Gosse the father
Jane Gardam
GLIMPSES OF THE WONDERFUL: THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE by Ann Thwaite Faber, £25, pp 387, ISBN 0571193285 In 1984 Ann Thwaite published a life of Edmund Gosse, 'mandarin and literary politician', as John Gross has called him, of the Victorian critical scene, author of multitudinous essays and a few flimsy collections of verses (On Viol and Flute, etc!) and mountains of literary criticism. Though he was a dubious scholar the great writers of the day were for some reason enchanted by him. They also feared him. He had 'a feline eye', and kept a notebook. 'A man whom one would prefer to survive,' said even his friend of 30 years, Henry James Edmund Gosse wrote one minor classic, Father and Son, which is still in print, an apparently blazingly honest autobiography — there were few at the time (1907) — about his sufferings as the motherless only child of the great naturalist and Christian fundamentalist, Philip Henry Gosse. Father and son were bound together in an intensity of love, learning and prayer beneath which the son's rebellion smouldered and eventually exploded. The Gosses were members of a sect called the Hackney Brethren (The word Plymouth never passed Henry's lips') who were obsessed by the thought of an imminent Apocalypse and the death of millions in hell-fire. On her deathbed Edmund's mother had made his father promise to see that their son always 'walked with God', and the book describes the poverty in every sense of this awful childhood: the boy's long, terrible days alone with the dying mother, the constant harangue of the near-maniacal father that the child should keep the faith. Edmund did not crack until his early twenties, after he had left home for London, the
letters coming thick and fast by every post. (No, says Thwaite.) On a visit to his father in Devon he suddenly rushed out of the great man's orchid-house and rolled on the lawn, weeping and denying the faith. That, we understand, was the end of it. They parted company.
Researching Edmund, however, Ann Thwaite began to find him an unreliable witness. He said himself his memory was 'like a colander' and that he liked 'to change things to make a better story'. His mother had been a novelist manqué. Ann Thwaite asked her publisher if she might now research the life of Philip Henry Gosse, the father, but this was refused and only now, after her books on A. A. Milne and Emily Tennyson, does Gosse the father come to light.
The new publisher has produced a beautiful book, the jacket glorious with sea anemones surrounding old Gosse's homely, happy face, the face not of a grim reaper but of everybody's favourite grandfather. The end-papers are printed with Gosse's paintings, the originals now in the British Museum: beetles, butterflies, lizards, flowers and a wonderful mouse. Inside, drawings and photographs of the Gosses' circle remove you to a lost world of earnestness and piety, the heavily jowled women with haystack hair, the men in the full pride of their whiskers and intellect and faith. The opposition is represented by a photograph of Darwin, with whom Gosse actually got on rather well, with brow of granite, looking much like a gorilla.
P. H. Gosse was born very poor to an itinerant portrait painter often away from home, and a mother whose family had come down in the world and who had been a domestic servant. A cold, disputatious woman — there was a lot of chastising — her son was always very kind to her into her disagreeable old age. Gosse went to a dame school in a slummy part of Poole in Dorset. The drawings he made in the evenings at home began the passionately accurate collection now considered works of genius. Personal genius, of course, Gosse would have denied. All comes from God. Despite the fact that in Gosse's prime discoveries were being made, some by Gosse himself in his work on fossils, about the age of the world, he believed all his life that God had made everything in six days. The good book said so. To put his case, he wrote a book called Omphalos on the vexed question of whether or not Adam had a navel, deeply embarrassing his fellow scientists and members of the Royal Society to which he had been on the point of being elected. Virginia Woolf, writing later about Gosse. and as one who knew about such things, said that Gosse was clearly mad.
Father and son then moved to Devon into what Edmund described as loneliness and misery (Thwaite says otherwise), the father badly shaken. But he recovered from Omphalos and began to recover from the death of his wife, joined another meeting house and presided there, and began a new life of happy energy and growing fame. Father and son were regularly seen about the beaches looking for wildlife hand in hand. Always in a formal black suit, the father would often wade up to his neck in the sea, endlessly instructing his brilliant son who didn't look all that unhappy. `Aint I a nice little trotting boy?' he once asked. Gosse remarried, worked like a demon at dozens of books and became 'a happy old fogey' with his nice second wife. Far from breaking with his father after the weeping on the lawn Edmund and his wife and children came down from London regularly for seaside holidays.
But Glimpses of the Wondetful is more than an apologia for Father Gosse and one quite forgets Father and Son in the enjoyment of a life of such sublime energy. Gosse's early life turns out to have been as exciting as something from the Boys' Own Paper. From the slums of Poole he became a shipping clerk and was sent to Newfoundland for six years, into the ice and snowfields with only one companion and where people had been known to 'disappear'. Wolves howled. Henry read his Bible and began his first great collection of beetles. He moved to Canada to try to farm in a religious community, but the farm failed because he grew too many turnips. Somehow he found himself on the railroad south when by wonderful luck (God) somebody gave him a home and his own school to run. In Alabama he taught the slaveowners' children about snowflakes. Hating slavery, he returned to England and starved (a herring and a crust a day) as he hawked his specimens round London. On the point of death — he fainted when a publisher at last offered him £100 to make a start — he began to thrive and pass his long, frugal, scholarly life in scientific research. There was a deliriously happy 18 months collecting birds in Jamaica. His last years were in Devon with a microscope and then a telescope. He died after catching cold on his balcony examining the stars. And he died bitterly disappointed that he had missed the Judgment Day.
This well-researched, long book never seems laboured. As a study of a great Puritan it is hugely enjoyable. Ann Thwaite has obviously enjoyed writing it and it is sad that she says that it is to be her last biography.
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