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.
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