Backlisted - Father and Son by Edmund Gosse

Episode Date: June 24, 2017

Sarah Perry, bestselling author of The Essex Serpent, joins John and Andy to discuss Edmund Gosse's account of growing up the son of a widowed Victorian fundementalist preacher. The trio also talk about Attrib. and Other Stories by Eley Williams, and Spanish Crossings, the second novel by John Simmons.Timings (may differ due to variable advert length)3'43 - Attrib. & Other Stories - Eley Williams11'46 Spanish Crossing John Simmons18'57 - Father and Son by Edmund Gosse* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. I'm actually placing Shoreditchitch which will remain nameless. I mean, you know, and I'm not against, I'm really not against. I think it's great that people are making their own booze and they're doing all sorts of weird and fabulous things.

But the first thing that slightly made me nervous was they said they'd foraged a lot of the ingredients for their menu locally, which seems to me to be a bit of a category error if you're in shoreditch you know old bus tickets and cigarette parts you know a ground elder i suppose um but then they said would you like a glass of homemade wines and i looked at the menu and one of them had, it was burnt beetroot in a whey, W-H-E-Y. In wine? I mean, that's not even, you know, I mean, that sort of, isn't it,

that's student fridge level of desperation, isn't it? What have we got? What have we got? Well, we've got some off milk and a beetroot. All right, let's make some wine out of it. I'd forage those locally. In John Finnamore's very funny radio series, Cabin Pressure, the character Arthur, played by John Finnemore, he describes himself as the inventor of fizzy yoghurt.

You know what the ingredients of fizzy yoghurt are? Yoghurt. Yoghurt. Plus time. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. My name's John Mitchinson. I publish books at Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something special. And I'm Andy Miller and I write books, including the Year of Reading Dangerously.

And I also read books, including the Year of Reading Danger dangerously I just write and read that one book increasingly you join us in our only recently completed and partially furnished villa on the Devon coast the sea of faith lapping against the shore where today we'll be discussing Edmund Gosse's father and son and with us today we're delighted to be joined by delighted a novelist called Sarah Perry. Sarah, I hope you don't mind me saying, I'd never heard of you before. But it's amazing that you're here and it says here on my bit of paper that you are the author of two novels, After Me Comes the Flood, and you're also the author of a novel called The Essex Serpent, which apparently is a Sunday Times number one bestseller.

It actually says on the piece of paper in front of you, Andy, and I'm not going to let Sarah off this, it says a blockbuster. A blockbuster, and it was Book of the Year at the British Book Awards, which means you are the closest thing we have ever had on here. And Waterstones Book of the Year as well. You are the closest thing we have ever had on here to what,

John? A master storyteller. Sarah is a master storyteller. A master storyteller. So please welcome to Master Storyteller. Sarah Perry. Could we have a master storyteller jingle? A sort of strong...

How are you? I'm well, thank you, and all the better for being here. Are you enjoying your visit to London? It's reminding me of living here five years ago and walking around in a cloud of resentment that everybody was young and happy and I wasn't. Perhaps we should start where, as Yates once said, where all ladders start,

in the foul rag and bone shop of your reading list, Andy. What have you been cupping in the foul rag and bone shop of your heart this week, Andy? I have been reading a book of short stories. And actually, I contacted the author to double-check on the pronunciation of their first name. And it's a book called A Trib and Other Stories, and it's by Ellie Williams and you can of course find Ellie on twitter at giant rat Sumatra which is one of the great twitter names I think we

can agree can't we anyway this is her first book of short stories and this is published by the excellent publishing house of influx press independent publisher. And I read these stories probably in the space of three or four hours the other day, and I am really looking forward to finishing the next backlisted book that I'm reading for next time so I can go back and read them again because they are some of the most interesting and intricate short stories I can remember reading for ages and ages and ages. And the fact that they are new, and they've been written in the last few years,

is really exciting, because most writers you read are like other writers, but the thing about Ellie is, actually, she's really... I find it very hard to find reference points for these. Do you think so, Sarah? I completely agree, yeah. What I really like about her is that she is playful and knowingly witty and slightly absurd, but without being whimsical and quirky,

which are the two worst things that fiction can be. Constitutionally incapable of anything that has quirk in it. I mean, they're kind of deeply serious and profound. And there's a line here where she says, you should never start sentences like that, I mean, they're kind of deeply serious and profound. And there's a line here where she says, you should never start sentences like that, I know, but what's a sentence, really, if not time spent alone? And that's kind of typical of her lexicographer's wit, the way everything has a double meaning.

I love the fact that these are stories about, amongst other things, they're stories about human relationships, about communication, but they are also stories about means of communication and especially types of word and literature and, as you say, lexicography. John, you've read this, this is actually one that we've all read. And honestly, with excitement, I haven't had really for a long time because, as you say, Sarah, it could be quite easy to dislike it because she's an academic. She teaches at Royal Holloway, I think, creative writing. And the book is, superficially at least, it is quite academic.

You know, it's about stories and words. But it's so funny. It reminded me a little bit. Do you remember that Paget Powell book we had, The Interrogative Mood? Yes, yes, yes. You'd think, oh, this is going to really get on my nerves. But actually, it's so brilliantly done. This is the best collection of stories I can remember reading for a really long time.

I loved it, absolutely loved it. And I didn't even know you were going to talk about it, Andy. That's the other odd thing. I just love that thing of, I mean, I haven't read any reviews of this book. It may well have been reviewed, I just haven't read... I think it was reviewed in the FT. Was it? Melissa Harrison did.

