Historian Alan Axelrod is the author of the business bestsellers PATTON ON LEADERSHIP and ELIZABETH I, CEO, the Great Generals series books PATTON, BRADLEY and MARSHALL, and many books on American and military history. The latest entry into his impressive bibliography is LOST DESTINY: Joe Kennedy Jr. and the Doomed WWII Mission to Save London --- an exploration of the origin of today's controversial military drones, as well as a searing and unforgettable story of heroism, WWII and the Kennedy dynasty that might have been. Here, Axelrod explains why the father-son relationship is central to his story and lists five other books that share that theme.
When people ask me what I’ve been working on, I tell them about my new book, LOST DESTINY: Joe Kennedy Jr. and the Doomed WWII Mission to Save London, pretty much summing it up by reciting the subtitle. The book is about military history and about pushing remote-control flying weapons beyond the available technology of the World War II era in a desperate effort to halt the onslaught of the Nazi V-1s and V-2s. More particularly, it is about how one U.S. Navy flier eagerly undertook a mission that looked a lot like suicide but he believed had no more than a 50/50 chance of killing him.
That’s what I say about the book. But a lot of it is really about the consequences of being the son of a powerful father. In literature, it’s at least as old as Abraham and Isaac in the 22nd chapter of Genesis, or maybe Euripides: “The Gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.” For me, the following are top-of-mind entries in the rich literature of sons and fathers:
FATHER AND SON: A Study of Two Temperaments, by Edmund Gosse (1857; reprinted by Oxford University Press, 2004)
The Victorian poet-critic recalls coming of age in the home of a father, Philip Henry Gosse, who combined the fundamentalism of his Plymouth Brethren faith with pioneering work in marine biology. Renowned as a scientist, the senior Gosse was also infamous for his religious tyrannizing, yet his son, while ultimately rejecting his father’s religion, etches a portrait that is frank, painful, comic and, finally, loving: a masterpiece of lyrical complexity.
RENOIR, MY FATHER by Jean Renoir (1978; reprinted by New York Review of Books Classics, 2001)
The great French filmmaker paints a quietly adoring portrait of his father, the Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. In the process, he evokes a Parisian universe the shattering of which the son’s own landmark films Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game both reflected and mourned. This is not a brooding study of the father-son dynamic, but a crystalline account of the painter --- his personality and working method. It is both an intimate monument and an extraordinary document in the history of art.
LETTER TO MY FATHER by Franz Kafka (1919; bilingual edition published by Schocken, 1966)
The writer that W. H. Auden called the Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe “of our age” begins: “You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you…” Originally a combination of typed and handwritten text, which Kafka gave to his mother to deliver to his father, the printed version of LETTER TO MY FATHER runs to just 45 pages: a painfully detailed diagram of the emotional minefield a father has sown in advance of his boy. Some may see only neurosis here. For me, it is heroism. Too bad Frau Kafka never delivered it.
NOTES ON A COWARDLY LION by John Lahr (Knopf, 1969)
Bert Lahr (1895-1967) is remembered today largely as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939), but his career spanned low-comedy burlesque to Nobel-caliber theater (he was Estragon in the 1956 U.S. premiere of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”). Longtime New Yorker drama critic John Lahr created a memoir that not only documents his father’s stage and screen career but lays bare the journey of the archetypal sad clown, a man phenomenally insecure, and chronically depressed --- the lyrical “perfect fool,” who struggled to love his family.
THE KING’S SPEECH: The Shooting Script, by David Seidler (Newmarket Press, 2011)
If you loved the 2010 Tom Hooper film (starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush), you will find this edition of the shooting script a revelation. Screenwriter David Seidler became intrigued with the life of Britain’s World War II king, George VI, after he himself overcame a severe childhood stammer. Seidler’s script relates how an unconventional Australian-born speech therapist, Lionel Logue, worked intensively with Prince Albert, Duke of York, son of King George V, to help him overcome a crippling stammer. The two developed a doctor-patient relationship that lasted from 1926, when Albert first consulted Logue, until his death, as King George VI, in 1952. To study the shooting script is to contemplate --- as only one can from the printed page --- the psychosomatic toll of growing up in the palace of a king at the imperiled apogee of the British Empire, son of a father overbearing, austere and remote. In Logue, who was just 15 years older than Prince Albert, the man destined to reign --- and reign magnificently --- during both defeat and victory in World War II, found the nurturing father he and his nation so desperately needed.
