Alone Again (Naturally)

 I've always found the second half of Gilbert O'Sullivan's song "Alone Again (Naturally)" to be much more effective than the first. The 1972 hit single opens, as you may recall, with a story about the speaker being stood up at the altar and threatening to hurl himself off a tower in order to punish his erstwhile bride-to-be. After the chorus and bridge and all that, the song then shifts to a second narrative: about the death of the speakers' two parents. 

The first part of the song always strikes me as a bit forced and artificial. It has all the makings of a sentimental, mawkish scenario that the songwriter invented purely for the sake of wringing self-pity. The events position the speaker too perfectly as a unilateral victim, with the jilting bride as a cartoonish villain. I can't really bring myself to believe that any of this happened—or would happen to anyone—as described. 

The second part of the song, however—about the loss of his parents—seems much more genuine and sincere. Even knowing nothing else about the songwriter's life, this verse seems like the part that actually happened to him. 

Perhaps—I'm even tempted to imagine—this was the part of the song he wrote first, and all it was supposed to be about; but then the commercial studio forced him to tack on the mawkish opening half to appeal to romantic lonelyhearts out there. 

And indeed, the single would probably have sold much more poorly if it were known solely as a song about grieving one's parents, rather than one involving a tragic romance. 

This points to a larger aspect of our culture that I've always found confusing. The songwriter in this case obviously had things to say about losing his parents—but most listening audiences don't want to hear it. Why? 

Our pop culture—and even the majority of our "high" literary culture—treats the romantic bond as far and away the most interesting and important one in life. Parents pale into insignificance beside it. The vast majority of pop songs, poems, and ballads throughout history have dwelt on the love relationship between romantic couples; and "sad" songs are almost always sad because they tell of romantic heartbreak, rather than the grief of losing blood relations. 

Yet, to my mind (and I'm obviously betraying my autobiographical biases here, but so be it), the romantic relationship has always seemed like the least necessary, most skippable, and most easily dissolved of all human ties. By contrast, the relationships between parent and child, or brothers and sisters, go much deeper—and are more nearly universal. 

Yet, we rarely hear about losing a parent or child in songs or poems or plays. And even when a songwriter like Gilbert O'Sullivan dares to step out and comment on this distinct form of heartbreak, he has to tuck it away inside a sentimental love story with a conventionalized tragic ending. 

I can count on one hand the great poems in the English language that deal with the emotion of losing a child, say. Ben Jonson's "On my First Son." Basil Bunting's "A Song for Rustam." They are few and far between. Yet, for genuine emotion rung out of a meagre few lines, I would put either of these poems up against a half-millennium's worth of sentimental love ballads. 

I would need even fewer hands and fingers, meanwhile, to count the number of great poems or stories that have been written about the grief of losing a parent. Which is odd, since—throughout human history—this must have been far and away the most common form of loss that most people endure.

Vulgar Freudians will perhaps tell us that this is because the Id in adulthood secretly wishes for the death of the parent; and meanwhile it is the sublimation of the Id that produces art and literature. The hidden narcissism of the unconscious is what comes across most in poems and plays—and it has room only for those love relationships that seem to enhance our sense of power and self-importance. 

And to be sure, it is much easier to think of literary works that have explored the death of a parent from the standpoint of Oedipal conflict and dread of the deceased parent, rather than those that have dealt with it as a source of heartbreak. Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father, say, may make for amusing reading—but it certainly will not provide any insight or consolation for a person contending with grief. 

Joyce got plenty of authorial mileage out of that scene at his mother's deathbed, meanwhile—but what troubled him most was his mixed sense of guilt and self-righteousness at his refusal to bend his knee in prayer to a creed he no longer believed in. Again, the memory is more about dread than it is about heartbreak. 

Yet, it's worth emphasizing that Freud himself—in his Reflections on War and Death—held a more nuanced and sophisticated view on these matters than some of his followers. He emphasized that the reason there is often so much conflict in people's relationships with their parents is precisely because there is so much love. This is the essence of the "ambivalence of feeling" that Freud was always talking about, in the context of people's families of origin. 

The human being—even at the deepest, most unconscious level—often deals with so much contention in familial relationships because these are the parts of life in which one finds the most intense and genuine affection. It is only because we long so much for love and unity with the people closest to us that we feel so wounded and scraped up by those times when we seem to encounter an obstacle or hindrance to their affection—that "something foreign" in every person of which Freud writes. 

I am immersed right now in Philip Roth's loving and sad and funny memoir Patrimony—about his father's battle with cancer—and I am appreciating it especially in this moment not only for its brilliance and its relevance in this moment to my own life—but also for its uniqueness. It tackles what is simultaneously one of the most universal of human griefs and one of the least discussed: the pain of losing (or facing the potential or imminent loss) of a parent. 

It's a pain I had always assumed would be blunted if it occurred in adulthood, as opposed to when one is little. And perhaps it is, slightly. But not blunted enough.

The other part of Gilbert O'Sullivan's song that feels genuine, in this regard, is its detour into theodicy. If God really exists, the speaker ponders, how could he take his parents from him? How could he desert him in his "hour of need"? "Perhaps," as Thomas Hardy once put it, "like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked."

Henry Adams writes at one point in his memoirs that it was when he lost his sister to tetanus in adulthood that he was forced to part ways forever with even the most abstract conception of a "personal diety." The idea, he writes, that such a being could exist, enjoy ultimate cosmic power, and nonetheless somehow "find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment." 

"For pure blasphemy," he goes on, "it made pure atheism a comfort. God might be, as the Church said, a Substance, but He could not be a Person."

Giacomo Leopardi likewise demands, in one of his poems, to know exactly "whom our enormous pain" as a species "brings pleasure or profit to" in this universe. What Being designed us with this fate in mind? And to what possible end? 

How, O Nature, does your heart let you sever —Leopardi writes elsewhere—

friend from friend, 

brother from brother, 

child from parent, 

loved one from lover, and, when one has died, 

expect the other to live on? How could you let so much pain be necessary to us, 

in that mortal has to keep on loving mortal? (Galassi trans.)

The poem from which these words come—now that I think of it—is another to add to the list of those that tell of the heartbreak that comes when death cuts the connecting thread between parent and child. Leopardi's subject is an ancient funerary urn that portrays a young girl bidding leave to her parents as she passes from life into death. And it is among the most heart-wrenching of all Leopardi's verses—even more so, I submit, than his tragic love poems. 

Let us have more literature, then, telling of this loss. It's not to dismiss or diminish the heartbreak people feel from losing a romantic tie. But it is to say that this is a form of love and loss and heartbreak that—in poetry and literature—has too often gone unsung.