Iowa Journal of Literary Studies

Grearson, Jessie

A PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER
Jessie Grearson
“Please take me with you” it begins, this note in my own handwriting, 
tucked deep to the back, left of my father’s top drawer. I am standing 
before his tall dresser; I am supposed to be looking for his reading 
glasses somewhere along its cluttered top. Deep within me is a physical 
shift of surprise: What? What’s this?
I read the note furtively: it is a plea; I have done something wrong, 
am being punished. I am begging to escape some penalty. They are 
not going to take me to the lake. They HAVE to take me to the lake.
Why is it in his drawer? I breathe the question in like a sharp new 
scent. It is my mother, the disciplinarian, who should have received, 
and surely would have prompted this note; my mother at any rate, 
who would have had the final say, whether or not to relent, to pardon.
Why does he have this letter? I say it aloud, exhaling. And why did 
he keep it for ten years? And why am I so entirely surprised?
My father doesn’t save things. He is not a collector of objects. If he 
left our house, it wouldn’t look much different; I can think of little he 
would claim or take with him, no corner that would be emptier for 
having been exclusively his.
My father always . . . wasn’t. Was not an intellectual. Not a farmer. 
Not tidy, not thorough, not punctual. Often not even awake. Not a 
reader and not really a business man. Not a finisher of things. Did not 
go to college.
He was a verb, not a noun: bringing home creamsicles and silver 
ball bearings from work, taking us down to the docks and the bakery, 
eating four or five donuts in a row while looking at the boats and the 
sports page of the Sunday newspaper; he always seemed to know 
everyone. And then the siren, the disappearance. My father following 
the fire trucks, a volunteer fireman, chief of the department in our 
small New Hampshire town.
His weakness. His passion. It is all mixed up in my mind: his 
silhouette against the blaze of the Clark’s new house, shouting 
directions to people, going in himself, a hero. His sheepish face
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coming in the back hall, late for dinner again, a disgrace, pot lids 
slammed in disapproval. Taut silence. His secure place at the big table 
in Dedham for Thanksgiving, at his mother’s right hand, served first, 
firstborn, only son. His puzzlement over my college financial aid 
forms, how to say he’d never been to college, been to the navy, went 
to East Coast Aerotechnic school for two years to earn a license as an 
aircraft engine inspector . . . how do you fit that into such a small 
space? In the end, I left it blank.
26 School Street. In the old, beautiful part of Dedham, southwest 
suburb of Boston, is a massive white house built in 1836, in the old 
tradition—high ceilings, wooden floors, fireplaces in each of the many 
rooms. My grandmother has lived there all her life. I go each year to 
visit.
I go back to be with him. I go to the back bedroom, how strange, 
now storage, and I touch the chest of drawers full of my ancestors’ 
jewelry, silver tipped walking canes, manicure kits, keys, bonnets. On 
one plaster wall I see a yellowed news clipping—golf, he won some 
golf tournament. I didn’t realize he played; he doesn’t anymore. And 
a wooden plaque engraved with his name, and a pile of empty 
suitcases.
Here I can imagine him. Can imagine him with a baseball mitt in his 
hand, or creaking up the narrow staircase late from dates, never really 
getting into trouble. Can imagine him swaying in and out of doors, 
teasing his four sisters, trying out an outfit on them, them straight­
ening his tie. Here is his car, his first job at the gas station, as short 
order cook, his fame as high school hockey star. Here is a photograph 
of him playing tennis; skinny but wiry, in jeans and a striped T-shirt. 
He must be eighteen, he is in the air, leaping up and over with the 
racquet stretched up and left in his left hand. The ball is still an oval 
blur, it hasn’t made contact with the racquet, and yet I know that it 
will, I can tell from the picture, from his grin, that he is confident—
My great Aunt Patty told me recently how she used to take care of 
him when he was little, how she’d thought he had a learning disability, 
for all his brightness could not read. She said no one really listened to 
her; Nana had four other children and a demanding mother-in-law to 
care for, my grandfather was determined to make it big as a salesman. 
No one listened. He made it through high school. And I feel a sharp 
pang of grief: why didn’t he go to college? Why did my grandfather 
have a room with a fireplace in a Colby fraternity, and my father no 
college education at all?
When I am without him at 26 School Street, I miss and appreciate my 
father, and I savor that feeling. Dedham is so—on his side, the whole
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town that can remember, remembers him well. Introduced as his 
daughter, I feel the dream build: this one's Doug’s, Doug the favorite, 
who had girls and best friends all around town, who would mow lawns 
and wash cars just as a favor, a great athlete, your father.
When he is with me in Dedham, this image I have of him expands 
and contracts. My father in favor, seated at the right of his mother’s 
hand, laughing and boyish. T hen—his face—creased with pink lines, 
his blue eyes sleepy from sitting still, loosened tie, tired. Now getting 
up to make coffee, now slipping out the back across the lawn, keys 
jangling as he jogs toward the cry of the siren—we laugh helplessly 
and I love him most fiercely then, when he is gone. Then his parents 
tell stories about the time he was two and wandered out across that 
same back lawn, across busy Washington Street to the fire station. 
How he’s been going there ever since, can’t seem to help himself, loves 
those fire stations. Some myth surrounds him most successfully in his 
absence, there in that huge old house where his parents wait tolerantly 
for him to come home; where they let him come and they let him go.
I wonder what it was like. To go from being number one son to being 
