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My Father's Fortune
My Father's A Life
255 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Michael Frayn
119 books248 followersMichael Frayn is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy. His novels, such as Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong and Spies, have also been critical and commercial successes, making him one of the handful of writers in the English language to succeed in both drama and prose fiction. His works often raise philosophical questions in a humorous context. Frayn's wife is Claire Tomalin, the biographer and literary journalist.
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November 13, 2022
I like some aspects of this book more and other aspects less. The book has an ironical tone—all the way through. Look at the title. Maybe you’re think Michael Frayn’s father was wealthy and owned many possessions. The opposite is true. What then is the fortune his father once possessed? He died in 1970. This book looks at the relationship between father and son. Trying to understand their relationship kept me thinking, and it is this I have enjoyed.
Michael Frayn, the author, expresses himself in a joking manner. He speaks with sarcasm. He joffs. He repeatedly informs us that he has a tendency to fictionalize, that what he recalls may be false, that perhaps he has missed the point and gotten things wrong. In a book of nonfiction, I am looking for the truth, and so this manner of telling frustrated me. I kept wishing he would get serious and speak to us in a frank, straightforward manner.
Secondly, the author and other members of his family seem to exhibit an inability to open up and express their views. Their reticence is extreme. Mind-boggling, in my view.
Where does this leave the reader? It leaves the reader guessing and guessing, grasping for the truth.
The author frequently hints of coming events but holds back in revealing what we are searching to know. This increases suspense. I do not like this technique; I see it as a ploy.
By the end, we do come to understand. We come to see that Michael has been shaped by his father to a very large extent. I was satisfied at the end, but as a book of nonfiction I would have preferred it being told in a more straightforward fashion.
Martin Jarvis, through his narration, emphasizes the underlying sarcasm, irony and humor in the author’s lines. His narration fits the prose to a T, but in that I wanted the author to get serious and be frank, the narration enhanced my displeasure. Jarvis’ narration made the lines even harder to swallow. Dithering back and forth between three or four stars for the narration, I have settled on four. Jarvis is conveying the author’s message, and this is what a good narrator should do.
Let me finish on a good note. I have given the book three stars. This indicates that I do like it. I like very much the author’s outspoken appreciation of his father as well as his awareness of the gifts given to him by his father.
Michael Frayn, the author, expresses himself in a joking manner. He speaks with sarcasm. He joffs. He repeatedly informs us that he has a tendency to fictionalize, that what he recalls may be false, that perhaps he has missed the point and gotten things wrong. In a book of nonfiction, I am looking for the truth, and so this manner of telling frustrated me. I kept wishing he would get serious and speak to us in a frank, straightforward manner.
Secondly, the author and other members of his family seem to exhibit an inability to open up and express their views. Their reticence is extreme. Mind-boggling, in my view.
Where does this leave the reader? It leaves the reader guessing and guessing, grasping for the truth.
The author frequently hints of coming events but holds back in revealing what we are searching to know. This increases suspense. I do not like this technique; I see it as a ploy.
By the end, we do come to understand. We come to see that Michael has been shaped by his father to a very large extent. I was satisfied at the end, but as a book of nonfiction I would have preferred it being told in a more straightforward fashion.
Martin Jarvis, through his narration, emphasizes the underlying sarcasm, irony and humor in the author’s lines. His narration fits the prose to a T, but in that I wanted the author to get serious and be frank, the narration enhanced my displeasure. Jarvis’ narration made the lines even harder to swallow. Dithering back and forth between three or four stars for the narration, I have settled on four. Jarvis is conveying the author’s message, and this is what a good narrator should do.
Let me finish on a good note. I have given the book three stars. This indicates that I do like it. I like very much the author’s outspoken appreciation of his father as well as his awareness of the gifts given to him by his father.
August 29, 2024
When I first began this book, it wasn’t long before I considered putting it aside. I don’t read many autobiographies, and for one to engage me, it needs to be by someone I am interested in, who can express themselves lucidly and above all has something to say. My Father’s Fortune: A Life is by Michael Frayn, an author whose work I know is enjoyable and literate, yet still it had sat on my bookshelves for several years, unread. To be honest, the deciding factor in my actually buying it in the first place was that it is in Large Print, as it dates from 2010, a time before e-readers. I thought it was high time I gave it a look.
My Father’s Fortune: A Life is in two parts, the second part beginning on 3rd November 1945, when life changed for this family forever when . But before Part One are a few pages titled “Homburg”. Michael Frayn is remembering one occasion in 1969, at home alone writing his first play, when his father’s hat appeared round the door (as he says, nobody locked their front doors in 1969) followed by his father’s irresistible smile. The author’s brief irritation at being interrupted subsided immediately, and I knew that this memoir would be fuelled by great emotion:
“The quest that I’d so reluctantly begun came to occupy my mind and heart alike. I laughed aloud to myself sometimes at the things that came back to me, and at other times could scarcely see what I was doing for tears. I also discovered many things about him - and a few about myself - that I’d never known, and that took me completely by surprise.”
My Father’s Fortune: A Life was written forty years after his father had died. Michael Frayn was 76: six years older than his father had then been:
“Six years older - I’m on my way to becoming his father. If I’m making fun of him in this account of his life - his ridiculous hopes of my sporting abilities, the lightness of his tread upon the earth, his deafness, his ‘guv’nor’ and his ‘hotchamachacha’ - it’s rather in the way that he made fun of me for so many things - rather in the way that a lot of sons and daughters seem to make fun of their father when they get around to writing about him, as they so often do in later life.
Whether he in the end felt proud of me or not, I’m certainly proud of being his son. The joshing is the way I’ve inherited from him of expressing my pride.”
