SOURCE: Forester, John. “Father's Tales.” American Scholar 66 (autumn 1997): 533-45.

[In the following essay, Forester's son reminisces about his father's often self-absorbed behavior.]

My father, author of Captain Horatio Hornblower and other novels, was a storyteller, and I started reading his books when I was seven. He spent part of most mornings at the desk in his study, a ground-floor room that looked onto the front garden of our house in suburban London, and when he was in there all the household had to be quiet. No vacuuming, no loud shouting, not while Father was working. However, one morning I found him writing in three books spread out on the dining room table, each one held open by other books resting on the margins of the pages. He was marking the books with his pen, a desecration I had never seen him commit before. In our house, you never made marks in books; they were too precious, and many belonged to the library. As he turned the pages of the books, they turned their pages back themselves.

“What are you doing, Father? Can I hold these?”

“I'm correcting them. I have to mark them exactly alike. Here, hold this one while I correct that one.”

“What made them wrong?”

“These are the books you see me write at my desk. The printer has made these proofs and sent them back to me so I can see if he has done it correctly. I have to mark the mistakes and send him a copy back so he can correct the type.”

I looked at the word he was correcting. He underlined the word Lydia.

“Do you want a line under it?”

“No. That tells the printer to use italics, letters slanted like these.” He pointed out Natividad on the same page.

“That's funny writing. Why is it like that?”

“These are the names of ships, and they are always written in either italics or capital letters. I like italics better.”

“Is this a book about ships?”

“Yes, it is. Here, don't lose that page until I have finished.” There were not many mistakes. When he had finished, I asked if I could read one.

“Not one of these. These are too precious now. But I have one more copy you may read.” He picked up the three copies and took them to his study. From his desk he handed me a fourth just like them. “Now run along. I have other work to do.”

That morning I opened the first pages, reading about a sea captain taking his bath, looking at his tummy in the mirror because he was starting to get fat, tapping the weevils out of his breakfast hardtack, and impatiently trying to finish his breakfast slowly because the lookout has hailed “Land Ho!” and he doesn't want his men to see him in a hurry. Now I realize that I was probably the first of millions of Hornblower fans, but that morning there was nothing unusual about my father writing stories for other men to print so many other people could read them. The book took me a week or so to read, and I was left wondering a little why Captain Hornblower was so angry at his happy return.

Some time later I saw my father getting ready to work at his desk and I asked him if he was writing another story about Captain Hornblower. “Yes, I am,” he replied.

“Please hurry up and finish it. I liked the first one so much.”

I noticed that one of our bookshelves had a row of books with my father's name, C. S. Forester, on the back, and I took to reading about Rifleman Dodd, General Curzon, the Gun, Mr. Marble, and Rose and Allnutt. I even risked boredom by starting Mr. Brown's essay about resolute behavior, to discover how Leading Seaman Brown's devotion to duty ensured the sinking of a German cruiser in the Great War.

I knew that Cecil Forester was not my father's birth name; he had been born a Smith, the name of his father. When he started writing he thought that Smith “would not attract notice on the spine of a book,” and ended up by using Forester for both professional and social affairs.

My father knew all about ships and the sea and boats and boat handling. Before I was born, my mother and father had toured France and Germany in an outboard motor boat, and now they owned toltebootes or folding canoes (kayaks to Americans) in which they paddled English, French, and Austrian rivers. In the autumn of 1938, Hitler proposed to carve up Czechoslovakia and my father was sent to Prague, officially as a correspondent and unofficially to tell the Czechs that Britain would stand by them. Britain did not, and my father, ashamed, slunk out of Prague “like a beaten dog with his tail between his legs.” In recompense to me, whose holiday plans had also been disrupted, he took me for a weekend in a camping punt on the Thames, just before my ninth birthday. This trip is my deepest memory of him.

We hired a camping punt and paddled it upriver from Teddington lock through sights new to me. The water probably was shallow enough for poling, but I was far too small to use a punt pole. The upper river has that singular English charm, both rural and civilized at once. Cows graze in carefully tended fields right down to the water's edge, for the water level varies only by inches throughout the year. The string of bungalows near the lock slowly crept behind as we paddled gently upriver through the sunshine. Father showed me how to grasp the paddle.

“Look, John, pull steadily without a jerk, and at the end of the stroke turn the blade like so, so it acts as a steering oar for a second. That way you counteract the turning effect of paddling on one side. Do it just often enough to keep the bow lined up with that tall tree at the next bend. That's our steering point for this reach.”

“What's a reach, Father?”

“Each section of the river between bends is a reach. It's as long as you can hold a straight course. When we enter the bend by that tree we'll leave this reach.”

“Look, Father, see the string of whirlpools my paddle leaves in the water.”

“Yes, those are the only marks you should leave. They show that you have pushed against the water with each stroke. Every other ripple or swirl is a mark of wasted effort. See how smoothly my paddle goes through the water on the return stroke. Not a sound, not a ripple, and no drag at all. Can you do as well?”

Quietly the banks slid by. We heard music behind, and were overtaken by a steamer full of passengers gazing at us.

“See that flag, John? That's her house flag. It tells you she's owned by Salters. She's going up to Oxford, to come back tomorrow.”

Motorboats passed by both upriver and down.

“You don't have to worry about them. You're under oars, they're under power and have to stay clear. Just don't do anything unexpected at the last minute. The rule is: ‘Hold your course and speed.’”

One cruiser passed too close and too fast, her wash beating against the flat sides of the punt and a cupful of water came aboard.

“Pull up the cushions, John. Use the cloth to mop up before it spreads. She was going much too fast. It's no danger to us, just a nuisance if they catch you while cooking dinner, but it washes down the banks all along the river. The Thames Conservancy Board will be after him about it.”

In the late afternoon, we moored to a pair of willows along the bank, and let down the canvas camping cover on the shore side. While mooring the punt, Father showed me how to make a clove hitch with the mooring line around the branch of a willow tree. At some other time he had shown me how to make a reef (square) knot. These two were the only knots that he ever knew; they were the extent of his knowledge of marlinspike seamanship.

Father showed me how to start the Primus stove and prepare dinner. I did not at the time realize that warming an opened tin of beans in a saucepan of boiling water was hardly the way to make a hearty meal for active sailors, but it was as much as Cecil was capable of.

We ate slowly, watching the sun come down among the trees of the opposite bank. A pair of glittering flashes appeared upriver from us. I pointed.

“That's a rowing boat coming down. The sun is flashing on his varnished oarblades as he feathers them. He's coming down fast, too. Probably trying to be home before dark.”

I could see the rower long before I could see his boat. As he rowed closer, I could see a powerful young man balanced on a long narrow hull barely above the water, his oars pivoted on frames extending from each side of the hull. As he passed us, he turned his head to catch a quick glimpse of the river ahead, and I saw his open mouth, heaving chest, and the glitter of sweat on his forehead.

“Watch his blades in the water. See that they hardly pull through the water at all, while his pull on the sculls pushes the rowlocks forward, and with them the shell.”

“Is he racing?”

“No, not here, now. He may be practicing for the Diamond Sculls, the most famous race in the world for single sculls. Some want to win that more than anything else in the world. There was an American, of Irish family, who was a noted oarsman. He wanted to race, but his entry wasn't accepted because he'd been a bricklayer in his youth. You can't race if you've been a manual laborer. It gives you an unfair advantage. So he raised his son to win the Diamond Sculls just because he couldn't do it himself.” (Cecil knew the story of John B. Kelly of Philadelphia, who brought up his son, John B. Kelly, Jr., to compete in the races from which he had been excluded, and who was the father of Grace Kelly.)

The oarsman round the bend, the sun below the trees, we unrolled our sleeping bags on the cushions that covered the bottom of the punt, pulled down the remaining sections of the cover, and went to sleep. The return trip the next day was a harder pull against the wind with a few showers of rain. Father took up the quant and poled us along for a little, but most of the water was too deep. We returned the punt at dusk and hungrily set off homeward.

Just as in that weekend on the Thames, Father knew everything and was always willing to share his knowledge. Some of his more discerning acquaintances scathingly described this as “Cecil's Infallibility.”

I had spent the Augusts of 1938 and 1939 in Berlin. The first summer was in the house of my father's German publisher on the Kleine Wannsee, where I was derided by the other children as a foolish Englishman who did not worship Hitler. The second was with a friend of my mother's, a teacher in Zehlendorf. My father arrived unexpectedly.

“The international situation is very tense,” he announced. “Pack your clothes.”

I packed, forgetting my blazer, and Father and I sped to the train station. It was a hot August night as the train crept across Germany toward Holland. My father did not permit me to leave the coach to find the station bathroom, which I increasingly needed, until we crossed the frontier into safety.

The next week, war came. In a month, my father was sent to America, to write things that would help keep American public opinion favorable to Britain, and in five months my mother, my brother George, and I, with our Danish au pair girl, Ruth, were able to follow. My father's work was partly in New York with British Information Services and partly in Hollywood, but he told my mother to “go to San Francisco and rent a house; it's the nicest city on the West Coast.” We ended up high in the Berkeley hills across the Bay from San Francisco, and Berkeley remained my father's official residence for the rest of his life. Particularly before America entered the war, he came and went as his duties required.

In the summer of 1941, my father produced an amateur story simultaneous with writing his professional ones. Poo-Poo and the Dragons was designed to encourage George to eat better. George had a low-grade unsuspected allergy to eggs, which made him puny, irritable, obscurely ill, and uninterested in food. Father then decided to tell a story at lunchtime as long as George ate. When George stopped eating, the story stopped. This story grew famous in the neighborhood, and soon not only George and I but Tom Lewis and John and Bill Underhill were regular visitors for lunch, all of us encouraging George to eat so we could hear more of the story. Like any successful serial writer, Father managed to foreshadow a crucial event just at the critical time, which was not at the end of the day's installment but just as George would be wondering whether or not to ask for a second helping.

Father's day, as had been his usual plan for years, began with breakfast in bed at eight exactly, continued with the newspaper, letters if the postman had arrived, and thoughts about his professional story. At nine-thirty he rose, shaved, and dressed, with the day's writing in his head, and from ten to twelve he wrote out that story. At ten past twelve, when we returned from school, Father came straight down to the dining room prepared to eat lunch while continuing his amateur story of Poo-Poo without any apparent effort or pause.

He played for time every once in a while, giving his characters outrageous names and using them to test our attention while he thought out the next incident. Poo-Poo had a real name, Harold Heavyside Brown, which we all had to remember and repeat when asked, but everybody called him Poo-Poo. One day he went walking and found a lost dragon, named Horatio, who later acquired a mate, Ermentrude, and child, Marmaduke. “You know that eggs have to be kept warm to hatch, don't you? Well, dragon's eggs have to be kept red hot by the father dragon breathing fire upon them. It was rather like having a blast furnace in the back garden, and when the baby dragon hatched out, Horatio roared in joy, making a noise like all the lawnmowers on earth, never oiled, being run at once. That noise brought the policeman.

“As Mr. Brown said this, the policeman scratched his head and said … And what was the policeman's name?”

“The policeman's name was Patrick MacGillicuddy,” we chorused.

“He said, ‘I know there's no regulation that specifically prohibits keeping dragons, but I do have one here (he opened his notebook that contained all the laws and regulations) that prohibits keeping dangerous animals.’”

“‘Would you call that a dangerous animal?’ asked Mr. Brown, pointing to Ermentrude, who was proudly rocking Marmaduke's perambulator back and forth and singing to herself, blowing little puffs of steam and smoke with every note.”

“‘Well … er,’ said Officer MacGillicuddy.”

“‘Well, er, indeed,’ said Mr. Brown … And what do you remember about Mr. Brown?”

“Mr. Brown was a very clever man!” was our immediate reply.

The fact that we knew very well that “the very clever man” was C. S. Forester we could never hold against him. He was charming about it, and, confound it all, he was indeed a very clever man.

After finishing the Poo-Poo stories, Father took to running a quiz contest at mealtimes, giving peanuts or raisins as prizes for every correct answer.

“You know that many flexible fabrics are woven of fibers. In thirty seconds I want you, John, to give me …” here he looked at his watch, then rushed out the rest of the question: “one from each of the major kingdoms, or classes of material, the sources and uses of four different fibers used in fabrics.”

He demanded full and complete answers. For this question he would reward a peanut only for the complete answer: “Wool, from sheep, an animal product used for sweaters. Cotton, from cotton plants, vegetable, used for sheets. Nylon, man-made from oil, used for stockings. And … and. …” Here time began to run out swiftly. “And asbestos, a mineral that's mined, for rescue suits and insulation.”

