Commonplace 56 George & His Alter Ego: Bad George Gissing. PART ONE.
Biography of a literary figure is a strange beast. Which comes first - a liking for the works or a fondness for the author? The one often leads to the other - when famous people you like turn to writing, you go along with them. When you really like a book, you can't help but want to know more about the author. So, what do we want from biography? What I want is authenticity and a sense the biographer has a unique, but accurate, insight into my adored subject, based on truth and hard facts. I want information from the primary sources; opinion is interesting, and interpretation can be enlightening, but, what I want is insider stuff from the horse's mouth with the biographer stood as close to the horse as possible.
Take all the biographies of George. Considering his relatively modest output and claim to fame, there seems a disproportionate amount of accounts of his life, with most written by those who came after - long after - and who never met their man. Only one or two are written by people who actually knew him, or knew someone who knew him. These rare fragmentary 'intimate' accounts are like precious cyphers helping us decode the enigma - we want to know what they know about the real George: the George behind the mask.
This need for authenticity is the appeal of the Diaries and Letters - they are primary sources, and seem authentic (seem, being the operative word). But, we must beware. George redacted the Diaries as he knew these would be scrutinized after his death - after all, he was a prominent literary figure and we, his public, would want to do homage to his remains, but we could not have been entrusted with truth! That had to be managed and made sanitary, or the precious heritage would be scuppered. We know this because of the shameful way he writes about his wives - and reduces them to transgressing recidivist or demented harridan as he expunged all but the death scene of Marianne aka Nell and rewrote the entries for Edith to reflect his need to justify why he was so vile to them before abandoning both to their fate. And then the way he sacrificed his two children with little thought of what was to become of them whilst he swanned off to France to shack up with another poor, unsuspecting woman - if he couldn't constantly bleat about having the boys' best interests at heart, we would never have realised what a good father he was. Not.
Unfortunately, in The Private Life of Henry Maitland, Morley Roberts, himself a far from good writer of even trite and dull stories, gives us a strange hybrid of fiction (aping The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, George's fake autobiography) and biographical legerdemain, written nine years after George's death by the person who considered himself to be his oldest, best friend. This was not George's view of Roberts. On more than one occasion, George commented on the misreading and inaccuracy of Roberts' understanding of the novels; and George told Gabrielle Fleury the two were not as close as Roberts claimed they were. Much of Maitland is gussied up to reflect well on Roberts himself and reinforce his claim at the forefront of Gissing scholars. He claims influence in events in which he did not take part, gives wrong information, meddles with half-baked literary criticism and is generally regarded as a risible unreliable source - unless modern biographers want to make use of him to back up their own prejudices, when he suddenly becomes unimpeachable (you should know who you are but insight is not gifted to everyone, is it?). This is clearly seen with regard to the death of George's first wife, Marianne, and various entries Roberts made about her, despite never having met her in person - which is odd, considering he was at Owens with George when Marianne was, according to some biographers, anybody's.
Roberts had planned to write his version of George's life but claimed to have been waiting for the right moment before committing. That right moment came in 1912 when he got wind of the fact a rival was about to publish a biography: Frank Swinnerton, a more respected critic, planned to release George Gissing: A Critical Study. It seems Roberts asked to meet with Swinnerton to compare notes. The upshot was Roberts' desperate drive to get his book out complete with a Unique Selling Point to distinguish his biography from his rival's. No doubt this is why there are so many fanciful accounts of things Roberts can only be speculating about, or downright lying about. Regard for most of George's posthumous and late work was reasonably high when both books appeared. The keepers of George's literary flame were his family (particularly Ellen and Algernon), Gabrielle and both of George's sons, Walter and Alfred - who were old enough to weather some little storm in a teacup of controversy if it should arise. However, the main revelation openly expressed (which had been known to a few behind closed doors) contained in both books was the suggestion that George was afflicted with syphilis - which would have come as quite a shock to all of the family, as you might imagine. More of this later. Let's go back to HG Wells.
