Books: Wreck of a Desperado

THE DUKE OF DECEPTION: MEMORIES OF MY FATHER by Geoffrey Wolff; Random House; 275 pages; $12.95

Charles Dickens drew Mr. Micawber straight from the outlines of his own bumbling, eternally optimistic father. When James Joyce created Simon Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, he took a cold look at his da and virtually transcribed the old man’s boozy conversation. Examples proliferate, but the point is clear: lucky the writer who is blessed with a vivid parent. The childhood may have been hellish, but the material supplied by domestic drama can be invaluable. In the endless quest for characters that is a writer’s lot, there is simply no starting place like home.

Author Geoffrey Wolff tried to capture his own outlandish grifter of a parent in his first novel, Bad Debts (1969). In The Duke of Deception he tries again, this time discarding fiction and giving the facts a chance. They are colorful but not, at first glance, terribly consequential. Arthur Samuels Wolff, nicknamed Duke for his noble pretensions, was neither famous nor accomplished, except at the art of running up unpaid bills, and even that skill deserted him at the end. To Geoffrey and his younger brother Toby, their father’s life was a matter of putting on heirs, of inventing a past that never was and promising a future that could never be. Endless rascality ultimately becomes tedious and irksome; all the world loves a confidence man until it discovers its wallet is missing. Yet Wolff’s account of this misspent life is absorbing throughout. It is not just the story of “a wreck of a desperado,” as he calls the Duke at one point; it is an engrossing, often moving search for the troubled bond between sons and fathers that is known as love.

The quest begins with a shock. Upon hearing of his father’s death, Wolff blurts out “Thank God.” Feeling both self-righteous and ashamed, he decides to plow back into the past, trying to find the man who both made and ruined large swatches of his son’s life. A cousin stares at him and says, “He was a gonif, a schnorrer. He was just a bum. That’s all he ever was.” Wolff decides that the man he once adored must have been more than that.

He traces the record back to the Duke’s childhood as the pampered son of a stern Hartford physician. “An old and sad story began to unwind,” he reports, “of love’s shortcut through stuff.” Early on, the Duke absorbed the notion that goals could be reached without the bother of achievement. Similarly, inconvenient truths could be wished away. Jewish was not the thing to be in the yacht-club world the Duke aspired to, so he simply erased this fact about himself; he never told his sons about their heritage.

By the time Geoffrey was born his father was a bona fide failure and a sham success. Abortive stays at five prep schools and two colleges were transformed into a gilt-edged education at Groton and Yale. He concocted a dossier that did not even try to make its many falsehoods look plausible. For years he got away with it. He declared himself an aeronautical engineer, a seemingly impossible trade to fake, and was hired by a succession of major firms. During World War II he even performed some valuable services as a liaison between planners and mechanics who worked against the clock to modify bombers. The son notes that his father “was never fired for incompetence.” But contempt for superiors and the howls of unpaid creditors kept the Wolff family on the run just the same: Farmington (Conn.), Colorado Springs, Hermosa Beach and Chula Vista (Calif.), Birmingham, Dallas, Atlanta, Niagara Falls, New York City, Connecticut again, Sarasota, Seattle. All this before Geoffrey reached his 13th birthday.

Wolff voluntarily followed his father to Seattle, though his mother did not go. His parents later divorced, and he was to see his mother only three times in the next 14 years. With Geoffrey solely his responsibility, the Duke tried to teach by precept what he did not teach by example: “Truth, he told me, was our most powerful bond.” Improbably, the old fraud proved to be a good father in most of the ways that matter. Wolff is pitiless in recording his own adolescent faults. Not surprisingly, his impulses led him to boasting, corner cutting, dismissing out side claims on his integrity as irrelevant to his needs. The Duke slapped him down every time. “Be good,” he told his son. “Try, at least.” Discovering a letter filled with self-serving untruths that Geoffrey had written, the father was gentle: “He told me I was better than I thought, that I didn’t need to add to my sum.”

Geoffrey listened and learned. For some reason, the Duke could not. Here Wolffs narrative becomes baffled. But bafflement seems the only sensible response. What to make of a man who steals his second wife’s silver and pawns it to get his son a semester’s tuition at Princeton, then charges extravagant sums for clothes on his son’s charge accounts? How to explain someone who prints a self-promotional brochure claiming nonexistent books published by McGraw-Hill and then sends a copy to McGraw-Hill? The deceptions grew too outrageous and transparent. Geoffrey began dodging the Duke. With considerable struggle, the son later earned credentials (Choate, Princeton) of a kind that the father had only cherished and claimed. In the early ’60s while the Duke went to jail and to seed on the West Coast, the son began a promising journalistic career in the East.

That is how it seemed to end, with the old man dying alone in a California apartment house, apparently two weeks before his body was found. But Wolff discovered that the story had not ended, that his father lived on in him as surely as if the Duke had gone straight, survived and prospered. Running away from paternal demands had been a temporary aberration. “I saw again,” Wolff writes, “what I had seen when I was a child, in love with my father as with no one else. He had never repudiated me or seen in my face intimations of his own mortality.” In this, at least, the father proved both loving and wise. He was wrong about nearly everything in life except his son, and The Duke of Deception is his reward. —Paul Gray

Excerpt

“Paul and Tommy Scott Ferguson were the strangers at Ramon Novarro’s door, up on Laurel Canyon. Charles Manson was the stranger at Rosemary and Leno LaBianca’s door, over in Los Feliz. Some strangers at the door knocked, and invented a reason to come inside: a call, say, to the Triple A, about a car not in evidence. Others just opened the door and walked in, and I would come across them in the entrance hall. I recall asking one such stranger what he wanted. We looked at each other for what seemed a long time, and then he saw my husband on the stair landing. ‘Chicken Delight,’ he said finally, but we had ordered no Chicken Delight, nor was he carrying any. I took the license number of his panel truck. It seems to me now that during those years I was always writing down the license numbers of panel trucks, panel trucks circling the block, panel trucks parked across the street, panel trucks idling at the intersection. I put these license numbers in a dressing-table drawer where they could be found by the police when the time came.”