Commonplace 164 George & HG Wells' Experiment in Autobiography PART TWO.
With artworks by Max Ernst (1891-1976) click.
In his 1934 autobiography, Wells gives us part of chapter 8 devoted to our man, so let's explore some of the most interesting parts. You can read the whole of Wells' autobiography book here click for free.
As mentioned in the last post, by the time he wrote his autobiography Wells had somewhat revised his opinion on George, both as a writer and a man. Any views Wells had on George the man were coloured by public spats with the Gissing tribe, and some of George's well-meaning but impractical (and sometimes self-serving) supporters. And his family, including Gabrielle Fleury, a woman Wells did not fancy and so, had little use for. Wells was immensely successful in his lifetime, and his story-telling skills came naturally to him. George was more of a formal stylist, which Wells took to be a failing in a world which was changing rapidly. But he was also aware George used his failing as a popular novelist to explain, even celebrate his misery, and Wells was never one to dwell for long on self-pity, which George rather excelled at. As a writer, he felt George never reached his full potential mostly because he was hampered by an over-estimation of his love for all things past (ie the Romans and Greeks), and because of a failure to expand his mind on the future. Philosophically and politically, they were not compatible; HG wanted to be a 'man of the people' and George would have given up the struggle completely if he had ever been mistaken for a democrat.
Firstly, we have to note that Wells' overview contains several factual errors (accidental or intentional, we may never know, but very possibly because Wells was repeating a lie told to him by George), and a few intentional discrepancies that possibly served to protect people still alive when his book was produced. After the trouble he had with the Veranilda introduction and the mess surrounding George's estate (see previous post), it is understandable that HG was treading on eggshells with anything that involved the Gissing cadre of minions and bodyguards - dead body guards haha. But we must remember that, in the years since George's death, Wells had spoken to many of his friend's social circle, Edith had died in a mental institution from the complications of the venereal disease George had infected her with; George's son Walter had been killed in WW1; his other son, Alfred, had gone his own way, after a childhood farmed out to strangers before being incarcerated in a very minor public school. Various biographies of George had been published, some of them favourable to the work, but not the man. Wells was never much of a fan of George's novels or his politics; by 1934, his own influence in the world was under scrutiny after he visited Stalin and failed to outright condemn his policies. If Wells learnt a few truths about George along the way, some of which he passed on to his son, Anthony West, perhaps he felt less than generous towards him, especially if those seeking to write George up as a decent, noble genius were not being adequately challenged by the intelligentsia. He once described George as a snob and a humourless prig. There can be few more damning concepts in the English psyche than snob, humourless and prig. Perhaps Wells just wanted to set the record straight. If so, he forgot to add selfish, heartless and deceitful.
I'm picking it all apart for this post, and the order is rearranged, but I don't think that affects the meaning.
HG Wells writes:
George Gissing was a strange tragic figure, a figure of internal tragedy, and it is only slowly that I have realized the complex of his misfortunes.
The Gissing I knew, therefore, was essentially a specially posed mentality, a personal response, and his effect upon me was an extraordinary blend of a damaged joy-loving human being hampered by inherited gentility and a classical education. He craved to laugh, jest, enjoy...
After George had met Gabrielle:
At George's death:
George and his hatred of Demos:
That readiness to call common people 'base' 'sordid' 'mean', 'the vulgar sort' and so forth was less evident in the man’s nature than in his writings. Some of his books will be read for many generations, but because of this warping of his mind they will find fewer lovers than readers. In Swinnerton’s book one can see that kindly writer starting out with a real admiration and sympathy for his subject and gradually being estranged by the injustice, the faint cruelty of this mannered ungraciousness towards disadvantaged people.
His education:
At the back of my mind I thought him horribly mis-educated and he hardly troubled to hide from me his opinion that I was absolutely illiterate. Each of us had his secret amusement in the other’s company. He knew the Greek epics and plays to a level of frequent quotation but I think he took his classical philosophers as read and their finality for granted; he assumed that modern science and thought were merely degenerate recapitulations of their lofty and inaccessible wisdom. The transforming forces of the world about us he ascribed to a certain rather regrettable 'mechanical ingenuity' in our people. He thought that a classical scholar need only turn over a few books to master all that scientific work and modern philosophy had made of the world, and it did not disillusion him in the least that he had no mastery of himself or any living fact in existence. He was entirely enclosed in a defensive phraseology and a conscious 'scorn' of the 'baser' orders and 'ignoble' types. When he laughed he called the world 'preposterous' but when he could not break through to reality and laughter then his word was 'sordid.'
Death
So ended all that flimsy inordinate stir of grey matter that was George Gissing. He was a pessimistic writer. He spent his big fine brain depreciating life, because he would not and perhaps could not look life squarely in the eyes — neither his circumstances nor the conventions about him nor the adverse things about him nor the limitations of his personal character. But whether it was nature or education that made this tragedy I cannot tell.
The old 'nature versus nurture' alleged dichotomy, first expressed in these words by Francis Galton, the so-called 'father' of eugenics - see Commonplace 101. A fitting and ironic comment on the man who thought he was an innate aristocrat, but who was really a victim of his own, self-induced, inadequacies.
With artworks by Max Ernst (1891-1976) click.
In his 1934 autobiography, Wells gives us part of chapter 8 devoted to our man, so let's explore some of the most interesting parts. You can read the whole of Wells' autobiography book here click for free.
