Father and Son Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Edmund Gosse

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Copyright

  About the Book

  The classic of memoir of inter-generational strife, with an afterword from author of The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry and an introduction from Anthony Quinn

  Subtitled ‘a study of two temperaments’ Edmund Gosse’s childhood memoir tells the often fractious, often comic story of Gosse’s relationship with his authoritarian father. A pioneering naturalist and marine biologist, Philip Henry Gosse’s strictly religious worldview is brought into crisis by the discoveries of Charles Darwin and the death of his wife – and Edmund’s mother – Emily. As Edmund breaks away from his father’s influence, the evolution from one epoch to the next is described in all of its struggle, humour and glory.

  About the Author

  Sir Edmund William Gosse was born in 1849 to the Naturalist Philip Henry Gosse and the poet and illustrator Emily Bowes. Gosse was raised within the devout Protestant Sect, the Plymouth Brethen, and after the death of his mother, Gosse’s father struggled to reconcile his faith with the increasing evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution. The psychological struggle to break away from his father’s influence formed the subject of his 1907 biography, Father and Son. A poet and a critic, as well as the librarian of the House of Lords library, Gosse wielded considerable influence in the art world of the early 20th century, and was instrumental in introducing the works of Isben to the English-speaking world. Gosse was knighted in 1925, three years before his death in 1928.

  ALSO BY EDMUND GOSSE

  Poetry

  Madrigals, Songs, and Sonnets

  On Viol and Flute

  King Erik

  New Poems

  Firdausi in Exile

  In Russet and Silver

  Collected Poems

  Hypolympia, or the Gods on the Island

  The Autumn Garden

  Non-fiction

  English Odes

  Gray

  Seventeenth Century Studies

  Life of Thomas Gray

  Life of William Congreve

  A History of Eighteenth Century Literature

  The Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S.

  The Secret of Narcisse

  The Jacobean Poets

  Life and Letters of Dr John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s

  Gossip in a Library

  A Short History of Modern English Literature

  Illustrated Record of English Literature

  Jeremy Taylor

  Life of Sir Thomas Browne

  French Profiles

  Two Visits to Denmark, 1872, 1874

  Portraits and Studies

  Collected Essays

  Inter Arma

  The Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Three French Moralists

  Some Diversions of a Man of Letters

  Malherbe and the Classical Reaction in the Seventeenth Century

  More Books on the Table

  Introduction

  In literature’s overgrown cemetery lie graves beyond number of men and women whose names once flared during their lifetime and now languish in cold oblivion. The writer and critic Edmund Gosse enjoyed a long life (1849–1928) and a busy career, but his refined style quickly dated and on his death his work fell into neglect. His would be among those unvisited tombs today had he not written one astonishing thing, his memoir, Father and Son. It is in every way a sensational book – sensational in its boldness, in its disclosure, and in its impact. When published in October 1907 such was its author’s trepidation that at first it appeared anonymously. Once assured of its reception Gosse appended his name, and the book’s reputation grew steadily. In a letter to the author in February 1908 the American scholar Howard Furness declared it ‘the best you have written and the most enduring’, a shrewd judgement, and a prescient one.

  It is difficult for a modern reader to appreciate quite how much courage it took Gosse to write this book. In the twenty-first century the confessional memoir is a commonplace, and a matter of entitlement; indeed the urge to reveal, to turn one’s private life inside out, has become almost pathological. Father and Son is subtitled ‘a study of two temperaments’, his own and that of his father, Philip, a renowned marine biologist and a fanatical Calvinist. Their relationship would become a struggle of wills, which in an age of repression and filial obedience was fraught enough in itself. That the son then wrote an intimate and agonised account of that struggle would, and did, offend readers still attached to the old proprieties. Gosse was born a Victorian, and was himself vulnerable to the blind spots of his age. He condemned E. M. Forster’s Howards End, for instance, as ‘vile’ and ‘obscene’ for its depiction of an unwed lady with child. But he also straddled the modern, and if he felt bound to honour his father and his mother he was also determined to pursue the emotional truth of his upbringing – to honour his vocation as a writer.

  Gosse had in fact already written a biography of his esteemed parent, The Life of Philip Henry Gosse FRS, in 1890. Fifteen years later, at the urging of a friend, he decided to recast the story from his own perspective, adopting a first-person narrative that embraced the period from his birth to his flying the family nest, aged seventeen, for London. So Father and Son breaks new ground in life-writing, being neither straight biography nor autobiography but what Peter Abbs has called ‘an experimental form combining both’. One may detect a slight nervousness in the author’s throat-clearing Preface as to what his book will actually constitute. He informs us that it is offered as ‘a document’ and ‘the diagnosis of a dying Puritanism’; a paragraph later it is ‘the narrative of a spiritual struggle’, and now ‘a genuine slice of life’ that mixes ‘comedy and tragedy’. Already the book’s identity is shifting, and it has not even begun. Comedy and tragedy, though, are very soon established as the contrasting keys of the narrative music, handled at times with such delicacy that the one can hardly be distinguished from the other. In short, it is one of the funniest books I have ever read, and one of the saddest.

