Nonfiction
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THE SHADOW MAN
By Mary Gordon
Random House, 274 pages
To the Reader
It is a winter afternoon. March 25, 1994. I am in a dark room, a windowless room in lower Manhattan. Varick and Houston streets, the National Archives and Records Administration — Northeast Region. I am looking at the census for the years 1900 and 1910, looking for facts about my father and his family. I'm doing it out of some impulse of studiousness, or thoroughness, an impulse whose source is not desire, even the desire to know, but a rote habit. The habit of doing things as they should be done. In this case it is an unfriendly habit, because in this dark room, illumined by the silver light of the screens of the microfilm readers, at the age of forty-four, I discover I am not the person I thought I was.
This was only the last and perhaps most obvious stop on a journey of discovery and loss, of loss and re-creation, of the shedding of illusion and the taking on of what might be another illusion, but one of my own. I was looking for my father. I always understood that in looking for him, I might find things that I wished I hadn't, but I didn't know the extent to which this would be the case. And I didn't know that some of the things I'd thought most essential to my idea of who I was would have to be given up.
My father died when I was seven years old. I've always thought that was the most important thing anyone could know about me. I've told his story hundreds of times, because I thought his life was extraordinarily interesting, extraordinarily complex, and in telling his story, I took on the luster of having an interesting and complex father. No one could know me very well without knowing some of the high points of his history: His riotous youth at Harvard, then in Paris and Oxford in the twenties. His career as the king of Cleveland soft porn, the editor of a "humor" magazine called Hot Dog. His conversion, in the thirties, from Judaism to Catholicism, his turn at that time to the political right; his becoming a Francoist, a Coughlinite.
I am primarily a writer of fiction, but I knew I couldn't present him as a fictional character because the details of his life, presented as fiction, would be too bizarre to be believed. I did use some elements of his life in some of my characters: the father in Final Payments has his politics; the artist in Men and Angels meets someone like him in France. But why did it take me so long to get around to writing his life as biography, or memoir, or some nonfiction genre whose proper name hasn't yet been found? I've been a writer for as long as I have conscious memory, or perhaps it is better to say I have no conscious memory of myself as not a writer. Now I am forty-six. Why did I wait so long to write this book?
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