Like so many fathers in the 1950s, mine lived on the outskirts of our family. He worked a lot, traveled at times, and didn't have much to say when home. Mom was the garrulous parent. She discussed our day, put Band-Aids on our cuts, and lavished praise on our finger painting. During the summer Dad would occasionally dig out a flat old baseball glove left over from his boyhood and play catch with his three sons. Sometimes he'd drive us all to the beach. When we were little my two brothers and I once took turns tickling my father as he dozed on the sofa. Without opening his eyes Dad made a game of trying to catch us with a swooping hand as we screamed and giggled and dashed out of reach. But that sort of thing is rare in my memory. I just don't remember a whole lot about Dad during my childhood. To me he felt present but not accounted for.

This wasn't what I had in mind for a father. What I had in mind was a guy who took up more space. Someone who could hit home runs. Stare down the bad guys. Handy with a hammer, handy with his fists. At an age when bullies were picking on me, I wanted a model, someone to imitate when it came time to stick up for myself. I'd been hoping for Superman but had to settle for Clark Kent.

One episode stands out in memory as an exception to my father's mild-manneredness. When I was six or seven, we were at a museum in Chicago which had a full-sized car simulator. My older brother and I couldn't wait to try it out. But a pot-bellied guard brushed us aside as "too small" to use the simulator. He then helped a comely blonde get behind the wheel and showed her how to steer. My father went over and talked to the guard. Dad spoke so softly that I had trouble catching his words, but thought I heard, "There was no need for you to be rude to my children." I was shocked. My dad! Sticking up for his kids!

But that's the only such incident I can remember. Mostly I remember feeling that to be a member of my family was to be easy pickings for little Lex Luthors. With a soft-spoken father and an older brother who regularly got chased home from school by the Doyle brothers, I decided early on that my only alternative was to never, ever, turn down an invitation to fight. And I didn't. I lost a lot of fights, but felt that I'd made the distinction clear between me and my family. This became the theme of my childhood: letting the world know that at least one of my father's sons would put up his dukes.

For a long time this approach served its purpose. I reveled in the many times a pal complimented me for not being sissy like the rest of my family. But as I got older and wanted to pick my fights more selectively, I found that I didn't know how. I still don't know how. It's counsel I wanted from my father and felt like I never got.

Our relationship picked up a bit after I started high school. Dad seemed to have an easier time talking with me once we could discuss Adlai Stevenson's presidential prospects in 1960, or the emerging civil rights movement. In time we settled into a genial relationship, but not a close one. Our chief topic of conversation was current events. Anything else I looked for from Mom.

I got a glimmer of something different when Dad's mother died during my junior year of college. His relationship with her had been difficult. My father clearly was not eager to wrap up his mother's affairs, so I offered to give him a hand. He accepted my offer without hesitating. During our few days together in Pittsburgh Dad reminisced about the troubled years he'd spent there sharing his mother's dark apartment. At one point he moved out, into a room at the YMCA, then spent his nights drinking in a bar across the street, numbing the guilt his mother heaped on him for "deserting" her.

My grandmother was a bitterly unhappy woman. She'd lost her own mother at seven, and her grandparents six years later. After that Dad's mom was shunted between relatives and boarding schools because her own father wouldn't take her in. In my grandmother's trunk I found a picture of her as a girl, looking quite solemn. On the back she'd written, "At 13 I looked like this. Mrs. M. tried to get me to smile and so did the pater [her father] but I felt so lonely. Grandma had just gone, gone away for all time and I seem to be lost. Nobody seemed to care or to know. Nobody seemed to understand poor little one. This dress was blue serge and the velvet doily blue, almost black. The pater and I went shopping and this was the material we selected for one of my winter dresses. It was bright September and morning. That afternoon Grandma was stricken with paralysis and at night she had left me forever. I shall never forget this little dress. I had to go to the dressmaker alone and design it. I had begun to grow up."

The time we spent together in Pittsburgh gave me a new sense of my father. It was the closest I'd ever felt to him. That interlude suspended our rules of conduct. Afterward those rules were restored. Our conversations reverted to Eugene McCarthy's presidential prospects in 1968, and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

After college I began to feel frustrated by this meager relationship. During the intensity of an "encounter group," I realized that the most vivid image I had of my father was of him reaching out to shake hands with me as we met, always keeping an arm's length between us. As I cogitated about where we stood with each other, I couldn't come up with much. To me we felt more like cordial boarders in a rooming house than father and son.