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| L'Ange du Foyeur (The Angel of the Hearth) 1937 |
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| The Antipope 1941-2 |
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| Ubu Imperator 1923 |
HG Wells writes:
George Gissing was a strange tragic figure, a figure of internal tragedy, and it is only slowly that I have realized the complex of his misfortunes.
Gissing was… an extremely good-looking, well-built
man, slightly on the lean side, blond, with a good profile and a splendid
leonine head; his appearance betraying little then of the poison that had crept
into his blood to distress, depress and undermine his vitality and at last to
destroy him. He spoke in a rotund Johnsonian manner, but what he had to say was
reasonable and friendly.
The Gissing I knew, therefore, was essentially a specially posed mentality, a personal response, and his effect upon me was an extraordinary blend of a damaged joy-loving human being hampered by inherited gentility and a classical education. He craved to laugh, jest, enjoy...
When Mr and Mrs Wells were on holiday with him in Italy and bad news arrived about Edith's behaviour (see Commonplaces 61-69) he wrote about George's reaction to hearing it:
This poor vexed brain — so competent for learning and aesthetic reception, so incompetent, so impulsive and weakly yielding under the real stresses of life.
This poor vexed brain — so competent for learning and aesthetic reception, so incompetent, so impulsive and weakly yielding under the real stresses of life.
...beneath the struggle to sustain that persona, the pitiless
hunt of consequences, the pursuit of the monstrous penalties exacted for a
false start and a foolish and inconsiderate decision or so, was incessant.
Perhaps Gissing was made to be hunted by Fate. He never turned and fought. He
always hid or fled.
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| Men Shall Know Nothing of This 1923 |
Presently
he published a novel called The Crown of Life. It is the very
poorest of his novels but it is illuminating as regards himself. The 'crown of
life' was love — in a frock coat. This was what Gissing thought of love or at
any rate it was as much as he dared to think of love. But after all, we argued,
something of the sort had to happen and now perhaps he would write that great
romance of the days of Cassiodorus.
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| The Virgin Spanking Christ Before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, And The Painter 1926 |
Only
once did the old Gissing reappear for a moment, when abruptly he entreated me
to take him back to England. For the rest of the time this gaunt, dishevelled,
unshaven, flushed, bright-eyed being who sat up in bed and gestured weakly with
his lean hand, was exalted. He had passed over altogether into that fantastic
pseudo-Roman world of which Wakefield Grammar School had laid the foundations.
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| The Robing Of The Bride 1940 |
That readiness to call common people 'base' 'sordid' 'mean', 'the vulgar sort' and so forth was less evident in the man’s nature than in his writings. Some of his books will be read for many generations, but because of this warping of his mind they will find fewer lovers than readers. In Swinnerton’s book one can see that kindly writer starting out with a real admiration and sympathy for his subject and gradually being estranged by the injustice, the faint cruelty of this mannered ungraciousness towards disadvantaged people.
His underestimation of the British working class:
For that thin yet penetrating juice of shrewd humour, of kindly stoicisms, of ready trustfulness, of fitful indignations and fantastic and often grotesque generosities, which this dear London life of ours exudes, he had no palate. I have never been able to decide how much that defect of taste was innate or how far it was a consequence partly of the timid pretentiousness of his home circumstances, and partly of that pompous grammatical training to which his brain was subjected just in his formative years. I favour the latter alternative. I favour it because of his ready abundant fits of laughter. You do not get laughter without release, and you must have something suppressed to release.
For that thin yet penetrating juice of shrewd humour, of kindly stoicisms, of ready trustfulness, of fitful indignations and fantastic and often grotesque generosities, which this dear London life of ours exudes, he had no palate. I have never been able to decide how much that defect of taste was innate or how far it was a consequence partly of the timid pretentiousness of his home circumstances, and partly of that pompous grammatical training to which his brain was subjected just in his formative years. I favour the latter alternative. I favour it because of his ready abundant fits of laughter. You do not get laughter without release, and you must have something suppressed to release.
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| The Entire City 1934 |
At the back of my mind I thought him horribly mis-educated and he hardly troubled to hide from me his opinion that I was absolutely illiterate. Each of us had his secret amusement in the other’s company. He knew the Greek epics and plays to a level of frequent quotation but I think he took his classical philosophers as read and their finality for granted; he assumed that modern science and thought were merely degenerate recapitulations of their lofty and inaccessible wisdom. The transforming forces of the world about us he ascribed to a certain rather regrettable 'mechanical ingenuity' in our people. He thought that a classical scholar need only turn over a few books to master all that scientific work and modern philosophy had made of the world, and it did not disillusion him in the least that he had no mastery of himself or any living fact in existence. He was entirely enclosed in a defensive phraseology and a conscious 'scorn' of the 'baser' orders and 'ignoble' types. When he laughed he called the world 'preposterous' but when he could not break through to reality and laughter then his word was 'sordid.'
Death
So ended all that flimsy inordinate stir of grey matter that was George Gissing. He was a pessimistic writer. He spent his big fine brain depreciating life, because he would not and perhaps could not look life squarely in the eyes — neither his circumstances nor the conventions about him nor the adverse things about him nor the limitations of his personal character. But whether it was nature or education that made this tragedy I cannot tell.
The old 'nature versus nurture' alleged dichotomy, first expressed in these words by Francis Galton, the so-called 'father' of eugenics - see Commonplace 101. A fitting and ironic comment on the man who thought he was an innate aristocrat, but who was really a victim of his own, self-induced, inadequacies.
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