by Roger Dobson
Notes
1. Yet we should remember the words of Simone Weil from the essay ‘Morality and Literature’: ‘Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. . . . With fictional good and evil it is the other way round. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm.’
2. The Oxford-born actress Heather Angel (1909-86), whom Machen knew in her girlhood—he and Purefoy were friends with her mother—played Constance in the 1935 Hollywood version of The Three Musketeers. Paul Jordan-Smith in his autobiography recalls her on holiday with the Machens in Pembrokeshire as ‘a pretty little girl dancing about on the shore’. Heather Angel starred with Leslie Howard in H.P. Lovecraft’s favourite film, the romantic time-travel fantasy Berkeley Square (1933), from the play by John L. Balderston, inspired by The Sense of the Past by Henry James, and voiced Mrs Darling in Disney’s Peter Pan (1953). Her other films include The Hound of the Baskervilles (1932), described as ‘dreadfully dull’ and ‘not to be dwelt upon’ by Holmes expert Michael Pointer, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1935), screenplay again by Balderston, John Ford’s The Informer (1935), The Last of the Mohicans (1936), Pride and Prejudice (1940), That Hamilton Woman (1941)—Churchill’s favourite film—Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and Lifeboat (1944), written by John Steinbeck, The Undying Monster (1942), a werewolf thriller, from the book by Jessie D. Kerruish, and Roger Corman’s The Premature Burial (1962). In the 1960s she appeared in Peyton Place. Her progression, from Bulldog Drummond thrillers in the late 1930s through prestige productions to horror movies and a TV soap, represents the perfect Hollywood career arc. Sonic Youth have produced a track entitled ‘Heather Angel’, and she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
3. Rochefort was splendidly portrayed by that Machen admirer Sir Christopher Lee in Richard Lester’s handsome but infuriatingly comic adaptations of The Three Musketeers in the 1970s.
4. Besides its lively educational features, Look and Learn, which has been revived online (lookandlearn.com) and as a 48-issue periodical, carried an intelligent, cinematic science fiction comic strip, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire’, drawn by Don Lawrence, surely influenced by the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Some time ago I found that the Trigan scriptwriter was Michael Butterworth, but not, alas, our Michael Butterworth, of the Machen Friends and Savoy Books, Manchester. My thanks to comics historian Steve Holland for confirming that the Dumas serialisation appeared in Look and Learn in 1963.
5. ‘Classics Illustrated’, the U.S. series of comic-books issued between 1941-71 merits mentioning here. The Three Musketeers was the first issue published, and the musketeers’ sequels followed. The series, which sold for 10 and 15 cents and in Britain for 1s. and 1s. 3d., was the brainchild of Russian-born publisher Albert Kanter. The issues are now being reprinted by Jeff Brooks’s Classic Comic Store (classicsillustrated.co.uk) of Thatcham, Berkshire. Among more than 160 ‘Classics’ adaptations were Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Mysterious Island, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein, Gulliver’s Travels, The Moonstone, The Woman in White, Sue’s Mysteries of Paris, Goethe’s Faust and even a film tie-in, Dr No. For a complete list see org/wiki/ Classics_Illustrated at Wikipedia. Ironically, children’s books and periodicals in the twenty-first century are not what they were. Those interested in Arthuriana may fondly recall Roger Lancelyn Green’s Sir Lancelot of the Lake, superlatively illustrated by Janet and Anne Grahame Johnstone, of One Hundred and One Dalmatians fame (see the Wikipedia entry), serialised in Purnell’s magazine Finding Out in the 1960s and published as a book in 1966; though I have never been fortunate enough to find a copy. Is it any wonder literacy rates were higher in the past? Children were eager to learn to read simply because such thrilling works were available.
6. Joe, who acts as hatchet-man in Cathy’s Salinas brothel, makes one wonder if the ‘Cockney Venus’ episode concluding The Hill of Dreams was a possible further influence.
7. Michael Moorcock—famous contributor to Avallaunius (No.11, Autumn 1993)—wrote for Look and Learn in the 1960s, producing features on historical subjects such as Alexander the Great, Roland and Oliver, the Alamo and even author biographies such as Trollope. Trollope in a children’s magazine! The past is not just another country, but another world.
