Commonplace 17 George & the Curse of Henry Maitland's Flaming Trousers.
There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Am I being hard on George to think of him as one of nature's liars? In some of the most important events of his life, there you can find him, protecting his selfish interests with accomplished untruths, half-truths and expert dissembling, offering rationalisations that blame anyone/thing but himself for his miseries. Or, is it that so much of the legend is written by others, and made up of half truths and lies, false suppositions and make-believe-posing-as-fact, that it often makes whatever George says less believable? This is the curse of Henry Maitland's flaming trousers.
George's legendary, somewhat self-deluding, 'aristocratic' shamelessly grandiose belief in his own superiority allowed him to break the social codes when it suited him, and you don't need to go much further than the Owens incident to find proof for this. One can imagine the shock he felt at finding himself judged against all the other scrotes in the prison for being nothing better than the proles for a change. Why is this series of crimes usually presented as an act of youthful nobility? Perhaps it is only apologists and biographers who are able to assign 'noble' motives to ignoble acts, because to see George as a common thief is too blue collar for white collar minds. (Do they regard all other light-fingered lads this way or is it just George?) Despite a lack of proof, blaming Marianne aka Nell for his decision to steal is the Lord Lucan old boys network approach to justify his crimes. I like to think, if there was any 'heroism' in George, it was that he took responsibility for the things he did wrong - that would be brave and inspirational. Maybe he stole for the same reasons his Bellevue peers stole - to offset the drudgery of life; to impress others with wealth; to get the rounds in at the Dog Inn; for the sheer feck of it because sometimes, any sort of thrill is better than no thrill at all. Passing it off as the actions of a wannabe Robin Hood is farcical, and a touch of hypocrisy that tarnishes Gissing's legacy. Misogynists might blame Marianne - that's for their consciences to address. George's apologists now do his lying for him - “But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed, while others reap and sow in his stead.” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
George was not a very good liar; you have to be a good judge of character to be a top notch fabulist. He probably assumed people believed whatever he told them; he manipulatively once said maybe he wasn't lovable - anyone with a smidgen of empathy would, of course, instantly reassure him that he was.
He usually judged others harshly, never succeeding in empathising with them, or allowing others to just be themselves, warts and all. Even when they had wealth and social status, if George thought they were intellectually inferior - and he seems to have thought everyone his intellectual inferior - it followed that they did not present him with a challenge. (George was never good with challenges.) He famously wrote to Eduard Bertz: 'It is my fate to be known by the first-class people and to associate with the second class - or even third and fourth. It will always be so.' (The Letters of GG to EB p102), George, ever lacking real fellow-feeling, forgets to reassure Eduard he is in the first category. His over-inflated sense of his own superiority (which is a carapace so thin it is almost transparent) must have made it hard to find anyone to value. This lead to the arrogance that allowed no contradiction - we know George tended to literally question the sanity of anyone who did not agree with him - both Marianne and Eduard were labelled thus when they strayed too close to God.
George's intellect was, as Jim Morrison might say, the only card in the deck he had to play. I don't know if he found anyone he considered an equal so it might be a safe bet to say, George never really found a true friend - after all, we don't look down on our friends, do we?
In some ways, George's determination to keep himself apart from the commonplace for fear of contamination of all kinds never fully seems to have afforded him insight into his own inner workings especially what might be seen as that thing the British truly hate in the heart of man (yet do so well): hypocrisy.
The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy. William Hazlitt.
One example, taken from George at Work Extracts From My Reading p. 40: Despite, uninvited, asking Swinburne to assess his poems (1883) then sending him a presentation copy of the Unclassed (these examples also show George as the shameless social climber he was, ever ready to make use of strangers to get both sympathy and
favour), and praising Swinburne to Algernon, he wrote in 1888 that he had gone off him, and wrote to Alg and Bertz to that effect, in unflinchingly critical words. Fair enough. However, in 1895 he was asked by the Idler magazine to say who should succeed Tennyson as poet laureate, and George wholeheartedly supported popular Swinburne. So, in private: one thing; in public: another. George subsequently references Swinburne in his short story The Honeymoon, one of the most odious of all George's perverse short stories, to denigrate Phyllis and her choice of honeymoon destination.
Lies were part of George's upbringing - if you want to appear better than your neighbours you have to emphasise the things that separate you from them. After all, so much of what is visible in the class system is visual and surface - suppressing one's true self is the basis of etiquette, is it not? And, if you can't buy what passes for class, because you are relatively poor, you have to direct your energies at what others of the class to which you aspire, value. After all, if no-one values the thing you are good at, you have to go off and find people who do value it - there's no sense in casting pearls before swine. For George and his siblings, that was academic learning. Instead of exhorting them to kindness or sweetness, or decency of spirit (that was Will's domain), he advises his brothers and sisters which languages to learn and which books to read. That they might end up being the only souls in Agbrigg who could read Heine in the original, and so might suffer even more from isolation from their neighbours, passed him by!
