by Roger Dobson
Returning to England in 1877, Gissing made the fatal error of living with, then marrying, Nell, but his attempts to reform her failed. In 1888 after a life of alcoholism and whoring she came to a squalid end, dying of syphilis and drink in a Lambeth slum. Gissing told Roberts: ‘My dear chap, she had kept my photograph . . . all these years of horrible degradation.’ He remarried in 1891, shortly after finishing New Grub Street. Edith Underwood, a working-class girl from Camden Town,9 bore him two sons and, turning into a violent shrew, led him as nightmarish a life as Nell had, with hysterical rages and smashed crockery. Gissing feared for his sons. After they legally separated in 1898 Edith was confined to an asylum. Conscious of his duty, he continued supporting her financially. Although Gissing claimed New Grub Street was written in ‘utter prostration of spirit’, meeting Edith in September 1890 ended his loneliness, spurring him to creative heights. We may owe this classic partly to her initially benign influence.
Gissing’s key themes are money, or lack of it, sex, class and ‘the marriage war’. His class consciousness amounted to paranoia. In Born in Exile (1892) his protagonist Godwin Peak, a brilliant student in the Gissing mould, feels obliged to flee town when an uneducated uncle opens a local restaurant. Machen’s mystical and supernatural dimension is absent from Gissing’s works: he was a rationalist and agnostic, as is Reardon. Christianity was ‘at best a helpful delusion’, Gissing wrote in Born in Exile: one of his milder comments. As he wrote to one of his devout sisters: ‘My part is with the men and women who are clearing the ground of systems that have had their day, and have crumbled into destructive ruin.’ What vital debates Machen would have had with him. Orwell describes him as ‘a bookish, perhaps over-civilised man, in love with classical antiquity’. Roberts reports how furious Gissing was receiving letters from an East End clergyman containing ‘indecent words’. How pleasing to see that trendy vicars were with us more than a century ago.
Edwin Reardon lives in an apartment block adjacent to the Marylebone Workhouse, which Gissing ‘regarded with a proprietary eye’. Gissing’s flat in Cornwall Residences, later Cornwall Mansions10, is given to Reardon, just as Machen gives Llanddewi Rectory to Lucian and in ‘The Red Hand’ his rooms at 36 Great Russell Street to Dyson.
As with Machen, Gissing’s neglect—he was initially forgotten in the way Reardon fears—has led to the welcome paradox that for half a century scholars have been busy rehabilitating his reputation. Orwell had difficulty finding his novels and had to read New Grub Street in soup-stained library editions. Many excellent studies and biographies have appeared since the revival began in the early 1960s, with all his novels reissued. Gissing, unlike Machen, has an entry in the Collins English Dictionary. Much more of an academic hot property, he receives four pages in the Dictionary of National Biography and is now regarded as an important Victorian novelist. Much of The Gissing Newsletter, founded in 1965, is published online. The fourth international Gissing conference was held at York in March 2011.11 Gissing wrote not just for his own times but for the future, and it our age that appreciates him, though his readership is naturally limited. The man in the street, or on the Clapham omnibus, has never heard of Gissing or Machen, but that is his loss.
Machen wrote to Munson Havens:
I remember that passage in poor Gissing’s beautiful ‘Private Papers’ [The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft]; that description of the haphazard, shabby, unlighted vie de bohème of London back streets; & I am sure that Gissing was talking about what he knew. You have read, I suppose, Morley Roberts’s Life of Gissing? I cannot remember the title, since Roberts no doubt from motives of delicacy, while giving a literal & accurate account of Gissing’s miserable life, changed the names of his hero’s books & of the hero himself. But there you will find the same story; poor, starving men passing happy evenings in the garret of one of them—discussing the intricacies of Greek choric metres!
Machen makes a valuable slip here: it is in New Grub Street and The Life of Henry Maitland and not in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903) that Greek poetry is discussed. This suggests he knew the novel. The literary world would have known Roberts’s memoir was about Gissing. He retitles Veranilda (1904), Gissing’s unfinished novel about sixth-century Rome, Basil, after the name of the hero. The Nether World becomes The Under-World; The Whirlpool (1897), The Vortex; Demos (1886), The Mob. New Grub Street is Paternoster Row.
