Commonplace 9 George & Psychogeography.
More than most authors, George was susceptible to the vibes of what is now termed 'Psychogeography' - the mystical art of linking the urban cityscape to the landscape of the mind.
William Blake wrote this in his poem 'London':
'I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter's Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.'
Merlin Coverley writing of Blake and his relationship to the city (2010): 'Here, then, we find all the features ascribed to Psychogeography today: the mental traveller who remakes the city in accordance with his own imagination is allied to the urban wanderer who drifts through the city streets; the political radicalism that seeks to overthrow the established order of the day is tempered by an awareness of the city as eternal and unchanging...'.
This could be George's attitude to the fatalism he eventually came to allow to dominate his thinking - following hours of solitary nocturnal meandering through the districts that ended up in his novels: Clerkenwell, Camberwell, Brixton, Hackney, Barbican.... To him, the lives of the poor - and their pitiful environs - were the inevitable result of Evolution, and Fate. This was an age that put a price on everything, and valued very little (thank you, Oscar) of what might be termed 'the proletariat'; and George was typical of those who misread the 'Origin of Species' as a treatise on eugenics, and resolutely failed to see the sameness in all classes. After all, if you prick them, do they not bleed? Ever fearful that great 'Demos' might rise up and swallow the minority middle class whole, George did his best to anathematise them.
George claimed to 'know' the working classes, but did he? He admitted that his own upbringing kept him apart from mixing even with his own class - his father's class of lower middle-class shopkeeper. You could see Thomas Gissing as a frustrated intellectual forced to be a tradesman; he was, essentially, a man who made his money as a shopkeeper and indulged his love of botanizing as a hobby that had the added value of allowing him to collect and classify plants that might be useful to his trade. But, he also played a large part in local politics, making him much more of a man of the people than George ever was, but, also, a man of his times. In the first part of the nineteenth century, there seems to have been genuine emancipation of the right of anyone to indulge intellectual thought - the common man and woman were not castigated so harshly for immersing themselves in the world of science, of literature and of political thought. Learning was only class-ridden because it was financially beyond the means of the poor. The aspiration towards it was a good thing: evidence of striving for noble 'enlightenment'.
I think this distinction between attitudes to class and learning from the early to late nineteenth century is important to George and his response to the working class. His father was a tradesman but one who perhaps turned to running a chemist shop only as a means of making money, whilst nursing the soul of a frustrated man of science. It's clear from the two works published by Thomas, that his heart was in his botany. Many authors are forced to teach to make a living, but that does not stop them feeling, in their souls, that they are authors. Art - in every discipline - is hard to make money out of; indeed, most Artists are amateurs, unsung and unpaid.
Mr Gissing Snr started George off on this Psychogeography kick by taking him on his field trips to the countryside around Wakefield. Modern Wakefield, now stripped of its dependence on coal and manufacturing, is clawing back some of the land kidnapped by Victorian industry; many new open spaces and wildlife parks replace the railway lines and heavy industry landscapes of its former life. Thomas would be pleased with the likes of the Heronry and the Crofton Water Park.
George made a lot of his exposure to the landscapes of London. In his works where London doubles as a character as vivid as any of the humans: for example, Workers, Nether World, Jubilee, Eve's Ransom and many of the short stories he achieves the feat of making us feel he knows what he is talking about, but George was a perpetual tourist; a flaneur. His brief exposure to what might be termed 'sordid' living conditions is made far too much of - and as it was largely self-imposed, his complaints are a little fey and self-indulgent. All that talk of starving being the only ticket to being an Artist is BS nonsense. When you are young you care less for comforts especially when you have the burning soul of an Artist. Why else do students spend their money on lager and not slippers? Was George just a cry baby when he harked back to Colville Place? I lived in a squat when I was an Art student and then a basement flat so overrun (or overslimed) with slugs I never entered the kitchen until midday for fear of treading on one on its slow progress home after a night of leaving trails all over the lino. George makes Colville Place sound like hell on Earth, but, really: man up Gissing! I worked two jobs and studied all day - and paid for rent, food, Art materials and books - so you did not have it half as tough as you think you did. Art is never going to happen in comfortable, easy surroundings - Art equals struggle plus desperation plus blood sweat and tears minus recognition for most who lay claim to the true crown of life which is to be called an 'Artist'.
However, it is not how I see it that matters here - it was how George saw it. He must have felt he was in an even stranger land than America, being in this hellish place called London. Colville Place would have seemed very like the rougher areas of Manchester - but, as he was never able to refer to his old Owens days, he could not make mileage of the fact he was fairly used to slum life. His tender sensibilities may have aspired to live higher, but he had been dossing for several years - possibly from 1875/6 - in dirty, slummy places with poor sanitation and no comforts, so why Colville Place hit him so hard is probably a little bit of George embellishing the awfulness to make it clear he was familiar with the vilest of situations. (Flagstones on the floor and junk furniture are what is trendy now - if those flagstones are accompanied by central heating and the tatty furniture is shabby chic'd. A house in Colville Place this year was valued at £1,850,000. How times do change.) But, he was near his beloved British Library which must have been an exciting prospect - much as I thrill to the sight of the sea every time I go to the end of my street - and one important thing kept him buoyant: no matter how vile his surroundings or the people he rubbed along with, he was still, class-wise, a cut above the poor thronging the pavement above his basement grating.
