A Letter to My Father

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Dear Dad,

It’s been seventy years since you left this world and more than eighty since you left me.  I have missed you my entire life, but for many years, as you know, I have felt your influence, indeed, your presence in my life, and I know that you have really never abandoned me.  I also know, as you are aware, that for a long time you have actually guided me and watched over me, as if you were my own guardian angel.  You know the evidence I have for that and how I learned some years ago how deeply you had loved me when I was a child.

At night, in my office, I often talk to you – actually, to the photograph I have of you that sits on my desk – and wonder where and how you now and ponder the quizzical fact that I am still here, now a very old man myself, while you were never allowed to live to reach the age of barely forty.  I hope before too long we will be together again, but for now I can only write to you and tell you more about how I have felt your presence in my life. 

I suppose I should begin by telling you about my return to California because that is when I began to feel your influence on me in an undeniable way.

However, to do that, I need to draw on some material I wrote about you in my book, My Father, Once Removed.  In that book, I tried to give an honest, but loving, portrait of you.  When I say honest, I mean to indicate that I was compelled to make some harsh judgments about your character for which I hope you’ll forgive me.  But as you will understand, some the character flaws I perceived in you I also find in myself.  Like father, like son.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote about you, Dad, after I returned to California thirty years ago….

After retiring from the university in 1994, I am no longer yoked to the academic year, so I can now undertake more extensive international lecture tours: to Germany, to Scandinavia and to Australia (twice). During my second Australian tour in March, 1996, I have a series of epiphanic experiences whose meaning gradually crystallizes for me: I must return home to California. Something is calling me there.

I heed the call. By the end of the year, I am living in California again, not far from where I grew up and went to school. Although I have visited California many times since I left it for graduate school, I have been away for almost forty years. “Forty years in the winterness,” I joke to my friends when they ask my reasons for returning to California. They wouldn’t understand the real reasons. In fact, I am not entirely clear about them myself. I only know that I needed to return. After a time, it seems I have been called back to childhood things, to those interests I had as a kid that I had to abandon when I left California and entered into the life that led to my professional career.

When I was a boy growing up during the Second World War, I discovered a book my mother had in her library that featured biographical sketches of the world great composers. I don’t remember its exact title, but I can still see the book in my mind’s eye and feel its heft. For some reason, even though I was not yet familiar with classical music, I loved reading about these composers, and since I had a head for dates, I soon memorized the years of their births and deaths. In those days, the great composers started with Bach and ended with Stravinsky (who was then listed as 1882 —), and seemingly constituted about a dozen in all. Early in my life, then, the stories of the lives of these men (and they were of course all men) impressed themselves upon me vividly. It’s odd—I don’t really remember many books I read as a child, but the memory of lying across my bed absorbed in my mother’s book about the great composers is still clear to me. From the outset, it seems, I was fascinated with the lives of composers.

The paragraph you have just read actually comes from the preface of a book I wrote some years ago that deals with three well-known composers, Leos Janacek, Peter Tchaikovsky and Edward Elgar, and the muses who inspired their work. In it, I was trying to explain to my readers how it happened that I came to write this book. I would like to quote some further passages from this preface next, even at the risk of some redundancy, because they will also serve to delineate the links in the chain of redintegration that reconnected me with you, Dad. 

At this point, I was describing my circumstances just after returning to California.

“I took some time to wind up my professional career, finishing a couple of books I had been working on, and then wondered what I would do next. I gave no conscious thought to music, but one day, during a period when I was ill for quite a while, found myself reading about Camille Saint-Saëns. In short order, I became completely engrossed in his life story about which I had not previously known much, and in my enthusiasm thought I might share a few of my thoughts about him in a little essay I would write just for the fun of it, mainly for my friends. Well, without recounting this whole improbable adventure, suffice it to say that I wound up writing an entire book about him, got it published by the sheerest fluke without even seeking a publisher, and even ended up collaborating on a screenplay about him. 

I had done all this really as something like a lark, but I found that writing about Saint-Saëns had triggered something in me— something new, and something old. I had become interested in composers again and felt a yen now not just to read about them but to write about them—despite having no professional credentials in music whatever, only the chutzpah of an academic who apparently had no qualms about venturing into territory where he had no right to tread.

There was more to it than that, however, though I did not realize at the time that these new stirrings were beginning to make themselves known to me.  To begin with, probably because of my interest in Saint-Saëns and his world, I became aware that I was now extremely curious about European history and culture, particularly in the nineteenth century—a domain that had never previously elicited any special appeal for me and that I had explored only cursorily when I had been a professor. Indeed, I had never even been to Europe until I was nearly fifty—though once I went, I found myself drawn back to it many times and came to love being there, almost no matter where in Europe I was. Now, however, I became very keen to inform myself about nineteenth-century Europe and somehow found it easy to imagine myself among the salonnières of Parisian cultural life in Saint-Saëns’ day. Doing so, I came to recognize that, despite having had a professional career as an academic psychologist, there was something in me that aspired to be identified with being an artist, especially one living in Europe—and that composers, for me, represented the very epitome of the type of artist I really longed to be and most admired.” 

