28 December: Boreham on George Gissing

De Profundis
Admirers of George Gissing, the anniversary of whose death this is, are coming to feel that, at last, they are beginning to understand him. That is saying much, for Gissing is one of those elusive and self-contradictory personages whom it is exceedingly difficult to comprehend. He lacked the knack of fitting into the general scheme of things: he possessed few social qualities: he did not find it easy to get on with others. He himself deplored it. "I suppose," he wrote, "that the day will never come when I shall have intimate acquaintances among people of ordinary family life. Yet it would be pleasant in its way"; and then, in a confidential outburst he unfolds the secret of his singular incapacity. "I readily get impatient with people," he says, a trifle sadly, "and am apt to display my contempt for them: but still they might put up with me. I even think they might profit by me in a sensible way."

They are very few, however, who have any patience with a man who treats them with apparent contempt. And so it came to pass that George Gissing took his place as an insoluble enigma. Even those who, pluming themselves on their perspicuity, have essayed to interpret the baffling elements in his singular individuality, have contradicted each other in the most thoroughgoing fashion. If we read H. G. Wells on George Gissing, or A. C. Benson on George Gissing, or Morley Roberts on George Gissing, or Hamilton Fyfe on George Gissing, we lay aside the work feeling that we have now, at length, solved the problem. But if, by some excess of studious zeal, we read any two of these critiques, we find ourselves once more floundering in a morass of bewilderment. The George Gissing of any one of these expositors is certainly not the George Gissing of any of the others.

For this confusion Gissing is himself primarily responsible. Until recently every biographical sketch of him was based on the assumption that the novelist lived in abject wretchedness for forty years or so, and then, during the last days of his brief life, enjoyed a little unalloyed comfort and uninterrupted sunshine. Did he himself not say so? Toward the end of his days he wrote "The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft." For some inscrutable reason, everybody took it for granted that Henry Ryecroft was George Gissing, and that the volume was really a thinly-veiled autobiography. It should, of course, have occurred to them that the man who could write so charmingly of the English field and woods and gardens could not have spent his whole life in a slough of misery. The pages of Henry Ryecroft could only have been penned by a man whose mind was stored with a treasury of delightful recollections. So much for the first half of the theory. The second part—the part that credits him with a restful and prosperous eventide—is equally false. Driven by failing health to live in the Basque country, his lungs resumed their functions but, simultaneously his ability to work forsook him. With starvation staring him in the face, he spent what he himself describes as the most unprofitable year of his life. And, as to his supposed prosperity, "it will amuse you," he confides to a friend, "to learn that all the noise about Ryecroft has resulted in a total sale which means, to me, not quite two hundred pounds!" And Ryecroft is the book which, according to the accepted theory, lifted its author once and for all out of the grinding poverty to which he had been so long inured!

When we turn from Gissing's external circumstances to his inner life, the issues are no less conflicting. Mr. A. C. Benson, who claimed to have known him intimately, wrote of him as a paragon of innocence. To Mr. Benson, Gissing was a lily blooming in a coal-mine.

In sordid surroundings, Mr. Benson says, Gissing kept the fortress of his soul fresh and intact, free from soil and stain. He made no terms with life's uglier elements. And he won through, with his spirit hardly dimmed by the dust of conflict. Engulfed in a boisterous city, full of heat and unlovely sound, his soul dwelt in a garden of cool shade and silvery fountains.

It is a thankless task to dispel so pleasing an impression. As to the appalling sordidness of Gissing's environment, there can be no doubt at all. He knew what it was as to be hungry and homeless; and, for some time, he could only enjoy the luxury of a wash by resorting to the lavatories of the British Museum. But Mr. Benson's beautiful faith in his hero's immaculate innocence is, to say the least, slightly misplaced. It may be argued, in relation to each of Gissing's delinquencies, that he is rather to be pitied than blamed: and it may be pleaded that, for each offence, he paid the penalty to the uttermost farthing: but that is as far as, without seriously compromising herself, charity can go.

