Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Writing Patrimony: The Son's Book of the Father as a Sub-genre
- Part I Challenging Authority
- Part II Memorialising Self-Denial
- Part III Performing Masculinity
- Chapter Five A Speaking Subject/A Watching Object: Addressing the Father in Peter Rose's Rose Boys
- Chapter Six Choosing Patrimony: Performing for the Father in John Hughes's The Idea of Home
- Chapter Seven ‘Neither to Vindicate nor to Vilify’: Becoming the Father in Robert Gray's The Land I Came Through Last
- Conclusion: The Turn to the Father in Autobiography
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Seven - ‘Neither to Vindicate nor to Vilify’: Becoming the Father in Robert Gray's The Land I Came Through Last
from Part III - Performing Masculinity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Writing Patrimony: The Son's Book of the Father as a Sub-genre
- Part I Challenging Authority
- Part II Memorialising Self-Denial
- Part III Performing Masculinity
- Chapter Five A Speaking Subject/A Watching Object: Addressing the Father in Peter Rose's Rose Boys
- Chapter Six Choosing Patrimony: Performing for the Father in John Hughes's The Idea of Home
- Chapter Seven ‘Neither to Vindicate nor to Vilify’: Becoming the Father in Robert Gray's The Land I Came Through Last
- Conclusion: The Turn to the Father in Autobiography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I might have loved him had I dared, and had we been able to talk to each other.
—Patrick White, Flaws in the GlassIf I think of you
I'm horrified - I become obsessed
with you. It is like love.
I am filled with pity.
I want to live.
—Robert Gray, ‘Poem to my Father’Gray has no centre to him. I cannot find, in this book, the man's heart, mind, spirit or gut.
—Robert Adamson, ‘Review of Grass Script‘Early in The Land I Came Through Last, Robert Gray's auto/biographical account of his parents’ troubled relationship, the author offers the following description of his father:
My father's expression, at first sight, mixed intelligence with arrogance, but that look was undermined, for me, as I grew aware of how underneath it there was a secretive discomfort. There was always about him, I felt, for all the authority of his talk, a subtle embarrassment, a consciousness of what would have been thought his moral weakness. (18)
The father's moral weakness - his alcoholism - is, as Gray's portrait makes clear, a red herring. While the book contains some astonishing descriptions of drunkenness and its destructive effects, Gray's account of his father is far more complex and penetrating than a simple lesson on the dangers of alcohol. Crucially, the passage given above, while remarkable as a demonstration of the author's ability to succinctly portray the instability of the father who is progressively revealed through the text, is also a strikingly apt description of the book itself.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Australian PatriographyHow Sons Write Fathers in Contemporary Life Writing, pp. 161 - 190Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013