‘A TRADE OF THE DAMNED’: TWIN TOILERS IN VICTORIAN GRUB STREET
Faunus 24, Autumn 2011
When I admit neglect of Gissing
They say I don’t know what I’m missing.
Until their arguments are subtler,
I think I’ll stick to Samuel Butler.
Dorothy Parker
Among the myriad mysteries of Machen’s fiction is one minor puzzle. Which unnamed book so impresses Henry Wilkins, alias Richmond, in The Three Impostors? In the ‘Novel of the Dark Valley’ he tells Dyson: ‘I had read one of the most charming of the works of a famous novelist of the present day, and I frequented the Fleet Street taverns in the hope of making literary friends, and so getting the introductions which I understood were indispensable in the career of letters.’ Is the book George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891)?1 As a boy, seeing it in bookshops and unaware of Gissing, I found the title repulsive: who would want to read such a gloomy-sounding tome? The ignorance of youth is infinite. If New Grub Street is not a masterpiece it is perilously close to one. Readers may find themselves putting it down for the sole reason that they do not wish to reach the end. Its cast of bohemian scribblers eking out a living in the Grub Street of the 1880s is so vivid and memorably drawn it seems a tragedy that the characters never existed. Of course, never having lived they will never die: immortality of a kind. Try the first chapter online and you may well be hooked.
George Gissing, 1857-1903.
The principal plot concerns Gissing’s alter ego, novelist Edwin Reardon2, who after modest success becomes blocked, in the modern phrase, over his latest manuscript. When we meet Reardon and his wife Amy they have been married nearly two years, and Amy’s initial admiration of her husband has worn thin. ‘You will be a great man,’ she tells him in a flashback chapter outlining Reardon’s early career. Yet he warns her: ‘I implore you not to count on that! In many ways I am wretchedly weak. I have no such confidence in myself.’ For dramatic purposes Gissing makes Reardon more ineffectual than himself. He paints the portrait of a crumbling marriage where happiness hinges on shillings and pence. Reardon aims at producing quality work but fears that as a ‘mediocrity’ posterity will judge him. ‘A year after I have published my last book, I shall be practically forgotten; ten years later, I shall be as absolutely forgotten as one of those novelists of the early part of this century, whose names one doesn’t even recognise.’ Creative impotence crushes him:
I can’t see my way to the end of anything; if I get hold of an idea which seems good, all the sap has gone out of it before I have got it into working shape. In these last few months, I must have begun a dozen different books; I have been ashamed to tell you of each new beginning. I write twenty pages, perhaps, and then my courage fails. I am disgusted with the thing, and can’t go on with it—can’t! My fingers refuse to hold the pen.
This reflects Machen’s agonies over composition, and might be one of his own characters speaking: Edgar Russell in The Three Impostors, Lucian Taylor or Machen himself. Reardon’s troubles seem like artistic temperament to Amy who just wants him to finish a book, however trashy, to bring in some money to the household exchequer. She tells him that he must now write for the market. To Reardon making an art into a trade seems sacrilege. ‘Art must be practised as a trade, at all events in our time,’ says practical Amy. ‘This is the age of trade.’ One thinks of Machen, blessed in having the understanding Amy and Purefoy as wives; he never regarded literature as a care
er but as a vocation. Reardon manages to complete a poor novel, wearily entitled Margaret Home, notable for containing ‘not a single striking scene and not one living character’. ‘The public don’t care whether the characters are living or not,’ says Amy: true in 1882 and in 2011. Reardon then writes a ‘glaringly artificial story with a sensational title’ to bring in a few pounds. He and Amy separate after he accepts a hospital clerkship3 at twenty-five shillings a week. Before making a small name for himself as a novelist, Reardon has been a hospital clerk. This is a backward step, declassing him. Outraged, Amy refuses to join him in humble rooms in Islington.
