The Heroic Life of George Gissing Part 2: 1888-1897 [2]

Citation preview

PARTS OF THE EDITION

THE HEROIC LIFE OF GEORGE GISSING , PART II: 1888-1897

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part I: 1857-1888 The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part II: 1888-1897

BY

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part III: 1897-1903

Pierre Coustillas

PICKERING & CHATTO 2012

l TRAVELS IN FRANCE AND ITALY (SEPTEMBER 1888-FEBRUARY 1889)

'Schon einige Jahre her durfi:e ich keinen lateinischen Autor ansehen, Nichts betrachten, was mir ein Bild Italiens erneute. Geschah es zufallig, so erduldete ich die entsetzlichsten Schmerzen [... ] H atte ich nicht den Entschlu~ gef~t. den ich jetzt ausfiihre, so ware ich rein zu Grunde gegangen : zu einer solchen Reife war die Begierde, diese Gegenstande mit Augen zu sehen, in meinem Gemi.it gestiegen'. For many a long year I could not bear to look at a Latin author, or to cast my eye upon anything that might awaken in my mind the thoughts ofltaly. Ifby accident I did so, I suffered the most ho rrible tortures[ ... ] H ad I not made the resolve, which I am now carrying into effect, I should have been altogether lost - to such a degree of intensity had grown in me the desire to see these things with my own eyes. Goethe, Italienische Reise, I, 12 October 1786

I. The arrival in Paris was the occasion of a tragicomic incident over which Gissing would merely have laughed, had he not, in his customary state of nerves, looked upon it as another stroke of fate. Remembering his visit of March 1886, he took a cab with the German linguist and amateur artist Ernst Plitt to the Hotel Cujas in the Latin Quarter, only to discover that the place had just been pulled down. After some tiresome driving to several places, they ended up at the Hotel Atlantique, Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from which they moved the following day to the Hotel de Londres, in the Rue Linne, near the Jardin des Plantes, where they booked for a month. The first difference of opinion between the two men arose when it came to choosing rooms fairly close to each other. Plitt, who was miserly in a sordid manner, wanted one at 25 francs a month on the fifth floor while Gissing wanted one at 35 francs on the second floor. Plitt only agreed to the change when his companion offered to pay 5 francs towards his rent, a piece of generosity which did not win Gissing a word of thanks. 'And yet the man is a good and honest fellow', the diary reads conciliatorily, 'only stupid, very stupid. I have never known intimately so stupid a man'. 1 H owever trivial, the episode was typical. Plitt's presence was often to spoil Gissing's time in Paris, but the fault, - 1-

had rented and the room 'not fir for kennels' with which Plitt, who was 'bent on impossible cheapness', would have contented himself despite evil odours. Gissing's ascetic leanings, probably inherited from his mother, which his years of struggle had confirmed, inclined him to make light of such drawbacks. Then again, petty considerations speedily faded before the vast opportunities for study that Paris afforded him. On 2 October his uncertainty regarding Ihe Nether VVorld came to an end. After observing that his books sold poorly (400 copies for Th_yrza, he was cold not quite truthfully), Smith, Elder offered him £150 for his new novel, about which, he cold Berez, they were complimentary. His letter of thanks had a dignified tone about it, probably a reflection of the cavalier way in which his two previous novels had been treated by the firm: 'I detect, happily', he replied immediately, 'no note of disappointment in your remarks on "The Nether World". A cheerful book it neither is nor ought to be; the conclusion I have of course planned with care to suit the tone of the whole'. It was agreed that publication would take place before mid-1889. Although he pretended to turn up his nose at the fee he was offered for the copyright he had probably not expected more: £150 was a distinct advance on the£ 100 he had received for Demos and the £60 with which he would eventually have to satisfy himself for Ihyrza. The Italian project could now materialize. He had thought of dividing his time in Paris between sightseeing and work, but he soon realized that his next novel would not be begun in France. His dislike of English journalism naturally led him to make a comparative exploration of the Parisian press. He bought Le Soleil, a royalist paper which, in an officially republican country, catered for the still very large number of monarchists, but did not renew the experience. He also read Le Petit Moniteur, edited by Ernest Daudet, brother of one of his favourite French authors. From Le Petit Journal he extracted a bellicose and abysmally stupid diatribe against the British, and deplored the fostering of the lowest national prejudices by the popular press. Basing its argument on a simple news item, this paper had printed: 'Les Anglais ont renie toute pudeur et sont d'ignobles exploitants de chair humaine' 3 [The English have lost all sense of dignity and are base traffickers in human flesh]. When he opened La Diane, he was faced with an illustration showing an executioner holding up the head of field-marshal Bazaine, who had just died in Madrid, with the words: 'Fran

Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts.

He rejoiced to see his letter in print on 25 February: this surely meant that hl name carried weight with the editor of The Times. Besides, it was good adve tisement just before the publication of New Grub Street. Algernon, Robe •.. and Bertz were each favoured with a copy of the paper. The choice of the thre . names had not been made at random. After months of professional stagnatio' and emotional frustration, he was not sorry to be again in a dominant positio regarding his brother and that, among his own assets, there was something mo· than a new novel about to be published which read flatteringly at proof stage an which would at the very least sustain his reputation. (Contrastingly Algerno whose latest novel, 'Pixy: soon to be retitled A Moorland Idyl, had been discoui

}.fasochism and A1arriage

113

teously rejected by Blackwood, was in low water and in a fair way to become a chronic borrower from his brother on the eve of a new removal.) Nor was the copy of The Times that Gissing sent to Roberts an altogether gratuitous gesture. (Roberts had oflate become rather too pleased.with his own publishing exploits. Speaking of his landlady he had remarked with self-defeating pride to his friend: 'I wonder what she thinks of having a public man in her house?' So the letter in The Times pointed to the widening gulf between their ambitions.) Lastly the copy of the paper posted to Bertz reminded the latter of the continuity of his cultural quest. It came felicitously in the wake of the visit to the university of Athens the year before and if anything showed Bertz that his English friend was forging ahead. For a few days Gissing's spirits were positively affected by the success he had scored in a field that few people associated with him. Ellen was invited to read The Times assiduously. Had the Bruces in Wakefield noticed his letter? he asked her. 'These little things are no small satisfaction to me: he added. 'As I get no recognition from the public at large, I must make the most of that which comes from individuals'. 39 Had Gissing known that Demos was being serialized in Vyestnik Evropy, where his articles on life in England had appeared in the previous decade, and that a laudatory article on his work had just appeared in Russkaya l.fysl, his spirits would have risen even more. 40 On the day his letter was printed in The Times Gissing married Edith Underwood in the quietest manner before the Registrar of St Pancras, London. Her elder brother Herbert James and her sister Florence served as witnesses. He had arrived in London the day before in a thick fog, had found Edith waiting for him at Paddington Station and had purchased a wedding-ring in Tottenham Court Road, one of his haunts some ten years earlier, when he was still struggling to redeem Nell. After the ceremony the nex1: day the couple drove to Paddington in a cab and took the 11.45 a.m. train to Exeter. Gissing knew that in marrying this poor, uneducated girl for whom he had conceived no passion, he was incurring the censure of his relatives as well as grieving some of his well-wishers - he did not tell Bertz about his marriage though he had mentioned Edith's name in a recent letter. He himself was later to own to 'criminal recklessness:41 but for the moment he refused to heed either advice or shruggings of shoulders. His words to his younger sister in a letter of 1 February remained totally valid in his own eyes twenty-four days later: 'Once more a new epoch is beginning with me, and under reasonably favourable auspices. We shall see. My life passes in experimenting, like that of so many people in our time: The truth was that with his strange genius for self-punishment, he had condemned himself at short notice to domestic misery and grave moral distress.

4 MARRIED LIFE IN EXETER (MARCH 1891-MAY 1892)

'Change is nor made without in convenience even from worse to better'. Richard Hooker, quoted by Samuel Johnson in the Preface to his Dictionary of

the English Language

I. In Gissing's eyes, the conditions of a saner and more fruitful life were now combined: under the Devonshire sun, miles away from the poisonous atmosphere of London, his hopes revived. Of course there could be no question of shutting himself up on the first morning in his 'den' at the top of the house, but there was no question either of taking Edith on a honeymoon. A new home in new surroundings would stand in lieu of it. After a few days' relaxation he must get back to work with a will for, unless he had another novel to sell in the summer, he would again find himself in dire straits. Further, as a result of Blackwood's rejection of 'Pixy' and a series of removals to and back from Jersey then to Willersey near Broadway within a few weeks, Algernon's situation was becoming a subject of worry to all around him. Fresh appeals for assistance were likely to come from him before long. Fortunately, living in Exeter was inexpensive and, by keeping a strict watch on household expenses, Gissing hoped to make his money go a long way. Still, the resumption of work was done at a leisurely pace. Scarcely had he written a few pages when Morley Roberts turned up at Exeter, on his way from Dartmouth. With Gissing's removal from London he had lost his most intimate friend, the boon companion with whom he spent hours every week discussing literary matters, and some nostalgia not unmixed with curiosity now led him to Prospect Park. He stopped overnight at a nearby hotel and had his meals with the G issings. The two men debated professional questions and Edith joined them to go round the cathedral which for some reason Roberrs wished to see. ' Vastly more suave than in old days', Gissing remarked of his friend, who returned to London under the impression that he had left a peaceful home. For the present, apart from a visit to the local museun1 and a few walks in the neighbourhood, the

- 115 -

116

1he Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

couple went out little, for as early as 2 March Gissing began to plan his book and gave names to his characters, that of Raymond Peak being attributed to the leading character and, provisionally, to the book itself. The scene would first be in a Midland town, then move to London, Sark and finally Exeter. Even more tha!l in New Grub Street he felt that he had a message to propound. On 10 March he started the writing proper at a much slower stride than usual, owing partly to the wealth of intellectual matter to be woven into the narrative. So serene was he that various events which, in past months, would almost certainly have put him out now left him unperturbed. He made it one of his foremost duties to 'improve' Edith's mind, a purpose which concerned both behaviour and intellect. A passage in a letter to Ellen.·. indicates that the uneducated bride made some terrible.fitttx pas in writing to her sister-in-law, the nature of which cannot be guessed. Only George's comment: suggests that a breach of manners had been committed. George, however, would not lose hope: 'I have been told of the extraordinary note you received from Edith', he wrote to his sister on 7 March. Well, I have so ofi:en told you that the uneducated have seldom any delicacy. But perhaps a little may be cultivated in process of time. Thank goodness, there is much docility and some slight capaciry for household work - a very exceptional thing, let me tell you.

Tact and restraint were virtues of which Edith was to prove less and less capable. Her father's warning to her suitor must have echoed many times in Gissing's mind in the next few years. At the moment he thought that introducing her to his own work would be a good means of drawing her closer to him, so he gave her The Nether World to read, perhaps feeling that she would be less disconcerted by a story set exclusively in lower-class surroundings. The attempt, he promptly owned in the same letter to Ellen, ended in a flat failure: willing though she was, the obedient wife could not overcome the language barrier. 'It is not for everyone that my books are written', he explained not without pride. Edith struggled again, with better results, through A T7illage Hampden, even though this title, if George failed to explain it briefly, may have proved a temporary stumbling block. Bravely she also read New Grub Street some time later and, oddly enough, enjoyed it, doubtless unaware of her disguised presence in it. However, her husband's endeavours to polish her did not, and perhaps could not, be expected to last. The superiority of his tone when he referred to her in his letters to his relatives, also the impersonal phrasing he used to describe her putative progress in the next few years, already betrayed a moral distance between the two which foreshadowed many possible misunderstandings. A new interruption occurred with the arrival of the first proofs of Thyrza. 1 Gissing resumed the working hours which had proved so beneficial at Agbrigg:

Married Life in Exeter

117

from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., then from 4 to 8 p.m. As a recreation he went out herborizing as he used to in childhood, with a handbook in his pocket to identify any uncommon plant he might come across. Geology, which was to figure in his novel on hand, also drew him occasionally otJt of his den. By the end of March only one third of volume 1 was written. Yet he was satisfied with his work and he savoured his slow, steady progress. In a letter to Algernon of 26 March the pleasure he felt in composition is expressed with uncommon candour and clarity: 'I am in good health and spirits, and work more easily than for a long time'. The experience was not to be renewed until the days when he wrote The Crown ofLife and By the Ionian Sea. And four days later it was Ellen's turn to share his intellectual happiness: 'In this air I write with astonishing ease, and feel a free play of intellect'. There had not been a single false start. In the evenings he would turn with delight to his Homer and The Canterbury Tales. As he wrote, new ideas occurred to him which fertilized his narrative: thus the first name of his hero, Raymond Peak, became Godwin - a symbolical allusion to the author ofPolitical Justice and to the fierce hatred of social iniquity nursed by Peak's father, Nicholas. As usual his reading was astonishingly eclectic and of solid quality. Within a very short period we see him reading or rereading, besides his six volumes of the Aldine edition of Chaucer's works, a large number of studies in the Men of Letters series, for instance those on De Quincey, Gray, Sterne and Wordsworth. His intellectual curiosity seemed insatiable and, but for his pressing need to focus on his novel, it would have followed many unrecorded directions like travel literature, which made its entry in his diary with A. R. Wallace's book On the Amazon, soon to be continued in the same decade by an impressive list of volumes which could be compiled with the assistance of his diary, and which constituted for him in years when he was shackled by matrimony, a form of travelling by proxy. On 2 April a request indicative of a turning-point in his career came from a journalist on the Pall Mall Gazette, Frederick Dolman, who asked for an interview in London. This man, who had been working for the Scarborough News and the London evening newspaper the Echo, was to have no better chance than the London Figaro some years before. He had obtained from Smith, Elder an advance copy of New Grub Street (which has become a bibliographical rarity) and purposed to draw public attention to the social dimension of Gissing's novels. With his distrust of the press in general, Gissing could not but decline the journalist's suggestion. Distance was not his sole excuse. 'I have endeavoured to make [the book] a work of art; there is the beginning and end of the matter', he replied snappishly. 'I shall be glad if it interests the right kind of people; if not, why it can't be helped'. Hardly discouraged, Dolman bade his time and wrote on two occasions on Gissing's works. He first devoted a few pages to them in an article entitled 'The Social Reformer in Fiction', a title which cannot have

llS

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

pleased the author of New Grub Street, then a much longer piece devoted exclusively to 'George Gissing's Novels'.2

II. That such a skilful achievement should have seen the light in exactly two months under circumstances so unpropitious to artisti c creation is something of a cultural miracle, of which Gissing himself first became conscious when the book was at proof stage. Ir was ilien to take the best part of a century for criticism at an international level to acclaim it unanimously as a masterpiece, as well as the most candid treatment of p rofessional literary life in Anglo-American fiction. Too candid a treatment fo r Victorian critics in an age when assessments were often vitiated by hypocrisy, New Grub Street offers a memorable image of ilie circumstances under which literary creation took place at the end of Victoria's reign for two essential reasons: it shows the artist's world in context and ilie artist's personality with a detachment of which few men and women were capable at ilie time. The writer is shown at work in his study, that is, in his complex mental solitude, but also in his fam ilial milieu and professional environment. Social revelation by an insider and self-revelation are conducted simultaneously. How art can be produced in the age of trade, what varieties of life the artist must combine and reconcile if he is to eschew professional failure and keep at bay the spectre of insolvency, are questions Gissing never loses sight of. The scene is a variously populated one and no less various are the difficulties wiili which all the actors.in this tormented Darwinian world are confronted. Theirs is not a black or white world. Each character has his or her subtly differentiated strong and weak points. Their plausibility as artistic creations is never in doubt. If Edwin Reardon inv'.tes pity, his wife's view of ilieir predicament makes full sense. Around ilies~ is a variegated gallery of careerists, pedants who live largely in an obsolete past, JOurnalists more concerned with ilie quantity than with the quality of ilie copy they produce. If some society women who seem to live exclusively in drawing roo~ns and whose sole distinctive feature is ilieir double-barrelled name can be descned in ilie background, some close-ups of sharply contrasted women, ranging from Alfred Yule's slavish, semi-educated wife to his ill-fated daughter Marian and ilie egotistic Mrs Edmund Yule give the narrative an unque.stionable air of a~ilien­ ticity. In Jasper Milvain the genial self-seeker we recognize ilie arch exploiter of ilie 'quarter-educated', of which Forster's Education Act had turned out a few millions, ilie type of journalist who had a flair for notoriety and was born to succeed at an easi ly definable level of socially accepted, if not envied level of superior mediocrity. Mentally Gissing had seen all iliese characters and it is no wonder he often chuckled when reading ilie proofs of his novel. But the journalists who were called upon to review the book had lost ilie art of chuckling, and ilieir

Married Life in Exeter

119

responses were in some cases comically purblind. The writer in the Scotsman, whose critique was sent to Gissing by the publishers despite his repeated request that no press-cuttings should be communicated to him, probably beat the record when he questioned whether such characters actually existed. 3 The first volume of 'Godwin Peak' was not yet completed when New Grub Street appeared on 7 April afi:er a substantial advertising can1paign devoted to it and to the six-shilling edition of Thyrza. The comments on the new book were apparently proportionate in bulk to the efforts made by the publishers to promote it. Gissing was pleased with the tasteful binding and the full page of advertisement for his works at the end of volume I. D espite his vehement detestation of the average journalistic critique of his novels, he was not averse to an occasional visit to the local public library to scan the press for any comment on his book. In the main, reviewers were more inclined to laud selectively than to deprecate, but obtuse judgements were not uncommon either. There was a widespread recognition of the skill and depth of the author's psychological analysis and his powerful depiction of the literary profession. The ill-informed and unfair review in the Scotsman' was lucidly contradicted by the Manchester Examiner and Times, which did Gissing as full justice as could be expected of a novel which has gradually conquered the status of a classic in the twentieth century. 'Mr. Gissing writes as only a man could write who believed that he was not telling merely the truth, but the whole truth - that the side oflife which he depicts is not merely one side but the only side'. As for Gissing's workmanship, the perceptive critic concluded, it had never been firmer, stronger, and within the author's scope, more relendesslyveracious than it is here. The story of the Reardons, husband and wik is a masterpiece of grim, realistic presentation ; and the clever, versatile, outspokenly self-seeking Jasper Milvain is a portrait which bites itself into the imagination and the memory. New Grub Street is not a book for those who like 'cheerful reacLng: for it is throughout painful, but its painfulness is equalled by its power. 5

Two weekly journals, the Athenteum and the National Observe!' placed me story below his best work, but they were exceptions. The former, under the pen of Mrs De Mattos, was not prepared to praise it at ilie expense of Demos and The Nether YVorld; it was a series of self-contradictions, of assertions mechanically followed by qualifiers which gave an impression that the iliird-rate critic, afraid of what was to her 'dreary, a little grimy even', objected to unvarnished truth and preferred whitewashing, as though it were the best artisti c form suitable to her public. If anything, the National Observer, while conceding iliat the narrative was 'interesting from the first to the lase: was a weary, low-brow and purely descriptive assessment from which a single idea emerged: Gissing's real theme was money in the literary world. As usual the author's so-called pessimism - an

120

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

artistic blemish in the eyes of critics who were stipended for repeating that optimism was a virtue - antagonized a majority of critics, who refused to believe that the average writer's life was all too ofi:en a sad one. With reasonings unsupported by evidence that Grub Street had always had its sunny side, they nonetheless asserted that from the days of Alexander Pope the writing profession had offered much to its practitioners. For instance, L. F. Austin, who at the turn of the century was to reveal a warmonger with a facile pen, afi:er stating in the New Review tha~ Gissing's prejudice conveyed an impression of unreality, admitted that New Grub Street had 'a sombre fascination which is rare in modern English fiction'. What if the novelist's pen was driven by provable experience, Gissing's eloquent partisans implicitly objected. Austin himself had conceded a few weeks earlier in the ILiustrated London News that 'the very grimness of the writer's hostility co common illusions is a refreshment to the jaded reader of the average novel'.7 The Patt MaLL Gaz ette, after baiting its readers with appetizing compliments - 'Mr. Gissing's new novel is very able ... It contains passages of real dramatic power, and moments of intense psychological insight' - regretted in apologetic terms that the picture of the literary world was neither complete nor even widely rep· resentative, and that Jasper Milvain (mirabile dictu!) was an individual but not a type! 8 Vanity Fair picked out two grarnrnatical errors in conversation between Reardon and Arny (a subject for which Gissing was to blame certain reviewers in a letter to the editor of the National Observer in 1894),9 accusing the author righteously of coarseness because he had used the epithet 'sexual' several times. With theological pseudo-logic the Guardian argued that, since the characters kept on discoursing on happiness as deriving solely from affluence, they could only be expected to be unhappy. 10 What a pity, whined the organ of the Church of England, that this novelist could not see the world beyond! Although laudatory, the World 11 predicted, in typical Victorian fashion, that the author's gloomy outlook would prevent him for ever from being popular, and as if to redeem its short, jejune notice of The Emancipated, the Spectator underlined the 'persistent 12 dramatic and narrative vigour' of New Grub Street. Had Gissing read or wished to read the three dozen reviews which appeared in the English and Scottish press, he might have derived some genuine satisfaction from an honourable minority of critics who respected and indeed unreservedly admired his work. The Glasgow Herald, 13 for instance, observed that the intense humanism of the book is its leading feature and strongest recommendation; at the same time the situations are powerful, and at times deeply tragic. The contrast between the characters of Jasper Milvain and Harold Biffen is startling in artistic effect, and the skill with which one is kept from utter loathing of the despicable Jasper is proof of the success of the author in reproducing a truthful portrait.

