Interview We tracked down Douglas Milburn at his small mountain redoubt In New Mexico. In the valley north of Jemez Springs, his rustic cabin ("A 19th century miner’s relic," he says) is homebase for eight months of the year. Winters find him in Key West. While Filicide, which was initially published in the United States in 1982, has never found a large audience, the audience it has found has been passionate about this strangely disturbing book. A member of the editorial board of an Ivy League press to which Milburn submitted the manuscript responded with a smudged, overwritten single-spaced diatribe about how "This book must never see the light of day. It would be a danger to right-thinking people everywhere." In contrast, the German edition found a small, committed audience among the culturally disaffected. Blalla Hallmann came to refer to Filicide as his "bible" and did a series of large paintings inspired by it. Milburn these days is so strangely distanced from his magnum opus that he was at first reluctant to grant an interview. "The book stands, or doesn’t stand, entirely on its own terms. I made the argument, admittedly quite radical, as clearly as I could. What more need be said?" Quite a bit, it turns out, as you will see. The interview took place over three days, with many interruptions for Hempstead’s complex business life, which he conducts via the internet. Of an evening, he would drag us up the road to the Jemez hot springs for an hour or two of sundown relaxation. Has the time come for the book to experience a cultural
breakout? Even after re-reading it, and after spending days with its author, we’re
still not sure. Judge for yourself.
Magellan's Log: Can we get the business of your name out of the way up front? People see your first name and always think you’re Scottish. DM (smiling): I assure you, the mistake—and the teasing—started in first grade, before first grade actually. My father was that common American mix of English-Scottish-Irish-who-knows-what. So you get "Milburn," "mill" as in "mill", "burn" as in "spring" or "stream". ML: But the name and people’s reactions to it had nothing, you think, to do with your winding up writing a book which pretty much stands a lot of modern psychology relating to gender on its head? DM: I don’t think so… Perhaps now’s the time for the backstory of Filicide. How it came to be. Believe me, the book, as it turned out, was a big surprise to me. So. Here’s the story, which, by the way, I’ve never told in print, and have in fact shared with only a couple of family members. We start with my father. I’m acutely aware that Filicide can be read as a personal attack by the author on his own parents. At the same time, it’s my experience that such a view actually reveals more about the critic’s relationship to his or her own parents. After all, there’s nothing direct in the book about my parents, so an outsider can only infer rather large problems. In hindsight, with the distance of some years, my own childhood looks rather benign, if—given the thesis of Filicide—one can use that adjective about any childhood. Of course there were problems. Two specific physical problems. I was circumcized at birth, being part of the long American generation in mid-20th century which accepted the AMA’s anti-foreskin judgment unquestioningly. And I was whipped, pants down, with a large leather belt, rather severely, repeatedly, for both small and large infractions, until around the age of ten. ML: So there was physical abuse. DM: Yes. But on the whole no more, and probably quite a bit less, than that experienced by many, many boys around the world both then and now. On the other side of the coin, I received a great deal of loving attention and support, emotional and financial, from my family. Yes, I have things to complain about, as do we all. And yes, I was bitter and angry as a young adult about the circumcision and the beatings. Not until I was in my thirties did I verbally confront my father concerning what he had done. He was in his early 70s, a couple of years from death, still in possession of his faculties. The conversation started smoothly but he quickly moved into his quick temper, not shouting but showing the body language of nearly out-of-control anger (Marines we shall always have with us). Words flew back and forth. We finally both fell silent. I got up and left, went outside, got in the car, and started driving. I just wanted to be away for awhile. It was near sunset, in November, somewhere--let's just say in mid-continent. Driving in the brown, barren countryside of early winter, with little traffic, under a darkening, hazy sky, I was suddenly—that’s the word—it was the sheer abruptness of the feeling that was so unsettling… I was suddenly overcome by a huge fear that when I went back, my father would shoot and kill me. I knew he kept a handgun in the bedside table. I was instantly trembling, breathing fast, with tears in my eyes. The fear was there, but at the same time, I was standing apart from it, watching it, and me. I was frightened, but I was also astonished, puzzled, and intrigued. And as suddenly as the fear had come, I understand in an instant what I was experiencing: a replay of infantile emotion, the feelings of the tiny baby in a crib, either being spoken to harshly, or in a room where adults were arguing loudly and incomprehensibly. The fear of helplessness, unable to understand what was happening, unable to communicate, unable to do anything about it. That was the moment, what I came to call "the primal moment" in the book, when I grasped what we have all experienced as infants, and began to understand what that huge fear means in terms of limiting and closing off our growth and development as individuals and as societies. As helpless infants, we all at some point experience the awful terror of possible annihilation by the huge, powerful creatures who have us in their control. It is the filicidal moment. Since we all have this experience, and since it has been going on for a very long time, clearly some kind of adaptation, some adjustment of the psyche must occur to deal with such fear. It is this massive adjustment, a kind of battening of the psychic hatches, that I'm thinking of when I use the term "filicide." That is, not physical murder, but psychological "murder." The filicidal experience forces us to limit our virtually infinite mental potential to such an extent that it has to be seen as a kind of killing. Then book then became a review of evidence in our oldest and biggest myths that such is in fact the case. ML: But you went back, to you father. DM: Of course. You see, part of that experience was a clear realization that this fear I was experiencing really was irrational: my father would not kill me. My parents loved me. Parents do love their children. That’s why in Filicide I repeatedly emphasize that we are talking about unconscious acts carried out with the best of intentions. Yes, I went back, and my father and I were civil to each other. But we never brought up the subject of my childhood again. ML: Which must have saddened you. DM: Saddened, and for a time made me quite pessimistic. Because as Filicide has made (or failed to make) its way in the world, I have seen how many people are simply not ready to face the kind of unvarnished truth which the book lays out. They often react with an anger which surprises even themselves. Like that early editorial reader. I would say now I'm less pessimistic and more realistic. I hope you people at Magellan’s Log are prepared for some hate mail. I mean, I step on a lot of toes right up and down whole spectra, from conservative to liberal, homosexual to heterosexual, female to male, not to mention wading into the whole range of organized religious activity. ML: Did I just glimpse a tiny grin of perhaps malicious delight? DM: Maybe you did. Given the pomposity of the ignoramuses who run the world, or who want us to think they run the world, I can’t deny a bit of pleasure in undercutting such poseurs. ML: How long did the writing take? DM: About eight years. It went through countless drafts. If I may, just a brief editorial aside: two friends, Chester Rosson and Barbara Burnham, both editors, read an early version and made enormously helpful suggestions. Since they are not mentioned in the book, I'm grateful for the oportunity here to publicly acknowledge my great debt to them. Anyhow, as time passed, the more I thought about our filicidal behavior, the more I realized this book had to, had to be as calm and gentle as I could make it. No need for shouting here, no need for rancor, or preaching. Just the facts, ma’am. The early drafts were fairly angry, cutting, and—hard to believe—funny in places. As the process of my understanding went on, all that fell by the way. Evidence, maybe, of my own growing understanding of the importance of forgiveness. Early versions were also much longer. I did a lot of reading in world mythology, and of course everywhere I looked, in every culture, I found supporting examples. But in the end, it seemed best to limit myself to the really famous mythic examples. So. A short book, a short, calm book. ML: But a bombshell. DM: Perhaps. But perhaps I’m totally wrong.
Perhaps the whole idea is wrong-headed. That’s for the world to decide. We may be
much farther, as a species, from accepting this kind of self-analysis than I thought at
the time of writing. To the extent that I still think about the book as book, I see it as
a highly revealing litmus test, both for individuals and for us as a society. Either I'm
completely wrong, or that fact that Filicide is rejected out-of-hand only
indicates how right I am. |