About this time I read Burt Prelutsky's eulogy for his father in West magazine. Prelutsky's "Elegy" was brief, direct, and profoundly moving. "I didn't think I would, but I shed tears," he wrote. "I cried because he had worked too hard for too long for too little. For many years I had resented him because he had never told me he loved me; now I wept because I'd never told him." Reading these words tightened my throat. Doing so tightened many throats. Prelutsky's eulogy was among the most clipped-out articles of its time. It was passed from one male hand to another, kept handy on desk tops, folded and put in wallets so that it might be pulled out and shared. My own copy went into a newly-created file folder labeled "Sons & Fathers."

The second item I put in this folder was Larry King's essay on "The Old Man." This Harper's Magazine article was also destined to become a classic. "The old man was an old-fashioned father," King wrote, "one who relied on corporal punishments, biblical exhortation and a ready temper." Larry King's memoir described a far more complex relationship than did Burt Prelutsky's. But both ended up in the same place: post-funeral remorse and empathy. Men treasured these two articles as if they were vintage Mickey Mantle cards. One friend told me of writing a fan letter to King on the airplane where he'd just read his memoir, even though his tear-blurred vision made this hard to do.

Reading the eulogies by Prelutsky and King made me realize how eloquent men can be when writing about their fathers. Some of the best reading I've done since is portraits of fathers by sons. Perhaps this subject is just too important to sully with poses or pretension. As examples of good writing, if nothing else, I began to gather prose and poetry by sons about their fathers. During the past two decades this has been my hobby.

When I mentioned this hobby to a prominent poet, he wondered why my collection was limited to sons and fathers. Is that relationship so unique? Why not include sons on mothers? Or daughters on fathers? I can't imagine that he himself believed those relationships are equivalent. There is no doubt in my mind -- or the minds of most men -- that the way we feel about our fathers is singular. On the one hand such feelings are very strong. On the other, they are seldom expressed. Athletes never mouth "Hi, Dad!" to television cameras. No biker has "Pop" tattooed on his bicep. Few men ever say, "I love you," to their fathers, no matter how much they yearn to. And they do yearn. "My only regret," Dwight Eisenhower wrote shortly after his father's death, "is that it was always so difficult to let him know the great depth of my affection for him."

This is how it goes for most men. Conditioned to play our cards cagily in an imagined poker game with our father, we don't say enough to him while he's alive. Only when it's time for a eulogy do we realize that our tongues were tied not because we had too little to say, but too much; not that our feelings were too weak but that they were too strong; not that we loved our fathers too little but that we loved them too much. It is usually not until a father dies that unspoken words finally get said. "I wish I could have my father back, even for just a minute," eulogizers often conclude, "to tell him what I've just told you."

Few men are able to let a living father know how they feel about him. Yet feelings for his father can be a man's strongest. Time makes them more so. For lack of an outlet they grow explosive. When thinking about their fathers men can feel as though they're sitting on a rumbling volcano. Sensing this intensity had something to do with my drive to gather son-father writing as I once collected baseball cards. Perhaps reading about other men's fathers could make it easier to deal with our own.

The most common theme in such writing is frustration about the distance so many men feel from their male parent. "There was always a stiffness in the air between us," observed Adam Hochschild, "as if we were both guests at a party and the host had gone off somewhere without introducing us." Talk between sons and fathers tends to have a strained quality. The cross-currents can feel treacherous. They communicate through codes and symbols, glances and grunts. Or by putting words on paper that are impossible to say aloud. "My writing was about you," wrote Franz Kafka in a letter to his father, "in it I only poured out the grief I could not sigh at your breast." This emotional paralysis is not one-way. Sons can have as much trouble talking to fathers as fathers have hearing them. But many men saw (and see) their father as too remote to allow them even to try. They can easily place themselves in the opening stanza of Louis Simpson's poem "My Father in the Night Commanding No":

 

My father in the night commanding No

Has work to do. Smoke issues from his lips;

He reads in silence.

The frogs are croaking and the streetlamps glow.

 

When men gather to discuss common concerns, they return insistently to the emotional abyss so many feel separates them from their male parent. "Father hunger" is what some call this feeling. Much attention is currently being paid to the topic of insensitive fathers and wounded sons. One participant in a men's weekend gave this description of his childhood: "My father would come home, tired, he gave it all at the office. He had nothing left at home. The result was a wound." Some men in these groups report reconciliation with their fathers. More don't. At times such gatherings culminate in a chant of "Father! Come join me! Father! Come join me!"

