George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 58 George & His Alter Ego: Bad George Gissing PART THREE - What HG Wells Told His Son.

We've been looking at Anthony West's biography of his father, HG Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984), which gives a unique insight into George's life as seen from the perspective of one who knew him well and 'in the flesh'. It is a fund of recollections of things his father said about George - about how HG reconsidered the basis of their friendship after hearing of how George lied and deceived some of those who considered themselves to be his friends; at learning how secretive he was, and how selfish - and perverse. HG was a much simpler soul than George had ever been and so it came as a shock to realise he didn't know George all that deeply - and the person he got to know in life wasn't much to his taste, after all. All direct quotes from the West account are in blue.

Deer's Skull With Pedernal by Georgia O'Keeffe 1936 (a pedernal is a mesa/hill) 

HG's famous line about George having: 'spent his big fine brain deprecating life, because he would not and perhaps could not look life squarely in the eyes.' is a good, and even-handed, description, but somewhat lets George off the hook.

The friendship between the Wellses and George was about a year and a half old when Gabrielle Fleury arrived on the scene. Wells, at first, disapproved of this complication to George's existence - after all, he already had a woman in his life - a wife he was trying to drive insane - and he had already abandoned his two sons to indifferent situations, with one living where he wasn't wanted, in Wakefield; the other in the care of his allegedly mad mother. George and HG fell out (the exact letter from HG's side of the debate is lost - on purpose, no doubt recycled into the waste-paper bin!). But, the friendship survived and George did a flit to France and turned his back forever on his boys and his family. Running away from responsibility was always a Gissing favourite ploy - some might say he ran away from success for the first time by stealing from coat pockets at Owens - and then just kept on running.

HG disapproved of the flit, not on sexual/moral grounds (that would have been a bit hypocritical!), but because he wanted to know how George was going to pay for it all - two sons, a wife and now a new household in France - he was concerned George was being reckless with the lives of so many people who relied on him. It was clear George was no longer at the peak of his powers, and was not exactly all the rage, so future income was uncertain. HG strongly disapproved of the way George had virtually abandoned Walter and Alfred, especially when their mother became increasingly mentally unwell. Did George see the irony in HG's 'Mankind in the Making' - the reference to what HG would do to the parents of 'neglected children' - a footnote in the Letters of GRG & HG reads: 'In respect to the problems of neglected children Wells recommended that parents be made debtors to society for the adequate care of their offspring for twelve or thirteen years. In case of parental default the children were to be removed, and the parents were to be billed for the cost of suitable maintenance. If parents failed to pay, they were to be put in 'celibate labour establishments' to work off the debt'.

Ram's Head With Hollyhock by Georgia O'Keeffe 1935

Anthony writes that the relationship George had with Gabrielle was based on a huge misconception on both their parts - he thought she was a monied minor aristo and she thought he was a internationally renowned writer. Anthony claims his father told him Gabrielle - being a single woman of a certain age - was desperate to marry a writer and spent her days collecting autographs of famous writers - asking for their John Hancocks by post. In fact, George was a very minor writer already heavily out of fashion (was he ever in fashion before he died?) and largely unread; Gabrielle was a female version of George - poor but with middle class pretensions, brought up wishing she was more connected than she was, desperate for some sort of life she thought she might get if she just wanted it enough. According to Anthony, she lied about her cultural credentials and pretended contacts with the French intelligentsia and even laid claim to being 'semis-aristocratic'. George, being the snob he was, took it all as fact. As he was lying to her about most of his life too, he was in no position to moralise! He told her he was a literary legend well known by the likes of Turgenev, Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Henry James... He wanted to be famous in France and on the Continent in general to cock a snook at the English who had failed to appreciate him. And, though he would not have admitted it to her, he needed a nurse because his health was abysmal, and Gabrielle was obviously a good little carer to her father. Gabrielle appeared to be an easily-manipulated gullible sort who seemingly fell for his downright bizarre cringeworthy attempts at wooing her - some of George's best-penned literary feats are to be found in the letters to poor, desperate-not-to-be-left-on-the-shelf Gabrielle. I say 'seemingly fell', because she obviously wasn't taken in - George's letters to her are so full of  beggings to not be misunderstood, illogical rationalisations and fantastical lies, any woman who could read would see through it and cringe. In fact, to respectfully misquote the Divine Oscar, one would need a heart of stone not to laugh at them click.

