Fathers

Sam Miller

Jonathan Cape, £14.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

THE influential editor and critic Karl Miller came from inauspicious beginnings and always, as his son Sam relates, “liked to describe himself as an orphan”. This was not strictly true, since his parents separated, rather than died, when he was very young, leaving him in the care of his grandmother and aunts in a poor but loving home in Edinburgh. Yet if the label was not technically applicable, it was nevertheless emotionally accurate, expressing the sense of abandonment

Karl must have felt the root of what he later referred to as “his divided self, his multiple personality”. He died in 2014 and, like many who lose a parent, his son Sam, a travel writer and journalist, has felt the urge to honour him in print. Fathers is not a simple response to loss and grief, however, although it is suffused with both. Nor is it a conventional family portrait. Going deeper than Karl’s memoir, Rebecca’s Vest, it reveals an undercurrent to the family in which Sam grew up, a secret that reverberated through the Miller marriage and the relationship between father and Sam, the middle of three children.

True to the spirit of the man to whom it pays homage, Fathers is a story of double-lives. Sam was in his teens when his mother told him he was not his father’s biological son, but the result of an affair she had had with her husband’s best friend, Tony White, with whom he had been at Cambridge. He was told not long after White died at the age of 45. Jane Miller cried when she revealed the news, and Sam hugged her. It would be 35 years before he and Karl discussed it, and then only fleetingly. Fathers, as a consequence, is Sam’s attempt “to understand...what being a parent, and more specifically a father, meant for Karl Miller”.

That he refers to his dad throughout by his full name should doubtless not be taken as indicating a lack of closeness, although it has a peculiar distancing effect. As becomes clear, the two were very attached to each other. In the last year of Karl’s life, Sam returned from India to spend as much time as possible with the man who had unquestioningly, unreservedly accepted and loved him as his own.

Fathers revolves around this decision. Karl Miller was no saint as a husband, but the opposite was true as a father. Offering a pen sketch of his dad, who left Scotland for Cambridge as a precocious young man, and settled in London for life, he treads lightly over his well-known career as literary editor of the Spectator and New Statesman, editor of the much-lamented The Listener and founding editor of the London Review of Books. Rather, he probes and reflects on the friendship between Karl and Tony, circling, assessing, and drawing apprehensively closer to their relationship, like a sapper with an explosive device.

As a graduate, Tony showed such promise as an actor he was dubbed the next Richard Burton, yet he gave it up to write, a profession in which he did not flourish. While Karl began to build a literary reputation, Tony turned handyman. He was the person people turned to when the roof leaked, or the kitchen needed painting. That he was charismatic is not in doubt. The village of Inishbofin in Ireland where he had a rundown cottage remembers him almost as a legend, as do his friends, all these years on.

Together, Karl and Tony founded the Battersea Park football team in 1956. When five years later Jane tells them she is pregnant, both suggest an abortion, and her doctor tells her, “you are the football”.

Sam’s mother is kept somewhat in the wings of this book, and casts only a watery shadow, yet in this you catch a glimpse of her mettle. Tracing the effect her infidelity had on the friends through old letters and photographs, Sam comes to the unexpected realisation that despite what some would see as the ultimate betrayal, their friendship survived. As he writes, “they remained strangely dear to each other as if they saw each other in themselves”.

There is a plainness in Sam’s writing that makes his sorrow and respect feel honest. He does not try to manipulate the reader, although the episodic way in which the story unreels can grate, feeling clumsy and occasionally allowing him off the hook, where dots cannot be joined, or conclusions drawn. To that extent, of course, it mirrors the nature of his quest, a sometimes stuttering, frustrating and eventually not fully knowable enterprise.

Despite its gaps or omissions, this is a heartfelt tribute to an

extraordinary man – Karl, not Tony – who emerges as profoundly likeable, admirable, and engaging. Sam Miller might not be his genetic heir, but these same qualities, and his father’s strength of character, are evident in him too. That surely tells you all you need to know about fatherhood.