Profligate Father, Square Son

The two adjectives chosen by the editor to characterize his father's correspondence - "strange" and "intimate" - are understatements of the first order. In the genre of posthumously published letters few volumes seem as "strange" as this one. Indeed, it is not a letter at all but more properly a diary; it comprised over 10,000 typewritten pages and had been written sporadically over a period of 30 years. After his father died in 1968 Page Smith inherited Ward Smith's voluminous manu- script packed in two trunks.

When Smith read his father's "letter," his "first impulse," he writes, "was to burn it." And well he might have! For it is clearly, as Smith recognizes, "a randomly obscene work in the form of a letter." Much of it is given over to recounting in explicit detail the father's sexual exploits, indeed debaucheries; it is a meticulously detailed scorecard of a sexual super-athlete with explicit names of most of the players and all the plays. "Intimate," the second adjective of the sub-title, seems the understatement of the year.

Even stranger, how does Professor Page Smith, one of our most eminent historians, biographer of John Adams, winner of the Bancroft Prize, professor of history at UCLA, and ex-chancellor of University of California, Santa Cruz, come to edit and publish what he himself characterizes as a "dirty book"? Smith is blind neither to the question nor to its implications, and in a moving foreword and afterword he records both his debate with himself and his motives in deciding to publish the book. His moral dilemma was made the more difficult because the profligate father had sired a "square" son - "something of a prude," he calls himself. A self-confessed "closet monogamist," he believes "in fidelity, in mastering one's passions rather than succumbing to them. . . . Virtually everything that my father did . . . seemed to me both wrong and personally and socially destructive, evil if you will."

Why then did he not follow his initial impulse to burn the letter? For two reasons: one professional, the other personal. In the obscene manuscript which the moralist found revolting the editor-historian detected some redeeming social virtue: "some historical-sociological-psychological significance." For during the rare times when Ward Smith was not well and thoroughly bedded he was a man of some significance: secretary to New York Governor Nathan Miller, a participant in the presidential campaigns of William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover, friend of the famous in society, politics, and the arts. And amid the pornography" is embedded some of the stuff of social history, shrewd comments, analyses, and evaluations of important personages and events of the 1920s through the '40s. Secondly, on the personal level, the editor-son saw publication as an attempt at "reconcilement" between himself and his father, a chance "to perform some kind of expiation for him and for myself," to atone for the life-long estrangement between father

One may well disagree with the wisdom of the decision to publish, as this writer emphatically does; his father's memory would seem to have been better served by silence and by consignment of the manuscript to the flames at the outset. But it would be harsh indeed to fail to sympathize with the personal dilemma and the moral anguish of the editor-son or to call too closely into question the professional judgment of the historian-son.

A LETTER FROM MYFATHER: THE STRANGE, IN-TIMATE CORRESPONDENCEOF W. WARD SMITH TO HISSON PAGE SMITH. Page Smith'40, editor. Morrow, 1976. 472 pp.$12.50.