The Shadow Man by Mary Gordon
"The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father" by Mary Gordon is a memoir that explores the complex relationship between the author and her father, who passed away when she was just seven years old. Gordon's understanding of her father is rooted in fragmented memories and limited writings she has of him, leading to a quest for deeper knowledge about his life and identity. Throughout the memoir, she grapples with the dissonance between her cherished memories and the troubling truths she uncovers, such as her father's Jewish ancestry and his troubling views during a time of great persecution for his people.
The book is structured in five sections, beginning with personal recollections and shifting towards archival research that reveals significant discrepancies in her father's life story. Gordon's journey involves reconciling her father's love as expressed in personal letters with the troubling evidence of his past actions and beliefs. Ultimately, she seeks to understand her father's legacy and her own emotional connections to him, culminating in a symbolic act of reburial. The narrative emphasizes themes of forgiveness and the complexities of familial love, suggesting that compassion can offer hope amidst painful revelations.
The Shadow Man by Mary Gordon
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1996
Type of work: Memoir
The Work
The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father is a true story. Because he died when she was seven, Mary Gordon’s father was indeed no more than a shadowy presence in her life. Her image of him was derived from her limited memories and from the scraps of his writings that she had in her possession. Gordon had used her impressions of him in creating fictional characters, and she also had written meditations about his death. However, in her middle forties, she still did not know who he really was. Gordon could not obtain any information from her mother, who was in a nursing home, her memory largely gone. However, as a skilled researcher, Gordon knows how to search out facts. This memoir is the account of her search.
The book is divided into five sections. “Knowing My Father” is a collection of her recollections. Gordon begins with his death and a description of the changes that took place in her own life as a result of it. She then moves on to what she calls “films,” fragments that show him with his daughter, taking her places, talking with her. Unfortunately, she is no longer sure about the accuracy of these memories, and therefore she does now know whether her father really was the man she thinks she remembers.
One way to solve the mystery, Gordon realized, was to read what her father had written. She knew that he could translate Vergil; she believed that he had gone to Harvard and then immersed himself in bohemian life in Paris and in London. Years before, she had found his articles and poems in some of the premier publications of his time. She also knew that in the 1920’s he had published a pornographic magazine. Rereading his other articles, however, she finds something much more troubling: that at the very time the Nazis were bent on exterminating the Jews, her father, himself of Jewish ancestry, was mocking his own people and justifying the Holocaust. Against this shocking discovery, Gordon must balance the tender letters that her father wrote to her while he was on his deathbed.
In “Tracking My Father: In the Archives,” Gordon discovers that her father had lied about the date and place of his birth, that he never went to Harvard and never traveled abroad—in short, that he was not the person he pretended to be. In the next section, “Seeing Past the Evidence,” Gordon attempts to reconcile these upsetting truths with her faith in her father’s love for her. Finally, in “Transactions Made Among the Living,” she fits what she now knows of her father with what she can guess about his life with her mother. She knows that he was never accepted by his wife’s family. It troubles Gordon that he was buried with them. She decides to have his remains moved to a cemetery that she often passed when she was with him.
The reburying of her father is in a sense also a resurrection. After losing her faith in him and in her loving memories, the author forgave him, and in that way she has regained him. Like many of Gordon’s novels, The Shadow Man thus ends with the insistence that only charity, in the Christian sense, can give one hope for the future.
Sources for Further Study
America. CLXXIV, June 8, 1996, p. 24.
Atlanta Journal Constitution. June 2, 1996, p. L9.
Boston Globe. May 19, 1996, p. B38.
Chicago Tribune. June 16, 1996, XIV, p. 6.
The Guardian. July 4, 1996, p. 5.
Houston Chronicle. June 16, 1996, p. 27.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. May 26, 1996, p. 3.
The Nation. CCLXII, May 6, 1996, p. 24.
New Leader. LXXIX, August 12, 1996, p. 26.
The New York Times. May 3, 1996, p. C29.
The New York Times Book Review. CI, May 26, 1996, p. 5.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch. May 12, 1996, p. C14.
The San Francisco Chronicle. May 29, 1996, p. 3.
Time. CXLVII, May 27, 1996, p. 82.
The Washington Post. May 7, 1996, p. D2.
The Women’s Review of Books. XIII, July, 1996, p. 26.