They tell me people are supposed to write books in Brooklyn or Manhattan, but I didn't get that memo in time. Outside my window in the Bronx, neighbors exchange greetings in Greek by day, and Manhattan College students stumble riotously home from parties at night. When I'm writing, though, I tend not to look outside but inside, often at the pictures of the people without whom I would write next to nothing. One photo in my work area shows my daughter Rebecca. Taken in infancy, it shows her with a smile that manages at once to be jaunty and placid; she looks as if the teddy bear beside her is all the protection she needs in the world. Another snapshot shows my mother and father, perhaps from 20 years ago. They stand in a formal garden in some holiday destination, well before their current infirmity ended their traveling days. My mother, otherwise not a vain woman, always refuses to be photographed with her glasses on. In this image, she squints smilingly toward the camera as she clutches her spectacles in her gloved hand. My father, in profile, looks at her with evident satisfaction and pleasure. This, to me, is the curious aspect of the scene. I cannot recall his ever looking at any of us ? my mother, my sister, or me ? with this kind of enjoyment. The inspiration I take from these two pictures is considerable, but it is of a more complicated kind from that which other people might suspect.
Family often supplies reasons for writing, I suppose. Braces and tuitions must be paid for, and the vicarious ambitions of parents make their own insistent claims. But I also think people tell stories in order to fill gaps and build bridges. Perhaps the very act of writing is a confession that there is an incompleteness somewhere that the writer is struggling to repair. Sometimes, that lacuna has evidently nothing to do with the author's apparent subject matter. So, indeed, with my book Eden's Outcasts.
My mature sense of the matter is that my father was fated for misunderstanding. He was born the younger of twin boys in 1920, and the details I have of how unevenly the family's love was divided between them make the story of Jacob and Esau look like Leave It to Beaver. Even in their naming, my Dad's brother received the birthright. He was named Herbert Jr. My father was second banana from day one. They named him Thomas. Look it up. It means "the twin." But it was also nature, not just his parents, who played a trick on Dad. He seems to have grown up with an innate aversion to human contact. Hug him to this day, and every muscle in his body tenses. He actually growls. If you played a game with him, everyone in the room abruptly vanished, as he focused mutely on the object of winning. In the photograph from his childhood in which he looks happiest, he is playing with a mechanical toy. When my father was a boy, no one knew the phrase "Asperger's Syndrome." Even if they had, he would never have gotten a diagnosis. Both my parents were raised as Christian Scientists, believing that all defects, mental or physical, stemmed from a failure to perceive oneself as a perfect child of God. Always evaluated morally, never medically, my father may never have understood the real reasons for his awkward placement in the world.
In his professional life, he indulged his fascination with mechanisms by becoming an airline executive, passionately devoted to problems of aircraft reliability and coming up with a theory of maintenance that, I am told, changed the way the people take care of airplanes. His spare time was also immersed in gadgetry; with deep patience and instinctive understanding, he tinkered obsessively with engines, made furniture, and restored antique clocks. Yet when his attention turned from gizmos and blocks of wood toward his family, the patience and understanding promptly fled. He became a man of savage jokes and easy anger. He was exquisitely skilled with a dovetail joint or a stubborn gear, but ham-fisted and unthinking in the presence of a beating heart and a vulnerable soul. He took daily pleasure in scanning the local newspaper for typos, shouting with glee "San Mateo Times strikes again!" whenever he found one. In his children, too, he hunted for failures as ruthlessly as he would have scanned a defective turbine.
Growing up with such a father, so alive to one's failings and so deaf to one's emotions, I suspect that one either tries furiously to win his approval or stops trying altogether. I chose the former path, driving myself toward academic excellence in hopes that the next A would be the one to garner the desired reaction. It never came. In the process, though, I earned bachelor's, law, and doctoral degrees. (I also appeared on Jeopardy!; Dad, of course, pointed out that one of my correct questions was technically wrong.) At some point, I must have stopped expecting our relationship to transform, but the habit had been formed. In a certain way, I became the thing that my father liked best: a well-oiled machine.
Then, in 1994, on the first day of spring, came my daughter Rebecca and my own turn to be a father. I was still in graduate school then, and my wife Michelle had to return to work almost at once to pay the bills. I had to become what my father could probably never have been: a hands-on dad.
At first I was practically clueless. Slowly, though, I worked out ideas that seemed to express my idea of the best environment for my daughter: a quiet atmosphere with lots of hugs and minimal criticism, one where disputes, whenever possible, were settled by the exercise of reason, not authority. The first of all the things I wanted to teach Rebecca was that she was loved.
After I had become a professor and it was time to write a book, I wanted to write about 19th-century Utopian communities. The first one I researched was Fruitlands, founded by Bronson Alcott, a close friend of Emerson and Thoreau and the father of Louisa May Alcott of Little Women fame. To my great interest I soon discovered that Alcott was among the first Americans to theorize about child development and early education. A possibility glimmered. Perhaps a book about the Alcotts might help me traverse some generational gaps in both directions. I sat down at my computer and started building bridges.
People familiar with the Alcotts may see some irony in the idea of getting parenting tips from Bronson Alcott. In fact, he lacked two of the attributes that somewhat redeemed my own father in that role: a practical understanding of the world and a capacity for making money. But Bronson got some things that were opaque to my father. He took it as a matter of faith that children's souls were sacred things. He approached children with humility and respect, always aware that they might know something he didn't. Conscious that the word "education" means drawing out, not cramming in, he asked children questions and listened when they answered. He made it a maxim to teach "appreciating the value of the beings to whom instruction is given." As my book relates, however, it took him decades to give that appreciation to his