Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Two Memorials






I have a perverse fondness for air travel. I don’t enjoy the hassle, the rush, the stale air and overpriced food, of course, but there’s something about being strapped into a sealed metal tube for hours on end that gives one a sense of perspective. Sometimes when I’ve got a window seat and the weather’s clear, I’ll spend most of a flight gazing at the patchwork of civilization down below, and at its intersection with wilderness. It’s beautiful to see how limited we still are by the lay of the land, how little we’ve touched many of the mountain ranges in the western US, how the houses and fields peter out at the edge of some gaping ravine or jagged ridge. All it takes, though, is a middle seat or a grey day to turn that sense of perspective inwards. It’s akin to a meditation retreat: nowhere to go, nothing to do (once I’ve given up reading the selection of overly ambitious tomes I’ve hauled along) but be here. In a sort of anti-meditation, at these times I throw notions of present-moment, embodied mindfulness to the four winds and give my memory and imagination free rein. Flights are good times for dreaming, remembering, consolidating, integrating. They offer enforced pauses, liminal times of neither here nor there, and in that sense they force us to slow down and take stock. 

A few transcontinental flights and about ten months ago, I spent most of my 5 or so airborne hours composing a sort of eulogy for my father. Though he’d died quite suddenly, he’d been sick for a decade or more with Alzheimer’s; my mother and I had lost him a long time ago. I flew home at short notice to be with my mother and, on the return trip from New York to Portland, the piece came pouring out of me almost fully formed. 

Now I sit here on the same flight, in an aisle seat at the back of the aircraft, and my thoughts turn to the two memorial services we’ve given for my father in the last two months. One was a family affair at the house my parents have long spent their June-to-August academic summers. The Vermont house was one of my father’s favorite places, but somewhere he went to retreat from distraction and concentrate on his music rather than to commune with family and friends. Episodically (and at times manically) social but at heart a loner, he’d never have come up with the two-day party and family reunion I planned and, with support and financial backing from my mother, executed. But he’d have appreciated the lamb roast, the ping-pong playing (we staged a tournament in his honor in the upstairs of the barn), the informality of the service, which took place under a pavilion on the lawn in a spot where we used to play badminton, where he used to smoke his pipe and blow smoke-filled bubbles, the piano playing of some of his favorite music performed by an old family friend. And he’d have been right at home during the carousing that followed. 

Amidst the day’s varied reminiscing, listening, eating, and playing, his spirit was present, hovering in the big white tent during the brooding chords of his Suave Mari Magno, as well as afterwards, boozily, in the ping pong arena. And the man that his friends, family and neighbors evoked in their eulogies? Funny--indeed, downright hilarious, even in his last, mostly silent years, when all he needed was a gesture to break up however momentarily the malaise in an institutional ward. Vivacious. Brilliant when it came to music, and intensely focused, dedicated, and single-minded. Uncompromising. Both intolerant and incapable of mediocrity and of pretense. Intolerant, too, especially when it came to his own family of origin, of their seeming inability to relate to him in his chosen field. His little sister, now over sixty herself, remembered with a chuckle how awed she’d been at George’s musical capacity when they were still teens--and how his response to her enquiries (“What are you working on?”) had always been brusquely dismissive: “Composing. Go ‘way!” 

The Vermont service blessed me with the sorts of anecdotes and recovered memories about my father that, as the only son of a dad lost too soon, I find myself hungry for. But more than this, it offered the opportunity to channel him, to bring him back for one long summer afternoon and on into the evening.

Six weeks and three cross-country flights later, a second service, this one put on by his former colleagues at the Columbia University Music Department. Instead of a white wedding tent by a haphazard woodpile on a sloping lawn, the venue was formal, citified: Columbia’s Italian Academy, a.k.a. “Casa Mussolini” (cue my father’s wickedly delighted laugh here), monumental and indeed rather fascist-leaning with its columns and lush red curtains. 

With a small handful of exceptions, the audience was different from that in Vermont: distinguished professors, former students of my father’s now risen in their own musical careers, colleagues too from my mother’s department in her university. No political agitator-slash-shepherd types, no apple-grafting, suspender-sporting opera buffs, no long-lost Edwards cousins over from Maine for the weekend. There was no lamb-roast, no ping pong tournament, and substantially less drinking. But the event brought him back in ways that the Vermont service didn’t. 

