George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 178  George & Money.

With paintings by Tamara Lempicka (1898-1980)

In February 1895, George's longest-serving friend, Morley Roberts, wrote asking if he could write a piece about him in the Fortnightly Review. Roberts liked to bask in what there was of George's glory, but, naturally, George needed to stage-manage the affair. He once said Morley Roberts didn't really understand him or his work, so that probably gave an urgency to compiling his own version for Roberts to use. But there was a more pressing matter of three fairly negative articles in the sort of publications that secured a wide readership (the Spectator, Sketch, and Illustrated London News) that was preying on his mind. Nettled, George grabbed at the chance to respond to all three (but especially the Spectator) making use of Roberts as his willing, and partisan mouthpiece.

Lassitude 1927

It is a masterly work, this reply from George agreeing to the request, and opens with a classic line of control-freak manipulation: 

My dear Roberts, - What objection could I possibly have - unless it were that I should not like to hear you reviled for log-rolling? (Logrolling is the practice of authors bigging up each other's work often to increase sales). 

So, George starts off making sure Roberts keeps his praise reasonably restrained and beyond the gushing that would give away his motives. George assumes Roberts would want to gush, of course. And no mention of how much fake logrolling he might have to do to reciprocate - after all, it takes two to logroll!

George goes on:

But it seems to me that you might well write an article which would incur no such charge; and indeed, by so doing, you would render me a very great service. For I have in mind at present the careful and well-written attack in the current Spectator. Have you seen it? Now I will tell you what my feelings are about this frequent attitude in my critics.

There we have it - removing Roberts' freedom to write what he pleased. George could have written the piece himself and published under his own name, but that would have disrupted his cunning plan to be eternally aloof and seemingly indifferent to outside influences. And, Roberts, desperate to please and with the devotion of an unrequited lover, was happy to play the eternal patsy fully prepared to take a bullet for his hero if the response backfired. 

The Spectator piece published 9th February 1895 was Anonymous, but George commented that it was a careful and well-written attack. In fact, it is a very good piece, and gives an introduction and overview to George's main themes, whilst fairly critiquing his strengths and weaknesses. It sums up the central theme of the 'post slum ghetto' (or whatever George's early works can be termed) books as being preoccupied with middle class men with mediocre education, talents and expectations, who have aspirations to climb the greasy pole to the upper middle class but no big plan or motivation/options to achieve this. The author of the article makes the point that the lower middle classes and below had Charles Dickens as their champion - now the aspirational but dismal middle classes have George. (As there is a tinge of sarcasm here, we can take it this was not meant as a compliment!) But the author goes on to observe that, anyone from this class who reads about themselves as George portrays them (probably having borrowed a volume from a circulating library) will turn away from the finished work 'as if dissatisfied'... they will only feel in a vague, uncomfortable, resentful sort of way that the general effect is false, misleading, even libellous; that it is in essence caricature, though it has been produced without any of those obvious tricks of draughtsmanship which make ordinary caricature at once recognisable for what it is.

Portrait Of Madame G. 1930

Anon goes on to say that George has a way of caricaturing his types by what they don't do or fail to say as much as what they actually do, and by the omitting useful information and insights into their motives and thoughts, rather than by delineating details that might make them seem real to the reader. The author (who could be male or female - I rather hope female) points out:

The artist who sees life steadily and sees it whole, never allows us to forget that whatsoever be a man's caste, or calling, or condition, he is first of all a human being, and only secondarily a courtier, a rustic, a lawyer, a publican, a barbarian, or a Philistine. The humanity which unites him to his fellows is really more significant, and should, in any serious art, be made more emphatic than the idiosyncrasies which distinguish him from them; but it is Mr Gissing's way to give distinctness and force to his delineation of a species by emphasising its special isolating features, which are frequently, if not generally, the features that indicate weakness or limitation.

So far, so true. In the Year of Jubilee was George's most recent fictional offering, so this comes in for some harsh but fair flak. In discussing the characters, this Anon author writes:

The seniors live a dull, colourless, vegetating life, unglorified by any fine emotion or elevating instinct; the young throw the energies of youth either into sham culture, which leads only to unlovely priggishness, into degraded pleasures which land them in still more unlovely profligacy, or into a sordid money-worship which, in the young, is perhaps the unloveliest, because the most unnatural of all.

Spring 1930

The insightful author goes on:

Now, no one will deny that such characters as these represent existing types, or that such types (at least some of them) are most frequent in communities where the materials of comfort are in marked excess of the resources of culture; but to paraphrase Matthew Arnold, even in a cheap suburb life may be lived with well, - certainly not less well in the main than in any other civilised human sphere. But in Mr Gissing's pages the brutish stupefaction of his men and women is obviously treated as the inevitable, unescapable (sic) result of their social conditions and surroundings; therefore, in so far as fidelity to the fact is essential to art (and to realistic art such fidelity in the one thing needful), his treatment may be challenged on purely artistic grounds by critics who would treat its fatalistic pessimism  as an indifferent thing for which they have neither approval nor condemnation. 

You can see why George was pissed off.

There's more: 

Mr George Gissing must therefore be regarded not as a realist, but as an idealist of the new school... His acquaintance with certain social features is hardly less intimate than that of the Greek sculptor with certain anatomical features; but just as we know that there never was a living man or woman so physically perfect as the Apollo Belvedere or the Venus of Milo, so do we know that there never was a civilised community in which human nature was so largely denuded of its attractive elements as is the human nature of the community depicted in Mr Gissing's latest story. He has lately been the recipient of enthusiastic praise, and though we think that some of it has been extravagantly expressed, we do not grudge it to him. But it is in the interests of art that praise should be awarded on the right grounds; and praise can be awarded to Mr Gissing only for the vigour and vividness with which he renders his own vision - a most distorted vision it seems to us - of the vulgarity, sordidness, and ugliness of life.

George must have thought this piece of criticism was accurate or he never would have formulated a response - most of the time, he remained above any debate about his work. and was always happy to disregard what he didn't think much of in terms of understanding of his writing. Being misunderstood was George's thing, and he revelled in it. He added in his letter to Roberts, a clear manifesto for Roberts to repeat:

My books deal with people of many social strata. There are the vile working-class, the aspiring and capable working-class, the vile lower-middle, the aspiring and capable lower-middle, and a few representatives of the upper-middle . . . . But what I desire to insist upon is this: that the most characteristic, the most important part of my work is that which deals with a class of young men distinctive of our time – well educated, fairly bred, but without money.

This doesn't quite address the points raised in the Spectator piece, which charges him with accentuating the vile and sordid and failing to do justice to the good and uplifting in the lives of these well educated, fairly bred paupers. (Oddly, as George puts it, he deals with all social strata except the middle class and the actual hereditary aristocracy!) 

The Blue Hour 1931

These young middle class poor people George so wanted to champion - when they received their fancy education, did no-one tell them about Charles Darwin and his Theory of Natural Selection? Did they not learn we all have to adapt to survive? This was where George might have given them hope. There was work, of course, for them to do, if they accepted it. Not middle class well-paid work, but honest labour in lowly trades - like teaching. 

It's soon back to the usual shenanigans with our man deep in a funk of self-pity. He ends his letter to Roberts moaning about the cold weather: I write with a numbed hand. I haven't been warm for weeks. This weather crushes me. I suppose he was vexed at the accursed unfairness of it all - he was far too aristocratic to suffer the indignity of being cold. That was for the lower orders, the ones George Orwell later termed 'proles'.

The Spectator piece and the letter from George to Morley Roberts appears in the The Critical Heritage edited by Pierre Coustillas pages 238-245.