Right. Oh, did she? As enthusiastically as it deserved. But the word of mouth, this is what always sells books, really, is word of mouth. And sure enough, it's word of mouth that made me pick this up. And I'm just going to read a bit, which, in the event, matt may want to edit down

but i need to but i need to get to the end of this because because the payoff is worth the payoff is worth it so this is from a story called cine sthete would like to meet and i'm not titles as well i'm not starting at the beginning of the story i'm starting a couple of pages in my life is often an unmanageable series of sensations. Other synesthetes describe their experiences as pleasant, while for me it is a constant sensory overload. Back to the switchboard simile, I have it on good authority that when something overloads it tends to crash. Pick up any paperback that uses too many mixed metaphors and that is my day-to-day with all attempts at

clarity squandered by confusing muddled leaps of imagery. I see fireflies when a tyre screeches, smell fried onions when I step on an upturned plug. In an attempt to process fewer sensations and block out the worst unexpected repercussions of my surroundings, I have taken to wearing tinted shades even when indoors. I'm well aware how daft this looks. Always wearing shades and looking either wary or disgusted whenever I leave the house can make for quite a lonely existence. That's why I chat online. If I adjust the settings on my monitor so that all text appears a certain shade of grey on a yellow background I don't have to shield my eyes or stuff up my nose nearly so often. Changing the display settings like this just takes the edge off.

Grey text on a yellow background sounds so clearly to me like snow on a tin roof and smells so strongly of mown grass that all other synesthetic responses are dulled. Online dating marked a huge step. At first I found the profile that I created absolutely disgusting. Reading through it, the paragraph smelt like tar and vinegar and it was full of chewy, tooth-aching words. I had no hope of any response to such a squalid, acrid thing, and imagined that anyone to whom it might appeal in any way must have some kind of perversion I did not want to share. You must understand that it was not just that I did not have high hopes, I actively dreaded who would be interested in such a thing. I gave it to my doctor to edit, and he gave me two thumbs up,

but I could tell by his tweedy, neoprene-edged vows that he was just being kind. Your email back, however, smelt like a sea breeze. That was all it took. I didn't have to read about the interests you listed, your hobbies or your star sign. It was that sea breeze smell cutting through the snow sounds and mown grass

that convinced me this was a chance I had to take I organized a meeting you chose a spot near Piccadilly in view of Eros and the Criterion I like Piccadilly Circus the exhaust fumes and the chatter present me with a fresh inky blue it's almost precisely the color of the line on the tube map. To me, the flashing adverts are a barbershop quartet suffering the giggles, which makes me smile, and the tourists' interbraiding accents cause a firework display of neurological responses. The taxi driver's swearing is accompanied by different shades of silver, squeaky and lickable. As I waited, the rain made a pink overture against my jacket. And your colour

when you introduced yourself? You must not be insulted but you were blank. A soundless, tasteless, brilliant blank. That's not the end of the story, is it? It's so good, isn't it?

I mean, sorry Ellie, I hope I did that justice. Great. Terrific. I felt slightly earlier this year, where is the British writer that has the wit, the poise, the humour, the kind of cojones of George Saunders? And now I feel I've found one. It reminded me of that brilliant collection of George Saunders and now I feel I've found I've found one it reminded me of that brilliant

collection of George Saunders more than it reminded me of any other in 10th of December because as she shares with him I think a fundamental benevolence and niceness there's a good spirit behind it and I think there's a lot of there's a lot of literature written at the moment which is ironic and is post-modern and rather posturing and rather insincere, which is very fashionable and goes down very well. But this is not insincere. It's very sad in places and very well-meant. But at the same time, very playful with form and language. So, yeah, I mean, it does share that with him.

Anyway, to recap, the book is by Ellie Williams, E-L-E-Y Williams, and it's called A Trib and other stories and it's published by influx press and looks a million dollars as well i think it's a fabulous such a great little book john what have you been reading this week something very different it's a historical novel oh i'm sick of those yes oh god if there's one over-published genre. No, I think it's a doozy. And I declare an interest. It's written by a friend of both Andy and I called John Simmons,

and it's his second novel. It's called Spanish Crossings, and it's set in the... Well, it is mostly... The story is a love story. Nobody needs, really, to have plot summaries of historical novels. But let's just say it is a love story, and it's set in the Spanish Civil War, and it's an love story. And, you know, nobody needs really to have plot summaries of historical novels. But let's just say it is a love story and it's set in the Spanish Civil War and it's an English woman who falls in love with somebody who goes to fight in the international brigades and he dies. Okay, first spoiler. And then she ends up looking after a young Spanish refugee child.

I think he manages. It's that great thing, and we maybe talk about research, but he manages his research. I'm kind of quite excited. You know, if you've known someone for a long time, and I've known John for 25 years, and he's always been, he's a brilliant teacher of writing. He's done more than anyone else, I think,

at getting people who work in business to think about their words and tone of voice. And for him, the first novel he wrote, Leaves, which I liked very much, which was a London novel, this is really ambitious and kind of fugal. You know, there's a lot of characters, there's a lot of action, there's a massive amount of research. But he's just a very, very, very good writer.