Two of his compositions performed, including a late, playful and texturally richly varied chamber piece. The audience was about the most sympathetic imaginable, and the emotional and intellectual impact of his writing was palpable amongst the hundred-twenty-odd people suited and seated, so many of them musical and intellectual peers of my father’s. The man this group evoked in their eulogies was recognizably the same as the one who had been brought back for us in Vermont, but the perspective was different--more institutional, certainly, while still retaining the earlier event’s strong sense of his human qualities. Indeed, the institutional angle revealed aspects of my father I’d never had occasional to consider. He was evidently a capable administrator and, as department chair, a fair-minded, selfless leader. At the reception, a woman he had hired over a decade ago told how my father, her new boss, had encouraged her to “follow [her] conscience” when faced with her union striking just as she was supposed to begin her new position, and assured her there would be a “job waiting for [her] when [she] returned.” Other speakers emphasized how much they respected not only his music but his writing about music, as collected in a book of essays published in 2008. As in Vermont, there were speakers who had known him only in the last five or so years of his life, after much of his decline had taken place, who nevertheless had rib-splitting anecdotes to share. Andy Delbanco, a Columbia colleague from another department who had known my father only in passing, spoke poignantly of the way he communicated with looks, facial expressions and the occasional gesture even after words had failed him. What moved me was how clearly Andy had been able to know my father even under these limited, limiting circumstances, and how much respect for him he’d developed. In some ways this was the bravest speech of the evening, because Andy didn’t shy away from touching on some of George’s more difficult qualities. His utter intolerance for nonsense, said Andy, sometime meant that he haw it where it wasn’t, dismissing people too quickly or harshly. His disinterest in meaningless banter and, if it came down to a choice between the two, his preference for awkwardness over fluff. A former student echoed this sentiment: brilliant in the classroom, George was not afraid to wait out ten and fifteen minutes of silence before he was satisfied that his students had no answer to the question he had posed. Silence, it seemed, was part of the method to his madness long before the madness overtook the method. 


Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Rome Diaries III: Deep Funk



After the diversions of the Napoli sojourn, George’s mother Connie visits him in Rome; evidently he was busy showing her around and had little energy to spare for journaling (or found all the touring rather tedious and had little to say about it). Shortly afterwards he took the train to Paris to visit his friend and future colleague Fred Lerdahl and take in some sights. There his notes are largely museum-oriented; in art and architecture, as in music, aesthetics were serious business for George. By late Spring the frequency and length of the entries pick up again. A sequence of brooding, self enquiries mark a period of depression that is to last for the better part of a couple of months. He first makes mention of the shift on May 7, 1974: 

Struck by similarity of present situation and (to a lesser degree) symptoms with the period of my nervous crisis at Princeton: period of my father’s death, social, sexual + musical isolation, copying, rainy cold weather, conducting, feeling physically weak ---. Hopefully I’m more capable of dealing with it now. 
K + Q [G’s piece Kreiz und Queer (sp?)] went worse than I thought, - perhaps half the piece went well, but everyone was lost at one time or another, and only the general idea came through - which was enough for many people. Very depressed immediately after, but cheered up today by knowing the players were disappointed, the audience generally content. A long day. 

We get more insight into the nature of the “situation” on June 12th:

Period of intermittent angst, depression, broken by social events (Lee’s), concerts (Dachow’s group), people (Barbara Kolb, Olins, Classico Barbara), new places (little piazza behind Piazza Navona, finding Dackow concert), and small spurts of work on what appears to be a quintet. [margin note, added later: Exchange Misere]. The ingredients are familiar - dissatisfaction about my work -- can’t seem to find any new pitch relations, everything I try to write comes back to what I’ve done before; lack of really close friends, isolation from my friends in the States; feeling that I’m musically too isolated here, through lack of initiative, in part; sexual frustration, which continually makes me ripe for relationships with people I don’t want to be involved with; anxiety for my future both artistically and personally -- haven’t I settled rather too comfortably into my fuddy-duddy role as Neo somethingorother? If I don’t write “great” (?) music - am timid, conventional -- then what professional rewards (internal) will there be, also given that I’m largely denied the external rewards that I might get through pushiness, back-scratching, etc.? ... Obviously my music needs to escape my control, as it has every time I’ve done anything decent - and that requires hard work, but also a sense of adventure, neither of which I’m up for right now. 

There are rays of light in this mostly dark period, giving his emotional life a sort of chiaroscuro effect. In a more upbeat, if not manic mode in late June, he writes:

Finished quasi diary-letter to J. Hoffman - how impossible to try to describe daily life here! Who would believe it? Yet my pessimism is less than that of the English-language press -- I just can’t see violence + revolutionary thought here as anything but a fringe activity given the “Italian temperament.” If I were Italian (not only contra-factual but inconceivable) I would almost certainly be a revolutionary -- but I’m a fairly bizarre foreigner.

This flash of wit and apparent self-confidence, however, is followed closely by 

...Acute anxiety suddenly Thurs A.M. while in library looking at Journal of music theory Schenker bibliography - earlier had gotten official notice from Donald Harris of extension of leave of absence. Suggestive connections. Echoes thru next few days, in which I’m “serving time.” Much less severe than at Princeton, but an obvious relationship. No obvious solution; when I’m ready, work will go well, in the meantime the shit-work I have to do isn’t enough, people aren’t enough, recreation (tennis every day, chess w/ Laurie, poker at Millan-Liveseys) necessary but also not enough.  Have still found no better solution to these periods of non-existence than waiting them out. Part of the depression is all the things that didn’t happen: no word from Rudi, who was planning to be in Rome now, ditto from Fritz, who was supposed to call me for a Wed. meeting. Reception Thurs. w. summer school kids -- very naive, probably think we are monstrous snobs. The one Paesa Sera which came is full of the postal scandals - tons of first class mail sold by the post office for paper - only a symptom of the postal crisis, but at least it’s nice to know that someone is concerned about it.  Last lesson with Signorina Bolla, whose fate at the academy (forced retirement) is very sad. Sat. begin reading an Italian medieval history book -- if I’m not going to read anything worthwhile, it might as well be in Italian. 

A few days later, he gets his head above water enough to put things in perspective, writing on SUnday June 30th:

...Too bad these periods of nothingness keep coming back, but I perhaps can learn something from them--what function do they serve?

The end of the dark spell is in sight. By the end of the weekend, his spirits are up:

Very pleasant trip to Frascati, etc. with the Olins, Liveseys, Frank, Charles Hope, Bill Hood, and Ann (?)...notice how important it is who you travel with! Got to convert Jean-Michel to a more frivolous attitude--one might well ask “why do I so easily take on the coloration of those I’m with?”--but perhaps my minimum requirements are that 1) I be able to eat and drink well, 2) that my chess-type intellect be stimulated by verbal games with outgoing + intellectual people. Or substitute for #2 that there be a spirit of improvisation (not so far #1!).

The question about “taking on the coloration” of those he’s with goes unanswered, seemingly. But the train of thought that follows it is interesting in its own right. This is the first written evidence that his earlier indifference to good food (remember Ann’s “he lived off bourbon, cigarettes and instant coffee”) has shifted and his tastes matured--“being able to eat and drink well” is now a non-negotiable requirement. This development was a permanent one; he was eventually to return from Italy with a nose for wine and the command of a small arsenal of pasta dishes (pesto, carbonara). He still liked bourbon and cigarettes (until his eventual switch to pipe-smoking), but they were now snacks and dessert, not his daily bread. 

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Rome Diaries II: Napoli



Judging by the journal entries, some of the highlights of George's time in Italy were the trips-within-the trip: day trips to to small towns and ruins within shooting distance of Rome, and longer excursions to Florence, the Abruzzi, Puglia, Sardinia, Naples, Venice.  He always seemed to enjoy the adventure but was rarely unequivocally impressed with these places; about Florence, for example, he writes “on the whole didn’t really like the city itself apart from the incredible art works--rather Northern, very American, cold, narrow streets, dull colors--not unpleasant, but not magical either.” 


Napoli is something of a different story: this is no cold, touristy art-town but a chaotic, teeming metropolis.  Naples is the closest thing I've seen to India in Europe, and for my father in the Spring of 1974 it made a big impression, which he however distills into a few characteristically terse phrases ("crowded streets, insane vitality, extreme contrasts...the contrasts in the same streets from day to night"). 


The account begins with the drive toward Naples. 



Reach the massif around 5, incredible drive along the coast to Vieste.  Very poor ugly town with cheesy modern tourist hotels--very sad. At restaurant a local buys us drinks--which end up on our bill.  Hotel is freezing--haven’t been so cold at night since camping in winter.  Wake up in middle of night with a horrifying vision of returning to U.S. to teach at Harvard--based on previous day’s conversation at G. Bar with Leon + the frightening realization at the concert of the total irrelevancy of a teaching “career” for a composer.


...waiter did the classic hand-biting forehead-hitting routine to perfection.




...get lost going into city, which gives a pretty good idea of Naples--crowded streets, insane vitality, extreme contrasts. Finally find the hotel, Albergo Colombo, near Stazione Centrale, walk down Corso Umberto at rush hour, stop for cinzano at galleria, check out the opera, have excellent, inexpensive meal at Ciro’s - obviously the tourists are not flocking to Napoli. 



[Next day] Walk around the fish markets, go to Pompey, there from 9-4 with a break for lunch--much bigger than I expected--very curious place, since there’s little of artistic interest + since I am repelled by the morbidity of its appeal, why is it so interesting? apparently it’s the possibility, given a little imagination, of evoking a way of life which is both very distant + very close (“cave cave”) to life since. late afternoon trip up Vesuvius--mostly by car, then easy climb, guide is evidently a sort of patronage job. impressive view (the weather has cleared since leaving Naples), the cone is quiet but threatening (at the end the guides drop the garbage into it, which seems almost sacrilegious); am impressed by the lava flows, which are still obvious.  After meeting at hotel, go to a fancier 1-star Michelin restaurant towards S. Lucia, which isn’t really better than Ciro’s, but more elegant.


Sunday 24th March  - Our taste for ruins temporarily satisfied, we take the boat to Capri, spend the day enjoying the sun, sea + landscape, without doing or seeing more. very pleasant, even though we didn’t really see enough to even decide whether it would be worth coming back.  but my taste doesn’t run towards fashionable international resorts; it might be a nice place to grow up, or to spend a few weeks on vacation. Beautiful return trip via Sorrento.  
Monday 25th - Plans disrupted by Dan’s losing car-key, so we stay in Naples--national archeological museum, much of which is closed + which seems to be falling apart, then lunch and aquarium, back to Ciro’s. Naples is definitely not beautiful, but it’s quite an experience--the locksmith, the flea-bag hotel, the 10 lire “private” sidewalk, “sprika dish,” the world war II GI fascination with Americans, the contrasts in the same streets from day to night--it’s very enlivening, yet there’s no reason to go back.

And he never did. His few days' experience in Naples crystalized over the years into a two or three well-loved anecdotes, and a smile-and-shake of the head whenever he mentioned Naples.  I remember him telling the story of the vendor dumping his garbage into the crater of Vesuvius at the end of the day.  The "10 lire 'private' sidewalk" refers to a narrow street he was traversing when suddenly--thwap--a stick comes down in front of him, barring the way.  He looks over to see an old woman, who matter-of-factly demands 10 lire (probably less than 2 cents) to pass.  It's a tough town, but also a "vital" one, full of expressive energy: the waiter's "classic hand-biting forehead-hitting routine" upon realizing he had brought the wrong dish out was a gesture my father would imitate for decades to come.  Here's how it's done. First you slap your forehead, then bring your hand, fingers extended, down to your mouth and place the blade of your hand squarely between your teeth. The very picture of contrition. Solo in Italia!


Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Rome Diary Diaries I: Late 1973 - Arrival and Settling In


George Edwards on Squirrel Island, Maine, in 1968.  




George's early entries, starting in October 1973, are pithy, almost written in short-hand, with incomplete punctuation and fragments of sentences.  What was to become an at-times obsessively comprehensive record of his time in Italy and of his mental-emotional life begins much more haphazardly, and its pithiness gives an impression of non-chalance.  There must be so much to say upon arrival in a new place, but all we get is scattered notes, probably scribbled down in a minute or two before bed.  Evidently he's too busy getting his feet under him to reflect on it much, at first--or is pouring that reflective energy more into letters.  Thus the main impression that emerges from the first weeks of the journal is that George is adapting remarkably fast to his new circumstances, even as he does occasionally marvel at the new world he finds himself in:

Couldn’t find cambio (wrong address).  Bus + train strikes.  Italian life is crazy.  Street numbering! (wrap-around)

A few other typically concise entries, detailing the progress of his composing and exploring his new environs, from his first few weeks in country:

Compose early AM, go with Jean Michel + Jacqueline to Subraco, incredible hills, hill towns, autumn colors + monastery of St. Benedict, 13th Century, very beautiful, simple, wild situation overlooking a gorge.  

Then drive thru almost lunar hills to Alatri -- ancient walled town (walls 4th cent. BC), Romanesque church -- too bad we didn’t have more time.  

Party after at Kircheners.  Cold still going strong.
To Eurocambio, walk most way back.  Dislike the way I am known for an American (the scarf?), + the sense of the foreign domination of the city.  Back for rather distressing meeting with Millan.  “Toilet paper shortage” in U.S. gets big play in the papers.  After lunch tennis + coffee with Sharon, work a little.  Beautiful cold day.

To 'Pat Garett + Billy the Kid' with Sharon, then to dinner.  Get tired of these films of lyrical violence, but at least it's better than Clint Eastwood.

From the start, whether it comes to music or art or film, or the personalities of all the new people in his life, George's critical mind is up and functioning.  The work of a photographer fellow of his at the American Academy is "extremely proficient, deadly," while a colleague's concert is rife with "bad music, virtuoso stuff."  At a concert at the Foro Italiano: 


Leo Smit - cutesy pie marches alla Stravinsky; Hellerman - rather simple, Ligeti-like, not too much to listen to, clear     shape; lousy Italian piece badly played; Leon’s piece not well paced in the performance; more disturbed than on the tape by its incessant lushness, touching all bases - still, much better than the rest. Very tepid audience.


His sharp mind can be double-edged: he has no difficulty earning his colleague's respect, but less success forming personal bonds with people whose music he has reservations about.  Quick to judge, he can be scathing and abrasive.  [Ann recalls that the key quality he lacked during his grad school years was warmth.] If my own personality is any indication, he probably found it nearly impossible to pay anyone a compliment if he didn't really mean it.  And since his standards for artistic maturity (in composition in particular) were so high, such compliments were probably few and far between. It's easy to imagine he earned a reputation amongst his American Academy fellows for brilliance, a sharp wit and sharp tongue, and narrowly exacting aesthetic standards bordering on elitism. 

Compared with what comes later, there are few really substantive entries from the early months. One can imagine how busy he is adjusting to life in Italy, and probably his literary energies go more into correspondence with the friends he's only recently left in the States.  Some descriptive tidbits in December: so-and-so is "a red-bearded, disgusting little gnome." And, he writes, the Italian expression for "to make a bridge" refers to how to avoid working at all between a Thursday holiday and the following Sunday--I see the twinkle in his eye as he writes down this little gem of an Italianism.


As it went to some degree throughout his life, how his composing is going is a source of constant pre-occupation in the diary.  When the music is flowing through him, George is high on life. When work isn't going well, he loses heart, sometimes plummeting into depression.  “there is definitely something wrong here...” “much of the day pleasant, but still very intense periods of loneliness--desire to be alone.”  He will later refer to these depressive states as periods of "nothingness" or "non-existence," times when he feels outside of the flow of life,  waiting on the sidelines.  At their worst, he likens them to the period of his "nervous crisis" at Princeton--a psychological breakdown of some sort that he experienced around age 27.  



Is his mood a response to his work, or the quality of his work a result of his mental state? It's hard to say which way the causality runs, and it's probably not as simple as one way or the other. Realizing this, George makes a point of tracking his cycles of creative energy and high spirits.  Indeed, at one point he writes that "if this record has any value, it will be to chart my manic-depressive cycles and perhaps eventually indicate their causes." 


But that's getting ahead of ourselves; in December 1973 his highest highs and lowest lows in Italy were yet to come.  We'll pick up next time with George's account of his memorable trip to Naples, source of a number of anecdotes I grew up with, and the point his life in Italy starts to hits its stride.  


Thursday, May 24, 2012

The Rome Diaries Overture: The Early Years



The project of getting to know my father, George Harrison Edwards, continues to open up before me.  From the fertile ground of his 1973-5 Rome fellowship and its journals, tendrils stretch out in both directions.  Closer to my own 1984 entrance onto the scene, my mother has been unearthing the letters my father wrote her, starting early in their relationship in 1976; and on the other end, I have an unexpected lead on the period of his mid-to-late twenties -- my age now.  This last has been a tremendous blessing, as I had known little about this formative period in his life until I received an email from his ex-girlfriend, Ann.  He and Ann went out when when he was 25 to 29, which sets their relationship against the backdrop of the late 1960's and early 70's.  Ann heard about George's death and the devastating illness that led up to it through mutual friends, found this blog, and ended up contacting me.  After a few emails back and forth and a bit of phone tag, we finally spoke recently, in what I hope will be the first of a number of conversations illuminating my father's early years.



One theme apparent from talking to Ann was George's unmitigated bitterness and resentment towards his own family of origin. This is an emotional orientation foreign to me, and difficult in some ways to come to grips with. Difficulties are compounded by how challenging it is to put together a coherent picture of my father's childhood given the scanty source material.  But even the rough strokes gleaned from Ann, my mother, and George's younger sister Eleanor paint a striking picture. George grew up hating his older brother, Ross, who was perhaps cruel to him, or simply insensitive.  They certainly had little enough in common, George an intellectual musician-in-the-making, Ross a dyslexic tinkerer.  (Did George turn to music and literature in part as a response to his jock brother's interest in cars and sports?)  George resented his younger sister, Eleanor, too, perhaps simply for her status as an attention-stealing younger sibling.  His feelings about his father, Arthur Edwards, are difficult to discern, given a lack of attention to the subject in later letters and diaries and Arthur's death when George was only 16 or 17.  Ann remembers Arthur as an "interesting character," a stifled creative type in a square job.  At 6'6" he was an imposing figure; in the one photo I have of him his shoes look preposterously long. He was almost certainly the force responsible for introducing my father to music, and perhaps for galvanizing him towards far-left politics with his own pronounced conservatism.  That's about all I know about him; he was tall, and musical, and angry.  Perhaps the most puzzling bitterness, however, is that towards George's mother, Constance or Connie Edwards.  By all accounts George was her favorite child and she spoiled him, never failing to cook lavishly for him, buy and wash his clothes, etc.  But the man who was to become my father seems to have taken these blandishments for granted and developed a bitterness born, perhaps, of a feeling that his mother "domesticated" him (as Ann suggests).  There are suggestions in later journals that she was the source of much anguish, and he may resent his dependence on her.  Was he a momma's boy, the less robust brother favored by a doting mother? If he was bullied by his brother and by schoolmates, did he blame this on her?  We know he resented the fact that as a sickly, premature infant he was put in an incubator; this fact is perhaps a telling one, suggesting as it does early childhood trauma and issues around dependence and nurture.  We know too that George's frailty continued through early childhood with a wide range of food and environmental allergies, and that during this period Connie was having mental issues, probably anxiety-related, and even spent some time at some sort of "rest home" when George was little. My mother recalls that he never forgot an episode in which Connie forgot to pick up a young George from a dentist's appointment--and never forgave, either?  In any case, we know that he felt precious little solidarity with his family of origin and was probably only too happy to escape their clutches and to escape the dull, uninspired suburbia of his childhood in favor of a life lived on his own terms.


By the time Ann met him, George was living in Boston, teaching music theory and composition at the New England Conservatory.  Intense, passionate, critical, and angry, he'd left his suburban past well behind and taken to an unselfconsciously bohemian lifestyle centered around music.
Ann remembers him in his apartment in Boston's back bay, a place he didn't do much to keep up.  He didn't do much to keep himself up, either: according to Ann he lived on cigarettes, black coffee and bourbon. He was rail thin and his clothes had holes in them.  He lived and breathed music: despite a strongly frugal nature, his one major possession was a decent Yamaha upright piano.  "He'd wake up, light a Camel, drink his coffee, and start playing Chopin," Ann recalls.  Who had time for breakfast when there was music to be played, and more importantly, to be composed? Composition was his consuming passion, and also a continual trial.  Evidently the preoccupation with his work that figures so prominently in the Rome diaries took hold early; apparently George complained that he couldn't do anything else if he was going to compose that day.

Growing up, I didn't hear much about my father's twenties; it's almost as if his adult life started in Italy in 1973.  The one pre-Rome story from that I did grow up with concerns the Vietnam draft.  In the light-hearted version I heard, George was told at his draft board physical that he was a little too skinny and should gain a few pounds and come back--which prompted him to quit drinking beer, lose a few pounds, and get off the hook altogether.  Ann remembers this episode in more detail, and paints a picture that rings truer than this too-pat family version.  She describes him as fervently anti-war and critical of the U.S. government's motivation in Vietnam; he refused on principle to serve in the military.  He was also scared shitless. But he didn't claim conscientious objector status or head for Canada.  Instead, after being called in to his army physical, and once he realized his weight was an issue, he went to great lengths to make sure he'd never be considered fit for active duty.  He didn't just quit drinking beer; he actually went on a drastic diet and dropped his nearly 6'3" frame down to 109 pounds.

It's difficult for me not to wonder what consequences his choices had on his health decades later.  How much did his poor nutrition, heavy smoking and drinking, and this period of what can only be described as near starvation contribute to his eventual cognitive decline? How much of it is genetic? How much karmic, or how much miasmic, when one considers that his mother lived the last 20+ years of her lost her own life with marginal mental capacity (though through an entirely different patho-mechanism)?  Hard questions, and no answers forthcoming.

But even if the beginning and end of George's life were fraught with health issues and adversity, he managed largely to escape these specters for most of his prime.  The Italian diaries I'll delve into next time represent him at his complicated, intense, brilliant best.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Preface to the "Rome Diary" Diaries

Volume one. Oct 1973 - Oct 1974





I can't put a date to when I lost my father; when he finally died this past fall I had been effectively fatherless for well over a decade already.  He spent the last few years of his life trapped like a caged animal in a series of institutional homes, mostly silent, pacing around, alternately charming and frightening his aids and fellow residents.  While he was living out this farce--and he of all people would have hated that sort of existence--as far as I was concerned, my father was gone.

I said goodbye to him one chilly April night in Northern Illinois. I was sitting a 10-day Vipassana meditation course, an experience I wrote about here on this site.  It was 10 long, cold, lonely days of self-confrontation.  Deprived of all comforts--adequate sleep and food and all social interaction I sat hour after hour, trying to watch my breath or monitor all bodily sensations without reacting to them.  At the end of the day, I'd sit on my bed and turn my headlamp to its red light setting.  This was a small luxury--it was about the closest I got to warmth until Day 10 (unless you count Day 6, when I made a minor jailbreak and took an illicit stroll down a country road on one of the first days of Spring).  A few days in, I reached a sort of breaking point.  I thought myself unable to continue, until a brief interchange with a compassionate volunteer staff person gave me the strength I needed.  I had a moment of catharsis standing in a grove of bare trees in the mud, tears running down my face.  It must have been that night or the next that I dreamt of my father, who hadn't been on my mind at all as far I can remember.  The dream is faded now; I'm not sure if I ever wrote it down, even pen and paper being on the list of forbidden items during Vipassana.  But I remember the important part.  My father was lying in a hospital bed, in a gown.  I was sitting by his side, holding his hand.  It was clear that he was dying, and I told him "I love you." I told him "goodbye." That was all.  He passed away quietly.  I awoke, and knew with perfect lucidity that my father was gone.  Not from the physical plane; but for me there was no longer any last trace of the man I was already struggling to remember.  He was gone.

It took some time, I suppose to integrate this dreamt insight into my conscious life.  Once it happened, it opened up a new possibility: that of recovering my father.  If I'd been deprived of an adult relationship with my father, now was the time to start getting to know him.  If he was really gone, if his story was over, it was time to start telling it.  And I was a lot more interested in the good parts than the tragic ending.     

Since his decline began before my adolescence, I had to delve a fair ways into the past to make much headway.  Reading his old diary from the two years he spent in Italy in the 70's had once felt like an illicit, guilty pleasure; now it felt almost like a duty.  The serious, articulate, adventurous, sharp-tongued thirty year old man in its pages was instantly sympathetic; I was both surprised and unsurprised to recognize so much of myself in him, or him in myself.

After my father actually died, another volume of his Rome diary appeared.  I guess my mother had known about it all along, but for me seeing it was like being given another piece of him.  I've been reading my way through it, and it's sparked some more dreams that feel like they're continuing the process of recovering my father and healing our relationship, abused as it was by the cruelty of disease and the callousness of teenage-dom.

I don't know how much is going to be forthcoming, but I've got at least one or two posts to come that will be centered around my father's journals and my own experience of reading them and getting to know him at my age.  Here we have it: the Rome Diary diaries.






Friday, April 20, 2012

Family History

I've recently gotten my hands on some digitized versions of old family photos, and I can't resist putting them up here.  It seems that my mother was the photographer of the family throughout the seventies and eighties, judging by how few shots she's in.  

For anyone who knew my father, George Edwards, and hasn't seen it, I wrote an essay in memoriam that's currently up here on my mother's website.  


A shot of George dating back to his American Academy in Rome (1973-4)
My parents, George Edwards and Rachel Hadas, in Vermont, late seventies
Mom and Dad do American Gothic at the Vermont house.  Early 1980's
 
Infant me with father and maternal grandma, Riverside Park, Manhattan, 1984

The Edwards clan: snake handlers since 1642






George at work at the composition desk in Vermont, early Nineties.   

Crackers, cheese, pipe, baby.  

I've always had good taste in union suits (and long relied on my father for hand-me-down sweaters). 
George Edwards (right) with family friend and Vermont neighbor Harold Holden, circa 1996


George at Prospero's Island, central Vermont, 2007.  George's weeks "up the hill" were his last spent outside an institutional care facility.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

Central American Deja Vu


Guatemala.  Bumping along in a packed bus, immersed in dust and burning garbage fumes and thumping bass, it almost felt like I'd come home.  Home, that is, to that other home, the one in the Eastern Himalayan foothills.  So much in this new place reminded me of Nepal and North India, from the decorations on the buses to the features of the people.  (This last is less surprising when you consider that the indigenous population of the Americas probably crossed a land bridge at some point from Asia.)  So many details of life that hadn't crossed my mind since my last trip to the Subcontinent turned out to carry over to this other small, diverse, developing, and deeply politically troubled subtropical nation: bright political slogans painted on buildings and rocks by the roadside; women in traditional dress talking putting a few cents at a time on their cell phones in areas which have never seen landline service; corrugated tin roofed houses with dark, smoky kitchens; terraced fields of maize and potatoes.  At first, immersed in this new but deeply familiar place, I found Nepali syllables spilling from my lips whenever I tried to exercise my fledgling Spanish, and, worse, I kept slipping into the characteristic Southasian head waggle.

But despite or perhaps because of the many and obvious similarities between Nepal and Guatemala, the differences soon began to stand out.  The bus soundtrack was Reggaeton and merengue instead of Bollywood film music and Nepali lok git, and the buses themselves, though comparable to Indian-made Tatas, were decommissioned Bluebird school buses.  On the streets, women bared their arms and (gasp!) shoulders.  And other, more sinister differences, too, ones that speak of the appalling violence that has swept this country over the last decades: bus conductors carrying pump action shotguns slung across their chests, country roads unsafe to wander even at mid-day thanks to the armed plantation guards and to bands of roving thugs.


Coffee ripe and ready for harvest
Or maybe this violence isn't so different after all.  Both Guatemala and Nepal are rich in natural and human resources, but this wealth gets divided up incredibly inequitably so that they are effectively some of the poorest places on earth.  In both cases, cash crops and particularly stimulants are a major cog in this economic machine.  In Eastern Nepal and neighboring Darjeeling, of course, it's tea: plantations blanket the hillsides all around the famous former British hill station and employ a substantial number of locals at pitiful wages. In Nepal, inequity has been severe enough to give the Maoists a firm foothold across the country; I never got the inside scoop on labor conditions on Darjeeling plantations, Pitzer in Nepal being fairly politically apathetic.  But thanks to the terrific left-wing non-profit language school PLQE/La Escuela de la Montana, I learned substantially more about the realities of life on a coffee finca (plantation) in Guatemala.  The basic living arrangements at La Escuela spoke volumes on the subject: the entire founding populations of the two villages where our host families lived had migrated from a nearby finca  some twenty years earlier after their efforts to organize resulted in them being blacklisted from the farm.  Instead of the poor wages, housing, and lack of access to medical care of the plantation, they are now on their own.  This means subsisting on what day labor they can piece together.  But since the coffee crisis of the early 00's, day wages on plantations are hardly worth the effort.  Women and children sometimes do some picking; the men in the two communities of Nuevo San Jose and Fatima board an early morning pick-up when they can to work construction or dig potatoes in Xela or somewhere.  The work is far from steady, however, and most of the families seem to live day to day, hand to mouth.  