  Gosse’s parents, both Plymouth Brethren, were neither of them young when they married – he was nearly thirty-eight, she was forty-two. Emily Gosse wrote religious verse and ‘was possessed of a will like tempered steel’. She is the more vivid parent in the early stages of the book, a gifted storyteller who suppressed that instinct on the grounds that a fictitious narrative was ‘a sin’. Gosse discovered after her death a secret diary she kept in which she laments this passion for inventing stories, without ever explaining why. He wonders in retrospect if she might have become a novelist. Something of her talent was clearly handed down to the son, whose droll and oddly mischievous voice bewitches us, especially in the remembrance of his fledgling years. Devoted to their evangelical work, his parents left the young Edmund to his own devices, though he had no companions and claimed never to have spoken to another child until he was eight.

  Disaster struck the family in 1856 when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Three times a week she travelled from their home in Islington to Pimlico for treatment, an arduous journey perhaps lightened by the company of a pertly inquisitive seven-year-old who believed himself his mother’s protector. Harrowed by pain though she was, Emily Gosse continued to pre
ach the Lord’s word to passengers in whatever train or omnibus they happened to find themselves. The son closely observed his mother’s missionary zeal and ‘imitative imp that I was’ would sometimes take part in these bizarre conversations and thrill to compliments paid to his ‘infant piety’. When they moved to lodgings close to the doctor’s house he became his mother’s sole companion and witnessed her excruciating decline, yet even here he is pleased to recall an amusing incident in which he gave his temporary minder (‘Blind leader of the blind!’) the runaround. At the last his mother showed honesty as well as bravery: urged to confess her ‘joy’ in her imminent communion with the Lord she replied, ‘I have peace, but not joy. It would not do to go into eternity with a lie in my mouth’. Again, the cussed spirit, and the grave wit, would survive in the son.

  The hammer-blow of her death would have significant consequences for her loved ones. The immediate relief for Edmund was a sojourn with his cousins in Clifton, where he finally became acquainted with other children and lived a brief, blessed period as ‘an ordinary little boy’. Prior to this experience, he says, ‘I had no humanity’, such was the screen of sainted protectiveness his parents had raised about him. Confined once more in Islington the boy reverts to solitary daydreaming, face pressed to the windowpane watching the Mayhew-like ensemble of characters who troop up and down their street, this one selling onions, that one exhorting passers-by to ‘watch and pray’ – an injunction Gosse had absorbed well beyond the point of satiety. In this house of mourning there is one unforgettably moving scene of the son sitting quietly on his father’s knee, both lost in their grief as the light fades from the study. It also marks a moment, surprisingly rare in the book, where both father and son are pictured absolutely at one. ‘I do not think that at any part of our lives my father and I were drawn so close to one another as we were in that summer of 1857’.

  A second disaster, this time self-made, followed soon after. Philip Gosse, a familiar of Darwin, published a book, Omphalos, in which he tried to reconcile geology and religion. It exposed him to the ridicule of colleagues and public, and cast him into an intellectual wilderness. Mortified and depressed, the father decamped from London with his son to settle in the obscurity of coastal Devon among a ‘peasant’ community of Plymouth Brethren who took his word as holy writ. It was an act of wilfulness, and could never have satisfied a man of true erudition. Here the pair find a brief happiness hunting around rock pools and examining the brittle wonders of sea anemones, shells, fronds and fishes. Gosse describes these moments of togetherness in almost idyllic terms, as if to harden himself for the social and spiritual battles to come. In doing so he was compelled to foster two different selves. One was pliant and respectful, and submitted himself to be publicly baptised and dedicated at the age of ten; the other was restless and passionate, a creature alive to doubt and ambivalence. The one had to deny the pleasure of imagination; the other was eager to explore it.

  What lends Father and Son a fascination beyond the mere eccentricity of a puritan upbringing is the elusive tone of voice. Gosse clearly intends it to be wry, detached, cultivated, even as he shudders to recall the endless dreary Sundays of strict observance or the blinkered attitudes of their tiny rural community. But when scrutinising relations with his father his irony sometimes oversteps the mark and we feel what his biographer Ann Thwaite called ‘the claws in the velvet paws’. Picturing his father fervently at prayer, for example, he offers this delicate swipe: ‘I hope I am not undutiful if I add my impression that he was not displeased with the sound of his own devotions’. (Note how he doubles down with the double negatives.) Remembering his father’s uncharacteristic indulgence of new friends he describes his mood as ‘unusually humane’; or his reading of Walter Scott’s poems to his wife with ‘unwonted geniality’. One senses the tone poised on a knife-edge between praise and prickliness. As David Grylls remarks in his study Guardians and Angels, echoing Thwaite’s image of feline aggression, ‘When Gosse squeezes out a good word for his father, it is seldom unaccompanied by a reproachful scratch’.

  In the book’s startling Epilogue the language of hostility is more pronounced, the claws fully extended. Gosse’s father, a stern and forbidding presence hitherto, now takes on the aspect of a religious tyrant, bent on exercising an absolute control over his principal subject. The gospel of gentleness and compassion is fled, and in its place reigns a jealous and vengeful God. The son becomes simply a victim of his father’s merciless inquisition (‘I was naked, he in a suit of chain armour’) and his torment is expressed in words of plaintive abjection: ‘It was the prerogative of his faith to know, and of his character to overpower objection; between these two millstones I was rapidly ground to powder’. His quoting a letter of his father’s, dispatched after the son’s unhappy visit to Devon, seems to mark a final break in their relations; protagonist and antagonist have fought themselves to an exhausted standstill.

  The truth of the matter is less clear-cut. In fact Gosse continued to correspond with his father into his twenties, and though their differences were irreconcilable they were not estranged. Philip Gosse lived for another twenty years after the events described in the book, though his death in August 1888 sounds as traumatic as anything his son ever experienced. Gosse, late in his own life, told Harold Nicolson the terrible story of his father’s last racked hours. He and his wife Nellie watched helpless as Philip Gosse railed on his deathbed against God, cursing Him for treachery. As Ann Thwaite recounts in her biography, ‘The son and his calm strong wife knew that the father had lived his life in false hope and a faith that could not be rewarded on earth. They knew, though he had amazingly denied the knowledge, that he must die like everyone else’. It marked an extraordinary end to an extraordinary life.

  What are we to call Father and Son finally? Not a ‘document’, for sure, but nor ‘a slice of life’ either. On one level it is a marvellous feat of historical evocation, if not always a strictly reliable one. (His friend Henry James once remarked of Gosse that he had ‘a genius for inaccuracy’.) As an intimate glimpse into the religious and intellectual upheavals of mid-Victorian Britain in the wake of Darwin it is exceptional; at times we can almost smell the atmosphere of gloom that suffused Philip Gosse’s study. On another level it is a ‘voice book’ possibly without precedent, a voice that ranges from tender to troubled, from puckish to urbane, from sorrowful to unillusioned. It deftly melds domestic comedy with heart-piercing tragedy. Its influence touched a new generation of readers in the last years of the twentieth century. First, Peter Carey drew on its central pairing for his 1988 Booker Prize-winning novel Oscar and Lucinda, modelling Oscar’s father directly on Philip Gosse. Then, in the early 1990s, two ground-breaking memoirs about difficult fathers – Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? – nodded to the formative brilliance of Gosse’s book and inadvertently opened the floodgates to a new genre: the dysfunctional family memoir. Gosse cannot of course be held accountable for his distant heirs. But we can say that in throwing open the windows on his childhood he began to clear the air of the previous age’s neurotic repression. He brought a new stylistic energy and a deeper feeling to the literature of remembrance. These are enduring qualities. Look upon this work, ye mighty, and rejoice.

  Anthony Quinn, 2018

  Preface

  AT THE PRESENT hour, when fiction takes forms so ingenious and so specious, it is perhaps necessary to say that the following narrative, in all its parts, and so far as the punctilious attention of the writer has been able to keep it so, is scrupulously true. If it were not true, in this strict sense, to publish it would be to trifle with all those who may be induced to read it. It is offered to them as a document, as a record of educational and religious conditions which, having passed away, will never return. In this respect, as the diagnosis of a dying Puritanism, it is hoped that the narrative will not be altogether without significance.

  It offers, too, in a subsidiary sense, a study of th
e development of moral and intellectual ideas during the progress of infancy. These have been closely and conscientiously noted, and may have some value in consequence of the unusual conditions in which they were produced. The author has observed that those who have written about the facts of their own childhood have usually delayed to note them down until age has dimmed their recollections. Perhaps an even more common fault in such autobiographies is that they are sentimental, and are falsified by self-admiration and self-pity. The writer of these recollections has thought that if the examination of his earliest years was to be undertaken at all, it should be attempted while his memory is still perfectly vivid and while he is still unbiased by the sensibility of advancing years.

  At one point only has there been any tampering with precise fact. It is believed that, with the exception of the Son, there is but one person mentioned in this book who is still alive. Nevertheless, it has been thought well, in order to avoid any appearance of offence, to alter several of the proper names of the private persons spoken of.

  It is not usual, perhaps, that the narrative of a spiritual struggle should mingle merriment and irony with a discussion of the most solemn subjects. It has, however, been inevitable that they should be so mingled in this narrative. It is true that most funny books try to be funny throughout, while theology is scandalised if it awakens a single smile. But life is not constituted thus, and this book is nothing if it is not a genuine slice of life. There was an extraordinary mixture of comedy and tragedy in the situation which is here described, and those who are affected by the pathos of it will not need to have it explained to them that the comedy was superficial and the tragedy essential.

  September 1907

  Chapter 1

  THIS BOOK IS the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciences and almost two epochs. It ended, as was inevitable, in disruption. Of the two human beings here described, one was born to fly backward, the other could not help being carried forward. There came a time when neither spoke the same language as the other, or encompassed the same hopes, or was fortified by the same desires. But, at least, it is some consolation to the survivor, that neither, to the very last hour, ceased to respect the other, or to regard him with a sad indulgence.