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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780805210170 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/07/2001 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter 2
The dirt road leading to Upper Killington was knee-deep in mud when my parents moved into World’s End in the winter of 1939, and the moving van could not get down to the valley. Instead, it had to be unloaded at the top of the hill and the contents ferried laboriously to the house on a tractor and trailer driven by one of the local farmers, a mountain of a man by the name of Alf Chapel.
This was only the first of Alf’s many kindnesses. Alf knew every inch of Upper Killington like the back of his hand: he had been born in the very house in which he was now raising a family of his own, and his father and grandfather had farmed the same land before him. It was extremely rare in those days for ownership of a farm to change other than by family succession, and talk about the newcomers at Upper Killington had long preceded their rather undignified arrival. Alf has heard his fair share of rumors and speculation; sitting around the fire in the pub with the other local farmers he had listened as the gossiped their stories growing taller and taller under the influence of the landlord’s stupefying strong home-brewed cider. But Alf had a level head and a generous heart, and although he was as curious as any as to why a Russian architect and his young wife would want to move to a derelict farm in the heart of rural England, his inclination was to wait and see.
He didn’t have long to wait. Talking to my parents as they sat amid the sea of tea chests and cardboard boxes in the empty farmhouse, it rapidly became clear to him that they had bought World’s End on a whim, and that although they were obviously infatuated with the idea of becoming farmers, they knew next to nothing but the blind enthusiasm of the amateur and a twelve-volume encyclopedia of veterinary science, would surely soon have found themselves hopelessly out of their depth.
The local farmers were not the only ones to wonder what on earth could have possessed my parents to make them embark on this venture. When my father announced to his partners that his days as an architect were over, and that he and my mother intended to move to Upper Killington without delay and become farmers, they reacted with a mixture of consternation and incredulity. After all, my father, Berthold Lubetkin, then not quite forty, was at the pinnacle of his career, and the avant-garde architectural practice which he had founded shortly after his arrival in England in 1930 had become the talk of London’s artistic and intellectual circles. His colleagues knew him as a man seemingly totally committed to his chosen professional, a passionate idealist and inspired designer whose uncompromising perfectionism, exasperating though it could be, always managed to bring out the very best in those who worked alongside him. And now here he was, on the point of leaving architecture as abruptly as he had arrived, and talking with enormous enthusiasm about becoming a farmer.
But discontent was in his nature: regardless of how much success and acclaim he won for his work, it never seemed to satisfy him for long. The meandering path which had brought him to England bore witness to the restlessness of his spirit. He had gone from the wealth and comfort of his childhood in imperial Russia to an impoverished, bohemian studenthood in Warsaw, Paris, and Berlin; he had known the anonymity and bewilderment of the newly arrived immigrant, struggling to gain a toehold in an unfamiliar culture; he had mastered five languages, and had learned to bend them to his wit and his will like a native. His intellectual capacity was prodigious: he hungered for new places, new challenges, conquered them quickly and longed to move one.
That same restlessness had been evident in his behavior toward women, and he had earned himself a reputation as something of a philanderer. Handsome, cosmopolitan and brilliantly funny, women were naturally drawn to him, and he to them—but he shunned commitment like the plague. My mother, Margaret Church, was only nineteen when she met him. She was then a student at England’s most prestigious architectural school, and she had gone to an interview for a summer job at my father’s practice. Her youth and beauty elicited a predictable reaction from my father, who set his sights on her at once. She never stood a chance.
She was the youngest of three girls born into a wealthy English family. Her father had been killed in the First World War, while she was still only a baby, and she had no memory of him. Nevertheless, she felt the lack of a father keenly, and grew up revering him: all her life she kept a faded photograph of him in his army uniform, and it was precious to her. Tucked into one corner of the battered antique silver frame there was a tiny photograph of his gravestone—one of thousands upon thousands of identical white marble monuments marching forever in step across the haunted, windswept fields of northern France. With a magnifying glass one could just make out the inscription on the headstone: “Captain Harold Church, Oxon & Bucks Light Infantry. Somme, July 1st, 1916,” and then the epitaph: “Onward Christian Soldier.” Such was her pride in her dead father that as a child she was unshakably convinced that the Lord’s Prayer opened with the words “Our Father, who art in Heaven, Harold be Thy Name.” It had to come as both a shock and a disappointment that the official version was addressed to someone else entirely.
My father, almost twice her age, so accomplished, so handsome and so mesmerizingly strong-willed, must have seemed to her the personification of the father she had never had, and her devotion to him was immediate, unwavering and lifelong. She deferred to him in all things, believing his to be the better mind and the sounder judgment, even when her intuition, he conscience and he abundant common sense told her otherwise. When he encouraged her to give up her studies and come to work for him she hardly thought twice, even though her place at architecture school had been hard-won. (She had been the youngest student ever to be admitted there, and one of the very first women.) And when he invited her to leave the London flat she shared with her sisters and move in with him, she did so without a second’s hesitation.
For the next four years that defied convention by living as man and wife when they were nothing of the sort, an arrangement that scandalized her mother, who, herself the very soul of propriety, was horrified that her daughter could see fit to jeopardize the good name of the family by living in sin—and to make matters worse, the man was a foreigner. She must have lived in dread of the announcement of a pregnancy—but she needn’t have worried: in this matter, at least, she and my father were entirely in accord, although for vastly different reasons. My father’s fear of parenthood had nothing whatever to do with questions of legitimacy or decorum: he simply did not want to be tied down. For despite his sincere and unprecedentedly deep feelings for my mother, he remained restive and rootless at heart; a baby would impede his mobility, restrict his choices and impose its need on him; becoming a father would be profoundly inconvenient.
But birth control in those days was unreliable at best, and while my mother did what she could to dodge pregnancy, it seemed as though fate had cast his ineluctably as a mother. During the four years of their unofficial marriage, she became pregnant several times, and although she wanted very much to have the babies, my father insisted categorically on her getting rid of them. Abortions back then were illegal, extremely difficult to obtain and terrifyingly unsafe, but my father was adamant, and my mother, scared stiff of losing the man she loved so much, obediently ended each of her pregnancies under circumstances which, for the rest of her life, she remained deeply reluctant to discuss.
By 1939, perhaps stampeded by the general nervousness which pervade those ominous months before war broke out, and maybe influenced, also, by the desirability of acquiring British nationality and the right to reside permanently in England, my father decided he was at last ready to make a formal commitment to my mother. Since they were both atheists, they shunned a traditional wedding, choosing instead to solemnize their marriage in a strictly secular ceremony. On a stubbornly rainy late spring day they entered the registrar’s office at Chelsea Town Hall, emerging as man and wife not many minute later, to walk a gauntlet of their friends and architectural colleagues, each of whom held a T square aloft in a parody of the crossed swords of a military guard of honor.
Reading Group Guide
From the first page until the final revelation, Louise Kehoe’s In This Dark House is a riveting memoir of the author’s life-long struggle to understand and be loved by her tyrannical and enigmatic father. We hope the questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow enhance your group’s reading of this complex work: at once a memoir, an intriguing mystery, the portrait of a family profoundly shaped by the circumstances of history, and a fascinating exploration into the recesses of the human psyche.
1. By her own account, Louise was more influenced growing up by her mother’s Christianity than any other religion (p. 86). Why, then, does Louise decide to become officially Jewish? Is she reclaiming her father’s heritage for him out of a sense of obligation to her father’s family? Or did Louise long to have a heritage, any heritage, after being denied it for her whole life? Or is becoming Jewish the ultimate revenge on her late father?
2. Louise realizes with hindsight that there were many clues during her childhood of her father’s true identity as a Jew (p. 221). In the same manner, does Louise provide enough clues from the beginning of her memoir to enable the careful reader to surmise the mysterious identity of her father? What clues were the most effective or revealing? Does Louise successfully blend the genres of mystery and memoir, and, if so, how?
3. Louise explains her father’s personality as an “extraordinary union of heartlessness and humanity” that made him irresistible to his family (p. 54). Do the examples she provides support this characterization? Compare how Louise develops the positive attributes of her father to how she develops his negative attributes. Does Louise’s method of developing her father’s character enable the reader to empathize with her conflicting feelings of love and hate?
4. Louise writes: “One thing is certain, though: he never forgave himself for the death of his parents. He hated himself for failing to save them, hated himself for surviving, for living through the war in the safety and serenity of rural England. And, having hated himself to capacity, he let his bitter self-loathing spill over to taint his children, those three dark-eyed, dark-haired echoes of himself, who reminded him daily of his parents and his past” (pp. 216-17). How convincing is Louise’s explanation of her father’s behavior once she learns the truth of his past? Does Louise’s explanation justify or excuse her father’s behavior toward her and her siblings? Does Louise forgive him posthumously?
