Father and Son

"I have read innumerable books over my lifetime and some I would have said in the past were wonderful. But the only book that, in my eyes, has remained wonderful is Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son . When it was first published in 1907 it was shocking because up till then no son would ever criticise his father. With biographies and autobiographies, and this book is both, there are those that concentrate on emotion, certainly the misery memoirs – how I suffered – and others that concentrate only on events and actions – what I did. But this is great as both autobiography and biography because you see how his feelings and his thinking process were all one. He talks about realising his mother is going to die and writes that he ‘was possessed by a great anger’. Which is a wonderful description of what happens when cognition and feeling come together. The book demonstrates how children, who are not stupid, work out all sorts of things. Children are busy assessing and looking with a critical eye, even when adults are trying to keep them in the dark. He was brought up among the Plymouth Brethren. His father wanted him to become a special child, which means an especially religious child. And Edmund very dutifully did all the things he was required to do but belief never took hold. And he describes how he was experiencing this as a child. There is a passage in the book where he discovers that his parents don’t know everything, that his father doesn’t know everything. Yes. But Edmund has within him a companion that he can talk to, and he realises consciously that an internal dialogue is happening and that only he is on his own side. Some children find that they can’t go on to the next step, of discovering that the only person they can rely on is themselves – it is just too frightening, and so they carry on with that fantasy. And in religion, certainly the Christian religion, God is the father. So you convert your fantasy that your father is indestructible and infallible into religion – you have to recognise your own father’s fallibility but then you’ve got God. Edmund Gosse couldn’t do that. At one point he conducts a lovely little experiment where he worships a chair. His father has told him that God will strike him down. Nothing happens. This book is by a man who realised early on that to survive in society you often need to lie to other people but you should be very judicious about the lies that you tell and to whom. But the one person you must never lie to is yourself. That is what I say all the time – no matter how unpleasant your situation, you mustn’t lie to yourself because disaster follows. But is it not a bit like Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’, in that you don’t know what it is that you are not facing up to? I think you know when you lie to yourself. There are lots of things that you get wrong. For example, you thought you had a wonderful friend who would always be there and then, oh dear, you got that wrong. That happens, of course. But when you lie to yourself one part of your brain is containing what we know to be true and in another part of the brain we say, ‘No, this isn’t happening.’ So we are trying to hold on to two opposing ideas. I think the brain finds this very difficult when there are two opposing ideas that the person has created. You put up a barrier between what you actually know and what you are telling yourself – the brain has got enough problems trying to make sense of the world without having to maintain these barriers. If you do that you find that you just can’t control your own behaviour – you find yourself doing things that are inexplicable."

"There are autobiographies that are fantastically egotistical, but they tend to be not very good books. The universal is in the small. You write about your own life, but if you write about it with enough love and care then it will have the universal running through it. This book is a good illustration. It’s alive with specificity but it’s full of the universal – fathers and sons, children growing up and outstripping their parents. The book is subtitled “A Study of Two Temperaments”. Gosse’s father, Philip Henry Gosse, was an eminent zoologist in the mid-19th century. But he was also a member of a Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren, fundamentalists who thought that the Bible was literal truth. When Darwin published On t he Origin of Species in 1859, this was a huge intellectual crisis for Philip Gosse. His instinct as a scientist was to recognise the truth of what Darwin said , but his instinct as a Christian was to deny it. Much of Edmund Gosse’s early view of the world is blinded by this oppressive faith, but he eventually steps outside his father’s authority, outside his sway. And while most of the book is written with a quiet attention to detail, with a patience and respect for concrete things, it ends with a polemical passage against religious fundamentalism that wouldn’t look out of place as a memorial to the dead at ground zero in New York. He writes: “It divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing.”"