ABSTRACT
This book is about one dimension of the male experience: early fatherhood. It makes no claims, because what becomes immediately obvious is that we know very little about fathers. This study can be no more than a seek-and-find foray. Much of it is listen and watch and note. Most of our recorded knowledge and images of how fathers feel and behave is lodged in literature: Oedipus at the crossroads, Macduff meeting the news of his children’s death, Karenin holding on to the custody of his small boy, Paul Morel seeing his mineworker father only through the filter of his mother’s estrangement. Even autobiographies yield less than one might expect. Frequently father is dutifully there in the opening chapter, possibly overshadowed by mother, and then fading from the narrative at a very early stage. We can all recall exceptions, and a multiplicity of insights, but my initial review of both fiction and documentary was a reminder of how remote, or at least distanced, the father figure could be; and how infrequently the relationship with the new child was seen through his eyes. This occurs with many of the fathers interviewed in this book. They seldom have difficulty in recalling their sense of a mother’s relationship with them, when young. But when one asks about their father, there is hesitation, and sometimes a first exploration of that tract of selective memory.