M arried Life in Exeter

121

In full agreement with this was the writer in the Whitehall Review 14 who declared New Grub Street to be 'Mr. Gissing's newest literary triumph, a singularly skilful piece of work', which proved how true and prophetic a vision was his when he foresaw for him a great future after reading his first book. 'The man or woman who cannot appreciate, or stoops to depreciate, such a book as New Grub Street', the commentator concluded passionately, 'may surely be an object of pity to all who can enjoy this wonderfully clever, yet intensely sad, tragedy'. Ironically, it was perhaps lefi: to the least widely read of the weeklies, the London Figaro, to award the. book the supreme praise and to pronounce it 'the most powerful story he has written ... a novel of great intellectual strength'. 15 ~ong the fe.w reviews which he happened to read, those in the Saturday Review drew special comments from Gissing. The first to appear, which covered a criticism of the novel and a comparative study ofliterary bohemia past and present, had inveighed against his demoralizing inlluence, bur a week later another assessment led to almost opposite conclusions. The complexity of the characters, their verisimilitude, and the great power of the book were all commended unstintingly. Even more than this reversal of opinion, Gissing appreciated finding his name along with those of Stevenson, Kipling and Meredith in an article entitled 'American Servility', which listed British authors likely to be well received in Arnerica.16 The day before, 8 May, the Daily News had alluded to his novel in a leader.17 Did not all this prelude a new stage in which his work wou~d no longer be simply reviewed on publication but would elicit paragraphs, allus10ns and full-length articles ?18 From this particular angle New Grub Street was a landmark in his career. Many critics, even when reluctant to admit it, felt that an author of outstanding merit had come to sit side by side with Meredith and Hardy. The book was his first to run into a second edition in three-volume form, which was issued at the end of May, simultaneously with the one-volume edition of Thyrza. Walter Besant congratulated Gissing in the Author, the organ of the Society of Authors, and vouched for the accuracy of the types depicted.19 Gissing, who held this journal in low esteem, 20 was hardly flattered by this unexp~c ted intervention in his favour, but the debate which it aroused in the paper did N ew Grub Street a distinct service. On 1 July Andrew Lang, a glib dabbler in li~ht~eight verse, essays and anthropology, attacked both Besant and Gissing. In his view of well-fed man, there was no question of realism but of perverted idealism, deliberately circumscribed to the writer's profession. 'In real life', Lang somewhat irresponsibly wrote, 'the unlucky hero of Mr. Gissing would have had a devoted wife who believed in her husband's genius; but to give him such a wife would not be realism. It would be romance, or something of that kind'. As to the so-called slatings that people took so much to heart, this was a mere game of snowballs between gentlemen. Bur Besant would not be counted our in this manner, and in the same number he once more sided with Gissing. 21 Two

122

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

anonymous writers followed suit in the August number: they gave Lang a severe drubbing which must have rejoiced all the poor devils of Grub Street who happened to read the Author.12 Gissing enjoyed these exchanges of venom but took good care not to enter the arena himself. The quarrel over New Grub Street had one unforeseen sequel. Bentley, a dilatory (and deceitful) publisher if any, found it expedient to print at long last 'Letty Coe', which he had purchased seven years earlier for Temple Bar. 23 This belated publication induced Gissing to reflect on the advisability of trying his hand at short fiction. It would be less of a strain than the composition of the usual threedecker, and would enable him at the same time to experiment in a very different technique. The success of New Grub Street did not halt there. Within a year the book appeared in England in no less than five cheap editions: one at six shillings and two at half a crown in cloth as well as another two at a florin with pictorial covers; Tauchnitz issued the novel in two volumes on the Continent, E. A. Petherick in one in Australia while the Russian periodical Knishki Nodeli serialized it as Martyrs ofthe Pen in November and December 1891. In Vienna Adele Berger translated it for serialization in the Budapest daily Pester Lloyd. Lastly, through 24 the French version, the course of the author's life was to be totally altered. In G issing's circle there was also much applause. C harles Anderson, the agnostic parson of whom he had lost sight since his first journey to Italy, sent press-cuttings with his congratulations. Bertz was deeply impressed and declared the novel to be the 'maturest and most interesting' his friend had written, pointing out, however, what he considered almost too perfect, the agreement between all the characters as to the supreme importance of money. 25 Roberts likewise was not sparing in compliments, and even Ellen and her mother were by and large pleased with the book. H e brushed aside the customary reservations from Wakefield regarding his gloomy philosophy with this remark that he was now too old to change. Human aspirations had lost their interest for him. Ellen was sullenly reminded of his position: 'I do not dogmatize, remember', he wrote on 29 April, my ideas are negative, and on th e whole I confine myself to giving pictures of life as it looks to my observation ... I have reached the stage at which one is content to be ignorant. The world is to me mere phenomenon (which literally means that which

appears) and I study it as I do a work of art - but without reflecting on its origin.

III. W hile professional and amateur critics were busy airing their opinio ns, 'Godwin Peak' was progressing. The first volume did not suffer damagingly from a multiplicity of activities such as his temporary immersion in Grant Allen's book on Darwin, an unexpected visit from Edith's brother George and a short stay

M arried Life in Exeter

123

at Budleigh Salterton, where Gissing took a rather peevish Edith at the end of April - she was by then suffering from the first symptoms of pregnancy. May Day was spent in the Valley of the Otter where, walking about 'exquisite lanes', he was pleased to find an abundance of lady's smock and marsh marigold which reminded him of the botanical excursions in his childhood. On their return copies of A Village Hampden and In Low Relief met their eyes at Exmouth station in Smith's bookstall library. On 7 May he began volume II ; Edith was complaining more and more, and soon the word 'misery' reappeared in the diary. The unquestio nable success of New Grub Street for which £1 SO now seemed to him a shamefully meagre remuneration, added gall to his budding domestic cares. He had just paid l s. 8d. for Two on a Tower, which he wished to read again, and resented having to consider books a luxury: I cannot buy books, I cannot subscribe to a library; I can only just afford the necessary food from day to day; and have to toil in fear of finishing my money befo re another book is ready. This is monstrously unjust. Who of the public would believe that I am still in such poverry ?26

H e dreamed of the cultured, peaceful life of a Fellow at Oxford or Cambridge, with all material problems solved by the university authorities. His letter to Bertz of 26 April, partly inspired by Bertz's difficulties with his successive landlords, discusses their parallel predican1ents: Surely there ought to be Colleges fo r unmarried intellectual men (or even for married of small means,) where we could dwell much as students do at the Universiry. Some such plan is reali zed in the London ' Inns of Court'. originally devoted to Barristers and students of Law, now mu ch used by men ofletters and the like.

A Fellow in the two main universities had his manservant, his meals either in private or at the public table, and the nearest approximation to this system, he thought, was perhaps the Authors' C lub just founded by Besant, of which incidentally Morley Roberts soon becan1e a member. But no such haven awaited him; he had broken off relatio ns with the civilized world, as he plainly put it to Mrs Frederic Harrison when declining an invitation on 2 1 April: Whether the solitude of two will eventually be more endurable than that of one, I cannot foresee. But I shall never again meet with educated people, so that I must perfo rce live in silence and be very grateful for the mute companionship that is granted me.21

He must have used similar words when info rming Mrs Gaussen in early February of his forthcoming marriage. Mixing with the other occupants of 24 Prospect Park - his landlord and his wife, a newly married couple like himself and Edith - had not lasted long. At first Gissing had made some co ncessions, calling on the

124

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

Rocketts for tea with Edith, but their vulgarity repelled him physically and he took refuge in courteous aloofness. · Despite his retirement, he did not lose all contact with literary circles; his subscribing to the Exeter Literary Society palliated his isolation in some measure and provided him with books as did the Free Library. While engaged on the second volume of 'Godwin Peak', he read books as diverse as Andersen's Auto-> biography, Animal Intelligence by George John Romanes and Isaac D'Israeli's Calamities ofAuthors. His novel, he felt sure, would fetch £200 after asking for £50 more. Of course, he thought after the recent reissue of three of his titles in inexpensive editions, his interests would be best served by continuing his association with Smith, Elder, but supposing they rejected the book, why should he not apply to a literary agent, the best-known of whom at the time was A. P. Watt? Whether he was aware that Watt's probity was not above criticism is unknown, but James Hepburn in his study of literary agencies makes clear that Watt was not a man with an unclouded past. 28 Ideally Gissing would have liked to sell 'Godwin Peak' on the royalty system with, say, a fee of20 per cent on the published price, but he could not afford to wait. Concerned with money though he was, he still behaved generously to those whose fate was even less enviable than his own. Thus, when Bertz suggested that they should share the proceeds of his translation of'Phoebe', he refused to deprive his friend of part of his hard-earned fees. 29 Again, when Algernon settled at Willersey once more after a disastrous experience in Jersey, he sent him two £5 cheques to tide him over. Algernon and Katie's instability was becoming an ever more serious source of concern for him. A letter to Ellen of29 April makes the point in plain terms: I am uneasy about Alg ... It is a lamentable thing that they cannot find a permanent abode. Is it to him or to Katie that this wandering-Jew life is attributable? I fear that they are merely trying to run away from themselves. They cannot accept the fact that a great many disagreeables have to be faced in whatever locality ... This perpetual outlay on needless travel makes life harder for them ... I am in dread lest dire calamity should some day declare itsel£

Nor could he reasonably hope that Algernon's work would soon improve to an extent likely to affect his income considerably. His letter of 25 July to his brother betrayed much irritation after reading A Moorland Idyl. Algernon's solitude in country surroundings amounted to a self-condemnation to artistic stagnation. Those long passages of character analysis so common in his brother's fiction struck George as heavy-going and uninteresting: Let the reader analyse character and motive, if he be capable of it; do you simply present facts, events, dialogue, scenery. The result will surprise you. I don't think the invention ofplots is in your line, but neither is plot necessary to hold the reader; only

};farriedLife in Exeter

125

l~t your people moue; let them perpetually do something - as people do in everyday life.

After which he begged him to read and reread Hardy's novels. On 15 June he completed the second volllfue of his novel and began to think about holidays. Few serious difficulties had stood in his way so far. Early on, with Peak's turnabout in mind, he had wondered whether he was right in believing that a degree was not a sine qua non for a man who wished to present himself for orders. A little later, having reached chapter 12, he paused to note that he was. at a 've~ difficult' part of his book, and on 4 June admitted having trouble m arrangmg the last chapters of his central volume. Once this was done, he first decided on Ilfracombe for the holidays, then changed his mind after reading i~ t~e Dai~y Chronicle an article extolling Clevedon and its climate. Literary assoc1anons added further to the attraction of the place. Coleridge had lived at Clevedon and Arthur Hallam, the close friend of Tennyson who died at twentytwo, a young man of great promise immortalized in In Memoriam, was buried in the local church. On 6 July Gissing and his wife took lodgings at the house of Mrs .Elston, Stonington Villas, Old Church Road, and there, after rigging up a desk m the bedroom, holding out against the call of beach and country lanes, he finished 'Godwin Peak' on 17 July. 'Not wholly bad', he wrote to Bertz three days later, 'though some parts ought to be worked out more carefully'. Longing to know how much he would get for his manuscript, he dispatched it to Smith, Elder on 20 July, boldly demanding£250 for all rights, British and American. He now meant to write a one-volume novel which he would ask the agent A. P. Watt to place for him, as a means of testing the real value of his work on the literary market. There would naturally be the agent's 10 per cent commission to bear, but in his view - that of a man who all too often, with good reason, suspected his publishers of cheating him but could also, in hours of depression, own they could hardly be more generous - settling this point was worth a small sacrifice. While awaiting Smith, Elder's decision in the quiet of Clevedon, he thought over some forthcoming problems. As a child was expected in December, he would have to rent a house, and he hesitated between Exeter, Bristol and some industrial northern town. Meanwhile, he tentatively explored on his own the Somerset coast in search of a new holiday place. He first went to Minehead, where he found 'a blackguard assembly for some races' and later in the day to ~archer, 'a rather dirty little seaport', and did not let himself be tempted. On his return to Clevedon he was pleased to find a parcel of three copies of Demos and another three of The Nether T#rld sent to him by Harper, the New York publisher whom Smith, Elder had never mentioned to him, in case he should come to hear that they had received £10 for the former ride and £15 for the latter. On 27 July the couple moved to Burnham, further down on the Bristol

126

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

Channel, where they rented two 'poor little rooms' in Princess Street kept by one Miss Press, on cheaper terms than at Clevedon: 12 shillings a week instead of 16. From Burnham as from Clevedon, he often went for long rambles, visiting on his own or with Edith small sleepy places in Somerset like Cheddar, nearby Axbridge and, more importantly, Glastonbury, to which he went by himself 011 31 July. There he spent some pleasant hours, dreaming of the small town's semF. legendary past, perhaps the earliest outpost of Christian faith, the end ofJoseph of Arimathea's pilgrimage. Like so many visitors from the Middle Ages onwards he first climbed the Tor, that conical hill topped by a ruined church. He wrote in his diary a long paragraph on the rich historic associations of the town, clear evidence that he found the site pleasant. He went to Wirrall Hill from where he ..·.. had a magnificent view and saw the high thorn tree growing on the spot of the so-called miraculous tree. The idea of using Glastonbury and its surroundings as a setting for a short story, which was to be 'A Victim of Circumstances: struck him immediately, as appears in the diary entry: Saw the Abbott's Barn, and noted three cottages opposite, which may serve me in a story ... Enjoyed the Abbey, which lies peacefully in a park, amid great chestnuts and other trees. Black-faced sheep grazing about. - Remember the George Hotel, the Old Pilgrim's Inn, in High Street.

The site remained dear to him on account of its connection with the work of a few medieval poets and chroniclers including Geoffrey of Monmouth and Malory, and still more perhaps of Tennyson's Idylls ofthe King, which they inspired. In a letter of 2 August to Ellen he looked back, pleasantly on the whole, upon his holiday. Although the seaside at Clevedon was poor - 'very muddy, no sands, a steep, stony little beach' - he enjoyed the inland aspects, the view of the Bristol Channel and the Midlands. The proximity of Wales reminded him of delightful walking excursions in his Lindow Grove days. He was to introduce Clevedon into. 1he Odd Women in the summer of the following year. Glastonbury he described as a wonderful place. He admired the architecture of old houses and the country all around the town. But the beauty spots of Somerset were soon eclipsed by the necessity of turning to work again and of facing unexpected material difficulties. The impossible Mrs Rockett forthwith informed him that he would have to leave his rooms before the end of the year. Then James Payn wrote to him that reading 'Godwin Peak' would have to wait until he returned from holiday four weeks hence, and assured him meanwhile that after 'the financial failure' of New Grub Street the publishers could not possibly accede to his request for £250. Gissingwas all the more angered as on the same day he heard from Bertz that this so-called unprofitable novel had just been issued on the Continent by Tauchnitz, who had paid Smith, Elder £30 for that transaction. Had he known that Petherick in Australia had recently brought out a Colonial edition of both

Married Life in Exeter

127

this book and Ih_yrza, his rage would have been even greater. It was, at this stage, rather strange that the publishers should inform the author through their fatly paid homme de paille that the novel had not paid its way. They had purchased the copyright for fifty years and they dared to complain because three months after publication the author's fee had not yet been covered by the sales, which by then were limited to the sales to circulating libraries. Through his manuscript reader, George Smith was acting as though the life of the novel ended with the sale of the three-volume edition. What he himself must have considered sharp practice actually bordered on swindling, and Gissing's anger partly stemmed from his knowledge that he had no access to the firm's accounts. The sales (and profits) were to go on for almost four decades, but the notion of sharing profits with authors was largely alien to Smith's mind.30 On his return to Exeter he once more gave thought to his professional predicament. He was dissatisfied with all the publishers of his novels, the last in particular, and was aware that magazine editors now more readily accepted short fiction, as Roberts's recent successes attested - his collection, 1he Reputation of George Saxon and Other Stories, was about to be published by Cassell and another collection of his, King Billy ofBallarat and Other Stories, was brought out by Lawrence and Bullen in January 1892. Watchful for any change in the publishing trade, Gissing saw in these developments a tempting chance fully compatible with his artistic integrity. But he let some time pass before taking action, doubtless nursing a grudge against many editors, mainly English, who had spurned his early work after his return from America. Besides, finding a flat or a house to rent was relatively urgent. Leaving Prospect Park was after all a blessing in disguise, so trying had cohabitation with the Rocketts become. Their exasperating vulgarity and quarrelsome temper affected his capacity for work. From his experience oflife in lodgings he thought he could draw enough matter for a collection of short stories to which he might give the symbolical title of 'At a Week's Notice: His search for rooms in Bristol proved disappointing, but before going to nearby Clifton, where he was offered in a big house four rooms beyond his means, he had some consolation in seeing Demos and 1he Nether World in the catalogue of the North District Library. Fortunately he had better luck in Exeter, where on his return he found at 1 St Leonard's Terrace, near Wonford Road, an eight-room house for £19 10s. a year. His landlord, Charles Bryan, was a fifty-year-old widowed schoolmaster who lived at no. 6 in the same street, and taught at Newtown boarding school. He was the father of seven children ranging in age from seven to twenty-one. Gissing was to have pleasant relations with him, and the surroundings of his new home were, according to a diary entry for 29 August, 'purely delightful'. The eight-room house was destroyed by German bombing during the Second World War, but Gissing's diary offers some very positive details about the place. 'Good bath, little strip of garden in front ...

128

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

Undoubtedly the best house in all Exeter for my needs'. He took Edith to visit and his landlord agreed to let him have it from quarter to quarter and to do a tle papering before the couple moved in at the beginning of the following we Gissing exulted in his diary: 'The best day's work I have done for many a l .. day! Now for peace and comfort'. Once he had removed he expressed his isfaction: 'To-day am feeling comfortable in my study; the best I have everh for convenience, internal and external ... We have a servant, one Nelly Edwar at £9 a year; thus far she promises well'. On 25 August the Gissings had enter .. their new home without saying goodbye to the Rocketts. It seemed that ho11s~ hold affairs were in a fair way at last. Hardly had he set to work again when he heard from Watt, to whom he ha turned on 11 August after receiving Payn's unsatisfactory letter, that Chatto an Windus refused to handle 'Godwin Peak' for more than £120. Perhaps after Gissing thought to himself as a man whose self-confidence was badly shake he should have waited till Payn had read his manuscript. It was too late, ho""' ever, and the manuscript went to Longman's. At the end of August he tried hi hand at a short story, 'A Conspiracy of Kindness', which he gave up after a fe days, the narrow canvas cramping his imagination. September passed in hesit tion and unproductive efforts. He worked off and on at the rough sketch of novel which seems to have heralded The Odd Women, but he did not get dow to the actual writing, which was to begin with scenes at Clevedon, the title beiil undetermined. Much of his time that month was devoted to miscellaneous read ing, partly concerned with social questions, the so-called woman question i particular. From Macaulay's History ofEngland he turned to a couple of sermo by Jeremy Taylor, from Hudibras to Martial, from Rabelais to Browning, fro Gibbon on monasticism to Ibsen's The Wild Duck, then from Oliver Cromwell' Letters and Speeches to Guizot on the English Revolution. He also receivedBertz' first novel, written several years earlier, which had at long last been accepted b a new publisher in Leipzig, Victor Ortmann, founder of the Litterarisches EchO On 21 September he wrote to his German friend in genuine praise of his book: 'It impresses me as a noble piece of work, full of mature thought, of great ethical significance, and artistically good'. He was slightly disturbed by the frequency 6 coincidences, conceding however that the author's aim had been to amplify life not to copy it. The artistic skill of the novel inspired him with flattering remark 'There are beautiful and strong scenes. The interest rises, always rises, and culmi nates finely in that tragi-comedy at the Grave - a scene full of movement an vigour, of irony, of emotion, of eloquence, of life-criticism'. Algernon and Elle were invited to share his admiration for Gluck und Glas, but evidence that Ellen, who could read German fairly comfortably, did read it is lacking. 'I think highl of it', he wrote to his brother on 19 September. 'A very philosophical book, an with strong artistic interest'. With a printing of 4,000 copies selling at one mar

lvfarried Life in Exeter

129

(:shilling ~n tho~e days), Gluck und Glas illustrated in a striking manner the difference m policy between British and Continental publishers: whereas in France and Germany an attempt was made, by means of low prices, to distribute as widely as possible the first novel of a practically unknown author, British publishers, who knuckled down to the dictatorship of circulating libraries, went on issuing limited editions in the traditional multi-volume form. Yet Mudie's dictatorship was being challenged. Heinemann who, on the Continent, aimed at rivalling Tauchnitz, started a series of one-volume novels for the British mark~t. G~ssingwatch_ed closely the evolution which he perceptively looked upon as hIStonc, and he tned to shake off the yoke. 'I do wish', he confessed to Bertz on 18 _October, 'I could have done with 3-vol. novels, and publish henceforth in a rational way. But I fear the money-question will forbid it'.