George Orwell4 thought that while ‘England has produced very few better novelists’, Gissing did not exhibit much of a sense of humour in his novels, but here are some jests at least. One of Reardon’s novels is sardonically called The Optimist. Gissing has some fun with literary naturalism. Reardon’s friend Harold Biffen, who resembles a living skeleton, is an impoverished ultra-realist who outdoes Zola; he will never write a dramatic scene. ‘Such things do happen in life, but so very rarely that they are nothing to my purpose,’ Biffen argues. He would fit perfectly into the scene between Dyson and the realist Edgar Russell: ‘let us copy life’, he vows. Biffen aims to create ‘an absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent’. Zola’s books were dramatic tragedies; Dickens was unrealistic because of his devotion to melodrama and comedy. When lovers meet for a passionate scene, let one of them have a bad cold; let the pretty girl get a pimple on her nose just before a ball. In his dreary novel Mr Bailey, Grocer, Biffen anticipates Ulysses (1922) by many years:
‘. . . Joyce is attempting to select and represent events and thoughts as they occur in life and not as they occur in fiction,’ writes Orwell. Biffen does likewise. ‘If it were anything but tedious,’ Biffen says, planning his book, ‘it would be untrue.’ Reardon admires Biffen’s craftsmanship but finds the material of his ‘exhilarating romance’ repulsive. Ironically it is Biffen who is involved in the story’s one dramatic episode. Returning to his digs in Clipstone Street he finds them ablaze after a drunken tenant, Briggs, has knocked over a lamp. Biffen, who has his priorities right, risks his life, not to save Briggs but the precious Mr Bailey, Grocer. Nothing is said of this, and therein perhaps lies the humour. A fellow lodger cries: ‘ “It’s that — Briggs”—the epithet was alliterative—“ ’as upset his — lamp, and I ’ope he’ll — well get roasted to death.” ’ He is. How much funnier and expressive are these dashes than what might be termed ‘Channel Four language’.
As with Machen, part of Gissing’s appeal lies, as Orwell said, in his pictures of a fog-bound, gas-lit period London. Machen and Gissing never met. ‘I never came near Gissing. But then I never came near anybody!’ Machen wrote to Munson Havens in 1923. He and Gissing shared affinities and contrasts. Both frequented the British Museum Reading Room, and it is interesting to speculate that they were perhaps present under the dome on the same day. In 1881 Gissing lived in Wornington Road, north of Machen’s Clarendon Road: they might well have passed one another in the street, or book hunting in Holywell Street. Both were tireless walkers, exploring the wastes of Camden and Clerkenwell and other regions of the smoky metropolis. Both knew poverty, inhabited garrets and worked as tutors. They had associates in common: Jerome K. Jerome, John Lane, Grant Richards, Clement Shorter. Both were devotees of Dr Johnson and Dickens. Gissing’s Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1898) remains a classic. Both hated industry’s despoliation of the land and were environmentalists before the term was fashionable. Both were tobacco addicts, wedded to their pipes. Both worshipped nature and beauty but found themselves channelled into odd courses: Machen adopting Bacon’s dictum about strangeness being indispensable to beauty with his horror tales and Gissing with his narratives of gloom and misery. Both were conservative in outlook, fearing radicalism and rule by demos. Machen justified his reactionary stance on the day of Oliver Stonor’s first visit to Melina Place in 1926: ‘I am a Tory. I want everything to be just as it is.’ He was ‘against liberty, progress, liberalism, education and most of what is called civilisation’, he told John Gunther in 1925. ‘But there was a twinkle in those clouded blue eyes when he said it,’ commented Gunther: a faint one perhaps.
Gissing felt close to the Russian novelists, whereas Machen declared that no Russian should be taught to read and write. Machen would have had reservations about Gissing’s attempts to ‘photograph’ life. Art and literature should symbolise man’s spiritual nature, for the visible world masked a transcendent reality. Was he right? No living mortal knows. Yet he would have agreed with Gissing that the best artistic practice lay in not revealing everything but in ‘hinting, surmising, telling in detail what can be told and no more’: the ‘art of the veil’ technique that was Machen’s signature. Gissing would doubtless have been sceptical over Machen’s brand of romance.
World’s Classics edition of New Grub Street, Oxford University Press, 1958.
New Grub Street, Gissing’s ninth published novel, was written in two months. Around 220,000 words, it fills more than 500 pages in the Penguin edition. He began the book as ‘A Man of Letters’ in April 1890, shortly before ‘The Great God Pan’ appeared in The Whirlwind; then forsook it, beginning another abortive version, ‘Victor Yule’, in September. The novel was finally written from early October to early December 1890, at the rate of 4000 words a day5: matching Reardon’s daily rate in the novel. Gissing sold the copyright to Smith, Elder & Co. for £150. Gissing often abandoned manuscripts before he finished (cf. Machen at Turville). Like Reardon he had more than ‘several holocausts’, claiming to have destroyed as much as he published. How much fun it must be to invent imaginary characters all day, says Amy’s friend Edith Carter: fun and desperately hard work. To Gissing novel writing was ‘a trade of the damned’.
