Commonplace 61 George & His Alter Ego: Bad George Gissing PART SIX - The Last Part of Anthony West's version of George's life.
Anthony writes that, when researching our man's life, the more his father (HG Wells) found out about George, the less he liked him. HG struggled to reconcile the man he thought he knew, and the seeming stranger other associates described. Anthony's words are in blue.
The Gissing he had known had, for instance always been firmly on the right side on the increasingly important woman question. He had recognised that women were potentially men's peers, and that their appearance of being something a good deal less than that was a product of their gross abuse by the law and the mores of Victorian society. He had written with sympathy and understanding of their disadvantages. It was difficult to relate the Gissing who argued on this side of the great question with the man who took pride in having learned, in the course of breaking in two wives, that a man who found himself short of a cane when he wanted to give a woman a good thrashing need never be at a loss in a house with a carpeted staircase - there was nothing to equal a stair rod for that purpose. The Gissing who had made this discovery had also been capable of passing the tip on to a friend as one that any married man would be sure to find useful.
This issue of George being a wife-beating abuser of Marianne aka Nell and Edith is not news. It is generally dealt with by biographers as being a misreading of a reference George made in a letter to Algernon, of stair rods still being in place on the stairs. Algernon had been to stay and noticed the stair rods were missing or loose on some of the steps. After an anecdote about how generally awful women/landladies are, George mentions the rods and the stairs. But, in Anthony's account, we find someone closely linked to the Gissing circle making the same claims and making a very specific reference, long before the wider publication of George's letters in the 1990s. Was George a wife beater? We know his mother made use of corporal punishment and there is a link between what a child experiences and what that child grows up to do click. He locked Marianne in the house to stop her going out, and experienced extreme anger towards both her and Edith. He treated them both with cruel contempt, and his relationship with Walter was fraught with conflict. Edith is supposed to have beaten the boy - but was it really George who used violence against him? George made good use of his knowledge of psychology on Edith and Marianne. As previously mentioned in Commonplace 60, he claimed both women were mad. This is the way many difficult or inconvenient women were dealt with, though, as ever, George was behind the times, as public attitudes to mental illness by the 1880s were turning in favour of the sufferer/victim and it was becoming difficult to institutionalise a person without good reason (more of this in a future post). However, by constantly undermining and criticizing Edith, by lying to her and passive aggressively refusing to speak to her, stealing her child away and generally making her utterly miserable, did he eventually manage to drive her insane - with the help of his do-gooding spinster minions, of course? Or, was she also blighted by the disease he caught when he was at Owens?
In Commonplace 26 we looked at George's tendency to masochism. It is worth recalling that masochism is not nowadays seen as a stand alone state but forms a union with sadism, so that the term sado-masochism is the more appropriate nomenclature.
My father began to feel the sane and healthy Gissing of his first impressions had been an invention of his own. It had been Gabrielle Fleury's great offence that she had tried to tell him so. In more than one of those infuriatingly mannered letters that he had dreaded, she had done her best to make him see the darker reality. 'I know how impossible it is to feel absolutely sure and safe with him,' she had said in one of them, 'on account of ... an extraordinary, terrible, and perhaps morbid unstability (sic) in mind, views, decision (and) feelings'. My father had rejected all such formulations out of hand at the time, assuming that they rose from nothing more than an emotional woman's tendency to make the most of trifles. All that she had truly been aware of, he had thought, had been an absolute incompatibility of temperament. He could now see that she had been on the right track.
Is this a reference to George beating her? Or, is the inability to feel sure and safe with him referring to his tendency to run away or drop with man flu at the first sign of a challenge?
His new-found knowledge of the coldly considered cruelties that had been the staple of so large a part of Gissing's transactions with his women, put beside the latent sadism of so many of his imaginings, had brought my father a desolating sense that his friend had been badly damaged somewhere along the line of his development - the eagerly and joyously sensual being that he could so easily have been had been crippled and transformed into something devious and crabbed, a man who could only deal with a woman who was at a disadvantage, and who was compelled, even then, to teach her, by the most brutal possible means, that he was not to be counted upon for anything.
Biographers may not like this description of George, but it fits with what we know. George, being short on friends, uses his writings to have a conversation with himself about his ideas - and his characters are the manifestations of his inner jaundiced world view. They are all punished in some way for wanting something; they die, kill themselves, get rejected, never reach their goals, never find happiness, have to compromise and settle for less, get abandoned, orphaned, ripped off, humiliated, betrayed, usurped, persecuted... and the babies are wished to have never been born. This is not the writing of a man who isn't afraid to abuse his woman. Of course, he claimed to Gabrielle that he was ironic but irony is a manifestation of a passive aggressive mindset. It is designed to tell truths by the back door - and not cleanly, assertively or authentically. It is a weak way of speaking one's mind but it allows you to think anyone who does not agree with what you say is inferior. I am not sure George used irony much in his fiction, at all. So much of what he thought was even in late Victorian times, considered reactionary and unpopular, so he rarely wanted to fully state what his thoughts were - after his climb downs from movements like Positivism and Socialism, he did not want to have a label others could know him by. He was an adept manipulator of other people's perceptions, particularly of himself. Irony is a trick used to make sure you can tease out other people's reactions to what you say but without doing damage to yourself in their eyes, because you can then retract your point of view if they don't like it, and then claim they don't see the joke. This kind of semantic legerdemain is tantamount to dishonesty and would have confounded anyone with a simpler way of communicating - Marianne and Edith, for example, perpetually condemned to feeling inferior. Sadly, irony is a very British art form.
The usurpation of his mind by this new image of Gissing made it difficult for my father to write the wholeheartedly enthusiastic tribute to the man and his work that he intended the introduction to Veranilda to be. He did his best to be tactful and to avoid all mention of Gissing's darker secrets, but the burden of his knowledge could not be cast off and the essay came out as an apologia for a gifted writer whose promise and potential had not fully been realised. This was not at all to the liking of Gissing's family, whose members were united in their expectation of a eulogy.
HG's version was dumped and Frederic Harrison was brought in to replace him. Harrison praised Veranilda so much that whatever he said in George's biographical favour would easily have been overlooked - he describes Veranilda as George's best book. This was a great shame because, if you recall from the last post, HG Wells wanted to secure a better financial future for the two Gissing boys, and having a run on the Gissing back catalogue might have garnered more royalties. Being directed to Veranilda as George's best offering would have put the uninitiated right off the canon!
Gabrielle Fleury was also upset by the memoir, even though she was never to read it. Gissing had been selectively secretive with her as with his family, though about different things. He had never told her of his expulsion from Owens College, or what had occasioned it, for an instance. When a version of the memoir, purged, as he thought, of everything that had offended the Gissings, at length appeared in The Monthly Review, someone was kind enough to tell her that it was still loaded with transparent references to such matters. It was then that she declared she would never be able to bring herself to read anything that my father might write about either her husband, as she was still firm in calling him, or his work. He (George) had, she said, told her, not just once but several times, that he had never thought much of my father as a critic, or believed that he understood what his literary intentions were.
HG was not going to miss friendship with Gabrielle, and he was not surprised the Gissings were not keen to have George revealed as a different person and not the misunderstood genius they thought they were harbouring. My father had foreseen these reactions, but he was surprised when he found that he had given grievous offence in another quarter altogether. When Dr Hick saw the revised preface in The Monthly Review, he blew up. He read its references to Gissing's persistent ill health in the light of his own intimate knowledge of the case, and took it that anyone else who came across it would be able to do the same - the article then would be as good as a public announcement that Gissing had been a syphilitic... His fury knew no bounds, and under its influence he not only denied ever having said that Gissing had become infected by the disease but even went so far as to deny the fact. His surviving correspondence with Gissing shows that he was not in a position to do so, and my feeling is that the violence of his anger stemmed in part, though only in part, from guilty knowledge - he had indeed been indiscreet in talking of Gissing's private affairs with my father. (Remember, HG and HH discussed George's marriage etc when HG was staying with HH at New Romney.)
My father had liked Dr Hick, and was much wounded by some of the things that he felt called upon to say in his anger. He was particularly hurt by the doctor's observation that the memoir was just about what he should have expected from a man with my father's background.
This is a fine place to stop and pause - because these thoughts about class and biographical accounts might well sum up the reaction to Anthony West's account of George from hard core Gissingites. In January 1985, the book was reviewed by the Gissing Newsletter click to read and it did not go down well with the fans. However, that was thirty years ago, and perhaps it is time to review all the monomaniacal outpourings of a single biographer and inject some fresh thinking into Gissing studies. Just sayin'. Like, ironically haha.
Syphilis! Dash it all! I have run out of space!
JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 62 FOR A FULL ACCOUNT OF GEORGE AND HIS LEGENDARY PENIS INFECTION AND THE WHAT WE KNOW NOW COMPARED TO THE WHAT WE KNEW THEN OF IT ALL.
Anthony writes that, when researching our man's life, the more his father (HG Wells) found out about George, the less he liked him. HG struggled to reconcile the man he thought he knew, and the seeming stranger other associates described. Anthony's words are in blue.
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| Untitled Film Still (#30) by Cindy Sherman 1979 |
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| Club Night by George Bellows 1907 click |
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| The Giant aka Colossus by Francisco de Goya 1814-1818 |
My father began to feel the sane and healthy Gissing of his first impressions had been an invention of his own. It had been Gabrielle Fleury's great offence that she had tried to tell him so. In more than one of those infuriatingly mannered letters that he had dreaded, she had done her best to make him see the darker reality. 'I know how impossible it is to feel absolutely sure and safe with him,' she had said in one of them, 'on account of ... an extraordinary, terrible, and perhaps morbid unstability (sic) in mind, views, decision (and) feelings'. My father had rejected all such formulations out of hand at the time, assuming that they rose from nothing more than an emotional woman's tendency to make the most of trifles. All that she had truly been aware of, he had thought, had been an absolute incompatibility of temperament. He could now see that she had been on the right track.
Is this a reference to George beating her? Or, is the inability to feel sure and safe with him referring to his tendency to run away or drop with man flu at the first sign of a challenge?
 |
| Summer in the City by Edward Hopper 1949 |
Biographers may not like this description of George, but it fits with what we know. George, being short on friends, uses his writings to have a conversation with himself about his ideas - and his characters are the manifestations of his inner jaundiced world view. They are all punished in some way for wanting something; they die, kill themselves, get rejected, never reach their goals, never find happiness, have to compromise and settle for less, get abandoned, orphaned, ripped off, humiliated, betrayed, usurped, persecuted... and the babies are wished to have never been born. This is not the writing of a man who isn't afraid to abuse his woman. Of course, he claimed to Gabrielle that he was ironic but irony is a manifestation of a passive aggressive mindset. It is designed to tell truths by the back door - and not cleanly, assertively or authentically. It is a weak way of speaking one's mind but it allows you to think anyone who does not agree with what you say is inferior. I am not sure George used irony much in his fiction, at all. So much of what he thought was even in late Victorian times, considered reactionary and unpopular, so he rarely wanted to fully state what his thoughts were - after his climb downs from movements like Positivism and Socialism, he did not want to have a label others could know him by. He was an adept manipulator of other people's perceptions, particularly of himself. Irony is a trick used to make sure you can tease out other people's reactions to what you say but without doing damage to yourself in their eyes, because you can then retract your point of view if they don't like it, and then claim they don't see the joke. This kind of semantic legerdemain is tantamount to dishonesty and would have confounded anyone with a simpler way of communicating - Marianne and Edith, for example, perpetually condemned to feeling inferior. Sadly, irony is a very British art form.
 |
| Pornocrates by Felicien Rops 1878 |
The usurpation of his mind by this new image of Gissing made it difficult for my father to write the wholeheartedly enthusiastic tribute to the man and his work that he intended the introduction to Veranilda to be. He did his best to be tactful and to avoid all mention of Gissing's darker secrets, but the burden of his knowledge could not be cast off and the essay came out as an apologia for a gifted writer whose promise and potential had not fully been realised. This was not at all to the liking of Gissing's family, whose members were united in their expectation of a eulogy.
HG's version was dumped and Frederic Harrison was brought in to replace him. Harrison praised Veranilda so much that whatever he said in George's biographical favour would easily have been overlooked - he describes Veranilda as George's best book. This was a great shame because, if you recall from the last post, HG Wells wanted to secure a better financial future for the two Gissing boys, and having a run on the Gissing back catalogue might have garnered more royalties. Being directed to Veranilda as George's best offering would have put the uninitiated right off the canon!
Gabrielle Fleury was also upset by the memoir, even though she was never to read it. Gissing had been selectively secretive with her as with his family, though about different things. He had never told her of his expulsion from Owens College, or what had occasioned it, for an instance. When a version of the memoir, purged, as he thought, of everything that had offended the Gissings, at length appeared in The Monthly Review, someone was kind enough to tell her that it was still loaded with transparent references to such matters. It was then that she declared she would never be able to bring herself to read anything that my father might write about either her husband, as she was still firm in calling him, or his work. He (George) had, she said, told her, not just once but several times, that he had never thought much of my father as a critic, or believed that he understood what his literary intentions were.
HG was not going to miss friendship with Gabrielle, and he was not surprised the Gissings were not keen to have George revealed as a different person and not the misunderstood genius they thought they were harbouring. My father had foreseen these reactions, but he was surprised when he found that he had given grievous offence in another quarter altogether. When Dr Hick saw the revised preface in The Monthly Review, he blew up. He read its references to Gissing's persistent ill health in the light of his own intimate knowledge of the case, and took it that anyone else who came across it would be able to do the same - the article then would be as good as a public announcement that Gissing had been a syphilitic... His fury knew no bounds, and under its influence he not only denied ever having said that Gissing had become infected by the disease but even went so far as to deny the fact. His surviving correspondence with Gissing shows that he was not in a position to do so, and my feeling is that the violence of his anger stemmed in part, though only in part, from guilty knowledge - he had indeed been indiscreet in talking of Gissing's private affairs with my father. (Remember, HG and HH discussed George's marriage etc when HG was staying with HH at New Romney.)
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| Allegory of Sculpture by Gustav Klimt 1889 |
My father had liked Dr Hick, and was much wounded by some of the things that he felt called upon to say in his anger. He was particularly hurt by the doctor's observation that the memoir was just about what he should have expected from a man with my father's background.
This is a fine place to stop and pause - because these thoughts about class and biographical accounts might well sum up the reaction to Anthony West's account of George from hard core Gissingites. In January 1985, the book was reviewed by the Gissing Newsletter click to read and it did not go down well with the fans. However, that was thirty years ago, and perhaps it is time to review all the monomaniacal outpourings of a single biographer and inject some fresh thinking into Gissing studies. Just sayin'. Like, ironically haha.
Syphilis! Dash it all! I have run out of space!
JOIN ME IN COMMONPLACE 62 FOR A FULL ACCOUNT OF GEORGE AND HIS LEGENDARY PENIS INFECTION AND THE WHAT WE KNOW NOW COMPARED TO THE WHAT WE KNEW THEN OF IT ALL.
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