I am, of course, not deflected from my devotion to George because he had faults; he was apt to fib and filch, could be cruel, often wallowed in self pity, was vain, venal, selfish, self-obsessed, insensitive, self-aggrandising, deceitful, envious, bullying, morbid, misogynistic (only another man would claim he wasn't!), petty, ultra smart-arsey, cowardly, lazy... a typical bloke, really. But, he gave us Born in Exile (my favourite of George's novels), and Godwin Peak. God (what could a lover shorten it to? Not Winny!!) is one of his most affecting, believable, authentic Gissing heroes.
It is not a modern phenomenon to switch which social class you prefer to be in - many working class students from poor backgrounds have to do this when they go to university and begin to mix with people from other social backgrounds. Many feel compelled to abandon their roots and adopt new identities - George couldn't wait to; every day at Owens must have seemed like another step in the right direction - away from Wakefield. Godwin Peak does it by his intellectual capabilities, but is hampered by the very class system he wants to share. He comes up with a cunning plan to fast track his way to the eligible role of Mr Sidwell Warricombe, despite her mama being - to Godwin - dislikeable, commonplace and unworthy of being Sid's mother (he must have resisted the cliché of thinking that the daughter is a clone of the mother and will turn out the same way). In fact, it is pre-Freud projection at work, for Godwin considers himself to be dislikeable, commonplace and unfit to be Sid's husband - unless he changes what he is. Perhaps Mrs Warricombe is a slight resemblance to George's own mother, albeit with added middle class pretensions? The three Warricombe boys are: Buckland, the eldest - a fierce radical rebel who contravenes social codes; the second, Maurice, mother's favourite, who in George's weirdly grandiose speak 'taught her to see the cogency of a syllogism' (which I am taking as being a comment on his innate diplomacy!); the third, Louis, had an 'indolent good nature'. Sounds like the Gissing boys, to me,
Peak is guilty of 'bad faith' with himself, in the existential sense. His obsessive fixed idea about class equating to worthiness leads him up a blind alley, leaving him with nowhere to go but to lose his authenticity and become a professional hypocrite. In many Gissing characters, and in Gissing himself, it is a failing in imagination that leads to disaster.
If Godwin had challenged his own preconceptions, instead of reacting to things as if he did not have free choice - who would really care if he was related to a café owner? Was it true that no 'decent' girl would marry a man with less than £400 pa? George, ever the alleged sceptic, rarely shone that light of reason on his own doings. And, so, poor dingbat Godwin becomes, at the end, another of George's poorly treated by their maker characters who does not deserve to die, but is too unimaginative to do anything else. If, at Owens, George had composed a mind map entitled 'how to make money the heroic/legal way like the oiks do', and realised he could get a Saturday job stacking shelves in a grocer's shop, it would be we, and not his peers, who would have been robbed!
"The Liar" by William Blake
Deceiver, dissembler
Your trousers are alight
From what pole or gallows
Shall they dangle in the night?
When I asked of your career
Why did you have to kick my rear
With that stinking lie of thine
Proclaiming that you owned a mine?
When you asked to borrow my stallion
To visit a nearby-moored galleon
How could I ever know that you
Intended only to turn him into glue?
What red devil of mendacity
Grips your soul with such tenacity?
Will one you cruelly shower with lies
Put a pistol ball between your eyes?
What infernal serpent
Has lent you his forked tongue?
From what pit of foul deceit
Are all these whoppers sprung?
Deceiver, dissembler
Your trousers are alight
From what pole or gallows
Do they dangle in the night?
The saying 'liar, liar, pants on fire' is inspired by this from William Blake:
Deceiver, dissembler
Your trousers are alight
From what pole or gallows
Do they dangle in the night?