a son-in-law. My father tells this tale: Once I called for your mother. 
Her father asked, who’s calling and I said, Nobody.
Well, he said, nobody better not call HERE again.
I called back. I said, This is Douglas Clifton Grearson Junior, and I 
would like to speak to your daughter, please, thank you, SIR.
But I forget the point—this told to illustrate what proper identifi­
cation on the phone? Sturdy self-esteem, knowing who you are? 
Respect? Self-respect?
STUPID! I shouted once at him in anger. We were driving home 
from the prep school that turned me overnight from a highly 
conscientious student to a nervous wreck. He has quietly asked me to 
help him with the animals, I have told him, tensely, no, I can’t, I have 
too much homework, he has said, you have to ’make’ time, and I: you 
can’t 'make’ time; he, you can, me: explosion: YOU ARE STUPID! 
The silence that followed. That we never again leaned toward each 
other and kissed goodbye in the morning after that, never, not once 
for the four years he dropped me off at that school.
To go from being a son-in-law to being a father.
There are drawings my mother made of this time, and one in 
particular that I like, done in felt tip pen. So old it has soaked through 
to the other side of the thick cotton sheet, such strong lines, the arm 
curving around his son, the relaxed curve of his cheek. The dark 
widow’s peak above slightly surprised eyebrows.
My father did what was expected of him, what was necessary. He
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got a job at Sikorsky inspecting airline engines, and then another in 
New Hampshire as a “quality assurance engineer,” when the first job 
took him away from home too often.
Firefighting, and families don’t mix, he explained to me once. We 
were watching television, a factory on fire in Connecticut. That’s the 
Eagle Hose company, he said. Look at that ladder truck.
Professional firemen don’t make good family men; that’s a fact. 
Look at that burn, he said with wonder. That one went right to the 
ground.
I don’t really know what it means to be a quality assurance engineer, 
though I asked him once, when I wondered what it was he did. Did he 
enjoy his job.
He shifted uncomfortably. I got the sense that I wasn’t supposed to 
ask that question, and that it went against some code of his to stop and 
consider it. Not really, he said. I just push a lot of paper around.
I looked in his briefcase once, but I don’t remember what was 
there—charts, graph paper, pens? I remember what it smelled like 
though, and what he smelled like when he came home, his cotton 
shirts and dark suits full of that scent from his work world: smoke and 
oil and machines.
“You gotta let some things just roll off your back,” my father would 
tell me. “You’re supersensitive. Like your mother.” And he would 
shake his head over our most recent dispute.
I would imagine ducks, the way water rolls off their bright feathers, 
their unperturbability, despite the squawking. And I would shake my 
head, feeling the impossibility of it, the bright gunpowder of wanting 
to be RIGHT when talking to my mother, the despair, the shifting 
grounds of the argument. The eventual, inevitable explosion before 
my eyes, can’t see, can only react, argue, escalate, take things 
personally. Like her, it seemed I had a thin skin.
It must have seemed to him that we had no skin at all. He would try 
to buffer our collisions, or, after I’d fled from the dinner table in tears, 
he would sneak up the back stairs to console, to advise. To lure me 
back.
Or he would try to lure me away from such fights. I remember one 
of our conversations in the back hall, how I had complained to him: 
“You can’t have another OPINION in this house?”
“Oh, yes you can,” he told me. “But you keep it to yourself. Then 
you don’t have an argument.”
He’s missing, I say. More and more. All my memories are through 
someone else’s eyes, or else they’re just from before.
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I know why he isn’t here, Ruth says. I know why it’s hard for you to 
‘re-member’ him in Iowa City—this isn’t his world at all.
Not here, I wonder, seeing him this spring in my ten dollar 
yard-sale chair, patiently reading some book he’d brought along for 
the trip, one my mother had gotten him from the public library. Yes, 
he had seemed somewhat out of place in the halls of EPB. And yet 
he’d managed to get around, he had left his white business card taped 
to my desk and made friends with my office mate. He’d been to visit 
his brothers at the station. He’d found the best ice-cream in town, the 
best coffee; he’d fixed my dangerous outlet and gotten batteries for 
the camera and started the charcoal grill. He’d gotten my mother 
there safely, and would get her home safely. And for weeks after, 
there would be signs that he’d been around: I  talked to your father . . . 
hey, I  met your dad . . . enjoyed meeting your father . . .
He has always gotten us places: to the art museum in any city, to any 
city, to college. My father enables us. He is the map maker, the giver 
of directions and practical advice; he will draw me a map on a paper 
plate so I can look at it clutched on the wheel if I ask him to. He will 
give me one extra set of directions, just in case:
We’ll stake you to a taxi ride to Doug’s apartment if you don’t take the T. The T  
may be faster, you take the shuttle bus from the airport terminal and go one stop 
into Boston—couple of blocks walk to Temple and Cambridge Street—either way 
you can handle it.
You kids are so smart. You could always out talk me. I  cant keep up with you 
kids.
My father, standing in his son’s first office, twice as big as his own. My 
father, seeing us off to Europe, to college, loading our cars for us—I 
see him standing and waving goodbye over that gulf; goodbye, I want 
you to be happy. . . .
My father of few requests:
I put stickers on your mother’s car and I realized we are missing (2) both yours, 
WILLIAMS & Iowa. I put Dartmouth and MIT on this week, Merey had put 
Bowdoin on during fall trip—
We’re so proud of you, he writes. You have no idea.
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English

A Portrait of My Father

Eiselein, Greg

BOOK REVIEW
Greg Eiselein
Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia by Julia Kristeva. Translated by 
Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. 300 
pp.
Depression (in all its forms, from neurotic depression to melancholia) 
is as mysterious as it is widespread and everyday. Why do depressives 
continually intoxicate themselves with bottomless, incommunicable 
sorrow? Physicians assure us that depression is primarily a physiolog­
ical disorder. Psychoanalysis finds the sources of depression tucked 
away in the niches of our memories, conscious and unconscious. In a 
curiously nonpolemical argument which looks to medicine as well as 
psychoanalysis for answers and refuses to see these two discourses as 
exclusive and diametrically opposed, Kristeva elaborates in Black Sun 
a theory of depression which builds upon and departs from the 
insights of Freud. Although she recommends the use of chemical 
anti-depressants to a point at which psychotherapeutic work becomes 
possible, Kristeva sees depression not as an illness to be corrected with 
drugs, but as a discourse to be listened to and analyzed.
This perspective on depression is, of course, Freudian. The psycho­
analytic theory of Freud and Melanie Klein concludes that depression 
conceals a hatred toward a lost love object, usually the mother of 
infancy. Through the mechanism of identification, the depressive’s 
aggression is directed away from the object and inward on the self, 
resulting in self-hatred and cannibalistic fantasies of a cut up but 
regained lost object. The treatment of depression, according to Freud, 
requires a bringing to consciousness that the devalorization of oneself 
is actually an unconscious hatred of the other. With this recognition 
there must also be a naming of the sexual desire which underpins that 
hatred.
Freudian psychoanalysis is central to Black Sun. Nevertheless, 
Kristeva’s work moves her beyond this initial psychoanalytic under­
standing of depression as the concealed hatred of a lost love object.
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Working from her own clinical observations as well as the research of 
Andre Green, Kristeva attempts to identify and theorize another form 
of depression, a narcissistic melancholy in which the depressive 
mourns not the object but the “Thing” —a kind of archaic, unname- 
able pre-object. Denied a “primary identification” (with an imaginary 
father) which secures a subject’s link to the symbolic order, the 
depressed narcissist embraces suffering—a mourning for the 
“Thing”—as a defense against the violent separation and fragmenta­
tion which is a part of the pre-Oedipal journey to language and 
subjectivity.
The language of the depressed—repetitive, empty, and monoto­
nous, if not absorbed into silence—does not, as in psychoses, signal 
abandonment of the world of signs. Depressives know how to use 
signs; yet, they see with a hyperlucidity the arbitrary nature of 
meaning in signs. To them language seeffis absurd, ambiguous, and 
powerless. For Kristeva, a professor of linguistics and a psychoanalyst 
trained in France, the study of language plays a fundamentally 
important role in her theory. Her view on the interrelations between 
language and the unconscious is not the same as Lacan and the 
Lacanians, however. Kristeva insists “the unconscious is not struc­
tured like a language” (204). The analyst must also consider the 
affects, moods, as well as the tones, rhythms, and silences in an 
analysand’s speech.
In her incisive analysis of Holbein, Gerard de Nerval, and Dostoy­
evsky, Kristeva moves beyond linguistic and clinical concerns to 
illustrate her point that melancholy is an important psychic source for 
artistic inspiration. While loss stimulates artistic imagination, the 
creation of artistic and literary texts also represents a struggle against 
depression. Her essay on Nerval’s “El Desdichado” shows us how the 
poem works as a polyvalent sign as well as an empty signifier. For 
Nerval the creation of a prosody with undecidable meaning was a 
temporary, sublimatory attempt to fend off recurring bouts with 
melancholic madness.
Kristeva links melancholy not only to polyvalent poetry, aesthetics, 
and beauty, but also, significantly, to women. Kristeva (as a Freudian) 
sees in feminine sexuality the key to understanding the greater 
frequency of depression in women. According to Kristeva, a woman 
faces a staggering task in attempting to gain autonomy from her 
mother and in creating restorative erotic attachments. She elucidates 
these insights with four detailed and deftly interpreted case studies of 
feminine depressives and a brilliant closing essay on Marguerite 
Duras. Rather than explaining “the hidden meaning” of the awkward 
gaps and disquieting silences of Duras’ novels, Kristeva instead uses
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these texts as a site for tracing the interactions between history and 
melancholia, between society and depression as they manifest them­
selves in postmodern literature. Duras’ fiction, like the depressive’s 
speech, points to but cannot name the melancholic malaise which 
swallows up individuals and afflicts whole civilizations.
Black Sun will likely draw criticism from readers more familiar with 
and more in agreement with the Kristeva of Tel Quel. In Black Sun 
Kristeva is more concerned with therapy than revolution. Elsewhere 
she labels the distinction between masculine and feminine as “meta­
physical,” but that distinction is operative and significant to most of 
what she has to say in Black Sun. But, before critics launch attacks 
against Kristeva’s supposed retreat into apolitical, ahistorical, bour­
geois subjectivism, they should pay careful attention to her thoughts 
on the construction of feminine depression and feminine identity. For 
Kristeva, the personal is always already political. The civilization that 
gave us Nerval and Duras also produced Hitler, the Gulag, and the 
atomic bomb and continues to stifle women’s “longing to be present in 
the arena where the world’s power is at stake” (30). The totalitarian 
impulse in contemporary civilization is not unrelated to feminine 
depression, its fantasies of terroristic revenge and its painful hollow­
ing out of women’s psyches. The dark emptiness of melancholia is not, 
for Kristeva, a concern removed from the noise of politics.
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Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia by Julia Kristeva

Smith, Shannon M.

SUSAN EATS DINNER ALONE
Shannon M. Smith
The air is ripe tonight, and the kitchen table is unclean. 
The tabby cat crunches his lonely cat-food in the corner, 
and the ordered-in Peking Duck is quiet, though polite.
Sadie, that woozy, woeful bitch, snuffs her muzzle 
into her two front paws and sleeps, while General 
Electric commands: Wake Up, Little Susie, Wake Up.
Susie’s slipped her darling Mickey a you-know-what, 
and where he’s gone, nobody knows. She robes herself 
in her glory and blows with the wind onto the front 
porch.
She shrieks: O lead on, neon planets, electric stars!
The pine trees drop their cones quickly in the wild air. 
They are silent; they have known this secret all along.
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A Portrait of My Father

Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia by Julia Kristeva

Susan Eats Dinner Alone

Interview with Michelle Collins

From Nude Series

Night Watch

Soul of the Home

Squash

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 11.1

Untitled, Iowa Journal of Literary Studies, no. 11.1

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