Red Tree, Yellow Sky by Georgia O'Keeffe 1952

According to Anthony West, George soon came to see he had made a hideous mistake - It had taken Gissing a little more than eighteen months to realise how thoroughly he had been fooled. By then, Monsieur Fleury (Gabrielle's father) had died, and Madame Fleury (Gabrielle's mother) had dropped into the vacant slot of family invalid, a tactical move that allowed her, or so it seemed to Gissing, to absorb virtually all of Gabrielle's time and energy. It had become clear to him at last that the two women had very little money between them, and that it had never been in Gabrielle's power to win him the recognition in France that England had denied him. He had put himself in a box, and all for nothing. He had also become aware that an avenue of unappetising and possibly humiliating experiences lay ahead of him.

Flower Of Life by Georgia O'Keeffe 1925

This is how George came to arrive back in England in a malnourished state and desperate to get some sympathy (!) from his old friends. After a week with the Wellses, George went to the Suffolk sanatorium where he received the over-feeding treatment, one of many dietary-based cures offered to counteract the 'consumption' (tuberculosis). The term 'consumption' refers to the way the disease 'consumes' the body's flesh and fat, making the sufferer emaciated. Death comes quickly when this process reaches a tipping point and becomes irrevocable - leading to multiple organ failure. You may remember William, George's brother, was a firm believer in 'feeding up' and helped get Marianne aka well when she stayed with him in Wilmslow - by feeding her more than lentils. However, Dr Walker - a TB specialist - found no evidence of phthisis. Weird, no?

Anthony tells us his father, at the time, accepted what George said - which was, that he was suffering from tuberculosis contracted in adolescence and exacerbated by years of poverty and poor diet. As we saw in Commonplace 56, Frederic Harrison lifted the lid on that for him, by saying George was exaggerating... well, lying. He did not live in the direst of poverty - we know in the early days he had an inheritance to live off and a good deal of financially rewarding teaching to occupy his energies - in fact, he turned down more teaching because he wanted to concentrate on writing, Besides, George spent so much time at the Harrisons' meal table, he couldn't possibly have been starving. (Harrison did not say George took home a doggy bag for Marianne - in fact, as we shall see, Harrison hardly knew she existed.) Gabrielle, Anthony says, disagreed with this diagnosis and said she thought George was neurotic and suffered from psychosomatic symptoms including the old Gissing man flu of sore throats, breathlessness, difficulty with sleeping, over-active imagination, all variations of impotence, obsessive fixations, general malaise at the first sign of sun/wind/cold/damp, fear of sand/clay, altitude/lack of altitude, people/loneliness....

Red Hill, White Shell by Georgia O'Keeffe 1938

Anthony also suggests Gabrielle had the wit to realise George was about to do a bunk and leave her. When she returned to France, leaving George in the care of Dr Jane Walker at Nayland, she set about writing long letters to HG to prove George should return to the best place for him - which was by her side. Notoriously, HG eventually grew tired of these letters and subbed out replying to them to his wife to answer on his behalf. HG never really 'got' Gabrielle - he once rather cruelly said she wrote on 'thin paper' - meaning she was common. I have the feeling with Wells he didn't bother himself with women who didn't want to have sex with him - or, women with whom he did not want to have sex - so his opinion of females will always be a bit suspect - to a woman. According to Anthony, HG resented the fact Gabrielle seemed to know George better than he did himself. My father could never, in the end, bring himself to forgive her, not for having had the hardihood to claim that her understanding of his friend was better than his own, but for having been right in thinking so. At the time, nothing could persuade him to the contrary, he had been absolutely certain that no woman could understand Gissing as he understood him.

