Commonplace 125 George & The Influence of Fyodor Dostoevsky. PART ONE.
George's collected short stories offer up a treasure trove of insights into his unique take on the world. He regarded the short story as a money-spinner (and he was not wrong, as he made a steady income from them) though it's difficult to work out how popular he was with his reading public as the stories mostly appeared in periodicals, and were not 'stand alone' publications. George's never impartial world view was well-served by the genre and it often feels that the short story format is his way of settling scores in his ongoing battle with the 'accursed social order' that designated him lower middle class, with no private income, and a tendency to be misogynistic.
Short story writing is an art form easily misunderstood as a cheap alternative to a novel, but each of the tales has to stand alone as a beguiling and fascinating world of its own, at the heart of which is a gem-like universal truth (even if that is dark and perverse) that reveals a nugget of wisdom. A much better definition can be found here click. There is no fixed word count for a short story and George's vary in length; some are mildly amusing, many are irritatingly didactic, but a few are bits of the best writing he produced.
One of the great myths George promulgated throughout his career was that he had a working knowledge of the poor and poverty. I realise it is heresy to say this, but I don't believe he did. Not first-hand. There is no evidence he socialised with poor people, lived in their midst (not according to the Poverty Maps of the times when checked against his addresses), or had anything personally to do with them, other than as a dispassionate slummer and flâneur - one who roamed the back alleys and by-ways of the impoverished neighbourhoods in search of vile material for his stories. And, of course, he employed domestic servants. His poorest address, Colville Place, was no poorer than the family shop where he'd grown up in Wakefield. See Commonplace 93 if you don't believe me. He made much of relocating from Colville Place's attic to its cellar to save money, but this move might have happened because George had very Heath Robinson click ideas about economics - as with his crazes for only subsisting on lentils, or tinned meat, or packet soups whilst never giving up smoking or buying books, in order to save money. This lack of skill with the management of finances should not be taken as him having no finances to manage.
As for having to rub shoulders with the so-called lower classes, George did everything he could to avoid it. He cultivated a middle class crass separateness from his neighbours, at a time when many intellectuals were beginning to see the injustice and anachronism of class distinctions. Partly from a need to protect his infamous prison history from the public gaze, and partly because his fragile sense of self depended on feeling superior to everyone he met, George forever harked back to a time when the gulf between rich and poor kept people rigidly in their place. It was a constant source of anxiety and emotional and psychic pain to him that his natural place was on the losing side of that divide. Of all those he came into contact with, there isn't anyone George rated higher than himself. This is often misreported as him having an 'aristocratic' sensibility, but that is tosh and nothing more than a cheap trick to excuse him his most egregious beliefs. He had a relatively narrow gene pool of social contacts and what he had of friendship with his peers was artificial and limited, and always on George's terms, rarely allowing for what in psycho-dynamics is termed 'authenticity' click,
At no stage did George chose to socialise with the lower classes - even when he first arrived in the capital, he was repulsed at having to spend time with his London relatives who seemed, to him, to be so far beneath him. He never taught in a state school, and his own education had been with other lower middle class boys, so he had no exposure to playing with working class children who were his Wakefield peers, so even his experience of childhood was of no use except as from the position of outsider looking in. He despised working class social activities and gatherings and forbade his first wife Marianne aka Nell to mix socially and when she defied him he locked her in the house. Second wife Edith was prevented from chatting to neighbours and then George claimed she was incapable of socialising. Whatever George's neighbours made of this mild-mannered, passive-aggressive, paranoid, northern, effeminate-looking, misogynistic snob, would have made a good short story in itself haha.
So, there is no evidence at all George was ever in the the thick of it with the sort of people he wrote about in Workers In The Dawn or The Nether World. However, he took up writing at a time of great national interest in the poorer classes, when radical approaches to deprivation were the realm of a new breed of 'scientist': the sociologist. This meant any writer claiming to be actually reporting back from the front line of the war against the rise of the working class was guaranteed a hearing, but they would have to have something new to say in order to win a readership. The middle class mindset tends towards blaming the working class for its own predicament, with Tories (as ever) espousing the idea that we live in a meritocracy, and hard work will pay dividends if the diligent apply their talents to social climbing out of the abyss. This false belief nurtures self-interest and fails to acknowledge the part greed plays in the economic plight of the poor.
So, if George was not a genuine denizen of the Nether World himself, where did he get his ideas from? Obviously, the newspapers and periodicals available free to look at in the British Library Reading Room, and from the news-stands of places like WH Smith, situated at every railways station (and nowadays, high street - which English town doesn't have a WH Smith's?). And, the Gissing family swapped periodicals in the post - sending printed materials via Royal Mail used to be far cheaper than sending a letter or package. Stories of shock! horror! about the depraved deprived always do well, and the fierce battle for readers carried on by the big beasts of Fleet Street ensured readers would be desperate for salacious scandal. We can see from the news coverage of the so-called Jack The Riper murders how far the press went in the 1880s to win readers - as far as manufacturing letters taunting the police - and we know from the ongoing British Leveson Inquiry click into phone hacking by newspapers how ineffectual we all are at stopping them from whipping up controversy.
