Daddy Dearest

IN KEEPING WITH THIS DECADE'S all-consuming obsession with self, so-called emancipated women writers increasingly have headed for their typewriters to spew forth tortuous, long-winded, accounts of their traumatized childhoods. Works belonging to this "coming to terms with my past" genre--Marilyn French's The Women's Room, Christine Crawford's Mommie Dearest, and Nancy Friday's My Mother/Myself, are ghastly examples--are more motivated by bitterness than any sense of liberation as they grovel self-indulgently in memory's sludge and heap almost exclusive blame on mother for singlehandedly engineering their adult misfortunes.

Judging by its subtitle, "Memoirs of My Father," and its ominous preface, "Opening the Door"--in which the author "thanks God" for his father's death--Geoffrey Wolff's Duke of Deception seems to belong to this nightmares-in-the-nursery trend. But the initial likenesses are misleading; unlike his fellow excavators of the past, Wolff's maturity enables him to emerge--after a respectable period of thrashing--from the muck. He unflinchingly lays out the shoddiest episodes of a shameful upbringing, yet from this scrutiny he extracts a peace with that segment of his life over which he had no control.

Wolff is not absorbed in finding fault, in excusing his own character defects by attributing them to the appalling mockery his father made of parenting. Unlike other recent memoirs' writers, he actually comes to terms with his father's suffocating presence in his life. His exploration avoids morbidly picking at childhood scars; he aims to heal, not dredge up more torment. (His retrospective is infused with realism, tenderness untainted by excessive romaticism, and sadness devoid of self-pity.) Wolff knew when to close the door he pried open so forcefully in his preface.

Duke Wolff, a confidence man, conducted all his affairs close to the edge, masquerading as a WASP, a Yale graduate, an aeronautical engineer with the proper degrees from--of all places--the Sorbonne. He unscrupulously altered his give-away Jewish name the same way he adjusted his resume--as it suited his needs. When his creditors threatened to blow his cover, he skipped town, cruising indifferently from Manhattan extravagance--lunching at Club 21 and collecting forged membership cards from places like the New York Racquet Club--to boarding house sleaziness in Atlanta, and at last to a dishonorable end in a San Diego jail. He conned his employers and an endless string of gullible patrons with the same brilliant display of All-American neon gutsiness which led his own son not only to accept his lies, but to gobble them like kids of his '50s era devoured Wheaties.

After his father's death, Wolff said he felt compelled to write Duke of Deception, because it "was the only way I know how to deal with being left behind by my father." Duke left behind his son both literally--deserting the family in the mobile home mecca of Sarasota, Florida, for a financially-draining fling on Vancouver Island--and emotionally--substituting "glittering things" for fatherly affection. Continuing the precedent set by Geoffrey's grandfather, Duke discovered "love's shortcut through stuff," lavishing filched motorboats and sportscars on his child.

Geoffrey did not ask where the money came from, as he did not pry into his father's suspect background. The stakes were too high. As a child he based his own legitimacy on his father's identity; if his father did not exist, neither did he. So, he blindly trotted off to Harvard-Yale games with father, who rooted passionately, "as though he had a stake in its outcome." Duke even went so far as to buy English bulldogs to suggest his connection with Old Eli. Despite gaping holes in the Ivy League story--a friend once hailed Duke as a classmate from Penn in Geoffrey's earshot--Geoffrey "preferred this fabulous notion to the transparent reality." Children year for security above all and so "it never occurred to me that my father lied." Duke was not the only one to lead a life of deception. Perhaps Wolff can forgive his father more easily than most because he is uncomfortably cognizant of his guilty role in the game. At the time he vaguely perceived the travesty but chose to ignore it: "Maybe I didn't care. I was safe."

It's understandable that Geoffrey would shy away from the awful truths about his father, but it's peculiar that at no time did a suspicious employer challenge Duke Wolff with a copy of the Yale Alumni Directory. No one bothered to question his patently phony credentials, because Wolff's devil-may-care lifestyle harmonized with American post-war values, which rated bravado far above competency. Both the child, Geoffrey Wolff, and the nation idolized men who--like Duke--"despised prudence, savings accounts, looks before leaps."

Not surprisingly, he sympathizes less when his mother errs. Though her offenses were less reprehensible, Wolff bears down on them harshly. When ten-year-old Geoffrey discovers his mother in bed with a grimy ex-Sarasota policeman, he reaches a verdict instantly--"it was all over"--and he catches the next bus to California to set up house for the next 20-odd years with father.

Duke meanwhile is whooping it up with everyone from the cleaning lady to the glamorous divorcee of a Harvard graduate, but Geoffrey manages to look the other way. In retrospect, Wolff has the sensitivity to concede a double-standard--"I wasn't fair; I always took my father's side"--but he never can bring himself to forsake it.

Wolff lucidly discerns and expresses his complex, ambivalent emotions--shame mixed with admiration, repulsion juxtaposed with idolatry. His slickly-written prose deceives in its own way, presenting what must have been an exhaustive process of disengagement as a cinch to untangle. His rapid-fire style is possible because Wolff refuses to become mired in the devastations of youth. The straightforward manner could only be assumed by someone who has weeded an overgrown and tangled history and arrived at a resolution with which he can comfortably live.

His resolution is not one everybody can accept, given the wildly unstable, violent and often callous treatment Geoffrey received from his father. His humane acceptance is commendable, perhaps, but maddening for many who will find his father's despicable behavior undeserving of such kindness.

Wolff insists that despite its vile moments, "it had been fun to be my father's son." The joy is not apparent in his depictions of Duke's sick maneuvers. Case in point: an adolescent Geoffrey dubs a well-endowed schoolgirl "pear-shaped." When Duke finds out, he locks his son alone with him in the bedroom, strips him and beats him senseless with his razor strop (a prized possession incidentally, one of Duke's "glittering things"). When the punishment is sufficiently administered, his father Duke picks up his lifeless son, hugs him and whispers, "Be good. Try at least. Don't be like that." Later he fakes a suicide while his son watches. In the light of these episodes, Geoffrey Wolff's greatest achievement is not that he managed to write such a balanced account of his upbringing, but that he managed to come through this upbringing with his sanity intact.

How does someone forgive such a man, much less such a father? Wolff recounts the feelings of betrayal, of abandonment, of sheer abhorrence he felt after his father's death. But eventually--or so he claims--he realizes, "I had forgotten I loved him, mostly, and mostly now I missed him." Though it seems more likely that he did not forget his love, that this love never existed, Geoffrey's claim must be respected. Wolff writes to a Mr. Joseph, his Choate headmaster, that his father was "a bad man and a good father," and Joseph corrects him, "Don't ever again say your father was a bad man. There are no bad men." Certainly Wolff's description of his father's beatings is proof enough that "bad men" do exist and Duke Wolff is exemplary. Most would call him a bad father also, but perhaps only a son has the right to make that judgement.

Geoffrey's younger brother described Duke's condition a few months before his death in the San Diego jail cell:

He was very seedy, hesitant. He'd lost his power. I wasn't afraid of him anymore. His clothes were tacky and not clean. He was no Tom Buchanan, just an old Hebe. He had B.O.

Perhaps Geoffrey's brother at last exposed the real Duke, a fumbling, impotent, useless human being, unworthy of eulogy, much less a 270-page memorial. But this stinking jailbird did not bring up Geoffrey. The book is not about the real Duke, but the Duke of Deception, the father who raised a son "to be happier than he had been, to do better." Evidently he accomplished that goal and for that Geoffrey Wolff offers his compassion and his gratitude.Geoffrey Wolff and his children.