Biography is a delicate art, as the relevant papers are
often entrusted to a person who knew the subject well and who is expected to
accentuate the positives and downplay the negatives, if not actively to conceal
them. How much more delicate is the task of a son to give a candid account of
his father, warts and all - much more prudent to embark upon a cosy hagiography
and forget the warts entirely, giving no offence to the subject’s family and
friends. But such a route hardly serves the cause of historical truth, in as
far as that really matters.
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| Young Winston Churchill |
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| Lord Randolph Churchill |
Winston Churchill squared this circle with admirable aplomb.
He greatly admired his father, who had treated him with cold indifference, and
his mother who erratically neglected him. His 1905 biography of Lord Randolph Churchill is a masterly
effort, in 2 volumes, describing the career of this maverick Conservative, a
gadfly goad to eminent Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and briefly Chancellor of
the Exchequer. Winston overstated his father’s importance but analysed Tory
politics brilliantly. By concentrating on politics, he conveniently avoided any
real discussion of Randolph’s relations with his American wife Jenny Jerome,
nor of his early death from syphilis, that terrible scourge of the 19th
century West. Roy Jenkins in his great 2001 biography of Winston rates this
book his third best after Great
Contemporaries and My Early Life. Winston
was both readable and filial.
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Published at much the same time and credited with being the
first “psychological” biography is Father
and Son, the 1907 description by Edmund Gosse of his relations with his
father Philip Gosse. Philip was a man of extreme fundamentalist religious views
who developed a love of natural history, especially marine biology. He became a
well-known populariser of his science and spent hours huddled over his
microscope. He also became an accomplished scientific illustrator. In time his
expertise was recognised and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In
1847 he married the dynamic artist and religious pamphleteer Emily Bowes and
they had their only child Edmund in 1849. Much-loved, but fanatical, Emily
developed lung cancer and died when Edmund was only 6 in 1856.
Edmund was thus largely brought up by his father. Philip was
a loving, academic parent but he had become obsessed with the notion of an
imminent Second Coming and he adhered, like his wife Emily, to the beliefs of
the (Plymouth) Brethren, the “Close” variety, a small sect of fundamentalist
Protestants. The Brethren had no clergy and no church establishment. They were a group of independent Puritanical “Assemblies”
and their congregations were known as “Saints”.
The Gosse family moved from Islington to St Marychurch in
South Devon. The local Brethren met every Sunday, with Philip Gosse at their
head, and read the Bible aloud to each other (no secular literature permitted)
and speculated endlessly about Redemption through the Blood of Christ, the Chosen,
the Salvation of Souls and similar dismal concepts. The alarmingly apocalyptic
Book of Revelation was read as a kind of light relief! The luckless Edmund had
a childhood totally dominated by this brand of religion – no companions of his
own age, no fairy stories, no juvenile fantasy, no back-garden games. Other
than his own father, Edmund could talk to nobody but his rather dim if devout
governess and the uneducated kitchen-maids.
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| Philip and Edmund Gosse |
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| Philip's illustrations of sea anemones |
The high-point of Edmund’s religious education occurred at
age 10 when, after interrogation from two rustic Elders on the doctrine of
Atonement, he was baptised in front of a large assembly and admitted to the
society of “the Saints”. From then onwards it was down-hill all the way towards
liberty. Philip married again and his new wife Eliza was elegant and
easy-going, though a Quaker.
She brought poetry books into the house to
Edmund’s delight and Philip allowed his son to read Scott’s poetry, but not his
novels, even Virgil and astonishingly Dickens, whose Pickwick captivated Edmund. Edmund mixed with village children and
went unprofitably to a local evangelical boarding school. Aged 18 he went up to
lodgings in London, persecuted by a daily letter from Philip questioning him
about his spiritual condition and by the time he was 20 he found this constant
Inquisition too irksome and suffocating. He remained on polite terms with his
60-year-old father but gradually lost all his Faith and all respect for Christianity.
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| Philip in his 60s |
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| Edmund in his 20s |
After his breach with his son, Philip did not change –
despite his intellectual talents he remained a bible-punching party-pooper;
knowing he was dying, he was indignant not to witness the Second Coming. Happily,
Edmund survived his ruined childhood and became a poet, critic and expert on
Victorian sculpture. Edmund befriended Swinburne, Tennyson and the
Pre-Raphaelites. He married but was a closet gay – no doubt causing his father
to spin in his dismal grave. Edmund’s book was admired (never out of print
since 1909) but some thought it “unfilial” – he exposed the peculiar logic crippling
his father (understandable) and sometimes stretched the facts to make a good
story (reprehensible). Edmund’s real qualities were recognised by his 1925
knighthood.
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A more modern book and without doubt “unfilial” is Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson
describing the open marriage of his parents Sir Harold Nicolson and Vita
Sackville-West. Married in 1913, they were together 49 years. He was a junior
diplomat , she an aspiring author and sprig of the aristocratic owners of
majestic Knole in Kent. The oddity of the marriage was that from the start both
accepted that their partners were primarily homosexual, although they had two
sons, Ben and Nigel.
They loved each other profoundly, exchanged daily letters
for many years and were exemplary parents. Harold left the Foreign Office in
1929, was briefly the gossip columnist in the Evening Standard, flirted with
Oswald Mosely’s New Party. left it when it embraced Fascism and became a Tory
MP. He wrote biographies and kept a diary from 1930 to 1952, a treasure trove
for later historians. Vita inhabited the fringes of Bloomsbury and had a
passionate relationship with Virginia Woolf. She wrote novels, not much read
nowadays.
In the early 1930s Harold and Vita bought as their residence
Sissinghurst Castle, a rather neglected property in Kent. They together created
a magnificent garden, Harold the layout and the vista, Vita, an accomplished
gardener, the seasonal blooms and flower-beds. The castle was also a cherished
home for their two children.
Vita had embarked on an early affair with Violet Trefusis,
the love of her life. Violet, daughter of Alice Keppel, mistress of Edward VII,
was highly demanding, not to say unbalanced and eventually the affair ended.
Harold’s long-term companion was the critic Raymond Mortimer.
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| Harold Nicolson |
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| Vita Sackville-West |
Nigel Nicolson’s book lingered rather pruriently over Harold
and Vita’s sex lives – their respective lovers were many and various. A son is
best advised not to write much on this subject- it simply “is not done”. Harold
and Vita are well commemorated by their writings, their lengthy marriage and by
the beauty of Sissinghurst. The old adage De
Mortuis nil nisi Bonum retains some of its relevance.
SMD
20.07.18
Text copyright Sidney Donald 2018
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