IV. Suddenly chance befriended him. Harry Walton Lawrence, a young man of twenty-two, had recently founded with Arthur Henry Bullen, his senior by twelve years and known for his work on John Day, Thomas Campion and a few other Elizabethan writers, one of those publishing firms whose mushroom gro~h Gissing regarded with apprehensive curiosity. Morley Roberts had obtame~ from them ~hat others had refused outright, namely the publication of ~collection of poems mspired by his American experiences. Songs ofEnergy had J~St a~peared under their imprint, together with a book, Adrift in America, that his dymg brother Cecil had left him in manuscript form, not to speak of LandTravel and Sea-Faring, in which Roberts related his adventures in Australia and ~ef?re the mast. Bullen was keen on the distinguished personal nature of Gissmg s novels and he had asked Roberts in May whether his friend would welcome an offer to publish a one-volume novel. At the time Gissing had replied evasively, ~ut now that he was prepared to write a shorter novel and that 'Godwin Peak' found no ready buyer, he caught at Lawrence and Bullen's renewed offer. Bullen's lette~, received by Gissing on 26 September, proposed a plain, straightforward deal. The novel would be published at 6s., the author to receive a shilling per copy and an advance of £100 on publication. Gissing accepted those liberal terms all the more readily as he had only £27 left in the bank, a serious situation for the prospective father he was. He at once cast about for a subject, decided on the main lines of the plot and gave names to the characters. As early as 29 September he wrote down in his diary the tentative title, 'The Radical Candidate', but nowhere in his papers or correspondence does one find any hint th r this new novel of his would be for him a much lighter task, not so much becau:e its length would be limited to a single volume but because of his decision to recast his old unpublished story, 'All for Love', which had lain dormant in his

1

130

Ihe Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

papers since December 1879 or January 1880, that is, since Workers in the Dawn was going the round of publishers. Even an attentive observer of his intellectual development might have thought it likely that he had altogether forgotten this early narrative once rejected by an impertinent editor called John Dicks, who . tried to make a living by publishing pulp fiction. Of course, the difference in maturity between the discarded novella and the projected novel is so considerable as to relegate the former to the rank of writings from the pen of a merely gifted youth. Still, in 'The Radical Candidate' he conveniently preserved the basic marital predicament, presenting it in a much more sophisticated manner, and the drowning scene.32 He intended to have 'The Radical Candidate' ready within five or six weeks, and indeed it was one of the novels he completed with the greatest ease. The prediction he had made in 1890 that inspiration would not fail him once he was married again was verified for the second time. Bullen's cordial manner also helped him to recover his spirits, always so dependent on the small items of daily life. 'I am writing quickly', he confided to Bertz on 18 October, 'and with satisfaction; I think the book won't be bad, - but it may give some offence to the extreme philistine wing'. The publishers were highly pleased with the title, which indeed sounded nicely and left semantic options wide open. He was once more aiming some ironical shafts at his old obscurantist enemy Mrs Grundy, whose influence was only just beginning to wane. Gissing had ocher reasons for taking heart. Otcmann, Bertz's publisher, was bringing out the translation of Demos in his Biicherschatz Bibliothek. In England New Grub Street and Ihyrza had reached the significant stage of the six-shilling edition, and even if the Saturda_y Review bizarrely referred to his 'rose-water optimism' in a notice of the latter book, 33 the press now granted him greater attention and respect. An American magazine with a large circulation, the LivingAge, reprinted 'Letty Coe' on 3 October,34 while in London the Charity Organisation Review for October published the text of a lecture, of which he was unaware, on the social value of his works by a woman, Clara Collet, who was destined from 1893 onwards to play a crucial role in his life. 35 One day in the Illustrated London News he chanced upon his name coupled with that of Walter Scott, both having, according to the well-intentioned yet mistaken critic, used the Temple as a setting.36 Also, Berez, who always had an eye to his friend's interests, sent him the first number of the Tauchnitz Magazine, in which praises were heaped on New Grub Street, the anonymous reviewer calling it an 'enthralling book', 'an admirable novel', 'a serious book for serious people ... most powerfully written'. This was criticism which Bertz called 'mere puffery' and which Gissing, though doubtless pleased, discounted as such. 37 On the domestic plane there were still reasons for mild optimism. Peace reigned at home. Naturally nor all was perfect. Edith, for instance, had discovered that the servant's hair was a nest of vermin, but Gissing had fallen again to extolling his wife's domestic virtues since

lvfarried Life in Exeter

131

their installation at St Leonard's Terrace; meals were served on time, and the house was kept clean. True, Edith was uneducated, but 'I feel sure', he ventured to suggest to his brother on 6 November, 'Katie would not find it impossible to see a little of her now and then'. And a plan,began to germinate in his mind. Since Algernon was not satisfied with his present situation, professional and material, why should he not settle down near Exeter? 'There are little houses to be had, and the country is very fine. We could assist each other very greatly, I think, in many ways'. So, what about a visit and possibly a removal in the spring? The cultural temptations of Exeter, with its Literary Society and its very good library, might appeal to Algernon, whose loneliness was a permanent handicap. However, the project collapsed - his cottage in Willersey, probably Rose Cottage, a small house on one side of the village green, 38 had been rented for five years - and no visit was planned. The Gissing family, whether in Willersey or in Wakefield, was in no hurry to meet the new member whose progress George noticed as if she were a performing creature. Katie had little time to think of her sister-in-law and, like Gissing's mother, she apparently paid no heed to the invitation and of ruinous wanderings she probably had her fill for the moment. As usual, while 'The Radical Candidate' was on the stocks, Gissing indulged in a spell of miscellaneous reading which, to his biographers, is an index to his interests and culture. Then it was that, for the third time within a few years, he immersed himself in Ibsen's dramatic works, five plays among which were The Lady.from the Sea, An Enemy ofthe People and Hedda Gabler, plays that must be seen in the wake of Pillars ofSociety, Rosmersholm, The Wild Duck and Ghosts (read in 1888) and again Ghosts and An Enemy of the People (read in October 1889). The influence of these plays on 'The Radical Candidate', unsuspected for the best part of a century by critics of the novel, was to be revealed by Adeline Tintner in a seminal article which demonstrates that Gissing's recollections of and familiarity with Ibsen's dramas somehow spin the plot. 39 It became his conviction that Ibsen's groundbreaking ideas, if they were to be fully developed, needed the spatial freedom of the novel In the following year he was to express himself forcefully on the subject in his article 'Why I don't Write Plays'. 40 Before long, as his diary testifies, this interest in Scandinavian countries and their literature was to extend notably to the works ofBjornstjerne Bjornson, whose Heritage ofthe Kurts he recommended to his brother. His classical studies, though quite alien to his current creative work, did not suffer at all from his incursion into Nordic literature. On 18 October, a Sunday on which he began a regular reading of one of his favourite books, Robert Burton's Anatomy ofMelanchof:y, we find him somewhat incongruously thinking about a Greek story which he hoped some day to write. But Roman history would be more likely eventually to tempt him when the time came for him to revive some phase of ancient life. Rome and Greece in late 1891 still vied with each other in his mind. Within a few

132

The Heroic Lift ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

weeks his diary shows him reading Plutarch's Lysander, Aristophanes's Anacreon; Plato's Protagoras, a modem book by Christopher Wordsworth on Greece PicttJ~ ri,i/, Descriptive and Historical and a historical tale of ancient Rome published in 1886, Neaera, which he dismissed witheringly as being 'poor rubbish'. And so eclectic was he that from such a book, he could pass abruptly to fiction of cori: temporary life, English or foreign, for instance Dostoievsky's 1he Friend ofth~ Family, Daudet's Sapho or even that novel by Ouida about the life of the Italian peasantry, A Village Commune. The composition of 'The Radical Candidate' went on steadily, four or five pages being composed every day with a maximum of seven (on 7 November); Three days before, as the end was already in sight, it occurred to Gissing all of a sudden that the denouement lacked plausibility. Glazzard's foul play, he thought, must be restricted to the minimum required for triggering off the catastrophe. This meant retouching certain points in earlier chapters, but the whole structure was not thrown off balance. Gissing forged ahead confidently and on 12 November put the last full stop on the manuscript. He was exultant, revised his story the next day and promptly sent it to Bullen, who was soon to become more than an abstraction and a postal address for, on 6 November, he had heard from the publisher that he was on a tour of Devon booksellers and would stop at Exeter. On that very evening Bullen invited his new author to dine at the Clarence, a hotel in Cathedral Close. Bullen's name was by no means unknown to Gissing: his editing of the Elizabethan dramatists had won him a reputation in British literary circles. He had distinguished himself at Oxford as a most promising Greek and Latin scholar with a marked interest in the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, and after an unsuccessful application in 1889 for the chair of English at University College London he had gone into publishing. Gissing was surprised to find a man of his own age, and slightly disappointed that he did not look more intellectual, but he was delighted with his straightforward, unpretentious manner. The account he gave Algernon of the encounter on 6 November must have caused some envy at Willersey: Meeting with Bullen very satisfactory.... Altogether unlike a publisher; no business reserve; says plainly: 'I want to give you as much as ever I can, consistently with some profit to ourselves: Says my name is 'on all men's lips; and that he thinks great things are in store.

Bullen bore no resemblance whatever to the publishers Gissing had met until then, whether Chapman, Smith or Bentley. Yet Bullen's generosity slightly disturbed a writer with a record of over ten years of at least comparative disillusion. 'I hope', George explained to Algernon, 'he is not going recklessly to work with his publishing scheme. He said ofRoberts's poems: "Oh, we only printed them to please him! We didn't mind losing fifteen or twenty pounds. We shan't sell

Married Lift in Exeter

133

any."' Bullen also said that Algernon had quite a public, a remark which was reported with pleasure to the interested parry, and given the lie direct by the sales ofAlgernon's books as long as he published any. Optimistically, George added: 'I wish you could write a one-vol. book with ratb.er a strong story. I think he would buy it'. But Algernon proved unable to produce a novel of that description until after the demise of the three-volume novel. Gissing's worst apprehensions were now over. Even if 'Godwin Peak' could not be placed with one of the big houses, the advance on 'The Radical Candidate' would keep him afloat for some time. A minor difficulty arose, however: Bullen had been told that a title with political connotations might put off part of the female public, and Gissing was requested to choose a more neutral one. He complied without grumbling, except in his diary where his justified resentment spilled over: 'Confounded nuisance'. To save time and trouble he followed the recipe remembered by Edwin Reardon in a moment of artistic despair: he gave the book the name of its protagonist. 'It is well to conciliate the booksellers', Bullen commented on 24 November, 'for they can help or hinder the sale of a book'. Then added: Your name is better known in London than in the country, but I have no doubt that your new novel will do well. We will certainly push it as much as we can. You will excuse me for thinking that hereafter you will do stronger work than Denzil Quarrier.

A bold remark perhaps, yet a judicious one, which elicited no protest from Gissing, but nonetheless immediately affected his own judgement on the book. He took the earliest opportunity, on 16 December, to tell Bertz that he did not think much of it. On 27 November a cheque for 100 guineas reached him as an advance on British sales. 41 An agreement was made with Macmillan for the American edition, the English publishers to receive 10 per cent on the full sale price of one dollar, and share the profits with the author. 42 For the Colonial edition negotiations were conducted with E. A. Petherick of Melbourne, who agreed to buy 1,500 copies in sheets at 11 %d. a copy, yet the book appeared in Australia not under the imprint of Petherick, but under that of George Robertson and Co. The new firm of Heinemann and Balestier bought the Continental rights of publication in English for twenty-five guineas, a half of which went to Gissing. At the end of 1892 he calculated that, leaving aside the proceeds from the Colonial edition, the book had brought him in £124 14s. 3d., of which £6 lls. 9d. came from American sales. For a one-volume novel selling at six shillings in England, the result was barely passable. Meanwhile, the peregrinations of 'Godwin Peak' were drawing to a close. On 6 October Gissing had heard from Watt that the manuscript had passed from Longman's into Bentley's hands, where it still was two months later. Natu-

134

The Heroic L!fe ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

rally, as the author had anticipated, Bentley rejected the manuscript, but it is. characteristic that in doing so he acted against the advice of his reader, H. E.. Evans. Gissing's handwriting was so small that Evans wondered 'whether, on the strength of having his MS. recommended, he could be induced to have his next' type-written'. 43 But no other Gissing manuscript was ever to find its way to the desk of such a blinkered publisher as Bentley. Eventually 'Godwin Peak' landed at the end of December in the hands of Adam and Charles Black of Edinburgh; a firm which did not specialize in fiction but acquired the British rights of the. book for £150, one half payable immediately, the other on publication in October 1892. Gissing retained foreign rights, hoping their sale might help him to recover Watt's £15 commission, but Watt, to whom he had begun to wish the. novel had never been entrusted, apparently made few efforts to seek some profitable contact across the Atlantic. During those weeks of waiting for news from the agent he had pondered the reasons why the manuscript proved so difficult to place. There was of course the fact that, with the exception of Bentley, none of the publishers Watt had tried could know much about Gissing's work, which most reviewers had so far described in ways more expressive of their own limited professional capacities than of their ability to assess original modern literature. Conventionality reigned supreme. The subject of 'Godwin Peak' could only be accepted with intelligence by emancipated people prepared to 'follow' the author in his powerful psychological analyses and in his dissection of questions of faith. Gissing feared that his German friend, the only man of his intellectual circle who shared his artistic and spiritual independence unreservedly, might 'conclude that the story must be very bad indeed'. 'But I don't think it is', he went on; 'I believe it rather strong. Possibly the reluctance of publishers is due to the subject; a man pretends to study for the Church, solely to gain certain personal ends'. It was only posthumously that the full dimensions of the novel were apprehended, and more lucidly abroad than in England. The translation into French by Marie Canavaggia with a stimulating preface by Emile Henriot and those into Italian by D. and A. Pettoello and into Japanese by Kazuo Mizokawa have placed upon the book a seal of international recognition, of which very few of the writer's works offer an equivalent. Bent on tapping a new vein, he wrote two short stories between 16 and 25 November, 'A Casual Acquaintance', and, as mentioned above, 'A Victim of Circumstances', which met contrasting fates. The former was submitted to the editor of Macmillan's Magazine, Mowbray Morris, who was off and on accused of Grundyism in the press and whose closed mind was eventually to cause the periodical's extinction. 'Fear I cannot make room for this', Morris wrote, 'but I hope you will give me another chance some time'. Words Gissing recorded in his diary on 12 December, adding: 'I am not likely to'. He does not seem to have preserved the manuscript. 'A Victim of Circumstances', a richly satirical tale, did

Married Life in Exeter

135

achieve publication in Blackwood's Magazine - in January 1893 - afi:er various incivilities on Blackwood's part, and it brought the author £20. As on several earlier occasions he had, before completing his novel on hand, announced what his next would be. He would call it 'Nondescripts', a title which Bullen thought a good one, but for family and professional reasons this project quickly lost its appeal and not one line of the story was ever written.

v. On 10 December 1891 Gissing's first son was born, and for a time material cares engrossed all his attention. A new kind of life was beginning. In view of this 'domestic event' he had purchased odds and ends of furniture for the house on the first day of the month and simultaneously the servant, fearing the extra work which awaited her, left without giving notice. To remedy this situation Gissing engaged a monthly nurse, Mrs Phillips. She first seemed excellent but soon turne~ out to be a bad-tempered, pretentious woman who brought about Edith's first display of querulousness. On the 9th Gissing sat up all nicrhc in feverish anticipation, trying to keep burning a fire which a violent stormt>threatened to put out, jotting down in his diary the ultimate stages of the birth. At 4.1 S a.m., the doctor, named Henderson, told him that 'the blackguard business' was coming to an end. Edith had been 'in long miserable pain' and the doctor had had to giv~ her c~oroform. An hour later Gissing heard the child crying. 'Nurse, speedily commg down, tells me it is a boy ... So, the poor girl's misery is over, and she has what she earnestly desired'. The atmospheric circumstances had been extremely un~leasant, the wind howling furiously. More disturbing was the end of the entry: The baby has a very ugly dark patch over right eye. Don't know the meaning of it'. Therein lay largely the cause of the mother's lifelong dislike of her son, a source of permanent trouble for Gissing, who recorded his intense sorrow in his diary as the year came to an end: '[Edith] in brutal temper, reviling everyone and everything. A day of misery, once more, and bitter repentance' (30 December). After a few days the conflict between the nurse, so full of her own importance, and Edith, who poured out orders and complaints, became so venomous that he had to interfere and restore peace, promising Mrs Phillips she :vould ~e rewarded for her trouble. The clash between these two suggested to him the idea of a novel dealing with authority placed in the hands of servile ~eople which h~ would c~l 'Jack in Office'. In Ihe Nether World he had already illustrated the view that a thrall suddenly endowed with authority will assuredly make bitter work for the luckless creature in the next degree of thraldom'.44 Without any special reason he agreed with Edith to call this child, whose birth had so disorganized the household, Walter Leonard: at least these names (the second may have been quite simply suggested by that in his address) were 'inof-

)

136

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

fensive', as he put it in a letter to his brother a few hours after the baby's arriv which was announced on the same day to his mother and to Edith's relatives · .. London. He frowned at his soaring expenses and grew impatient because hi wife took so long recovering. The commotion in the house and the wailing~. the baby made quite ludicrous any attempt at serious work. Fuming with vex tion, he resolved that once he had seen the back of the irascible Mrs Phillips, would put the child out to nurse. All he had managed to do in a whole mon was to correct the proofs of Denzil Q!Jarrier. His efforts to read or map out his. next novel had constantly been checked. The few book titles in his diary for tha · period, for instance Elizabethan plays or Heine's Die Gotter im Exil, have established connection with his work. The vicar of nearby Brampford Speke, to whom he had appealed, recom mended a nurse who, by a curious coincidence, was also named Mrs Phillips. Sh lived at a small farm in the parish, Mount Pleasant, and asked only six shillings a week to look after Walter. He was so relieved to have found at such little cost a solution which seemed to guarantee tranquillity at home that he closed the de.il immediately and on 14 January transferred Walter and his layette to Brampfor His paternal love had as yet hardly awakened. Indeed, his work before this date evinces little if any interest in children. In Demos and The Nether World they represent nothing but mouths to feed, human elements which help the author to stress the misery of parents, but do not arouse in him any particular form o pity. A change in his attitude became first noticeable in New Grub Street, whe Reardon shows some tenderness towards his son Willie, and more definitelyi 'Lou and Liz', a short story written in April 1893. Not until In the Year ofjubilee published in 1894, did fatherly love figure in his work in a conspicuous manner Unsatisfied with some parts of'Godwin Peak', the acceptance of which was confirmed by a cheque for £67 IOs. received on 6 January, Gissing asked A. and. C. Black to return the manuscript over which he wanted to go carefully. Of: the 18th he set to work and among other alterations changed two oft-recurring surnames. Vinnicombe thus became Warricombe whereas he made Peak intO Peek, only to revert shortly to the original spelling. He now decided to call the book Born in Exile, a title whose symbolism would be more transparent than' that conveyed by 'Godwin Peak', however cleverly these two names suggested the ambitious radicalism the hero had cultivated from early youth. For three weeks Gissing revised the story, touching up an occasional stylistic infelicity and rewriting certain chapters, notably the love scenes between Sidwell and Godwin, which had made great demands on his talent. Confident that he had appreciably improved his manuscript, he posted it back on 6 February to the publishers, wh9 declared they liked the new title. Doubtless also, they had rarely had to do with a novelist who wished to revise his work after it had been accepted. The book, he wrote with due restraint to Bertz on 16 February, 'represents an important

Married Life in Exeter

137

feature of my life; I shall be eager for its publication', and he knew that his friend, better than any member of his family, whose mental acuteness and sensitivity were equally deficient, would deeply sense his motivation and emotions. Gis;ing's initial dealings with the Edinburgh firm had been so smooth and courteous that he might conceivably have turned henceforth to A. and C. Black rather than to Smith, Elder, whom he rightly accused of working in blinkers, had not Lawrence and Bullen evinced an even greater liking for his writings. Bullen did what a publisher like Bentley would never have done. He not only asked him for his next novel before the appearance ofDenzil Qparrier, but offered to buy back the rights of his earlier novels. This, however, seemed difficult to arrange, considering that Smith, Elder were obviously determined to keep in print the five titles in their hands, and Gissing, for his part, regarded Workers in the Dawn, The Unclassed and Isabel Clarendon as youthful work not worth reviving. So there remained only The Emancipated about which, notwithstanding some hitches partly due to Bentley's crooked ways, an agreement was ultimately to be reached. Denzil Quarrier came out on 5 February, and as a further token of the publishers' liberality the author received ten copies of the book as against the usual six. He was genuinely grateful to Bullen for his open-handedness and liberal approach to the art of fiction. Judging from his correspondence and diary he had at no time felt involved in the narrative as intensely as he had ever been while writing The Nether World or New Grub Street or still less Born in Exile. There is in the book no character such as those that some commentators of the interwar period would have called exponent characters. The distance between the writer and the creatures of his brain is never a pressing concern for the reader; the narrat~r has no axe to grind, no excuse openly to put forward. Denzil Quarrier is plamly a novel of provincial life, in which any reader familiar with his past years in Wakefield and his contemporary knowledge of middle-class mores in Exeter will recognize elements supplied by daily observation. His characters act more than they think or discourse. Gissing fluently follows the suggestions he made a few weeks before to his brother, and the fluidity of the narrative is at all stages of the story perceptible, probably because he enjoys practising his new technique, whether his approach to the reality he creates partakes of social comedy or of drama. Even in his new framework the writer remains a realist, and many are the themes which connect the narrative with its predecessors and anticipate its successors. Although Gissing rather fitfully cast about for a subject he could treat of in his next three-volume novel, it is striking that he found the theme of The Odd Women in no other place than in Denzil Quarrier, where the eponymous hero addresses the Polterham voters on the so-called superfluous women: 'Let women who have no family of their own devote themselves, whenever possible, to the generous and high task of training the new female generation: 45 However, on at least one point, the earlier book goes further into woman's condition than the