He tells the story, he doesn't get in the way. I, you know, one always reads friends books with a slight sense of trepidation slight uh let's say absolute terrifying ignoring terror and i you know this i can really happily i'm i wouldn't come on this podcast and recommend anything that i didn't think was good and john knows that are you going to read a little i could just i just thought just a little tiny bit which is from towards the end of the book just because it seems unfair. It's quite a difficult book to excerpt from because it's

historical novels so it's like one damn thing after another. But this is towards the end and this is rather lovely. From my pocket I took out the artificial pearl necklace that I had discovered next to Harry's letters. When I'd seen it, I had

decided on a whim to bring it on this trip, perhaps as some kind of comfort because it reminded me of Mother. There had seemed something deliberate in their side-by-side placement, and that thought made me now deliberate in my own movements. I bent over the mound of stones, carefully removing the top three or four until a gap was revealed by its deep blackness. I dropped the necklace into the gap and placed the stones back as I had found them. Above, the stars were shining like pearls in the moonlight. There were more stars than anyone could ever count, more stars than anyone would ever want to count

in that black immensity of night sky. Each one was beautiful, however bright or dim, and it seemed to me that that night, every night, each one counted. That's quite lovely. Very good. So, before we move on to the main event, I believe we have a message from our sponsor. Indeed, and this is a novel uh another unbound novel by

claire scobie called the pagoda tree it's uh it's a historical novel but none the worse for that it wears its learning lightly it doesn't smell of the lamp it's a gorgeous actually it is it's a gorgeous tale from 18th century india almost no one has written a novel set pre-Raj. It's about, in a way, first contact of British trading companies in South East India. Take it away, Claire. I'm Claire Scobie and my novel is The Pagoda Tree. It's quite an epic historical novel set in 18th century India, just on the cusp of when the British were trying to set up their power base there. And it's very much a meeting of worlds because most of the story is told from a young temple dancer's point of view,

a young woman called Maya, and her life is set out for her. She's expected to become a courtesan for the prince, but then her world is turned upside down by the arrival of the British and the power struggles and the wars that go on. And so it's this amazing, really rich tapestry and a great dramatic backdrop for the story. My background is I'm a journalist and I've lived and worked in India, so I've travelled there a lot.

I've always travelled in the south and not many novels in the English language have been written set in the south, so that was one decision I made quite early on. And the other was that period in the 1770s just seemed to me so exciting and so unexplored because the Raj is very well covered and it was also a time of real static relations because the racial lines had been drawn so the fact of setting it in this earlier period when the East India Company was just growing its power seemed to me very exciting and also the East India Company was just growing its power seemed to me very exciting. And also the East

India Company was essentially our first multinational corporation and it had devastating impact on India and other parts of that region. That whole idea of the start of capitalism, of the start of the monopoly and looking at it in that early period seemed to be a great time to set a novel like this. So this is set just at the beginning when Maya is about to be initiated into the temple. Stepping over the threshold, Maya wavered for an instant, surprised at the crowd. Dancing girls and drummers, neighbours and children milled around, their faces illuminated by the last rose-gold rays of the setting sun.

With Maya pressed in between her mother and her aunt, she felt herself carried along by the rapid rhythm of the tarvel drums. Maya remembered her mother's words and gazed straight ahead. As they drew near the temple, she saw a man standing outside the gates. Dressed all in black, he wore an unusual triangular hat. He was a foreigner. His long hair was dishevelled, his pallid complexion ghostly. Her mother frowned. She too had noticed him. Only then did Maya falter. She'd seen foreigners before, but seeing him at this moment, as she was about to begin her life as a dancer of the temple, seemed a bad omen.

He was staring at her, his pale blue eyes wide, his mouth twisted. Even when she had stepped through the archway, still she felt his eyes on her. The Pagoda Tree by Claire Scobie is available from all good bookshops or from the Unbound website. Backlisted listeners can enter the code BACKOFF, that's all one word, B-A-C-K-O-F-F, to receive a 15% discount off the list price. We'll pick this up again after some adverts.

Stay tuned to this and now leaving uh 18th century india we return to 21st century london or 19th century yes islington yes near here but i mean that caledonian road okay road. Okay, so we will introduce what the book is in a minute properly, but I would like to just ask you, Sarah, so I had never read Father and Son by Edmund Gosse. John thought he had read Father and Son by Edmund Gosse. Can you remember when you first read this book? Before we get on to why you like it, can you remember?

Yeah, it was definitely a decade ago at least and i think i just saw it in a charity shop or a secondhand bookshop and read the back and for reasons that will become painfully evident immediately realized it was a book that i needed to read and it sort of stayed on my mind ever since this is the first time i've reread it in all those years but i've quoted from it often and pressed it on people and bought it for people, none of whom have read it. Yeah, so it feels sort of part of my fabric in some ways, but nobody recommended it to me.

It was a question of picking it off a shelf and thinking, oh, well, I'll have that then. And I'm going to do what we normally do a bit later on. I'm going to read the blurb on the back of this copy because I think I want to introduce what this book is quite quickly before we start talking about it. So it's a memoir and it was published in 1907. I've got a Penguin Modern Classics edition here

and I think this blurb was probably written in the late 1960s but it does the job. Edmund Gosse, Father and Son. For readers of Father and Son in this century, it is difficult to credit this factual and indeed well-documented chronicle of religious fanaticism in the middle of the last. We have grown used to hysterical outbursts of anger against the older generation. How infinitely more telling is the calm, measured, and often humorous style in which Edmund Gosse records the mental straitjacket of his early years in London and