Although my own attempt to bridge the gap with my father preceded today's men's movement by several years, this is approximately how I came to feel. In letters I told Dad that I wanted to get to know him better. During my next trip home he spent the first couple of days following me about the house, recounting one story after another from his childhood. There was the period during high school when he delivered scores of newspapers before sunup. Later he tried to publish stories under the pen name Winfield Scott. During Pittsburgh's 1937 flood Dad did relief work for 48 hours straight before crashing on a Salvation Army cot. I had no idea why my father was telling me these stories. Finally I asked him. Dad said that he was trying to let me know him better as I'd requested.

This clumsy rapprochement between father and son was hard on my mother. By custom she was their spokesperson. Traditions die hard, and mom was visibly unnerved by seeing her husband and second son huddled in conversations that didn't include her. She dealt with this by taking charge. "Why don't you two guys go off by yourselves," Mom would say heartily when I came home to visit. "You know, 'father and son.'" We did anyway. Over the next few years Dad and I talked a lot. This process was helped immeasurably by his retirement. As a city planner, my father's favorite topics of conversation had been things like regional development compacts and the need for coordinated national planning policies. Such topics interested us kids about as much as the price of rice in Siam. In retrospect, I'm not sure how much they interested him. Because within a year after he retired Dad had put his planning books in storage and begun writing poetry. This has been his principal occupation for the last 15 years.

The change was so stark that it concerned me. Didn't my father miss the career to which he'd devoted most of his adult life? No, Dad would say. He was proud of what he'd done but happy to let it go. He'd always wanted to write poetry, but became a city planner to make a better living and -- this surprised me -- because it felt more "masculine" than being a poet or an English teacher.

Retirement agreed with my father. In addition to writing poetry he took long trips with my mother and sister in an Airstream trailer, took part in local politics, and spearheaded a successful drive to save his town's historic library building from the wrecker's ball. Best of all, he seemed to relax. I got the impression that my father was enjoying himself. If his career never particularly inspired me, his retirement did.

Shortly after Dad retired, I enrolled in a Dale Carnegie course to write an article about it. Our concluding assignment was to talk on a topic of general interest. My classmates ranged from a flower shop owner through a Burger King manager to an appliance re-finisher with a greasy pompadour. Most were men. I chose to talk about sons and fathers. In previous speeches I'd sometimes had trouble holding my audience's attention. Not this time. Now my listeners' thoughts clearly stayed with mine from beginning to end. Afterward the appliance painter said haltingly, "You know, that stuff you were saying about your dad. I think that's something any man can understand."

In conversations with men generally, I saw how potent the subject of sons and fathers could be; a blasting cap setting off bombs of memory. Men generally are deft at sticking to safe topics of conversation: baseball, the price of corn, stock options. When talk turns to fathers, however, a hush settles over the crowd. Eyes look off, then turn inward. Even the most glib talkers grow tongue-tied when discussing their male parent. On more than one occasion I've seen men start, then stop because their throat grew too tight. Even more than sports and money, the topic of sons and fathers is a male universal.

This impressed me in the son-father writing I continued to gather. Although its authors came from a striking variety of backgrounds -- rich to poor, north to south, Greek-American to African-American -- their themes were common. These included:

 

• trying to meet a father's expectations; to avoid, as Christopher Hallowell put it, his "disapproving look"

• learning not to touch one's father affectionately; replacing hugs and kisses with manly handshakes

• sharing rites with fathers: playing ball, playing cards, driving cars

• competing with one's father, in sports especially

• trying to accomplish what one's father couldn't, either at his behest, or with his jealous resistance

• realizing gradually the terrible price our fathers paid to be "good providers"

• feeling vulnerable after a father's funeral, his coffin "one removed from my own," in Roger Kahn's words

• coming to terms with memories of one's father in the years following his death

Not all of the son-father pieces I found portrayed difficult relationships. Some were wry: Edward Serotta on the embarrassment of driving a "practical" Nash Rambler his father bought him, or Pat Jordan about trying one last time to beat his septuagenarian father at pool. A few were fictional, although only one was in the third person (Larry Woiwode's stunning depiction of a man building his father's coffin). Poems struck a variety of chords, including Robert Bly's ambivalent tribute to his father at 85.

The eulogies stood out for their eloquence. In the first flush of loss a torrent of dammed-up words bursts out. It is hard to read such poignant tributes to dead fathers without feeling something for our own. The essays written by sons of living fathers are a bit more circumspect; understandably. Their authors are in far greater danger. After profiling his late father in Harper's, Larry King noted that he'd spent years trying unsuccessfully to write about the man when he was still alive. "Goddamnit, I'm intimidated," King explained to his editor, Willie Morris. "I guess I just don't understand him well enough." Morris conceded the first point, but not the second. He was right. Two hours after his father's funeral King told his editor, "I can write it now."

