My father, Milton Taylor, recently completed writing his autobiography and called it A 20th-Century (Jewish) Life: From Shepherd to Professor of Virology. (You can download it here.) Reading my own father’s memoir was very different from reading a memoir by someone I don’t know. For one thing, I’m in the book. For another, it was written for me—and for others whom he knows—not for a broad public. So it’s a personal communication rather than a general one, like a letter in a way.
My father has led an interesting life. He was born and raised a Glaswegian Jew, but dropped out of high school to join a Zionist Socialist youth movement and lived for a few years on a communal farm in England, where he was a shepherd. He emigrated to Israel, worked as a shepherd there, served in the army, then met my mother; they decided to go to the US, where my father would study poultry husbandry. After a year in New York City, he went to Cornell on an Ag School scholarship, where he became interested in microbiology and virology. He went on to become a professor. When I was born my parents were still planning to move back to Israel, which is why I have a Hebrew name and my first language was Hebrew. But the jobs were better in the States.
My father has a very direct way of writing. One of my favorite things about the book is how straightforwardly he regrets his mistakes and how clear-eyed he is about the past. For example, “When it came time to decide on a post-doctoral career, I chose to move into animal virology. Whether I went into the correct lab is something I often think about. I had wanted to join the lab of Renato Dulbecco at La Jolla. Charley, my advisor, persuaded me not to do so. He possibly thought the Dulbecco lab was too high-powered and that I was not up to it. His argument was that it was a large lab and I would not get personal attention from Dr. Dulbecco. I regret this decision to this day.” Or this, on being part of the Jewish youth movement in Glasgow: “When I think about it now, all of this seems very strange, growing up in Scotland and singing songs about water and work. I loved the singing although I did not know the words, just a jumble of sounds, and the dancing was fun. I suppose this was part of the indoctrination. Communal singing became an important part of life in Israel, reflecting in many cases nostalgia for times that never were and places long lost.” The book is full of sharp observations like that.
It seems appropriate that the next book I turned to was Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, which I read for the second time. Bresson was a French filmmaker who never used professional actors and avoided theatricality and pretense. There’s probably less chewing of the scenery in his films than in anyone else’s (unless you count Au hasard Balthazar, which is about a donkey who literally chews quite a bit of scenery). His films made a huge impression on me when I saw them in my twenties, though now some of them seem a bit stiff. His Notes are simply notes he made for his own use as he was directing, little bits of general wisdom. It seems almost as if my father, unknowingly, was following Bresson’s maxims as he wrote his book. Here are a few:
Don't run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the ellipses.
Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.
To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.
It is the flattest and dullest parts that have in the end the most life.
Two simplicities. The bad: simplicity as starting-point, sought too soon. The good: simplicity as end-product, recompense for years of effort.
Neither beautify nor uglify. Do not denature.
Production of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion.