Organist’s son haunted by father
Memoir an attempt to reconcile an unbridled passion for music with emotionally distant parent
The pipe organ has been dubbed the “king of instruments,” and for good reason: none rivals it in physical size and sonic impact. Organists often sit high above their audience in a thronelike enclosure where they control a series of keyboards, pedals, and “stops” which vary substantially between instruments (hence the origin of the expression “pulling out all the stops”).
A close relative of much-maligned bagpipes, pipe organs provide the soundtrack of choice for vampires, deformed conjurors, and devout Christians.
Mark Abley’s father, Harry, wasn’t any of those things, but the instrument was the great passion of his life and took him from movie houses to cathedrals to concert halls on either side of the Atlantic. He was never so happy, so confident, as when he was playing the organ. And though much of the latter took place in church, the true object of his worship wasn’t God, but Bach. It wasn’t lucrative.
To supplement his meagre earnings, Harry Abley taught piano and did clerical work, all of which made him different from the other fathers his son knew growing up in1960s Lethbridge and Saskatoon.
“Music ruled his life. It did not rule mine, and therefore his was a life I could not fully enter,” he writes. Despite being an adored only child, Abley would always play second fiddle to his father’s organ playing.
“He was a prince while performing. The feeling of power of this gave him must have been exhilarating. It compensated, no doubt, for much else.” That “much else” includes bitterness over his perceived failure to live up to his early promise as a musician. But Harry Abley was also a moody, socially awkward man who endured a lifelong struggle with depression.
Like many memoirs about difficult parents, The Organist is, in part, Abley’s attempt to process his own lingering resentments about his relationship with his father and to probe where the latter’s failings inform his own. (“I don’t suppose it will save me now to tell the story of my father. But I fear it may destroy me if I don’t.”) In his parents’ courtship letters, and in interviews with ex-students and neighbours, he’s surprised to learn of a warmer, less familiar Harry Abley, though that discovery’s pleasure raises a question: Why did his father save his best self for others? What emerges is a vivid portrait of a profoundly talented but emotionally elusive and restless man (after emigrating to Canada in the ’50s, the Ableys re-emigrated back to England, twice; once for just two weeks).
Abley, a Montreal-based author, poet, and ex-journalist, writes movingly and empathetically about his father’s final days facing cancer, and with illuminating candour about the mixed feelings his death induced. The Organist is a keenly observed, often elegant accounting of the transformative power of art and the limits of knowing others, even — or perhaps especially — those we feel we should know best.