138

1he Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

later one. It makes full sense as an attack upon the immorality of marriage la which bind a woman to a criminal who has deceived her, a situation with whic some reviewers found it difficult to reconcile Quarrier's last words. lnterestingl it is just as easy to emphasize the innovative aspects of this little-studied b · highly suggestive novel which, as a tale of provincial life, comes in the wake Isabel Clarendon andA Life's Morning, with its characters seen from the outsid and its discreet authorial exposition, as it is to stress the permanence of som of Gissing's themes such as the guilty secret or the uncertainty of some chara ters' legal status or jealousy (Glazzard's envy of Quarrier, or Mrs Wade's attitud towards Lilian). Most reviewers were baffied, logically enough, by the artistic richness of the book. The novel excited less passion than New Grub Street with which it was nev~ ertheless compared, favourably by the World, unfavourably by the Illustrated. London News. 46 The political satire won warmer admiration than did Quarrier's matrimonial risky venture. The Times, the Guardian and the Athen£um47 concurred in praising the electioneering scenes, all the more unreservedly ne>:. doubt, as the author, careful to remain impartial, gibed with equal pungency at the Conservatives and the Radicals. The Illustrated London News dissented, pro.S nouncing those scenes 'little more than passable ... excursions into antiquated humour'. In its view the best part of the story lay in the analysis of the relations between Denzil, Lilian and Mrs Wade, that specimen of the 'new woman: who.· is secretly in love with the hero and makes no attempt to rescue his 'wife: and' in the psychological study of the treacherous Glazzard, which some refused to accept as a credible portrait. 48 The construction of the story also produced some contradictory judgements: for the Athen£ttm it was more a series of episodes than a novel oflogical building-up, but the Whitehall Review applauded the fine working out of the plot.49 The keenest appreciation came from the Daily Chroni~f cle which, after many cornpliments, placed Gissing above his fell ow writers in the art of leaving out. 'Where George Meredith, wanting to drive one of his char~. acters to a railway station, would call upon the Gods to summon his coach, Mr. George Gissing would be content to whistle for a hansorn'. 50 Equally admirative was the London Figaro, for which the book was by no means inferior to any of the stories by the same author: There are some capital political and election scenes in the novel, bur the interest centres in the relations between Denzil and Lilian. It is impossible not to sympathise with them, and yet they were utterly in the wrong, as Mr. Gissing knows. 51

Of the three most hostile notices, which appeared in the Academy, the Graphic and the New Review the author saw only the last, in which H. D. Traill, the future editor of Literature, unfairly accused him of presenting scenes 'vulgarly exaggerated in "line", and in colour of a crude violence to set the teeth on edge:

Married Life in Exeter

139

a grotesque judgement which makes one wonder whether Gissing's book was confused with some other title under review. The offensive comment drew this shaft from Gissing: To this man I should reply in Sam's words: 'You ll~, and you know you lie.' Whatever my fault, it is not crudeness of colouring- as I think you will agree; least of all in this particular book, where the tone is kept studiously sober.s2

Two months later, again in the New Review, Edmund Gosse was to redress this injustice when he recommended Denzil Q}larrier as one of the best books of the hour together with A Question ofTaste by the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, who wrote as critically of his fellow countrymen as Gissing did and was unpopular in his native country.53 The American press in general took up a more consistently laudatory attitude. The Chicago Tribune, in which Gissing's first story, 'The Sins of the Fathers: had been published, although admitting that the novel did not enable one to say whether the author was the 'corning man' awaited by some, already proclaimed by others, praised the workmanship and pointed the book to intelligent readers. Denzil Quarrier was, in the reviewer's estimation, an excellent bit of work from the technical standpoint. 54 The Boston Beacon followed the same line. Not yet a familiar name to American readers of fiction Gissing would be eagerly sought out if the present novel was a fair specimen of his talent. 'There is something almost pitiless in his method: the reviewer wrote, 'he has a vein of humor that is worthy to be spoken of as Rabelaisian in its sardonic breadth and vigor:s5 Gissing was seen as profitably dispensing with the descriptive accessories that had made the fortune of many less capable artists. The modernity of the novel would seem to have been more perceptible to American than to English critics. This wellwritten novel, the New York Times unconstrainedly acknowledged, depicted no impossible scene in the drama of life and the New York Daily Tribune, which called Gissing's characters 'fin-de-siecle people: found in them an ethical flabbiness it thought characteristic of the period. The Nation viewed the novel as staging a debate between marriage of the traditional type and !'union fibre, which was certainly going ideologically further than Gissing consciously did.56 :;ndoubtedly, it was from this book onwards that American reviewers began to follow his career regularly, a situation which in retrospect can hardly pass for surprising, since only three of his novels had been published across the Atlantic. The most striking feature of these contemporary criticisms was that, with the exception of the Guardian, 57 which was shocked by the treatment of free union and polyandry, no one took Gissing to task for the boldness of his opinions nor for his pessimism. He now seemed to write in harmony with the average view of morals, but this was largely an illusion. Realizing this, he relayed with a chuckle to his sister Ellen a remark of the Saturday Review, otherwise very favourable to

140

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part fl 58

the novel, to the effect that 'a bolder theme may possibly suit this author better'. It was indeed the first time he was given such advice. For Wakefield, however, the brew was still too strong ('Great disgust at Wakfl over "D. Q."; he wrote to Algernon on 15 March), and even though Quarrier ultimately seems to agree that there is no security outside the marriage state, Mrs Gissing and her daughters disapproved of George for having described 'evil: even in order to find fault with it. The lost son and brother replied ironically to Ellen on 14 March that she had utterly failed to grasp his intention and warned her that with Born in Exile there was worse to come. We are going through a social revolution, he lucidly added. ' We cannot resist it, but I throw in what weight I may have on the side of those who believe in an aristocracy of b1-ains, as against the brute domination of the quarter-educated mob'. Whereupon he left it to his sister to decide which category she belonged to. 'Never cease to reflect that there are a great many people of substantially your own way of thinking who welcome the new movement as a vast improvement upon the old worn-out processes'. No copy of Born in Exile went to Wakefield, and when Ellen, who was demonstrative in her antiquated virtue, showed astonishment, he tartly retorted that he had no copy for her and that, since the book was sure to repel her, she would gain nothing by reading it. Indeed the early chapters of the novel, than which there is no stronger, no more moving and deranging in all his works, would have been a devastating eye-opener to those three relatives who had never quite understood the extent of his sufferings. The only judgement on Denzil Quarrier that he valued was that of Berez, who as a matter of fact showed some hesitation. Like the Review ofReviews59 Bertz noted his friend's progress in form, but together with some unsophisticated readers he shied at the character of Eustace Glazzard. A conscious artist, Gissing recognized the advantage of objective storytelling but, in this regard at one with Berez he observed that, contrary to George Moore, he would never attempt to suppress his own personality.60 Literature, it would seem, has gained by both this admission and this practice. The sales of Denzil Quarrier were modest enough but those of the English edition more than covered the advance made by Lawrence and Bullen. Still, Gissing could well dream of the £18,000 which Mrs Humphry Ward was said to have earned with David Grieve: 'Incredible!' he exclaimed on 6 March. 'Five hundred a year for life! And in ten years no mortal will care to read the book'. He was not wide of the mark. Not without apprehension he watched other stars rising in the literary firmament. Kipling with The Light that Failed (1891), Barrie with My Lady Nicotine (1890) and The Little Minister (1891), Hall Caine with The Deemster ( 1887) and The Bondman ( 1890) were widely discussed in drawing rooms and adulated in the press, while his Born in Exile had taken nearly six months to find a publisher. At times he felt nauseated at the mounting tide of literary production and at the current advertising ruses. If he still had some con-

Married Life in Exeter

14 1

sideration for Kipling, whose Barrack-Room Ballads he found 'most remarkable work', he looked upon other contemporaries with much caution which posterity has more or less confirmed. 'I strongly suspect', he confided to Algernon on 9 April, thar the man Barrie is monstrously and unaccoumably over-rared. A grear man of prerry much the same sranding is Quiller-Couch. Then again rhere is Conan Doyle. Bm iris very mysrerious how these mushroom reputations come inro being. I believe the power of log-rolling, in our presem srare of journalism, is simply limitless. Seriously, I think that Andrew Lang, and two other such men, if they gave their minds w it, could sell some thousands of copies of any new book in a fortnight.

VI. Nevertheless, an objective observer would have detected solid reasons for hope in his professional life in early 1892. In mid-February when telling him about her translation of New Grub Street, which was still running in Pester Lloyd under the title of Ein Mann des Tages, 61 Adele Berger had said she wanted to translate his next book. The Polish Gazeta Narodowa [The People's Gazette] was also serializing New Grub Street under the title 'A Son of the Age' (30 January-29 April 1892). Bercz's translation of'Phoebe' was soon to be collected in Das Kind und andere Novellen published in the Bibliothek der fremden Zungen. After years of groping, not in the dark, but in the shadow of recognition, Gissing had found in Lawrence and Bullen congenial, honest publishers who held his work in high esteem. Adam and Charles Black speeded up the appearance of Born in Exile, which they now announced for spring, instead of autumn publication, and on 27 February he received the first batch of proofs. From his end Benz was zealous in promoting Gissing's name in Germany; in an autobiographical sketch he had recently publicized his longstanding friendship with the author of New Grub Street, and he was now engaged on a new article for the Litterarisches Echo later to serve as an introduction to Demos. 62 In England also his books were beginning to compel recognition in various circles. On 14 March, Ellen told him that according to the Queen, a ladies' magazine with a large circulation in which several of his books had been reviewed, a lecture had been delivered in London before the Ethical Society on 'The Novels of George Gissing'. Intrigued by the scrap of information, he undertook to find out more about the event. The Queen for 5 March gave a resume of the lecture by Miss Clara E. Collet, MA, at Essex Hall. Taking Demos and New Grub Street as examples, she had defined the social teaching of the entire work, dismissing the low-brow, unenlightened reviewers' approach to it: 'The terms "gloomy, depressing, morbid" are often applied to his work; but a morbid writer is one who studies life with a diseased mind, and George Gissing's mind is healthy'. In her article for the Charity Organisation

142

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

Review of October 1891 she had previously endeavoured to establish, on the strength of Demos, Thyrza and The Nether World, that their author, engrossed in describing social evils and not aiming at remedying them, possessed a remarkable knowledge of the life, habits and thoughts of the masses. He knew, Miss Collet considered, how to combine idealism and realism, and in The Nether World he rose above all those who had attempted a similar task. She explained in a negative manner the novelist's philosophic attitude: It is characteristic of Mr. Gissing that the moral indignation which pervades all his writings never moves him to curse individuals, classes or society at large ... he does not even find fault with Providence, for so far as he knows, there is no such thing, and he is far too logical an atheist to hate God.

It was the first article in an English paper to recapitulate his work so perceptively. It left far behind that of Edith Sichel who, with the patronizing approach of a woman of the fashionable world won over to philanthropy, had endowed him with intentions he never professed, except perhaps in his first novel. He did not rry to communicate with Miss Collet, though it was obviously a prospect she would have welcomed. Their rime-proof friendship only began a year later after a brief exchange of correspondence of which she took the initiative. For the time being he thought it significant that she had lectured on his books, and his good opinion of her was confirmed when he read a sociological 63 article from her pen in the April nun1ber of the influential Nineteenth Century. Feeling temporarily more cheerful, he wrote to Ellen on 14 March in that vein of black hun1our which Morley Roberts rightly enough emphasized: 'I begin to have hope of escaping the workhouse. Little Gubsey [one of the pet names he gave his elder son] may perchance be brought up as something better than a cabdriver'. Roberts was then about to make his first contribution to Gissing criticism. He himself explained in after-years 64 how he was invited by his friend Henry Hyde Champion, the socialist, to write an article on the author of Demos for the Novel Review. 65 Glad to do Gissing a good turn while earning a little badly needed money, yet fearing that some people might lay a charge of log-rolling at his door, he submitted a rough draft of his piece to Gissing, who tactfully reserved his true judgement for a few intimates. To his brother he confessed that he did not think much of it, and he further remarked to Bertz after it 66 had appeared in May: 'I don't think he understands my work in the very least!' With Roberrs exaggeration and verbosity were irresistible temptations. Of his friend he wrote with complacent emphasis that since Thyrza he has been consistently hopeless; consistently careless of criticism; consistently pathological. For he is of the order of realists whose work, whether they know it or not, is neither more nor less than the srudy of disease in one form or another.

Man·ied Life in Exeter

143

It is hardly surprising that Gissing preferred Clara Collet's steadier approach. If he saw it he must have been amused by a rather unexpected contribution, entitled 'Bohemia', which Notes and Q}teries printed on 16 April 1892, in which the writer contrasted the faithful picture of the literary world in New Grub Street with the somewhat hysterical gaiety in Murger's Scenes de la vie de Boheme. Influenced by these various tokens of sympathy and also by the realization that, as a rule, articles and paragraphs about a writer pushed the sales of his books, he relented for a time towards journalists hunting for interviews. At least he drew a distinction between himself and others. Thus when the London Figaro, whose offer of an interview he had once rejected harshly, applied in turn to Algernon in April 1892, George swept away his brother's scruples with arguments not unlike those of Jasper Milvain in New Grub Street. Whereas a year earlier he had turned up his nose at Frederick Dolman's suggestion, he now gave advice to Algernon which foreshadowed some personal concessions to journalists anxious to write on his works and personality. On one point, however, he remained unyielding. Algernon would have liked to mention his brother in the biographical sketch of himself he was asked to supply, but George, to whom Algernon's weak novels caused an undoubted prejudice, would not hear of it. 67 The necessity for a professional novelist to turn at certain times into a businessman had at last been brought home to him, probably thanks to his direct and cordial dealings with Bullen and his contact with A. P. Watt, but also because, being a family man, he was bound to think of other needs than his own. When Born in Exile reached the proofreading stage an incident occurred which illustrated both the inconvenience of the three-volume system and Gissing's inherent honesty. On 29 March, when going through the final proofs, he noticed that volume 3 ran only to 249 pages as against 288 and 271 for the first two. Annoyed at this lack of balance he decided that an additional chapter must be inserted before the final one. With astounding ease and celerity, he spent two days on it, carrying the third volume to 270 pages. The courtesy done him by the publishers, who asked him for the names of periodicals and persons that he wished to receive copies did not leave him indifferent; no other firm had taken such an initiative. Gissing named Bertz, Algernon and Roberts and was worried to receive only one copy for his own use, a freakish swing of the pendulum, as he had with laudable thoughtfulness planned to send a copy to Bullen ... who later bought from Black the copyright of the novel but eventually failed to publish it! Another consequence of Black's policy has escaped the notice of most critics: the reviews which have been exhumed reflect the choices of both Gissing and/ or his publishers, and failure to discuss or merely mention the book, as was the case with the Daily Telegraph and the Whitehall Review and still more typically with Vani~y Fair, may imply author's and publishers' censure.

144

The Heroic Lift ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

VIL In the cultural climate of England at the close of the nineteenth century when optimism was one of the keys to literary success, it was evident that a novel like Born in Exile stood no chance of seeing its importance and merits acknowledged. In introducing an atheist ready to take holy orders as the best means of climbing the social ladder, Gissing ran the risk of offending orthodox believers as well as the increasing numbers of agnostics. In none of the contemporary English newspapers and periodicals consulted is there any evocation of the social and spiritual drama experienced by Godwin Peak; he is accused of snobbery and pedantry, of hypocrisy and provincialism, the paragraphs devoted to the story throwing more light on the convictions and prejudices of the reviewers than on the real theme of the novel. With the exception of the Daily Chronicle, which under the title of'Our One English Realist', strove intelligently to fathom the depths of Peak's character,68 critics were content with respectfully praising the characterization and intellectual digniry of the debate while deploring the murky pessimism of the Gissing universe. Even respect was sadly lacking in two cases, which unfortunately came to the writer's notice. He was startled to read in the Pall Mall Gazette that his material was 'of the slenderest', though it was 'cleverly worked up'. 69 As to the notice in the Saturday Review, Gissingwas amply justified when he wrote that it exceeded 'in abusive misrepresentation anything I have come across, concerning my own work, of late years'. 70 He was derided for making a display of arid knowledge and for letting his characters ransack his own commonplace book; to crush the reader with boredom, he was reminded, was surely within the writer's power, but then it lay within his victim's rights to skip. As could be predicted the discussions of the novel scattered in the press revealed more critical embarrassment than perceptive assessment of its artistic distinction, but the passing of time has magnified both strong and bad points of the judgements that have been exhumed from the abundance of printed comments. That Gissing's pessimism was ideologically deplored is a routine observation. Nearly all analyses of the events and characters reveal preconceived notions about the nature of the novel as a genre. The novel reader, in the eyes of most reviewers, would seem to have been a puny, mentally fragile creature permanently exposed to depression. Thus the Bookman, under the characteristic heading 'At the Circulating Library: Diary of a Reader' (by which we can safely understand William Robertson Nicoll, the chatty Nonconformist editor), wrote with more complacency than.finesse: Mr. Gissing's new stor y has been sent to me. It is a concentration of all the nausea of life. 'New Grub Street' was cheerful and light-hearted by the side of'Born in Exile'. The pictures are painted in tones of black and leaden grey. There is nothing in them

M arried Lifein Exeter

145

to relieve th e monotony of gloom. Perhaps ic is the mosc frankly hopeless book ever thrust on a happy-go-lud.1' world.71

!"f~ybe inadvertently, howev~r, the writer conce~ed that Gissing's novel was without doubt, full of power. Another example ot reviewer who was convinced that a good novel must needs be cheerful if not amusing was James Ashcroft Noble, who had nonetheless passed a very positive judgement on Isabel Clarendon in the Academy. He now criticized Gissing in the Spectator72 because Born in Exile offere~ no appre~iation of the joy of life, 'but rather makes it a thing that is d~ ~d chill and grey, a remark which amounted to denying a writer's right to view ~fe oth.er~is~ than with the critic's eyes. Noble could not bring himself to enter mto G1ssmg s world uncontentiously. He acknowledged Peak's intellectual vivacity, ~orrecrly i~e ntifying Whitelaw College as an image of Owens College; he grudgmgly admm~d that the novel he was reviewing was 'in many respects one of the cleverest ot recent novels', but he peevishly rejected those presentations of life [i.e. the author's J which are thoroughly depressing, because unerly devoid of any fe eling for the simple human hopes and enthusiasms and affecrions which give co life ics interesc and charm. The Warricombes, the Peaks, che Moxeys'. and the rest, .all ace upon us as wer-blankers .. . They are human icebergs in whose VIC1I11 ty the ai r 1s cold.

George Cotterell's review in the A cademy was in some respects a reply to 73 ~oble. ~or .one thing he staged no quarrel with Gissing's subject, the originality of which m an age when loss of faith inspired so many novelists could not be denied, while for another he stressed the cleverness of the narrator who had succe.ede~ in cre.ati~g ~young ~an who 'neither forfeits the reader's sympathy nor wms his adm1rat1on. Interesnngly the Graphic underscored the modernity of the wo.rld described by Gissing,74 and Black and White acknowledged the desperate senousness of the book, an opinion which was shared by the Publishers' Circular and th~ Speaker, in the eyes of whose reviewer the novel was the work of an original wmer and Godwin Peak was 'intellectually brilliant, emotionally sensuous, at one mom~nt really no~le and at another contemptibly weak:7s The organ of the boo~selling community, the Bookseller, did its simple duty, describing the no~el as a fine ex~ple of Mr. Gissing's subtle, analytical method', powerfully wntten and contammg many admirable studies of character.76 Despite this mixed reception the book was not to fare too badly from the commercial point of view. Of the 520 sets counting as 480 printed for the first edition, .o nly 450 were to need binding as the rest of the sheets had eventually to be ~emamdered. In September 1892 the publishers had 3,500 copies printed of which 1,500 were sold in sheets to Petherick and Co. for their Colonial edition and another 500 in 1895 to George Bell and Sons afi:er Petherick's bankruptc; for a second Colonial issue. The rest were published in England in editions sell-

146

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part II

ing at six shillings (April 1893), 3s. 6d. (February 1894) and 2 shillings (April 1896). Lawrence and Bullen bought back the copyright from A. and C. Black in early June of the same year, planning to bring out the book uniform with their other Gissing titles, but financial difficulties prevented the realization of the project, and it was only in 1910 that the circulation of the novel culminated when it was included in Nelson's Sevenpenny Series, one of the author's most significant bestsellers, fraught with a social message unlikely ever to fade with time. In producing Born in Exile Gissing had written off a debt to himself; he had worked into the tragic story his own ineffectual search for the ideal woman together with the intellectual pride which had animated him at Owens College, when he towered above less brilliant but wealthier fellow students and winced at the humiliations he suffered on account of his inferior social origin. If the book, which most commentators failed to understand in depth, brought him compliments from his brother, who knew to his regret that he was temperamentally and intellectually incapable of producing such powerful work, it drew from Margaret (who may have borrowed Algernon's copy since George refused to send one to Wakefield) a resentful moan which largely defines her warped personality: It is a pity you should write on a subject you so little understand as Christianity. - It would be as reasonable for me to deny the existence of all the beautiful things you have seen and told me of in foreign countries, simply because I have not seen them, as it is for you to deny spiritual things you have never seen or felt, when there are thousands of people who have seen them, and are therefore as certain of them as of their own existence.

