A Life Without Stories
It’s the birthday of a famous literary critic, Sir Edmund Gosse, born in London (1849). He was famous in his own time as the man who rescued the reputation of the poet John Donne, whom nobody read at the time until Edmund Gosse wrote a book about him.
…his parents believed that telling stories was a sin…
And he was the man who brought Henrik Ibsen to the attention of the English-reading and English play-attending audience. But we know him best as the author of a single book, his memoir, Father and Son, about his struggle to break away from his own father.
Gosse grew up in a strict fundamentalist Puritan congregation called the Brethren, where dancing, gambling, tobacco and the theater were all considered sinful, but worst of all, his parents believed that telling stories was a sin. Gosse wrote in his autobiography, “Not a single fiction was read or told to me during my infancy … Never in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, ‘Once upon a time!’ I was told about missionaries, but never about pirates; I was familiar with humming birds, but I had never heard of fairies. Jack the Giant-Killer, Rumpelstiltskin and Robin Hood were not of my acquaintance, and although I understood about wolves, Little Red Ridinghood was a stranger even by name.”
As a boy, he was forbidden to read anything other than religious works. He was not allowed to go to college, so he got a job as a clerk in the British Museum and went to live in London. And just before he left, he realized that he had lost his faith in God. He became obsessed with literature instead of religion, and in 1907 published his book Father and Son about his childhood.
Edmund Gosse, who had grown up in a house without stories, died in 1928 in a house with a library that was so large, it was sold for a small fortune.
From the Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor
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