At the time I thought he knew everything of importance. He told me then his fictional tale that, when he was very small, he would collect all the library cards his brothers and sisters had, to obtain the maximum number of books at one time, and repeat that performance every week. I remember seeing him average between one and two books a day, plus an hour or so of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a soporific at bedtime. He claimed to be the only man in the world who had read the Britannica through more than once; he said he'd read it through three times. Much of what he read he retained for years in an unsystematic fashion, recalling abstruse facts at will, whatever the subject of discussion, except when it was music or philosophy. Music he never talked about except to say that he never read anything about it, but about philosophy he quoted the old chestnut: “Philosophy is a blind man in a darkened room seeking a black cat that isn't there.” He didn't say so, but he also did not understand the mathematics that was in the scientific articles. However, his ability to recall odd facts, or what he stated as facts, about the most abstruse of subjects led his listeners to believe that he was a well-educated man.

About this time Father first told me of his opinions concerning Hollywood society's extravagancies and materialistic way of life. He told me that there they spend everything they earn, that when a man earning a thousand a week suddenly finds his option isn't taken up, he's seen next Friday trying to sell his wife's fur coat. He called it conspicuous consumption, spending just to show you have it to spend. Those words introduced me to the concept of conspicuous consumption in funeral customs, and the money spent on coffins and flowers.

“It's ridiculous. More than that, it's almost extortion and I expect it's very profitable. The English workingman used to be extremely proud of his ability to pay his way and avoid the poorhouse, and he'd stint and save even in his old age to leave enough money for a brassmounted coffin [one with fancy polished handles]. That's where the slang phrase ‘with knobs on’ came from. I don't really hold with inheritance, but believe that a man should be buried with his last dollar. To stint and save in life for a fancy funeral, however, is nothing but perverted vanity.”

In the house library was a copy of Thorstein Veblen's devastatingly critical Theory of the Leisure Class, which had introduced the phrase ‘conspicuous consumption’ to sociology. Father recommended Veblen's book as an interesting exposition and support of the ideas he had just expressed to me. As an eleven-year-old's introduction to economics and sociology, that's quite an experience. I was already a foreign observer of American customs, and after the experience of reading that book, I never became quite acclimatized.

The line of conversation about funeral customs naturally led to a consideration of death. “Death comes to us all, not very considerately, perhaps, but inevitably. Remember, John, that I have been a medical student; I have seen men die. For many it comes as a release; for others, it steals upon them unawares. In either case, it is not an event one should place great importance on. Remember … [was I likely to forget after the third retelling?] that when Charles II lay dying, he still maintained his charm and consideration. His courtiers waited about his deathbed, as they must to be able to report honestly the circumstances and time of their King's death. Knowing that they had been in attendance a long time, Charles remarked to them, ‘I'm sorry, gentlemen, to be such a plaguey long time dying.’”

Father also told me Suetonius's story of the Roman emperor Vespasian, who, as he lay dying, referring to the custom of deifying past emperors, remarked to his courtiers, “Gentlemen, I fancy I am becoming a god.”

Through this period I became aware that my father was a famous man. He was obviously very well regarded by the British government. High-ranking military and, particularly, naval officers visited our house for both social and professional reasons. His works appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, the prime mass-market magazine in America, like network television today. Some were accounts of recent naval or military actions, some were fictions derived from such, while others were historical fictions, but all had relevance to the urgent task of keeping American public opinion favorable to Britain by telling the truth about the war. People whom I had barely met expressed admiration for his books and stories and asked me about him, to which I returned pleasant acknowledgments with admirable modesty. He knew secrets and participated in keeping them secret, as he told me after the war. One was the existence of the first radar set small enough to be carried by a night fighter plane; another was about the proximity fuse for anti-aircraft shells. Once, when I was burning the garden leaves in the incinerator, my father pulled a sheaf of correspondence out of his pocket, deposited it in the incinerator, and made sure it was burned.

“I am often sent secret material that I have to be sure cannot get into the wrong hands,” he said in explanation.

He became partially crippled in 1943, his walking limited to two city blocks and one staircase a day. In 1945 my parents divorced; George and I stayed with Father. He was the embodiment of the enlightenment, standing for truth, reason, and competence in every aspect of life. He could justify the reasons for his every action, and he expected the same from us. Only once did he hit me. The question was the proper time for returning from school dances. He thought they stopped an hour earlier than they did and insisted on an early return, despite my protest.

“Do you question my authority?”

“Of course I don't, but I don't have to believe that you are correct.” Slam, right across the cheek. At another time, he thought that I was lying, although I wasn't, and he browbeat me into tears over that. I didn't fuss about these actions; justice sometimes makes mistakes, and he seemed the embodiment of justice and reason.

While he was praised as an author, he didn't agree with schoolteachers. When I brought school essays home to ask why my teacher had blue-penciled so much, he thought the teacher was mistaken. Who was I to believe—a world-famous author or someone who couldn't get ten column inches in the local Gas Jet?

As soon after the war as new arrangements could be made, Father sent me for my final year of high school to a well-known eastern preparatory school, to get me ready for Harvard. “St. George's is run on the English model and you are behind. You will be there for at least two years, and if you don't work hard it will be three.” I accepted that if St. George's was run on the English model I would be behind, because I had been more than two years ahead of California schools when I arrived at the age of ten. Both my brother and I went to St. George's. I discovered how hard it was to be cooped up without girls, and when I discovered that I would graduate in a year because I was not behind, I hated the place. Besides, I wanted to be a physicist and I lived in Berkeley, adjacent to a world-famous department of physics. Back in Berkeley in June, I walked down to the University of California's admissions office, was admitted, and wrote to Harvard saying that I preferred U.C. Berkeley. The next day I told my father as he was having his breakfast in bed while the morning serenade of U.C.'s campanile bells drifted in the window. I expected an explosion, but the act was done. His face and voice expressed his anger.

“I suppose that it never occurred to you that this means that George cannot continue at St. George's?” My puzzlement showed. “You can hardly expect me to have one son on one coast and the other on the other coast on different vacation schedules!” Even I knew that Harvard and St. George's didn't have the same vacation schedules. That remained a puzzler for many years.

At St. George's I had been taught college-level English by Norris Hoyt, the finest teacher I have known, who criticized my writing to perfection and encouraged the study of literature as the broadest description of living through the ages. At Berkeley, I kept both physics and English going for two years, but after a deep disappointment in love and much soul searching, I graduated in English.

During those years, I had to re-evaluate my father's work, lest I be misled by personal prejudice. The professors largely sneered at his books, but I concluded that while he was not a great novelist he was an excellent craftsman who inserted into his stories every item that was necessary for the plot without alerting the reader to what had been done. While there is constant suspense, the resolution of his plots then seems inevitable; he was a first-rate storyteller. In comparison, other novelists far better received by academics seemed poor craftsmen and, in many cases, purveyors of intellectual fantasies under the claim of truth. I enjoyed both realism and fantasy when conveyed by excellent craftsmanship; I disliked intellectual fantasies parading as truth, and even more when conveyed by poor writing. Because my attitude disagreed with the New Criticism then, and even more with what has come of it now, I concluded that I was not cut out to be a professor of English.

My father recognized his own standing, as he wrote to his mistress and literary advisor, Frances Phillips, after reading half a dozen novels by Orwell.

“I've been quite drunk over them. And smug. I've been able to tell myself that I can write novels better than Orwell could—N.B. that doesn't mean the same as saying that I can write better novels. Some of his technique isn't so good, especially when he's handling plants for conversation. He has the clarity of mind, and so on, but he hasn't the low cunning.”

I felt then that my relationship with him had matured, that I understood his character, his profession, his way of life, and that few further changes would occur in our relationship. So far as my side of the relationship was concerned, that is what happened.

