Notes
Foreword
By Joseph Pearce
Once upon a time, when I was a boy, I recall watching a Western on television with my father. At one point the hero, played by John Wayne, walks into a saloon, heads to the bar, and orders himself a beer. The bartender pours the beer and sets it before our hero. The hero takes one sip, delivers his line to the villain with appropriate macho brevity, and walks out of the saloon, his nearly full pint of beer still on the bar. “And he calls himself a man,” says my father, alluding to the undrunk beverage. The lesson was learned. A real man doesn’t order a drink he doesn’t finish.
That was a long time ago, but even today, many years later, I cannot leave a bar or a restaurant without finishing my drink. How could I call myself a man if I did? What would my father think?
It’s funny how such habits become ingrained, inscribing themselves indelibly in our psyche. The lessons we learn at our father’s knee almost become a part of us, almost defining us. For better or worse. This problem is at the heart of the interwoven questions of boyhood, manhood, and fatherhood with which Jason Craig grapples. He has been a boy, he has become a father, and he has learned to be a man. More to the point, he has the gift to pass on the lessons he has learned to others. It is for this reason that I am honored to have been asked to raise the curtain on the drama of boyhood, brotherhood, and manhood that is presented in the following pages. Indeed, I wish that I could have read this book myself when I needed it most, during my own dark days of grappling and groping with these questions.
In some ways, I’ve come to realize that a large part of my growing up has necessitated an unlearning of some of the lessons I learned from my father. Don’t get me wrong. I had a great relationship with my father, whom I loved dearly while he was alive, and still love dearly now that he has left this mortal coil. It’s just that he had not fully matured beyond machismo to real manhood, at least not during the years when he was teaching me the lessons about life that I would spend the rest of my life learning to unlearn.
The problem is that machismo is a mark of immaturity. It is the failure to grow into the fullness of what it means to be a man. The mark of machismo is the boastfulness and braggadocio of the braggart. It is the mask of pride, worn by those who lack humility; it is the rant of one demanding his rights because he does not have the courage to face his responsibilities. It is the “manliness” of one who is not really a man.
In my own case, I would have to confess that I have spent most of my life as the macho man who was not really a man at all. It took marriage to make a man of me, which is to say that it took a woman to make a man of me. And not just a woman; it took a wife to make a man of me. And not just a wife; it took children to really make a man of me. I can say, therefore, echoing the words of William Wordsworth, that the child is father of the man. My own children have been the fathers of my manhood. Without them, I would still be a pathetic macho man, making all sorts of masculine noise without having any of the real masculine substance.
It is for this reason that our present culture, which makes war on marriage and the family, is also making war on genuine manhood. In spite of its own braggadocio, modern culture doesn’t really make war on things such as “sexism” and the abuse of women and children. Instead, it encourages the machismo that turns men into abusers while simultaneously discouraging the familial and paternal responsibility that turn men into good husbands and fathers. Such a culture does not only make men miserable, it makes women and children miserable, too — and all in the name of the pursuit of freedom and happiness! It’s all so pathetically funny. It is a tragedy that is also a divine comedy because it shows that virtue is the only way of getting to the happy ending.
My father became a man before he died. It’s just that he wasn’t a man when I was a boy; he wasn’t a man when I needed a man in my life. All too often he failed to come home after work, preferring to get drunk at the pub with his friends, though he was always man enough to get up in the morning and go to work, taking his hangover with him. My fondest memories of him are his teaching me to play chess and the many hours we played together, united in glorious silence as we pored over the pieces on the board. I recall his quoting from memory long passages from Shakespeare, declaiming whole speeches with intense passion, and his reciting of long poems, such as Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” or shorter pieces such as Rudyard Kipling’s “If” or G. K. Chesterton’s “The Donkey.” It was at these moments, waxing lyrical with his children, that he was really a man.
As for me, I still go to the bar occasionally to have an ale or two with friends and, unlike John Wayne, I always finish the beer in my glass before leaving. But I’m always home in time for family dinner and the family time that follows. I enjoy reading the classic works of children’s literature to my ten-year-old daughter, and although I’m not able to declaim Shakespeare as my father had done, I have recently taught my daughter to play chess, passing on this wonderful gift that my own father had given to me. The last time we played, my daughter beat me for the first time. I took the defeat with a real joy, rejoicing that my daughter was mastering the game and that, therefore, she was mastering me. In other words, I took my defeat like a man.
Preface
Whenever I was out of school in my teen years, my father put me to work. The summer sun seared the experiences into my memory, but I recall it more because I know now my father worked me hard to make me a man. He gave me hard work as a gift. These were formative years with sweat on my brow, and my father instructed me in the ways of men as he had received them. He had no other way. He was passing on an unspoken treasure: the life of a man. Masculinity, despite assertions to the contrary, is not something you can build by sheer effort — it is a gift received and responded to.
I remember pouring concrete with a team of men, probably too few men for the space we were covering. Each of us had on large boots that kept the wet concrete off of our pants and skin, but it slowly caked on, making steps heavier as the day went. Walking in concrete is like walking in a gravelly soup that won’t let go, because a vacuum is created when you lift your foot from the sludge, lending more weight to the already heavy mix of water, sand, cement, and stone. You have to spread, level, smooth, edge, and finish concrete before it sets up or else you will have to jack-hammer it up later and start over. In the summer sun, the concrete would dry too fast, so we could not slow down. Adding water can make it easier to work with, but in the end “watering it down” makes it weak. My father did not add water. And because of the inevitable and consequential time constraints of the job, he always turned into a bit of a wild man when it came to pouring concrete. Anyone from the outside listening to him barking commands might have thought him belligerent and coarse, but he wasn’t — just focused and intense. The demand of working with a liquid that’s drying into stone makes for an unavoidable sense of battle.
He never “coddled” me. There were no mothers or teachers warning me of dehydration, straining muscles, or working too hard. There were only the other workmen and my father who were expecting me to work hard like them. Pouring concrete with them starkly contrasted the worlds of home and school, places run by the motherly figures of my life. In this tough environment, there was simply no room for whining and self-focus. There was a task at hand, and we were the men to do it. I liked being one of the men.
I
