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Apostate
'I had arrived at the Greek view of nature. In wood and river and plant and animal and bird and insect it had seemed to me there was a spirit which was the same as my spirit...'
Born in Belfast in 1875, Forrest Reid would earn a reputation as 'the first Ulster novelist of European stature.' He studied at Cambridge, but it was Belfast where Reid returned to make his home, and where his questing mind seemed to find all that it required of inspiration. As he writes in Apostate (1926), the first of two volumes of autobiography - 'The landscape was the landscape I loved best, a landscape proclaiming the vicinity of man, a landscape imbued with a human spirit that was yet somehow divine.'
Born in Belfast in 1875, Forrest Reid would earn a reputation as 'the first Ulster novelist of European stature.' He studied at Cambridge, but it was Belfast where Reid returned to make his home, and where his questing mind seemed to find all that it required of inspiration. As he writes in Apostate (1926), the first of two volumes of autobiography - 'The landscape was the landscape I loved best, a landscape proclaiming the vicinity of man, a landscape imbued with a human spirit that was yet somehow divine.'
178 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1926
39 people want to read
About the author
Forrest Reid
58 books15 followersForrest Reid was an Irish novelist, literary critic and translator. He was, along with Hugh Walpole and J.M. Barrie, a leading pre-war British novelist of boyhood. He is still acclaimed as the greatest of Ulster novelists and was recognised with the award of the 1944 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Young Tom.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 11, 2025
January 2024
It feels such a shame that it stopped where it did, just as it was beginning to get really interesting. But then maybe if he had gone further he would have been in danger of being arrested and imprisoned. But it was such a beautiful and thrilling chapter to end on, and such a cliff-hanger. The rest of the volume was very readable too. It would have been nicer to have it in the first edition though, presumably printed on nice thick paper, instead of this cheaper 1928 edition which has much less aesthetic appeal. It was sad to hear Reid's attitude towards Christianity. It's not surprising, but it's just always sad to hear such feelings stated so explicitly, which leave one with no room for hope.
I wouldn't say that I felt a great deal of at-oneness with Reid. Some of his feelings and interests and behaviours I could relate to. Others of them I couldn't. But sometimes I wondered if he was saying things to try to present himself as closer to normal. Like in Dirk Bogarde's autobiography where he recounts sexual encounters with women, here, until the final chapter, Forrest Reid also throws in several remarks as though to give the impression that he was interested in women, that he was straight. It is only the last chapter which suggests anything different – and that was written in an ambiguous enough way that there would be room for Reid deny that it meant what he appeared to be saying.
_______________
January 2025
It's just under a year since I last read Apostate. Last time I read it in the 1928 Constable Miscellany edition, this time in the 1926 first edition, which is far superior in size and feel - thick paper, wide margins, large text. It's pleasant to handle and comfortable to read. My feelings are pretty much the same as last time. I waver between three and four stars. In many respects, apart from being written in the first person, it reads rather like a Forrest Reid novel.
You occasionally see the sources of inspiration behind some of the characters in his novels. But reading it at this stage (after I've grown so familiar with some of his other works) it's also highlighted some of the key differences between his fictional worlds and his reality. When reading his novels it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking they are very much based upon reality - upon Reid's own childhood, which appears rather idyllic. His fictional boys and their families often seem to conform to a particular pattern. The reality of his own family was rather different. His father died when he was five or six and he had little contact with him. He doesn't appear to have had a close relationship with his mother. And he had six older (surviving) siblings who were often reluctantly lumbered with the responsibilty of looking after him. There is no resemblance here to Tom Barber's family members and the relationships between them. You rather imagine that Reid's siblings must all have been dead by the time he wrote this autobiography because he doesn't paint a very flattering portrait of them and one can't imagine they would have been too happy at the way they were portrayed if they were still alive. Nor can one imagine that he would have wanted them reading some of the things he had to say, unless he had pretty much cut himself off from them all and didn't care what they thought.
