Dear Harry: Letters to My Father

by Peter Clothier

Thirty-years after his father's death, the author begins writing letters to Harry, an Anglican minister. Attempting mutual appreciation, his letters touch on everything from his loss of Christian faith, intimate matters, and the inevitability of aging and death. What starts out as a call for reconciliation, becomes a love story between father and son.

398 pages, Paperback

Published October 18, 2022

About the author

Peter Clothier is an internationally-known writer who specializes in writing about art and artists. He believes in avoiding the jargon that obscures much current writing about art, and in writing simply, clearly, in language that the lay person can readily understand. He seeks to achieve a harmony of mind, heart, and body in his work, and looks for this quality in the artists he writes about. A reformed academic, now fifteen years in recovery, he has returned in recent years to teaching, in mostly non-traditional ways: in workshops, continuing groups, and individual coaching and mentoring for artists and writers.

Reviews

[Aviva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Clothier is a decent, intelligent and thoughtful person who writes elegantly about his assimilation into an indecent, unintelligible and thoughtless system in his memoir, "Dear Harry." The system he assimilates into is patriarchal and withholding; the model for Anglo-Saxon colonialism and jurisprudence, leaving sex as the only narrow path to feeling. Clothier uses the epistolatory trope to structure his writing as a series of letters to his father, first apparently emotionally and then geographically remote and culminating with his father's response. Significantly, in this diary of a relationship with his father, as male authority, the corollary presence is the absence of political commentary except one short diatribe against Trump. More interesting to me than his tortuous disquisitions on his own and his father's sexuality, an extensive and often painful chronicle of desire, are the occasionally revealing glimpses into actual interactions with women in his life.

Critical exchanges with women include:
Hi mother's antisemitism
Slapping women
His father's denial of his wife Ellie's grief over the sudden death of her father

It isn't that he ignores the implications of these vignettes. It is with what alacrity he accepts and explains these lapses in decent behavior., until towards the end of the book, he doesn't.

Sexuality is the reliable lodestone for this ramble through the memories and yearnings of a sensitive man encountering a pitiless culture. An alarming trajectory is meticulously tracked from simple pleasure through the Sadomasochism that knits British aristocratic society in boarding schools and can culminate with adult violence in romantic relationships. Along the way, we encounter hints of how colonial and extractive prerogatives that persist throughout the status quo of our modern life obliterate empathy for the other, let alone the self, muddling countless personal boundaries along the way. Yet, empathy is what this book is about, for example, in accounts of killing farm animals, a window into a modern moral world in shades of gray.

Clothier is far too sophisticated to be inured to the psychological implications of his literary choices. He sprinkles his text with allusions to Freud and psychotherapy. A wordsmith, he teases the reader with the word "wicked," describing innocent speculations and yet casually skirting the normalization of virulent anti-Semitism, daring the reader to pass judgement on what he has already judged. This book seems to deliberately demand a decision from the reader as critical audience to engage in that dare. As a feminist, I was provoked by this description of how patriarchal systems become internalized, embellished, and glamourized. And yet I felt sad for the man who was so effectively taught to disengage his heart from the costs of privilege. It was only in the recurring references to his damaged sister that I glimpsed self-doubt.

In any memoir there is a paradoxical ambiguity in the relationship between writer and reader. Marketing success often depends on ruthless honesty. In the case of a writer as polished as Clothier and as personally accomplished, the scale of openness in "Dear Harry," deserves the respect of equivalently introspective honesty from the reader: do I begrudge the entitlement, feel compassion for the wounds, do injustices blind me to deeper wisdoms? Is this a test? The final pages of this memoir are about how a Mens group opened a world to him with a measure of accountability.

Clothier comes from a very particular class. He is a paragon of Western civilized education and the son of a formidably honed religious performer. He writes at a time of acute and volatile cultural sensitivity: all sorts if norms seem to be crumbling. "Dear Harry," teases our mutual awareness, our complicity in that crumbling estate and our discomfort with the collateral damage. This book plays monopoly with the personal real estate of ethical values. It taunted my own yearnings for moral clarity even as it painfully revealed why our cultural status quo is so profoundly intractable. A world that has engaged individuals at the level of early childhood sexuality, rewarded a small number of participants throughout life with rare and preciously sometimes bucolic and sybaritic intellectual gifts as described in these pages is a hard one to compete with if you're in the business of proposing another world. Despite his lack of credentials, Clothier became a noted figure in the artworld , our ultimate province of elitism (10% of artworkers come from the working class, .5% of acquisitions are from black women artists). He recounts his accomplishments there with creditable modesty. By his own account, his children have followed a path equally smoothed by hereditary privilege in that same world.

"Dear Harry," closes with a series of mediations on spirituality, mortality and religion. It isn't for the morally faint-hearted. It is for those of us who can admire the beauty of brilliant writing from a brilliant mind, willing to boldly expose it's imperfect machinery.

[Beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Memoir is an exceptional study of a son's recollections of his father: his hands, his ministry, his artistry, his humanity; and much more.
Carefully written; both poignant at some junctures, humourous in others.
I found it most interesting to follow his birth and education in the United Kingdom (Britain) and now following the author in Los Angeles and beyond.
Peter Clothier is a sensitive writer and astute commentator.
I am enjoying this reading immensely.

[Judith Teitelman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Clothier’s “Dear Harry: Letters to My Father” is an imaginative memoir. Through an extensive series of inter-connected letters written between July and December 2021, the author examines, questions, and relays his life’s journey honestly and bravely. While the letters are ostensibly written to his father, exploring their relationship and striving to glean a deeper understanding of the man who sired him, more often they are observations and inquiries into the author’s own choices and actions. This book is deeply personal, yet offers insights into the often complex and at times challenging relationship between fathers and sons that are universal.