So, George made good use of his geographic surroundings, using the kind of pastoral eloquence later employed by DH Lawrence. With the added flair for almost journalistic reportage, he wrote of people and places his reading public might allow themselves to study on the page, but could not face having to involve themselves with in the flesh; designed to shock, but also to reassure them there will always be someone worse off, not financially, but in terms of human value, 'Slumming' was beginning to be viewed as something shameful to indulge oneself in - particularly viewed this way by those wellying in to redress the inequality - so George was providing the non-ambulant voyeur with snapshots of lowlife, albeit from the sanitary and morally upright arm chair in the library, thereby letting them off the guilty conscience hook.
Was George conscious he was following in the footsteps of the likes of William Blake? We know he was an admirer of Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) - another Psychogeographer (and born in Manchester) - who delighted in bringing the reading public stories from the 'underworld' - much as did Dostoevsky to his readership (though with less humour).
De Quincey's love of the macabre, and his impish sense of humour, make his writing immense fun to read. His misanthropic world view is mitigated by his joie de vivre - he cannot quite bring himself to disapprove of murder and mayhem and malice, and even celebrates the person who commits vile acts as an 'Artist'; he sees parallels between the acts of destruction and creation that will have appealed to Nietzsche and any serial killer with a library ticket.
George indulged his own form of Slumming when he enjoyed a look round the refurbished workhouse at St Marylebone - once, his own back yard. He liked to claim he was not far from being in need of the workhouse, but this was his sense of self-pity, not fact. I am sure the thought of entering through those dread doors would have sent him scuttling back to his mama in Wakefield. Again, he is the tourist; under the guise of research, he must have studied the inmates with the same detached air he employed when looking at the dead in the morgue in Paris. To view paupers in their direst hour of need was not much removed from gawping at the inmates of Bedlam. Psychogeography indeed!
For more on Psychogeography click
Coverley, Merlin; Psychogeography; 2010. Pocket Essentials.
See also anything by Iain Sinclair especially 'London Orbital' and 'Hackney' - especially as it covers London Fields and the Regent's Canal and Victoria Park.
 |
| Grub Street as was |
William Blake wrote this in his poem 'London':
'I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter's Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.'
This could be George's attitude to the fatalism he eventually came to allow to dominate his thinking - following hours of solitary nocturnal meandering through the districts that ended up in his novels: Clerkenwell, Camberwell, Brixton, Hackney, Barbican.... To him, the lives of the poor - and their pitiful environs - were the inevitable result of Evolution, and Fate. This was an age that put a price on everything, and valued very little (thank you, Oscar) of what might be termed 'the proletariat'; and George was typical of those who misread the 'Origin of Species' as a treatise on eugenics, and resolutely failed to see the sameness in all classes. After all, if you prick them, do they not bleed? Ever fearful that great 'Demos' might rise up and swallow the minority middle class whole, George did his best to anathematise them.
 |
| Available for free on google play/books |
Mr Gissing Snr started George off on this Psychogeography kick by taking him on his field trips to the countryside around Wakefield. Modern Wakefield, now stripped of its dependence on coal and manufacturing, is clawing back some of the land kidnapped by Victorian industry; many new open spaces and wildlife parks replace the railway lines and heavy industry landscapes of its former life. Thomas would be pleased with the likes of the Heronry and the Crofton Water Park.
George made a lot of his exposure to the landscapes of London. In his works where London doubles as a character as vivid as any of the humans: for example, Workers, Nether World, Jubilee, Eve's Ransom and many of the short stories he achieves the feat of making us feel he knows what he is talking about, but George was a perpetual tourist; a flaneur. His brief exposure to what might be termed 'sordid' living conditions is made far too much of - and as it was largely self-imposed, his complaints are a little fey and self-indulgent. All that talk of starving being the only ticket to being an Artist is BS nonsense. When you are young you care less for comforts especially when you have the burning soul of an Artist. Why else do students spend their money on lager and not slippers? Was George just a cry baby when he harked back to Colville Place? I lived in a squat when I was an Art student and then a basement flat so overrun (or overslimed) with slugs I never entered the kitchen until midday for fear of treading on one on its slow progress home after a night of leaving trails all over the lino. George makes Colville Place sound like hell on Earth, but, really: man up Gissing! I worked two jobs and studied all day - and paid for rent, food, Art materials and books - so you did not have it half as tough as you think you did. Art is never going to happen in comfortable, easy surroundings - Art equals struggle plus desperation plus blood sweat and tears minus recognition for most who lay claim to the true crown of life which is to be called an 'Artist'.
 |
| How the other half existed |
 | ||
| Fitzrovia's Colville Place nowadays
|
Was George conscious he was following in the footsteps of the likes of William Blake? We know he was an admirer of Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859) - another Psychogeographer (and born in Manchester) - who delighted in bringing the reading public stories from the 'underworld' - much as did Dostoevsky to his readership (though with less humour).
De Quincey's love of the macabre, and his impish sense of humour, make his writing immense fun to read. His misanthropic world view is mitigated by his joie de vivre - he cannot quite bring himself to disapprove of murder and mayhem and malice, and even celebrates the person who commits vile acts as an 'Artist'; he sees parallels between the acts of destruction and creation that will have appealed to Nietzsche and any serial killer with a library ticket.
 |
| George's favourite workhouse: St Marylebone |
 |
| A Paris Street by Gustave Caillebotte 1877. You can see how the world is divided... |
Coverley, Merlin; Psychogeography; 2010. Pocket Essentials.
See also anything by Iain Sinclair especially 'London Orbital' and 'Hackney' - especially as it covers London Fields and the Regent's Canal and Victoria Park.
No comments:
Post a Comment