For a wealthy Westerner--and anyone on vacation in another country is wealthy by these standards--rural poverty can seem romantic at first glance: cue images of honest hard work and its wholesome fruits; vigorous health, fresh air, etc.  Of course the illusion falls apart upon closer inspection; poverty is never pretty, nor does it smell very good.  But in other poor rural parts of the world I've been to--Sikkim, say--there is at least some grain of truth to this myth.  People have a plot of land to sew and reap as they see fit and access to wild jungle beyond for foraging and hunting.  If nothing else, people are at least close to their food sources and able to eat simply but reasonably well.  Not so in Guatemala, where most of the fertile land is owned by coffee and cardamom fincas.  The villagers of Nuevo San Jose and Fatima own only the land their shacks sit on.  The food they buy is whatever their meager wages allow.  During the week I was there, this meant a lot of cheap pasta, carrots, eggs, a little rice, a little beans.  Not rice and beans--rice OR beans.  And for spices: not the traditional achiote, cassia cinnamon, thyme and laurel but artificial chicken bouillon, full of MSG and hydrogenated palm oil.  One of the few remnants of their traditional Mam Maya diet was the fresh corn tortillas at every meal.  Of course the women still know how to cook all the traditional delicacies--rich pepian, festive tamales, hot ponche de frutas, complex jocon--they just can't afford to make them except for big holidays. Strange to think that, while the poor majority can't afford to eat well, the helicopter-riding upper crust mostly doesn't want to: or rather, to them and to the slice of urban middle class, "eating well" means lots of fast food.  In Xela, the country's second city and the unofficial capital of the predominantly Maya Western highlands region, fried chicken joints were ubiquitous.

That city, somehow both gritty and picturesque, pulsed with life in a way that few of the more touristy sites manage to.  Here, amongst a thicket of fried chicken joints and a sprinkling of touristy restaurants, comida tipica was available from street vendors and comedores: thick stuffed corn pupusas, hot punches of milk and of fruit, thick and creamy atol de elote from the street, and richer tipica dishes like pepian and jocon from the restaurants. Christmas programs blared on loudspeakers from the Parque Central, and Catholic processions filled quiet streets with festive color and sound in the evening.  In the thin stark high elevation air, the pastel colors of old colonial buildings stood out starkly, almost glowed.  Though only an hour and a half by bus, it seemed a world away from little Fatima and Nuevo San Jose. Indeed, some of the villagers I spoke with had never visited Xela and certainly not the next stop on our itinerary, idyllic Lake Atitlan. A sobering thought as we headed off a little sheepishly to party at the lake, which Aldous Huxley called "too much of a good thing."

Our trip spiraled more or less into debauchery from that point.  In the bizarre Lake Atitlan hippie bubble of San Marcos, we discovered that 12 year old rum cost only 50 quetzales.  I have lots photos of sun on the water and tropical foliage.  Fighting briefly against the hedonistic tide, I did manage to take a morning class at IXIIM on some fundamentals of Mayan Medicine, adding to the modest knowledge I'd gleaned in the town of Colomba outside La Escuela de La Montana when my wonderful Spanish teacher Anny took me to visit the town's herbal farmacia.  Alex and I felt good to be supporting a Mayan youth organization when we hired on of their guides for a half day hike around the lake to Santa Cruz instead of piping our tourist loot straight back into the expat community.  But it was hard to escape the sense of privilege that comes with travel to poor countries, especially after the hard left perspective of La Escuela.

All resistance gave out when we reached our penultimate destination.  Actually the Bacchanalian spirit took hold of us even en route to Monterrico, Guatemala's only real beach party town.  It was getting to be Christmas, after all, and the reggaeton beats on our fourth or fifth second-class bus of the day stirred up a deep lust for beer and sunburns.  The following four days provided those pleasures in abundance, along with seafood at every meal and black volcanic sand in every bodily crevice.  I'm not proud to say it, but it was sweet oblivion.  It was, at least a multi-cultural oblivion: we befriended a motley crew of American Peace Corps volunteers; an itinerant, very drunk Polish photographer; and a miner-turned-millionaire from the Yukon and his 18 year old son.

Vacation definitely accomplished, it was time to make a brief stop in obligatory Antigua and head home.  A couple weeks later, all the traveling and sunbathing blurs together into one gesture.  It's the grit that stands out starkly in memory: kids playing in the dust in the villages where we ate our meals at La Escuela; the commercial town of Colomba with its fancy new evangelical churches and sublime giant Ceiba tree; the authenticity of Xela with its graffiti and bustling market.

      
Porch at La Escuela de La Montana


At La Escuela

Colomba street

Central American-style sink called a Pila

Resting and Digesting in Xela

Xela graffiti


Spices and Chiles for traditional dishes like Pepian

A bounty of comida tipica in Antigua

Lake Atitlan

Genuine artifact or otherwise: Mayan flute found while digging potatoes

Cathedral in Xela

Beautiful tree in San Marcos

Happy Pizza Tacos.  

Alex anointing himself with a little help from his friends




chocolate

various magical aguas

we caught the tail end of the Last Supper

Original artwork at Guatemala's only comic shop

Death by Seafood

Monterrico
the author keeping it comforable