My father’s music is gone but poetry is never far from his lips
Next month, I will turn 45. I always have reason to think of my father at this time of year, but now especially. Dad is very ill, approaching the end of his life. Covid-19 restrictions permitting, I will soon be paying him a visit.
My father has always been proud of the fact that I share the same birthday as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was a scholar of Coleridge, and a significant contributor to Coleridge Cottage in Nether Stowey. Before I was ever a wage or salaried worker, I was an underpaid research assistant to my father, hunting down books in the University of Alberta’s Rutherford Library and making photocopies of texts about Coleridge’s most famous poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Dad used to recite excerpts of the Mariner to me when I was a young boy. One, in particular, made me shiver, especially when he recited it at dusk, as we were returning home from one of our long walks in our quiet part of the Cotswolds.
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
The copy of the poem that my dad gave me was the one illustrated by Mervyn Peake in 1943. Being a boy and staring into the eyes of Life-in-Death, the companion of Death — and more menacing — I couldn’t help but wonder about the death of my own mother. I watched my father lecture on Mariner once when I was just a few years younger than the undergraduate students in his class. He said Coleridge had been traumatized when, at the age of eight, he’d been bereaved by the death of his father. Some of my earlier boyhood feelings and interest in the Mariner made more sense. When my mother died, I, too, was only eight.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many parents today would find Mervyn Peake’s illustrations and the Mariner’s story a little too much for a young boy, but I was never scared. The book was one of the only connections I had to a dark but important chapter in my family’s life. It was far more disturbing to see the opening scene of Dirty Harry which our neighbours once left on over the dinner hour. My dad would never have allowed such gratuitous violence in our household.
I’ve been reading the excellent Counterpoint by Philip Kennicott. The book is a memoir that considers the place of music, especially Bach, in the author’s life. I felt compelled by it from the very beginning, with its vivid portrait of the author’s mother, who had been trained in music in childhood but grew up and abandoned it — pulled away by the demands of marriage and motherhood.
It has made me think of my father’s other love, music. I know very little about this part of his life. He was one of the first people I know to create a website in the mid-1990’s, and it’s still online. On a webpage called Miall-Personal, he wrote: “I left [home] at 16 to go to music college in London, where I studied pianoforte, composition, and the oboe. I met my first wife Valerie there. Shortly after graduating from music college in 1967 we were married. I taught music for a few years, and tried to make a career as a film music composer, but this was a signal failure. I turned to literature instead.”
There is obviously a lot missing from this account. I know from the brief anecdotes Dad’s given me that it was the Guildhall School of Music that he attended. He then had a scholarship to study conducting in Munich, Germany. He returned to London in 1968 and, as he describes above, the plan of earning a living through composition didn’t work out.
When I was a boy, music was still a very strong presence in my dad’s life, and hence, in our home. There was a piano in the living room, and although my father almost never practiced, he did consent to showcasing his skills every New Year’s Eve, when friends and neighbours were invited in for a big party. He would play alongside my step-mother, and their playing was usually a bit clumsy, and my father would apologize afterwards. But wine and beer were flowing. The adults were merry. My father was always at his happiest in those moments.
The last time I remember music being a big deal to him was when he agreed to be a volunteer conductor for an amateur group of musicians that were accompanying a dramatic performance outdoors at night. It was very cold, and I had to snuggle under a blanket. My father stood perfectly straight, waving his conductor’s baton. Afterwards, he was slightly critical of himself and of the musicians, but he admitted it had been great fun.
In Canada, music faded away from our lives almost entirely. My parents bought a new piano that remained closed, gathering dust. When my father retired from his professorship, the conditions seemed perfect for him to take up the piano again. My parents made their final move, this time to rural France, near Poitiers. Their little home had no room for a full-sized piano, not even an upright, so my step-mother bought Dad an electronic keyboard. He’s only ever used it as a resting place for books.
One of the symptoms of my father’s Parkinson’s, which has afflicted him for most of the past decade, is a loss of interest in aspects of life that once brought great pleasure. Music has been one of the losses. There have been others. My father no longer loves cats the way he used to. He doesn’t like to travel. And those long walks are a thing of the past.
But I don’t believe the poetry has yet left him. Just three years ago, when I visited, he was quite obsessed with visiting all the local churches and paying particular attention to the medieval frescoes on the walls. I remember one of the frescoes depicted Christians being slaughtered, bodies in decomposition — really brutal stuff — and there, in the perfect quietness of that cold church, which was empty except for us, a rhyme came into my father’s head, and he shared it with me:
And the worms crawl out and the worms crawl in
The worms that crawl in are lean and thin
The ones that crawl out are fat and stout
This is how I am always going to remember him — with a rhyme never far from his lips.