To our generation the last chapter feels very much like an account of Reid's 'coming out', but bearing in mind that it was published 99 years ago, long before homosexuality was legal, I wonder how most people of the time read it and understood it and what they thought he was saying.
It feels such a shame that it stopped where it did, just as it was beginning to get really interesting. But then maybe if he had gone further he would have been in danger of being arrested and imprisoned. But it was such a beautiful and thrilling chapter to end on, and such a cliff-hanger. The rest of the volume was very readable too. It would have been nicer to have it in the first edition though, presumably printed on nice thick paper, instead of this cheaper 1928 edition which has much less aesthetic appeal. It was sad to hear Reid's attitude towards Christianity. It's not surprising, but it's just always sad to hear such feelings stated so explicitly, which leave one with no room for hope.
I wouldn't say that I felt a great deal of at-oneness with Reid. Some of his feelings and interests and behaviours I could relate to. Others of them I couldn't. But sometimes I wondered if he was saying things to try to present himself as closer to normal. Like in Dirk Bogarde's autobiography where he recounts sexual encounters with women, here, until the final chapter, Forrest Reid also throws in several remarks as though to give the impression that he was interested in women, that he was straight. It is only the last chapter which suggests anything different – and that was written in an ambiguous enough way that there would be room for Reid deny that it meant what he appeared to be saying.
_______________
January 2025
It's just under a year since I last read Apostate. Last time I read it in the 1928 Constable Miscellany edition, this time in the 1926 first edition, which is far superior in size and feel - thick paper, wide margins, large text. It's pleasant to handle and comfortable to read. My feelings are pretty much the same as last time. I waver between three and four stars. In many respects, apart from being written in the first person, it reads rather like a Forrest Reid novel.
You occasionally see the sources of inspiration behind some of the characters in his novels. But reading it at this stage (after I've grown so familiar with some of his other works) it's also highlighted some of the key differences between his fictional worlds and his reality. When reading his novels it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking they are very much based upon reality - upon Reid's own childhood, which appears rather idyllic. His fictional boys and their families often seem to conform to a particular pattern. The reality of his own family was rather different. His father died when he was five or six and he had little contact with him. He doesn't appear to have had a close relationship with his mother. And he had six older (surviving) siblings who were often reluctantly lumbered with the responsibilty of looking after him. There is no resemblance here to Tom Barber's family members and the relationships between them. You rather imagine that Reid's siblings must all have been dead by the time he wrote this autobiography because he doesn't paint a very flattering portrait of them and one can't imagine they would have been too happy at the way they were portrayed if they were still alive. Nor can one imagine that he would have wanted them reading some of the things he had to say, unless he had pretty much cut himself off from them all and didn't care what they thought.
To our generation the last chapter feels very much like an account of Reid's 'coming out', but bearing in mind that it was published 99 years ago, long before homosexuality was legal, I wonder how most people of the time read it and understood it and what they thought he was saying.
August 17, 2025
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/apostate-by-forrest-reid/
I was vaguely aware of the Northern Irish writer Forrest Reid. This is the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1926, covering his boyhood up to the point of his first real love affair. He was born in 1875, and his father died when he was six (and his beloved nurse Emma returned to England around the same time, which seems to have left a larger gap in his life), with Forrest as the youngest of half a dozen surviving children. His education was very patchy, starting with a late stint at Miss Hardy’s preparatory school and then a few years at Inst, which was not exactly an intellectual powerhouse at that stage. Meanwhile he played with the neighbourhood kids, who seem to have been generally pretty nasty.
As with H.G. Wells, who was born nine years earlier, a slow recovery from serious childhood illness got Reid into reading serious (and also frivolous) literature. Then a friendship with John Park, the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen’s University, brought him into contact with the deeper currents of philosophy. This meant that he was completely unsuited to the office job in a tea merchant that his family eventually found for him. He was also quietly opposed to a lot of the norms of the conservative Belfast Protestant society of his roots. Clergymen (including his uncle) are figures of fun in the book, and as soon as Reid had been confirmed he announced that he was not attending church any more, and didn’t – hence his embrace of apostasy in the book’s title.
