I like to think of my father as having been radicalized to literature in prison the way young men in prison today are radicalized to Islam. I picture some older prisoner––possibly the same imaginary beatnik-y black man who turned him on to jazz––introducing a smart but ill-prepared teenaged Thomas J. Wingate to books. 

Maybe not entirely ill-prepared, though, since young Tom had grown up in Paterson and had maybe even taken a class with Paterson poet Louis Ginsberg, father of the not-yet-famous Allen. (He got out of prison in 1956, the same year as Howl hit the streets and one year before On the Road, so I doubt there was time for him to discuss the Beats with his fellow inmates). What did he read in prison, then? Marx? Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man came out in 1952, and I could see that being a huge hit in the prison community. My father's imaginary literary mentor would certainly have loved it.

Like everybody who writes, my father must have wanted to tell his own story. But if that's all he wanted, why didn't he write more about his youth (which he did, a little) or his time in prison (which he did, a little)? Why did he write detective stories and crime stories, none of which turned out well enough to include here because they hewed too closely (and without much imagination) to their genres' trends of the time? Why did he try to publish in the well-paying Atlantic Monthly instead of in one of the thousand alternative litmags rolling around in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he forged his literary output?

Maybe he just wanted to be a writer and get famous. Maybe he saw it as a way to make a buck, and had no literary aspirations at all. That would serve me right, wouldn't it? 

I can do nothing but focus on what hasn't yet been lost to time: the writing itself. The man himself is dead, and he might not even have known his own motivation. How can I possibly believe that I can figure it out, simply because I became the writer that he never managed to make himself? But I want to know because it will neaten up the story of how he came to be him, and therefore the story of how I came to be me.