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.