There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-large.jpg) |
| Dante and Virgil in Hell by William-Alphonse Bougeureau 1850 This painting was inspired by a short scene from the Inferno, set in the eighth circle of Hell (the circle for falsifiers and counterfeiters), where Dante, accompanied by Virgil, watches a fight between two damned souls: Capocchio, a heretic and alchemist is attacked and bitten on the neck by Gianni Schicchi who had usurped the identity of a dead man in order to fraudulently claim his inheritance. |
 |
| Pinocchio by Jim Dine circa 2005 |
George was not a very good liar; you have to be a good judge of character to be a top notch fabulist. He probably assumed people believed whatever he told them; he manipulatively once said maybe he wasn't lovable - anyone with a smidgen of empathy would, of course, instantly reassure him that he was. He usually judged others harshly, never succeeding in empathising with them, or allowing others to just be themselves, warts and all. Even when they had wealth and social status, if George thought they were intellectually inferior - and he seems to have thought everyone his intellectual inferior - it followed that they did not present him with a challenge. (George was never good with challenges.) He famously wrote to Eduard Bertz: 'It is my fate to be known by the first-class people and to associate with the second class - or even third and fourth. It will always be so.' (The Letters of GG to EB p102), George, ever lacking real fellow-feeling, forgets to reassure Eduard he is in the first category. His over-inflated sense of his own superiority (which is a carapace so thin it is almost transparent) must have made it hard to find anyone to value. This lead to the arrogance that allowed no contradiction - we know George tended to literally question the sanity of anyone who did not agree with him - both Marianne and Eduard were labelled thus when they strayed too close to God.
George's intellect was, as Jim Morrison might say, the only card in the deck he had to play. I don't know if he found anyone he considered an equal so it might be a safe bet to say, George never really found a true friend - after all, we don't look down on our friends, do we?
In some ways, George's determination to keep himself apart from the commonplace for fear of contamination of all kinds never fully seems to have afforded him insight into his own inner workings especially what might be seen as that thing the British truly hate in the heart of man (yet do so well): hypocrisy.
The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy. William Hazlitt.
One example, taken from George at Work Extracts From My Reading p. 40: Despite, uninvited, asking Swinburne to assess his poems (1883) then sending him a presentation copy of the Unclassed (these examples also show George as the shameless social climber he was, ever ready to make use of strangers to get both sympathy and
favour), and praising Swinburne to Algernon, he wrote in 1888 that he had gone off him, and wrote to Alg and Bertz to that effect, in unflinchingly critical words. Fair enough. However, in 1895 he was asked by the Idler magazine to say who should succeed Tennyson as poet laureate, and George wholeheartedly supported popular Swinburne. So, in private: one thing; in public: another. George subsequently references Swinburne in his short story The Honeymoon, one of the most odious of all George's perverse short stories, to denigrate Phyllis and her choice of honeymoon destination.
Lies were part of George's upbringing - if you want to appear better than your neighbours you have to emphasise the things that separate you from them. After all, so much of what is visible in the class system is visual and surface - suppressing one's true self is the basis of etiquette, is it not? And, if you can't buy what passes for class, because you are relatively poor, you have to direct your energies at what others of the class to which you aspire, value. After all, if no-one values the thing you are good at, you have to go off and find people who do value it - there's no sense in casting pearls before swine. For George and his siblings, that was academic learning. Instead of exhorting them to kindness or sweetness, or decency of spirit (that was Will's domain), he advises his brothers and sisters which languages to learn and which books to read. That they might end up being the only souls in Agbrigg who could read Heine in the original, and so might suffer even more from isolation from their neighbours, passed him by!
 |
| St Sidwell just about to be decapitated; this is from the minster at Wimborne |
Peak is guilty of 'bad faith' with himself, in the existential sense. His obsessive fixed idea about class equating to worthiness leads him up a blind alley, leaving him with nowhere to go but to lose his authenticity and become a professional hypocrite. In many Gissing characters, and in Gissing himself, it is a failing in imagination that leads to disaster.
If Godwin had challenged his own preconceptions, instead of reacting to things as if he did not have free choice - who would really care if he was related to a café owner? Was it true that no 'decent' girl would marry a man with less than £400 pa? George, ever the alleged sceptic, rarely shone that light of reason on his own doings. And, so, poor dingbat Godwin becomes, at the end, another of George's poorly treated by their maker characters who does not deserve to die, but is too unimaginative to do anything else. If, at Owens, George had composed a mind map entitled 'how to make money the heroic/legal way like the oiks do', and realised he could get a Saturday job stacking shelves in a grocer's shop, it would be we, and not his peers, who would have been robbed!
"The Liar" by William Blake
Deceiver, dissembler
Your trousers are alight
From what pole or gallows
Shall they dangle in the night?
When I asked of your career
Why did you have to kick my rear
With that stinking lie of thine
Proclaiming that you owned a mine?
When you asked to borrow my stallion
To visit a nearby-moored galleon
How could I ever know that you
Intended only to turn him into glue?
What red devil of mendacity
Grips your soul with such tenacity?
Will one you cruelly shower with lies
Put a pistol ball between your eyes?
What infernal serpent
Has lent you his forked tongue?
From what pit of foul deceit
Are all these whoppers sprung?
Deceiver, dissembler
Your trousers are alight
From what pole or gallows
Do they dangle in the night?
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