t was my father's strange conceit to write me a letter, the writing of which extended over a period of more than thirty years, and which, ultimately, reached ten thousand pages in length, a total of over two and a half million words. The length of the "letter" was only one of its oddities. Much of it was devoted to an account of his sexual adventures, related in very explicit detail. It contained, to be sure, a great deal of additional information dealing with his ill-fated business ventures and his lifelong fascination with politics, but anyone plunging into the nonstop narrative at almost any point could not avoid the predominantly sexual character of it.

The letter was never delivered to me during my father's lifetime but he made references to it on those rare occasions when I saw him and read brief portions during visits to Greenwich, New York, where he and his third wife had a weekend and vacation home. So I knew something of its general character long before it passed into my hands upon his death in 1968. His estate was a modest one: some hats, of which he was a diligent collector, a gold watch that had belonged to his father, a lengthy genealogy, the compilation of which took up much of the time not absorbed in writing the letter to me, a considerable number of autographed portraits of prominent politicians and theatrical figures, the letter, and a small trunk full of what might be called supporting documents.

These were delivered in several boxes and two small trunks. The "letter" was, from the moment of its arrival, something of a white elephant or, perhaps more aptly, an albatross. I poked into it more or less at random, reading the erotic, pornographic portions and feeling, while doing so, somewhat like a small boy reading a dirty book. It was a puzzle to me-as it had been from the time I first got a notion of the nature of the letter-that a father would wish to have his son read such accounts. Innumerable fathers have been womanizers. Most have attempted to conceal their philandering from their families, certainly from their children. Some have, I am sure, been the deliberate debauchers (or teachers in sexual matters) of their children, more particularly their male children. Very few, I suspect, have left such detailed and explicit accounts of their sexual liaisons. So, I asked myself repeatedly, without, I fear, producing any satisfactory answers, Why? Why the letter? Why the extraordinary emphasis on sexual encounters? And then, equally baffling, what was to be done with this white albatross? I confess my first impulse was to burn it. I have very different views on sexual matters from my father's. I am what Arthur Hoppe has called a "closet monogamist." Like Konrad Lorentz' greylag geese, I believe in "bonding," in "finding the right little woman" and cleaving to her until death us do part. I am appalled at the notion of a series of wives and mistresses, partly on aesthetic grounds-it seems so messy-and largely on emotional grounds: I could not bear all that meaningless excitation, violation of the spirit, misery, and recrimination. I believe in fidelity; in mastering one's passions rather than succumbing to them. I even adhere to the moral argument. Indeed, I am bound to because I believe that all matters are, in essence, moral, that is to say they have to do with diminishing or enhancing our humanness and thus they have to do with right and wrong. Morality, to me, is simply a kind of convenient code which prescribes most behavior so that we do not have to approach every problem de novo, as though it was entirely new and had to be figured out ad hominem, so to speak, a course which I believe to be exhausting and unnecessarily time-consuming. Virtually everything that my father did, especially though not exclusively in the realm of sex, seemed to me both wrong and personally and socially destructive, evil if you will.

So it was surpassing strange to me that I should be what I suppose many people would consider something of a prude and the son of a libertine. Such a succession is in no way exceptional, of course. Quite the contrary. It is the sons of drunkards who are most commonly teetotalers, or at least common wisdom has it so. And the sons of libertines who are often "closet monogamists," sexually repressed, homosexuals, or simply enemies of the married state. I am clearly the first of these. Certainly I am the second, to a degree, in that I have confined my sexual activities to the marital bed and, though powerfully attracted to a considerable number of women, have repressed my impulse to try to make love to them. Part of this may be simple cowardice-the fear of being rejected and thus wounded in my self-esteem. After all, if you have never tried you can, like the man who has never failed, believe that had you tried you would have been found universally irresistible. But I have persuaded myself that I have a more respectable motive -- to have sexual relations with another person without the sustaining structure of enduring love surrounding that act seems to me to be both a violation of oneself and of the "other." I go into these matters in some detail because, while this is a book about my father it is, of necessity, a book also about me. And part of whatever drama it may have clearly lies in the differentness of our respective temperaments.

Thus, while it is admittedly not uncommon for libertines to have moralistic offspring, it nonetheless struck me as a particular irony that my libertine father should have dropped on me this vast, imponderable, randomly obscene work in the form of a letter. So I considered, as I say, burning it. It was of no more than prurient interest to me. And the prurient is today so well attended to that I had no special need of it, granting some need for the prurient. It could hardly have any different kind of interest for my children. In fact I rebuffed their curiosity and forbade them, adults though they all are, to read it. Not on the grounds that their morals would be corrupted (their morals seem to me quite exemplary and if they were going to be corrupted they would, presumably, have been corrupted long ago) but on the grounds that I could see nothing to be gained by opening those strange, interminable, even morbid, pages to them. They could hardly live long enough to read the manuscript through from beginning to end. Therefore they, like me, would be confined of necessity to the pornographic portions. And to what good purpose?

