George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 1 George & His Genius

'He hardened himself against the ties of blood, and kept repeating to himself a phrase in which of late he had summed his miseries: ‘I was born in exile - born in exile’. Now at length had he set forth on a voyage of discovery to end perchance in some unknown land among his spiritual kith and kin'.  So says the hero of Born in Exile, Godwin Peak.

It’s hard to be lukewarm about George Gissing – you either love him or hate him, though frequently, you vacillate between the two, never really knowing if you are offended or captivated. He does talk tosh at times, but then again, he speaks with the voice of clarity at others, and so balance is maintained. He can move you from the heights of adoration to the depths of misery and yet always he leaves you fondly wanting more. Within some sordid tragic event or when a minor character plays the cards they are dealt - and loses - you are in there, with the - well, not quite the action (not very much happens in Gissing) but at the centre of the drama, rooting for what there is of goodness and humanity.  There is a lot of humanity in George's writings, not all of it intentional. Some of it concerns the author himself, who doesn’t root for any of it or anyone. He leaves the reader to do the empathy – George just reports back from the front line. But, we must guard against thinking there is autobiography in the works - he told us to watch out for that and not go jumping to conclusions.

Westgate in Wakefield where George was born.

So, there is good and bad in George but it’s the good that generally prevails. Most times, you want to embrace or slap him in about a ratio of 6:4 because he can be very hard on his characters - especially the young men with ‘silky pencillings’ for moustaches (In the Year of Jubilee) and independently-minded girls with unconventional ideas (almost all his central heroines). When what you read moves you to tears of sympathy then anger then sorrow then joy – and you have only covered a chapter (The Nether World) and when the trials suffered by most of his characters seem emblematic of the wider struggle for personal redemption (Born in Exile), you see the bigger picture George paints and you want to be involved. And then, when George's own irrational conservatism; vulgar snobbishness; blatant misogyny and childlike self-pity leave you recoiling in exasperated horror, you just want to time travel back and punch him in the face – but then follow that up with a hug.

Plaque now outside the Gissing Centre,
just round the corner from Westgate, Wakefield 

No-one flirts with George, but, if you need a tease to begin your love affair with him, whet your appetite with the two George Orwell writings. Put simply, Orwell considered him to be ‘perhaps the best novelist England has produced’. If you like Orwell, then, generally, you will ‘get’ Gissing. Fewer writers have a greater power to rouse me to anger – nothing George writes leaves me indifferent. What he does well is to make the reader feel she is in cahoots with him regarding his world view - which, to George means you are clever and erudite enough to understand him - and that writer and reader are sharing a conspiracy lesser mortals fail to comprehend. There are layers of meaning here, that require much attention. Nothing is as superficial as it seems; everything is mutable, open to interpretation. You have to reread the novels several times before you have the solution – or lack of it – to the human puzzles they contain; they send you off to think. The short stories are bizarre for their creepy banality yet stuffed full of the degradation of the human spirit – beyond depressing, deeper than misanthropic, hard to like, small gems of despair and disappointment, much harder to let go of than you would think. His non-fiction – the Dickens criticism and his various bits of factual stuff like By the Ionian Sea - are loaded with original and powerful insights. And then there is The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, a book so annoying I can’t bear to read more than one page at a sitting – infuriating because it is so blatantly fake and false. More of that another time.
 

Most of us come across New Grub Street  - considered by many to be the best of the novels - though I consider Born in Exile to be his masterpiece – from university reading lists or when journalists and writers want, in print, to reference their noble struggle. It was featured in ‘The Hundred Best Novels’, the Guardian newspaper’s September 2013 list which puts it at number 28. The compiler Robert McCrum, likens it to Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, inasmuch as he says the character of Jude Fawley is like Edwin Reardon in New Grub Street.  

I’m not sure Reardon or Jasper Milvain, or even the gifted but tragic Biffen in New Grub Street share much with Jude Fawley, but George has quite a bit in common with the eponymous Wessex stone mason – not least the undiagnosed tendency to bibliomania they share. He wrote n this about JTO:  

'This is a sad book. For one thing, Thomas has absolutely lost his saving Humour - not a trace of it. The bitterness which has taken its place is often wonderfully effective – certain passages go beyond anything I know in vehement illustration of pessimism. But the book as a whole is wearisome. The talk often outrageous in its lack of verisimilitude.' (letter to his brother Algernon  in November 1895. A bit rich as George is often characterized as being humourless and, thanks to a brief, youthful devotion to the works of Schopenhauer embellishing an already depressive tendency, overly-pessimistic. To be fair, whilst not exactly being Mr Chuckles, is actually occasionally funny, if your sense of humour is ultra-dry and sardonic. When, towards the end of his life, he was wooing his third life partner, Gabrielle Fleury, he claimed his style was ‘ironic’, but really, he’s sarcastic and bitchy – almost spiteful at times – and he isn’t afraid to use litotes in a quintessentially English way, when judging another’s shortcomings. Typical passive-aggressive! 

Algernon

So, George lends Algernon the book and writes later, to an old friend and sometime medical advisor, Henry Hick: ‘My copy of Jude the Obscure is just now in Alg’s hands. As soon as ever he returns it, it shall go to you. A sad book! Poor Thomas is utterly on the wrong tack & I fear he will never get back to the right one. At his age (Hardy was 55) a habit of railing at the universe is not overcome’. Later, in April 1897, in a typical piece of over-reaction to anything said that hurt his feelings, George’s response to criticism that his novel, The Whirlpool was ‘too long’ was: ‘Oddly enough, no-one said that Jude the Obscure was too long’.

George was often included with George Meredith and Hardy as the three best novelists of their Age - so, maybe there is a little macho rivalry stirring in our man. ‘The Whirlpool’ isn’t too long, of course, because it is politically challenging and deeply tragic and these themes take time to unfold. Alma Rolfe is probably my second favourite Gissing heroine (after The Unclassed's Ida Starr); if you liked Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, you will like The Whirlpool’s Alma. Here's the picture I think of when I conjure her up in my mind's eye:

Dreams by Vittorio Matteo Corcos 1896

A word of warning (again):  with George Gissing, you have to decipher what are taken his personal appearances in his works, shape-shifting and morphing into various bits of (sometimes several) characters, using them as his mouthpiece or putting them through ordeals he experienced – or claimed to have experienced. This sort of blurring of the boundaries between real and imagined seeps into the many biographical volumes published since George’s death. You have been warned – keep asking ‘where did this idea originate - who is the source? and ‘where is the proof?’ and tiptoe through with care. I will return to this theme in subsequent posts.