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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
To write "What We Lost," Peck interviewed his formerly violent, alcoholic father, Dale Peck Sr., about the older man's childhood, which was even worse than the childhood he in turn inflicted on his own children. "What We Lost" is a generously embellished account of a year-and-a-half-long reprieve Peck Sr. had from the one-room house on Long Island he shared with seven siblings in two beds, along with a father who passed out in his own piss almost every night and a mother who hated her third son with a terrifying focus. She regularly beat him with a hose, kept food from him and, when a younger son was killed in an accident, told Dale, "It should have been you."
One morning in 1956, Peck Sr.'s already-drunk father dropped off "the boy," as he's called in "What We Lost," at the dairy farm of an uncle he'd never met. He worked the farm with his uncle and started running track at school, missing his brothers and sisters but enjoying the freedom from his mother's Olympian spite and his father's degradation. The boy is just unclenching, starting to trust in order, responsibility and the kindness of his aunt and uncle, when he's abruptly returned to the chaos back home. There's a harrowing scene of the boy and his big brother stalking the drunk "old man" through the pine barrens to lift his paycheck for the family. The story then leaps to 2001 and the trip Dale Sr., 10 years sober, and his 34-year-old son Dale Jr. make to the dairy farm.
What's left out is the years in between. They've been covered before: Episodes of drunken cruelty bob to the surface of Peck's three novels like a corpse carried down a river. Fifty pages of autobiography explode from the middle of his second novel, "The Law of Enclosures" (1996), where Peck repeats his suspicion, also hinted at in his debut, "Martin and John," that his father struck the blow that ultimately killed his mother. Peck Jr. was almost 4 when she died, and three stepmothers followed in quick succession. Peck Sr. brutalized all of them, with the second getting it the worst. His father once dragged Dale Jr. and his sister Dalene out of bed to make them watch him put a gun to his third wife's head and then to his own, before finally passing out. In that household, as Peck writes in "Enclosures," "everything flew ... her body, eight and a half months pregnant, over a chair -- that was the morning she gave birth to her son -- and her son's body, across the dozen feet of the room we shared."
The new book, with its tender portrait of the 13-year-old Dale, strikes me as a Jesus-caliber act of forgiveness. Peck says, "It may have taken my father 60 years to fix himself, and it's ongoing, but I think he did. That's what made me want to write 'What We Lost,' an acknowledgment of his ability to be true to his nature, which is a loving nature ... In my fiction, there's a divided aspect. I have to write the book where I go after my father's jugular ['The Law of Enclosures'] and then I have to write the book where I lionize him. It's very hard to put those two things together."
Peck says he had a head start on the interviews he conducted with his father for "What We Lost" because "I knew a lot of this stuff from growing up." He's already told me that his father, a plumber, is "not a therapy type," so I ask about the context of those first tellings.
What happens next on Peck's living room couch is an eerie channeling. Peck grabs his empty coffee cup off the table and throws his head back and sucks at it. He slams the cup down and pokes his finger into my leg so hard it hurts for 10 minutes. His eyes narrow and he yells in an angry slur, "'You fink you got it bad? I had it bad. My muvver used to beat me wif a rub-ber hose!' That was the context," Peck continues, his voice staying loud and furious. "Over and over again. 'I'm going to get drunk and tell you why I'm such a bad father.'"
Peck says he and his sister were only badly beaten themselves once each, Peck for a "faggy haircut," but they saw their stepmothers beaten whenever their father drank. Peck conjectures that "my father's violence was as much a correction by example as it was punishing his mother -- keeping your woman in line. If his own father had kept his mother in line, she'd never have done those things to him. My father was never as incensed with my stepmothers as when they disciplined me."
Peck says, his voice back to chatty, "All that chaos had a very progenitive effect; it's like atomic energy. It made me a writer. I'm not that creative, I'm analytic, not in a logical way, but I'm always trying to put together extremes, to see what they generate. I don't think I would have had the temperament or desire to turn real things into fake things if I hadn't had such a complex set of things to reconcile."
