Karl Miller used to joke about his hypochondria: “No poor soul was ever iller / than Karl Fergus Connor Miller.” When in his early 80s he really was ill, with cancer, his son Sam, a writer and foreign correspondent with the BBC, returned to the family home in Chelsea to spend time with him – not out of guilt or duty, but from “a selfish longing to be with this man who had done so much to shape me”. At 11 every morning, he and his brother Daniel would gather at Karl’s bedside for coffee, poetry, laughter and reminiscence. Karl found the sessions a tonic and recovered sufficiently for Sam to risk a short trip to India. While he was there, in September 2014, Karl fell down the stairs and died.
This book began as an extension of the speech Sam made at his father’s funeral – and as a way to cope with his grief. It has become something else in the process: an exploration of love, sex, genetic disposition and what makes us who we are. Doubles was the title of one of Karl’s books; dual allegiance is the subject of Sam’s.
His first and last allegiance is to Karl, whose unlikely journey – from a working-class Scottish childhood to become one of the great literary editors – is concisely recalled. We learn of Karl’s indebtedness to the grandmother and maiden aunts who raised him, of his precocious intelligence (he captained his Edinburgh school to victory on the BBC radio quiz show Top of the Form), his poetic ambitions, his teenage affair with a married bohemian naturist called Lotte, his National Service years (when he scored 0 out of 20 on an army intelligence test for reassembling a bicycle pump), his time at Cambridge (where he met his wife, Jane, and numbered Thom Gunn among his friends), and his first journalistic job, at 26, on the Spectator.
All this is history that predates Sam (born 1962), and though he’s able to supplement Karl’s two memoirs, Rebecca’s Vest and Dark Horses, he worries not just that there’s something “leaden” in the recounting of old anecdotes but that he’s guilty of holding something back. Indeed he is, but first there’s a tender portrait of Karl as Dad – a more indulgent and domesticated figure than those who knew him only professionally might guess. He liked to describe himself as an orphan, and though this wasn’t strictly correct (his parents weren’t dead, just living apart from each other – and from him), it affected his own feelings about fatherhood. No child under his roof would ever suffer abandonment or rejection.
That’s the other story Sam has to tell, the one hinted at in the title of his book – a revelation to the reader, if not to him. In 1958, Karl and Jane, two years married, had a holiday in Rome with Tony White, whom they’d known since Cambridge days. When Karl returned to London for work, Tony and Jane stayed on, to await the arrival of a mutual friend – and one thing led to another. Jane owned up to Karl when she got back, and Tony wrote him a letter, hoping the betrayal wouldn’t wreck their friendship. Karl’s reply doesn’t survive, but he and Tony remained close. They resumed playing for the football team they had founded, Battersea Park. Later the affair resumed too, and Jane became pregnant. There was talk of an abortion, but she couldn’t go through with it. When Sam was born, Karl accepted him as his own.
Few people knew or suspected the truth. But Sam looked nothing like his older brother, Daniel, or younger sister, Georgia, and it was always intended that he be told. One day, at 13, while he and Jane were painting his bedroom, he was. By then Tony had been dead for 18 months: aged 45, of a pulmonary embolism, a month after breaking his leg playing football. Sam had gone to the wake. And he had memories of Tony as “the loudest and largest” of his parents’ friends. But he wasn’t sure how to process the discovery. Here he is earnestly doing so four decades later.
To have a father who’s the stuff of legend can be a mixed blessing; to have two of them is doubly confusing. For every homage that has been paid to Karl (among which Andrew O’Hagan’s stands out), there’s a matching one to Tony. “Friends and lovers / All had their own versions of him”, Gunn wrote; others recalled a “prince of panache” and “master of transformations”, bear-like, polyamorous, a hippie ahead of his time. At Cambridge, his acting parts included Romeo and Cyrano, and he looked set to be the next Richard Burton. But he packed it in after two seasons at the Old Vic, and worked as a lamplighter in the East End before moving to Inishbofin off the coast of Ireland and a succession of other pursuits: fisherman, lobster-farmer, builder, translator, ghostwriter. Though he called himself a “fuck up”, a footloose lifestyle clearly suited him. And whether a Lancelot or Lothario, he never lacked for lovers.
It’s mostly thanks to Jane, who kept Tony’s letters, wrote a private fictional account of their affair and retrieved a metal box containing his belongings from his flat, that Sam has been able to reconstruct the father he never knew. Did Tony show any interest in knowing him? A little, and in time there might have been more. But Sam needed a home and, with Tony too itinerant to be involved, Karl became his father in all but sperm, without (it seems) any fuss, anguish or recrimination.
There has been some remarkable dad lit over the last year, including memoirs by Hisham Matar and Keggie Carew, and Sam Miller’s is a fascinating addition to the genre. Karl used to put a capital W (meaning “winsome”) in the margins of his son’s drafts so as to rein him in. Here the structure of the book – short, numbered sections – offers a similar curb. There may be some who would have preferred the story to stay in-house. And as Sam is quick to acknowledge, others would tell it differently. But his, the son’s version, is sunny: generous in spirit, exculpatory in tone, grateful rather than self-pitying. It doesn’t convey the charisma of Tony White (maybe you had to be there), but Jane and Karl come out of it very well.
• Fathers is published by Jonathan Cape. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
