Commonplace 52 George & His Inner Circle. George and HG Wells. PART ONE
What a peculiar attraction was there! How did George and HG ever get to best mates terms? On paper, it should never have happened - and HG was rather amazed that it ever did, if the section on George from 'Experiments in Autobiography' is to be believed.
We know about George and his snobbish upbringing and his denial of his lower middle class roots; we recognise the impractical-for-the-real-world useless middle class education; we read of the hatred of progress, of science, of democracy, of Demos; we know the man who really didn't like women awfully much; the one with the wimpish need to be mothered, loved, sympathised with and generally forgiven for being a selfish cad. The one mistaken by some as a 'hero' (don't make me laugh! We British are the nation of Lord Nelson, Edith Cavell and Stephen Hawking - real heroes!!). The writer who could only write if there was an 'R' in the month, or if the sun was in Scorpio, or if the wind was in the right direction, or if the world had stopped its noise, or if the mood took him, or if he had nothing better to do, or if the piggy bank was empty, or if he was being ignored and needed a fix of male attention... That's our George, isn't it. As for HG - well, he was a completely different kettle of fish.
HG (1866 -1946) is an immense English literary figure and, though slightly out of fashion nowadays (except among the science fiction fraternity), is not widely read here in the UK. When I was a nipper of thirteen, Wells (and Arnold Bennett) was embedded in my school literature curriculum; nowadays, he is never mentioned. However, his legacy is to be remembered for his works of science fiction - those ripping yarns that translated so well into moving picshuas*.
HG came into George's life on November 20th 1896 at an Omar Khayyam dinner where Arthur Conan Doyle was also in attendance. It was love at first sight for George. He liked men who were not as tall and handsome he was, and HG was short and thin-to-weasley, and definitely no oil painting. 'I rather liked Wells's wild face and naive manner. As usual, not at all the man I was expecting.' This is not George's usual type of man-friend. Then, on November 26th, an invite to the Wells' home, Worcester Park. 'He seems the right kind of man', he cryptically wrote in his diary. After a few weeks' delay, the two met on Wednesday, 16th December. 'Liked the fellow much. He tells me he began life by two years' apprenticeship to drapering. Astonishing, his self-education. Great talent'.
George took to Mr and Mrs Wells and no doubt unburdened himself to their sympathetic ears. He liked Mrs Wells and noted how close she and her man were, which must have made George wince. Edith, that poor woman so poorly served by George and his biographers, seems to have been left at home for all these socials - though the Diaries, of course, have been doctored - as mentioned in my previous posts, I think George did this when he was living with Gabrielle, not to save her feelings but to manage his legacy. A few months after meeting his new friends, there is a mighty suspicious four-month gap (from February 9th - June 2nd 1897) in the entries. What did he have to hide? Possibly that there was nothing wrong with his relationship with Edith! Dull, perhaps, it might have been but not life-threateningly worse than many marriages. There is something...despicable?...about the way George treated both Edith and Marianne aka, isn't there? Both little more than collateral damage in a mediocre writer's sordid selfish life - some might say. So, the diary had to be redacted again to reflect the wife's crimes and the husband's martyrdom - after all, he couldn't justify dumping wife number two plus two small children if all that troubled him about the relationship was boredom - could he? Some might call him out for it!
It's in the diaries that he seemed to have been getting on reasonably well (under the circumstances) with Edith prior to the end of 1896, doing a fine line in blaming her for problems with servants, resenting the time he wasn't left alone to read, rationalising his literary impotence as a symptom of marriage and not as a sign of his own neuroticism; resenting every minute of his life that was suborned to the role of husband yet failing to give credit to Edith for being his whipping post. Alfred had been born in January, and George no doubt made Miss Collet fully aware of how this impacted on him - on his miserableness, and his predicament - after all, she wellied in and went to Wakefield to give her two pennyworth on Walter and the Gissing females. Was she impressed with their performance as foster carers? Did she ever find out about the little boy Mrs Gissing traumatised by locking him in that cupboard? And, did she mount an Ofsted-like recce on the Gissing sisters' school? Lordy knows what that was like! Two religious spinsters who had led the sort of sheltered life nuns might envy, bringing learning to young minds? In Wakefield? What possessed them?
Anyway, betwixt and between the many and various events in George's social calendar, Miss Collet returned from Wakefield to report on Walter. Was she particularly naive in thinking Edith might be all right with this? One child already kidnapped and sent to unfeeling relatives - the threat of having the second removed - if you remember what George said when Walter was born (December 10th 1891)? 'So, the poor girl's suffering is over, and she has what she earnestly desired.' How could he possibly have treated Edith so cruelly? Did Miss Collet act for purely selfish reasons (had she set her cap for George?) or from genuine interest in a fellow political sister - Edith, the victim of a loveless marriage? Or, was the pull of being a problem-solving activist too strong for her to leave them to it?
To have Miss Collet snoop and smarm round the Gissing clan must have hurt Edith deeply. She wasn't good enough for them; Miss Collet was more their sort of person, and would have been welcomed with open arms. Only a person of very little feeling could fail to see this as deeply wounding to Edith. The blow to her self esteem must have been profound with the removal of her first born - what cruelty she had been subjected to in those few years of married life! To have some baseline of the cruelty and oppression George could mete out, we have his diary entry of September 7th 1898. He and Edith have split up, and George has moved to a house of his own; he tried to keep the address secret from Edith, but she showed up with Alfred, and he is not amused. He writes: 'I gave her to understand our parting was final, but that I should not take Alfred away from her as long as she keeps well... The poor little child is now in knickerbockers... I spoke not a word to him, and he hardly looked at me.'
But, back to the days when Alfred was a tot - 1896/7. We have George moaning about his lot ad nauseum, Edith suffering from neuralgia and useless servants (who were all paid such pitiful wages by George they probably had every right to be rubbish), and the Wells' lovebirds act reminding George he was never going to find a soulmate. Then, there was the visit to Dr Beaumont after several bouts of coughing, sore throats etc etc - the usual Gissing man flu. George seems to have come down with chest problems - and Dr Beaumont diagnosed problems in the right lung - requiring doses of syrup of hypophosphites? One wonders if he advised George to give up smoking!
What was syrup of hypophosphites? This was a fairly controversial treatment for phthisis pioneered in the mid-century by John Francis Churchill MD - possibly the authority on consumption at the time. (It was also touted as a cure for syphilis but that's another post). Controversial, because trials did not produce great results, but as Dr Churchill renounced any financial reward for his advocacy of this by-product of the lime and soda chemicals industry, it is reasonable to assume he genuinely thought it would help. Dr Beaumont, George's physician, was probably using it prophylactically, because, by 1859, Churchill was saying it prevented consumption, rather than cured it. As phthisis was linked to many of what we now term 'psychosomatic' symptoms - sleeplessness, anxiety, weight loss, weakness and exhaustion (and all of these made worse by good weather) you begin to appreciate why George was an ideal candidate for it, and why it might have been difficult to diagnose in him. Then, a few months after the diagnosis of lung disease, suddenly, we have the old George up to his lung lobes in real and imagined illnesses, and dobbing off to Budleigh Salterton, having been 'driven from home'. And this man is supposed to be 'heroic'??
HG Wells was no stranger to illness but does not seem to have developed the man flu gene. Or the self-pity one. He tended to underplay his ailments and even when at death's door with a kidney problem, still chirpily kept up a front of sanguine resilience. Perhaps George dreaded being at Edith's mercy - did he have her down as a bad nurse, unlike HG's wife who was a veritable Nightingale of a woman (as well as being 'best chum' material, according to HG speaking of his own wife)? We know Edith did not - according to George - sympathise overmuch with his lung problems. Maybe this lack of sympathy irked George more than anything else - knowing what we do about his need for it; to have it denied would have been symptomatic of how far apart they were in sensibilities. When he developed something that was (if nothing else) a precursor to full-blown TB, did he decide to cut and run and find somewhere he might succumb in peace, fully knowing Edith was not nurse material? As it happened, he had another six years in which to nurture his final illness, but not until he ballsed up some other poor woman's life haha.
Wells was always there for George in the little time they had to be friends. After their trip to Italy, Wells noted that George regarded him as something of a ill-educated ignoramus, but HG took this in good part. When George came to his senses in France and realised he was being slowly starved to death by Gabrielle's maman (or TB or syphilis!), it was the Wells' who saved him. When he needed to be fed up and coddled, then it was HG who mobilised the troops and made it possible for George to soldier on a few more years. At the end, having become as close a friend as Bertz, and possibly a more intimate associate than Morley Roberts, he did his best to be with George at the end.
In 1934, HG Wells wrote 'Experiments in Autobiography', and he included some details of his friendship with George, some strong opinions, and some revealing insights into our man's state of mind. Here are some extracts; the whole thing is available free here click. He starts with their initial meeting at the Omar Khayyam dinner.
'Gissing was then an extremely good-looking, well-built man, slightly on the lean side, blond, with a good profile and a splendid leonine head; his appearance betraying little then of the poison that had crept into his blood to distress, depress and undermine his vitality and at last to destroy him. He spoke in a rotund Johnsonian manner, but what he had to say was reasonable and friendly. I asked him to come over to us at Worcester Park and his visit was the beginning of a long intimacy.
click to find out why a classical education is still regarded as the cat's pyjamas.
What a peculiar attraction was there! How did George and HG ever get to best mates terms? On paper, it should never have happened - and HG was rather amazed that it ever did, if the section on George from 'Experiments in Autobiography' is to be believed.
We know about George and his snobbish upbringing and his denial of his lower middle class roots; we recognise the impractical-for-the-real-world useless middle class education; we read of the hatred of progress, of science, of democracy, of Demos; we know the man who really didn't like women awfully much; the one with the wimpish need to be mothered, loved, sympathised with and generally forgiven for being a selfish cad. The one mistaken by some as a 'hero' (don't make me laugh! We British are the nation of Lord Nelson, Edith Cavell and Stephen Hawking - real heroes!!). The writer who could only write if there was an 'R' in the month, or if the sun was in Scorpio, or if the wind was in the right direction, or if the world had stopped its noise, or if the mood took him, or if he had nothing better to do, or if the piggy bank was empty, or if he was being ignored and needed a fix of male attention... That's our George, isn't it. As for HG - well, he was a completely different kettle of fish.
HG (1866 -1946) is an immense English literary figure and, though slightly out of fashion nowadays (except among the science fiction fraternity), is not widely read here in the UK. When I was a nipper of thirteen, Wells (and Arnold Bennett) was embedded in my school literature curriculum; nowadays, he is never mentioned. However, his legacy is to be remembered for his works of science fiction - those ripping yarns that translated so well into moving picshuas*.
HG came into George's life on November 20th 1896 at an Omar Khayyam dinner where Arthur Conan Doyle was also in attendance. It was love at first sight for George. He liked men who were not as tall and handsome he was, and HG was short and thin-to-weasley, and definitely no oil painting. 'I rather liked Wells's wild face and naive manner. As usual, not at all the man I was expecting.' This is not George's usual type of man-friend. Then, on November 26th, an invite to the Wells' home, Worcester Park. 'He seems the right kind of man', he cryptically wrote in his diary. After a few weeks' delay, the two met on Wednesday, 16th December. 'Liked the fellow much. He tells me he began life by two years' apprenticeship to drapering. Astonishing, his self-education. Great talent'.
George took to Mr and Mrs Wells and no doubt unburdened himself to their sympathetic ears. He liked Mrs Wells and noted how close she and her man were, which must have made George wince. Edith, that poor woman so poorly served by George and his biographers, seems to have been left at home for all these socials - though the Diaries, of course, have been doctored - as mentioned in my previous posts, I think George did this when he was living with Gabrielle, not to save her feelings but to manage his legacy. A few months after meeting his new friends, there is a mighty suspicious four-month gap (from February 9th - June 2nd 1897) in the entries. What did he have to hide? Possibly that there was nothing wrong with his relationship with Edith! Dull, perhaps, it might have been but not life-threateningly worse than many marriages. There is something...despicable?...about the way George treated both Edith and Marianne aka, isn't there? Both little more than collateral damage in a mediocre writer's sordid selfish life - some might say. So, the diary had to be redacted again to reflect the wife's crimes and the husband's martyrdom - after all, he couldn't justify dumping wife number two plus two small children if all that troubled him about the relationship was boredom - could he? Some might call him out for it!
It's in the diaries that he seemed to have been getting on reasonably well (under the circumstances) with Edith prior to the end of 1896, doing a fine line in blaming her for problems with servants, resenting the time he wasn't left alone to read, rationalising his literary impotence as a symptom of marriage and not as a sign of his own neuroticism; resenting every minute of his life that was suborned to the role of husband yet failing to give credit to Edith for being his whipping post. Alfred had been born in January, and George no doubt made Miss Collet fully aware of how this impacted on him - on his miserableness, and his predicament - after all, she wellied in and went to Wakefield to give her two pennyworth on Walter and the Gissing females. Was she impressed with their performance as foster carers? Did she ever find out about the little boy Mrs Gissing traumatised by locking him in that cupboard? And, did she mount an Ofsted-like recce on the Gissing sisters' school? Lordy knows what that was like! Two religious spinsters who had led the sort of sheltered life nuns might envy, bringing learning to young minds? In Wakefield? What possessed them?To have Miss Collet snoop and smarm round the Gissing clan must have hurt Edith deeply. She wasn't good enough for them; Miss Collet was more their sort of person, and would have been welcomed with open arms. Only a person of very little feeling could fail to see this as deeply wounding to Edith. The blow to her self esteem must have been profound with the removal of her first born - what cruelty she had been subjected to in those few years of married life! To have some baseline of the cruelty and oppression George could mete out, we have his diary entry of September 7th 1898. He and Edith have split up, and George has moved to a house of his own; he tried to keep the address secret from Edith, but she showed up with Alfred, and he is not amused. He writes: 'I gave her to understand our parting was final, but that I should not take Alfred away from her as long as she keeps well... The poor little child is now in knickerbockers... I spoke not a word to him, and he hardly looked at me.'
But, back to the days when Alfred was a tot - 1896/7. We have George moaning about his lot ad nauseum, Edith suffering from neuralgia and useless servants (who were all paid such pitiful wages by George they probably had every right to be rubbish), and the Wells' lovebirds act reminding George he was never going to find a soulmate. Then, there was the visit to Dr Beaumont after several bouts of coughing, sore throats etc etc - the usual Gissing man flu. George seems to have come down with chest problems - and Dr Beaumont diagnosed problems in the right lung - requiring doses of syrup of hypophosphites? One wonders if he advised George to give up smoking!
What was syrup of hypophosphites? This was a fairly controversial treatment for phthisis pioneered in the mid-century by John Francis Churchill MD - possibly the authority on consumption at the time. (It was also touted as a cure for syphilis but that's another post). Controversial, because trials did not produce great results, but as Dr Churchill renounced any financial reward for his advocacy of this by-product of the lime and soda chemicals industry, it is reasonable to assume he genuinely thought it would help. Dr Beaumont, George's physician, was probably using it prophylactically, because, by 1859, Churchill was saying it prevented consumption, rather than cured it. As phthisis was linked to many of what we now term 'psychosomatic' symptoms - sleeplessness, anxiety, weight loss, weakness and exhaustion (and all of these made worse by good weather) you begin to appreciate why George was an ideal candidate for it, and why it might have been difficult to diagnose in him. Then, a few months after the diagnosis of lung disease, suddenly, we have the old George up to his lung lobes in real and imagined illnesses, and dobbing off to Budleigh Salterton, having been 'driven from home'. And this man is supposed to be 'heroic'??
HG Wells was no stranger to illness but does not seem to have developed the man flu gene. Or the self-pity one. He tended to underplay his ailments and even when at death's door with a kidney problem, still chirpily kept up a front of sanguine resilience. Perhaps George dreaded being at Edith's mercy - did he have her down as a bad nurse, unlike HG's wife who was a veritable Nightingale of a woman (as well as being 'best chum' material, according to HG speaking of his own wife)? We know Edith did not - according to George - sympathise overmuch with his lung problems. Maybe this lack of sympathy irked George more than anything else - knowing what we do about his need for it; to have it denied would have been symptomatic of how far apart they were in sensibilities. When he developed something that was (if nothing else) a precursor to full-blown TB, did he decide to cut and run and find somewhere he might succumb in peace, fully knowing Edith was not nurse material? As it happened, he had another six years in which to nurture his final illness, but not until he ballsed up some other poor woman's life haha.
Wells was always there for George in the little time they had to be friends. After their trip to Italy, Wells noted that George regarded him as something of a ill-educated ignoramus, but HG took this in good part. When George came to his senses in France and realised he was being slowly starved to death by Gabrielle's maman (or TB or syphilis!), it was the Wells' who saved him. When he needed to be fed up and coddled, then it was HG who mobilised the troops and made it possible for George to soldier on a few more years. At the end, having become as close a friend as Bertz, and possibly a more intimate associate than Morley Roberts, he did his best to be with George at the end.
In 1934, HG Wells wrote 'Experiments in Autobiography', and he included some details of his friendship with George, some strong opinions, and some revealing insights into our man's state of mind. Here are some extracts; the whole thing is available free here click. He starts with their initial meeting at the Omar Khayyam dinner.
'Gissing was then an extremely good-looking, well-built man, slightly on the lean side, blond, with a good profile and a splendid leonine head; his appearance betraying little then of the poison that had crept into his blood to distress, depress and undermine his vitality and at last to destroy him. He spoke in a rotund Johnsonian manner, but what he had to say was reasonable and friendly. I asked him to come over to us at Worcester Park and his visit was the beginning of a long intimacy.
He was terrified at the prospect of
incompatibility. His sensitiveness to reactions made every relationship a pose,
and he had no natural customary persona for miscellaneous use.
The Gissing I knew, therefore, was essentially a specially posed mentality, a personal response, and his effect upon me was an extraordinary blend of a damaged joy-loving human being hampered by inherited gentility and a classical education. He craved to laugh, jest, enjoy, stride along against the wind, shout, "quaff mighty flagons." But his upbringing behind the chemist's shop in Wakefield had been one of repressive gentility, where "what will the neighbours think of us?" was more terrible than the thunder of God. The insanity of our educational organization had planted down in that Yorkshire town, a grammar school dominated by the idea of classical scholarship. The head was an enthusiastic pedant who poured into that fresh and vigorous young brain nothing but classics and a "scorn" for non-classical things. Gissing's imagination, therefore escaped from the cramping gentilities and respectability of home to find its compensations in the rhetorical swagger, the rotundities and the pompous grossness of Rome. He walked about Wakefield in love with goddesses and nymphs and excited by ideas of patrician freedoms in a world of untouchable women. Classics men according to their natures are all either "Latins" or "Hellenes." Gissing was a Latin, oratorical and not scientific, unanalytical, unsubtle and secretly haughty. He accepted and identified himself with all the pretensions of Rome's triumphal arches.
For that
thin yet penetrating juice of shrewd humour, of kindly stoicisms, of ready
trustfulness, of fitful indignations and fantastic and often grotesque
generosities, which this dear London life of ours exudes, he had no palate. I
have never been able to decide how much that defect of taste was innate or how
far it was a consequence partly of the timid pretentiousness of his home
circumstances, and partly of that pompous grammatical training to which his
brain was subjected just in his formative years. I favour the latter
alternative. I favour it because of his ready abundant fits of laughter. You do
not get laughter without release, and you must have something suppressed to
release. "Preposterous!" was a favourite word with him.
The Gissing I knew, therefore, was essentially a specially posed mentality, a personal response, and his effect upon me was an extraordinary blend of a damaged joy-loving human being hampered by inherited gentility and a classical education. He craved to laugh, jest, enjoy, stride along against the wind, shout, "quaff mighty flagons." But his upbringing behind the chemist's shop in Wakefield had been one of repressive gentility, where "what will the neighbours think of us?" was more terrible than the thunder of God. The insanity of our educational organization had planted down in that Yorkshire town, a grammar school dominated by the idea of classical scholarship. The head was an enthusiastic pedant who poured into that fresh and vigorous young brain nothing but classics and a "scorn" for non-classical things. Gissing's imagination, therefore escaped from the cramping gentilities and respectability of home to find its compensations in the rhetorical swagger, the rotundities and the pompous grossness of Rome. He walked about Wakefield in love with goddesses and nymphs and excited by ideas of patrician freedoms in a world of untouchable women. Classics men according to their natures are all either "Latins" or "Hellenes." Gissing was a Latin, oratorical and not scientific, unanalytical, unsubtle and secretly haughty. He accepted and identified himself with all the pretensions of Rome's triumphal arches.
At the back of my
mind I thought him horribly mis-educated and he hardly troubled to hide from me
his opinion that I was absolutely illiterate. Each of us had his secret
amusement in the other's company. He knew the Greek epics and plays to a level
of frequent quotation but I think he took his classical philosophers as read
and their finality for granted; he assumed that modern science and thought were
merely degenerate recapitulations of their lofty and inaccessible wisdom. The
transforming forces of the world about us he ascribed to a certain rather
regrettable "mechanical ingenuity" in our people. He thought that a
classical scholar need only turn over a few books to master all that scientific
work and modern philosophy had made of the world, and it did not disillusion
him in the least that he had no mastery of himself or any living fact in
existence. He was entirely enclosed in a defensive phraseology and a conscious
"scorn" of the "baser" orders and "ignoble"
types. When he laughed he called the world "Preposterous," but when
he could not break through to reality and laughter then his word was
"Sordid." That readiness to call common people "base"
"sordid" "mean," "the vulgar sort" and so forth
was less evident in the man's nature than in his writings. Some of his books
will be read for many generations, but because of this warping of his mind they
will find fewer lovers than readers. In Swinnerton's book one can see that
kindly writer starting out with a real admiration and sympathy for his subject
and gradually being estranged by the injustice, the faint cruelty of this
mannered ungraciousness towards disadvantaged people
Through Gissing I was confirmed in my suspicion that this orthodox classical training which was once so powerful an antiseptic against Egyptian dogma and natural superstitions, is now no longer a city of refuge from barbaric predispositions. It has become a vast collection of monumental masonry, a pale cemetery in a twilight, through which new conceptions hurry apologetically on their way to town, finding neither home nor sustenance there. It is a cemetery, which like that churchyard behind Atlas House, Bromley, can give little to life but a certain sparkle in the water and breed nothing any more but ghosts, ignes fatui and infections. It has ceased to be a field of education and become a proper hunting ground for the archaeologist and social psychologist.
Through Gissing I was confirmed in my suspicion that this orthodox classical training which was once so powerful an antiseptic against Egyptian dogma and natural superstitions, is now no longer a city of refuge from barbaric predispositions. It has become a vast collection of monumental masonry, a pale cemetery in a twilight, through which new conceptions hurry apologetically on their way to town, finding neither home nor sustenance there. It is a cemetery, which like that churchyard behind Atlas House, Bromley, can give little to life but a certain sparkle in the water and breed nothing any more but ghosts, ignes fatui and infections. It has ceased to be a field of education and become a proper hunting ground for the archaeologist and social psychologist.
This poor vexed
brain—so competent for learning and aesthetic reception, so incompetent, so
impulsive and weakly yielding under the real stresses of life—went on from us
into Calabria and produced there By
the Ionian Sea and, later on,
after returning to England, The
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. The interest of these books, with their
halting effort to pose as a cultivated leisurely eighteenth century
intelligence, is, I think, greatly intensified by the realization that beneath
the struggle to sustain that persona,
the pitiless hunt of consequences, the pursuit of the monstrous penalties
exacted for a false start and a foolish and inconsiderate decision or so, was
incessant. Perhaps Gissing was made to be hunted by Fate. He never turned and
fought. He always hid or fled.
He was a
pessimistic writer. He spent his big fine brain depreciating life, because he
would not and perhaps could not look life squarely in the eyes,—neither his
circumstances nor the conventions about him nor the adverse things about him
nor the limitations of his personal character. But whether it was nature or
education that made this tragedy I cannot tell.click to find out why a classical education is still regarded as the cat's pyjamas.
though he held some fairly eugenicist views he could draw sublime pictures.
I include them here especially for HG and his love of science.
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