‘I keep remembering those things, all the old things,’ says Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). He says this in response to his married sister Emma’s surprise when he mentions the house they grew up in, far from sunny Santa Rosa where she now lives happily; she (Patricia Collinge) says something like, ‘Fancy you mentioning Burnham Street. I haven’t thought of that old place in years.’ Strange that she hasn’t, or maybe not so strange when she hints, later, at their troubled and unhappy shared history. Uncle Charlie is a haunted, hunted man, his sister’s home his last shot at a ‘normal’ life, after a string of murders of wealthy widows (this isn’t a spoiler – we know he’s a wrong ‘un from the very beginning of the film.) And part of his justification for these murders is that these women are all corrupt and evil, like the modern world in general, unlike the roseate world of his childhood, as he explains to his appalled niece and namesake Charlie (Teresa Wright.) It’s my favourite Hitchcock film because of the acting (even the minor characters are brilliantly brought to life, like Herb, Emma’s husband’s friend), the setting, the story, and the ending. But it also offers the challenging notion for a historian that thinking too much of the past can not only paralyse a person, but poison them as well.
The new weight-loss drugs – Mounjaro, Ozempic, Wegovy, I’m sure there are others – are controversial for many reasons I won’t go into, but one thing they do very effectively, their supporters insist, is turn off ‘food noise’, the constant thinking about food and about what to eat and when to eat that everyone is familiar with, but that bothers some people more than others. The noise of the past is something that bothers some of us more than others, too; it may even be a professional pitfall for historians in particular. We are so used to thinking in terms of historical, geopolitical, and social causes, that we often apply this reasoning to our own lives as well. Of course it is fascinating to figure out why people are the way they are, but focusing too much on the reasons why can cause emotional stasis in the present. I speak from experience. Ruminating about the past for me has been ‘time I have wasted on the way’, to paraphrase Graham Nash. I’m not sure if he’s talking exactly about what I’m talking about, but I am sure he would agree with Joni Mitchell that songs are like children, they grow up and go out into the world and develop in ways their parents never intended. And his song has become for me not a lament but an anthem of hope for the future.
Over the years I’ve consumed forests of self-help books and books about Letting Go and religious books about forgiveness of the Self as well as Others, but it is fiction that has really been my salvation – and I don’t use that word lightly. I can’t list all the books that have helped me put my past into perspective, and today I am just going to write about two novels which I would recommend heartily to anybody trying to turn off the noise of their personal history.
(By the way I should point out that neither of the scenarios depicted in the two novels discussed below resemble my own life story. Like the Graham Nash song, they are more about mood than details.)
The funny thing about Anne Tyler’s Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant (1983), which I read not long after it came out, is that it took multiple re-readings over the years for me to ‘get’ its meaning. It is the story of the odd and contrary Pearl Tull, and her late and desperate marriage to a man she came to despise, and their three children Cody, Ezra and Jenny, born in the late 1930s. They are reared in an atmosphere of tension and occasional rage but there are periods of normality too. Their father, Beck, flees from his wife’s scorn when the children are young (I think Tyler is far too easy on him for doing this), Pearl has to go out to work (in the 1940s), times are hard and she has a terrible temper – they are all afraid of her, but they love her too. They grow up. Cody, unsettled and driven, is the popular boy at school, confident, handsome and ambitious, and he goes into sales. Ezra, the dreamer and their mother’s favourite, sets up a homely restaurant and falls in love with a girl who is perfect for him, Ruth, plain and bony but attractive in a way that only Anne Tyler can evoke. No spoilers, but the path of true love does not run smoothly. Jenny goes to medical school and gets married and has a big family and still practises medicine and it’s all very chaotic. Pearl rises admirably to a number of crises and can be a rock of support at times. But there’s no point at which she acknowledges how difficult she was, and she is genuinely mystified when any of the three brings up unhappy memories. The point of the book is that there can be no ‘closure’ in human relationships, but that being stuck in the past – like Cody, whose entire life consists of undermining Ezra because of their mother’s childhood preference for him – only leads to unhappiness. Ezra isn’t bitter, though he has every reason to be. Jenny’s domestic chaos might be a reaction to their mother’s strictness and minimalism, and no doubt she’s making mistakes of a different kind but, the author seems to suggest, who cares? What does it matter? As long as there’s love, some kind of love… And at the end of her life Pearl feels little regret, just a lot of weary incomprehension at how things turned out. She did her best, as she saw it. She has nothing to apologise for. At least she stuck around, not like their father.
The other, more recent book is Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Adult Onset (2014). It is a great read, often quite funny on the ludicrous demands of modern parenting and as always with Canadian writers, there is a strong sense of place. Mary Rose, the main character, writes a series of books for young adults ( books I’d love to read if they weren’t fictional fiction) and lives with her wife Hilary and two children in Toronto. Mary Rose is at home permanently, and finds it very difficult and fraught, because she is an overly anxious mom. Her own childhood is woven in and out of the narrative; her parents, Duncan and Dolly, are enthusiastic grandparents, genuinely good, lively people, and they often visit from the west. The novel opens with Duncan congratulating Mary Rose on being a role model for gay and lesbian teenagers. So why does she feel like responding ‘go fuck yourself Dad’? It is because sometimes she gets bleak flashbacks to her parents’ angry and hurtful reaction (and rejection) when she told them for the first time that she was gay. There is also a hovering childhood memory from their time in Germany (Duncan was in the army, posted there), of a physical injury to Mary Rose that still gives her bother. Her parents also had the worry of the Rh factor, which led to so many neonatal deaths before the 1970s; there are two dead babies, buried in Germany. But now they seem fine, sailing blithely through old age; Dolly rings Mary Rose on the phone and while she’s talking goes through the names of all her (the mother’s) sisters in turn: ‘ That’s not what I mean, Sadie, Thelma, Minnie, Maureen..’ (Until I read this book I thought my mother was the only person who did this.) Neither Duncan nor Dolly ever face up to the ‘bad’ things they did, nor do they ‘apologise’ for them, and there is no more ‘closure’ than there is in Tyler’s book. When Mary Rose goes to meet them off their train at Union Station, she sees them momentarily as ‘two little old Canadians traversing the vastness’ – sometimes the long view, the panning-out, is the only way to love the people who have hurt us. Maybe we should recognise that they too have come on a long journey. But anyway, here we all are and let’s get on with it.
(NOTE: I am not talking here about seriously and continually abusive and neglectful parents who deny their children the necessities of life and injure them physically, making them unable to function in the world. I am talking about the ordinary everyday common-or-garden minor neglects and cruelties perpetrated by parents who fed, clothed and provided a safe environment for their growing children, and who were often themselves materially, psychically or emotionally damaged.)
And as for the past being a better place, as Uncle Charlie insists? I’ll leave the last word with the great Stephen King. In his novel 11-22-63, when the main character goes back to 1958 (from the early 21st century) he finds that food and drink taste incomparably better but that everything and everyone smells worse – factories and rendering plants and drainage, and everyone smokes and nearly everyone reeks of sweat. And out behind a reassuringly homely and friendly drugstore/diner, there is a restroom for white people and a little further away, a plank across a gutter for ‘colored’ people.
Shadow of a Doubt Universal Studios 1943. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Anne Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (London: Vintage 1982).
Ann-Marie MacDonald, Adult Onset (London: Hodder & Stoughton 2014).
Stephen King, 11-22-63 (London: 2012).
‘Wasted on the Way’ by Graham Nash is on the album Crosby, Stills & Nash, Daylight Again Rudy Records 1982
Clear Classic Books 
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