Wheelis Plenary “On Love and Shame”

I have heard my father speak publicly only once. As far as I know, it was the only occasion in my lifetime — and maybe his — in which he departed from his customary reticence. It was the summer of 1994, at the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, where he delivered a lecture on his newly released novel, The Way Things Are. It was both disconcerting and wonderful to hear him hold forth.

My father was and is an inspired storyteller. Weaving precision and poetry into each sentence, his spare words are luminous and transporting. But for all of his talent, my father has always been a shy and silent man — sometimes so quiet that my mother, with her discerning ear for any possible utterance, would often say, “Wait, your father is about to speak,” or less patiently, “Say something!” On such occasions he would smile slightly but like a ghost, rise without a sound, and pass, descending via a house elevator to his office. Moments later the tragic, searching notes of Mahler would permeate our house. My childhood fantasies had him going to his office to don a black cape in an effort to exorcise the demons within. In fact I was not so far from the truth; instead of a cape he relied on his pen to struggle against his father's eternal indictment that he was a “lazy, low-down, no-account scoundrel” deserving of no audience. “Steel fingers” were my father's words to describe the grip of forbidding unworthiness.

While my father did not hold forth publicly, neither did he succumb to his father's denunciation. Since 1958 he has written fourteen books. Five are novels (The Seeker, The Desert, The Scheme of Things, The Doctor of Desire, and The Way Things Are), one is a collection of short stories and meditations (The Illusionless Man), and eight are non-fiction (The Quest for Identity, The End of the Modern Age, The Moralist, How People Change, On Not Knowing How to Live, The Path Not Taken, The Life and Death of My Mother, and The Listener).

The Life and Death of My Mother is a biography of his mother; his most recent, The Listener, is his memoirs. All contain literary and philosophical invitations to join him in an existential quest for meaning. In On Not Knowing How to Live, he poses the paradox of his quest as:

How to live?

Who knows the question knows not how, Who knows not the question cannot tell.

From his first book (The Quest for Identity) to the most recent (The Listener), my father has explored the boundaries of reason and desire, meaning and alienation, power and fear, will and change, in an effort to find the answers. He pursues meaning through the examination of what is fleeting, unexpected, and arbitrary and examines virtue through the exploration of that which is corrupt and evil.

My father was ahead of his time, anticipating current postmodern issues within psychoanalysis in The Quest for Identity. The last chapter, “The Vocational Hazards of Psychoanalysis,” was originally published as an article in 1956 in The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis and anticipated the work of such modern theorists as Irwin Hoffman and Owen Renik. He recognized the dangers of determinism and arrogant rationalism, suggesting that it is only the maintenance of skepticism, freedom of inquiry, and tolerance of doubt that might lead to something vital and mutative. In perhaps his best-known and most successful book, How People Change, he demonstrated the liabilities of insight and unconscious motivation and explored the concepts of conscious choice, action, and will as necessary for change. In The Doctor of Desire my father reckoned with the nature of male desire and the easy slide into self-deception long before it was deemed proper to discuss openly.

To this day I am often asked how I grew up with such a dark and brooding, enigmatic man who revealed so much of his inner life, sexual fantasies, and nihilistic preoccupations with meaninglessness. While I lived under the arc of my father's grim and brutal honesty, I thrived under his magical and protective watch. He spared me the indictments he had known and gave me room to find meaning where he could not. He taught me the tools for living a valuable life: patience, persistence, and hard work. His demand for accountability taught me to face the harshest truths and to endure the difficult tasks of life without looking away. I like to think that I have helped soften the blows of my grandfather's indictment by my steadfast devotion.

On December 17 my father will again rise before an audience. I don't think his father will summon him this time as he takes his place before us. I believe that grave is now quiet and my father can speak freely.

The title of his plenary address is “On Love and Shame.” He will be introduced by Owen Renik.