Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
5.0 out of 5 stars
Child is father to the Man? ...., 6 Feb 2009
This is one of the best biographies which I have ever been lucky enough to read. (In the interests of brevity, I will refer to the elder Gosse by his initials PHG, the younger as Edmund, and "Father and Son" as F&S.) I read it because F&S is one of my favourite books, and I expect most readers will have reached it via this route. However, even ignoring Edmund's role this stands as a superbly written biography of an "eminent Victorian". As a young man PHG spent several years in the wilds of Newfoundland, then in the warmer climates of Alabama and Jamaica. This sparked his interest in natural history, and he became one of the greatest marine biologists of his time. The book covers PHG's successes, and also what were probably the saddest events of his life (this much is totally in line with F&S):
-the tragic early death of his beloved first wife
-the failure of his fundamentalism to overcome Darwin's theory of evolution
-his failure to make Edmund a fanatically devout Christian like himself.
The book throughout has lavish illustrations, many of them PHG's own beautiful and meticulous drawings of flora and fauna.
But, inevitably, much of the interest centres on Edmund. The book challenges two popular views implicit in F&S:
-that Edmund's upbringing could have literally driven him mad. This is suggested in the blurb on the jacket of my 1970 edition of F&S, and Ann Thwaite quotes Virginia Woolf as saying that PHG had an "almost insane religious mania". Edmund's upbringing was incredibly constricting, but there could be worse ways to bring up a child (especially for a grieving lonely widower, which PHG was until his happy second marriage). Both Edmund and Ann Thwaite make it clear that PHG was a very loving, caring father.
-that, once Edmund left home, he and his father became forever estranged. (To be fair to Edmund, the first paragraph of F&S says: "neither, to the last hour [i.e. PHG's death] ceased to respect the other, or to regard him with a sad indulgence".) Ann Thwaite suggests that, in fact, their relationship improved once Edmund had matured and married:
"The mutual reproaches at last ceased; the mutual love of father and son remained"
"They could not be friends; they could only always be father and son - but with all the tenderness that that can imply".
As an example, she quotes Edmund's emotional account of PHG's very last outing, when he was driven round his favourite Torbay by Edmund himself.
In the preface to F&S, Edmund said that he was writing while his memory was "still perfectly vivid", and that "at only one point has there been any tampering with precise facts". However, Ann Thwaite quotes Edmund as describing his memory as "like a colander", and she describes several minor and some major events involving PHG in respect of which Edmund, in F&S, was either remembering inaccurately or was being creative with the truth.
Next stop for me - to read Ann Thwaite's biography of Edmund, and Edmund's "conventional" biography of PHG, which preceded F&S.
|
|
|
|
by Ann Thwaite
by Seamus Heaney
by Charlotte Mosley
by Hilary Mantel