Devon. The elder Gosse was a marine zoologist of considerable repute. He was also a Plymouth brother, and a man of such unbending and fundamental Christianity that in an effort to reconcile geology and Genesis, he publicly challenged the findings of Darwin and others during the controversy over evolution. But what, assisted by his first wife, the godly daughter of a New England tradition of Puritanism, he did to the mind of a brilliant and sensitive son was far worse. That Edmund Gosse remained sane is extraordinary. That he so far triumphed over the stifling dogmas of his childhood to write this gentle masterpiece and to contribute substantially to English literary criticism is a miracle. I mean, I think there was a certain

degree of irony in invoking a miracle in that particular context. But so this is a book about... The historical setting was quite clear there, but it's a book about growing up, growing away from, it seems to me, the parent, or growing up and growing away from the child or the parent and the child growing apart. That's one of the things it's about yes yeah and one of the things that makes it such a remarkable book is that it is utterly specific and particular and its descriptions of the material world and of the very particular and very strange preoccupations of his parents but totally universal which is one of the great kind of marks of good literature which

is that they achieve the same thing so it means a great deal to me because my upbringing was so similar but everybody is the parent the child of a parent and everybody knows what it's like to reach that weird moment where you suddenly look at your father and you realize that that's a human being with thoughts and an independent nature and anxieties and worries and that's kind of deeply troubling so um it's just it's completely extraordinary so this is the first time you've reread it yeah how was it it's the same as before i mean intensely painful in some ways um i should say for people who haven't had the misfortune to hear me boring on about this before that i was brought up in a biblical fundamentalist sect in a biblical fundamentalist sect, which in its hymns, its Bible, its habits, its Sundays,

its mistrust of Christmas, its hatred of the Roman Catholic Church in the 1990s was almost identical to what Edmund Gosse had as a child in the 1850s and 60s. And to read it was absolutely astonishing to me because it was like I had slipped into a wormhole in which all of this was still unfolding. When you call a book timeless you don't think that a book that is so specific to time and place could be timeless but it was as if he and I had worshipped at the same church, our baptism was the same, our hymns were the same the bible verses were the same uh you know our sundays were the same um and it's very painful because he loved his parents as much as i love mine and therefore to betray everything for which they have formed you and fitted you is is a a terribly sad and difficult thing to do so i was crying in the bath this morning as I finished it

and read the final letter. And I have the attachment to it that you have with the books that you love best, which is that you do want other people to read it. You're mildly affronted that they think they understand it because nobody gets it but you. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, that's a brilliant way of... And I think lots of people will respond to it in the same way,

very legitimately, but I'm the same way, very legitimately. But I'm the one that mostly owns it. It's funny that you win father and son. I win. Absolutely. My dad was Church of England vicar, which is not even on the same... It's barely religious. But I remember when I, in a slightly flouncy kind of teenage way, decided I was rejecting my faith.

I remember one of my friends saying, I'm so envious of you that you've got that, you can reject. My parents don't believe in anything. But I wonder what I would have felt if I'd read this book when I was a teenager because it is the most... if I'd read this book when I was a teenager because it is the most... I know it's legendarily supposed to be the first psychological autobiography.

I don't know really what that means or whether that's true or whether that's even interesting. But what it is is completely authentic and compelling. I mean, unputdownable because once you're into the narrative, he sets it up at the beginning and says, you know, this is a clash. This is, you know, something's not...

You know that you can sort of feel what's going to happen. Yeah, the subtitle is A Story of Two Temperaments. Two Temperaments. Which is such an extraordinary way of putting it. And the generosity with which he portrays both his mother and his father, as you say, it leads to a very, very, very heart-rending conclusion. We can ask Sarah to read something in a minute, but I'd just like to add that I hadn't read this book.

Two things. It really reminded me... A few weeks ago, I read a novel by Miriam Taves, the Canadian novelist, called A Complicated Kindness. And I really... Her most recent novel, All My Puny Sorrows, is one of my favourite books of the last 10, 15 years. It's a magnificent book.

Anyway, so this is an early novel of hers. And she was raised in the Mennonite community in Canada. And actually, Sarah, you should read that. That is a really good novel. There's a few problems with it, but in terms of it being... It has certain similarities to this. Move forward 100 years. The sense of parents being constrained

by what they believe, what they want to believe, what they want for their children. You know, it's very... It's a very powerful book. I also... I mean, you know, it seems obvious to me, but it's pretty fundamental text if you want to understand fundamentalism,

if you want to understand what it's like being a young Muslim growing up today and wanting to rebel against. I mean, it's as precise and forensically precise, that sense of feeling the pulling apart from a worldview, having to try and reinvent yourself. I mean, we'll probably talk about that, but the importance, the primacy of your own identity. Sarah, have you got a bit that you could read us? Yeah, I'm going to read a bit that's about prayer and the nature of prayer,

which is one of the, I left the kind of established church and a fundamentalist faith when I was in my early to mid-20s it wasn't a quick extraction and the prayer was a sort of fundamental turning point for me because I realized that I couldn't believe in petitionary prayer in the way that I had been trained to do and I had entered into an extremely long period of prayer because a friend of the family was dying, and I had been taught that God answers prayer, and the man died. And you would think that it would be long before your early 20s you would realise the sort of logical inconsistencies in some of it.

But anyway, it was quite catastrophic for me. And this is characteristic of Gosse's ability to recount something in a way which is very sad, but with a mordant wit behind it, which at one point he uses this amazing line, let sleeping dogmas lie. And you can just imagine him like this sort of Edwardian writer nudging you. It's a properly funny book. It's really funny.