Wells wrote reviews of George's novels long before they physically met, and displayed a good deal of insight into the secretive, murky world of Mr. Gissing's mind and oeuvre. Here is a piece of Wells on George, written in April 1895 as a review of Eve's Ransom. It is one of the best summations of George's work and the lure of his mercurial genius and if anyone asks you why he is such a compelling writer still worth reading, just point them at this:
'The horror of being hard up, the fixed idea of the dismalness of middle-class life, is not only the keynote of this book, but of all his work; it reduces it from the level of a faithful presentation of life to genre. It is the genre of nervous exhaustion, just as the Restoration drama is the genre of witty immorality. Only the Restoration drama was exhilarating. This is neither exhilarating nor morally helpful... nor terrifying, nor sedative. It is miserable. And yet we must needs admire it because it is so remarkably well done, and we must needs read it to its bitter end for the grim interest of it that never fails.'
George and HG finally collided at the Omar Khayyam dinner in November 1896 held to celebrate the life of George Meredith. They became firm friends. In 1903, HG rushed to the bedside (but left before witnessing the last breath) to do what he could to save George from the inadequacy of the nursing provided by Gabrielle and the French medical team. On January 4th, 1904, several days after George's sad, unnecessary end, Wells replied to a letter from Edmund Gosse, a poet and writer (but not a very esteemed one) who, in 1902 had been made Librarian to the House of Lords. Gosse was writing to request some insider gen on George to see if the Great British Nation could show their appreciation for a dead writer, not with a plaque in Westminster Abbey click but by stumping up a pension for Walter and Alfred (it never has been what you know - it's always been a case of who you know; not that anyone would grudge it them). Gosse said this in his letter to HG: 'Were there not quite a number of events in his life which have to be treated gingerly?' Apparently, the prime minister Arthur Balfour knew some of the rumours (thefts at Owens, for example, and maybe the living in bigamous sin - sans any actual sin - with Gabrielle. And maybe the syphilis claim to be revealed by Roberts and Swinnerton eight years later) and was leery of making an award if something dark lurked in George's woodshed.
In reply, Wells wrote: 'Gissing was a most amiable decent man but an absolute fool, outside the covers of a book, in all arrangements and affairs, and there is nothing lurid and bad but much that is pitiful in his life. Here is the worst I know, and I think all that matters.'
He goes on to detail some of George's passion for 'a girl on the streets' (meaning Marianne), gives some sketchy bits about the Owens incident, cobbles together something about Marianne dying in a hospital of lung trouble, hardship and drink, makes a few remarks about a second marriage to another unsuitable girl who went mad and outlines how Gabrielle Fleury fitted into the scene. He then says: 'It's not a story of magnificent artistic vice, is it? That's really every scrap I know. I think the boys ought to be provided for in the scale of his education and quality.' Wells suggests the prime minister be given 'the square truth'. He then ends with this description of his friend: 'He was one of the most clean minded and decent of men.'
A little later, at the end of January 1904, HG Wells was approached by George's old friend and mentor, saviour and then dumped personal advisor, Frederic Harrison. He wrote asking about George's last years, and said he had received a French mourning card from 'Madame Georges Gissing' - which was at odds with his expectations as George had told Mrs Harrison he had married an 'English farm girl' (meaning Edith?). Fred Harrison then added: 'Has he left a real autobiography?'
What an interesting question! What did he mean by 'real'? More of this later.
To the reply Wells made to this initial letter (February 4th 1904), Harrison writes:
'I am perhaps the only living person who really knows his story, and I am glad that nothing about it will be made public - certainly not by me even to his intimate friends. I am amused to read the various myths which his younger admirers and readers are putting about. They are mostly mere romances. George Gissing passed through a year or two of acute pressure and dreadful suffering - for which he alone was responsible. To the age of 18 he had a perfectly comfortable, easy, successful, and even brilliant life, with every prospect of a fine career. Then he threw it away and smarted horribly for some years.'
