Commonplace 121 George & Conservatism.
In the UK, Guy Fawkes click (1570-1606) and his ill-fated attempt to stage a coup and overthrow the state is commemorated with a ritual called (in the back lanes of George's home town of Wakefield in Yorkshire) 'Plot Night' but is more widely referred to throughout the land as 'Bonfire Night' or 'Guy Fawkes Night' click. Burning an effigy (in days gone by sadly filled with live cats), fireworks, special sweet treats click and spicy drinks are on offer. Gone are the days when ragamuffin children made effigies called 'guys' and stood on street corners asking for pennies, with their cheery cries of 'Penny for the guy, mister/missus'. The amount paid by the mister or missus was strictly commensurate with the quality of effort and creativity that had gone into making the effigy. In my day, we would have been insulted at anything less than a threepenny bit, and we occasionally aspired to a sixpence. Where you pitched your guy was crucial, and railway stations or the Dockyard gates were fought-over spots. Having a girl on your team is always a wise move - big blue eyes, and a winning smile and all that - but in a good way! Definitely not Maiden Tribute territory click.
Nowadays, the British state is allegedly opposed to children on street corners asking for money, though you would never know that from their unfair treatment of the poor or low paid (or asylum seekers, refugees etc) and their fight to smash the working class with their evil 'austerity' policies. As many members of the British working class don't vote, and state education rarely educates children about politics (which would arm them with the knowledge required to make a choice) it's easy to trample on their rights and entitlements.
Anyhoo, Bonfire Night is November 5th. In the Devon town of Ottery St Mary click, not far from Exeter, they celebrate this with a spot of tar barrelling - where the young men and women race down a hill with barrels aflame with burning pitch, after carrying these health and safety threats on their shoulders through the streets click. It is a time of tricks and japes - the last tar barrelling I witnessed resulted in the exhaust pipe of my car being stuffed full of bananas, rendering the car un-driveable! Hilarious (not!), and a very good way of getting revenge. For maximum effect, peel the bananas and insert one at a time - about half a dozen should do it nicely.
Ottery St Mary is a very pretty place. It has many historical associations and I recommend it to you for its beauty, quietude and for the fact that this is where Samuel Taylor Coleridge click was born. What has this to do with George? Apart from the fact he lived up the road in Exeter for a few years, US economist Russell Kirk linked George to Coleridge in his doctoral dissertation The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (1953), subsequently published and enlarged in book form. Kirk writes about both Coleridge and George as Conservative (with a large 'C') writers.
In these post-Nazi Party days, most of us don't really know what a Conservative is; we are not talking smarmy Tory self-serving Daily Mail reading twits here. Well, we are, but it's bigger than that! Conservatism is a worldwide phenomenon that rears its ugly head in many Western states - chiefly, the USA, the UK, France, and many countries with self-aggrandizing ways. However, let us not be naive - as History and George Orwell have shown us, you can't get much more 'Conservative' than Joseph Stalin!
Kirk makes use of George's The Unclassed, but he makes the common mistake of assuming everything George wrote was autobiographical - whereas 'spin' might be more like it. George was writing The Unclassed when he was tired of caring for his first wife, Marianne aka Nell, and he was moving in elite circles cultivated to further his social and artistic ambitions. He did not want Nell but he couldn't divorce her. He wanted to turn his back on his feeble attempt at being a bohemian but how could he ditch the ailing wife and keep every decent person's good opinion? After all, her prognosis was an inevitable slow, lingering squalid death, whilst his trajectory must have seemed potentially stellar (George always thought he was a genius!) - it might seem a bit immoral, cruel and unheroic to walk away from a woman in need. And so he had to stage-manage perceptions of Nell in order to justify abandoning her. And he did this by demonising her, and that work has been carried on by most of his biographers ever since. He couldn't actually lie to anyone's face about her - because he might get caught out - but he could drop hints, claim he was in some way indisposed by his home life, unable to extend hospitality... you will recognise these if you are familiar with the Letters Volume I. Of course, if you haven't got true faults to write about, you make them up - and a good venue to showcase these is a novel. Harriet Smales is portrayed as a sordid mess of a woman, but how do we know this is this based on Nell? Epilepsy is all they seem to share, in my reading of the available detail. But George links epilepsy to vicious behaviour and a vile personality, and so that is applied to the real-life Nell. Epilepsy was (and still is in some quarters) a frightening and embarrassing condition, and in George's day, a source of shame. It's an insult to epileptics to portray it as vicious - and ridiculous, reductive logic in the macho minds of George's biographers to assume Nell was in any way a bad sort just because Harriet was. And, does George really want to be taken as Julian Casti - that spineless, under-achieving doofus who hides his light so successfully under a bushel? Poor Julian - sacrificing himself for his woman the horrible Harriet because he is decent and noble. What utter tosh! As we have seen in Commonplaces 120-121, there is nothing noble or heroic in 'Fear of Freedom' click which is what all the characters in The Unclassed seem to suffer. Heavens! Is George really Osmund Waymark?? Who goes to live on an island in the end, thus constricting his freedom even more!! Hopefully when Ida took up her pen at the end: Reader, she ditched him in the Solent haha!
By claiming Osmund Waymark's thoughts were George's, we can see Kirk fails to realise how manipulative this type of alleged introspective self-revelation could be. George wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, but also as a thinker. In fact, he didn't have a wide enough peer group in which to debate his own ideas to their conclusion - which could be why he never comes up with solutions to problems, and is generally behind the times with his current affairs. So, what is it Kirk wants us to understand, and how does it fit with the George Gissing we know and love? From the wiki page click
Anyone who knows George and his preoccupations will recognise some of him in this. I am no political theorist, so I took guidance from someone who is: Aaron McLeod and this publication click which gives us a Kirk 'condensation' published by the Alabama Policy Institute.
This is lifted from Aaron McLeod's essay (pages 51-52) and I thank him/them for it:
That connoisseur of misery, George Gissing, is discussed in the second section of this chapter. Gissing once resided in the poorest, grimiest sections of London, and so to him Kirk looks to understand the currents of proletarian politics from this time. Gissing knew the poor—he had been one of them, and he knew the socialists because he had given their speeches. It was not long, however, before experience with the socialist agenda and its effects on the working class caused him to repent, and he became an eloquent conservative. The same man who wrote Workers in the Dawn, who aspired to be the mouthpiece of the Radicals, examined his folly four years later in The Unclassed, writing,
Nowadays, the British state is allegedly opposed to children on street corners asking for money, though you would never know that from their unfair treatment of the poor or low paid (or asylum seekers, refugees etc) and their fight to smash the working class with their evil 'austerity' policies. As many members of the British working class don't vote, and state education rarely educates children about politics (which would arm them with the knowledge required to make a choice) it's easy to trample on their rights and entitlements.
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| From the 1920s - before my time! |
Anyhoo, Bonfire Night is November 5th. In the Devon town of Ottery St Mary click, not far from Exeter, they celebrate this with a spot of tar barrelling - where the young men and women race down a hill with barrels aflame with burning pitch, after carrying these health and safety threats on their shoulders through the streets click. It is a time of tricks and japes - the last tar barrelling I witnessed resulted in the exhaust pipe of my car being stuffed full of bananas, rendering the car un-driveable! Hilarious (not!), and a very good way of getting revenge. For maximum effect, peel the bananas and insert one at a time - about half a dozen should do it nicely.
Ottery St Mary is a very pretty place. It has many historical associations and I recommend it to you for its beauty, quietude and for the fact that this is where Samuel Taylor Coleridge click was born. What has this to do with George? Apart from the fact he lived up the road in Exeter for a few years, US economist Russell Kirk linked George to Coleridge in his doctoral dissertation The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (1953), subsequently published and enlarged in book form. Kirk writes about both Coleridge and George as Conservative (with a large 'C') writers.
In these post-Nazi Party days, most of us don't really know what a Conservative is; we are not talking smarmy Tory self-serving Daily Mail reading twits here. Well, we are, but it's bigger than that! Conservatism is a worldwide phenomenon that rears its ugly head in many Western states - chiefly, the USA, the UK, France, and many countries with self-aggrandizing ways. However, let us not be naive - as History and George Orwell have shown us, you can't get much more 'Conservative' than Joseph Stalin!
Kirk makes use of George's The Unclassed, but he makes the common mistake of assuming everything George wrote was autobiographical - whereas 'spin' might be more like it. George was writing The Unclassed when he was tired of caring for his first wife, Marianne aka Nell, and he was moving in elite circles cultivated to further his social and artistic ambitions. He did not want Nell but he couldn't divorce her. He wanted to turn his back on his feeble attempt at being a bohemian but how could he ditch the ailing wife and keep every decent person's good opinion? After all, her prognosis was an inevitable slow, lingering squalid death, whilst his trajectory must have seemed potentially stellar (George always thought he was a genius!) - it might seem a bit immoral, cruel and unheroic to walk away from a woman in need. And so he had to stage-manage perceptions of Nell in order to justify abandoning her. And he did this by demonising her, and that work has been carried on by most of his biographers ever since. He couldn't actually lie to anyone's face about her - because he might get caught out - but he could drop hints, claim he was in some way indisposed by his home life, unable to extend hospitality... you will recognise these if you are familiar with the Letters Volume I. Of course, if you haven't got true faults to write about, you make them up - and a good venue to showcase these is a novel. Harriet Smales is portrayed as a sordid mess of a woman, but how do we know this is this based on Nell? Epilepsy is all they seem to share, in my reading of the available detail. But George links epilepsy to vicious behaviour and a vile personality, and so that is applied to the real-life Nell. Epilepsy was (and still is in some quarters) a frightening and embarrassing condition, and in George's day, a source of shame. It's an insult to epileptics to portray it as vicious - and ridiculous, reductive logic in the macho minds of George's biographers to assume Nell was in any way a bad sort just because Harriet was. And, does George really want to be taken as Julian Casti - that spineless, under-achieving doofus who hides his light so successfully under a bushel? Poor Julian - sacrificing himself for his woman the horrible Harriet because he is decent and noble. What utter tosh! As we have seen in Commonplaces 120-121, there is nothing noble or heroic in 'Fear of Freedom' click which is what all the characters in The Unclassed seem to suffer. Heavens! Is George really Osmund Waymark?? Who goes to live on an island in the end, thus constricting his freedom even more!! Hopefully when Ida took up her pen at the end: Reader, she ditched him in the Solent haha!
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| The Isle of Wight - Osmund Waymark's existential Alcatraz. |
Kirk developed six "canons" of conservatism, which Russello (2004) described as follows:
- A belief in a transcendent order, which Kirk described variously as based in tradition, divine revelation, or natural law;
- An affection for the "variety and mystery" of human existence;
- A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize "natural" distinctions;
- A belief that property and freedom are closely linked;
- A faith in custom, convention, and prescription, and a recognition that innovation must be tied to existing traditions and customs, which entails a respect for the political value of prudence.
Anyone who knows George and his preoccupations will recognise some of him in this. I am no political theorist, so I took guidance from someone who is: Aaron McLeod and this publication click which gives us a Kirk 'condensation' published by the Alabama Policy Institute.