Cow's Skull With Calico Rose by Georgia O'Keeffe 1931

Anthony says his father and Jane Wells were surprised George went back to France and Gabrielle. but they had already begun reforming their opinion of George, and so did not put up much of a struggle to rekindle the intimacy. George and the Wellses met up in Paris, and Anthony reports: They both thought that Gissing looked seedy and uneasy, and that he eyed them with a mute appeal, as if he was regretting his mistake. The Wellses were doing very well and enjoying their life, and Gissing was not. A gulf was opening between them. Gissing's letters were becoming progressively more guarded and restrained, and on his side my father was beginning to wonder how he had ever had quite such warm feelings for a man who could really believe that the case for thinking of Bacon as the man who wrote Shakespeare's stuff for him needed answering; describe Carlyle's stupefying 'Sartor Resartus' as one of the most important books of the century; and, worst of all, speak of Ruskin - yes, John Ruskin - as the last of England's really great men. To have a go at Sartor Resartus yourself click. Here is a typical line: "Are we Opossums; have we natural Pouches, like the Kangaroo? Or how, without Clothes, could we possess the master-organ, soul's seat, and true pineal gland of the Body Social: I mean, a PURSE?' Which, you will have to agree, is a sound point.
As for Ruskin - maybe George meant some other John Ruskin - and not the one who wrote this Demos-loving sentence: 'The first duty of a state is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed and educated till it attains years of discretion.' click 

Oriental Poppies by Georgia O'Keeffe 1928

When HG rushed to be by his side at the end, we know he was too late to make much difference to George's state of health - he couldn't kidnap him and repatriate him back home. HG was very critical of what Gabrielle was doing - and not doing - to help, but Anthony makes the point she was worn out with looking after him and Maman, and she was not up the job before that. The more Gabrielle wailed and mourned her own predicament, the more HG seethed at her. HG arranged for a nun to come and nurse George; he tried to take over and forced food on George - countermanding the doctor's instructions to Gabrielle that this would prove fatal. While the two rivals for his love were hissing tensely at each other in whispers, Gissing stared straight up through the ceiling into Gothic Ravenna and holding muttered conversations with its notables. That George died soon after this feeding up was on HG's conscience forever.

Cow's Skull With Red, White and Blue by Georgia O'Keeffe 1931

HG left the death scene on December 27th, because he couldn't stand the grief of George being beyond reach and and beyond help. It was, according to his son, one of the worst moments of his life and one of his deepest regrets to have not been there for George - and for making a hash of things when he had travelled there hoping he might be able to save him. HG wrote this in Tono-Bungay, of Uncle Ponderevo's death scene: 'For a time he struggled for breath.... It seemed such nonsense that he should have to suffer so — poor silly little man!'   My father, present in the narrator's person, behaves very well this time around. He is coolly competent in his organisation of the dying man's sickroom, and he stays with him to be a pillar of support and comfort until he has drawn his last breath.

From The Lake by Georgia O'Keeffe 1924

Anthony gives an account (as covered in Commonplace 56), of being contacted by Edmund Gosse about a pension for the boys: My father's enlightenment came by way of his remorse. He wished to atone for having failed Gissing in his last hours, and it seemed to him that he might go some way towards doing so if he were to volunteer his services as literary executor to the dead man's estate. It was then that Frederic Harrison contacted him with the 'I knew George better than anyone else' letter (see Commonplace 56). HG and Fred Harrison got together to compare notes. Anthony was told that Harrison said: All went swimmingly until, one day, chance brought a young man to the house who had been a fellow student of Gissing's in Manchester. This former student saw George there and told Harrison about the Owens incident. 

JOIN ME IN PART FOUR TO SEE WHAT ANTHONY WEST SAID ABOUT GEORGE'S FIRST MARRIAGE.