Den litterære jæger (arkiv)

Virkelighedens Mad Men

For tiden nyder mange danskere tv-serien Mad Men, en tv-serie om reklamemændene på Madison Avenue i New York City i 1960’ernes glamourøse USA. Den har været vist på forskellige kanaler, men kan også med fordel købes og ses sæsonvis på f.eks. www.amazon.co.uk. Gør man det sådan, minder det ret meget om at læse en god, solid, intens og godt gennemvævet roman a la 1800-tallet.

Billedet af boomtidernes reklamefolk er, ja, næsten for reklamelækkert. For selv om uhæmmet kontorflirt, interne magtkampe, slagene på hjemmefronten og alkohol i stride strømme skildres levende og med kant, så er det altid også med et skær af kulørt, tilgivende sentimentalitet.

Hvis man vil se den sande historie om reklamemændene, og om hvad de lange arbejdsdage, det tunge familieansvar og de mange three martini lunches gjorde ved ”det svage køn”, må man kigge andre steder hen. For måske er det først nu, sandheden bag glansbilledet er ved at blive omsat i ord.

Min gode ven og kollega fra USA, rejseskribenten og forfatteren Margie Goldsmith, voksede op med en all-American far, der var en af de mange stærke, bærende skuldre i etableringen af den amerikanske reklamebranche. Han var en uhørt succesfuld tekstforfatter, først i New York City på netop Madison Avenue, siden i andre amerikanske byer, hvor han var med til at bygge nye reklamebureauer op.

Margie Goldsmith var over 60 år gammel, inden hun kunne finde modet og ordene til at beskrive sin opvækst i det, man ofte kalder den amerikanske drøm. En drøm, der ikke bare handler om nye vaskemaskiner og Cadillacs, men som også handler om psykiske lidelser, overgreb og selvdestruktion.

For mig står Margie Goldsmiths erindringsessay, Fragments of my Father, der for et par år siden blev tryk i The Washington Post, som et af de stærkeste og smukkeste stykker selvbiografi, jeg endnu har læst.

Margie Goldsmith har personligt givet mig lov til at genoptrykke originalen her. Jeg har valgt at lade de amerikanske billeder fra 1950’erne stå, som de er skrevet – altså på amerikansk-engelsk. De virker simpelthen stærkere på originalsprogets mundrette klangbund.

Mon ikke teksten giver nye perspektiver til de mange seere, der aften efter aften har siddet og set den silhuet af en mand i habit, der i introen til tv-serien om Mad Men falder fra toppen af en skyskraber?

Fragments of my Father

By Margie Goldsmith

When I think of my father, I see fragments of him: sad brown eyes, a downcast mouth, huge hands clasping and unclasping indecisively.  I see his six foot two frame towering over me, his enormous feet digging into the sand at Bailey Beach as he barbecues hamburgers.  I see him playing the piano singing songs from Cole Porter and Rogers and Hart.  But mostly I conjure up a shattered pair of eyeglasses, a wristwatch with a broken crystal, a worn brown leather wallet containing two crumpled one-dollar bills.  Those were the only possessions the police returned to my mother after he jumped from the fourteenth story of an office building in downtown Philadelphia.

I try to picture the scene — he drives to the advertising agency. It’s Saturday, so no one’s around.  He’s lied to my mother about having to work that day.  Does he lock his office door first?  Does he take a drink from his dented little silver flask?  Has he written the note already or does he write it then? He goes to the window and opens it.  It’s winter. Does he climb right out on the ledge or does he hesitate?  What is he thinking right at that instant as he steps into the air?

It happened 45 years ago when I was only 18 years old, so the whole thing is just fragments in my memory.  But it still comes back to haunt me.  It starts when I read about a suicide in a newspaper article or see it in a movie or play. As the word springs to life in my mind, I feel not sadness, but shame, maybe because there’s still such a taboo about suicide. When my father died, the radio announced that he had fallen out of a window by accident. Fallen out of the window on a blustery cold day by accident? I don’t know who gave the radio station that information — probably our lawyer, a good family friend, trying to protect us.

If someone asks how your father died and you say heart attack or cancer, they tell you how sorry they are and the subject is over.  But if you answer  “suicide,” they ask “Suicide?”  This is not a substitute for “I’m sorry,” but rather a shortcut to what they really want to know: Did he take pills? Slit his wrists? Shoot himself?  Whenever anyone asks, I answer that my father died in a freak accident. September 11 was a nightmare, not only because I’m a New Yorker,  but because they kept showing footage of bodies falling from buildings. The tragedy was horrific for everyone who was a victim of that violence. But how could I tell anyone I kept seeing my father falling from those buildings every time I turned on the TV?  The whole world was in shock, but my pain was mingled with humiliation that so many people died who wanted to live; while my father died the same way, but on purpose.

