The pending conversation between Matthew Tree and his father

A good relationship with your father keeps you company and drives you throughout your life; a bad relationship with your father weighs you down and deforms you throughout your life. Matthew Tree (Barcelona, 1958), the London-born writer who has lived in Catalonia for decades and has produced his literary work in both English and Catalan, always had a conflictive and hurtful relationship with his father, a tormented and problematic man who, in turn, had an alcoholic and absent father. Be that as it may, however, a father is always a father, and, even long after they are dead (Tree's father died in 1994), children remember them, keep them in mind, and often need to understand them.In Almost Everything, a book that functions as a portrait of his father, as a sketch of an autobiography, and as a transcription and interpretation of existing literary materials, Matthew Tree sets out to understand the enigma that his father has always been for him. It is an enigma full of thorns and holes, because Tree remembers and writes from the awareness of many grievances and many wounds. He explicitly states that for a long time he blamed his father for the severe chronic obsessive disorder he has suffered for a large part of his life and which has at times made him feel dramatically uncomfortable in his own skin and led him to drink too much.Tree, in any case, does not write out of vengeful resentment, but out of a desire to investigate and understand. His father was the man who humiliated him in public, who had fits of rage and from whom he, as a son, needed to escape, but he was also the man he loved and who was capable of great displays of affection. In the initial pages, Tree explains that he does not want to settle accounts with his father, and perhaps this is true, but this does not detract from the fact that the whole book – and this is one of its virtues – has a ghostly air of an unfinished conversation.Sordid, gloomy and at the same time moving

The trigger for Tree's literary maneuver, originally written in English and translated into Catalan by Jordi Dausà Mascort, is the reading of his father's youth diaries, a reading that did not occur until years after finding them – and it is evident that this impasse denotes many things, from reverential respect to fear, disinterest, and repudiation. It is one of the axes of Almost Everything: the faithful transcription, only modestly commented, of what are supposed to be some of the most interesting and significant passages of young Michael Tree's diary production.Conscientious objector during World War II and in the midst of the blitz, “pacifist, socialist and Anglican,” a fervent believer tortured by the notion of sin, a young man with hormones boiling afflicted by complicated relationships with women and sex, a depressive son of a father prematurely destroyed by alcohol, a vocational writer who published three novels that passed without glory or shame and who, after leaving literature, lived submerged in a prosperous but very frustrating life, full of enervating self-pity and rage: the reader's impression when reading these diary fragments is that Michael Tree was made of good stuff, but that the moral rigidity of the time and personal circumstances corroded him. All in all, it has that air of sordidness, a bit grim and a bit moving, of Philip Larkin's poems.Philip Larkin.More than the father's annotations, and the reconstruction of his personality by the son, the most raw and confessional passages of the book are particularly interesting, those in which the son, that is, the author, tells – without prevarication, but also without immodest exhibitionism – the biographical, psychological and literary consequences of the bad relationship with his father. Free from bitterness and resentment, grateful for all the good things life has given him (partner, children, a home in Banyoles), Matthew Tree's conclusion about his father is generous and at the same time terribly stark: he was not a bad person, he was just a very unhappy man. Almost everything proves that painful and sad reproaches can also be a tribute.