As Gissing’s early novels depict London slum life, it is grimly amusing to read him complaining about poor sales when he focuses on unalloyed misery. This is from The Nether World (1889): ‘On all the doorsteps sat little girls, themselves just out of infancy, nursing or neglecting bald, red-eyed, doughy-limbed abortions in every stage of babyhood, hapless spawn of diseased humanity, born to embitter and brutalise yet further the lot of those who unwillingly gave them life.’ Here is a scene from Thyrza (1887): ‘Windows glimmered at noon with the sickly ray of gas or lamp; the roads were trodden into viscid foulness; all night the droppings of a pestilent rain were doleful . . . and only the change from a black to a yellow sky told that the sun had risen’. Hogarthian passage after passage like this appears in his books. No wonder readers preferred Sherlock Holmes.
Gissing’s first novel, Workers in the Dawn (1880), appeared from a Strand publisher, Remington, a few weeks before Machen, visiting London for the first time, stood amazed in that thoroughfare: it brought Gissing the Machenian sum of sixteen shillings. Because he was working in the Victorian three-volume format, with the circulating libraries such as Mudie’s6, charging subscribers for each volume they took out, New Grub Street contains some padding. Dialogue sometimes runs at excessive length, though as all the characters are compelling, even the minor figures, one cannot complain. Gissing addresses this in the novel: ‘Messieurs and mesdames the critics are wont to point out the weakness of second volumes; they are generally right, simply because a story which would have made a tolerable book (the common run of stories) refuses to fill three books.’7 The novel does sag ever so slightly, then rallies magnificently. The question of whether Reardon wins back Amy, and the role Biffen plays, is handled as suspensefully as any thriller.
Reardon claims he would prefer to have been a scholar rather than a novelist. ‘That, I quite believe, is my natural life; it’s only the influence of recent circumstances that have made me a writer of novels.’ Opinion is divided over whether this applies to Gissing. Gissing’s friend Morley Roberts published a lightly disguised memoir The Private Life of Henry Maitland (1912). Oliver Stonor, editing the book for Martin Secker in 1958, dispute
s the claim that Gissing was a scholar rather than a writer as ‘it seems perfectly clear that no man who wrote as many novels as Gissing, and who took such obvious pains with them, can have been as totally devoid as Roberts represents him of the true aspirations of the novelist’.
New Grub Street and Gissing’s life tally closely with Machen’s autobiography and The Hill of Dreams. These books tell the same story of unrelenting toil to produce enduring art and the forces, economic and social, that prevented both men achieving the status in literature that they merited. ‘In many ways writing to him was a kind of sacred mission,’ wrote Roberts: this could be said of Machen. Gissing had a haunted life, marked out, Henry James observed, ‘for what is called in his and in my profession an unhappy ending’. He always felt in exile, trapped in the ‘wrong world’. No novelist ever worked harder: Roberts writes that such a work rate must lead only to the hospital, a lunatic asylum or early death.
George Robert Gissing was born at Wakefield in 1857. A brilliant student at Manchester, he was imprisoned in 1876 after stealing money from fellow students. He was desperate to save his alcoholic lover, Marianne Helen Harrison (Nell), from selling herself on the streets. After serving one month’s hard labour he spent a year’s exile in America, where he taught in Massachusetts and began writing.8 Shameful secrets run throughout his fiction. In New Grub Street Gissing’s experiences of near starvation in America and his embarking on a series of short stories to sustain him are given to the writer Whelpdale, modelled on Morley Roberts. As Gissing had done, Whelpdale lives for several days on handfuls of peanuts. Gissing’s tales were written not for art’s sake but purely for money and are inferior to his novels. Roberts writes ‘starvation was for him one of the initiation ceremonies into the mysteries of literature, and he was always accustomed to say, “How can such an one write? He never starved”.’ In New Grub Street Biffen lives on bread and dripping, faggots and pease-pudding: equivalent to Machen subsisting on dry bread and green tea.