Letter from My Father: 1893-1930 v. 1

by Page Smith

Hardcover without jacket. Volume 1. Two or three page corners dog-eared. Otherwise, clean and tightly bound.

Genres: Sexuality

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Charles Page Smith, who was known by his middle name, was a U.S. historian, professor, author, and newspaper columnist.
A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Smith graduated with a B.A. degree from Dartmouth College in 1940. He then worked at Camp William James, a center for youth leadership training opened in 1940 by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, a Dartmouth College professor, as part of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Smith was awarded a Purple Heart for his service as a company commander of the 10th Mountain Division of the United States Army during World War II. (wikipedia)

Reviews

[Lowarn Gutierrez · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange, oddly compelling piece of history.

I like reading memoirs for two primary reasons: seeing a personal view of some sort of experience or place; and because I'm rather nosy. Because of the nature of this book - the letter was not written for the public to read, and Ward expresses uncertainty that even his son will ever read it - this is a particularly interesting one from both of those angles.

Ward does not come across as a pleasant person. He is self-absorbed, horrifically antisemitic, and prone to throwing hissy fits over perceived slights. Although most of the sexual experiences he writes about are kinky within the realms of acceptability there are some stories that very much cross the line. He was a deadbeat dad and a shitty husband (albeit devoted to his third wife). I suspect that at least some of his anecdotes are embellished to make himself look better - or, at least, to present himself in a way he thinks (incorrectly, if the afterword is any indication) would be more appealing to his son.

Not only is this a really rare look into life during the time periods covered in (mostly) upper-class New York, down to details as mundane as slang, but it puts together a portrait of an incredibly strange and rather pitiful man.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know what to really make of this... artifact, because effectively Page Smith, whose credentials as a historian at UC Santa Cruz and his long time activism to champion for the homeless are well known and generally highly regarded, publishes this work that largely was not written by him but to instead to him by his father, with the most minimal of commentary and analysis. There's a sixteen page introduction, but it may provide some context to the work but doesn't answer the multitudes of questions the text brings up, not that one would imagine that Smith could answer any of them anyway.

Smith is largely known as a historian of early to early-modern history of the United States, and in that sense this work fits within his oeuvre and bailiwick, but beyond that, it's almost impossible to make sense of this work. It has been described as "erotic literature" but it's clearly neither erotic nor literature. It feels embellished but it's impossible to separate what is embellishment and what isn't, and it's not something the editor would be able to discern either, clearly. Some of the attitudes and behaviors described matches history that's documented in the biographies of other men of similar social standing - Joe Kennedy Sr., for example - but not to the degree or casualness by any stretch. In one sense it's what a truly great historian would and should do when it comes to editorializing an original manuscript: give a context, and leave the interpretation to those who read the text without further editorializing or the imposition of morals, judgment, or jumping to conclusions. As a result, there are a multitude of ways of reading the text and how it fits within the narratives and noise of American social history that is difficult to find a real parallel to: it could be read at face value and become a commentary on the incongruence between the public morals and private acts that we know exists and in turn, highlights how revisionism affects historiography that ignores primary non-professional sources and creates narratives that are convenient but bowdlerized and to a degree imaginary. It also can be read cynically, from a feminist view or a broader, oral history sort of way, that examines masculinity, the fragility and the performative aspects of it as the century went on, and how class in addition to wealth affected America's east coast seaboard elite society in a manner that shows something more akin to the more openly acknowledged behavior that is far more frequently attributed to the working classes and the immigrant classes, and the primary difference is not how people behaved but who was there to clean up the dirt afterwards to create hagiographies instead of biographies. In that sense it reminds one of Ronald Hyam's works on the mid-to-late years of the British Empire in particular Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience and more remotely, a question of legibility and history that, when Smith published his (father's) work, mostly was still a subject in its infancy.

I'm not sure what to really make of the work but nevertheless feel that it's something meaningful and important in a way that I simply don't have the right.... vocabulary, almost, to really describe. It's post-modern without consciously being post-modern. It is broad in scope almost by accident. It is thematically slightly reminiscent of almost all of Page Smith's works yet not quite fit into his back catalogue in any real recognizable way. Maybe 'it is what it is' is the best way to describe it.