E-Mail This Article to a Friend The prodigal father (continued)

When he was at his worst, Jonathan represented a frightening mirror — an object lesson on how Nick’s life could disintegrate if he left those feelings about his mother’s death, about his father’s absence, about his own failures, unresolved, blunted by a deluge of booze. At one point, he writes of seeing his father at the shelter, "upright and ranting, his head lolling from side to side, his naked body wrapped in a sheet ... his bare feet in a pool of his own piss."

"I could see that it was harder and harder to deny it, to deny what I was doing to myself. That I was really on a bad course," Nick says. "There was always this fear that I would end up like him, because there was this similarity in our paths." But even when he was driving Pine Street’s outreach van on the overnight shifts, delivering blankets to those who slept outside, he confesses, "I was dreading encountering him." When he did, Nick would brush the snow off his father’s recumbent form, wrap him tighter in his improvised sleeping bag, and drive away.

Still, Nick insists, "I don’t feel guilty about what happened when he was homeless, really. The big question, when you read the book, is why didn’t I help him? That’s sort of the central question, which I don’t really answer." He rationalizes it in two ways. First, that almost every person on the street has a mother or a father or a brother or a sister or a son. "If that question could be answered, it would sort of indict everyone else who doesn’t bring their relatives in," he says. Second, "it’s possible that by me not — as they say in this New Age–y way — ‘enabling’ him, by not giving him a place and letting him keep drinking, it forced him to take it more seriously and say, ‘Okay, I have to help myself.’ " Indeed, once Jonathan turned 60, he became eligible for a modest subsidized apartment that Nick, by then sober and seeing a therapist, and a few co-workers from Pine Street helped secure. And now, Nick says, "he knows he has to hold on to it."

THE PUBLICATION of this book might even be seen as a belated but momentous gift from son to father, from an acclaimed poet to an aspiring, unpublished writer. In one of the many funny moments in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick relates how his father mailed his shambling, autobiographical roman à clef, a novel he’d been "writing" for years, to Viking (per Kurt Vonnegut’s advice, of course) in the late ’60s. The rejection letter came back, lauding the book as "a virtuoso display of personality," but demurring that "the dosage would kill hardier readers than you’ve had here." For years Nick had doubted that the book existed in anything more than a scattershot, skeletal form.

"I couldn’t imagine him ever sitting down and actually writing anything," he says, "because there was never a writing surface [in his cluttered apartment]. I’m a writer. You at least need a surface, a clear space. He claims to still be writing. If you ask him today, that’s what he’ll say. That’s what he does! He writes every day! But if you go into his apartment, there’s nothing obvious about that. There’s no desk, there’s no space, there’s no place to write. And so, his idea of writing and mine were very different, and I came to the conclusion that he was basically a storyteller. Storytelling is a social activity. You do it in a bar, surrounded by friends. You get instant gratification from it. Well, part of his ‘story’ is that he’s a great writer. That doesn’t make him a great writer. Writing, for me, requires solitude, being alone. You have to grapple with things, go deeply into things, which didn’t seem to be his strength."

But to his surprise, Nick one day found four binders, typed up from Jonathan’s rambling verbiage by an acquaintance. "The first 30 pages actually showed some promise," Nick says. "But after 30 or so pages, it dissipates into incoherence, self-aggrandizing incoherence. At some point, he was missing almost 100 pages. And for the life of me, I don’t miss those 100 pages."

Striking, and a little eerie, however, was the fact that in the early going, Jonathan’s book shared certain hallmarks with the one his son would write decades later. "It was sort of like my book," Nick says. "It’s like a musical. It has lyrics in it, and fragments of letters. It was actually sort of an interesting hybrid of styles. It’s interesting that it’s come to this: I’ve written a book much like he perhaps would have written."

Toward the end of the Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, Nick points out that "[T]he only book being written about my father (the greatest writer America has yet produced), the only book ever written about or by him, as far as I can tell, is the book in your hands. The book that somehow fell to me, the son, to write. My father’s uncredited, noncompliant ghostwriter."

For an "author" like Jonathan, of course, that’s cause for some jealousy. Nick says his father sometimes mutters bemusedly about his own son "beating" him at writing. But Nick seems to think he’s also, somehow, somewhat proud. Will Jonathan come to his son’s Boston reading? "I don’t know. I don’t know if he’ll come. Since it’s at the end of the month, he’ll probably be pretty good. He gets a check at the beginning of the month, and he drinks until the money runs out, which is usually around the middle of the month, and he’s sober for a couple weeks, and then it starts up again. So, maybe he would come, but I don’t see him coming. He’s not a very social person in a certain way. He gets very paranoid in crowds."

The past decade or so has seen Jonathan and Nick establish a more substantial relationship, relatively speaking, and build on it. They visit, they phone. They talk. And while Nick says that writing this book in fits and starts over the past seven years was cathartic, perhaps, and constructive, he doesn’t expect this book to solve the conundrum of his filial relationship.

"It lines up your past in ways that it becomes comprehensible," Nick admits. "But the more I got into writing it, the less I realized there were any answers to anything. It’s still pretty incomprehensible, really: why he was homeless, why he is like he is, why I am like I am, the phenomenon of homelessness itself. There are more questions than answers by the end. I don’t feel like it’s done. I feel like there are more projects to work on. But I don’t think I could have gotten to the next project without grappling with this."

Nick Flynn reads from Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir on September 23 at Buttonwood Books, Route 3A, Cohasset, and September 24 at Barnes & Noble Boston University Bookstore, Boston. Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com