There follows some details about George as the Harrison boys' tutor. Then:
'The stories put about of 'grinding poverty', 'solitude', 'hunger', 'neglect', etc, etc, etc, form a myth which has grown up 1. partly, as to 1/5th out of the acute suffering of 2 or 3 years - self-imposed. 2. partly, as to 2/5ths from the younger men assuming Henry Ryecroft and other books to be real autobiography, whereas they are romances based on detached and occasional experiences, and psychological dreams. 3. mainly - as to 2/5ths (or more) from his curious idiosyncrasy - his taste for a solitary life, and for trying what misery was like. He was a sort of amateur Fakir of modern slum life. Do not suppose I am, or ever was, unfriendly or unsympathetic towards him. I am sure I was the most useful friend he ever had, and the one who knew him best. I understood and respected his idiosyncrasy from the first - and giving full allowance for that, I did not complain of his habit of mind so utterly alien to my own. I admired his genius as something so rare. I was on terms of the most perfect confidence and familiarity with him. And I used sometimes to rally him as being the most hardened egotist and the most refined sybarite I knew. What surprises me is that with all this roaring of the young lions about him no one seems to know his earliest and in many ways his best book - savage and foul as it is - the Workers in the Dawn. 4 vols!'
More of this in Commonplace 58.
Wells was asked to write a preface for the book George had been writing for most of his life: Veranilda. Despite it being reasonably laudatory, Algernon and Ellen Gissing (and no doubt Mother) were miffed at it and so Frederic Harrison - he who claimed to know George better than anyone else - stepped into the breach and wrote one that they did like. HG's work was later published in the Monthly Review in August 1904. We are going to look at the HG Wells version; or, one aspect of it, the choice of which which will later become clear.
In the opening section, HG makes this reference apropos George and his literary reputation:
'He has been likened to Zola (which would have incensed George because he thought Zola a pornographer and said so to Wells!), a well-nigh incredible feat of criticism; and a legend of him as a prowling figure gathering 'copy' - they always call it 'copy' - 'among the barrows of the East End costermongers', and in the galleries of 'slum side theatres', has been the imaginative response to this illuminating comparison. His life and these inventions lie patent for the Griswolds* of our time; and there is the clear possibility of an English parallel to that cairn of misrepresentation and ugly falsehood which the Americans have deemed a fitting monument to their Poe. For the proper reading of Veranilda, if for no other reason, this growing legend must be resolutely thrust aside.'
 |
| Louise Bourgeois by Robert Mapplethorpe 1982 |
Take all the biographies of George. Considering his relatively modest output and claim to fame, there seems a disproportionate amount of accounts of his life, with most written by those who came after - long after - and who never met their man. Only one or two are written by people who actually knew him, or knew someone who knew him. These rare fragmentary 'intimate' accounts are like precious cyphers helping us decode the enigma - we want to know what they know about the real George: the George behind the mask.
 |
| Self Portrait by Andy Warhol 1981 |
This need for authenticity is the appeal of the Diaries and Letters - they are primary sources, and seem authentic (seem, being the operative word). But, we must beware. George redacted the Diaries as he knew these would be scrutinized after his death - after all, he was a prominent literary figure and we, his public, would want to do homage to his remains, but we could not have been entrusted with truth! That had to be managed and made sanitary, or the precious heritage would be scuppered. We know this because of the shameful way he writes about his wives - and reduces them to transgressing recidivist or demented harridan as he expunged all but the death scene of Marianne aka Nell and rewrote the entries for Edith to reflect his need to justify why he was so vile to them before abandoning both to their fate. And then the way he sacrificed his two children with little thought of what was to become of them whilst he swanned off to France to shack up with another poor, unsuspecting woman - if he couldn't constantly bleat about having the boys' best interests at heart, we would never have realised what a good father he was. Not.
