Five Best Alexander Waugh on books that capture the complexities of father-son relationships July 12, 2008; Page W8 1. Father and Son By Edmund Gosse Scribner's, 1907 Sir Edmund Gosse (1849-1928), an eminent man of letters and a distant relation of mine, first brought the Waughs to literature by arranging my great-grandfather's first job, as a publisher's reader, in the 1890s. His "Father and Son" is a touching and original work in which he chronicles his relationship with his father, Philip Henry Gosse, a botanist and fundamentalist Christian. "With me," Gosse senior once said, "every question assumes a Divine standpoint and is not adequately answered if the judgement-seat of Christ is not kept in sight." This was the same person who invented the Creationist defense against Darwin according to which God made fossils only as a ploy to test the faith of mankind. Edmund was "ground to powder" by his father's relentless religiosity and eventually rejected it. The book outlines a terrible clash of personalities in a chilling account of a miserable, pious Victorian upbringing. [books icon] MORE BOOKS � "My Three Fathers":1 Bill Patten Jr. tries to make sense of the multiple paternity he learned of late in life. � "Brilliant Women":2 A story of a group of friends who met in London beginning in the 1750s. � "Palace Council":3 Stephen L. Carter provides an entertaining but hokey tale, salted with predictable period references. � "Enlightenment":4 Novelist Maureen Freely tracks the lives of a handful of friends in Istanbul, half of them Turkish and half American. � "The Trouble Begins at 8":5 A lively illustrated biography of Mark Twain. 2. Seminary Boy By John Cornwell Doubleday, 2006 John Cornwell's memoir takes the opposite tack to that of Edmund Gosse. Here a bad, abused boy from the impoverished East End of London is driven, not away from Christ by a religious fanatic, but toward him by an indigent, fantasist father. The boy hears a mystic voice: "Come, John. Follow me. I want you to be one of my priests." It is the voice of Jesus. At Cotton, a seminary in the West Midlands, Cornwell is beaten and sexually assaulted by a fellow novitiate. The book is unusual for a father-son memoir in that the father disappears for 45 years and is seen only in the first and last chapters. Jesus takes the father's place but in the end fails to fill the emotional void left by the absent parent. "Seminary Boy" provides a searing insight into a boy's driven need for a father and a stark warning of the dire psychological consequences of a father's emotional or physical absence. 3. Swimming With My Father By Tim Jeal Faber, 2004 Sticking with the religious theme -- goodness, how God drives wedges between fathers and sons -- Tim Jeal's short memoir is remarkable in that it portrays a father who is a religious crank, an adulterer and a mystic bore but, for all this, remains a likable human being. Jeal senior, a member of a bizarre Christian sect called Order of the Cross, was literally a tree hugger -- "sometimes he placed his arms around an ancient trunk as if embracing an old and trusted friend" -- and a vegetarian who lay long hours in womens' bathing costumes paddling in a river and saying things like: "Be not merely in the river, but become part of it, through its penetration of one's whole being." Jeal's father eventually disappears into his own cuckoo fantasy, believing himself to be divine. "Swimming With My Father" is a wry, sad little chronicle of forgiveness that can make even grown Englishmen weep. 4. Letter to Father By Franz Kafka Schocken, 1966 "Dearest Father . . . Your extremely effective child- rearing devices which never failed with me were: abuse, threats, sarcasm, spiteful laughter and -- strangely enough -- self-pity." In this vein the young Franz Kafka tears his father apart in a 60-page letter of the utmost brilliance and daring. There are few epistolary equivalents (I can think only of Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis") and certainly nothing to match the directness of attack by a son upon his father, though this particular broadside was never delivered to its target. Kafka is as self-critical as he is damning of his parent, but in the end -- as is always the case -- it is the father who must shoulder the blame for the damaged relationship. Hermann Kafka never did. Power, guilt, pride, love, money, jealousy, honor . . . this little book deals with all the themes that still bedevil fathers and sons today. 5. My Two Wars By Moritz Thomsen Steerforth, 1996 I do not hesitate in declaring "My Two Wars" a masterpiece in the great line of father-son memoirs. Moritz Thomsen (1925-91) may not be well known, but his inventive prose puts many writers of far greater reputation to shame. He begins his posthumously published work with the unforgettable line: "This is a book about my involvement with two outrageous catastrophes -- the Second World War and my father." These disasters do not really come together until the end, when Moritz returns home from the war, bedecked with medals and hoping at last to have won his father's grudging approval. He doesn't get it. The rich older man is drunk when Mortiz arrives and coldly addresses his conversation only to his dogs. He tells lies and refuses to say why he has sold his son's car and disposed of all his son's possessions in his absence. That same evening Moritz and his medals are unceremoniously ejected from the father's house. This is moving stuff but written with enough wit and skill to make reading it enjoyable, if achingly painful. Mr. Waugh is the author of "Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family," recently released in paperback by Broadway Books. URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121580967334046839.html Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121580910701946799.html (2) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121581291160447067.html (3) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121581005499546929.html (4) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121581235822047027.html (5) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121581333770647059.html