Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (1907)

I just didn't like the narrator which spoiled this for me - see my review http://www.dnsmedia.co.uk/reviews/view/1195 ( )

At the risk of showing my biases here, I can't help but see this as a quiet and deeply sad chronicle of the ways religious faith and the expectations it engenders in parents for their children can drive wedges between them and hollow people out. Or primarily that; it's also a record of the practices of a particular fundamentalist sect, the Plymouth Brethren; a historical document of one corner of the evolution controversy (the thing where humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time and the geological evidence was put on earth by God to trick us was not actually attributable to Philip Henry Gosse; it was a nasty caricature of his Omphalos by the press--funny how now it's considered fair comment and worthy of respect in some quarters); an examination of the furtive imaginations and priggish unpleasance of the stifled and melancholy child. But mostly it's the wedge-driving thing. Love your kids anyway--and that "anyway" should cover everything. ( )

This was recommended, in a newspaper article on Father’s Day, as a classic of the growing generational differences between a father and his son. This is true, and worthy of reading and contemplating for its universal message, but this was no ordinary family: Gosse the father was a zoologist of some repute, but he was also a man of severe, fundamental religious principles; his attempt to bridge the gap between faith and growing evidence for evolution was a failure and sidelined him from what might have been a brighter career as a scientist, as a cataloguer, as a proselytizer of science at the time when there was a growing hunger for exposure to such ideas in the general population. But his uncompromising religious faith provided the prism through which each and every action in life was to be measured or assessed and, all too often, found wanting. Nevertheless, as Gosse says in the opening lines of the book:

“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, on 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.”

Gosse junior led a very sheltered, restricted life as a child, one conditioned solely and completely by his father and his father’s expectation that Edmund would pursue some sort of life in the church. Edmund’s mother died when he was only seven, but she would probably not have been much of a mitigating influence as she shared her husband’s uncompromising view that all of life was to consecrated to the glory of God in preparation for life after death or for the imminent second coming. As a child, Edmund had no idea that his was a very different sort of upbringing as he had very little contact with children his own, or any other age; he was, in things religious, mature beyond his years and seen as something of a prodigy. But, he began to move apart as he grew into his teen years, as he became exposed to the wider worlds of literature and art and society, as he came to see even within the confines of the religious strictures of his life, that his father was not infallible and that God was likely neither omniscient nor omnipotent.

While maintaining his respect, and love, for his father, Gosse can see the limitations imposed on his father’s life: “My Father’s inconsistencies of perception seem to me to have been the result of a curious irregularity of equipment. Taking for granted, as he always did, the absolute integrity of the Scriptures, and applying to them his trained scientific spirit, he contrived to stifle, with a deplorable success, alike the function of the imagination, the sense of moral justice, and his own deep and instinctive tenderness of heart.”

Gosse’s final word on the pernicious effects of unblinkered fervor is still pertinent today:

“After my long experience, after my patience and forbearance, I have surely the right to protest against the untruth (would that I could apply to it any other word!) that evangelical religion, or any religion in a violent form, is a wholesome or valuable or desirable adjunct to human life. 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 the 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.”

This is also a book about a time and places that have long disappeared: life in small English villages in the second half of the 1800s, when government provided no social supports, when life was direct and often poor and often hard, when people were strongly influenced by class, by superstition, by beliefs, and when they found their pleasures without all the paraphernalia that characterize our world today.

This book is also a considerable pleasure to read. It is beautifully written, in a style of grammatical correctness and mellifluous expression that are, alas, also something of the past.

This memoir broke ground in the early 20th century by presenting generational conflict in an apparently frank, dispassionate, indeed "scientific" way. In its restrained way, it helped lead Gosse's countrymen from the piety of the Victorian vision of family life to Philip Larkin's definitive statement: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you." The truly fascinating part of reading this book is in the inexorable build up of the tension in the central relationship, a tension that is not fully realized until the extraordinary "Epilogue." It is also touching to witness the long-term effects of the father's indefatigable judgmentalism on the son's ingrained self-criticism. I am now going to provide an extended quote that will chill the blood of anyone possessed of an abundant super-ego in the form of an insistent voice of a strong parent figure. The fact that the author himself is not aware of life-blighting process that is just now beginning makes it all the more poignant: "But of all the thoughts which rushed upon my savage and undeveloped little brain at this crisis, the most curious was that I had found a companion and a confidant in myself. There was a secret in this world and it belonged to me and to a somebody who lived in the same body with me. There were two of us, and we could talk with one another. It is difficult to define impressions so rudimentary, but it is certain that it was in this dual form that the sense of my individuality now suddenly descended on me, and it is equally certain that it was a great solace to me to find a sympathizer in my own breast." That this "sympathizer" will mature into the child's most intolerant critic and implacable enemy is never recognized. "Ah, the pity of it Iago." ( )

Edmund Gosse (the son) wrote this memoir of his relationship with his father a hundred years ago. By all accounts he became the most convivial of men; his father Philip, a reclusive naturalist, the very opposite. Edmund was aware from an early age that his parents intended his life to be dedicated to their rather narrow view of Christ, and he was baptised at the early age of ten, becoming the equal of some adult members of the Plymouth Brethren and the superior, in spiritual terms, of many. His mother having died when he was young, his cramped life was to an extent alleviated by the benign influence of his Quaker stepmother who while religious was not bigoted. As an account of the effect of religious fanaticism on an intelligent child it is still difficult to beat. I have always wondered if Philip Gosse was one of the originals from which Stella Gibbons drew her portrait of Amos, preacher at the Church of the Quivering Brethren. ( )