Unfortunately, in The Private Life of Henry Maitland, Morley Roberts, himself a far from good writer of even trite and dull stories, gives us a strange hybrid of fiction (aping The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, George's fake autobiography) and biographical legerdemain, written nine years after George's death by the person who considered himself to be his oldest, best friend. This was not George's view of Roberts. On more than one occasion, George commented on the misreading and inaccuracy of Roberts' understanding of the novels; and George told Gabrielle Fleury the two were not as close as Roberts claimed they were. Much of Maitland is gussied up to reflect well on Roberts himself and reinforce his claim at the forefront of Gissing scholars. He claims influence in events in which he did not take part, gives wrong information, meddles with half-baked literary criticism and is generally regarded as a risible unreliable source - unless modern biographers want to make use of him to back up their own prejudices, when he suddenly becomes unimpeachable (you should know who you are but insight is not gifted to everyone, is it?). This is clearly seen with regard to the death of George's first wife, Marianne, and various entries Roberts made about her, despite never having met her in person - which is odd, considering he was at Owens with George when Marianne was, according to some biographers, anybody's.
 |
| Equivalent VIII by Carl Andre 1966 |
 |
| Untitled by Martin Kippenberger 1987 |
'The horror of being hard up, the fixed idea of the dismalness of middle-class life, is not only the keynote of this book, but of all his work; it reduces it from the level of a faithful presentation of life to genre. It is the genre of nervous exhaustion, just as the Restoration drama is the genre of witty immorality. Only the Restoration drama was exhilarating. This is neither exhilarating nor morally helpful... nor terrifying, nor sedative. It is miserable. And yet we must needs admire it because it is so remarkably well done, and we must needs read it to its bitter end for the grim interest of it that never fails.'
 |
| Parrot For Juan Gris by Joseph Cornell 1953 |
 |
| Dead Hare by Joseph Beuys 1965 |
In reply, Wells wrote: 'Gissing was a most amiable decent man but an absolute fool, outside the covers of a book, in all arrangements and affairs, and there is nothing lurid and bad but much that is pitiful in his life. Here is the worst I know, and I think all that matters.'
He goes on to detail some of George's passion for 'a girl on the streets' (meaning Marianne), gives some sketchy bits about the Owens incident, cobbles together something about Marianne dying in a hospital of lung trouble, hardship and drink, makes a few remarks about a second marriage to another unsuitable girl who went mad and outlines how Gabrielle Fleury fitted into the scene. He then says: 'It's not a story of magnificent artistic vice, is it? That's really every scrap I know. I think the boys ought to be provided for in the scale of his education and quality.' Wells suggests the prime minister be given 'the square truth'. He then ends with this description of his friend: 'He was one of the most clean minded and decent of men.'
A little later, at the end of January 1904, HG Wells was approached by George's old friend and mentor, saviour and then dumped personal advisor, Frederic Harrison. He wrote asking about George's last years, and said he had received a French mourning card from 'Madame Georges Gissing' - which was at odds with his expectations as George had told Mrs Harrison he had married an 'English farm girl' (meaning Edith?). Fred Harrison then added: 'Has he left a real autobiography?'
What an interesting question! What did he mean by 'real'? More of this later.
 |
| Cape Siren by Philip Taaffe 2007 |
'I am perhaps the only living person who really knows his story, and I am glad that nothing about it will be made public - certainly not by me even to his intimate friends. I am amused to read the various myths which his younger admirers and readers are putting about. They are mostly mere romances. George Gissing passed through a year or two of acute pressure and dreadful suffering - for which he alone was responsible. To the age of 18 he had a perfectly comfortable, easy, successful, and even brilliant life, with every prospect of a fine career. Then he threw it away and smarted horribly for some years.'