So the bit I'm going to read is meant a great deal to me personally and will to everybody who has often wondered about the nature of prayer. And it's also really funny book. It's really funny. So the bit I'm going to read is meant a great deal to me personally and will to everybody who has often wondered about the nature of prayer, and it's also very funny. Several things tended at this time to alienate my conscience from the line which my father had so rigidly traced for it. The question of the efficacy of prayer, which has puzzled wiser heads than mine, began to trouble me. It was insisted on in our household that if anything

was desired you should not, as my mother said, lose any time in seeking for it but ask God to guide you to it. In many junctures of life this is precisely what, in sober fact, they did. I will not dwell here on their theories which my mother put forth with unflinching directness in her published writings but I found that a difference was made between my privileges in this matter and theirs and this led to many discussions. My parents said whatever you need tell him and he will grant it if it is his will. Very well I had need of a large painted humming top which I had seen in a shop window in the Caledonian Road. Accordingly, I introduced a supplication for this object into my evening prayer, carefully adding the words, if it is thy will. This, I recollect, placed my mother in a dilemma and she consulted my father. Taken, I suppose, at at a disadvantage my father told me I must not

pray for things like that to which I answered by another query why and I added that he said we ought to pray for things we needed and that I needed the hummingtop a great deal more than I did the conversion of the heathen or the restitution of Jerusalem to the Jews two objects of my nightly supplication which left me very cold. It's brilliant. When I read that passage, I just found it reminded me of one of my favourite lines of the American comedian Emo Phillips. He said, when I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised the Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked him to forgive me. work that way so I stole one and asked him to forgive me

which has in a way sums up my relationship with Christianity if not everybody it's funny though isn't it I had the great good fortune so I'd started reading Father and Son and

because time was the essence over the last week or so, I thought, I wonder if there's an audio book. And I was... So I looked it up, and there are two audio books. And one of them, the one that I downloaded and listened to and read, quote-unquote, was read by the actor Geoffrey Palmer. And I assume everybody knows who Geoffrey Palmer is,

but, you know, he was in As Time Goes By he's famous for being lugubrious first of all the reading is superb not as good as yours Sarah but still good he's a pro but he does a thing makes an artistic choice

where for the whole book, he does it in the sort of rather lugubrious Geoffrey Palmer-ish, I was vaguely surprised, kind of way until the last few pages of the book. And there is a letter in the last few pages of the book, no spoilers,

but there is a letter from father to son. And I almost feel like saying to people, if you read the book, which I hope you do, you should also go to the trouble of downloading the audio. If you want to hear an actor change gears dramatically in all senses, it absolutely made the hair on my arm stand on end. The rage that he pours into that letter which he has held back he has presented

to you a document that is you know rather wry and you know in the english comic tradition and then it suddenly accelerates into this pain this real pain is absolutely magnificent i i've it's so moving but also that it's hard not to feel sympathy for the father because of the way Goss writes the book even though he says you know my dad is basically an idiot the idea of the omphalos I mean one of the

key things here is this is the great moment I mean this is the other thing about this book in terms of the history of ideas this is the big moment this is the fundamental moment in the modern world where we realise that God didn't create the Earth because we have fossils, because Charles Lyell's geographical work, the work that Darwin was doing,

the work that all these amazing 19th century, of which Gosse's father was one. He was a brilliant marine biologist. I mean, apparently the vogue for having aquariums, marine aquariums in your house, was down to him. He was an amazing populist for science. But he couldn't reconcile that with his belief that the world was created by God. So he came up with this idea that God had hidden, basically, signs of ageing, fossils and so on, as a sort of, almost to fool people. Well, that was the way it was taken, wasn't it?

But actually, one of the things that's really interesting about this book is that it looks at how theology forms your mind. Right. And there is something about christian theology which is dependent on chains of logic right so you think about things like romans 8 where the apostle paul's thing says you know he whom he called them he also justified and this is where kind of the doctrine of election comes from and and what i was brought up with and what is exemplified in this is that it is more than possible for a very very intelligent person to subordinate their

intellect to the logic of their faith so he would say well we know that adam was created first adam had a belly button there was no need for his belly button because he had no mother therefore we can say that the earth could have been created entire as it is in the same way that adam was born with a belly button the earth could have been created with the fossil record, not to fool anybody, but really just as it is. Why not? They're wonderful things. It's just the way it is. But obviously it was taken by his critics as being this sort of... And that was the thing, the ridicule.

And it was rejected by atheists and Christians, which is quite an extraordinary achievement. But there's a line I just want to read out because the melancholy of the book, I think, is dependent on how sad it is to think that you have to extinguish these kind of sparks of of your all your natural instinct they have to be flattened by what this ancient manuscript says and this is what eventually drew me out of the church so he talks about his father and he says my father's attitude towards

the theory of natural selection was critical in his career. Oddly enough, it exercised an immense influence on my own experience as a child. And then this is the bit that I found so tragic, it almost reduces me to tears. Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence

went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so when a recollection of the opening chapter of Genesis checked it at the outset. And I think this is something that people who are not familiar with fundamental faith of any flavour won't understand, is that it requires a daily recalibration and suppression

of everything that is kind of natural in you to subordinate it to a bigger idea. So it isn't sort of lazy or foolish. It's actually an enormous intellectual exercise to do it every single day about everything. But what does the Bible say? One of the things I discovered about this book is that there was a TV adaptation in the 1970s

for a play for today called Where Adam Stood by Dennis Potter, by the great Dennis Potter. And as luck would have it, that play, which was repeated, it was like all Play for Todays, it was on in the 1970s and then disappeared for 30 years. It was repeated in, I reckon, the 1990s

or the early 2000s on BBC Two. Some kind soul has put that repeat up on YouTube. It's been blocked in the UK, but were you to use a YouTube proxy site, you would be able to watch it illegally, and I can't counsel you to do that. You're a bad man, Angela. I am a bad man.

It's wrong. It breaks all sorts of copyright laws, but were you to do it, you would find it a very satisfying experience. Frankly, buck up BBC is what I say. Anyway you were talking Sarah about the sadness and what Potter does in the adaptation is it is

a very much, not a direct adaptation, it's based on specific scenes. He potters it up a bit. He does and he bases it and there's stuff around the abuse, the woman taking him out of the church. There's also stuff with the scene with the boat becomes the final scene in the's taking him out of the church. There's also stuff with the scene with the boat becomes the final scene in the film.