What I particularly loved about this book was the intimate and detailed account of the geography of Mount Charles, the Belfast street where he grew up, and the surrounding bits of University Street, Botanic Avenue, etc, in the 1880s when these were all relatively new buildings and all inhabited by families (or unmarried professors), as opposed to the mix of student accommodation and university-related offices on Mount Charles now and for most of my lifetime. I always find it appealing when a book has a strong sense of place, and even more so when it’s a place I have known since my own childhood, but roughly a century earlier. (There are also excursions to an uncle’s vicarage at Ballinderry, which is less well known to me.)
The City Hall feels so solid and iconic to us today that one easily forgets that it is less than 120 years old, and my great-grandmother, who was born in 1887 and lived until I was 18, would have seen it being built when she was a teenager visiting from her Lower Bann home, and would have known the White Linen Hall which preceded it. And I had not realised (though I should have) that the Linen Hall Library was based in the old Linen Hall before being forced to move across the road; I was one of its governors in the mid 1990s.
I’d love to find a few weeks somehow to produce an annotated version of this book, chasing down the literary and personal references. Reid died in 1947, so his works are out of copyright now. If anyone would like to join forces on such a project, let me know. In the meantime, you can get Apostate here.
I was vaguely aware of the Northern Irish writer Forrest Reid. This is the first volume of his autobiography, published in 1926, covering his boyhood up to the point of his first real love affair. He was born in 1875, and his father died when he was six (and his beloved nurse Emma returned to England around the same time, which seems to have left a larger gap in his life), with Forrest as the youngest of half a dozen surviving children. His education was very patchy, starting with a late stint at Miss Hardy’s preparatory school and then a few years at Inst, which was not exactly an intellectual powerhouse at that stage. Meanwhile he played with the neighbourhood kids, who seem to have been generally pretty nasty.
As with H.G. Wells, who was born nine years earlier, a slow recovery from serious childhood illness got Reid into reading serious (and also frivolous) literature. Then a friendship with John Park, the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Queen’s University, brought him into contact with the deeper currents of philosophy. This meant that he was completely unsuited to the office job in a tea merchant that his family eventually found for him. He was also quietly opposed to a lot of the norms of the conservative Belfast Protestant society of his roots. Clergymen (including his uncle) are figures of fun in the book, and as soon as Reid had been confirmed he announced that he was not attending church any more, and didn’t – hence his embrace of apostasy in the book’s title.
What I particularly loved about this book was the intimate and detailed account of the geography of Mount Charles, the Belfast street where he grew up, and the surrounding bits of University Street, Botanic Avenue, etc, in the 1880s when these were all relatively new buildings and all inhabited by families (or unmarried professors), as opposed to the mix of student accommodation and university-related offices on Mount Charles now and for most of my lifetime. I always find it appealing when a book has a strong sense of place, and even more so when it’s a place I have known since my own childhood, but roughly a century earlier. (There are also excursions to an uncle’s vicarage at Ballinderry, which is less well known to me.)
The City Hall feels so solid and iconic to us today that one easily forgets that it is less than 120 years old, and my great-grandmother, who was born in 1887 and lived until I was 18, would have seen it being built when she was a teenager visiting from her Lower Bann home, and would have known the White Linen Hall which preceded it. And I had not realised (though I should have) that the Linen Hall Library was based in the old Linen Hall before being forced to move across the road; I was one of its governors in the mid 1990s.
I’d love to find a few weeks somehow to produce an annotated version of this book, chasing down the literary and personal references. Reid died in 1947, so his works are out of copyright now. If anyone would like to join forces on such a project, let me know. In the meantime, you can get Apostate here.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews