiming on his deathbed? Also included are the unsettling surprises that were revealed about Cumming’s genealogy on a British television show.
Cumming admits early on in the book that “It has not been pleasant as an adult to realize that dealing with my father’s violence was the 
beginning of my studies of acting.” So much for method acting. Upon meeting the father, Alex Cumming, the reader is aware right away of a presence so evil and narcissistic that the storyline assumes that of the grimmest Grimm fairy tale, with the young Cumming and his older brother Tom in constant danger of being eaten by a wolf or crushed by an ogre. When an adult behaves with the degree of brutishness recounted here, the reader finds himself harboring the darkest of thoughts, wishing that the father would just—die.
While Cumming never expresses that wish directly, we know that his father might very well have thought that of his own son. In one incident, after having been ordered by the father to select healthy saplings from ones that won’t grow, an apt metaphor if there ever was one, and realizing that he had failed at the task, the young boy Cumming “looked into my father’s eyes” and for “the first time I truly believed I was going to die.” Knowing that a severe punishment was imminent, Cumming writes how he “felt like I was my father’s sacrifice to the gods, a wide-eyed, bleating lamb that he was doing a favor in putting out of its misery.” It’s only in the Acknowledgments page that, along with praise to his agent, editor, partner, and friends, Cumming finally thanks his father “for siring me and ensuring I will always have lots of source material. I forgive you.” It’s unlikely that most readers would be so charitable toward the man from whom we, too, have cowered for many pages.
In a book that’s unremittingly frank and revealing, the only detail that seems out of character for Cumming, a white lie by omission, is the lack of detail about his sexuality. Not until well into the book do we learn that Cumming’s “box began to burst in 1993” when he and his wife of seven years—that’s certainly news to the reader—were trying to have a baby. Not so many years later, Cumming writes of his “late-night drunken walks along the banks of the Thames with a man I now realized had been the latest in a line of lovers I had engaged with because I was drawn to their anger and I wanted to fix them.” Then again, what this book proves is that even a person’s sexuality pales in importance relative to an abusive parent and the sorting out of that. Survival, actual and emotional, is the only prerogative. Writing about being bisexual would have been a mere diversion in comparison. Unlike many a memoirist, Cumming has little interest in discussing sex (though there is a randy recounting of his finding pleasures with himself as a pre-pubescent). In the truth that came with learning of how he “had lost a father but found a grandfather … there is never shame in being open and honest.” By not discussing sex, Cumming is, in a way, adhering to that declaration, focusing on what is honestly on his mind and not what the reader wants to hear.
Every man and woman, gay or straight, growing up in Scotland or anywhere else on the planet, has probably been immersed at some point in a metaphorical smirr. What Cumming proves in his book is that no matter how dense or seemingly impenetrable that weather condition might be, there is a way out of it, a way to clarity and clearer skies.
