AN OLD MAN GONE
317
he tried to draw others to him w,as most often, in its deepest meaning,
a gesture of attempted reconciliation: let us agree to forgive each
other. The guilt of his own need meeting the guilt of the yielding
unyielding world: this was his contact with those who stood near
him. It was the closest possible contact and it was no contact at all.
Like many Jews of his generation, he had an intense family feeling
that operated with all the force of the particular and yet was fun–
damentally generalized and abstract; a family was necessary-I
cannot imagine him not surrounded by dependents--but his rela–
tion to the family had little to do with the specific qualities of the
individuals who belonged to it. He was happiest, I think, with the
small children-his own first, and then his grandchildren-whom
he could treat as undifferentiated objects of feeling, and who had not
yet failed him. In the end, the family was only one more area for
the rigidly patterned operations of his personality; it satisfied his need
to have others around him, but this compulsive sociability concealed
a fundamental unwillingness to endure the tensions of real intimacy.
He had read the speeches of Robert Ingersoll, and perhaps heard
some of them delivered, and he tried a number of times to make
me see how important it was that Ingersoll had challenged God
to strike him dead. (I think now that he was right: it was important. )
In the course of time he changed his mind about many things, but it
could never have occurred to him to question the truth of atheism:
religion was the aberration of those who were unwilling to face the
facts. (lowe it to my father that I myself have had little "meaning–
ful" contact with religion.) Nor would he have been prepared to
understand that quasi-religious "re-evaluation" of the liberal tradi–
tion which has occupied a number of intelligent men in recent years.
He did not need to be told that life is difficult and men are imperfect;
his error, if he was in error, was the opposite one: he lacked presump–
tion.
I have said more than I intended and perhaps more than is
necessary. Throw the ashes into an ash can: the idea was half
brutality and half self-pity.
Several hundred people carne to the funeral. I used them, as I
had used the picture in the
T imes}
to justify my own uncertain and
somewhat shamefaced sense of my father's importance. I experienced,
