George Gissing: A Fan's Commonplace Blog

Commonplace 212  George & The Odious Mr Ryecroft.

With the help of Paul Gauguin 1848-1903

Towards the end of his life, George began to realise he was running out of time. His creative energy was waning fast as the effects of syphilis began to disable him, and most of the strength he had was needed for everyday survival; whatever was left over went into writing shorter, lighter and more readable to the general public books, as well as gathering together the various strands of his legacy - both personal and literary.

Women Bathing 1885

One of his most pressing tasks was overhauling his image by putting together a sanitised version of his life, safe for public consumption. Being a secretive and duplicitous sort of cove with plenty of metaphorical skeletons hiding in his metaphorical cupboard, he was well aware that many of his past actions would be seen for what they truly were by the world he tried so hard to deceive - acts of cruelty, dishonesty and self-serving capriciousness.

His sons were going to inherit nothing much but their father's 'good name', but George had spent thirty years lying about his prison sentence for theft. His cruelty to his wives and the real reasons he abandoned his children needed to be expunged and whatever the cost to integrity, he needed to be blameless when their stories were told. Between the lies and the subterfuge, the thieving and the gaol time, the public would see emerge a bitter and resentful man who was too lazy to realise his full potential, too superior to accept he was a middling talent, too irrationally conceited to celebrate the wonders of the human race, and too envious of his peers' success to give credit where it was due.

A starting point for this piece of mass public and personal image manipulation was writing 'The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft', a work finished for four-part serialisation as 'An Author at Grass' in 1901, then published in one volume in 1903. It was George's equivalent of a psy-ops operation - he intentionally muddied the historical waters by suggesting there were elements of autobiography in the piece. TPPOHR enthusiasts have long been captivated by the tale of this battle-weary scholarly writer who never had the breaks in life because he was always too hard up to give all his attention to his talent and consequently, had to see his potential frittered away. The smug, self-obsessed, odious Ryecroft needs that thing George most craved: sympathy. And his cringeworthy emotional manipulation and passive-aggressive whining reveals more about George's Machiavellian strategy to control others' perceptions than some readers might like to admit - or recognise.

Winter Landscape 1879

In Ryecroft, the conceit is that the author is 'at grass', an English phrase that comes from working animals being allowed a happy retirement in the fields rather than a swift jog to the abattoir. It implies Ryecroft - and George, by extension -  has been an industrious and productive unit, a noble beast of burden who has seen his lifetime's energies spent on selfless, back-breaking work. Nothing could be further from George's own life as the biggest sweat he ever worked up was digging his back garden cabbage patch. George spent his life blaming 'poverty' for his lack of social contacts but he was never truly poor. His lack of money was a self-inflicted act, but even at his lowest, he always had his family to borrow from. When, as a young man, he inherited a sizeable chunk of change, he frittered it away on vanity publishing his first (unwanted, then unread) novel. If he had spent that money wisely, his life would have taken a different route. In fact, everyone associated with him post 1879 would have been better off, too.

Ryecroft is lucky enough to inherit a modest annuity which allows him to live without poverty dogging his heels. So, what is the first thing he does? Well, it isn't realise his creative potential to write the sort of book he claimed poverty prevented him from writing! Neither was it an urge to do justice to his talents. He withdraws to a small rural location in Devon (a place George once lived in and came to dislike) to live the ascetic life as a reader of books, but with a housekeeper who keeps quiet and invisibly cares for his daily needs behind the scenes. From his armchair, Ryecroft treats us to his cod philosophy about the state of the world and how it is going to hell in a handcart, but not in the way of one who has ever made a contribution to redeeming it, but as one who stood on the sidelines moaning about the state of it all, with a sort of Eeyorish glee.

Gauguin's mother 1889

Now, anyone who knows anything about George Gissing knows that withdrawing to a small rural setting to live the ascetic life as a reader of books, with a housekeeper who keeps quiet and invisibly cares for his daily needs behind the scenes, was his life's dream. Everything he did that wasn't whoring after payment for work he considered rubbish (his own opinion of his books) was about pursuing the dream of living the ascetic life reading books, with a woman quietly behind the scenes making his life possible by taking on all the nasty, boring tasks he didn't want to do. That's why George got through three wives. In TPPOHR there is no acceptance of the faults of the man, himself, or the part he played in his creative demise; it is little more than a sanitised rationalisation that blame circumstances that let him down, and the misguided notion that his mind is too pure, too much at home in the ancient time of the Roman and Greek Classics, and too aesthetically refined to fit in with the world in which he finds himself. In fact, he claims to be a man out of his time.

It's no surprise 'The Private Papers' fools many into thinking George was Ryecroft because this was the intention. A harmless old codger with a sad past and a fondness for nature, a lover of books and learning is how George would have liked to be remembered. Not as the petty thief wife abuser-cum-child-abandoner of reality. If George's life was blighted it was because of his own character flaws, but his constant lack of insight led him to blame poverty and women for his misery.

Garden in Vaugirard (Painter's Family in the Garden at Rue Carcel) 1881

We are never treated to the chance to make our own minds up about Ryecroft because the preface tells us what we should think of him. This is George at his most self-aware, knowing and controlling, manipulating us into offering up sympathy on his terms. George had very little insight into what the general public knew about him - he probably didn't realise many literary people knew about his past - his prison past - and that they openly discussed him and his secretive, aberrant, deviant ways. He probably didn't know how badly regarded he was by his old mentor, Frederic Harrison, or how much HG Wells had gone off him, partly for the cruel way he treated Edith, the second wife, and how Wells disapproved of George making use of physical abuse to intimidate her. Both of them would spill the beans after his death. George thought his syphilis was a secret. and that no-one would ever discover the truth if he just kept on claiming he had TB. But his old Wakefield childhood friend and occasional GP, Dr Henry Hick had already suggested to him that the chronic lesions on his patient's forehead were syphilitic, not tubercular - as George claimed. After George's death, Hick would compare notes with Dr Jane Walker, George's medical TB specialist at the Suffolk sanatorium, Nylands click, who blew apart the contention George suffered from any form of tuberculosis, because she never found any evidence for it in 1901. George's end of life task was to bury these unpalatable things and lie to re-imagine and explain the ones he couldn't inter. Such as not being able to recall the year his first wife died in dire poverty after he abandoned her to her sad fate. Sins of commission and omission. No wonder he hoped Ryecroft would be a smokescreen.