In 1964, when he was sixty-four and I was thirty-four, my father suffered an incapacitating stroke. The man who lived by words, spoken and written, could no longer find the words to express his thoughts. In 1966, he died. Very quickly, new facts changed my picture of him. His second wife passed his clothes on to me. In the pocket of a tweed jacket, just like the one from which I had seen him pull letters to burn in the incinerator, I found two love letters from different women in England, responding enthusiastically to his requests to visit with each of them during the annual trip to England that he had planned before his stroke. Both letters were addressed to the Hawaiian hotel where he and his wife had been vacationing. His will disclosed far more financial assets, of far different types, than he had, of his own choice, taken his time to carefully inform me of in years past. The very same terms that awarded a pittance to my brother and to me awarded an equal amount to a lady and her son, the lady probably one of those whose letters I possessed. There was a string of bequests, each nominal considering the size of the estate, some to English people, more women than men, of whom I had little knowledge, but others to several couples who had been my college friends. In the only case into which I felt able to inquire, my father and his second wife had invited that couple on a Hawaiian vacation on the excuse that I and my wife could not come, and my father's relations with the wife had been one of the causes of the divorce in that family. Some months later, an English friend sent me a newspaper review of my father's recently published autobiography, Long Before Forty, the first I had ever heard of that.

My parents had met when my mother was nine and my father was twelve, and she had kept all of his letters despite his instruction to burn them soon after receipt. My father's eldest brother had written an unpublished family history “because my brother Cecil is a far better novelist than historian.” Years later, another series of my father's letters surfaced, these to another mistress and also literary advisor, Frances Phillips, the editor of William Morrow & Co. I became involved in an investigation that I pursued intermittently for thirty years.

Comparison of my father's contemporaneous letters with his brother's history showed that Long Before Forty was an elaborate disguise, written when he was thirty for publication after his death. The same sources showed that the stories that he had told me about himself and his family had a large admixture of lies. He despised his parents and feared that his children would be as bad as he thought his parents had been. As he expressed it in a letter to Frances:

It's a good thing I didn't have three sons—I suppose the third one would be a chronic invalid or something; that's one thing we can say about the first two and that is that even though they have neither brains nor morals they enjoy good health and I hope they fry in hell. Not that I wish them any harm. I think it would have been better both for them and for everybody else if when they were small they had had their faces immersed in a few inches of water for just a few minutes.

One series of letters told of the events that had destroyed his social reputation in Berkeley, entirely unknown to me at the time. His reputation explained the antagonism of the parents of the Berkeley girl whom I had expected to marry when I graduated from U.C., the antagonism that had forced us apart.

Two of his letters explained his peculiar reaction when I had informed him that I would be attending U.C. Berkeley instead of Harvard. His letters said that, although he had custody of George and me and owned a house for us to live in, he didn't like that. Once George and I had become settled after our first year in boarding school, he planned to sell the house and spend his time traveling, writing, and visiting his lady friends. By enrolling at Berkeley and declining Harvard I knew that I had prevented any acceptance by Harvard, but of course I had had no idea that I had thereby upset his planned new life. He could not be seen to abandon me when we lived within walking distance of the U.C. campus, and therefore there was no point, as far as he was concerned, in having George continue at St. George's.

He despised me until, fortuitously, at the age of thirty-three I became an assistant professor in the California State University system while still working at my normal job. That was recognition that he could not deny, particularly since, in his penniless youth, he had tried for a similar position with no success.

Quite clearly, both my father's social and professional lives had been made by storytelling. Professionally that had brought fame and fortune. Socially, that storytelling had been carefully crafted to serve his own ends, regardless of the effect on others. His autobiography was his record of the falsehoods that he had already told to conceal his past.

What causes a person to descend to such depths? My father was raised under circumstances that could lead a sensitive child to believe that he was the result of an adulterous relationship. I hypothesized that that is what he sometimes feared—the shame that such a discovery would bring. But, I hypothesized, he may sometimes have hoped for this, because that belief allowed him to fantasize about how much better his real father, and hence he himself, was than the man who was his mother's husband. That hypothesis explained much of my father's character and life, but there was no hard evidence that his biological father was indeed a prominent Egyptian instead of an English school-teacher.

In November 1995, I met again, for the first time in years, the daughter of one of my college friends. When I mentioned the hypothesis to her, she replied, “Of course,” and described a scene when she had been thirteen. Cecil used to tell her stories that he obviously did not want others to hear, because he stopped whenever anyone else came within hearing. At one point he told her that he had Egyptian blood. He pointed to his easily tanned skin, his brown eyes, neither characteristic of his ostensible family, and, turning to show his profile, he pointed to his distinctively beaky nose, saying, “Isn't that the profile you see on statues of the pharaohs?”