It was then I thought of you again, and why you were so drawn to live and work as an artist in Europe after the war.

You see, what I haven’t told you is that when I was well into my forties, I began to have what I can only call some “intimations” of you. Not that I actually had a presentiment of your spirit, exactly, but, somehow, I felt you near to me after all this time. Despite my never having known you well when I was a little boy and having very few memorabilia of you (my mother always refused to discuss you with me and had discarded all of your paintings and destroyed virtually every photograph of you when she divorced you), I always felt that in my essence I was very like you. My mother, for example, was not at all musical, but the only artifact of yours still in my possession is a tattered copy of a piano score of Beethoven’s Rondo in G, with some annotations in your hand. Before an aunt of mine had come across it and given it to me, I had not even known that you played the piano, but obviously you did. Later, I learned that you even performed as a pianist in clubs.

In any case, as I was immersing myself in my musical researches for what turned out to be this book, I found I was having many more thoughts about you—almost as though your spirit was somehow trying to impress itself upon me. And then it hit—of course! I suddenly saw the connection.

When I had returned to California, to the area where I had grown up, and to the only place where I had actually spent time with you, I was, as it were, returning to what I loved as a child. Those composers were a part of it, you were a part of it, my artistic longings and aspirations were still in me. And you of course were an artist, had clearly loved music too, and had followed your passion for a life in Europe. The thought occurred to me that perhaps, if you had remained in my life, I would have followed an entirely different course in which art and music, not psychology, might have become my path, as it was for you, Dad. However, by returning to California, it was as if I were becoming your son again, feeling in myself your interests, having your tastes, and reconnecting to an alternative life you might have led me into. At the same time, I realized that it wasn’t too late—that I could enter into that life now, that I could still honor you, my father in me, and in that way draw close to you again. That perhaps over all these years you had been guiding me back to yourself, back to that boy who loved music and composers from the start, and, finally, back to my native soil where my soul had been forged and where I could at last resume the kind of life I had once seemingly been destined for. 

So, while it was my mother’s book I first recalled for you, it is really your world that seems to have called forth the work I have done here. In that sense, this volume is a kind of belated offering both to your spirit that still lives in me and to the life I might have been had if you and I not been parted from each other when I was young.

Before these realizations struck me, there had been other events that seemed almost “designed” to foster them. Some of them had to do with unexpected encounters with people from my past who suddenly turned up in my life again and came to play a critical role in my awakening to the more artistic side of my nature. One of these persons was a woman named Frances.

I first met Frances when I was a young professor and she was a graduate student, just a few years younger than myself. She took a course with me, and we had some very casual social contact afterward, but we had really never become friends and soon lost touch with each other. However, during the time I was working on my Saint-Saëns book, she was led to track me down, which initiated an email exchange between us. At that point, we had not had contact with each other for more than two decades. In recent years, however, Frances, who, like me, had become a professor of psychology, had developed an interest in native Americans and was spending a good deal of her time in the Southwest. Since I was now living in California, she had thought of me and had sought me out by asking my departmental chairman my whereabouts.

It turned out that Frances was extremely interested in my work about Saint-Saëns and classical music generally. She asked to read my manuscript and even other books that I had consulted in order do my research, which led to many stimulating discussions both through email and over the phone, and eventually in person, about my work and particularly about the world of Saint-Saëns and his circle. 

Like me, Frances had a deep interest in nineteenth-century French culture, and in a way we both came to live there. That is to say, we began to talk about the artists who flourished at that time almost as if they had become personal friends of ours. And for a time, we imagined ourselves as characters in that world. We would even write dialogues through email in which we had assumed distinct identities in the life of nineteenth century Parisian salons. She had become Francoise, an Irish-born Francophile, while I portrayed myself as a minor poet named Armand. We gave each of these characters a history and personality, and in our playful fashion we even inhabited them. 

Another person who had also come to play an important role in my life these days was Carolyn, my first girlfriend from more than sixty years ago when we were in high school together. Because we had not had contact with each other for so many years, much of our email was understandably devoted to trying to depict the kind of persons we had developed into since we were teenagers. At one point, I was having a very hard time getting Carolyn to understand how much I had come to identify a part of my personality with nineteenth century French artists, so I drew on my “Armand” character to try to make this clear to her:

I want to say just a little more about this artist-sensibility-in-Ken, however, just so you might understand this part of me better. First, I did not mean to imply—in fact I remember denying this explicitly in one of my letters to you—that I have any particular artistic talent. Truly, I do not feel as if I do. What I have is more of an identification with a particular type of artist. I can tell you more about him. He lives in Paris in the nineteenth century. He lives a rather dissolute life, probably as a minor poet. He has had a number of affairs, most of which have ended badly (think Musset), and, needless to say, he is very alienated from bourgeois society. He is into hashish (which, as you probably know, was the rage for a while among French intellectuals and artists of the nineteenth century), and suffers from tuberculosis from which he will die when relatively young. He is a frequent participant in the salon life of Paris, and he likes associating with the artists and philosophers of that time, as well as consorting with the denizens of the demimonde. He even has a name: it is Armand.

Now, I don’t mean that the Ken you know is this character. Of course not. Nor do I mean that I think I have been this guy in a past life. I’m not sure I even really believe in “past lives” as such. But when I read about guys like him, there is an immediate identification—I know this sort of raffish fellow and, in some way, I am like him inside.

This was something I never had to explain to Frances, however. As I was to learn, she had been aware of this side of me for a long time.

Because Frances and I were both psychologists, it was also natural that in our conversations and email correspondence, we talked a good deal about our families and our personal backgrounds—especially since we were really getting to know each other after so many years and had, in fact, never known one another well to begin with. And just as Frances had become engrossed in my nineteenth century preoccupations, she was also deeply interested in my character in this life. In this connection I vividly remember one telephone conversation we had in which she told me how she had perceived me when I was a young professor and she was my student.

What shocked me was her telling me that even then she saw me “as an artist, as a creative artist,” not a psychologist, which was to her mind just a role I had been playing as if it were a kind of performance. Therefore, it had come as no surprise to her that when I had discarded, as it were, my psychologist’s robe I had donned an artist’s smock. That’s how she had perceived me from the start, she said.

From her point of view, therefore, it was perfectly understandable—even fitting—that I had finally come to acknowledge how deep and abiding this aspect of my character was. And after I had come to tell her a good deal about you, she could see you in me, too. 

By the time I had completed my book on composers and their muses—another work in which my friend Frances had taken a great interest, so much so that she had almost become, I suppose, a muse of mine in the process—I found myself coming back to you again. Without really having been aware of it at the time of my writing that book, I had been dealing with you all the while. In a personal afterword to the book, I tried to express to my readers what I had found myself having to come to reckon with. It was not pleasant. In any event, I will let my closing words of that book conclude this blog.

“Perhaps I might be permitted one final personal reflection now that the work of this book is done. In the course of writing it, I did come to realize something about my father and how my feelings for him connect to the composers I chose to write about.

In a word, at one point I suddenly understood that in writing about them, I was actually writing about him. 

You see, from everything I have been able to learn about my father, he was in many respects like the composers I describe in this book—selfish, concerned mainly with his own work and career as an artist, a womanizer, and all in all, from what I have been told, not a very likable man. And like these men again, my father was clearly something of a Puer—intent on having his adventures and escaping as much as possible from the responsibilities of adult family life. Whether he acquired minions, as these composers all did, to help him escape from these onerous ties, I don’t know, but from all accounts I have of him, his art, his freedom and his amorous pleasures were indeed the ruling passions of his life. His proclivities remind me most of Tchaikovsky and Janacek, but there is even some suggestive resemblance to Elgar [who had in effect “married” his mother] because I understand that toward the end of my father’s life, and possibly earlier, he sought the favors of at least one older, maternal woman.

Yet, just as I am fascinated by the very artists whose lives I have researched despite, at the same time, often being repelled by their character, I feel the same ambivalence toward my father. I loved him, I’m sure, before I could know the kind of person he was. It makes me think that something of his ‘artistic personality” was imprinted on me early in my life and perhaps has led to my persisting interest in creative men who all too often turn out to be repugnant, self-seeking narcissists whose love for women is ultimately a form of ego-gratification. 

But discovering my father at the possible root of my draw to this kind of man wasn’t the only personal insight I had in the writing of this book. Ultimately, I could not avoid seeing something far more disturbing. It wasn’t just that my father was like these composers; it was that I was perhaps more like him than I had supposed, and that his effect on my life ran much deeper than simply my predilection for becoming engrossed in the lives of creative artists. So, it was not just my father’s ghost that I caught sight of here; it was my own shadow. 

Needless to say, this realization threw me into a funk for some time. But after brooding about this, I could see at least one way in which I was not merely my father’s son. However else I might be like him, I knew I wasn’t callous toward women. Indeed, I couldn’t help becoming aware that in writing this book I was no longer identifying so much with the composers themselves as with the women in their lives and with what they had suffered. After all, it is really to these women, not the artists they served, that this book is dedicated.

This gives me some hope that, notwithstanding my father’s undeniable influence on me and my nature, my search for him will serve to free me from blindly having to follow his blighted course to the end of my life. What this book ultimately was about for me personally, I now see, was not just my yearning to be reconnected with my father’s spirit but my own quest for redemption.”

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It must be said that however self-involved my father may have been, however centered on his own professional aims as he certainly was, and whatever the means he employed to reap the rewards he was able to extract from life, he was, at least toward me, a loving father. Whatever else may be said or speculated about my father, this has always been my enduring and ineradicable sense of him.  Somehow, I have always felt his love as the primordial fact of my life, even when he was forced to part from me, and even, especially, after his death.  Even now as I write these words.  And when I die, which must be soon enough now, I hope I will have my own confirmation of this when, at last, I may see him once more with his arms outstretched, waiting to welcome me home.