This is lifted from Aaron McLeod's essay (pages 51-52) and I thank him/them for it:
That connoisseur of misery, George Gissing, is discussed in the second section of this chapter. Gissing once resided in the poorest, grimiest sections of London, and so to him Kirk looks to understand the currents of proletarian politics from this time. Gissing knew the poor—he had been one of them, and he knew the socialists because he had given their speeches. It was not long, however, before experience with the socialist agenda and its effects on the working class caused him to repent, and he became an eloquent conservative. The same man who wrote Workers in the Dawn, who aspired to be the mouthpiece of the Radicals, examined his folly four years later in The Unclassed, writing,
"I often amuse myself with taking to pieces of my former
self. I was not a conscious hypocrite in those days of violent radicalism,
workingman’s-club lecturing, and the like; the fault was that I understood
myself as yet so imperfectly. That zeal on behalf of the suffering masses was
nothing more nor less than disguised zeal on behalf of my own starved passions.
I was poor and desperate, life had no pleasures, the future seemed hopeless,
yet I was overflowing with vehement desires, every nerve in me was a hunger
which cried out to be appeased. I identified myself with the poor and ignorant;
I did not make their cause my own, but my cause theirs. I raved for freedom
because I was myself in the bondage of unsatisfiable longing."
Now that Gissing had abandoned socialism, he began to speak of duty; the only reform possible and really worthwhile was reforming one’s character. Gissing saw no shelter from the harsh realities of life on the lowest rung of the economic ladder except that of stoic endurance and self-amendment. In the world of Gissing, the whole duty of man, Kirk relates, “is to stand siege within the fortress of his character.” Unlike his socialist counterparts, Gissing believed the only proper channel for real improvement in society was improving the character of the educated and the leaders of society. Unfortunately, he had little hope.
Kirk finds a nagging doubt in Gissing’s later thought that the beauty in literature and philosophy would withstand the attack from modern secularism, and that the new collectivism, by whatever name, would fail to erase the variety and individuality that make life tolerable. Instead, his advice to those who would fight the good fight is to cling to what remains of a better world with the tenacity of men over an abyss. The chiefest protection against a fiery end in anarchy, he thought, lay in reconciling the British aristocratic ideal with the “grey-coated multitude.” But whether such reconciliation occurs, or is even possible, Kirk gives much the same counsel as Gissing: “Such of us as still are men, then, will hold fast by shaken constitutions and fading beauties so long as there is breath in us.”
So, George the Conservative is what he is often remembered as, but that is a shame because Conservatism is a perspective populated by such dreadful backward-looking specimens of life. History has been warning us to beware the influence of them since records began. Again from the Aaron McLeod piece: Kirk said that Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another" and that "all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief."
Now that Gissing had abandoned socialism, he began to speak of duty; the only reform possible and really worthwhile was reforming one’s character. Gissing saw no shelter from the harsh realities of life on the lowest rung of the economic ladder except that of stoic endurance and self-amendment. In the world of Gissing, the whole duty of man, Kirk relates, “is to stand siege within the fortress of his character.” Unlike his socialist counterparts, Gissing believed the only proper channel for real improvement in society was improving the character of the educated and the leaders of society. Unfortunately, he had little hope.
Kirk finds a nagging doubt in Gissing’s later thought that the beauty in literature and philosophy would withstand the attack from modern secularism, and that the new collectivism, by whatever name, would fail to erase the variety and individuality that make life tolerable. Instead, his advice to those who would fight the good fight is to cling to what remains of a better world with the tenacity of men over an abyss. The chiefest protection against a fiery end in anarchy, he thought, lay in reconciling the British aristocratic ideal with the “grey-coated multitude.” But whether such reconciliation occurs, or is even possible, Kirk gives much the same counsel as Gissing: “Such of us as still are men, then, will hold fast by shaken constitutions and fading beauties so long as there is breath in us.”
So, George the Conservative is what he is often remembered as, but that is a shame because Conservatism is a perspective populated by such dreadful backward-looking specimens of life. History has been warning us to beware the influence of them since records began. Again from the Aaron McLeod piece: Kirk said that Christianity and Western Civilization are "unimaginable apart from one another" and that "all culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief."
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| I salute Khaled al-Asaad: A True Hero click |
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