Parallel to Reardon’s story is the account of the romance between the young journalist Jasper Milvain and Marian Yule, Amy’s cousin. Reardon and Milvain are friends, initially at least: he later feels Jasper has influenced Amy by glorifying commercial success. Milvain, ‘a man of his day’, is Reardon’s antithesis, never writing anything that cannot profit him, regarding literature as just another commodity, a way of rising in society: ‘I tell you, writing is a business.’ Complaining that Reardon ‘sells a manuscript as if he lived in Sam Johnson’s Grub Street’, Milvain condemns his friend as
the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won’t make concessions, or rather, he can’t make them; he can’t supply the market. . . . Literature nowadays is a trade. Putting aside men of genius, who may succeed by mere cosmic force, your successful man of letters is your skilful tradesman. He thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising.
Milvain’s one superstition is never to take a backward step; yet this is what Reardon does by returning to clerking. Jasper proposes to Marian after it appears she will inherit a legacy; her fortune will aid him in his rise to fame. Naturally things go awry and Marian loses most of her money, leaving Jasper with a dilemma: will he marry a woman he does not love? He is fond of Marian—she is adorable—but it is her fortune that really attracts him. When her money vanishes so does his love. Amy also inherits a legacy, which should solve her husband’s financial plight but Reardon’s pride proves an obstacle. Milvain regrets that Marian does not play the piano: something the reader should bear in mind when reaching the final scene. The situation sounds trite but Gissing handles it enormously skilfully, and the reader genuinely feels for Marian. Needless to say she is head over heels with the self-centred Jasper, who has at least warned her: ‘I shall do many a base thing in life, just to get money and reputation. . . .’ By the bitter-sweet ending Milvain survives and flourishes. In actuality Milvain would probably not have the insight into his own nature that Gissing gives him. Would he ever admit to writing ‘rubbish, but rubbish of a very special kind, of fine quality’? But he is partly a satirical figure.
Even more effective than the Milvain-Marian plot strand is the devastating portrait of another failed writer: Marian’s father, the embittered ex-editor Alfred Yule, who pours out articles for journals. Gissing performs a simple authorial trick, directing readers to the British Museum Catalogue, where Yule becomes as real as that other dubious catalogue entrant, Enoch Soames:
Turn to his name in the Museum Catalogue; the list of works appended to it will amuse you. In his thirtieth year he published a novel: it failed completely, and the same result awaited a similar experiment five years later. . . . At the age of fifty he was still living in a poor house, in an obscure quarter. He earned enough for his actual needs, and was under no pressing fear for the morrow, so long as his faculties remained unimpaired [Yule later develops cataracts]; but there was no disguising from himself that his life had been a failure. And the thought tormented him.
How different from his early years when Yule lived in a garret dreaming that ‘his name should be spoken among men’. He has won some respect and acclaim from his peers but his creative work is unwanted: he is a parasite on literature, incestuously writing about writing. By contrast, his amanuensis Marian, though she loves books, is contemptuous of the acres of print in existence. The British Museum Reading Room, where she toils for her father, seems to her to be ‘the valley of the shadow of books’:
When already there was more good
literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here was she exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market. What unspeakable folly! . . . She herself would throw away her pen with joy but for the need of earning money. And all these people about her, what aim had they save to make new books out of those already existing, that yet newer books might in turn be made out of theirs? This huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print—how intolerably it weighed upon the spirit!