I’m no longer angry. I’m mute, like a toddler who won’t speak although nothing seems to be wrong. The parents send the kid to a speech therapist, and nothing happens.  Right after my father died, I went to a therapist. Many years and many dollars later, I still haven’t come to terms with it.  Secretly, I’m hoping that one day, maybe I’ll finally understand why he did it and what I lost when I lost him.

I try not to think too much about who my father was, besides the gentle giant who danced me around the room, because he was only gentle part of the time. Most days he was mean and angry, disappointed by life.  He’d wanted a boy but instead got stuck with three girls, me in the middle.  My older sister, Kathy, was emotionally ill –no one knew it then –it wasn’t until she was fourteen that she was finally diagnosed as a schizophrenic.  Kathy refused to obey my mother, so every day my mother would threaten, “Wait till your father gets home.” Each night, there would be a screaming match between Kathy and my father, always resulting in him winding back his arm like a batter and whacking her on the back of her head. One time, the screaming was so loud our neighbors called the police. When they arrived, my father told them we’d been rehearsing a play.

My father hit me, too, usually after he’d had a few drinks – which was every night.  I was terrified of him. One July 4th, when I was about 14, we were driving to the beach to see the fireworks. I’d wanted to stay home because I had my first boyfriend, but he wouldn’t allow it. I told him it wasn’t fair and that I hated him, and suddenly he jammed on the brakes, stopped the car in the middle of the road, dragged me out of the back seat and kicked me hard.  I hated him that day and every time he struck me. And I hated him for other reasons, too. Every morning, he went into the bathroom to hock up and spit out mucus. The sound was disgusting, and I’d try and block it out by pulling my pillow over my ears.  Most of the time, I wished he were dead.

Hitting wasn’t all he did to me.  When I was about 11, I saw my father cry for the first time, because my mother had just had two radical mastectomies. One morning, a few years later, we were all sitting at the breakfast table except for my mother, who was in the kitchen cooking. My father told me to come sit on his lap. I did, and he started touching my breasts, wrapping his huge palms around them. Both my sisters sat watching, horrified.  I was too scared to tell him to stop and couldn’t tell my mother because I felt so sorry for her, so I sat there waiting for him to stop, cringing and ashamed.

They say that only about a third of suicides leave notes.  My father left one typed on yellow copy paper.  It said he loved us, that he knew my mother, my younger sister and I would be fine, and that he only wished he could take Kathy, with him.  The day before my father killed himself, he’d taken Kathy to her first mental institution.  As he said goodbye to her and the thick steel door locked him out, he felt as though he were the one who should have been inside.

He’d been depressed before.  At Brown University, he’d tried to kill himself with a rubber gas hose.  He’d also been in the hospital for shock treatment. The week before he killed himself, he’d been depressed and wanted to go to the hospital, but my mother talked him out it because she knew he hated shock treatment. For months afterwards, she lay sobbing on the living sofa, drinking herself into oblivion with vodka, and saying over and over again, “If only I hadn’t cancelled the bed.”

The night of his death, I went into his den and rummaged through his desk drawer. He was as an advertising copywriter who hated his job, thought he was a hack, and only wanted to write detective stories. As I looked under his typewritten pages, I saw a small black spiral notebook with his familiar scrawl: “Wednesday: Bad.  Friday: Worse.  Tuesday: Terrible.”

They say that one million people take their lives each year.  Did the families they left behind ever recover? My family was dysfunctional before he did it, but after, we were wounded in new ways.  My mother blamed herself until she finally died twenty years later.  Kathy spent the rest of her life in a mental institution, terrified of heights. Seven years ago, she choked to death. My younger sister, who was even more terrified of my father than me, is still afraid of life.

And me? For years I dealt with it by doing drugs, drinking myself into oblivion, and going through eight years of therapy.  I gave up the drugs and drinking, regained my self-esteem, and graduated from therapy.  I married and divorced twice. The first husband was 24 years older, obviously my father substitute. The second was emotionally abusive. I didn’t have kids because I was so afraid they might become schizophrenic like Kathy or depressed like my father.

For the last three years, there’s been a special guy in my life.  He’s just a couple of years older, very gentle, and he understands my past.  But then, he might innocently point his finger at something, and, as he raises his hand a little too close to my face, I flinch and it all rushes back: my father’s huge palm the second before it smashes across the back of my head. My body tenses and I have to fight not to cry.  I’m not re-living the sting of the blow. The scene has already changed. The looming hand has turned into a body falling from the air towards the ground. And I’m wondering, in those last few seconds of his life, which to him, must feel like floating in slow motion; in those last moments as he is hurtling towards the sidewalk but his eyeglasses have not yet shattered, does he think, if only for just a brief second, of me?