And she gave further proof of her mental limitations by adding indignantly: ' How anyone can disbelieve the Bible merely because it is not written in the latest scientific language seems remarkable'. 77 Admiring though he was of Born in Exile as a literary achievement, poor Bertz was quite alarmed at the passionate tone of the social criticism Peak indulged in, but Gissing answered soothingly on 20May: You will not find that Peak's tone is to be henceforth mine - do not fear it ... No, I hope to be more and more objective in my work; I hope to, and mean to. Already l have begun my new book, and herein you will see howl regard the pursuit of money and ease as it affects the mass of the London population; you will see, moreover, that I am very far from over-rating the moral worth, the value as individuals, of what we

call the educated classes.

In other words, after glorifying the leisured existence of the cultured middle class, he purposed to paint the seamy side of their culture and material well-being. His next novel was in fact to deal with the feminist question, and although the idea referred to in the letter to Bertz became the central theme of none of his future books, it was turned ro some account in In the Year ofJubilee (1894) and The

M arried Life in Exeter

147

Whirlpool ( 1897). :"Born in Exile" was a book I had to write. It is off my mind, and now I go on with a sense of relief'.

VIII.

If..n~w that D enzil Quarrier was being discussed in newspapers and periodicals, ~ issmg let his eye run over his diary entries since the thorough revision he had given to the manuscript of Born in Exile, he was bound to admit that he had no real progre~s ro b~as~ of. First of all, thinking he needed a change he went t~ ~en zance with Edith m early February. Either by himself or with his wife he Visited a number of small places like Newlyn, Marazion and Gulval within easy reach of the mod~st quarters they had come across on their arrival from Exeter, comfortable lodgmgs at one Miss Bolitho's, 7 Regent Terrace, which they rook for a week for fi~een s~illings. He made notes about many topographical details he observed d.unng ~1s walks. He was attentive ro oddities in the language he heard about him, to signs of change in people's habits and to architectural originality when there was any, and above all to the landscape which was unlike any he had seen in other parts of England, but the mail which was forwarded to him and the volumes he had brought with him were the best guarantee against boredom. Only St Ives, formerly a pilchard-fishing harbour which was destined to become a holiday resort and haunt of artists, truly delighted him. 'Its old streets, roc~-y headla~ds, sandy bays' struck him as memorable features of the place, the praises of whKh he sang eagerly in his letter to Katie of 13 February. Otherwise he record.ed no special enjoyment of this curious holiday in the heart of winter. On h1s return to Exeter he applied as in the old days to Algernon for some fac tual information about the salary of a clerk to the Poor Law guardians in a co~ntry Union in the 1870s and early 1880s, a task to be combined with that of registrar. But on 22 February he threw aside the pages he had written and took up another subject which had once tempted him, that of competition between tradesmen, treated by Zola in Au Bonheur des Dames and to be treated by h. ·~ b ~ m t lifiar urton. By the beginning of March, however, he was at work on yet another s~elved ~roj~ct, ~hat of 'Art for Art's Sake: soon to be superseded by the shortest-lived of msplfatJons: an article on 'The Domestic Appeal for Ret·Kence · Ar' m t. March ended without a line of the new untitled novel announced on the 15th hav.i ng been written. He was then correcting the proofs of Born in Exile an~ read.mg his brother's last story, A Masquerader, perhaps a good title, yet one which did not suit the contents of the three volumes, as Gissing and a reviewer n.oted. Lack of tangible progress was not caused by idleness, a word which at no time co~d acc~unt f~r his ~ta.gnation, but by a temporary difficulty in planning a narranve whKh smted his mspiration. So, extensive reading filled the hours which ideally should have been devoted to creative writing. The diary shows

148

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

him reading or rereading Lucretius, Lessing and Goethe - with little satisfaction. Then it was, precisely on 21 February, that he first wrote down a significant evolution in his intellectual taste; having taken off his shelves Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, 'the first German for a long time', he disburdened his mind of a secret which none of his familiars, not even Berez, had yet pierced: 'I have very little taste lefi for German literature, that's the truth'. He sought a cultural refuge in some old favourites such as Charles Lamb's Essays ofElia and, though he repeatedly encouraged Algernon to improve his chances with a certain rype of reader, he could not conceal his brotherly fears when he mentioned him and his family to Ellen. His letter to her of 11 April reveals some of his current thoughts:

Married Life in Exeter

149

and discontent at our loneliness'. The period of apparent wifely submission and housekeeping efficiency was over. On a memorable day, he drew up a list of the servant's weekly tasks in the hope of curbing mutual grievances and emulation in dishonesry. As for Walter, who had been vaccinated alter his rather unhygienic stay at Brampford Speke, it was heartbreaking to look at him; the large mole he had above the right eye seemed to be growing and people who saw him in his perambulator in the street were struck by his ugliness.

In spire of its obvious fault, I think 'A Masquerader' decidedly the best thing he has yet done. Most of the characters are intelligible people [Gissing was a past master in the arr of implication]. Bur he cannot yet piece a story together.

Further, as Mrs Bruce's diary testifies, the relations between Algernon and his wife on the one hand and their Wakefield relatives on the other were strained. Margaret and Ellen could no longer put up with Katie and Enid as guests, and Algernon could not do intellectual work in the atmosphere of Wakefield. How could he and his family live? George wondered on 11 April. Doubtless Algernon and Katie had turned to the Bruces in Wakefield and to the Thompsons - that is Katie's sister Florence and her husband Charles, who was the son of Frederick Thompson, Thomas Waller Gissing's friend - in Leeds, for financial assistance, the first of a long series of similar requests, originally shamefaced, but which gradually verged on the shameless. The spring of 1892, unproductive though it was of marketable manuscripts, saw further attempts at fictional composition. On 14 March we hear in a letter to Ellen of a new book he is just beginning and which he must finish before the end of the summer. On 11 April he tells the same correspondent that his next book, which will perhaps be called 'A Suit of Sackcloth', is still in limbo, but it was not to emerge from that state, Walter's return from Brampford Speke putting an abrupt end to it. The latter part of April, owing to the child's presence in the house, was largely wasted. Gissing advertised for a nursemaid, who soon had to be replaced. He read, with little enjoyment it would seem, Henry James's The Tragic Muse, then Short Studies on Great Subjects by ]. A. Froude, and Reuben Sachs, the story of a sexually adventurous politician by Amy Levy, who had committed suicide in 1889. Edith, as Gissing realized, was incapable of giving simple, intelligible orders. She would shout at the poor helpless servant and, what with the baby's crying and squabbles worthy of Clem Peckover and Ada Peachey, Gissing had somehow to act as nursemaid. Melancholy grew upon him. On 6 May he noted his fear that he would 'never get to work again until the child [was] out of his first year. E[ di th] constantly groaning with neuralgia,

5 THE LURE OF LONDON (MAY 1892-JUNE 1893)

'Space is ample, east and west, But two cannot go abreast'. Emerson, Essays, First Series, IX, 'The Over-Soul'

I. Now that the two novels he had written in 1891 were facing him on his own shelves Gissing felt an ever more pressing need to give them a successor. On 17 May he broached one more unnamed story and this time managed to fill some forty pages, which must have amounted to about half a volume. Just before this new start his attention had been briefly captured by Maspero's volume on Ancient Egypt and Assyria, then more typically by the Bancrofi:s' Memoirs of their lives on and off the stage, two volumes likely to satisfy his curiosity for and to sharpen his distrust of a world from which he was increasingly estranged. In the evenings after composition he filled some gaps in his knowledge of contemporary literature. For the first time he readAn Inland Voyage by R. L. Stevenson, at whom he had always looked askance, doubtless because of his low-brow approach to literature, but with whom he shared interests in travelling and bohemian life and, disregarding his conviction that he would be disappointed, he perused Richard Gzble, the Lightshipman by Baring-Gould, the story of a low-born East coast man who marries an heiress, which he promptly dismissed as 'poor stuff'. His next reading in that line was Richard Jefferies's The Open Air and Kipling's Plain Tales.from the Hills, which drew no comment from his pen. Perhaps yielding to Edith's complaints about their loneliness, he asked his sister Margaret to come and stay with them. He made no attempt to embellish the situation with which his sister might be confronted. His letter to Ellen of 11 May began with unusual outspokenness: Things go but moderately well with us. The infant is a terrible trouble; he refuses ro sleep at night, and there is perpetual quarrelling with the nurse to prevent her from feeding him every quarter of an hour. We suspect she gives him secret supplies of

-151 -

152

The HeroicLife ofGeorge Gissing, Part II cold milk whilst he is out in the perambulator. Impossible to find a servant who can be trusted.

W hereupon he relieved his feelings by speaking the truth about Walter's deplorable unsightliness. 'For all that', he conceded, 'he seems of quick intelligence, and when not crying, he laughs uproariously at everything and everybody'. Margaret's visit lasted from the 13th to the 25th of June and George sho~ed her around the city, managing despite the unsettled weather to have a daily walk with her and to visit Budleigh Salterton. Madge, he rejoiced to write after barely a week, was quite sunburnt, and her visit, he noted in his diary on the 19th, was 'fairly successful, but of course no hope of genuine understanding bet[ ween] her and Edith'. They went to Teignmouth and Dawlish, and ascended the Cathedral Tower so as to beguile tedium, but when Margaret lefi: her brother, sister-in-law and nephew, his hopes of amicable relationships between the two branches of the family had crumbled to nothing. Edith's behaviour had become 'profoundly disagreeable'; her growing spite against her husband had switched o.n to his sister. The two women were fated to cultivate the strongest mutual antipathy. Going through his diary o n 1 July Gissing was dismayed at the seven false starts recorded since the completion of Denzil Quarrier, and as each time he had chosen a new subject he was compelled to admit to himself that there was something wrong therein. Artistic creation stagnated during the most part .of]uly ~d August. Not that composition was really at a standstill, witness the diary entries in early July; thus he wrote four pages on the first, another four on the 2nd, two on the 3rd, four on the 4th, and four on the Sth, and declared himself 'in good spirit', certainly cheered up by the news that his energetic old friend William Summers had been re-elected Liberal MP for Huddersfield. But as early as 9 July, it was 'all over with work', and indeed one has the impression that he was easily distracted that summer. H e borrowed from the library a new book which was something of a bestseller, A Girl in the Karpathians, by Merrie Muriel Dowie alias Mrs Henry Norman, the Liberal journalist's wife, a book which indirectly proved three years later to be a minor yet significant landmark in his career, in that his enjoyment of it predisposed him in its author's favour when she wrote to him glowingly about his own novels. On the 11th, he was greatly puzzled to hear from a namesake of his in Croydon that a cousin of Herr Heinrich Steinitz of Berlin had mistakenly left him a copy of the translation of D emos. If anything, this man, George John Gissing, a linen collar manufacturer, was rather pleased with the mistake as it gave him an opportunity to hear from a stranger on the authorship of whose novels he was often congratulated! Once the riddle was unravelled, Gissing did some checking in the three paper-bound volumes and gave his impressions to Bertz on 7 August: 'I have looked through the German "Demos", and see that it is translated pretty closely'. At first Ben z declared Frau

The Lure ofLondon

153

Steinitz's translation 'passable', but a closer inspection revealed some gross errors, the effect ofwhich, however, was toned down by a later admission that the translator had not disgraced herself. The atmosphere of general confusion was further increased by the bad news Gissing had receive· from Bertz for some time that Victor Ottmann, the publisher of Gluck und Glas and D emos, was going through serious financial difficulties which soon culminated in bankruptcy. Fortunately, Benz's supplement to his three-part article 'George Gissing, ein Real Idealist', published in the D eutsche Presse from 3 to 17 December 1889, did achieve publication in the Litterarisches Echo for June,1 and Gissing expressed his great satisfaction on 19 June, praising his friend's critical faculty at Roberts's expense: I am convinced that it is a great advantage for me to be introduced to German readers by such a study as this of yours; your serious writing calls for serious attention. Roberts thinks well and kindly of my work, but his tone is altogether too journalistic to influence people of the better sort. I like very much what you have added to the earlier essay.

He was so pleased with Benz's public comment on his work that he wished he had the time to translate Gluck u.nd Glas - a way of returning the compliment as he thought Heinemann's International Library might be a possible home for his friend's novel, which had affinities with The French Prisoners, and in which he said 'an intelligent critic would divine the later in the earlier work'. Both men somehow felt they were on the eve of some blossoming of their career. Gissing no longer thought that Meredith and Hardy, as far as reputation went, would remain out of reach. 'I was told by Mlle Le Breton [a few years ago]', he had written to Bertz on 20 May, chat her acquaintance, the editor of the Edinburgh Review [Henry Reeve] , insisted to her on the importance of my work. - It is true that there are occasional little signs of spreading recognition, bur chis affects only a small, very small section of the public'.

And what about Use Frapan and Hermann Sudermann, those two German novelists who were attracting attention currently in England? With no correspondent could he for the moment be absolutely candid about the story he had on the stocks. Still, if Bertz read him carefully in the spring and summer of 1892, he must have gathered that Gissing was only groping forward. The confession he made on 20 May was devoid of an1biguity: ' The search for a satisfactory subject for a new book is terribly worrying. At times it has made me ill'. Then on 7 August: The summer has, for me, been all but wasted. I have begun several stories, but in each case only to destroy what I wrote. Now, alter a holiday, I am again making a beginning, and I think with better hope. I must get a book done so as to have some money before the end of the year.

154

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

On two occasions, the second time with Edith, he went to Seaton, 'a very beauti ful spot' and there succeeded in thinking out an entirely new story. This must hav. been the novel known to posterity as Ihe Odd TiVOmen. Of all he had attempte to do since mid-July, very little is known and nothing has been preserved. diary dutifully records the number of pages written or rewritten every day, with a few details about material life and occasionally the activities of this or that person around him. July 30, a 'day of headache and misery', would seem to hav:e augured a new era with these exclamatory words in italics: 'Decided to throU!: aside all I have written'! Next day he wrote three and a half pages of a new novel in the first person, 'No character to lose', which obviously corresponded to on of the half-dozen vague projects that he revived mentally in times of difficulty. But what could he expect from work undertaken in a ferment of excitement afi:e only a few hours' reflection? On 1 August he gave up this story of which n details have survived, deciding to recast the volume he had almost complete However, it was only on 17 August that he wrote the first pages of what was t become Ihe Odd TiVOmen, one of his most frequently reprinted tides, especiall. since 1970. He was on the right track at last, a situation reported in his diary oil 2 September only: Sick of chronicling endless beginnings, I lefi: offwriting in this book sixteen days ago. But on that same day I began once more a new story, and now I am able to note that I have finished the first vol[ume], and with some satisfaction.

He had kept to his desk with remarkable assiduity every day until 10.30 P·~ not allowing interruptions to hinder his progress perceptibly. Whether he wa really sorry to hear from his brother that Lawrence and Bullen had declined. t. publish his new novel is doubtful. Seeing his name and that of Algernon s1d by side in a publisher's list did not appeal to him; this collocation could only mutually counter-productive. Vol~es 2 and 3 were as speedily written as the first; their completion bein briefly noted on 16 September and 4 October respectively. Few distractions slac ened his pace, which usually amounted to five pages a day. He derived onwar help from his study of two volumes he purchased as the autumn was ~pproach ing, Karl Pearson's Grammar ofScience and Physiognomy and ~-"pres~ion by th physician and anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza. Together with Edith, he wa visited on 4 September by one of her sisters and her husband, probably Flor ence who had married George Lloyd on 13 August. Meanwhile, that his nam meant something to aspirants (mainly women) to literary fame was becomin& demonstrable: twice during the weeks he was busy with his second volume h~ heard from strangers. One Mrs Bedells of Bristol asked him for advice 'in liter;; ary effort', but his experience precluded him from replying glowingly, while an. American lady, Jenny Bullard Waterbury, who published a single novel, A New

'Ihe Lure ofLondon

155

Race Diplomatist, in 1900, wrote to him from Paris in praise ofNew Grub Street, referring to herself as a struggling author. A better index to his rising reputation was the request he received from the editor of the PallMall Gazette, E. T. Cook, to st~te among other novelists why he did not write for the stage. This enquiry had originated in an article by William Archer, the dramatic critic and translator, which had appeared in the current Fortnightly. Under the tide 'The Drama in the Doldrums' Archer had urged the serious novelists, Gissing by name, to apply their talent to dramatic art. In his reply, written on 23 August and published on 10 September, Gissing argued that in contemporary England the theatre had become a popular entertainment and was consequently divorced from literature. Since author and player alike now lived on the applause of crowds, it was inevitable that the quality of dramatic literature should be affected. In Elizabethan and Jacobean times, he wrote, dramatists had no temptation to write below their powers; the better their work, the surer its reception by those patrons of the theatre upon whom success depended. Tra~h might be produced in abundance, but only becatL~e genius and talent are always rare. Conflicts between the artistic sense and motives of self-interest there could - at the happy moments - be little or none. 2

To Algernon he candidly owned that he had sent 'rather a savage criticism of all things dramatic: Savage indeed it was: Nowadays, the paying public are the unintelligent multitude. The people who make a manager's fortune represent a class intellectually beneath the groundlings of Shakspeare's time ... When Johnson, or when Lamb, sat in the pit, they had no such fellow pl~ygoers about them as now crush together at the unopened doors, but a majority ot men who with us would merit the style of gentle. Our democratic populace, rich and poor, did not exist.

One only had to see a dramatization of an outstanding novel like Daudet's Fromont Jeune et Risler Aini or Dostoievslqr's Crime and Punishment to realize the damage done in suiting the book to popular taste. He himself produced novels and not plays, he declared, for the sake of greater liberty of expression since the novel puts no restraint on dialogue, and fiction is less subjected to outside influences which may become anti-literary. Dramatizing a novel meant submitting it to a process of impoverishment, hence a remark of his which may have disturbed some dramatic critics: 'In reading some of Ibsen's plays, I have regretted that they were plays. 'Hedda Gabler', for instance, seems to me a strangling of rich possibilities which might have been worked out in the generous scheme of a novel'. He agreed that the novelist should not come forward among his characters, but he was adamant on the question of authorial objectivity, and he counterattacked in a way all his own, declaring that the artist cannot possibly suppress his own individuality: 'No novelist was ever objective, or ever will be.

156

1he Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part II

His work is a bit oflife as seen by him. It is his business to make us feel a distinct pleasure in seeing the world with his eyes'. . This unpaid contribution to the Pall Mall Gazette was the last opportunity he had to discuss the drama as a genre, though there loomed up briefly the hope that New Grub Street might be dramatized. One Bernard Traille, who introduced himself as ' business manager of the Opera House, Sydney', proposed an interview about this extraordinary project. When Gissing replied that he was very busy but would like to hear further details, the affair was at an end. And ~o was soon the composition of The Odd JiVomen, whose history he s.~ed up m his diary on 4 October: 'I have written it very quickly, but _the wnrmg has been as severe a struggle as ever I knew. Not a day without wrangling and uproar down in the kitchen; not an hour when I was really at peace in mind'.