Did the novel influence Machen? Reardon is ‘a recluse in the midst of millions’, his early ‘monkish seclusion’ in London prefiguring the theme of The Hill of Dreams. Stevenson’s Across the Plains (1892) has been cited as an influence on Wilkins’s interminable train journey to Colorado in The Three Impostors, but Whelpdale’s odyssey from New York to Chicago may have contributed something. This would be a pleasing touch if the ‘charming’ book referred to by Wilkins is New Grub Street. Describing a sunset over Athens (seen by his creator) Reardon says: ‘In the west, the clouds were still glorious for a time; there were two shaped like great expanded wings, edged with refulgence.’ Might this have suggested the clouds resembling ‘living creatures’ over the Strand in ‘The Idealist’ and the angelic beings that appear above Holborn in ‘The Holy Things’? The early scenes of ‘A Fragment of Life’ resemble Gissing’s domestic settings, though Edward and Mary Darnell are far too contented to be authentically Gissingesque. Admittedly, all these parallels may be coincidental.12
Reardon grows up near Hereford, gaining a fine classical education at a local grammar school. Did Gissing have Hereford Cathedral School in mind? Reardon, had he existed, would have preceded Machen by a few years. When the novel opens in 1882 he is thirty-two: Gissing’s age when he began the book. In a tragic prediction, in the ironically titled chapter ‘Reardon Becomes Practical’, the author dies of congestion of the lungs, just as Gissing did. Although Reardon is the central figure, five chapters, amounting to nearly sixty pages in the Penguin edition, follow his death as Gissing completes the stories of Milvain and his sisters (who encouraged by Jasper become hack writers), Marian, Biffen and Amy. This adds another level of reality to the book: a commonplace novel would end with Reardon’s death.
To cavil: one minor flaw is that Gissing steps omnisciently into his characters’ lives, such as Biffen’s demise, about which no one, apart from God, would have comprehensive knowledge. The novel purports to be a chronicle of real events with Gissing occasionally addressing his audience. Alluding to a conflict between Alfred Yule and a rival editor, Gissing tells readers: ‘Well, you probably remember all about it.’ He directs the reader to The Wayside (an imaginary journal) for June 1884, for Milvain’s essay on the dead Reardon’s novels. In reality, of course, Jasper would sue for defamation.
Those who prefer Machen’s autobiographical writings to his supernaturalism would relish New Grub Street and Henry Ryecroft. Gissing wrote too rapidly to indulge in sustained impassioned or poetic flights, though his prose is always polished and assured, and the twin masterpieces have lyrical passages where Reardon and Ryecroft recall their visits to Greece. Gissing took pride in his work, though his predictions were not always accurate: he thought his novel Thyrza would still be read when Rider Haggard’s She (1887) was ‘waste paper’. She seems imperishable yet who reads Thyrza today?
Unlike Machen, Gissing was able to create a gallery of credible fictional characters. ‘His people live,’ wrote a critic. Even the flawed figures who have been hardened by circumstances, Milvain, Amy and Yule, are occasionally treated by turns sympathetically and harshly, their faults and their virtues limned. Yet readers should perhaps steer clear of his two masterworks: there is the danger that you will end up devouring Workers in the Dawn, The Nether World and Born in Exile and other novels of Gissingesque gloom. No Reardon, no Biffen, no Milvain, no Marian, and no Ryecroft. . . .
Ryecroft, originally titled ‘An Author at Grass’, is a fictional memoir or essay-novel. The Gissing authority Professsor Pierre Coustillas calls it ‘unclassifiable’. Gissing has a fifty-year-old widowed writer, after receiving a life annuity of £300, retire to live near Exeter. Freed from the bondage of authorship after twenty poverty-stricken years, Ryecroft, though he hopes ‘never to write another line for publication’, ponders on a variety of themes in his country seclusion: ‘the veteran had set down, as humour bade him, a thought, a reminiscence, a bit of reverie, a description of his state of mind, and so on’ in one final leisurely written manuscript. The Private Papers, supposedly edited by Gissing, is the happy result. At least one reader, a cleric, thought Ryecroft existed: he wrote enquiring whether the late author’s housekeeper required a position. Discursive, elegiac and opinionated, this is a fine book; though the reader may revolt at some of the opinions expressed by this intellectual aristocrat. Ryecroft has much to say about the ink-stained life: ‘Oh, you heavy-laden, who at this hour sit down to the cursed travail of the pen; writing, not because there is something in your mind, in your heart, which must needs be uttered, but because the pen is the only tool you can handle, your only means of earning bread!’ Ryecroft should never have taken to professional authorship, says Gissing in his draft preface. H.P. Lovecraft gave the book to his future wife Sonia Greene to alert her to his character. The natural world meant more to Gissing (and to Lovecraft) than human beings. Reflecting on the Greek landscape, Edwin Reardon asks: ‘What does a man care for any woman on earth when he is absorbed in contemplation of that kind?’13