5. In her disclaimer at the beginning of her memoir, Louise states: “This book represents the truth as I see it, but because of the sheer complexity of the story it has been necessary to introduce occasional elements of fiction.” In some instances, such as Louise’s relaying of her parents’ courtship and her father’s reputation before his marriage (pp. 8-11), Louise does not provide the source of the information. However, in other instances, such as the quote from her father’s Book of Grievances (p. 67), the source of the information is clearly revealed. Do these different methods of retelling her and her family’s history have any effect on the persuasiveness of Louise’s memoir? Does Louise’s memoir absolutely defy her father’s dictum: “Facts do not exist” “There are no such thing as facts” (pp. 35 and 213)?
6. What is the tone of In This Dark House? Is it detached or even clinical, such as when Louise offers a psychoanalytical interpretation for Sasha’s reaction to Andrew’s death (pp. 25-27)? Or is the tone more personal and emotional, such as when Louise reacts to Sasha’s ordering her to return to The World’s End (p. 121)?
7. From Louise’s childhood “house”—The World’s End—to the “dark house” of the poem, what different images does the motif of the house convey throughout her memoir? Why did Louise quote the entire poem In This Dark House, by Edward Davison (p. 155)? Do the images conveyed by the poem reflect Louise’s feelings for The World’s End or those of her mother, and what is the significance of Louise choosing to entitle her memoir with a poem recalled by her mother’s last words? Does Louise reconcile the different feelings her parents have for The World’s End with her own feelings for the house?
8. Louise writes: “Mama was as bewitched by him as we were, and it was she who fed and fueled the natural longing we had to be loved by him, and who shielded the flame and kept it alive when his volatile temper and blistering anger threatened to extinguish it entirely” (p. 54). Mama was at once “the older sister,” who encouraged Louise’s father’s bad behavior by her silence and her own desire not to incur his wrath (p. 89), and a mother who stood up to her husband and defended her children (pp. 66-67). How would you describe the family dynamic—was it all controlled by Louise’s father, or did her mother have any control? Whose actions—or lack of action—were more pivotal to the family’s interrelationships? What was her mother’s role in creating the family dynamic?
9. Louise writes of her mother: “However much she loved us… still her love for Dad surpassed everything else” (p. 93). And, in her next paragraph, she writes: “How lucky we all were to be loved by such a woman; what a precious gift she was to us all” (p. 93). Is there significance in the juxtaposition of these two thoughts, especially in light of her father’s admonition to his children upon his wife’s death: “You’ll never know what you’ve lost!” (p. 154)?
10. How might this story have been different if it had been told by Steven, the only son in the household, born into the shadow of Andrew’s death? If it had been told by Sasha?
11. So many questions remain at the end of the memoir: What is Louise’s own marriage like? What is her current relationship with her siblings, and how did they overcome the sibling rivalry inculcated into them as children? What were Sasha’s and Steven’s reactions to the truth about their father and their involvement in uncovering the mystery? What is Louise’s relationship with her mother’s family, if any? Why did Louise choose to end the memoir where she does and leave these and other questions unanswered?
12. Louise writes that “disloyalty haunted” her father (p. 65), and she recalls him being very moved by the passage in Dickens’s Great Expectations in which the newly made aristocrat Pip disclaims his humble, lower-class father (p. 81). Was Lubetkin truly afraid of his children rejecting him, as Louise guiltily thought as a child, or is it her father’s haunting memory of his own disloyalty to his parents of which the passage reminds him? Why else might Berthold, the self-avowed Communist, have been taken by this passage?
13. Characterize the marriage between Louise’s mother and father. How might their relationship in and of itself affected Louise in her adult life? Does Louise recognize these effects?
14. Louise states that “she grew up feeling transparent,” and when she tried to lock her door to get privacy from her family, she was, ironically, accused of secretiveness—something profoundly disapproved of in the Lubetkin family (p. 102). What other ironies occurred in her life because of her father’s secret?
15. Why was her parents’ reaction to her experience with the doctor in Bavaria the event that pushed Louise to leave them and The World’s End, and not any of the other cruelties heaped upon her by her father?
16. Steven confided to Louise: “We’ll never be free until Dad’s dead” (p. 104). Does Louise answer the question of whether she is finally “free” from her father?