There was another source of inspiration for George. Many of George's British contemporaries wrote short stories focusing on the lives of the poor from the perspective of the religious activism, seeking to save the world and its unfortunates with prayer, much like missionaries toiling in exotic outposts. The likes of Walter Besant click telling his tragic tales of the poor was a long way from the type of work George wanted to do. George wanted his creative outpourings and observations to fit into a broader tradition of reflecting on poverty as an inevitable evolutionary condition. The European writers he admired rarely tried to redeem the poor they wrote about. Two of his favourites were France's Alphonse Daudet and Russia's Fyodor Dostoevsky. (The historic tradition of pre-Revolution Russia being included in Europe for cultural purposes is explained here click.) As much as he admired Daudet for his warm-hearted stories about happy peasants leading blissfully unsophisticated lives, it was Dostoevsky who was the writer George most wanted to be.
Charles Caleb Colton click (I hadn't heard of him, either!) once said that 'imitation is the sincerest form of flattery'. As covered in Commonplace 35, from time to time George 'borrowed' from Dostoevsky but we must take this in the spirit of Colton and not think of that ugly term, plagiarism. (No-one says artists plagiarise when they do their own versions of things like portraits, still-lifes, etc.) From that Commonplace post, where I link a novel written by Dostoevsky to the myth George invented to conjure up an origin story to stage manage perceptions of his first wife, Marianne aka Nell, there is this:
However, let us look slightly to the side - to one of his heroes, Dostoevsky and The Insulted and Injured (sometimes also called Humiliated and Insulted) of 1861. First serialised in monthly instalments in the fortnightly periodical 'Vremya', it in part tells the story of a poor young orphan of the streets who is prevented from being a prostitute when the hero, Vanya, rescues her from the clutches of an evil procuress. (Note: a 'person of the street' in UK English idiom is not a prostitute as in 'streetwalker'; it is someone who is homeless.) The girl's name is Elena - Vanya suggest she give herself a new name to mark the difference between the old life and the new - and she chooses Nell as her new name. Nell suffers from epilepsy. Vanya takes her to his room and looks after her - no hanky-panky (Vanya is an intellectual and all-round good egg) - and she thrives. Vanya begins to teach her the ways of a middle-class life, with the help from his love interest, a girl who is marrying someone else. Nell responds well, helps the plot along with some homely wisdom and housekeeping skills before an untimely death from heart failure. What a coincidence, I hear you say. I can imagine George reading this in his Owens days and hoping some young Elena - or Marianne Helen might drop into his lap just waiting to be re-branded as a Nell... And, we know George read this novel: in a letter of November 4th 1889, he recommends it to Eduard Bertz. Read the novel for free here
What was it George so admired - even envied - in Dostoevsky's work? And did he ever make use of Dostoevsky's ideas in his stories? Yes, he did. SO JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO FIND OUT MORE.
George's collected short stories offer up a treasure trove of insights into his unique take on the world. He regarded the short story as a money-spinner (and he was not wrong, as he made a steady income from them) though it's difficult to work out how popular he was with his reading public as the stories mostly appeared in periodicals, and were not 'stand alone' publications. George's never impartial world view was well-served by the genre and it often feels that the short story format is his way of settling scores in his ongoing battle with the 'accursed social order' that designated him lower middle class, with no private income, and a tendency to be misogynistic.
 |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky by Vasily Perov 1872 |
Short story writing is an art form easily misunderstood as a cheap alternative to a novel, but each of the tales has to stand alone as a beguiling and fascinating world of its own, at the heart of which is a gem-like universal truth (even if that is dark and perverse) that reveals a nugget of wisdom. A much better definition can be found here click. There is no fixed word count for a short story and George's vary in length; some are mildly amusing, many are irritatingly didactic, but a few are bits of the best writing he produced.
One of the great myths George promulgated throughout his career was that he had a working knowledge of the poor and poverty. I realise it is heresy to say this, but I don't believe he did. Not first-hand. There is no evidence he socialised with poor people, lived in their midst (not according to the Poverty Maps of the times when checked against his addresses), or had anything personally to do with them, other than as a dispassionate slummer and flâneur - one who roamed the back alleys and by-ways of the impoverished neighbourhoods in search of vile material for his stories. And, of course, he employed domestic servants. His poorest address, Colville Place, was no poorer than the family shop where he'd grown up in Wakefield. See Commonplace 93 if you don't believe me. He made much of relocating from Colville Place's attic to its cellar to save money, but this move might have happened because George had very Heath Robinson click ideas about economics - as with his crazes for only subsisting on lentils, or tinned meat, or packet soups whilst never giving up smoking or buying books, in order to save money. This lack of skill with the management of finances should not be taken as him having no finances to manage.