Although writing about a dead father is easier to do, it can also be more frustrating. Some of the most affecting pieces of writing I read were those by remorseful men whose fathers were no longer around to hear their son's confession. One reason that the movie "Field of Dreams" struck such a powerful chord was its portrayal of a thirty-six year-old man struggling to reach a dead father whom he now regretted alienating. A friend of mine, whose father died unreconciled with his son, told me that this was the first movie in years to make him cry. I said that hadn't been my reaction. "Is your father alive?" asked my friend. Yes he is, I responded. "Well there you go."

How men feel about their fathers is at the heart of how they feel about themselves. Yet most feel alone in their struggle to do better on both scores. This book is meant to address that concern. It is intended to help men resolve mixed feelings about their father. If he is alive, perhaps to do so directly. If he is not, at least to feel less isolated by reading other men's experiences with their fathers.

The best son-father writing I've found in two decades' time is gathered here. Some authors -- Bill Moyers, Lewis Grizzard, Lewis Thomas, John Cheever, Jimmy Carter, Robert Bly -- are better known than others. Not that it matters. As this collection illustrates, prominent and obscure men alike write about their fathers with equal intensity and similar themes. Their writing is organized to portray the evolution of father-son relations from reverent childhood through explosive adolescence to ambivalent adulthood and the years of reflection following a father's death. Some men depict a heroic struggle to get square with live fathers. Others are trying to deal with memories of dead ones. Their common thread is an almost excruciating need to understand, forgive and reconcile. Poet Stanley Kunitz thought that the modern renaissance of son-father writing represented a shift in emphasis from patricide in the Oedipal myth to the reconciliation of Odysseus with Telemachus following their 20 years apart. "The son goes in search of the father," Kunitz wrote of this shift, "to be reconciled in a healing embrace. In that act of love he restores his father's lost pride and manhood. Perhaps also he finds himself."

To understand ourselves we must first understand our fathers. Accepting ourselves means accepting him. At some point in his life every man looks in the mirror and sees his father. I did, and it unnerved me; at first, anyway. While growing up, the cornerstone of my identity consisted of not being the man my father was. He was usually late, I was always prompt. Dad never fought, I often did. He was soft-spoken, I raised my voice. As the years passed, however, my guard dropped. Now I have trouble being on time. People frequently ask me to speak up. Accepting any and all invitations to fight came to seem more stupid than manly, even though avoiding conflict put me in danger of feeling like the chicken I'd imagined my father to be.

But Dad no longer seemed to be quite the pushover I'd thought he was. He didn't change; my attitude did. So did my knowledge about him, things I learned as we talked. My father once traveled halfway across the country to help his sister deal with her abusive husband, taking care to first find the man's pistol, break it down, and hide the parts. On his own initiative Dad later conducted a solitary picket of a whites-only barbershop. When fired as an economics professor by Penn State, due partly to his political beliefs, he took part in a protest by students and colleagues which won him reinstatement. And, in a temporary lapse from pacifism, my father was ready to kill Nazis if his fragile 6-foot, 130-pound frame hadn't kept him out of the service three years after he married my mother.

For their fortieth wedding anniversary my brother Gene and I took our parents back to City Hall in Philadelphia where they were married in 1938. Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia's ultra-conservative mayor, sent them a letter of welcome to the city and a small replica of the Liberty Bell. I'm sure Rizzo's staff mailed dozens like them every week. Nonetheless my father wrote the mayor -- with whom he could not have agreed less politically -- a letter thanking him for his thoughtfulness. At one time this would have struck me as pretty lame: expressing gratitude to a Neanderthal like Rizzo for his form letter and tacky souvenir. Now it impressed me: that my father had the courtesy to thank even a political nemesis for a small gesture that had touched him.

As usual, Mom's exuberance dominated our gathering. She was happy to be with us and said so many times. Dad didn't, though he clearly felt the same way. Over the weekend both told us repeatedly how they'd courted, broken up, got back together three years later, then married almost spur-of-the-moment in the Philadelphia mayor's chambers.

Dad and I were at Mom's bedside when she died two years after their fortieth anniversary. Smoking cigarettes for over half a century led to her death from lung cancer. My father was devastated. Then and since Dad must have told me a hundred times about the day he met my mother at a meeting he was chairing of Penn State's Liberal Club and finding the electricity so strong that he could barely stammer through his duties. As Dad's repeated again and again, "I fell in love with your mother that day and didn't stop for 42 years."

