Fathers & Sons: Robert Aickman and Edmund Gosse

Philip Henry Gosse & Edmund Gosse (1857)

Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) was an accomplished and respected English poet, author and critic. Among many well-received books, he wrote a biography of his father, Philip Henry Gosse, and in 1907, aged fifty-eight, Edmund published a memoir of his youth, Father & Son, focussing on his relationship with his father. His family were very devout members of the Plymouth Brethren, and Philip was a self-taught marine biologist. The primary interest in Father & Son is the relationship between the religious father (who cannot reconcile his fundamentalist faith with the new evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin), and the son who questions and rejects his father’s religious beliefs. The father is a looming presence over Gosse’s childhood and could even be considered something of a tyrant in the account written by his son, but the relationship is not without a degree of love.

 

In August 1971 The Folio Society asked Robert Aickman to write an introduction to their reissue of Father & Son. Aickman noted that this request was, no doubt, prompted by his own autobiography, The Attempted Rescue (1966) being compared favourably to Gosse’s classic memoir. Despite a tight deadline, Aickman submitted eight typed sheets to the Folio Society in 1972.

 

Father & Son by Edmund Gosse, Folio Society, 1972

It is not known why the publishers did not use Aickman’s introduction, which is interesting and entertaining. However, it is also somewhat rambling, and in many respects says more about Aickman than about Gosse senior or junior. Aickman, for example, states that the central theme of the book is ‘the right to be an individual’, which, it can be argued, is only a small part of what Father & Son has to offer the reader. Aickman also takes the opportunity to complain about his usual bug-bears (‘the great modern trinity, technocracy-overpopulation-egalitarian­ism’). 

 

There are striking similarities between Father & Son and Aickman’s own The Attempted Rescue, but there are also important differences. Gosse’s father is a strong, charismatic personality and the son is obviously in awe of him. Aickman described Philip Gosse as a ‘unique and noble figure’, and suggested that his own father was similar. But whereas Philip Gosse found himself grappling with seismic changes in attitudes in the second half of the nineteenth century, William Arthur Aickman simply found himself failing to get to grips with the demands made him, becoming more and more eccentric as the result of either some undiagnosed personality disorder, or just plain senility (while retaining, at least in the eyes of his son, his old charisma).

 

Thanks to Edmund Gosse, his father is now viewed as a man who exemplified the important nineteenth-century dilemma of religious faith in a modern world. Father & Son is also seen as fascinating coming-of-age book in which Edmund learns to reject everything that is most important to his father, and makes his own way in the world. Unfortunately, William Aickman appears to readers to have been simply an eccentric, perhaps to be pitied. And The Attempted Rescue is not at all convincing as a coming-of-age book; Robert seems to have lived a life in thrall to his father until 1941, when Robert was twenty-seven and his father died. Rather than learning from his relationship with his father, and moving forwards, Robert Aickman seems to have been forever yearning for the idealised pre-marriage life that he believed his father to have once lived.

 

 

 

A melodramatic Four Square paperback edition from 1959

Gosse wrote of his memoir, ‘This is not an autobiography’ and published the first edition anonymously. Aickman noted that Gosse left him with the ‘impression that every single word had been fought for to express the exact truth as the author felt it’. (My italics.) This acknowledges that Father & Son might not have been precisely factual (and did not need to be). It is inter­esting that Ann Thwaite’s 2002 biography of Philip Gosse sug­gests that Edmund’s father was a far more gentle, loving and thoughtful man than the one portrayed by his son. Far from being sequestered and melancholic, Edmund’s childhood appears to have been full of affection and warmth, and he was surrounded by many friends.

 

Robert Aickman with his mother and father, 1920s

Here, there is a fascinating similarity between Edmund Gosse and Robert Aickman, for Aickman attempted to persuade read­ers that his own childhood was lonely, with his mother sick and his father domineering and eccentric. However, Aickman him­self admits in The Attempted Rescue that he had friends throughout his early years, attended parties, was popular at school, and saw a great deal of his wider family. Some members of his family thought his descriptions of them highly inaccurate, and it is quite probable that Aickman would have excused any exaggerations and embellishments as the truth as the author felt it. Such judicial management of information would, of course, only serve to cement Aickman’s feelings of an affinity with Gosse, whom he described as a Grand Old Man in the field of letters.

Father & Son is rightly considered a classic nineteenth-century memoir, and Aickman was incorrect to suggest that his own The Attempted Rescue was in a similar vein. Aickman wrote a quite different kind of autobiography with its own, unique qualities. The one important similarity between the two books may well be that both sons portrayed a father of whom they were somewhat in awe, as rather tyrannical, but still with a measure of love.

 

Robert Aickman: A Biography by R.B. Russell is available now.

 

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Heather Smith, and Artellus, Ltd.

All photos, unless otherwise stated, are copyright Estate of Robert Aickman/British Library/R.B. Russell, and are not to be reproduced without permission and acknowledgement.