Attractive as burning seemed, I was, I suppose, as an historian, conditioned against it. I knew of too many instances where protective widows or heirs had burned papers to protect the image of a husband or father (or, less often, mother) to be quite comfortable about burning my father's ostensible letter to me. There was some prospective historical-sociological-psychological significance to it. Beyond that it represented a substantial part of my father's odd life simply in the writing of it and, in its exhaustive and endless detail, it, in another way, contained his life, a life that seemed to me singularly futile and depressing, but a life, nonetheless, and my father's at that.

It was also possible, though it seemed unlikely then and still does as I begin this work, that it contained the answer to some riddle, some obscure mystery, having to do with my life and my relation to my father. No one can live in the middle of the twentieth century without being aware of Freud's Oedipus complex. I have never taken it as more than a kind of loose metaphor. In fact I believe that rather than wishing to murder his father and possess his mother and his father's domain, the son more typically wishes to receive from his father those gifts of mind and spirit that will enable him to find his way through the tangled forests of this strange world. But even if one rejects the Freudian system as I do, one cannot remain entirely unaffected by it. My father had never functioned for me as a real father (my maternal grandfather performed that role). I had no warm childhood memories of a loving, caring, protecting person, or even of a stern, severe, demanding person. On those occasions when my father did appear he was almost a supplicating figure, a person who showered me with moist kisses from his full sensual lips -- kisses that I found so different from the firm, warm, discreet kisses of my mother and other adult relatives, as to be rather offensive -- and bestowed presents in bewildering profusion. Even then I think I felt the presents were tainted by his prolonged absences, his inattentiveness, his easy emotionalism. I sensed that he was trying to buy something cheaply -- my love and admiration. With a child's shrewdness, I withheld them.

When I was three or four, I climbed on a little wooden horse with wheels to reach for some attractive object on a dresser. The horse slid from under me and I fell and cut my cheek rather severely on a wastepaper basket (I still bear the scar). I was sewed up and when my father heard of the accident he appeared in our New York apartment with a blizzard of toys, featuring a whole array of airplanes that were suspended above my bed. Much later I imagined he had come from one of his assignations full of remorse and shame, believing my accident a judgment upon him for his wicked behavior.

I will include further of our infrequent but strange meetings in the course of the "letter." Here I am describing my perplexity over what to do with the letter. I suspect that more than by an historian's scruples, I was constrained by this riddle I have spoken of; by the sense that someday I might need or wish to undertake the unriddling of it, so far as possible. Or might, seen in another way, perform some kind of expiation for him and for myself so that we might be united after his death in a way we had never been during his lifetime. To be candid I should say I also considered the possibility that the letter might someday be published in some form (and thus fill out my sparse inheritance). I knew that my father had made several attempts to interest publishers in the manuscript but its length and explicit language (the latter of which constituted the principal attraction for a publisher as well as the principal obstacle) prevented any serious consideration by publishers during my father's lifetime. (With the virtual disappearance of censorship, the problem of the language and the pornographic character of much of the narrative are no longer perceived as liabilities by publishers.)

In any event, for whatever combination of reasons, I forbore to burn the letter and instead locked it in a footlocker and stored it in an inaccessible corner of the barn. I mentioned it to my editor at Little, Brown. He, in turn, mentioned it several years later to my agent, John Brockman, who took an immediate interest and urged me to send him a portion of the manuscript to show to publishers. I complied, saying as I did so, that I, in a manner of speaking, washed my hands of the project in the sense that if a publisher's editor was interested he would have to do the editing. I would have nothing to do with the venture. I had meantime left the academic world and founded, with a colleague, a nonprofit corporation to do good-or what we considered good. To do good the corporation needed money. I was thus more susceptible on purely monetary grounds to the notion of publishing the letter than I had been before. I clutched at the straw of publishing the work but somehow disassociating myself from it at the same time. It turned out not to work. Several publishers were interested but shied away from the enormous editorial problems involved and, obviously, from the lack of context for the book itself. John Brockman reported this reaction to me and suggested gently that it would float only if I took responsibility for the work myself. It was, after all, a letter to me. Without, in any real sense, resolving my own ambiguities about my father's letter, I consented to try to do what I had from the beginning dimly perceived I must try to do sooner or later. I must try to exorcise the ghost of my father, that very material ghostly manuscript: the letter and the life.

I must confess that even at this stage of things I am not sure enough of my own motives to be able to say with confidence that I did not undertake what is in many ways a repugnant task in order simply to make money. I have taken some of the edge -- but by no means all -- off that anxiety by resolving to put the greater part of any royalties that may accrue into our nonprofit venture. But that is not enough to give me an entirely clear conscience (not that anyone should enjoy such a luxury anyhow). I still fret over whether, with all my high-sounding psychologizing, I am not simply exploiting a dirty book that my father wrote. So I fall back on what is a final argument to myself, the undoubted fact that my father would be enormously pleased. There will, after all, be a postlude to that strangely unfulfilled life. All of us search for something, a grail, a meaning, a journey through the middle earth, a Frobisher's passage of the mind and spirit, a pilgrim's progress. Perhaps my father's insatiable pursuit of sex (surely he was one of its classic prisoners) was no more than that (sex, power, money, and politics-all that is certainly thoroughly American and thoroughly human if not especially admirable), his particular grail.

A Letter from My Father

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