There are men—and a list of them would include illustrious names like those of Milton, Wesley, and Tolstoy—who seem to possess no faculty for understanding women. Gissing's lifelong agony was almost wholly clue to the grim fact that he was a pronounced specimen of this unfortunate type. In the society of men he was a pleasant and agreeable companion: and one is tempted to wish that he could have lived his life without coming into touch with womenfolk at all. At the age of seventeen, being then a very promising classical student at Owen's College, Manchester, he became infatuated by a girl on the city streets. To meet her demands, he shamelessly stole the clothes and picked the pockets of his fellow-students. A detective was employed. Gissing was caught redhanded and his academic career was, of course, ruined. He fled to America and earned his keep as a struggling journalist, but, unable to forget the woman who had magnetised him, he returned to England and actually married her! With that senseless act, he plunged into the abyss. His wife was a drunken fury: there was no depth of degradation to which she would not stoop: she smashed their few sticks of furniture, tore up the shrubs that her husband planted in the garden, and flew at the landlord when he called for the rent. Men like Frederick Harrison and Edward Clodd, pitying Gissing, gave him odd jobs to do, but he spent half his time and nearly all his money in buying himself out of the loathsome scrapes into which his wife's insane outbursts were everlastingly dragging him. He worked away at novels that, although amazingly successful, brought him—through some bad management—next to nothing: and then, one day, he received a telegram telling him that his wife was dead. Although the event was as like the opening of the prison gates to him, he received the news with deep emotion. He mourned for her as though she had been angel-pure and lily-sweet. She died in a London slum under the most vile conditions, but he insisted on going to the horrid place at once. "And, my dear chap," he exclaimed to Morley Roberts on his return, "she had kept my photograph, and a little engraving of the Madonna, through all those years of terrible degradation.

Will it be believed that a moth, once so badly singed, could flutter into the cruel flame a second time? At that stage, Gissing could have moved in the best society, could have won for himself both wealth and renown, and could have sought a wife of refinement, rank and charm. Debonair and meticulously groomed, he had all the gifts and graces that would have infatuated such a lady. But he again lost his head. Overtaken one day by a torment of loneliness, he rushed headlong into misery a second time. "I could stand it no longer," he moaned, in recounting the episode afterwards, "so I dashed into the street and spoke to the first woman I came across!" His second wife, courted in this unconventional and violent way, possessed at least the virtue of respectability. But, apart from that, she was totally unsuited to him. "She had not," Morley Roberts says, "the least pretence to beauty. She possessed neither face nor figure, nor a sweet voice, nor any charm—she was just a female. And this was she that the most fastidious of men was about to marry!" It turned out, of course, disastrously: how could any other result have been anticipated? If, in his novels, Gissing outlines, with a particularly sure and convincing touch, the seamy side of life, it is because he is dipping his pen in the gall and wormwood of his own bitter and humiliating experience.

But, through it all, he kept his goal clearly before him. "You will see," he says in one letter, "that I shall force my way into the army of novelists—be my position there that of a private or of a general." "If ever," he says again, "if ever literature was as a man's vocation, it is mine. No amount of discouragement will make me cease writing." Taking him all in all, it must be confessed that he is one of the adornments of our annals. And beyond the shadow of a doubt, his books have come to stay. His personality was engaging; his manner pleasant; he drew to himself many famous friends and contrived to make them devotedly attached to him. "He had," says Mr. Benson,

"a distinguished bearing and finely-moulded features, with a look of great intellectual refinement. His head had a stately poise, and I recollect well his brown wavy hair, grown rather long. His expression was, perhaps, a little wistful and dreamy, but bore no trace of his having passed through any very distressing experiences. His manner was diffident and abstracted at first but, becoming interested in some subject that was being discussed, he showed both humour and animation: and I can recall his quick, shy, eager glances and the movements of his delicate hands."

Gissing, it has been finely said, "wrote the Epic of Poverty in twenty-five volumes. His was the cry of a spirit born to bask in the breadth of knowledge, yet doomed to struggle towards his ideal in the grip of hunger and want." On the whole, the years that have passed since his death have been kind to his memory. They have cleared the air. We now know that he was not as some of his expositors would have us believe, a suffering innocent, and we no longer see him pilloried as a shameless scapegrace.

He was a man who, aiming high and struggling bravely, nevertheless stumbled badly and suffered terribly. He has left us a record that must always excite both pity and amiration, and he has bequeathed to us a set of books that will awaken the gratitude of every reader.

F W Boreham

Image: George Gissing