Every time Dad starts to say this, however, he can't finish. His vocal chords stop working. This happens to him a lot. When talking about something he cares about deeply, speaking up at Friends Meeting for Worship, say, or reciting his poetry, my father tends to choke up. I have the same tendency. Dad says that his father -- who owned a sand and gravel business -- did too. He thinks it might be a genetic trait. Perhaps it is.

As much as I miss my mother, the best decade of my relationship with my father has been the one since she died. Partly this is because we now could talk directly, with no intermediary. Partly it's because without Mom's effervescent personality as a buffer, Dad became more outgoing. He made friends (his "in-group" Dad called them). He began to date. He bought a statue of a nude man and woman embracing and displayed it prominently in the living room of his apartment. He began to give poetry readings, buying a microphone-equipped boom box with which to practice.

The older Dad got, the easier it became for us to talk. It turns out that my father has a lot to say. Or perhaps I'm just listening better. Dad tells me how his own absentee father was kicked out of the house by his mother when he was four. He and his sister only saw their father sporadically after that, usually in hotel lobbies. Though he grew close to his father in later years, Dad says he could never quite shake his mother's "programming" of him to hate her ex-husband. She was a difficult woman. My father has told me often about the night he was awakened by his mother who was pretending to be a policeman come to take her 4 year-old to jail for throwing a cow pie at a friend. A few years later she bade her son farewell as he left for Boy Scout camp with a tongue-lashing that left him weeping on a friend's shoulder during much of the train ride. Since his mother didn't work a day of her life, my father grew up in virtual poverty. His grandfather refused to loan him money for college on the grounds that young men should make their own way in life. Dad did. He got through college by waiting on tables, stoking furnaces, framing pictures and selling books. In his early 20s my father hitchhiked around Pennsylvania and West Virginia, checking into hotels knowing he could only pay his bill if he sold some books. While earning his PhD in the middle of the Depression Dad and Mom lived on what was left from the $90 a month he was paid as a graduate assistant after they'd given much of this money to their mothers.

As I learned more about him, I began to see my father differently. I noticed how devoted his friends were to him, men and women of all ages. "Your dad is one of my favorites," the man who handles his medical claims told me. "Did you know that he wrote a poem for me?" His friends saw something in my father I'd sometimes overlooked: not just his gentle good-nature but integrity to the bone. In time my own perspective changed. The mildness I'd mistaken for passivity began to look more like quiet self possession. My father is a basically uncomplicated person. There is no difference that I can detect between his inner and outer self. He has difficulty sustaining a conversation with his grandchildren just as he had trouble talking with his children. Kid-talk is not my father's strong suit. This is part of his integrity. He talks the same to everyone. Dad does nothing for effect, partly because this would violate his sense of honor, partly because he just doesn't know how. He lacks guile. I wish that were more true of me. I have different faces for different situations, and have cut ethical corners. Someone once asked me what type of man my father was. Without thinking I responded, "He's high quality. I wish I had half his quality."

Our relationship has grown easier over the years. By now it feels like friendship. Dad calls me to discuss his poetry, what kind of car to buy, and whether or not he should re-marry. When together we sometimes just sit quietly. There are few people in the world with whom I'm that comfortable. Although Dad was always taller than me, he's shrunk in recent years and we now share clothes. The first time he passed along some undershirts to me, it felt good to wear them: the idea and the fit. We do our best at hugs and kisses and "I love yous;" not very good usually, but the best we can do.

The key to our current relationship lies in my father's genes. The fact that he's lived to the age of 81 has allowed us to pass through perilous seas and end up -- him old, me middle-aged -- as close companions on a safe shore. For the past few years Dad has had bladder cancer. Rather than let this disease take its course or limit himself to a single course of treatment, he has sought various opinions, tried different therapies. At one point Dad contacted a friend at the National Institutes of Health and became a candidate for experimental treatment there. Although he wasn't accepted, I admired the spirit of his attempt. It seemed that my father was trying both to increase his odds of survival and make his illness have meaning for others.

It turns out that my father is the model I always wanted. When talking to my own two sons I often hear his voice emerge. "If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right," Dad tells them through me. Or, "come on, push like you meant it," when putting on their shoes. Following his lead, I don't deny myself the last piece of candy for my children's sake, with bills for self-sacrifice coming due later. And I hear echoes of my younger self when my 12 year-old moans that his father sure can be boring.

Reading what sons have to say about their fathers has made me wonder what my own might write about me. That sort of question is hard to avoid when reading sons on fathers. Hopefully, sharing other men's experiences with their fathers will make it less difficult to deal with our own. Reconciliation may not always be possible. Understanding is.