After a while he [J. R. Ackerley] thought, I’m not describing a presence, I’m describing an absence. This is the tale of an unlived relationship. Who was he? Who was I? Why did we keep missing each other? After another while he realized, I always thought my father didn’t want to know me. Now I see I didn’t want to know him. And then he realized, It’s not him I haven’t wanted to know, it’s myself.

When Rousseau observes, “I have nothing but myself to write about, and this self that I have, I hardly know of what it consists,” he is saying to the reader, “I will go in search of it in your presence. I will set down on the page a tale of experience just as I think it occurred, and together we’ll see what it exemplifies, both of us discovering as I write this self I am in search of.” And that was the beginning of memoir as we know it.

The immensity is the story; the rest is situation. That this son must come into his own by making war not on a parent who is willful and self-involved (which he is) but on one filled with the tender regard that alone gives a growing creature the ability to declare itself (which he also is). This is the thing the reader is meant to register; this is the narrator’s wisdom. It is the betrayal of love that is required in order that one become.

At the end of this memoir we do not know everything there is to know about Edmund Gosse, not by a long shot—of Gosse the Victorian aesthete or the literary man-about-town, nothing. We know only one thing: we know what it was to be his father’s son. That is, we know the man who is recording the struggle and the value of the separating self: the man who is speaking.

The writing continues to dazzle while the structure falls apart. And rightly so. Because, after all, what difference does it really make—the second and third times around—which comes first? We are in the presence of a man in a trance of self-analysis: a man who will never act on what he knows and therefore is compelled to go on “knowing.