The moment of rebellion, as it were. But we have just a little... This is a clip from where Adam stood of the conversation between father and son. Just stick with this till the end. I think perhaps you had better go on up to bed, Edmund. Not on my account, please. Yes, sir. I'm sorry, Father.

Good night. Rest is what you need, my son. Yes, sir. Good night, Father. Edmund. Sir? Perhaps the Lord will come tonight. Tonight? Perhaps it will be this very night that our Saviour comes to you and says, Come, ye blessed.

Might the world end tonight, Father? Indeed it might, my son. And? Yes. What is it? I, I, I, tonight. And I. But in Christ our Lord, there is no death, Edmund. Pray tonight to be gathered up into the arms of Jesus.

Yes, Father. Ah, that's cheered the boy up. His father was very affectionate, wasn't he? There was one point where he calls him my love, which is a really kind of lovely mid-Victorian turn of things. Well, I think the bits where he, you know, after the mother dies, it's magnificently affectionate. I just wanted to read just another amusing bit,

which it just is the affection. So this is them reading the Bible together. Hand in hand, we investigated the number of the beast, which number is 603 score and six. Hand in hand, we inspected the nations to see whether they had the mark of Babylon on their foreheads. Hand in hand, we watched the spirits of devils gathering the kings of the earth into the place which is called in the Hebrew tongue, Armageddon. Our unity in these excursions was so delightful that my father was lulled in any suspicion that he might have formed that he did not quite understand what it was all about. It's just... He's playing Lego, isn't he?

It's just... He's playing Lego, isn't he? This preoccupation with the end times is very familiar to me. And there were factions that were very like the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front. So there were the amillennials and the premillennials and the postmillennials. And it was all on whether Christ would reign for a thousand years here on earth or elsewhere. And someone once told a joke from the pulpit, which I don't think had ever happened since 1820, when Ebenezer Strict and Particular Baptist Chapel was founded, and he said, I'm a

pan-millennialist, and you could see all the deacons frantically trying to work out what he meant, and he leaned forward and said, I'm going to wait and see how it all pans out, which is as far as a joke as a strict Baptist preacher will get halfway through a sermon. as a joke as a strict baptist preacher will get halfway through a sermon sarah you and i were talking about this on uh twitter this morning and i hope you won't mind but dr matthew sweet told us a story which i'm gonna i'm gonna read out about father and son which is relevant to what you just said matthew sweet says i read father and son while working on a plant nursery run by a plymouth brethren Brethren family. The father preached against the fax machine and threw one son out for going round to watch Blind

Date at his mates. Other son used to go crazy when dad went off on business, drove the tractor pissed, shot a duck, sat all day in the sun, reading Knave. And I said, wow, had they read Father and Son? And he said, they hadn't read anything except the Bible and porn mags hidden in the porter cabin. So, does that chime? You were saying

that as an element of truth. Because if you completely suppress young people's kind of natural desire to kind of hang out and dance and and do whatever do whatever it is you young people do nowadays um it will find expression elsewhere and i i know we i used to go every year to christian camps and christian conferences and there was a pair of brothers that you to slope out of the window at midnight and go clubbing and smoke weed and then present themselves for the prayer meeting the following morning. And were they figures of sort of glamour, or did you feel very...?

I thought they were rather glamorous, although I only found out about this later. They're both pastors now. I mean, that was one question. I mean, one of the things, talking about that thing of, you know, having to make do on little, that thing where he reads the novel that's been plastered on the inside of the lid of the thing. And then later, Tom Kringle's Log, which sounds like...

Sounds a terrible book, doesn't it? Can you talk a bit about, Sarah, about the role of... Like, this in some ways as well is a book about books. Yeah, absolutely. Do you know, one of the most moving things that I have ever read was that he wasn't permitted to read any fiction.

There was a certain amount of poetry was allowed him but no novels which occupied this kind of peculiar space of iniquity in the same way that television films did when i was young um and what happens is if you deprive someone of something when they are exposed to it it's a sort of sensory overload and it is overwhelming in a way that's very difficult to convey to other people. And he happened to have been going through an old trunk and, of course, they were lined with paper and it happened to be a fragment of a paper that had a kind of Penny Dreadful story on it.

And he was utterly, utterly overwhelmed. I mean, he couldn't... Because he'd been told that, you know, he thought it was true, he couldn't distinguish between fact and fiction because he didn't know what fiction was. He knew what a lie was, and the idea of lying was so beyond the pale that I don't think it occurred to him

that someone would willingly lie on paper and commit it to type. And then when he eventually started reading novels, it had this sort of extraordinary effect on him. And reading Virgil, even Virgil in the Latin, just the sound of the cadences was absolutely intoxicating. There's that moment with his stepmother when they're talking about here only and to my marlowe. That's right, yeah.

And she hides it under her knitting. And then his father comes and he says, you know, this is basically, you read this and you're lost. When I was about 10 or 11, a double cassette tape of The Best of Elvis Presley found its way into the house and we listened to it secretly in my sister's bedroom and In the Ghetto was her favourite I can't remember what mine was

and after a bit we couldn't find it and we thought to check the dustbin and it had gone in the dustbin He describes, and John and I will both be pleased at the role that, because we both love Dickens the role that Dickens plays in here. Pickwick, yeah, yeah. Pickwick.

So the effect, I was thinking, this is why this book is universal. You know, you were saying, Sarah, quite rightly, that it has a particular resonance for you. You know, I don't grow up in that kind of environment, but I have been a son, and I am a father. Yeah. I am both a son and a father.

And the bit where he describes reading Dickens, the joy, the liberation and the joy of reading something funny at about the age of 12 or 13, I think that's me reading Douglas Adams. You know, when I found Douglas Adams, that kind of unburning. I'm also hearing him sort of saying

a lot of people don't really seem to like Pitwick. For him, it was every story, just the force of a revelation. He would do that thing we all recognise if you read comic fiction, is that you start laughing long before the funny bit. And that is exactly what it's like. Have we got the, speaking of funny bits, have we got the very famous, the most famous scene from Father and Son?

It's probably this one, isn't it? It's the adventure of the Christmas pudding, yeah. So in keeping with Reformation theology, Gosse's family considered the Roman Catholic Church to be the actual whore of Babylon, which is also something that I was taught. And so anything which was even vaguely Pope-adjacent was not only Pope-ish.

I mean, I was brought up to call the Catholic Church sort of Popery and Papism and all the rest of it. And I genuinely hated Catholicism with the burning fiery passion of a thousand Protestant sons until I was about 17. In fact, every year on May Day, I went with a small group of people to Walsingham to protest the Anglican pilgrimage to the Shrine of Our Lady

and would stand with sandwich boards while a procession of diligent Anglican Catholics... What would they say on the process? Well, they would say things like, repent ye and believe the gospel and terrible puns about what Walsingham was. And they would proceed past singing Latin. It took about four hours. A lot of them had been on the beer. And so the sight of someone

drinking alcohol while in clerical vestments, which I knew were also devilish, was quite overwhelming to me. And we sang, there is power in the blood, power in the blood, there is wonderful power in the blood, for about three hours to try and drown out the latin it was astonishing so we did celebrate christmas at home because my parents were 10 less mad than the gosses um but my dad did it with a with what i can only describe as an ill grace so he would win he would he would complain about having a christ Christmas tree and call it that heathen branch until Christmas morning where he could be found behaving like a Labrador puppy and being Father Christmas all day and having a wonderful time. Anyway, Christmas was... Such an effort.

...looked on askance. It is an extraordinary effort. So anyway, this is a very famous bit. The subject of all feasts of the church, and this is written with a capital C to indicate that we're not talking about the chapel and the saints, but the church, the established church. He held views of an almost grotesque peculiarity. He looked upon each of them as nugatory and worthless.

But the keeping of Christmas appeared to him by far the most hateful and nothing less than an act of idolatry. The very word is popish, he used to explain, Christ's mass, pursing up his lips with the gesture of one who tastes asafoetida by accident. Then he would adduce the antiquity of the so-called feast adapted from horrible heathen rites and itself a soiled relic of the abominable yuletide. He would denounce the horrors of Christmas until it almost made me blush to look at a holly berry. On Christmas day of this year 1857 our villa saw a very unusual sight. My father had given strictest charge that no difference whatever

was to be made in our meals on that day. The dinner was to be neither more copious than usual, nor less so. He was obeyed, but the servants, secretly rebellious, made a small plum pudding for themselves. I discovered afterwards, with pain, that Miss Marks received a slice of it in her boudoir. Early in the afternoon, the maids, of whom we were now advanced to keeping two, kindly remarked that the poor dear child ought to have a bit anyhow and wheedled me into the kitchen where I ate a slice of plum pudding shortly I began to feel that pain inside me which in my frail state was inevitable and my conscience smote me violently at length I could bear my spiritual anguish no longer and bursting into the study I called out oh papa papa I have eaten a flesh offered to idols it took some time between my sobs to explain what

had happened then my father sternly said where is the accursed thing I explained that as much as was left of it was still on the kitchen table he took me by the hand and ran with me into the midst of the startled servants seized what remained of the pudding and with the plate in one hand and me still tight in the other ran till we reached the dust heap where he flung the idolatrous confectionery onto the middle of the ashes

and then raked it deep down into the mass the suddenness, the violence, the velocity of this extraordinary act made an impression on my memory which nothing will ever efface. That gear change at the end is exactly it. Honestly, it's such

a good book. That was beautiful, by the way. I have a surprise for you, Sarah. Edmund Gosse couldn't be here in person today, but he sent this message from the hereafter. This is the only recording that exists of the voice of Edmund Gosse. He is delivering a lecture in the late 1920s about after the death of his friend Thomas Hardy.

And this is recorded off a 78 RPM record so please make yourself known to us Gerard Hamilton wrote Samuel Johnson is dead let us go to the next best there is nobody we should do a grave injustice to several younger veterans of genius if we declare that nobody can take the place of Thomas Hardy, since one or other of them will presently slip into preeminence. But for the moment there is no visible head to the profession of letters in this country. The throne is vacant and literature is gravely bereaved. It would be conventional, it would even be insincere to allege that literature has lost anything by Hardy's death. He preserved to a very great, perhaps to an unprecedented age,

the power of expression. And it will be found that even in his eighty-eighth year he added something to his life's achievement. But practically his life's achievement. But practically, his work was over. The cup was drained to its final drop, although the wine was excellent to the last.

I think Dad would be proud. I mean, that's a fairly extraordinary thing to hear. That is an amazing thing to hear. And isn't his voice exactly what you would think, sort of knowingly slightly prissy? Okay, so I want to say that Edmund Gosse went on to become one of the great men of English letters of this era.

Well, he became an enabler, didn't he? I mean, he was an enabler. I think he's probably, this is the book that's read, but he was a great friend. He was a friend to Hartley, but he was a friend to Joyce. And he was a friend to... But we should also, I would also like to make this point I read a little, I dipped into it

I didn't have time to read it all, but the biographer Anne Thwaite, who had written a book, sorry, a biography of Edmund Gosse, also wrote a published about ten years ago, a biography of the father of Philip Henry Gosse, and she goes to some lengths in this book, not to

rubbish father and son, far from it, but it does change the way you think about it to make a very strong factual case based on reports of the time that lots of this is made up, that what mattered to Edmund Goss was to capture the feeling of conflict over these philosophical, religious and personal issues. And that's one of the ways in which this is such a modern book.

What matters is the essential. No, it comes down to almost the nature of truth. I was thinking if I were to write a memoir, I would perhaps devise incidents which were entirely possible, but more vividly and more accurately showed a psychological truth that I didn't have a memory of. So the adventure of the Christmas pudding may not have happened. The better for showing up the moral.

Well, that's right. But this is the point. As you were saying, John, so Goss was a great friend of Henry James. And after he died, Henry James said famously, the thing about Edmund Goss is he had a genius for inaccuracy you know, there was

a sense that what mattered as you say was the essential truth rather than the literal truth you get this feeling that he was somebody when he discovered when he was converted to literature I mean this is a sort of leading question in a way, when he was converted to literature he became in a way when he was converted to literature he became

in a way all his his devotion and his passion and his kind of and that does sound like a sermon you know that that it's that he transferred that zeal to his love for literature and he was an amazing um from what you read there's also I mean I was I guess it he he was you know he had kids happily married but also there was there's a lot of stuff about him having very strong repressed gay, or maybe not even that repressed gay tendencies. But the point about it, what I wondered was that he seems to have survived it, you seem to have survived it. Do you feel that there's something...

It's such a difficult thing with a childhood. Do you feel that it's something a difficult thing with a childhood do you feel that it's it's something that you transcend or that i mean other positives that gets always sounds from the outside my god can you imagine living like that i i don't regret a second of it for a number of reasons firstly the sheer folly of regretting anything about that made you you because if you were to do that you wouldn't have the consciousness to do the regretting in the first place because you wouldn't exist so it's a logical defeatist yeah but also sometimes when I speak about my upbringing I'm asked you know was it like Jeanette Winterson um and you know my parents were not abusive alcoholics with mental health problems and they were loving and are loving intelligent

interesting kind people and I think there is an inability nowadays in particular to understand that you can be a fundamentalist and you can desire nothing more for your child than they are also exactly the same flavour of fundamentalist that you are, but that also you can have had, in many respects, a merry and a nourishing upbringing. But what has happened is that I know no other way of living than to have an ardor and a devotion for something larger than the immediate self or of you know a romance or

or you know I have children I can't live like that so I think I've displaced my striving for something vast and eternal where I am small and mortal and manifestly and thankfully not eternal into literature to something that is grander and as strange and as and as um sublime actually and I you know writing for me is a sacrament in some respects in that it's the nearest I can come now to formal worship is this sense that there is something bigger than me and yeah and I think that that's what Goss did actually and I wouldn't have the the voice that I do or the references that I do had I not been saturated in the King James Bible, in Fox, you know, in the hymns that he sang. Every single hymn that he mentions in this book,

I can sing by heart. Amazing. Or every verse, virtually. I certainly could do it. It's funny, it's the hymns that leave you last. I always feel that. Yes, very true. If I may, as ever, provide a pathetic note.

Speaking of songs and singing and things that you know by heart so we were having a joke this morning about Father and Son by Cat Stevens the famous song as for Cat Stevens from I'm going to say Tillman I'm going to say Harold and Maud from the film Harold and Maud

it's in that as well and Sarah's looking scant at me but so i had a look at the lyrics of father and son by cat stevens and of course i've convinced myself that he read father and son before he wrote the song right so this is the third verse of father and son which again let's hope cat stevens's people aren't listening why would they be how can i try to explain because when i do he turns away again it's always been the same same old story from the moment i could talk i was ordered to listen now there's a way and i know that i have to go away i know i have to go sorry sorry uh

everyone who loves that song for Rune. Well, it's... Yeah, yes. Can I just read one more line? Yes, and then I think this would be great. Because we've talked a lot about the humour in it, and it is very funny, but this is the last line of his 1907 preface, and it was published anonymously, so his name is not appended to this preface.

But this is extraordinary, and this is the universal and particular aspect of it that it can apply to all of our lives as well. Butended to this preface. But this is extraordinary and this is the universal and particular aspect of it that it can apply to all of our lives as well. But listen to this. There was an extraordinary mixture of comedy and tragedy in the situation which is here described. And those who are affected by the pathos of it will not need to have it explained to them

that the comedy was superficial and the tragedy essential. It's one of the great sentences. You say that and I want to use it as an epigraph in a book. Yeah, I want it in my tombstone. Well, that seems good on that long shelf. We're going to have to end, but can I ask,

was there a reconciliation? Well, Anne Thwaites says they got on perfectly well for most of their lives. That's one of the great, the art being the beautiful lie we say often. They've got on fine. And what Edmund was able to express through art, through literature, was a kind of settling and a summation of things that probably weren't expressed in person. But that's why, of course, when you read it, Sarah, you get one strong response to it. I read it, I found it very powerful. It is. I mean, somebody said,

who do you think should read this book at lunch? And I said, well, anybody who's ever believed strongly in something, anybody who's ever had a in something. Anybody who's ever had a parent and anybody who's ever had a child. It's that universal. But it's also that particular. It's glorious. I think, yeah, we should stop now. Yes. Massive thanks for a really, really, I mean,

one of the most moving and powerful things I think we've done on Backlisted. I hope that recorded Matt oh damn thank you Sarah thank you Matt our excellent producer as ever our extensive archive of all shows our backlist of Backlisted is available on Soundcloud

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