Writing to Oliver Stonor in 1942, Machen compared his memoirs to Ryecroft, and in a rare boast said he preferred them to Gissing’s book: see the Introduction to The Autobiography of Arthur Machen (1951). It is evident why the work appealed to him. ‘Come, once more before I die I will read Don Quixote,’ writes Ryecroft. And: ‘I care nothing for first editions and for tall copies; what I buy is literature, food for the soul’. The Revd Thomas Hampole’s reflections in The Green Round and ‘N’ are curiously similar to a scene (Summer VIII) where Ryecroft describes light transmuting dull London architecture into ‘something new’. Like his creator, and Machen, Ryecroft is anti-democratic. ‘I am no friend of the people,’ he writes. ‘Democracy is full of menace to all the finer hopes of civilisation. . . .’14 In his younger days Gissing, flirting with socialism, tried to educate the poor through lectures. Swiftly disillusioned and influenced by Schopenhauer, he scorned his idealism: education and political reform could only make the suffering masses yearn for what they could never achieve. Despite his sympathy for the downtrodden, the Victorian age’s great Jeremiah did not believe anything could be done to relieve their plight. The poor’s condition, he claimed, chiefly interested him only as material for fiction. In a grim passage in New Grub Street Gissing refers to a couple’s three children: ‘all were happily buried’. To sleep is better than to wake, as Thyrza puts it. Better not to be born at all, as Sophocles advised. Machen would have abominated this pessimism. In 1943, in his eightieth birthday speech he declared in the words of the Albert Chevalier song ‘We Did ’ave a Time’, that there was honey amidst all life’s stings, and that ‘the sport is prime’. Gissing by contrast, ‘perhaps the most sensitive man alive’, was moody, neurasthenic, hypochrondriacal introspective, self-pitying and self-destructive.
Gissing’s loathing for science matched Machen’s. Ryecroft hates and fears science ‘because of my conviction that, for long to come, if not forever, it will be the remorseless enemy of mankind’. Science which should be humanity’s servant is all too often a despot. Machen would have agreed with Gissing that progress in the modern world was almost ‘purely material’. To Gissing change meant disturbance. The ‘apostle of melancholy’ disliked many aspects of modernity: ‘scientific industrialism’, London’s roar and reek, imperialism, militarism, puritanism, capitalist and materialist greed, advertising, Christianity, anything new. ‘Damn the nature of things!’ was a
favourite expression. A pity Gissing did not live to see our world wars (Ryecroft prophesies the 1914-18 war), nuclear weapons, communism versus fascism, celebrity-worship, the tabloid press, Internet porn and all those other facets of the twenty-first century that make existence so stimulating.
In 1898, with his health failing, Gissing fell in love with a Frenchwoman, Gabrielle Fleury, who had sought permission to translate New Grub Street. He took the opportunity to trim the text for the translation. After a mock marriage at Rouen, they settled in France, far away from Edith. Although happy enough with Gabrielle, Gissing complained that his mother-in-law, a frugal eater, was starving him and felt homesick for England. Sturdy as an athlete, he lived his last years as an invalid. He died, aged forty-six, of bronchopneumonia15, his lungs ruined by emphysema and chronic bronchitis, at St-Jean-Pied-de-Port in the Pyrenees in December 1903. He had published twenty-three novels and more than one hundred short stories. His wives survived him by many years: Edith died, still institutionalised, in 1917. Gabrielle lived until 1954.
Although his novels concentrate on material hardship, Gissing was not devoid of awe and wonder before the mysteries of the universe. Ryecroft, an agnostic, includes passages on the incomprehensibility of the cosmos: ‘now, as of old, we know but one thing—that we know nothing’. This Socratic doctrine was championed by Machen: ‘At the last, what do we know?’ Despite thousands of years of science, philosophy and religion, the riddles of life and death remain impenetrable. With his faith to console him, Machen rejoiced that existence lay beyond human comprehension. Gissing, having no such faith, was beset by existential angst. In a letter to a friend he produced a moving paean to the enigma of the universe, proving him to be at heart as great a romantic as Machen: