Forrest Reid (1875–1947)

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/apostate-by-forrest-reid/

I was vaguely aware of the Northern Irish writer Forrest Reid. This is the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1926, covering his boyhood up to the point of his first real love affair. He was born in 1875, and his father died when he was six (and his beloved nurse Emma returned to England around the same time, which seems to have left a larger gap in his life), with Forrest as the youngest of half a dozen surviving show more children. His education was very patchy, starting with a late stint at Miss Hardy’s preparatory school and then a few years at Inst, which was not exactly an intellectual powerhouse at that stage. Meanwhile he played with the neighbourhood kids, who seem to have been generally pretty nasty.

As with H.G. Wells, who was born nine years earlier, a slow recovery from serious childhood illness got Reid into reading serious (and also frivolous) literature. Then a friendship with John Park, the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen’s University, brought him into contact with the deeper currents of philosophy. This meant that he was completely unsuited to the office job in a tea merchant that his family eventually found for him. He was also quietly opposed to a lot of the norms of the conservative Belfast Protestant society of his roots. Clergymen (including his uncle) are figures of fun in the book, and as soon as Reid had been confirmed he announced that he was not attending church any more, and didn’t – hence his embrace of apostasy in the book’s title.

What I particularly loved about this book was the intimate and detailed account of the geography of Mount Charles, the Belfast street where he grew up, and the surrounding bits of University Street, Botanic Avenue, etc, in the 1880s when these were all relatively new buildings and all inhabited by families (or unmarried professors), as opposed to the mix of student accommodation and university-related offices on Mount Charles now and for most of my lifetime. I always find it appealing when a book has a strong sense of place, and even more so when it’s a place I have known since my own childhood, but roughly a century earlier. (There are also excursions to an uncle’s vicarage at Ballinderry, which is less well known to me.)

The City Hall feels so solid and iconic to us today that one easily forgets that it is less than 120 years old, and my great-grandmother, who was born in 1887 and lived until I was 18, would have seen it being built when she was a teenager visiting from her Lower Bann home, and would have known the White Linen Hall which preceded it. And I had not realised (though I should have) that the Linen Hall Library was based in the old Linen Hall before being forced to move across the road; I was one of its governors in the mid 1990s.

I’d love to find a few weeks somehow to produce an annotated version of this book, chasing down the literary and personal references. Reid died in 1947, so his works are out of copyright now. If anyone would like to join forces on such a project, let me know. In the meantime, you can get Apostate here. show less

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/private-road-by-forrest-reid/

This is the second volume of Belfast-born writer Forrest Reid’s autobiography, published in 1940, fourteen years after Apostate, the first volume. I did not find Private Road as interesting; a lot of it is about the back-story behind each of Reid’s novels (more than a dozen at that stage), and as I haven’t read any of them, I did not learn much. There are however some interesting chapters about his education, at Inst and then show more at Christ’s, Cambridge, and about the rather small circle of literary enthusiasts in Belfast in the early 1900s; and there’s also a rather moving chapter about his love for his dogs and cats (in that order).

Reid does not seem to have had a long-term romantic partner, though it’s fairly clear what was going on with his series of male house-mates; there are a few women in the narrative (and I’m glad to see that he stayed in touch with his nurse Emma) but it’s mostly a story of men talking to men. Or not talking – an early dramatic moment is his friendship with Henry James, cut short when James apparently was mortally offended by Reid’s dedication to him of his very gay second novel, The Garden God.

I think that if I were going to make a serious effort to get into Reid’s fiction, and the circles he moved in, this would be a really interesting book, and I wonder if someone enterprising might produce an annotated version; but unlike with Apostate, I am not particularly interested in taking that on myself. show less

I had totally forgotten I'd read this book before, it hadn't left any mark. And re-reading it, nothing in it provoked any sense of recollection. On the whole, I found it a bit strange, but young Tom's yearning for a friend and for somebody who understands him, unlike his stepmother and stepbrothers, was rather touching.

Forrest Reid was a very popular and highly-respected writer in his day, the friend of E.M. Forster and Walter de la Mare, but is almost totally forgotten these days. You are unlikely to have come across him unless you have a particular interest in Ulster writers or in pioneers of gay writing (two interests that don't necessarily coincide very often!).

This novel is the third part of his "Tom" trilogy, published in 1944. The three parts were written in reverse chronological order: in this one show more we meet Tom at the age of eleven, living an idyllic life in rural Ireland in his last summer of freedom before starting proper school. It's all very Natural History, full of early-20th century charm (you half expect Romany of the BBC to turn up with his gypsy caravan and tape recorder). If you can get past the dogs, squirrels and water-rats — beware: they talk (Reid was a fan of the Doctor Doolittle books) — then there is a charming and innocent friendship with a farm boy that may or may not be suggestive, but you may well feel as though you're drowning slowly in syrup before you ever get that far. show less