Chapter Seven - ‘Neither to Vindicate nor to Vilify’: Becoming the Father in Robert Gray's The Land I Came Through Last

Summary

I might have loved him had I dared, and had we been able to talk to each other.

—Patrick White, Flaws in the Glass

If I think of you

I'm horrified - I become obsessed

with you. It is like love.

I am filled with pity.

I want to live.

—Robert Gray, ‘Poem to my Father’

Gray has no centre to him. I cannot find, in this book, the man's heart, mind, spirit or gut.

—Robert Adamson, ‘Review of Grass Script‘

Early in The Land I Came Through Last, Robert Gray's auto/biographical account of his parents’ troubled relationship, the author offers the following description of his father:

My father's expression, at first sight, mixed intelligence with arrogance, but that look was undermined, for me, as I grew aware of how underneath it there was a secretive discomfort. There was always about him, I felt, for all the authority of his talk, a subtle embarrassment, a consciousness of what would have been thought his moral weakness. (18)

The father's moral weakness - his alcoholism - is, as Gray's portrait makes clear, a red herring. While the book contains some astonishing descriptions of drunkenness and its destructive effects, Gray's account of his father is far more complex and penetrating than a simple lesson on the dangers of alcohol. Crucially, the passage given above, while remarkable as a demonstration of the author's ability to succinctly portray the instability of the father who is progressively revealed through the text, is also a strikingly apt description of the book itself.