“Bow Ties and Poetry: Father’s Day,” by Tamasin Day-Lewis, was originally published in the January 2006 issue of Vogue.
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“The past is a foreign country,” L. P. Hartley wrote at the beginning of his great novel, The Go-Between. And that is what strikes me each time I look at this photograph of my father, the man I knew in some ways so well, in other ways not at all, for he had already lived the major part of his life before I was a gleam in his eye and his past was something I would only hear about in the edited-down, romantic way that parents have of telling you about their childhood. Like his early memory of being a young boy in turn-of-the-century Ireland on a bus in Dublin with his aunt Knos. “How to develop a beautiful bust,” the advertisement ran in the magazine she was reading, and my father, unaware of its meaning or impact on his fellow travelers from the most zealously imprurient nation on earth, is said to have started chanting the line rhythmically, the first signs that there was poetry running through his veins.
This same aunt had stepped in when my father was four and his mother died tragically young. His father was so heartbroken that he left Ireland, taking his young son to England with Aunt Knos, who devoted herself to his upbringing. By the time my brother, Daniel, and I went back to Ireland with our parents for childhood summer holidays, Knos was in her 90s, languishing in a nursing home in Rathmines in Dublin, paid for by my father. It was our first stop as we ended the rolling misery of the ferry crossing the Irish Sea from Liverpool.
As for the loss of his mother and the effect it had on him, it was not something our father ever talked about, and nor, as children, did we think to ask. Any more than we thought, in early childhood, that we would be fatherless by our mid-teens. Perhaps if we’d known how short a time we’d have with him, we would have delved more deeply into his trunk of memories and gotten closer to his heart, though back then the sort of openness our generation has with our children hadn’t been invented.
In this portrait taken of my father by the great Irving Penn, for American Vogue in 1951, my father is resplendent in his bow tie, a sartorial stroke that on the wrong neck could appear an epicene affectation, but never on him: He saw the joke in it, the potential dandification; he loved clothes but knew where to stop, when elegance became uncomfortably theatrical and shouted “Look at me.” And I can see now, although at the time I would not have been conscious of it, that he always looked the part, looked like the distinguished man of letters that he was. He was comfortable in his beautifully tailored suits and the shirts he bought from Turnbull & Asser—whom he referred to as Turnbull and Arsehole throughout our childhood. The curious angle of the black brolly swinging jauntily at his side makes me sure that when Papa walked into Penn’s studio Penn must have been arrested, like everyone else who crossed my father’s path, by the completeness of his image; by his not just being absurdly handsome and charismatic, but by the way he could only be what he was, an Irish poet.
The dark side is there, too, the fact that the portrait casts a shadow over one side of his face, at once accentuating the strength and refinement of his profile while suggesting the unknowable. He is looking away from the camera, and Penn has caught something of the stare into the middle distance that Papa used to have when he would seem to leave the conversation as though some poetic abstraction, thought, or line was playing in his head and had to be attended to, and we knew then not to interrupt. We had to knock on the door before we entered my father’s study, too, knowing from an early age that the Muse might flee if we barged in when Papa was writing, breaking the invisible line from head to pen, since imagination and inspiration were as ephemeral and unpredictable as the Irish sunshine.
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