The Stories We Don’t Tell Ourselves

Every once in a while—perhaps as often as once or twice a month, perhaps more—my mind wanders from whatever novel or short story I am reading, or whatever movie I am watching, to remember, with a jolt, my father’s firm opposition to storytelling.

My father did not, of course, characterize his viewpoint in precisely those terms.

As best as I can remember, I was 11 or 12 when, after expounding on the merits of this or that book or movie, my father presented me with a challenge to my claims. As far as he was concerned, the theme of any book or movie could be stated in its first paragraph or opening scene. Everything that followed—whether hundreds of pages of prose, or 90 minutes of acting, writing, and directing—merely underscored the central idea, he said. In my recollection, I countered with the wandering, discursive films of Robert Altman (M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Long Goodbye), which I was then discovering and of which I was, and am, enamored. But my father would have none of it: As he saw it, even an Altman movie, with its jumble of dialogue and free-flowing camerawork, could be reduced to a statement of theme that was merely reinforced or repeated until the end credits.

This struck me, even then, as an intriguingly unique position for my father to take. It seemed to me that he was applying the rules of journalism—in which news articles present the salient information at the outset and then elaborate on that information—to the more expressive, less didactic mediums of literature and cinema. All in all, though, his attitude did not surprise me: My father had always had an indifference verging on impatience with fiction in all its forms.

My father was born in 1937, and I have no reason to doubt that he had become familiar with plenty of good books covered in what would have been the robust public-school education of his youth. I also know that he went to the movies, although his tastes, as expressed to me, were limited to the Westerns of the singing cowboy Roy Rogers and his wife, Dale Evans, and the comedies of Martin and Lewis. By the time he got to college, his literary interests had narrowed to philosophy and possibly the novels of Ayn Rand, and his movie interests had, as far as I know, all but evaporated. As an officer in the Air Force, I know he saw and loved Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, but that movie, with its ferociously accurate but rather baldly stated satire of the military industrial complex, likely confirmed to him his feeling that all art could be understood in a line or two.

To put it another way, my father was practical-minded. He lacked the patience to sit down with a novel or sit through a movie if he did not know the point, and if he already knew the point going in, or learned the point very quickly, why bother? This was the crux of his argument to me in my youth: In his eyes, it was easy to ascertain the premise of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five or Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal—to name but two youthful favorites of mine. Therefore, the act of actually reading the novel or watching the movie was, by his reckoning, something of an exercise in self-indulgence. 

As I saw it, though, my father was trading the joy of storytelling—with all its complexities and surprises—for the functionalism of CliffsNotes. 

For that reason, it was always a challenge for me, my mother, and my brother to convince my father to go to the movies with us—a favored pastime of we three but a true chore for him. Of course, he could be convinced to join us, especially if it was the weekend and if he was in a good mood. 

To my astonishment, we persuaded him to come along with us to a spate of Woody Allen movies in the early 2000s: Small Time Crooks (which he enjoyed), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Hollywood Ending, and Anything Else (which, to varying degrees, he did not). I suppose I thought he would find these flicks diverting because they were comedies, and I remembered his sincere enthusiasm for Dr. Strangelove, and because they were relatively brief. My impression was that he permitted himself to be amused at the start of the movies, but by the 20-minute mark—because he had either discerned their themes or because he was simply bored—he inevitably grew restive. Fittingly, he did not even see the entirety of the last Woody Allen movie we took him to see, the 2006 murder-mystery Scoop: The 35mm print literally burned up in the projector midway through. He declined our invitation to see the movie a second time at another theater. Occasionally, in my teenage years, when I wanted him to join me for a revival screening of some esoteric art-house classic or would-be classic, he would offer to pay me the cost of the ticket—a kind of unearned bonus to my weekly allowance—rather than see it. 

Let me be clear: My father supported—and was rather amused by—my enthusiasms. He just didn’t happen to share them. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate his viewpoint: Compared to serving in the Air Force, running a company, and raising a family—the things my father was, at various points, most occupied with—getting lost in novels and movies is rather childish. It also happens to be my strange vocation. That I have constructed a life for myself whereby I pay bills by reading John Updike’s collected letters or rewatching Master and Commander, and then writing about those things, is, admittedly, an astonishment.

He has now been gone for 15 years, and he would have been bewildered by the advent of long-form streaming shows and the normalization of preposterously long movies. And, despite his unwavering support for my ambitions, I frequently wonder whether he would have made it to the end of many of my articles—since, after all, my basic theme would have been stated at the top.

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