As for having to rub shoulders with the so-called lower classes, George did everything he could to avoid it. He cultivated a middle class crass separateness from his neighbours, at a time when many intellectuals were beginning to see the injustice and anachronism of class distinctions. Partly from a need to protect his infamous prison history from the public gaze, and partly because his fragile sense of self depended on feeling superior to everyone he met, George forever harked back to a time when the gulf between rich and poor kept people rigidly in their place. It was a constant source of anxiety and emotional and psychic pain to him that his natural place was on the losing side of that divide. Of all those he came into contact with, there isn't anyone George rated higher than himself. This is often misreported as him having an 'aristocratic' sensibility, but that is tosh and nothing more than a cheap trick to excuse him his most egregious beliefs. He had a relatively narrow gene pool of social contacts and what he had of friendship with his peers was artificial and limited, and always on George's terms, rarely allowing for what in psycho-dynamics is termed 'authenticity' click,
At no stage did George chose to socialise with the lower classes - even when he first arrived in the capital, he was repulsed at having to spend time with his London relatives who seemed, to him, to be so far beneath him. He never taught in a state school, and his own education had been with other lower middle class boys, so he had no exposure to playing with working class children who were his Wakefield peers, so even his experience of childhood was of no use except as from the position of outsider looking in. He despised working class social activities and gatherings and forbade his first wife Marianne aka Nell to mix socially and when she defied him he locked her in the house. Second wife Edith was prevented from chatting to neighbours and then George claimed she was incapable of socialising. Whatever George's neighbours made of this mild-mannered, passive-aggressive, paranoid, northern, effeminate-looking, misogynistic snob, would have made a good short story in itself haha.
 |
| Study for Peasant with Harness by Mina Moiseev 1883 |
So, if George was not a genuine denizen of the Nether World himself, where did he get his ideas from? Obviously, the newspapers and periodicals available free to look at in the British Library Reading Room, and from the news-stands of places like WH Smith, situated at every railways station (and nowadays, high street - which English town doesn't have a WH Smith's?). And, the Gissing family swapped periodicals in the post - sending printed materials via Royal Mail used to be far cheaper than sending a letter or package. Stories of shock! horror! about the depraved deprived always do well, and the fierce battle for readers carried on by the big beasts of Fleet Street ensured readers would be desperate for salacious scandal. We can see from the news coverage of the so-called Jack The Riper murders how far the press went in the 1880s to win readers - as far as manufacturing letters taunting the police - and we know from the ongoing British Leveson Inquiry click into phone hacking by newspapers how ineffectual we all are at stopping them from whipping up controversy.
There was another source of inspiration for George. Many of George's British contemporaries wrote short stories focusing on the lives of the poor from the perspective of the religious activism, seeking to save the world and its unfortunates with prayer, much like missionaries toiling in exotic outposts. The likes of Walter Besant click telling his tragic tales of the poor was a long way from the type of work George wanted to do. George wanted his creative outpourings and observations to fit into a broader tradition of reflecting on poverty as an inevitable evolutionary condition. The European writers he admired rarely tried to redeem the poor they wrote about. Two of his favourites were France's Alphonse Daudet and Russia's Fyodor Dostoevsky. (The historic tradition of pre-Revolution Russia being included in Europe for cultural purposes is explained here click.) As much as he admired Daudet for his warm-hearted stories about happy peasants leading blissfully unsophisticated lives, it was Dostoevsky who was the writer George most wanted to be.
 |
| Constructed Head No 2 by Naum Gabo 1916 |
However, let us look slightly to the side - to one of his heroes, Dostoevsky and The Insulted and Injured (sometimes also called Humiliated and Insulted) of 1861. First serialised in monthly instalments in the fortnightly periodical 'Vremya', it in part tells the story of a poor young orphan of the streets who is prevented from being a prostitute when the hero, Vanya, rescues her from the clutches of an evil procuress. (Note: a 'person of the street' in UK English idiom is not a prostitute as in 'streetwalker'; it is someone who is homeless.) The girl's name is Elena - Vanya suggest she give herself a new name to mark the difference between the old life and the new - and she chooses Nell as her new name. Nell suffers from epilepsy. Vanya takes her to his room and looks after her - no hanky-panky (Vanya is an intellectual and all-round good egg) - and she thrives. Vanya begins to teach her the ways of a middle-class life, with the help from his love interest, a girl who is marrying someone else. Nell responds well, helps the plot along with some homely wisdom and housekeeping skills before an untimely death from heart failure. What a coincidence, I hear you say. I can imagine George reading this in his Owens days and hoping some young Elena - or Marianne Helen might drop into his lap just waiting to be re-branded as a Nell... And, we know George read this novel: in a letter of November 4th 1889, he recommends it to Eduard Bertz. Read the novel for free here
What was it George so admired - even envied - in Dostoevsky's work? And did he ever make use of Dostoevsky's ideas in his stories? Yes, he did. SO JOIN ME IN PART TWO TO FIND OUT MORE.
 |
| 13th November 2015 |
No comments:
Post a Comment