There follows some details about George as the Harrison boys' tutor. Then:
'The stories put about of 'grinding poverty', 'solitude', 'hunger', 'neglect', etc, etc, etc, form a myth which has grown up 1. partly, as to 1/5th out of the acute suffering of 2 or 3 years - self-imposed. 2. partly, as to 2/5ths from the younger men assuming Henry Ryecroft and other books to be real autobiography, whereas they are romances based on detached and occasional experiences, and psychological dreams. 3. mainly - as to 2/5ths (or more) from his curious idiosyncrasy - his taste for a solitary life, and for trying what misery was like. He was a sort of amateur Fakir of modern slum life. Do not suppose I am, or ever was, unfriendly or unsympathetic towards him. I am sure I was the most useful friend he ever had, and the one who knew him best. I understood and respected his idiosyncrasy from the first - and giving full allowance for that, I did not complain of his habit of mind so utterly alien to my own. I admired his genius as something so rare. I was on terms of the most perfect confidence and familiarity with him. And I used sometimes to rally him as being the most hardened egotist and the most refined sybarite I knew. What surprises me is that with all this roaring of the young lions about him no one seems to know his earliest and in many ways his best book - savage and foul as it is - the Workers in the Dawn. 4 vols!'
More of this in Commonplace 58.
 |
| A Divorced Man... by Robert Indiana 1961 |
Wells was asked to write a preface for the book George had been writing for most of his life: Veranilda. Despite it being reasonably laudatory, Algernon and Ellen Gissing (and no doubt Mother) were miffed at it and so Frederic Harrison - he who claimed to know George better than anyone else - stepped into the breach and wrote one that they did like. HG's work was later published in the Monthly Review in August 1904. We are going to look at the HG Wells version; or, one aspect of it, the choice of which which will later become clear.
In the opening section, HG makes this reference apropos George and his literary reputation:
'He has been likened to Zola (which would have incensed George because he thought Zola a pornographer and said so to Wells!), a well-nigh incredible feat of criticism; and a legend of him as a prowling figure gathering 'copy' - they always call it 'copy' - 'among the barrows of the East End costermongers', and in the galleries of 'slum side theatres', has been the imaginative response to this illuminating comparison. His life and these inventions lie patent for the Griswolds* of our time; and there is the clear possibility of an English parallel to that cairn of misrepresentation and ugly falsehood which the Americans have deemed a fitting monument to their Poe. For the proper reading of Veranilda, if for no other reason, this growing legend must be resolutely thrust aside.'
*The volume 'George Gissing and HG Wells: Their Friendship and Correspondence', from which the above comes, carries a footnote about Rufus W Griswold and his legendary spat with Edgar Allen Poe click for a full account. Basically, Rufus Wilmot Griswold (which is a name you couldn't make up and is not to be confused with the family in a certain amusing Chevy Chase flick) seemed to be in love with the same woman and, as rivals, did their macho testosterone posturing in bouts of mutual loathing in literary form. When Poe died, Griswold wrote this obituary: 'Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it.' Griswold then set about inveigling his way to being Poe's literary executor, and, from this, he began to demolish Poe's good name and artistic legacy. He told lies about Poe's life, misrepresented events to make them appear criminal and amoral, actively slandering him at every opportunity. Because this sort of thing sells, the Griswold version of Poe's life was taken as the most accurate for many years to come. To some, the damage to Poe's reputation has been so great that an authentic account of his life is still not possible.
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| Puppy by Jeff Koons 1992 (and forever, if looked after right) |
So, we see a little of what HG was afraid of, should someone decide to do a job on George's reputation and maybe uncover some of the lurid details - assuming there might be any to uncover. Quite unconsciously, HG seems to be sending us off to look for them! As in, the sort of stuff Griswold might have hoped to find in his investigation into Poe's biography, snuffling about for juicy gossip or evidence of aberrant behaviour. Little did HG realise it would be his own son, Anthony West, who would really spill the beans on George.
JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO FIND OUT WHAT ANTHONY WEST SAID HIS FATHER TOLD HIM ABOUT GEORGE.
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