This quotation comes near the end of the book, which is a clever partial autobiography, related through a biography of his father, Thomas Allen Frayn. He is the focus, and only Michael Frayn’s early life is covered. What confounded me in the beginning was that Michael Frayn went back not just one generation but two, to Thomas Frayn’s father (also Thomas Frayn) and mother, and also his first mother’s mother and father, as well as those of his wife, and told the stories he knew of all the great-aunts and uncles. Families were often huge in those days, and life expectancy was short, so there were many relatives to include:
“My first surprise when I looked into my father’s origins [was] quite how poor the family had been. When he at last joined the household, on 29th January 1901, he was the eleventh human being to be fitted into the four rooms, and cooked for and washed in the communal kitchen.”
But this was all familiar fare, from my grandmother who was born in 1880 into similar circumstances and moving from place to place chasing work (although admittedly various Northern cities, not London boroughs). Why should I be interested in these people, I wondered? I could barely get all my many relations of that generation straight in my own family. But when Michael Frayn fast forwards to the present generation of his own children, and writes nostalgically:
“We’re recreating for the next generation the overcrowded dining room of our own childhood, the convivial scrum around the tea table, the conversations about how to get across London. We’re bringing back to life as best we can the uncle with the beetling eyebrows, the glamorous young aunt with the Evening in Paris [perfume], the whistling grandfather with the plus fours and the enormous lap. We’re putting the whole show back on the road.”
his writing sucked me in despite myself, and I became involved with these people’s lives. Perhaps it was even partly because some things sounded familiar; reminiscent of all the stories my own parents had told me. The details might be different, but I recognised the concerns and mores, the loyalties and petty arguments of the working classes at that time.
How many times had I been told family stories about great-grandparents, great aunts and uncles (and various vague cousins) of my own family members. There were the two sisters who emigrated to America on a boat to make their fortune - one of whom returned alone after a few years, her husband having died. There was a distant great uncle who I was told was a “drunkard” and who spent all his weekly money in the pub, coming home with just a string of sausages for his family. (This may explain why quite a few of my antecedents were Salvation Army.) Or the one who became the mayor of the large city I grew up in. Or the one who was hidden away because he was “not right” - which made my parents very uneasy even all that time ago. Or the one who was knighted for bringing music concerts to the city, and so on. I have a wealth of family anecdotes, as do so many of us, but this is about Michael Frayn ...
His family origins were working class. Some had very hard lives, and suffered great tragedies, and some struggled and attained lower middle class living standards. We get a sense of how they related to different groups in society at that time, and within the larger social structures. Because of the skill of the writer, we feel we get to know these individuals very well.
We are in London, with families at the end of the 19th century, in extreme poverty and over crowding. Michael Frayn’s paternal grandfather and all his siblings were deaf, all living in those few rooms, and work was hard to come by. Michael Frayn considered his origins. Previously he would have said “lower middle class”, with an office boy, a pianola roll librarian and shop assistant grandfather. But his grandfather’s sister was a book-folder and his brother was a printer, which he considered were probably skilled working class occupations. We follow each one’s story, the lucky ones being employed and getting regular pay.
Along came his father, another Thomas Frayn, but this time quick-witted, with the gift of the gab. He managed to establish himself as an an asbestos salesman, although he had to care for most of his relatives too:
“And yet he had very little middle-class sense of material possession, or of making provision for the future. For most of his life he drew a monthly salary and paid it into a bank account …”
This was not the traditional working class way. Even my own father, who by the time I came along worked in an office, did not have a bank account.
“He never owned a house though, probably never any of the cars he drove, or much of anything, really, except a few suits and hats and later a hearing aid. I don’t think he ever took out insurance or assurance, and he certainly never made a will.”
After he died Michael Frayn arranged for his father’s sister to receive £300, with the semi-fiction that her brother had intended to leave it to her:
“I got a letter from her husband saying that it was the biggest surprise of her life to be so generously remembered - and I think the real surprise was that anyone in the family was in the business of leaving anyone anything at all.”
It was only the middle classes who would think this way. Thomas Frayn was also nonplussed when he found himself in a house with a garden. He did his best, but Michael Frayn remembers their garden as being unlike any other in the road:
“It looked like … well, like a garden bravely planted by a man brought up in two rooms, who has never seen a garden before. I don’t think anyone could ever have accused my father of keeping up with the Joneses. I’m not sure he even cared what the Joneses were up to. Or even knew.”
Many family stories and anecdotes about their neighbours are included.
Thomas Allen Frayn had met Michael’s mother Violet Alice Lawson at a dance, when he was eighteen and she was fourteen. She was as immediately smitten with Tom, as he was with her. Tom was introduced to her family - who we already feel we know. They were not destitute like some of his own - far from it. Nell and Bert were respectable and lower middle class, so the author wondered what they would have made of his father, with his swagger and his cheeky smile; a confident cockney lad. Violet had just been taken out of school to study violin and piano at the Royal Academy of Music. She had a gift, and wanted to be a violinist.
However, Violet had to leave when she was just 16, even though she had already played with the Queen’s Hall Light Orchestra, because her father Bert’s business selling palliasses failed. Perhaps in 1919 when the war was over, nobody wanted to sleep on straw mattresses any more. Violet had to work as a shop assistant, like her father and Tommy’s father before her. Occasionally she modelled clothes at Harrods, and Michael Frayn tracked down a photo in their catalogue, from those times.
The lives of Violet’s relatives are all described too. Michael Frayn sometimes darts to later in the history, but we know when he is about to tell us another part of the jigsaw, as he changes to the present tense. This is very effective, and gives us a sense of immediacy, although it all feels impossibly long ago. Much is before the First World War. We wonder how he knows all this …
My own knowledge of grand- and great grandparents’ generations is from anecdotes told by each of my parents, and the many photographs; fewer of course from the early days when only the momentous occasions could be marked by the purchase of a professional photograph. Michael Frayn asked his mother’s sister, his Auntie Phyllis who wrote a useful memoir for him, describing the first meeting of his parents seventy years earlier, and many other occasions and facts which he often refers to, while musing over the photographs. He also used the electoral roll and the census to fill in the many gaps in the photographic record. Some of the discoveries give him much pause for thought.
The final column in the census in 1901 had to be filled in relating to 4 categories: 1. Deaf and dumb. 2. Blind. 3. Lunatic. 4. Imbecile, feeble-minded. And it was filled in to show that every single member of the family except for 2 month-old Thomas (his father) belonged to the first category. (Ironically, his father also became deaf as a young man.)
“Four deaf children and two deaf parents. This is surprising enough, But one of the other couples sharing the house with them, a draper and his wife, is listed in the same way. The draper was from Devon, like the Frayns so maybe he was a relative with the same heredity. But his wife, from Berkshire - also deaf! …
Difficult to fathom this. Difficult too, to imagine my grandfather selling china, and the other tenant drapery, to customers who couldn’t make them hear what sort of china and drapery they wanted. More difficult still to imagine what life was like in the house … Mabel was not only deaf but simple … and said to be often very difficult - given to wild outbursts at certain phases of the moon when she shouted among other things that she wanted a man. Every now and then she had to retire to a mental hospital.”
And into this was born the author’s father, who ended up looking after them all - or at least those of them who reached old age - as well as being responsible for some of Violet’s relatives.
So the years pass, through the Second World War with all its tragedies.
Later, Michael Frayn along with another school friend were determinedly intellectual, discussing philosophy and writing poetry, but not making much impression on their actual school work. Michael Frayn did go to Cambridge university, and the description of how this came about is as quirky as the rest of this memoir. Even though he had little respect for formal education, it was down to his father’s contacts at one particular college that the author was offered an interview for a place at all.
Michael Frayn’s biography covers most of his father’s life, but is only a first part of his autobiography, covering the years up to his early 20s, although there are flashes from later. So we never hear of his second wife the writer and biographer Claire Tomalin, but only of his first wife Gillian Palmer and the three daughters they had together. Claire Tomalin is not mentioned by name, but only referred to as his second wife, whom his sister refused to speak to for 27 years, in disapproval at Michael’s breaking up with his first wife. In fact it was one of his daughters who insisted that he should write this memoir of his father, before those times were all forgotten, and disappeared without trace. Michael Frayn is now 90, after all.
Perhaps you think you do not know the work of Michael Frayn. Although he is very prolific, his work has covered a huge range, from farces to serious plays, from translations of Russian texts to original works of philosophy. There are novels, and a stream of screenplay adaptations too. Thus it is hard to pin down any “style”. He is perhaps best known for the farce “Noises Off”, one of the funniest modern plays I have ever seen. But then he also wrote “Copenhagen” which was based on an actual event that occurred in Copenhagen in 1941; a meeting between the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, who had been Bohr’s student. That one is the complete opposite, and the most complex and interesting modern play I know, tying with Tom Stoppard’s “Jumpers” in how much it challenges its audience intellectually. “Donkeys Years” and “Benefactors” are two others you may know, out of at least 21 original plays.
If you never watch or read plays, you might know one of his many screenplay adaptations, as his name whizzes past in small letters on the screen - or perhaps the hilarious film “Clockwise” (1986) with John Cleese playing the inept time-conscious headmaster, for which he wrote the original script. Or perhaps you prefer novels, of which there are at least 11. I can recommend “Headlong” (1999) a farce about the discovery of a long-lost painting by Pieter Bruegel. Despite the light tone, there is a lot of detail about the painter, and social history, distinguishing between iconology and iconography. Or perhaps a psychological novel “Spies” (2002) which features two schoolboy neighbours who believe they are involved in an intelligence operation.
You never know quite what to expect when you approach a work by Michael Frayn. I had hoped he might continue this autobiography, and he did indeed bring out another last year (2023) called “Among Others: Friendships and Encounters”. Yet again though it sounds as though he has written his own take on an “autobiography”. The blurb says it is:
“a patchwork memoir of a lifetime’s encounters. Truthful and loving, sometimes elegiac, sometimes comic, it is a celebration of the endlessly intriguing otherness of others.”
I may read it some day, but perhaps I should not wait as long as I did for this one.
It is impossible to convey the interesting detail and anecdotes in this absorbing read. Are they accurate? We cannot truthfully know. His mother tried to inject some glamour into her children’s lives, and give them a mysterious and exciting past, telling of how the Frayns came to this country as pirates, Now the author reflects:
“Perhaps, after all, my mother’s story of the pirate ship contained a grain of truth. There was gold in the family, waiting only for me to claim it, though it was amassed by a twentieth-century salesman rather than a sixteenth century pirate. Out of it I have made a childhood, and the person I became. Some of it has found its way into the stories I have written. And now into this true account of my inheritance.
Or as true an account as I can manage, given the weakness for fiction that my father also left me.”
And later, of his father:
“Of course he’d improved the stories. That was his style. Have I improved them still further in retelling them, in spite of all my conscious concern for the historical truth? I can see my daughter’s sardonic smile at my even asking the question.”
But don’t we all do this, to some extent? Some will flamboyantly and deliberately colour their memories; others are scrupulous, but unconsciously remember selectively. My brother and I had many experiences in common, but in retelling them they would take on different hues. We both heard the family stories about the relative, known for her outrageous hysterical tantrums, who threatened to throw herself in front of a train … whereupon her father calmly reached for the railway timetable, consulted his pocket watch and said “If you go now, you’ll be just in time for …”. Or another relative, who in one of her furious tempers grabbed the bread knife and shouted about her naughty child “Let’s kill him!” These and many others were told to us laughingly over and over again, so I mention them now - just to you of course - and giving no names.
What Michael Frayn does not tell would probably fill another book. But this one is worth a read. His love and respect for his relatives, especially the father who this memoir is about, shines through:
“My father left few possessions … they fit rather comfortably into a small cardboard box … to me personally he left a fortune - an intangible and unrecorded legacy more precious than money or anything he might ever have written down. The humour he used to deal with his customers and circumvent his deafness; his indifference to all systems of belief; the smile on his face that I sometimes find so disconcertingly on mine. My very existence, in the first place, of course - and the beginnings of a life that turned out to be so much easier than his. I didn’t have to share two rooms with six other people, or a kitchen and lavatory with four more. I didn’t have to leave school at fourteen, or go out and sell things, or support feckless parents and in-laws. He loved me, saw to it that I was fed and clothed and educated, and left me reasonably free to get on with things in my own way. What more can anyone want from a father?”
My Father’s Fortune: A Life is in two parts, the second part beginning on 3rd November 1945, when life changed for this family forever when . But before Part One are a few pages titled “Homburg”. Michael Frayn is remembering one occasion in 1969, at home alone writing his first play, when his father’s hat appeared round the door (as he says, nobody locked their front doors in 1969) followed by his father’s irresistible smile. The author’s brief irritation at being interrupted subsided immediately, and I knew that this memoir would be fuelled by great emotion:
“The quest that I’d so reluctantly begun came to occupy my mind and heart alike. I laughed aloud to myself sometimes at the things that came back to me, and at other times could scarcely see what I was doing for tears. I also discovered many things about him - and a few about myself - that I’d never known, and that took me completely by surprise.”
My Father’s Fortune: A Life was written forty years after his father had died. Michael Frayn was 76: six years older than his father had then been:
“Six years older - I’m on my way to becoming his father. If I’m making fun of him in this account of his life - his ridiculous hopes of my sporting abilities, the lightness of his tread upon the earth, his deafness, his ‘guv’nor’ and his ‘hotchamachacha’ - it’s rather in the way that he made fun of me for so many things - rather in the way that a lot of sons and daughters seem to make fun of their father when they get around to writing about him, as they so often do in later life.
Whether he in the end felt proud of me or not, I’m certainly proud of being his son. The joshing is the way I’ve inherited from him of expressing my pride.”
This quotation comes near the end of the book, which is a clever partial autobiography, related through a biography of his father, Thomas Allen Frayn. He is the focus, and only Michael Frayn’s early life is covered. What confounded me in the beginning was that Michael Frayn went back not just one generation but two, to Thomas Frayn’s father (also Thomas Frayn) and mother, and also his first mother’s mother and father, as well as those of his wife, and told the stories he knew of all the great-aunts and uncles. Families were often huge in those days, and life expectancy was short, so there were many relatives to include:
“My first surprise when I looked into my father’s origins [was] quite how poor the family had been. When he at last joined the household, on 29th January 1901, he was the eleventh human being to be fitted into the four rooms, and cooked for and washed in the communal kitchen.”
But this was all familiar fare, from my grandmother who was born in 1880 into similar circumstances and moving from place to place chasing work (although admittedly various Northern cities, not London boroughs). Why should I be interested in these people, I wondered? I could barely get all my many relations of that generation straight in my own family. But when Michael Frayn fast forwards to the present generation of his own children, and writes nostalgically:
“We’re recreating for the next generation the overcrowded dining room of our own childhood, the convivial scrum around the tea table, the conversations about how to get across London. We’re bringing back to life as best we can the uncle with the beetling eyebrows, the glamorous young aunt with the Evening in Paris [perfume], the whistling grandfather with the plus fours and the enormous lap. We’re putting the whole show back on the road.”
his writing sucked me in despite myself, and I became involved with these people’s lives. Perhaps it was even partly because some things sounded familiar; reminiscent of all the stories my own parents had told me. The details might be different, but I recognised the concerns and mores, the loyalties and petty arguments of the working classes at that time.
How many times had I been told family stories about great-grandparents, great aunts and uncles (and various vague cousins) of my own family members. There were the two sisters who emigrated to America on a boat to make their fortune - one of whom returned alone after a few years, her husband having died. There was a distant great uncle who I was told was a “drunkard” and who spent all his weekly money in the pub, coming home with just a string of sausages for his family. (This may explain why quite a few of my antecedents were Salvation Army.) Or the one who became the mayor of the large city I grew up in. Or the one who was hidden away because he was “not right” - which made my parents very uneasy even all that time ago. Or the one who was knighted for bringing music concerts to the city, and so on. I have a wealth of family anecdotes, as do so many of us, but this is about Michael Frayn ...
His family origins were working class. Some had very hard lives, and suffered great tragedies, and some struggled and attained lower middle class living standards. We get a sense of how they related to different groups in society at that time, and within the larger social structures. Because of the skill of the writer, we feel we get to know these individuals very well.
We are in London, with families at the end of the 19th century, in extreme poverty and over crowding. Michael Frayn’s paternal grandfather and all his siblings were deaf, all living in those few rooms, and work was hard to come by. Michael Frayn considered his origins. Previously he would have said “lower middle class”, with an office boy, a pianola roll librarian and shop assistant grandfather. But his grandfather’s sister was a book-folder and his brother was a printer, which he considered were probably skilled working class occupations. We follow each one’s story, the lucky ones being employed and getting regular pay.
Along came his father, another Thomas Frayn, but this time quick-witted, with the gift of the gab. He managed to establish himself as an an asbestos salesman, although he had to care for most of his relatives too:
“And yet he had very little middle-class sense of material possession, or of making provision for the future. For most of his life he drew a monthly salary and paid it into a bank account …”
This was not the traditional working class way. Even my own father, who by the time I came along worked in an office, did not have a bank account.
“He never owned a house though, probably never any of the cars he drove, or much of anything, really, except a few suits and hats and later a hearing aid. I don’t think he ever took out insurance or assurance, and he certainly never made a will.”
After he died Michael Frayn arranged for his father’s sister to receive £300, with the semi-fiction that her brother had intended to leave it to her:
“I got a letter from her husband saying that it was the biggest surprise of her life to be so generously remembered - and I think the real surprise was that anyone in the family was in the business of leaving anyone anything at all.”
It was only the middle classes who would think this way. Thomas Frayn was also nonplussed when he found himself in a house with a garden. He did his best, but Michael Frayn remembers their garden as being unlike any other in the road:
“It looked like … well, like a garden bravely planted by a man brought up in two rooms, who has never seen a garden before. I don’t think anyone could ever have accused my father of keeping up with the Joneses. I’m not sure he even cared what the Joneses were up to. Or even knew.”
Many family stories and anecdotes about their neighbours are included.
Thomas Allen Frayn had met Michael’s mother Violet Alice Lawson at a dance, when he was eighteen and she was fourteen. She was as immediately smitten with Tom, as he was with her. Tom was introduced to her family - who we already feel we know. They were not destitute like some of his own - far from it. Nell and Bert were respectable and lower middle class, so the author wondered what they would have made of his father, with his swagger and his cheeky smile; a confident cockney lad. Violet had just been taken out of school to study violin and piano at the Royal Academy of Music. She had a gift, and wanted to be a violinist.
However, Violet had to leave when she was just 16, even though she had already played with the Queen’s Hall Light Orchestra, because her father Bert’s business selling palliasses failed. Perhaps in 1919 when the war was over, nobody wanted to sleep on straw mattresses any more. Violet had to work as a shop assistant, like her father and Tommy’s father before her. Occasionally she modelled clothes at Harrods, and Michael Frayn tracked down a photo in their catalogue, from those times.
The lives of Violet’s relatives are all described too. Michael Frayn sometimes darts to later in the history, but we know when he is about to tell us another part of the jigsaw, as he changes to the present tense. This is very effective, and gives us a sense of immediacy, although it all feels impossibly long ago. Much is before the First World War. We wonder how he knows all this …
My own knowledge of grand- and great grandparents’ generations is from anecdotes told by each of my parents, and the many photographs; fewer of course from the early days when only the momentous occasions could be marked by the purchase of a professional photograph. Michael Frayn asked his mother’s sister, his Auntie Phyllis who wrote a useful memoir for him, describing the first meeting of his parents seventy years earlier, and many other occasions and facts which he often refers to, while musing over the photographs. He also used the electoral roll and the census to fill in the many gaps in the photographic record. Some of the discoveries give him much pause for thought.
The final column in the census in 1901 had to be filled in relating to 4 categories: 1. Deaf and dumb. 2. Blind. 3. Lunatic. 4. Imbecile, feeble-minded. And it was filled in to show that every single member of the family except for 2 month-old Thomas (his father) belonged to the first category. (Ironically, his father also became deaf as a young man.)
“Four deaf children and two deaf parents. This is surprising enough, But one of the other couples sharing the house with them, a draper and his wife, is listed in the same way. The draper was from Devon, like the Frayns so maybe he was a relative with the same heredity. But his wife, from Berkshire - also deaf! …
Difficult to fathom this. Difficult too, to imagine my grandfather selling china, and the other tenant drapery, to customers who couldn’t make them hear what sort of china and drapery they wanted. More difficult still to imagine what life was like in the house … Mabel was not only deaf but simple … and said to be often very difficult - given to wild outbursts at certain phases of the moon when she shouted among other things that she wanted a man. Every now and then she had to retire to a mental hospital.”
And into this was born the author’s father, who ended up looking after them all - or at least those of them who reached old age - as well as being responsible for some of Violet’s relatives.
So the years pass, through the Second World War with all its tragedies.
Later, Michael Frayn along with another school friend were determinedly intellectual, discussing philosophy and writing poetry, but not making much impression on their actual school work. Michael Frayn did go to Cambridge university, and the description of how this came about is as quirky as the rest of this memoir. Even though he had little respect for formal education, it was down to his father’s contacts at one particular college that the author was offered an interview for a place at all.
Michael Frayn’s biography covers most of his father’s life, but is only a first part of his autobiography, covering the years up to his early 20s, although there are flashes from later. So we never hear of his second wife the writer and biographer Claire Tomalin, but only of his first wife Gillian Palmer and the three daughters they had together. Claire Tomalin is not mentioned by name, but only referred to as his second wife, whom his sister refused to speak to for 27 years, in disapproval at Michael’s breaking up with his first wife. In fact it was one of his daughters who insisted that he should write this memoir of his father, before those times were all forgotten, and disappeared without trace. Michael Frayn is now 90, after all.
Perhaps you think you do not know the work of Michael Frayn. Although he is very prolific, his work has covered a huge range, from farces to serious plays, from translations of Russian texts to original works of philosophy. There are novels, and a stream of screenplay adaptations too. Thus it is hard to pin down any “style”. He is perhaps best known for the farce “Noises Off”, one of the funniest modern plays I have ever seen. But then he also wrote “Copenhagen” which was based on an actual event that occurred in Copenhagen in 1941; a meeting between the physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, who had been Bohr’s student. That one is the complete opposite, and the most complex and interesting modern play I know, tying with Tom Stoppard’s “Jumpers” in how much it challenges its audience intellectually. “Donkeys Years” and “Benefactors” are two others you may know, out of at least 21 original plays.
If you never watch or read plays, you might know one of his many screenplay adaptations, as his name whizzes past in small letters on the screen - or perhaps the hilarious film “Clockwise” (1986) with John Cleese playing the inept time-conscious headmaster, for which he wrote the original script. Or perhaps you prefer novels, of which there are at least 11. I can recommend “Headlong” (1999) a farce about the discovery of a long-lost painting by Pieter Bruegel. Despite the light tone, there is a lot of detail about the painter, and social history, distinguishing between iconology and iconography. Or perhaps a psychological novel “Spies” (2002) which features two schoolboy neighbours who believe they are involved in an intelligence operation.
You never know quite what to expect when you approach a work by Michael Frayn. I had hoped he might continue this autobiography, and he did indeed bring out another last year (2023) called “Among Others: Friendships and Encounters”. Yet again though it sounds as though he has written his own take on an “autobiography”. The blurb says it is:
“a patchwork memoir of a lifetime’s encounters. Truthful and loving, sometimes elegiac, sometimes comic, it is a celebration of the endlessly intriguing otherness of others.”
I may read it some day, but perhaps I should not wait as long as I did for this one.
It is impossible to convey the interesting detail and anecdotes in this absorbing read. Are they accurate? We cannot truthfully know. His mother tried to inject some glamour into her children’s lives, and give them a mysterious and exciting past, telling of how the Frayns came to this country as pirates, Now the author reflects:
“Perhaps, after all, my mother’s story of the pirate ship contained a grain of truth. There was gold in the family, waiting only for me to claim it, though it was amassed by a twentieth-century salesman rather than a sixteenth century pirate. Out of it I have made a childhood, and the person I became. Some of it has found its way into the stories I have written. And now into this true account of my inheritance.
Or as true an account as I can manage, given the weakness for fiction that my father also left me.”
And later, of his father:
“Of course he’d improved the stories. That was his style. Have I improved them still further in retelling them, in spite of all my conscious concern for the historical truth? I can see my daughter’s sardonic smile at my even asking the question.”
But don’t we all do this, to some extent? Some will flamboyantly and deliberately colour their memories; others are scrupulous, but unconsciously remember selectively. My brother and I had many experiences in common, but in retelling them they would take on different hues. We both heard the family stories about the relative, known for her outrageous hysterical tantrums, who threatened to throw herself in front of a train … whereupon her father calmly reached for the railway timetable, consulted his pocket watch and said “If you go now, you’ll be just in time for …”. Or another relative, who in one of her furious tempers grabbed the bread knife and shouted about her naughty child “Let’s kill him!” These and many others were told to us laughingly over and over again, so I mention them now - just to you of course - and giving no names.
What Michael Frayn does not tell would probably fill another book. But this one is worth a read. His love and respect for his relatives, especially the father who this memoir is about, shines through:
“My father left few possessions … they fit rather comfortably into a small cardboard box … to me personally he left a fortune - an intangible and unrecorded legacy more precious than money or anything he might ever have written down. The humour he used to deal with his customers and circumvent his deafness; his indifference to all systems of belief; the smile on his face that I sometimes find so disconcertingly on mine. My very existence, in the first place, of course - and the beginnings of a life that turned out to be so much easier than his. I didn’t have to share two rooms with six other people, or a kitchen and lavatory with four more. I didn’t have to leave school at fourteen, or go out and sell things, or support feckless parents and in-laws. He loved me, saw to it that I was fed and clothed and educated, and left me reasonably free to get on with things in my own way. What more can anyone want from a father?”
July 28, 2022
Reading this made me realise that writing a memoir of somebody close is an effective way of writing one's own story. Here we have all the raw material of an edition of 'Who Do You Think You Are?' concocted by a fine writer who has many skills which come into play, having been both a journalist and fiction writer of regard, as well as a translator and dramatist. All the different attributes these require come together. He writes sensitively and fairly of his father, who is an ordinarily extraordinary man. I saw a report on the Lehrer News Hour years ago which suggested that all men are heroes. If they come home of an evening and don't beat their family, that's more or less enough. It struck me as a bizarre thing to say to all those who were waging war at the time, but even setting that aside, can't we have some standard of what ordinary heroism is?
And if so, Frayn's father might well be in that category. From teenage years he spent his whole working life supporting various family members who needed a roof over their heads and food in their mouths. He unquestioningly did whatever was required of him. He smiled his way through a harsh life.
I highly recommend this as a piece of social history, as well as to those who love memoir. It shows that the form does not have to be about important people, but rather, about people who have something to tell us about the world and how to live it. Frayn's father does that without any idea that he will have that import. We are lucky to have it preserved....and maybe like me, you will cry at the end.
And if so, Frayn's father might well be in that category. From teenage years he spent his whole working life supporting various family members who needed a roof over their heads and food in their mouths. He unquestioningly did whatever was required of him. He smiled his way through a harsh life.
I highly recommend this as a piece of social history, as well as to those who love memoir. It shows that the form does not have to be about important people, but rather, about people who have something to tell us about the world and how to live it. Frayn's father does that without any idea that he will have that import. We are lucky to have it preserved....and maybe like me, you will cry at the end.
June 25, 2020
Frayn, author of one of my favorite plays ("Noises Off"), wrote this charming memoir about his father. Frayn's father shares this attribute with the character Selsdon Mowbray from "Noises Off": he's deaf, and plays it off with disarming humor by responding to conversation with non-sequiturs.
All in all, this book is a funny, colorful, and affecting memoir in the subgenre written by people who came of age in England during WWII.
All in all, this book is a funny, colorful, and affecting memoir in the subgenre written by people who came of age in England during WWII.
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March 18, 2019I love Michael Frayn's work and love memoirs, so had to get this book. A very loving account of a family and a time in history.
July 6, 2012
This would have been a much better portrait of his father if Michael Frayn had not spent so much of it musing why he didn’t remember more about various pivotal incidents. And for a memoir about his father’s life, there is a bit too much about his own teenage years. Adolescent self-absorption and angst is just not that interesting! I understand why it was so important for him to write this honest and sympathetic book, and in a way it was quite moving to read, but as someone outside his family, I didn’t feel it was very successful.
November 28, 2011
A lovely book. I expected a "Who Do You Think You Are"-type 'family history from the census' story. But it's actually about recovering lost or half-lost memories about himself and his friends and immediate family as he grew up; all the stuff that's usually lost even as it shapes you. A masterpiece; Proust but better!
October 19, 2017
This is a tender and humorous account of his father's life, of his background and his struggles to support his family. His father is brought to life on these pages; his charm, his foibles and his amazing smile.
But this is also a social history. It tracks the movements of the lower orders from the turn of the century, through the war years and up to the nineteen seventies. Growing up in suburban England among the aspiring middle classes in the fifties and sixties, it rang many bells with me. I had half-forgotten the social norms of the time, the behaviour of neighbours, the treatment of children. Michael's Grammar school was my Grammar school. I can almost smell the Latin primer as I read.
But more important, this is the story of the making of Michael Frayne the man and Michael Frayne the writer. We see how he wrestles with his father's expectations, from his disappointing lack of sporting prowess to his desire to continue his education through to Cambridge and become a writer and not rush out to get a paid job as his father had done. His father's attitudes and uncommunicativeness sometimes baffle him. As an adolescent, he espouses new ideas which he feels are superior to those of his father. In short, his is the usual generational dissonance.
With age, though, comes greater understanding. He realises that he and his father are both products of the world they have grown up in. He understands, too how much he owes his father; how his father has allowed and enabled him to be who and what he is. And as a father himself, he describes the sudden, helpless rush of joy he feels when catching sight of his children and realises that this is how his own father must have felt on seeing him. Now he no longer has his father, he finds comfort in the sense of continuity his children and grandchildren offer and also in the wonderful genetic fact that he has somehow inherited his father's fabulous smile.
This is a wise and insightful work and very touching.
But this is also a social history. It tracks the movements of the lower orders from the turn of the century, through the war years and up to the nineteen seventies. Growing up in suburban England among the aspiring middle classes in the fifties and sixties, it rang many bells with me. I had half-forgotten the social norms of the time, the behaviour of neighbours, the treatment of children. Michael's Grammar school was my Grammar school. I can almost smell the Latin primer as I read.
But more important, this is the story of the making of Michael Frayne the man and Michael Frayne the writer. We see how he wrestles with his father's expectations, from his disappointing lack of sporting prowess to his desire to continue his education through to Cambridge and become a writer and not rush out to get a paid job as his father had done. His father's attitudes and uncommunicativeness sometimes baffle him. As an adolescent, he espouses new ideas which he feels are superior to those of his father. In short, his is the usual generational dissonance.
With age, though, comes greater understanding. He realises that he and his father are both products of the world they have grown up in. He understands, too how much he owes his father; how his father has allowed and enabled him to be who and what he is. And as a father himself, he describes the sudden, helpless rush of joy he feels when catching sight of his children and realises that this is how his own father must have felt on seeing him. Now he no longer has his father, he finds comfort in the sense of continuity his children and grandchildren offer and also in the wonderful genetic fact that he has somehow inherited his father's fabulous smile.
This is a wise and insightful work and very touching.
May 10, 2021
I came across this book while looking for 'patre-moirs' I might suggest to my book club as we'd just read several 'mum-oirs'. The appeal was partly Frayn's name, but also the fact he grew up not far from where we all live. It did not disappoint. He's a wonderful writer with a great eye for anecdote and a gift for humour. But he's not blind to the pain that families can often inflict on each other, willingly or no, and he faces the faults in others and himself with refreshing honesty. But it's ultimately a love story, as Frayn and his father come through the difficult years and differences in character still very much friends, which is a real tonic after some of the angry memoirs I've read lately (though I get that the anger can be justified and is therapeutic to get on the page). Also great social history of the war and after-war years, the three-piece suites and little glasses of sherry, etc... The audio version I got from the library was narrated by Martin Jarvis, who has a wonderful voice.
May 20, 2018
Brave in the face of his deafness. Worked extra hard as a salesman of asbestos. Disarming charming well-liked. Responsible made up for the deficits of his feckless family. How many unsung everyday heroes There must be. And how sad that the energy rooted in good intentions had such catastrophic consequences for his own health and his daughter’s. He died early of renal cancel, she from asbestosis.
October 10, 2019
Stifling and self-indulgent.
What a waste of time.
What a waste of time.
July 25, 2021
Apoignant and endearing memoir.
March 17, 2020
What an absolutely beautiful book. I was moved to tears at the end.
March 18, 2017
Charming memoir covering decades of family life in parts of London.
July 24, 2012
Michael Frayn’s memoir is probably the family biography we’d all wish to write, had we the wit and talent. Frayn scavenges information from public records and relatives to fill out the family history he wasn’t around to remember, but this is primarily the story of family life has he experienced during the war years (WWII) to the death of his sister in 2003. Like all of us who grew up with siblings, our memories of our parents and family events are exceedingly partial. Frayn is dismayed to hear his sister‘s retrospective condemnation of their father - the man he so vividly and compassionately brings to life on these pages; the man he so hoped to please, but so often disappointed.
My favorite part of the book is that it was written at all. Biography’s of ordinary people have long been noticeable by their absence and we are a fortunate generation to be able to give voice to an historically silent majority.
My favorite part of the book is that it was written at all. Biography’s of ordinary people have long been noticeable by their absence and we are a fortunate generation to be able to give voice to an historically silent majority.
September 27, 2016
Memoirs, you either love them or you hate them .. maybe it depends on who the memoir is about. Michael Frayn is a British journalist who has written about his father, Tom Frayn, with whom he had a fairly distant relationship, but who he loved, appreciated and learned lots from. Born into a poor family who were mostly deaf, Tom starts work at 14, finds love with his first wife, Vi, but looses her to a heart attack at the tragically young age of 41. Set mostly in the war and post WWII years, the reader experiences life, the ups and downs of Tom's first, second and last loves.
Michael Frayn spends a lot of time describing his own teenage years of self absorption. In adult life he slowly gets closer to his father but never quite makes it.
A gentle story of an unexceptional man.
Michael Frayn spends a lot of time describing his own teenage years of self absorption. In adult life he slowly gets closer to his father but never quite makes it.
A gentle story of an unexceptional man.
August 13, 2012
I have just finished this book and enjoyed it enormously. Michael Frayn is a favourite author anyway, and this opportunity to hear about his early family life was fascinating, beautifully written and very poignant.
He is a fabulous writer and is never mawkish or sentimental and yet I managed (as is my way!) to cry through large parts of it.
His Father sits between my grandfather and father's generations, so there were lots of fascinating social history.
He is, of course, a very funny man and great observer of people and, having read this wonderful book, you can see why.
Highly recommended.
He is a fabulous writer and is never mawkish or sentimental and yet I managed (as is my way!) to cry through large parts of it.
His Father sits between my grandfather and father's generations, so there were lots of fascinating social history.
He is, of course, a very funny man and great observer of people and, having read this wonderful book, you can see why.
Highly recommended.
January 2, 2013
I know that MF is a greatly respected writer but I found this very dull. Everyone I know, who has read this book, absolutely loved it. For them, he did turn his father’s life into a compelling story. It was obviously a very important book for Frayne to write, paying homage to his father and their life together, managing to say things that he wished he had done earlier BUT… I never really managed to engage with or care enough to finish the book. Apparently it did ‘kick in’ eventually and reward the reader, but I didn’t last that long, partly because of the other stack of gorgeous books on the table just begging me to get to them.
February 5, 2014
I was captivated by this book from the start. In today's climate, where family is not always so important and often older members of our heritage were farmed off to a home, this book is the anthithesis of this.He makes us realise how we connact,whether educated or less educated,older or younger, higher or upper class. World Wars and family traumas and who we experience them with make us the person we evolve. A wealth of human interest that should get us running towards our telephone and ringing long forgotton relatives.
July 1, 2012
It is not a criticism to say that in this beautifully writtten memoir Frayn circles around and around his father, getting ever closer, never actually fully understanding the man. For sure, isn't that how it is with all of us?
But, as you would expect of a writer and thinker of Frayn's stature, there are insights a-plenty both into the way his family has shaped him but also into how family shapes all of us.
But, as you would expect of a writer and thinker of Frayn's stature, there are insights a-plenty both into the way his family has shaped him but also into how family shapes all of us.
September 23, 2012
Michael Frayn writes beautifully, combining humour with warmth and affection for his father, an apparently ordinary man but a fascinating one. Frayn has researched his family background and produced an account that is alternately very funny and sad, but never sentimental. Being just a little younger than the author I was gripped by his picture of the 40s and 50s and his relationship with his father which had its ups and downs. Highly recommended.
April 27, 2011
Michael Frayn creates wonderful portraits of his extended family and their lives in England in the 30's and 40's. I found the stories of how ordinary people perservered during hard times heart-warming and inspiring to those of us living through some hardships now. MY FATHER'S FORTUNE is the story of ordinary doing their best.
May 23, 2011
Haunting story of Frayn's childhood in a suburb of London before, during and after World War II. He is honest, moving without being sentimental about his very practical father who sold asbestos sheeting for his whole life. After this, read his novel SPIES, clearly taken from this setting. I listened to this book and the reader is excellent.
December 24, 2016
Michael Frayn is a skillful novelist with a wicked sense of humor. My Father's Fortune is his memoir of his father, who was a bit of a scoundrel. I got about halfway through and had to return it because it was an inter-library loan (ILL) book and I couldn't renew it. I'm looking forward to finishing it next year. (At my library, you can't request the same book twice in one year.)
April 10, 2011
What a nice change to read a memoir where the author is not whining or blaming his parents for his rotten life. Without being sentimental, Frayn tells a touching tale that paints a rounded and deeply compassionate portrait of his father.
October 3, 2012
A bit slow to get going - the pre-history, reassembled from family memories, didn't work terribly well for me. But once Frayn reaches the war years, and his own vivid memories of his youth, and his relationship with his family, especially his father, I was gripped and moved. Beautiful writing!
April 26, 2012
A sometimes hilarious and always moving account of a famous writer's childhood and adolescence, dominated by the personality of his father, Tom, whose infectious, dazzling smile comes shining through the pages of this beautifully written book.
November 5, 2012
A charming, self-effacing, understated and deeply moving memoir/biography by one of my favorite novelists. Also a fascinating social history of lower middle class life in early-mid 20th century England. Beautifully written, just as you would expect from Michael Frayn.
March 14, 2011
It's always interesting to read about other peoples families. This is a lovely book. His affection for his father comes shining through. Very funny in parts and moving in others. Highly recommended.
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