Father and Son

In an interview on Lying

It’s extremely readable, and a lot of it is about what I’ve been writing about from the other side – that we are incredibly bad at assessing risk. This is because we are very bad at assessing probability – every time I go into my newsagent I see people who obviously can’t afford it buying £20 worth of lottery tickets. And I tell them the odds and they say, ‘Oh well, somebody has got to win it.’ So many people are scared of flying when it is our safest form of transport – crossing the road is more dangerous here. And when it comes to our own personal life there is so much that we don’t want to see: when you look, for example, at all the failed marriages amongst your friends and your parents’ friends and you say, ‘My marriage is going to be different.’ Then there’s all the work that has been done by economists and mathematicians to eradicate risk – you cannot eradicate risk, risk is what life is.

So Whoops! is a book everyone should read. Lanchester demonstrates that out there in the real world we go on and on making these mistakes because we don’t understand ourselves. I am writing about the reasons why we don’t understand ourselves, which is because we are too scared.

Well, it is scary to think you know nothing, or even that you may know nothing.

If you understand that all you ever see or know is the constructions of your brain and that everything is a guess, then you can’t escape uncertainty. You could be wrong and that is frightening. The other part of it, therefore, is that we all live in our own world of meaning and no two people ever see anything in exactly the same way. What Chris Frith writes about, and what he and his wife Ute are now going on to research, is how, if this is the case, we manage to be able to communicate with other people. Chris and Ute are nice people and much more hopeful types, whereas I write about all our miscommunications – and there is no end of those. It is scary. You know, for example, when you are with someone who is a really good friend and then suddenly they say something and you realise there is no way of bridging your differences in how you see things. You feel so alone.

So is it better to acknowledge it, or be repeatedly horrified by these gulfs?

Some of us see ourselves as alone, but others go from ‘alone’ to ‘lonely’, which is more frightening. But not acknowledging these facts is about as sensible as refusing to acknowledge that we live in a world that contains volcanoes.

So which of our illusions are we going to smash with your next choice, which is Edmund Gosse?

I have read innumerable books over my lifetime and some I would have said in the past were wonderful. But the only book that, in my eyes, has remained wonderful is Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son. When it was first published in 1907 it was shocking because up till then no son would ever criticise his father.

With biographies and autobiographies, and this book is both, there are those that concentrate on emotion, certainly the misery memoirs – how I suffered – and others that concentrate only on events and actions – what I did. But this is great as both autobiography and biography because you see how his feelings and his thinking process were all one. He talks about realising his mother is going to die and writes that he ‘was possessed by a great anger’. Which is a wonderful description of what happens when cognition and feeling come together. The book demonstrates how children, who are not stupid, work out all sorts of things. Children are busy assessing and looking with a critical eye, even when adults are trying to keep them in the dark.

Gosse was brought up in a particular closed world, which makes it more intense, his rebellion and exposure.

He was brought up among the Plymouth Brethren. His father wanted him to become a special child, which means an especially religious child. And Edmund very dutifully did all the things he was required to do but belief never took hold. And he describes how he was experiencing this as a child. There is a passage in the book where he discovers that his parents don’t know everything, that his father doesn’t know everything.

In an interview on First-Person Narratives

Next is Father and Son by the poet and critic Edmund Gosse. We were talking about the ego and how autobiography can transcend it. But in this autobiography, a son – the author – explicitly throws off the influence of his brilliant father. Isn’t that close to the archetype of egotism?

There are autobiographies that are fantastically egotistical, but they tend to be not very good books. The universal is in the small. You write about your own life, but if you write about it with enough love and care then it will have the universal running through it. This book is a good illustration. It’s alive with specificity but it’s full of the universal – fathers and sons, children growing up and outstripping their parents. The book is subtitled “A Study of Two Temperaments”. Gosse’s father, Philip Henry Gosse, was an eminent zoologist in the mid-19th century. But he was also a member of a Christian sect called the Plymouth Brethren, fundamentalists who thought that the Bible was literal truth. When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, this was a huge intellectual crisis for Philip Gosse. His instinct as a scientist was to recognise the truth of what Darwin said, but his instinct as a Christian was to deny it.

Much of Edmund Gosse's early view of the world is blinded by this oppressive faith, but he eventually steps outside his father’s authority, outside his sway. And while most of the book is written with a quiet attention to detail, with a patience and respect for concrete things, it ends with a polemical passage against religious fundamentalism that wouldn’t look out of place as a memorial to the dead at ground zero in New York. He writes:

“It divides heart from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal, in the barren pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience; it invents virtues which are sterile and cruel; it invents sins which are no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy with futile clouds of remorse. There is something horrible, if we will bring ourselves to face it, in the fanaticism that can do nothing with this pathetic and fugitive existence of ours but treat it as if it were the uncomfortable ante-chamber to a palace which no one has explored and of the plan of which we know absolutely nothing.”