Douglas Stuart’s John of John

 Douglas Stuart, John of John, Booker Prize Short list, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, repression, love, homosexuality, fathers and sons

The reluctant son has a new enthusiastic girlfriend, and she is a voracious reader.  She suggested that the three of us read a new book by one of her favorite authors – Douglas Stuart, a Booker Prize winner.  John of John is the story of a father and son and their coming of age.  How better to introduce herself to this father of her boyfriend?  They sent it to me, via her mother’s bookstore (heart emojis here) for Father’s Day (more heart emoji’s)… 

When we first discussed the book (by telephone, I still have not met her in person), the enthusiast introduced the book  by outlining it as a work about fathers and sons and their contentious battles – and she wanted to reassure me that she was not weighing in on the relationship between her boyfriend and me.  I launched into a counter-reassurance that turned into a bit of an unasked for sermon about father-son relationships, stating that a son is necessarily experienced, through the father's love, as a narcissistic extension of the father – and that part of the coming of age process is the son’s assertion of who it is that he is discovering himself to be, separate from who the father imagines him, as a reflection of the father, to be. 

I apologized for pre-interpreting the book, and hoped that the ethusiast did not experience me as simply a narcissist, but could understand that we all have threads of more or less healthy narcissism in our character.  If we have solid self-esteem, in this context, we have healthy narcissism.  I was both reassured and somewhat concerned to find that the author was pretty explicitly in agreement with me about this basic tension.  John is the father, and his son is also named John, but goes by his middle name, Cal.  On page 67, the author explains, “John saw Cal as his property, or as an extension of himself, and his father was less inclined to listen to him simply because he would always be the child.”  OK, this is a bit more on the "unhealthy" side, but the idea is there.

That said, this father, like me, also cares deeply for his son based on who it is that he actually is – and, despite living in a puritanically repressive corner of the Outer Hebrides, he expresses that, as a single father, in physically and psychologically tender, but also explosive ways.  This book, like the book and movie Hamnet (in which I have also been recently immersed), explores the interior architecture of paternal love with achingly accurate sensitivity.  In discussing the book with the reluctant son, we agreed that these characters, as repressed and seemingly publicly inarticulate as they are in the book (and, at times, in our own lives), express aspects of our relationship in uncanny fashion.

As the reluctant son also pointed out, the characters in this novel; taciturn, isolated, and prejudiced, at first seem closed and inaccessible to the reader, but, as this master story teller fleshes out their characters, they become, if not always likeable, knowable and lovable because of their familiarity.  They are like the members of our family who have quirks and oddities, but are clearly connected to us – or, in the context of the book, each other, even when, or perhaps especially when they are at odds with each other.

These characters are not only at odds with each other, but with themselves.  Both John and Cal are closeted gay men.  Cal has left the island and pursued an education, demonstrating a gift for designing women’s clothing, something he abandons when he returns to the island, ostensibly because his maternal grandmother is dying.  When Cal arrives home and finds his grandmother in good health and is close to being ostracized from the tight religious community that overlaps with the social community, we wonder about his motivation to stay.  Especially after his father, the lay spiritual leader of the church that has a travelling priest join them every three weeks, beats him mercilessly, splitting open his face requiring his maternal grandmother to stitch him up using needle and thread without anesthetic. What kind of sado-masochistic world are we being introduced to, we might imagine...

Slowly, almost painfully, the author introduces us to not just John (the father) and Ella (the grandmother), but to the children Cal, the son, grew up with and to their parents, and we get to know the people in the village by fits and starts.  We also meet Cal’s mother, who lives across the island with his Uncle and their illegitimate children after she abandoned Cal and his father when Cal was nine or ten.  Again, we could judge and dismiss her, but the author doesn’t quite allow us to do that.  If anything, we feel somewhat puzzled that Cal doesn’t visit her more often.

Slowly, perhaps, it dawns on us, that Cal is his father’s son.  Like his father, he must hide who it is that he is, while also acting on it, but his identity is tied up not just in feeling his father’s and his grandmother’s love for him, but his place in this community that, if they fully knew him, would reject him, just as he fears his family would.  This quandary, of feeling both known and unknown, accepted and rejected, feels like a deeply familiar aspect of social life in a small community.  And, while it is perhaps most purely represented there, I think it generalizes even into our more complicated lives, where, at times, it seems like we have a relationship with a culture (whatever that is) rather than a community.

The reluctant son and I agree that the scene that is the high point of this book involves this close=knit community confronting Cal – not directly about his sexuality, but demanding of him that he put the needs of the community before his own needs in a way that they believe will be consistent with who they know him to be (without actually knowing either his actions or his inner life).  This meeting is a dreadful and beautiful thing as the men in this community navigate between what is known and not known and as they  gather enough information to be able to, somewhat surprisingly, profoundly respect Cal’s autonomy. 

We both found it deeply moving that deeply felt experiences could be contained in ways that allowed the community to stay together despite the imagined terrible consequences that would emerge from acting with integrity, and their choosing, both Cal and the community as a whole, to stick with their integrity: to protect the right of the individual to act on his own and to know himself.  We didn’t expect that, but, in retrospect, could see that this was the necessary and consistent outcome of this community’s modus operandi.

What was more confusing was how two closeted gay men could spend their entire lives together and not sus out each other’s sexuality.  The reluctant son and I agreed that Ella suspected Cal’s sexuality because of his effeminate qualities, and John, who was the hardest of hard men, would simply have been embarrassed by this aspect of Cal and expected and exhorted him to grow out of it.  Ella and John’s mother had caught John in the very act of adultery, leading John’s mother to leave (and Ella to stay – to raise Cal), but Cal only experienced his father as the stern, demanding man who was angry at his mother for betraying both of them by leaving – so, by the plot, they were protected from knowing about each other.  But still…

The reluctant son and I agreed that the intensity of the love of the father for the son, and the love of the son for the father would necessarily have an erotic charge.  And this charge needs to be repressed – all incestuous desires need to be.  So the act of denying the (could we call it) Oedipal love might blind them to the erotic life of the other.  What child does not cringe at the idea of their parent in the sexual act?  And what parent does not do the same when thinking of their child?  The answer to that is that those who don’t cringe have, at least momentarily, lost the repressive barrier that is so strongly represented in these individuals and in this community – and in our much faster paced culture, where we can imagine a whole range of things that would once have felt unimaginable.

This book, written by an openly gay man, clarifies that one’s sexuality, if one walls oneself completely off from it, has consequences that tie people up in knots.  At the same time, I think he also recognizes and supports the idea that unbridled sexuality is equally problematic.  We become lost – as various characters do pursuing sexual “liberation” and the liberation of libation – when we don’t retain our connections to each other, connections that require some measure of repression.  This challenging mix of knowing and not knowing, of freedom and restraint, leaves us in a world that is confusing, dangerous, but also potentially enriching.

We are left, at the end of this book, not with all of the loose ends tied up, but with questions.  How does one come of age, at any age?  What does it mean to (finally) own oneself?  How can we do that in the context of a community?  What should we do if the community cannot comprehend us, but we need to comprehend ourselves?  What damage does self-ownership cost – and is the value of that self-ownership worth the cost?  Can we express love from within a divided self?

The book does not provide the answers, but it better equips us to know the forces that will inform those answers – and the types of answers that different individuals will seek out, and the cost of doing that.  I think it is in a position to do that because the author was willing to have his hero engage deeply with the question of who he is – and to acknowledge that to do that, he needed to wrestle with that question in the context of the family and the community that had shaped the parts of him that were opposed to those parts he knew that he could not deny.

I hope that the reluctant son and his enthusiastic girlfriend are able to wrestle with similar questions, but hopefully without some of the culturally imposed restraints that were detrimental.  Of course, I also hope that some of the constraints allow for the retention of the familial bond through and beyond the process of coming of age.

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