IL After making some corrections in chapter 1 of his novel, Gissing despatched the manuscript to Lawrence and Bullen, to whom he had ~r~mised _first refusal. Although he admitted to himself that he had no high op1mon_ of 1t, he bol~y wrote to his publishers that he considered it his best book, a Judgement with which Bullen was inclined to agree. Tactfully Bullen made a few suggestions, the importance of which only publisher and author have ev~r been abl~ to estimate, the whereabouts of the manuscript being unknown. The openmg chapters, describing the sufferings of the sisters', he wrote on 14 October, 'repel the reader. If they were shortened, and if some of the more painful details were toned d~wn, I think it would be an advantage'. H e also censured the long conversation of ~at terrible person Mrs Luke Widdowson' with M onica, of which only a curtailed version is known, and a passage about George Eliot in which John ~alter ~ross appeared, at least implicitly. Gissing bowed to the opinion of his p~bhsher, who reiterated his enjoyment of such a masterly book, expounded his terms ( 100 guineas on account) and enclosed a cheque covering Gissing's share of the Continental copyright of Denzil Q!.1arrier, namely£ 13 2s. 6d. To the author the future looked a little brighter. H ardly was the manuscript of The Odd Women off his hands when he turned to work again; idleness was one of his pet aversions. Tennyson, the poet laurea~e, having just died, he read with some emotion what the press had to say about him and saluted the dismal event in his diary: 'A gloriously peaceful death, the room full of that moonlight which we had here. Not long before death, he a~ked f~r a Shakespeare and turned for a few minutes to "Cymbeline". Once or twice ~~ile? at those about him'. 3 N aturally the death of Tennyson, one of Thomas G1ssmgs favourite poets, revived his recollections of childhoo_d. To~eth~r w!th D'.ckens, the author of In Memoriam was and remained associated m his mmd with the

1he Lure ofLondon

157

somewhat austere happiness of those years in which he had a firm and kindly hand to guide him. ' We have lost our one indisputably great poet', he wrote to Berez on 3 November; 'for my own part, I agree with those who think him a worthy successor of Theocritus and Virgil. He had not much to say, but his utterance is consummate, the very perfection of language'. And circumstances were soon to give him an opportunity to express himself with some dignity on various journalistic bouts of sentimentalism concerning the poet's so-called popularity among the lower classes. One feels something more than cultural respect for the defunct poet in that same letter to Bertz, who had said that In Memoriam wearied him: 'No poet ever wrote more musically, or with greater command of picturesque, suggestive language. Remember that his best work belongs to a past generation. He is not of to-day - any more than Keats is'. In mid-October, after he had read Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Bjornson's Heritage ojthe Ku.rts, a Zolaesque treatment of heredity as well as a condemnation of shan1s and hypocrisy, Gissing, his wife and their child spent about a week at Weymouth in the house of Mrs Craig at 8 Belgrave Terrace, Dorchester Road, where they occupied two rooms for a weekly payment of 15 shillings. Then, as neither husband nor wife wished to make closer acquaintance with the other's family, George went off to see his brother at Willersey while Edith made her way to London with Walter. She expected to stay with her eldest sister Susan Bosher4 all through the winter but after a few days Susan was tired of her and, according to Gissing's diary entry for 30 October, 'as good as expressed a hope that she [would] soon depart'. By no means surprised he drew the moral of the story: 'No dealing with these low-class Londoners'. He, for one, remained with Algernon (Katie and an ailing Enid being in Jersey) for over a week, during which they discussed their professional future and took long walks in the autumnal countryside. After the fruitless efforrs of the spring and early summer, the peacefulness of fields and woods put new heart into him. Convinced that he must break fresh ground (he had used the London scene extensively and had turned Exeter to the best account in Born in Exile), he was glad to see places which might stinmlate his inspiration. He had walks on the Cotswolds, watched the Malvern summits standing out above the mi st, 'precisely like islands from a sea'. Once or twice in the evening, the two brothers went up a hill to hear the owls crying, 'answering each other far and near ... Some voices deeper and more tremulous than others, as if with age',5 echoes from Love's Labour's Lost. A letter to his cousin Mary Bedfo rd of 11 November shows that during his stay at Willersey with Algernon he visited his relatives at Broadway. He also h ad an opportunity to see his mother at Willersey and on 3 November made his way to Birmingham, travelling with her thus far, as she went back to Wakefield. His aim was to collect material in the Black Country. Birmingham and its district would serve as a back-scene for a vast social fresco in which he would denounce the evils of industrial civilization.

158

Jhe Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

On his arrival he first took two rooms at 129 Ladywood Road and later in the day visited the Central Public Library. Solitude weighed upon hin_i, but ~e was pleased to discover much new material likely to be incorporated mto his next novel. 'How few men there must be', he lamented in his diary on 4 November, 'who have spent as much time as I have in absolute loneliness'. As a good investigator of local peculiarities, he walked out to a number of public sights such as Handsworth and Aston, King's Heath and Dudley. After a week he moved to better lodgings at 160 Brighton Road, just under the station, and with his usual concern for material details noted that the weekly rent, including fire and light, would only amount to 1Os. 6d. He liked his landlady, Miss Rowe, 'a curious old creature', to whom he gave a copy of the clothbound half-crown edition of The Nether YVorld before he left the town, satisfied that he had by the third week of November got all the material he could hope for out of Birmingham. He spent much time at the Central Public Library, which he thought hardly inferior to the British Museum and where he found books as different as J. T. Arlidge's Diseases of Occupations and]. A. Symonds's Lift ofMichelangelo. Henry Kingsley's Geof ftey Hamlyn he dismissed as 'unliterary stuff' and cared little for a recent but now forgotten play by Ernest Renan, I.:Abbesse de ]ouarre, a dramatic love story under the French Revolution. His current literary work was not forgotten during those weeks in the Midlands. On arriving at his lodgings on 18 November he found awaiting him a 'huge packet of slip-proofs of The Odd YVomen' and began to read them immediately, but he couldn't reshuffle the first two chapters, as promised to Bullen, in Miss Rowe's home. It was only once back in Exeter, on 30 November and 1 December that he wrote what is known to us as chapter 1 of the novel, that is the dramatic antecedents of the Madden family between the accidental death of the paterjamilias and the moment when Miss Madden knocks at a door in a little street bv Lavender Hill just before Christmas of 1887. The possible reissue of The Emancfpated suggested by Bullen also engaged his attention at the time. When Gissing passed on to him Bentley's letter saying that the book had cost his firm £444 and that the receipts had amounted to only £392, Bullen understandably beat a retreat - he would postpone consideration of the one-volume issue. The fact that Bentley was telling a lie, as he was all too apt to do when convenient or advantageous (his records show that his deficit was only £23 16d. Ss.) was but one aspect of his crooked ways. If recouping the whole of his losses was out of the question, he reasoned with himself, offering to split the difference might prove a better tactic. So with feigned magnanimity he declared that he would be content with twenty guineas, a concession which brought Bullen round. 6 So The Emancipated was bought back on 28 November and the new edition scheduled for spring publication, profits on which to be shared with the author. Wherever

Jhe Lure ofLondon

159

he and his family travelled, as he told Bertz, they saw in shops and railway bookstalls the five novels brought out by Smith, Elder.

R~l~tively few though the signs that his reputation was spreading among the cm1cs and the cultured public were, they did not lack variety. From Boston, where he was remembered by a small number of distinguished people who had befriended him in hard times, the editor of the New England 11-fagazine, Walter Blackburn Harte, who had just been reading New Grub Street, sent him one of his articles on the philosophical basis of fiction,7 a prelude to an apparently tiresome correspondence which was to last a couple of years. The October Bookman reported in its column of literary gossip the gratifying news that 'Mr. Hardy is known especially to admire the writings of George Gissing'. 8 After New Grub Street it was the turn of A Lift's Morning to be proposed for a stage adaptation, but when the recipient had read the impudently phrased communication, he 9 wisely chose not to reply. From the Frederic Harrisons came a cordial invitation to stay with them, should he have occasion to come up to London for a time, and Gissing, who felt refreshed after his temporary absence from home, welcomed this friendly move by the stern apostle of Positivism. Lastly, William Blackwood, after being reminded of his empty promise of the previous year, gave himself a rousing shake on 18 November and replied apologetically, promising to publish his 'excellent' story in the January number of the Magazine, enclosing a £20 cheque which threw the writer off his guard, for indeed Blackwood was, as soon appeared, a publisher and editor of Bentley's school, that is, a man with blinkers who could only be trusted selectively. He promised his correspondent henceforth to give his correspondent 'early insertion, as being only due to you after your long patience'. All of this helped Gissing for a few days to endure his dreary married life. Nor was this the only good news that reached him in late 1892. For instance he discovered, besides the entry on himself which had been requested from him by the summer of 1889, the listing of his father's Flora of Wakefield in the Supplement to Allibone's multi-volume Dictionary ofAuthors in the Central Public Library, together with a mention of Algernon's first novel. 'Our page in the Brit[ish] Museum Catalogue must be getting rather imposing; he proudly wrote to his brother on 11 November. The Central Public Library earned his unqualified praise: 'Magnificent reading-rooms, vast and ornate. A large case exhibits the books recently purchased, and it seems to me that they have all of any moment pubd during the past year'. Praise which was extended in his next letter to Algernon to the town as a whole: Birmingham is a place of great conveniences. I have had mv dinner oflare at one or other of the B'ham Coffee House Company's establishmen~.1hese are really magnificent, especially the one in Corporation Street. My meal to-day (excellent roast-beef with two vegetables) cost 9d. What may have come to pass oflate years I know not, but formerly there was no such provision as this in London,

160

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

he went on as a man who had so often starved. 'Everything is on such a spacious scale, so comfortable and inviting in appearance. With one shilling a day for all meals, I see that a man may live here very tolerably'. However, he added, thinking of the development of the town achieved under the tenure of Joseph Chamberlain as mayor, 'rents are very high, and rates a perpetual subject of groaning. The excellent municipalism has to be heavily paid for'. 10 The surroundings and their topography also struck him as pleasant novelties. One day he went to Dudley, which he was to remember, perhaps a little less glowingly, in Eve's Ransom. The grand ruin on the top of a great hill shut in for use as a public park impressed him by its originality, as did the picturesque glens, glades, slopes and natur~ _terraces. The preservation of nature so close to the clash and clang of the towns industry reassured him as to the possible conciliation of two types of civilization he had so often viewed as antagonistic. To Algernon, who could not persuade Hurst and Blackett that a novel from his pen was worth more than £50, he felt able to write optimistically: 'Keep a good heart, my dear Alg! We shall weather these dreary times yet, and drink our bottle together of an evening'. But this was to prove an ephemeral mood.

III. Naturally during his visits to libraries and newsrooms he was led to read a number of obituaries of and articles on Tennyson, and he did so critically. Some chroniclers made out that the poet's popularity had spread to the humblest strata of English society and they even endowed the crowds outside Westminster Abbey on the day of his funeral with strong emotions and a hitherto unexpected culture. Exasperated by such twaddle, Gissing could not refrain from expressing his approval to Edmund Gosse, whose deriding of these mendacious reports he came across in the November issue of the New Review. 'The popular mind is my study', he wrote on 20 November, 'and I know that Tennyson's song no more reached it than it reached the young-eyed Cherubim . Nor does any song reach the populace, rich or poor, unless, as you suggest, it be such as appears in The Referee'. He tactfully accused himself in writing thus, confessing that the impulse was too strong. 'It rejoices me beyond measure, after the nonsense that has been poured forth, to hear veracity on this subject', whereupon he signed himself 'Yours gratefully'. In a typical manner, he afterwards wondered if he had not forgotten himself, but Gosse put all his fears to rest. Gissing's letter, he replied on the 26th, corroborated 'in the most authoritative manner an impression which I had formed more by intuition than experience: and he added: 'May I venture to say with how much interest and sympathy I follow your career and read your powerful and mournful studies of life'. Gissing looked upon his correspondent as a competent critic and he thought well of him for having contributed, through

lhe Lure ofLondon

161

his Northem Studies and his translations, to the introduction oflbsen's dramatic work into England. Nor was Gosse paying lip-service to Gissing. His esteem was expressed on other occasions right up to 1927 when he gave in the Sunday Times a hearty review of the novelist's letters to his family.11 The death of Tennyson, who had been President of the Society of Authors and was succeeded in that capacity by Meredith, gave Gissing an opportunity to update his estimation of the latter for Benz's benefit. I suppose there can be no rational doubt chat Meredith is che strongest literary man, all things considered, at present among us. I do not feel enthusiastic about his novels, but I recognize his great power of characterization, and che profoundness of his intellectual glance. He has done fine things in poetry, too; but his latest verse is more obscure chan the worst of Browning.

Another example of revised opinion which foreshadows his reconsideration of Dickens's artistic merits appears later in the decade. 'Obscurity in poetry is a contradiction in terms. However deep the thought, it must be pellucidly 12 expressed'. Although the summer of 1895, through the renewal of his acquaintan ce with the genial Edward Clodd, was to bring about friendly intercourse with the Grand Old Man, his judgement, if one leaves aside The Egoist, prefaced that of future generations. He began to see the literary world about him more placidly, less contentiously as well. His ready acceptance of Bullen's few suggestions about The Odd /¥omen was a sure proof that he was becoming less adamant in his professional dealings; it was now clear to him that a concession did not necessarily spell a surrender of principle. He even seemed ready to take greater account of the public's taste. Lawrence and Bullen were without doubt instrumental in causing this new attitude. Bullen sent him, as a token of esteem, all the titles he published in the Muses' Library as well as certain deluxe editions of the Elizabethan poets and dramatists; their relationship soon became friendly. The two partners of Henrietta Street had quickly discovered the very personal nature of his novels; believing that his work was sure to last, they thought more of Gissing's literary future than of the present. Their straightforward dealings greatly appealed to him. Whereas he never knew how many copies were issued of each new edition or printing of Demos or New Grub Street, whereas also he had to ask about the sales of The Emancipated, this kind of information reached him spontaneously from Bullen, who missed no opportunity to encourage him. Royalties were paid punctually and when they happened to be delayed the responsibility rested with the American or Continental publishers. Instead of awaiting publication as agreed, Bullen sent Gissing the second half of the advance on royalties on receipt of the corrected proofs of The Odd /¥omen. He told him that Heinemann and Balestier had acquired for 35 guineas the Continental rights and bought for their Colonial Library 1,500 copies in

162

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

sheets at one shilling a copy, these sheets to be supplied by Macmillan of New York, who would publish the American edition. The 10 per cent on this paid to Lawrence and Bullen would be halved with Gissing, like all the other profits. And their activity did not stop at that. They offered to issue cheap editions of Ihe Unclassed and Isabel Clarendon. We count it a privilege to publish your books. If we lose money in issuing popular editions of your earlier novels it won't trouble us. The pleasure of seeing your books collected would atone for any loss; bur we fancy they might ultimately be profitable.

Gissing copied these words in his diary on 7 February 1893 with a moving comment: 'Was ever struggling author thus addressed?' The idea of a uniform edition of his works delighted him. The first, and easiest, step towards this had been taken when he had revised Ihe Emancipated on 11 and 12 December, but what he regarded as feasible for a recent piece of work whose imperfections did not stand out yet might be out of the question for his very first books which, to his mind, did not deserve a second life. In other words, the enthusiasm of Lawrence and Bullen could and indeed did become a source of artistic embarrassment. Something of it is reflected in the obscure history of his first published novel, Workers in the Dawn, in the 1890s. His own copy, which was ultimately to find a permanent home in the Bcinecke Library, shows that he undertook a revision of the text, doubtless with the intention of reprinting it, and that this purpose was carried our only to the end of the first volume. Some five years later, when the Edinburgh publishers Adam and Charles Black decided to launch their epoch-making annual volumes of Who is Who, Gissing declined to claim the authorship of Workers. 13 The last few weeks of the year saw him try to solve some pending problems and to make a fresh departure. He came back to Exeter on 21 November, a few days before Edith and Walter, and the prospective move of the family to the Midlands was soon forgotten. The physical growth of the child was watched lovingly by an attentive father, who noted Walter's progress on the occasion of his birthday on 10 December. 'He can just stand by himself, but not walk. Speaks no syllable, but understands a few words, such as 'window: 'fire'. Only two teeth. On the whole in very good health'. He was already very concerned with the child's future and the influence his mother would inevitably have upon him. In the fact that he crowned him with a wreath of ivy can be read a laudable intent to divert Walter's attention from the routine of his baby's life. At this early stage Gissing could still afford to be hopeful though the persistent brown patch over the child's right eye worried him intensely, but there was little he could do until he saw a skin specialist. Above all, if indirectly, he was dolorously conscious that his son's future would be largely determined by his own professional career.

The Lure ofLondon

163

About the same time a rapprochement took place with Morley Roberts, who had many friends and acquaintances in common with Gissing. The allusions to him to be found in the diary and correspondence objectively represent him as an unstable, eccentric, 'unpredictable' man wh9 revelled in nursing grudges and something of a self-seeker, bur also as a man who, though more and more culturally alienated from Gissing, could not forget him for more than a few months. The process of reunion was rather slow and, as on various other occasions, one feels that the unmethodical author of Ihe Western Avernus was kept at arm's length by his former college friend. Thus on 9 December he was told, in reply to a proposal that he should visit the Gissings for a day or two, that domestic confusion made it impossiblt: to receive visitors. 14 But Gissing who in various ways sensed he was at a turning-point in his career did not turn a deaf ear to all that Roberts said or suggested. For one thing the profitable connection with Lawrence and Bullen had been made through him, and he did not ignore the double remark made by his erratic fellow writer that short stories, if one had the knack of writing them engagingly, could become a lucrative source of income, also that literary agents, a new kind of men, actually middlemen, who were driving a wedge into the literary market, could be very useful to writers who had neither time nor taste for placing their works with the appropriate sort of magazine or publisher. The letter to Bertz of 2 December echoes Roberts's own words and points to some of his aspirations: Roberts has joined the Society [of Authors J for the benefit of its 'authors' agency'. He tells me that he never sells his own stories nowadays; the agent does everything for him, and, it seems, decidedly to his profit. He is producing a great deal, and the demand for his work grows.

About that time Roberts estimated that his recourse to the Society's agent had enabled him to treble his income, which was partly derived from his journalism, partly from his collections ofshort stories like those published under the imprint of Lawrence and Bullen, for instance King Billy ofBallarat and Other Stories. Such information was viewed by Gissing as an incitement and relayed to other strugglers in the literary arena, essentially to his brother who henceforth tried his hand, with little success, at short stories, and Eduard Bertz, a background figure in the correspondence of the trio. 15 Since work at home, 'the wretched home: had become a trial he decided to rent a sitting room in the neighbourhood which he could use as a study. This he did at Mrs Couldridge's, 7 Eaton Place, Heavitree Road, from New Year's Day, and he coupled this decision with another which took the form of a list of twelve resolutions for the New Year, saying to himself: Hie incipit vita nova. This list, which has not resisted the outrages of time, was doubtless a fresh attempt to regulate his marital and domestic life, perhaps made more dramatic by its phras-

164

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

ing than it was in actual fact; at all events his pen was obviously driven by twin. motives never far to seek in his consciousness, i.e. remorse and sorrow. Apart from giving names to the characters of his novel, he had little enough to show of it as the month drew to a close, some twenty pages at most. So as to mark the festive season in a way likely to please Edith, he took her to a performance of Mendelssohn's oratorio Elijah, given under the auspices of the Royal Society of Musicians at Victoria Hall, and did not like it, blaming the cultural level of the local population for failing to encourage better entertainments. But he was not idle during this dull, wintry period. He borrowed from the public library books such as F. Marion Crawford's novel Dr Claudius and The Recreations ofa Country Parson by A. K. H. Boyd, Homer and Gibbon on his own shelves also claiming his attention. However, when the time came to sum up his achievements of the past year, he found no reason for exultation. The year 1892, on the whole profitless. Marked by domestic misery and discomfort. The one piece of work, 'The Odd Women: scribbled in 6 weeks as the autumn drew to an end, and I have no high opinion of it. Have read next to nothing; classical studies utterly neglected. With my new plan ... may hope to achieve more in year to come.

IV. At Eaton Place he at once made a beginning of his new novel, noting as usual in his diary the number of pages he wrote and sometimes rewrote every day, passing in the evening from ancient to modern literature or from history to proofreading, for Bullen was wasting no time in the preparation of The Odd T#Jmen, which was scheduled to appear in April. As early as 21 January volume 1 of the new narrative was completed. By then some bad news had reached him. On 2 January he read in newspapers that William Summers, his old friend of the Alderley Edge days, had died of smallpox the day before at Allahabad during a political tour consequent on his re-election as MP for Huddersfield. And next day he heard again through the press that William's brother, Alfred, whom he had also known at Lindow Grove, had been killed by a train in October 1887.16 Once more he was made to realize how it mattered for him to beware the slings and arrows of fate and to review the tragedies of past years around him, the misfortunes in his own life, not a few of which had been masochistically self-inflicted. Off and on, when he was not at his desk, he pondered the saddest aspects of his condition. Thus on 24 January after writing his daily quantum of fiction under Mrs Couldridge's roof he allowed his pen to express his despair in his diary: On way home, at night, an anguish of suffering in the thought that I can never hope to have an intellectual companion at home. Condemned for ever to associate with inferiors - so crassly unintelligent. Never a word exchanged on anything but the paltry

The Lure qf"'London

165

everyday life of the household. Never a word to me, from anyone, of understanding sympathy - or of encouragement. Few men, I am sure, have led so bitter a life.

In such moments of depression, only one remedy was left him - burying himself in work. From the Bible prophets Amos, Nah:tim and Habakkuk, interesting to him only as old-time thinkers, he would pass to Vasari's life ofFra Angelico, from Augustine's Confessions to a French translation of Turgenev, Un Hamletrusse. As it was about three years since he had visited Italy and practised the language of the country, experience told him that if he did not read a little Italian fairly regularly he ran the risk of forgetting what he knew. So, for some unrecorded reason, he read a volume of contemporary fiction by the young Neapolitan storyteller Luigi Antonio Villari, Il viaggio di due asini. The history of the composition of volume 2 of his novel is poorly documented save for the circumstances under which it came into existence. Not a weekday passed without his adding a few pages to his manuscript. So the diary of the period is mainly of interest for the details supplied by some entries about significant aspects of his daily life. The entry for 29 January, which shows him reading Rois en Exil, by his favourite living French writer, Alphonse Daudet, invites close attention because of Edith's later violent behaviour to Walter: To-night his mother got cross with him about some trifle, in the kitchen. I went and fetched him up, and when his mother came I saw him fix his little eyes on her for a long time with look of grave resentment, sad and impressive. Evidently he had felt the injustice.

But at this stage very few domestic incidents were reported in this way and at any length. Of considerably superior value is the previously mentioned entry for 7 February on his current work and Bullen's superb words about it which made Gissing wonder whether any struggling author was ever so glowingly addressed. It is no wonder he got on 'splendidly' that day, as he noted with alacrity. A few days later he read an anonymous book published in 1881, Through the Ranks to a Commission, actually a compilation by one John Edward Acland Troyte, his notes from which found their way into his Scrapbook. The arid, mind-deadening life suggested by these purely factual notes about military life at its lowest level doubtless accounts for the lack of any recognizable resurgence in the published works. Also contemporary with the writing of volume 2 was his apparently pointless cutting out of pictures from back numbers of the Review ofReviews on 19 February, a leisurely Sunday occupation destined to assist his knowledge or recollection of people and places, and the initial phase of the building up of a modest yet extensive pictorial collection. 17 By then Gissing, to whom Bullen's enthusiastic words about his work had lent wings, was confident that 'The Gods of Iron' or 'The Iron Gods' (he hesi-

166

The Heroic Life of George Gissing, Part II

rated between the two forms) would be completed by the end of March. His impetus was increased by the arrival of a copy of the one-volume edition of Born in Exile from A. and C. Black selling at 6 shillings, the common practice with pubLshers of fiction after the original three-volume edition. Whether he noticed how clever A. and C. Black had been in the matter of page layout, saving on the compositors' bill by reducing the blank spaces between the lines of the threedecker text and thanks to other (minor) readjustments appears nowhere in his papers, but another money-saving strategy did not escape his notice. Nowhere in the publishers' advertisements or on the title page of the new edition was it said that the book was a new edition, so that a number of editors, Lke those of the Glasgow H erald and Black and White, either had the first two editions reviewed or at least the second one which normally should have been ignored by the press. 18 This state of things, however, did n.ot prevent him from going on with his current work. New projects were budding in his head. He was becoming tired of Exeter, asking himself quite unreasonably whether he had not wasted two years there, apparently forgetting that he had had three novels pubLshed while in Devon, two of which, New Grub Street and Born in Exile, bade fair to be viewed henceforth as among his very best. Devon, he thought, was culturally very dull. An entry in his Commonplace Book which his diary enables one to date 28 February reflects his state of mind of the period. After attending a meeting of the local Literary Society during which a man who looked and spoke Lke a plumber remarked that he was not 'a very old gentleman, but ...', he wrote down the ludicrous statement - symboLcal in his eyes - and concluded dejectedly: 'Miserable speaking - vulgar, fooLsh'. 19 Here was, if his work of the moment must be seen primarily through his words, a singular contrast with the message with which he was trying to invest 'The Iron Gods', a message he expounded for Algernon's benefit on the same day: One way or another this frantic social struggle [as materialized by machinery] must be eased. I have a few people who work their way co an idea on the subject - that the intellect of the country must proclaim for Collectivism, but by no means for Democracy unrestrained.

As appears in the diary at the time, the charms of Devon had gradually palled on him; the local Lbraries could no longer satisfy his needs, and he too often had to buy the books he wished to read; then, his lack of cultured company resulted largely, he beLeved, from his Lving away from the London Lterary circles. In London he could have met his publishers, weighed up face to face what he could reasonably expect from this or that editor, found out of what service to him might be the Society of Authors, whose activities he had watched through the press since its foundation in 1891. So when newspapers announced in January that, thanks to the generosiry of the millionaire sugar merchant Henry Tate,

The Lure ofLondon

167

who had made a huge fortune with an invention to cut sugar loaves into small ~ubes, ~ larg~ free. Lbrary would soon be opened at Brixton, his plans crystalLzed, displacmg his previous idea of a removal to Birmingham. About mid-March, as he was still working steadily at the 'Iron Gods', an unexpected letter from his former pupil Walter Grahame reached him which threw him into a panic. The young man, who was on his way to SaLsbury, asked whether he could call on him as he passed through Exeter. Now, with the exceptions of his sister Margaret and Morley Roberts, no one among his familiars had met Edith and it must be supposed that Gissing had ranged her in the category of what he called 'unpresentable wives' in New Grub Street. Was he to devise some plausible excuse that would enable him to fend off the undesirable prospect of an encounter in his prosaic home or was he to brave it out? Should he or should he not invite Grahame and introduce him to Edith? Could he rely on her for arran~ng t~e lunch? In the end he composed the menu himself and spent the morning domg the shopping and laying the table, intensely aware all the time that inviting the young man was 'a bold decision, alas'. His brief account of the visit appears in the diary entry for 21 March: Grahame arrived at 1.39. Gave him for lun ch a couple of fowls (cooked last night), apple tart (cold from pastry-cook's) with cream, and a bottle of Burgundy. Afterwards walked about with him. Lefi: him at 6, and at eight he came to sit for an hour, having dmed - I hoped - at the Clarence, where he stavs to-night.

The rest of the visit is related both by Gissing, who next morning 'walked with Grahame on h'.s way to Budleigh Salterton, as far as St. George C lyst', and by Grahame m his letter to Alfred Gissing, written some forty years later and quo red by the latter in his unpubLshed biography of his father: Ar one point it seemed doubtful if we were on the right road, and none of the country ~eople we mer could remember ever having heard ofBudleigh. although it was only a few miles away. This surprised and armoyed him, and he said char such a thing could never happen in the N orth ; the Exeter folk were slow and stupid in everything; he could never even get his grass cur or small repairs to his house done. Nevertheless, he appeared to be very comforrable in his home. H e seemed busy and happy, was in good health and getting on with rhe work he had in hand. His wife was evidently devoted to him, and he was very proud of his baby son'.

v. Once more Algern on was proving a source of serious worry to all about him , to Geo rge in particular. At the end of February he had borrowed from him £10 which h e obviously was never to refund. These repeated appeals for assistance were a heavy strain on George's purse, which could ill bear this form of fraternal

168

The Heroic Life o_fGeorge Gissing, Part II

tapping. If only Algernon, he groaned not yet too audibly, had had a real literary vocation! His publishers, Hurst and Blackett, could not see their way to offer· more than £50 for any of his novels and, if the idea of following up the multi-vo ume edition with a six-shilling reissue occurred to them, they did not put it inti:>,. practice. Blackett was as dissatisfied with Algernon as Algernon was dissatisfie? with Blackett. No other publisher was prepared to take over. Algernon agreed with his brother that he had always written his novels of modern life (there had been six so far) half-heartedly and thought of trying his hand at romance, which might prove more lucrative. And George, who promptly detected the weak points of his brother's novels, gave as much advice as he could, sometimes anticipating structural defects as in his letter of 3 April 1892: From the name of your next book, I take it that there will be one distinct central figure. Indeed I hope so; I think it very necessary. To have such a figure - obvious from the first page as the character of the book - would help you vastly in holding your picture together.

Once he had read Between Two Opinions, he was in a position to give fresh advice which reflects his annoyance at once more finding that Algernon was not making real progress. 'I fear', he now wrote on 11 March, the general objection will be that there is not enough story. How enormously it would help you if you could deliberately construct what is called a plot, - help you, I mean, not only with the public, but in the mere writing. It is quite grievous to me to feel here and there how you must have laboured through a chapter. Now with a contrived story, situation follows situation, and there is always the obvious matter for description or dialogue ... I am convinced you would do well to invent something more out of the common way of life.

Whereupon for the sake of comparison he took A Tale of a Lone!J Parish, by Francis Marion Crawford, a second-rate American novelist, with whose fiction he had recently acquainted himself: Now this is a wretchedly poor book, from every point of view, yet people read it, and simply because there is an out of the way story. It is that of a woman whose husband is sentenced to penal servitude for forgery, and who goes to live as a widow at a little village in Essex.

Gissing's point is that it is enough for Crawford's readers that they want to know · 'what will happen', a type of curiosity which Algernon's fiction fails to rouse. The crux of the problem was that 'the other Gissing', as some reviewers called•• him, was constantly writing invita Minerva, that his artistic commitment was· . of the tepidest. His novels were conceived by a weary brain, whose energy had never been conspicuous. Perhaps because Katie, who lived their domestic penury most intensely as a housewife, spurred him on, he occasionally entertained the

The Lure efLondon

169

tho~ght of seeking some supplementary source of income. Attempts were made at differ.ent mo~ents at this time and in the next few years and decades, but never with the slig~test success and if one bears in mind the short period when he worked fo~ a Richmond solicitor, the idea that he was perhaps too choosy must be considered. One of his recurrent hopes was that he might work better and more profit~bly. in another place than that he was living in at a specific ~om~nt. Beca~se his exiguous home at Willerseywas synonymous with cultural isol~non, he. bn:fly contemplated settling in Edinburgh, but George pointed to the. impracticality of the scheme on 11 April, as soon as he heard of it: 'The Edmbu.rgh n~tion ··:would only be hopeful if you had acquaintances there, and of the nght kind. Without acquaintances, what is one to do?' A few weeks later th~s ephemeral plan had been replaced by another: 'Have you heard that Alg. i; go mg to London for two or three months', George asked Ellen on 21 May, whilst Katie and Enid accept a round of invitations from relatives? This may be a useful step, but I most heartily wish that Alg. could get some paid position. Things look very dreary for him - and indeed for all of us.

Log~cally, seeing t~at George was beginning to find an outlet for the few short stones he ~ad wntte~ since his trip to Glastonbury, Algernon asked himself whe~her this ex~andmg new market might be worth exploring. Tue reply he received from ~s brother about the activities of the Authors' Syndicate must h~ve. temporarily dazzled the frustrated aspirant to literary glory. 'Decidedly', Gissmgwrote on 13 June, they :place' short stories and articles ... The advantage is that these people know so well JUSt what paper or magazine is likely to accept a thing, and their knowledge e~ends o:er the whole English world. Roberts tells me that they get for him much higher ~nces than he would have ventured to ask for himself; moreover, that he has been paid several times for certain stories, which have appeared in paper after paper.

However, this fata morgana must have vanished when Algernon was reminded that Ro?erts was ~ore of a versatile journalist than a writer. In George's eyes, his brothers best policy was clear enough: let him try the Authors' Syndicate with no fewer than three attractive articles or short stories at a time. He himselfwould very soon chance it 'for mere bread and cheese'. Gissing also had to play the adviser with Bertz, who no more than Algernon, ~oberts. or h~mself, managed to settle down for good and was perpetually at vanan~e with his landlords, cursing the noise about him or his neighbours or b~th. As ill-luck would have it, Ottmann, his publisher, had just gone bankrupt, ~v1th th~. result that the only one of his books to have enjoyed comparative success, Glu~k und Gl°:, ~as.left adrift, as also the translation of Demos. Gissing, who realized that diss1patmg his efforts was Bertz's chief danger, urged him to

170

Ihe Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

concentrate on fiction. Why should he not write a novel of English life, us~~g his exceptional knowledge in this direction? Burdened with his w~rk as a c~nc and Secretary of the German Society of Authors, Bertz shied at this suggesnon, probably fearing to offend the intelligentsia of a neighbou~ing country, perhaps also conscious that his recollections of England were fadmg. So he opted for a subject which entailed drawing on his American adve~tures and wo~d not therefore tax his imagination too severely. The story, enntled Das Sabmergut, was to appear in early 1896. Only Roberts among Gissing's literary friends was .· making undoubted progress regarding income, and a rumour was afloat at the time, among his large circle of acquaintances in London ~d elsewher~, ~at he had gone to Africa. His eccentricity was smilingly_ recogmzed as consntunonal, but some people pronounced him mad. He culnvated restlessness as _a rather puerile form of self-advertisement, which Gissing more temperately viewed as affectation _ the man wished to be talked about and knew no other means of achieving his aim.

VI. So far Gissing's relations with Lawrence and Bullen were more than pro~is­ ing but there are signs that farther afield in the literary world he saw possible div:rsification of his activities. Encouragements came from Blackwood. A fee of £20 for a short story like 'A Victim of Circumstances' was in itself an astonis~" ing tribute from the conservative pundit of George Stre~t, who pronounce~ It 'touching'. It 'reads very well in print', the old i_nan added'. tho~gh the saddem~~ realism that runs through it may detract from its popularityw1th many readers. This read like a veiled warning to the author, who was invited to submit furthe,r manuscripts ifhe found suitable subjects, as did still more indirectly Blackwoods recommendation of a book, Mona Maclean, Medical Student, by Margaret Todd, from which the publisher had derived great amusement. But did Gissingwish to be amused and could he become a purveyor of amusing manuscripts? He was content to promise his collaboration if opportunity offered itself, an~ replied rather stiffiy to a courteous offer from the publisher to send a copy ~f his ~aga­ zine to any acquaintance his contributor might have on the press: I am m the happy position (for an author) of knowing not a sin~le reviewer, nor an~ person of journalistic influence'. 21 On receipt of his authors copy, he was aggneved to find that his story was published anonymously - a preposterous editorial ~olicy. Still he ventured to test Black:wood's goodwill. He broke off work on his new nov~l to produce another short story, 'A Shrewd Investment', which he so~n reti~ tled 'A Minstrel of the Byways'. A fortnight later the story was back on his desk, and this rejection spelt the end of the collaboration between Gissi~g ~nd Black- · wood. When in 1896 the publisher approached him once more, G1ssmg turned

2

Ihe Lure ofLondon

171

a deaf ear: for many months he had had a regular outlet for his short fiction and he had no wish to have his peace of mind disturbed by another rejection. Amusing Blackwood was not on his agenda. Evidently the ageing publisher could not be trusted. .,. As it happened, this new market opened to him shortly after Blackwood turned down 'A Minstrel of the Byways', a lost tale probably destroyed by the author. On 30 March the editor of the English Illustrated Magazine, a monthly periodical with a fairly large circulation, asked him for a short story 'like the Bank Holiday scene in The Nether World, that is, just the sort of writing that narrow-minded editors usually frowned upon as likely to be disliked by their predominantly conventional readers. This editor was Clement King Shorter, a man his age and a Liberal in politics to whom no moral or religious prejudices were attached. If anything, he was a self-made man of medium calibre with a modest education, not at all an intellectual but gifted with a commercial flair which was one of his assets throughout his life. He could recognize talent when he spotted any and had the art of making friends in the cultural world. A good many of his associates were known by name to Gissing and some of them were to become personal acquaintances and friends of his. OfShorter's sociable, even clubbable nature no one had any doubt and, like Edward Clodd a little later, he was instrumental in giving Gissing's life a new dimension, a socio-cultural one, one might say, which his limited resources did not allow him to cultivate as much as he could have done, had he not been handicapped by his own youthful past as well as his present domestic and familial conditions. In his world of predilection Shorter was known by his initials, C. K. S., and by his Literary Letters in the several periodicals, in particular the Illustrated London News, which he filled with gossip about literary life, past and present. In the next ten years he commissioned from Gissing a large number of short stories and sketches, the longest of which were illustrated by minor artists such as Dudley Hardy and Gunning King. But Shorter, who had more well-wishers than enemies, was a man of moods, of superficial culture, apt to misunderstand or distort what he glibly wrote about, and he was sometimes unpleasantly influenced by inveterate gossips like William Robertson Nicoll, who indulged in objectionable small talk whenever he got a chance. As the years passed the loyalty of both men to Gissing became questionable, and Gissing, who was aware of their difficulty in holding their tongues, chose to give them an implicit lesson in civility. But at the time he sought Gissing's collaboration Shorter had no ulterior motive, and he was genuinely anxious to obtain from him stories that would strikingly contrast with the common run of those he printed in the English Illustrated lvfagazine, and Gissing was no less genuinely anxious to publish short stories which, while breaking new ground, would increase his literary income.

172

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

So, despite the awkward interruption in the composition of his current novel> entailed by his acceptance, he answered favourably, taking advantage of a journey to London on 30 March to go and study Rosherville Gardens, a public pleasure ground at Gravesend, in Kent, in which he set part of his story. This trip to London was a very busy, and in retrospect proved to be, a highly profitable one. His determination to spend as little as possible makes pathetic reading. It shows notably through his buying an excursion ticket and in his taking a bedroom at 186 Kennington Road, in a shabby district, at four shillings per week~ He made it his duty to see as much of the district as possible, that he might use his impressions in future literary works, striding about the streets until late hours. Next day he went to explore Brixton on foot, walked up Brixton Hill to Streatham Hill and on his long circuit made a lunch of oranges on the way, and in the evening attended a concert at St James's Hall. The lodging house he had chosen because of its cheapness must have been an infernal place. He summed up his second night there in unequivocal terms: 'Kept awake all night by bugs, fleas and crowing of cocks'. Next day he went to the recently established Tate Library in Brixton to test its potentialities prior to a removal which was largely dictated by cultural aspirations, and could not resist the appeal of the British Museum reading-room. Visits to Westminster Abbey and St Paul's on 2 April preceded the vital topographical exploration of Rosherville Gardens, but as a man who, from his early days, had felt drawn to the music hall and planned to write a short·· story on the subject for some weekly or monthly periodical, he spent the following evening at the Pavilion, 'chiefly to hear Albert Chevalier in his coster songs [and found] a note of comedy inhim much superior to the run of hall people'. It was a world which he was to revive in The Town Traveller, a world he left behind on 6 April after calling on Lawrence and Bullen, who received him very cordially· but could not let him look forward to strikingly good sales for The Odd Women. Heinemann, whom Gissing disliked, was trying to back out of his offer to buy . the novel for his Continental Library. Were Bullen's optimistic expectations to . be disappointed? His new author, who was to become a major name on his list; ..· doubtless returned to Exeter with very moderate hopes that his picture of struggling unmarried women would sell better than New Grub Street. The new hat he purchased at Heath's, the well-known hatters, signalled no imminent triumph when he regained St Leonard's Terrace. In three days, from 17 to 19 April, he wrote the short story commissioned by Shorter, the specificity of which has gone· largely unrecognized. It was not only the first he wrote for Shorter, but his first commissioned story, a significant thematic link with the working-class tales of the previous decade and the starting-point of his second career as a storyteller. It was also to mark the beginning of occasional difficulties with Shorter once he had received a cheque for 11 guineas for 'Lou and Liz' ('Not quite enough: we

The Lure ofLondon

173

read in the diary entry for 28 July 1893), which appeared in the August number of the magazine. No less pleasant than Shorter's Commission was the request that Gissinghad received from Edmund Gosse on 18 March- ~.fresh sign that his reputation was in the ascendant. Could he write a new, longer letter on the subject of poetry among the poor to serve as an appendix to his next collection of essays in which his Tennyson article was to be reprinted? Obligingly, Gissing developed his two original paragraphs, letting his pen ramble over several blank pages. His short letter of 20 November had merely confirmed, with a touch of sentiment, that the people did not read Tennyson's verse for the simple reason that they did not read and could not appreciate poetry; the greatly expanded version of the original letter read like an arraignment of the cultural deficiencies of the age. 'What else could one have anticipated?' he asked rhetorically. To love poetry is a boon of nature, most sparingly bestowed; appreciation of the poet's art is an outcome of studious leisure. Even an honest liking for verse, without discernment, depends upon complex conditions of birth, breeding, education. No one seeks to disparage the laborious masses on the ground of their incapacity for delights necessarily the privilege of a few. It was needless folly to pretend that, because one or two of Tennyson's poems became largely known through popular recitation, therefore Tennyson was dear to the heart of the people, a subject of their pride whilst he lived, of their mourning when he departed.

Interestingly, his demonstration was studded with anecdotes which clinched the matter, one of which concerned the testimony of his landlord, Charles Bryan, a teacher of poor children, who had confessed to him bluntly that he could not stand poetry and that he had disliked it since the day when, as a schoolboy, he had to learn by heart portions of The Lady ofthe Lake. Ultimately his pleasure was to receive a check. On reading his observations in printed form, Gissing was clearly annoyed. He saw that Gosse, probably finding his remarks too pertinent to leave any of them out, had joined his two letters end to end instead of substituting the second for the first. His embarrassment appears in his diary: 'This rather troubles me, for readers will think that I had the impudence to send a stranger that long rigmarole, uninvited'. 22

VII. When he travelled to London on 30 March 'The Iron Gods' was within four or five chapters of the end, but his enthusiasm had been steadily declining in recent weeks and the journey to south London checked for good what little remained of it. He had noted in his diary on 25 March that he was lagging wretchedly over the end of his book, admitting after a month of miscellaneous work that, even though he only had twenty pages to write of'The Iron Gods: he doubted

174

1be Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

whether he would ever finish it. '.Arn much dissatisfied', he confessed. 'Would prefer to rewrite and re-construct the whole thing: 23 The trip to London spelt the demise of the book as originally conceived, but he recycled some portions of it in Eve's Ransom, which is set partly in the Black Country, the following year. A decisive step was taken on 20 April when he sent to Dalton's Advertiser an advertisement for four unfurnished rooms, justifying his decision by the neces~ . sity of a radical change owing to the perpetual rows in the house between Edith and the inept servant. Among the replies to his advertisement he retained that of Charles William Tinckam, owner of76 Burton Road, offBrixton Road, who offered the five rooms above his flat for a weekly rent of 12s. 6d. Before signing the lease he made a careful enquiry which would help to dispose of his alleged lack of practical sense, were there not so many proofs to the contrary in other circumstances. Besides the possibility for Walter of being outdoors without always going into the streets, Gissing wished to know how large was Tinckam's family, adding somewhat boldly: 'I think I may say that we are very quiet people; the nature of my work makes quietness necessary'. 24 He was reassured when he heard more about his prospective landlord. Ten years his senior, Tinckam was on the staff of Sampson Low, the publishing firm, and his family merely consisted of himself and his wife Elizabeth, who was then thirty-nine. They soon were on cordial terms and his professional position was later to enable him sometimes to pass on to his tenant literary items of interest, and they corresponded for some time after Gissing left Brixton. The negotiations between the two men, which involved redecoration of the rooms and the fitting up of a 'kitchener', or cooking-range, lasted a couple of months, a period Gissing found all the longer as he was condemned to inaction since he could not turn to his next main project - giving a successor to The Odd PVomen. The diary entries from April to June 1893 testify to no major progress in his work, but his capacity for singularly varied cultural activities remained and was to remain impressive. At one time he thought of writing a novel to be called 'A Girl's Wild Oats', a tentative title which brings to mind In the Year ofjubilee, though no details are available which might enable one to go beyond this reasonable assumption. Once he had finished his short story for Shorter, he wrote another story which has since vanished from all records, 'How a Misfortune Made a Philosopher'. His avowal in his diary for 25 April that he would not try to 'get rid of it just yet' reads like a disguised condemnation. Two days later a most unexpected letter from William Summers's sister, Mrs Buckley, reached him; it was projected to publish for private circulation some of William's writings; would he write a memoir for the book? Unhesitatingly, he agreed, waving aside the idea of a fee, but the worthy project petered out for unknown reasons. Then a letter from Morley Roberts deflected his thoughts from the possibility of work at home in the next few days. Roberts, who was passing through Exeter after Continental peregrinations (not Africa

1he Lure ofLondon

175

after all), called on him to discuss professional problems. Gissing reckoned that his friend's earnings, thanks to the Authors' Syndicate, amounted to some £600 a year, and Roberts gave a token of his affiuence of the hour by refunding a debt of £3 which dated back to April 1889. Duripg the five days he spent at Exeter then at Paignton with the Gissings he found George strangely reticent on the subject of his own life, but then Gissing dared not yet complain before anybody: neither before his relatives, who had tacitly disapproved of his marriage, nor before Bertz, a hardened bachelor who could not understand his sexual cravings (and who, for that matter, had never been told about the marriage), nor above all before Roberts, whose warnings he had disregarded. His only course therefore, at this early stage of his new matrimonial life, was to nurse his grievances against Edith privately. Or else he blamed the servant, a poor, quarter-educated girl like most of her predecessors and successors, who made a provoking display of her obtuseness. If Roberts, however, had judged his friend's reticence by his own standards of behaviour, that of a man who deliberately shrouded his own movements in mystery, his surprise at Gissing's reserve would have vanished altogether. He was currently living at St John's Wood in the home of Henry Hyde Champion, the socialist politician who had been in the public eye in the mid-eighties, when social agitation had become a national problem for a time. And Gissing had not forgotten that Roberts had published an article about him in Champion's Novel Review in May 1892.

VIII. After Roberts's visit first at Exeter then at Paignton from 29 April to 4 May came that of Mrs Gissing, who was apparently anxious to see young Walter, her second grandchild, and perhaps less compulsorily, her daughter-in-law Edith, of whom Margaret could hardly have given her a glowing picture. George was full of apprehension about a predictable collision between the two women, who had so little in common and were so unlikely to understand each other. So on 14 May he set down in his diary his strategy to shun such a possibility: 'Decided it would be impossible to make mother comfortable for a fortnight here, in our piggish house, so proposed to go to Burnham for a week next Friday'. Pending that prospect he went out with his mother as often as possible so as to reduce the risk of any wrangling under his own roo£ He took her round the city and one afternoon went with her to Dawlish, an attractive seaside resort with Jane Austen and Dickens connotations. The week at Burnham was spent in lodgings at 2 Royal Parade on the seafront and Gissing noted in his diary that the pleasantest day, doubtless significantly, was that on which he visited Wells with his mother. He was to use the cathedral city as a setting for one of his best known short stories, 'The Fate of Humphrey Snell'.

176

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part 11

While waiting for a final arrangement with Tinckam, he indulged in some desultory reading like George Borrow's Bible in Spain and Lavengro (his first contact wirh the aurhor's books), a potboiler by Grant Allen, This Mortal Coil, lamenting over the time he wasted in reading 'such trash as rhis', until he could move to Brixton. More interestingly, he also read, in very short instalments, a half-forgotten work by Xenophon, men had been on sale for nearly three months, and it was possible to review borh rhe commercial fortune of the novel and the critical evaluation of it. Less than a week alter publication Bullen had reported to Gissing that Mudie had bought one hundred copies, Smirh twentyfive, Grosvenor rhirteen, Cawthorne and Hutt rhirteen, Day's rhirteen, and several other circulating libraries seven each. 27 On 1July sales stood at 275 copies. These figures were not impressive, yet Bullen was quite pleased: 'This morning we have sold six; and we confidently expect rhat wirhin the next few days we shall have 'repeat' orders from Mudie and orher quarters'. Then, in words which foreshadowed rhe downfall of rhe three-decker system, he continued: 'A few days ago Mudie (who has had altogether 13 5 copies) tried to induce us to let him have a number of copies at a reduced rate; but we emphatically declined'. Whereupon Bullen showed unexpected compunction, increasing Gissing's royalty on each set of rhe first edition from 3 to 4 shillings, twenty-five copies counting as twenty-four in rhe place of thirteen as twelve. The novel was taken seriously by serious reviewers and rhere were some budding signs rhat remarks made by rhe more enlightened critics might be followed up by future commentators, when rhe Woman Question began to be seen in a historical perspective and no longer as a mere modish subject. Gissing's approach was level-headed and objective, lively and varied; he raised multifarious problems which all his perceptive read-

The Lure ofLondon

177

ers, as distinguished from those who only looked in his narrative for the twists and turns of rhe plot or witty and shocking remarks, were acquainted wirh. In particular rhe dramatic problems of spinsterhood connected wirh shallow education, lack of professional training, rhe di~astrous consequences of antiquated, cramping female gentility - problems wirh material as well as cultural connotations - were placed under rhe readers' eyes wirh a quiet vigour which lefi: no room for flippant discussion or malicious misrepresentation. As usual Gissing revealed his imposing knowledge of rhe English social scene and his profound humanity. Although some reviewers with simplistic notions of what was artistically acceptable in a work of art expected him to offer a panacea, Gissing was careful not to suggest specific remedies likely to improve the advancement of women's condition. True, at the level of minor characters functioning in background episodes, such unfortunate marriages as those of Everard Barfoot's brother, of Poppleton and Orchard cast a gloom upon the average man's chances of happiness in married life, so long as women's education is so disastrously deficient, but Gissing does not leave his reader in doubt as to his reasoned hope for more satisfactory matrimonial lives. Only a radical change in women's education wiJl remedy a situation which his experience has obliged him to pronounce dramatic. Only then will mutual respect, the foundation of a well-balanced marital association, be possible. As long as women are not educated very much as men are, equality between rhe sexes will remain a vain dream. The vital idea lies at the core of Gissing's message, and the concluding lines of the narrative are by no means depressing because of rheir atmosphere of 'port afi:er stormy seas'. Let us look ahead, he courageously suggests; rhe horrors of the present are bound to be gradually effaced. His most explicit statements on the question occur in his oft-quoted letter to Bertz of2 June 1893 responding to rhe latter's sympathetic critique of the novel: More than half the misery oflife is due co the ignorance and childishness of women. The average woman pretty closely resembles, in all intellectual considerations, the average male idiot - I speak medically. Thar state of things is traceable to the lack of education, in all senses of the word. Among our English emancipated women there is a majority of admirable persons; they have lost no single good quality of their sex, and they have gained enormously on the intellectual (and even on the moral) side by the process of enlightenment, - that is to say, of brain-development. I am driven frantic by the crass imbecility of the typical woman. That type must disappear, - or at all events become altogether subordinate. And I believe that the only way of effecting this is to go through a period of what many people will call sexual anarchy.

To which he added with sly lucidity: 'Norhing good will perish; we can trust rhe forces of nature, which tend to conservation'. His expectations were most reasonable:

178

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II My own hope is that the world will some day be reconstituted on a basis of intellectual aristocracy. I believe that, relatively speaking, there must always be much the same social distinctions as now exist. All classes will be elevated, bur between higher and lower the distinction will remain. I should be content to see the working-class woman about as reasonable as the present bourgeoise, which of course would imply a considerable advance.

Of the thirty-odd reviews of the novel that have come to light Gissing did not see more than half a dozen, of which he kept some record. On 12 June he noted in his diary that the reviews were excellent, an optimistic view of the situation not invariably confirmed by those still accessible. The Victorian malady, common among critics, which led them to exclude from praiseworthy literature anything that was not shallowly joyful and bright, can often be traced among the early journalistic assessments. Epithets like 'gloomy' and 'depressing' came readily under the pens of commentators who dispensed with serious thinking. Caring little for shades of meaning, the Review ofReviews referred to the book's realism as sordid and invited readers to compare the author with Zola, whose artistic greatness was not yet apprehended in England. Yet, the writer of the review hastened to add that Gissing's story was likely to do much good and to provoke a good deal of thought, 'if it only drives home to its readers the crime that middle-class parents commit when they allow their girls to go without rational training'. 28 For George Cotterell in the Academy Gissing painted the shadows and ignored all the lights; he was sinking lower and lower into pessimism. Cotterell's grandmotherly style of criticism amounted to denying his authors both their choice of subject and their treatment of it. 29 Sanctimonious for doctrinal reasons, the Guardian lamented that the writer recommended no remedy, as though it was a novelist's duty to offer any solution to the social problems he may be led to analyse. In other words, the Anglican official weekly was concerned to see that Christianity was left out of account.30 However, there were a great many British, and still more American, journals and newspapers which praised the power of the book, calling it 'absorbing', the liveliness of the characters, particularly the female ones, the convincingness of the story from beginning to end. The Atheru£um, the Spectator, the Morning Post and, across the Atlantic, the Boston Beacon and the News and Courier were on the whole of this opinion,31 but some dissension appeared when it came to appreciating the relation of art and social purpose. Whereas the Speaker detected in the narrative 'a somewhat dogmatic and polemical air, inconsistent with the true aims of fiction' (a remark betraying a confusion of the tone of the feminists and the narrator's), the New York Nation judged that the artistic qualities of this problem novel were uncommonly good. 32 In the Illustrated London News Clementina Black, herself a novelist keenly interested in the fate of her sisters, paid homage to this solid, straightforward book, but she sentimentally regretted that the behaviour

The Lure ofLondon

179

of Rhoda Nunn towards Everard Barfoot was not in character. She went on to wonder whether Gissing's averseness to happy endings had led him, like many other novelists but in the opposite direction, to sacrifice psychological verisimilitude.33 As might be expected, the Woman's H erald, a liberal weekly supporting the feminist cause, lavished praise on the novel in an enthusiastic five-column article which he kept in his album of press-cuttings afi:er passing it on to his younger sister: No novel perhaps ... has treated more exhaustively and more adequately the wh ole position of women; no previous writer has brought ro hi s task so complete a knowledge of the subject. It is a real environm ent, a living ci rcl e of characters, ro which Mr. G issing introduces us. 34

The Pall Mall Gazette rated The Odd Women the most interesting novel of the year. Like Zola and Ibsen, Gissing showed that 'the widest and loosest ideas can be treated in a purely artistic way', and his book constituted 'a great vindication of realism from the charge of dullness'. 35 Such gratifying assessments were naturally an an1enity to him, but the story had an unpredictable cap acity to ro use venomous responses in some benighted minds. Bullen forwarded to him an anonymous letter sent to his firm unstamped, virulently abusing The Odd Women. 'A curiously spiteful production', Gissing noted in his diary on 17 June. Strangely enough, a similar letter of abuse from an angry woman was triggered by In the Year ofjubilee years after its publication. The puritan writer, who signed herself 'A Mother of Girls', had been horrified to read of Nancy Lord undressing and looking at herself naked!36 From the publication of The Odd Women and Gissing's settling again in the London area can be dated the outset of that stage in his career that he had long yearned for - the stage when his name, popularized by the dozens of reviews of ~is works in newspapers and periodicals, would come under the pens of journalist~ as a matter of course. Hardly had he settled in Brixton when he was given a sign of such a change. Unexpectedly his brother, who after all did not try his luck in London and contemplated becoming a compositor, sent him a cutting from the Pall Mall Magazine in which he was eulogized, if rather unconventionally. In his monthly article 'Without Prejudice' Israel Zangwill, afi:er denying the relevance of the term 'photograph' applied to the heroine of The Odd Women by the National Observer, piled inflated complin1ents on hin1: Gissing has this supreme distinction : he is the one man of the age who has never been paragraphed - not even mendaciously. Hi s movements are a mystery, his style of dress is known only to his tailor. Shakespearean in his range of character. he is Shakespearean also in his incorporca1ty. Bur unlike Shakespeare, he has not kept his personalin· out of his book.3 ·

180

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

As though the news of his forthcoming arrival had been made public he received a number of invitations, all of them variously embarrassing. The Lord Mayor invited him to dine at the Mansion House on 1 July 'to meet representatives of Arr and Literature'. One Charles Stewart, a London solicitor with some literary pretensions, wrote from the Athena:um Club to ask him to his country home near Tonbridge. He found it easier to assure a Limerick governess, Isabella Keer, of his sympathy. An agnostic who had read The Emancipated and was in quest of a kindred spirit, she corresponded with him for some years. Mentions of him and his works in provincial newspapers became more frequent and after the publication of Colonial editions of a few of his novels, especially under Petherick's imprint, his name was no longer ignored in Australia. But the major event affecting his private life in mid-1893 was unquestionably the growth of his friendship with Clara Collet. Their correspondence began on 10 May, rather coolly on Gissing's side, as appears in his diary. Note from Miss Clara Coil et (one of the Labour Correspondents of Board of Trade, - who lectured on my books at the Ethical Society some time ago,) saying she would like to meet me, and asking if! could call upon her. Replied, saying I was too far off

He still had to realize what a resolute, enterprising person Miss Collet was. Undaunted, she sent him a parcel containing her publications, notably her 'good article' on his books, published in the Charity Organisation Review in October 1891, which helped to turn the scales in her favour. She put pressure on him energetically, feeling that Gissing's coming removal would favour her plans, but her task was not an easy one. When on 29 June she invited him and Edith to spend Saturday to Monday with her at Richmond on their arrival in London, he balked. She counterattacked by sending her portrait. Shortly afterwards his only valid excuse for postponing the meeting she so ardently wished for had ceased to exist.

6BRIXTON (JUNE 1893- SEPTEMBER 1894)

'He likes the country, but in truth must own Most likes it when he studies it in town'. Cowper, 'Retirement'

I. Clara Coll~t was an exceptional woman in her day. At a time when women were slow!~ fi~din~ access to professions hitherto monopolized by men, she stood our as a disnngu1shed pioneer. The daughter of Coller Dobson Collet, who edited the modest Diplomatic Review and earned his living as a reacher of singing, she had by 1893 already made her way in life in a strikingly original manner. Obviously, al_th?~gh her mother, Jane, ran a small laundry business to supplement the family s mcome, Clara was born into a cultured family, of which she the ~ourth child. Clara's biographer, Deborah McDonald, writes that 'the fan~~; background was one of unorthodox religion, merchant pursuits and adventurous characters' and that by the time Clara was born, the family, although of respectable middle-class origins, was by no means wealthy. Her father, with his radical Unitarian beliefs, was keen to provide an educaaon for his daughters and there was an expectation that all the fam-

ily would work for a living.'

:rru~ugh the periodical he edited he was in touch with men who have lefi: a name In history, notably John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx (whose daughter Eleanor became a friend of his own daughter), and Clara, in early life as indeed later through her pr~fessional activities, stood socially between several worlds. First, the m~nufac_rurmg world that we associate with Friedrich Engels, without whose financial a~s1stance Marx and his family would have been starving; then, with th~ ~manc1pated world of the Unitarians, who did not claim to constitute a relig10n because the so-called Trinity, with its an"thmeti"c divmon · · o f a sup. . posed de1?' mto clear-cut sections, could in no way satisfy their reason; lastly, · were a progressive world from which all dogmas , political , soci·al and economic excluded and replaced by rational values and beliefs. Right from rhe first she had - 181 -

182

'Jhe Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

been trained in an atmosphere of radical empiricism and tolerance which was poles apart from the mentalities chat Gissing had been at odds with, especially among his Wakefield relatives. These characteristics of Miss Collet he of course only gradually discovered as he was cold by her about her family and educational background. In 1872, at the age of twelve, she had been sent to Calais to learn French and the following year she had entered the North London Collegiate School, a liberal establishment where she enjoyed musical gymnastics classes. Unlike the average girl, she would climb ladders in the gymnasium and one day was delighted to find that she had remarkable capacities for rowing. She took her Cambridge Local Examinations in 1876 and fate played into her hands two years later when University College London allowed women to take its degrees. So by 1880 she was a bachelor of arts after becoming a teacher at Wyggeston Girls' School in Leicester, where she stayed until 1885, in which year she began to prepare her MA degree in political economy. From chat date until she met Gissing her life had been no less busy and noteworthy than before. Her experiences were wide and varied, as is suggested by a mere listing of her achievements from the mid-1880s to her emergence into the novelist's life. As early as 1884 she was elected to the council of the Charity Organisation Society, to whose official organ, the Charity Organisation Review, she was to become a frequent contributor. 2 Shortly after Charles Booth, the noted philanthropist, started his gigantic enquiry into The Life and Labour of the People in London, she was recruited among his staff in the wake of another female enquirer who was destined to become much more famous than she ever was, Beatrice Webb, nee Potter. In 1886 she had obtained her MA and won the Joseph Hume scholarship (which meant £20 per year for three years) and began lecturing in the next year so as to supplement her income. While Jack the Ripper committed his murders in Whitechapel she was collecting statistics in the East End for Booth's chapter on women's work, her speciality together with the problems of charity. Although her first contact with Gissing's work cannot be dated accurately, it necessarily took place about 1890 at the latest, and she was by then more and more involved in social work connected with and organized by a number of societies and semi-official foundations, which in a typically empirical manner, tried to cope with the severest social and economic forms of injustice. In 1890 she was elected Vice-President of the Toynbee Economic Club and read a paper on 'The Occupations of our Mothers and Grandmothers' at one of its meetings in 1891 and, since Gissing had heard of her lecture on his works reported in the Queen, she had become labour correspondent of the Board of Trade with an annual salary of £300. New steps forward in her career did not entail any relinquishment of her former involvement in the cause of women: although she had now lefi: for ever the world of education, she was and remained for years from 1891 onwards President of the Association of Assistant Mistresses

Brixton

183

in public secondary schools. All these aspects of her public career clearly point to the adva~ced nature of her opinions. Although she belonged to no political party and, like all women until after the Great War, had no right to vote, she doubtless was in sympathy with the movements vhich campaigned for women's suffrage, .and she technically and efficiently assisted official action against poverty and ignorance.

It is easy to understand why once he had met her, Gissing paid heed to the 'new woman' in the most sophisticated and inspiring sense of the phrase. He who had always advocated the intellectual and spiritual emancipation of women, even though he feared it might masculinize them too much ('unsex' was the word in vogue at the time), had before him a living example of his ideal. Like hi.m, yet in a more objective and rationally based manner, Clara Collet was fully alive to the human problems which faced England in chose days. He as an artist who had experienced numberless hardships and she as a humanitarian economist, had ~tudied. these problems, not from a comfortable armchair but through ~ontact with reality. In every respect she differed from the young educated Englishwomen he knew or had known. Compared with her, Ella Gaussen was an amiable, harmless nonentity who saw society through rose-coloured spectacles, and Edith Sichel an a.ffiuent bluestocking for whom slununing was only a sensational pastime. Moreover, Clara Caller's intelligence and culture had not strictly been fed on dry social and economic studies, seasoned with copious statistical enquiries; she was well read in English and French nineteenth-century literature. Her conversation was of the kind Gissing delighted in, serious talk based on extensive culture and knowledge of contemporary issues. How she came to know of his existence, then was led to read his novels and meet him are questions she herself answered in a letter of the early 1930s to Alfred Gissing which he quotes at length in his unpublished biography of his father: 'One afternoon', she wrote at his request, early in the firsr week of Ocrober 1891 , I losr my rrain ar King 's Cross and had ro wair abour rwenry- five minures for r.he next. To fill up r.he rime I wenr ro r.he booksrall ro see if there was anything that I cared to read. The Nether World caught my eye, and I remembered r.har Uncle Edward ... had praised ir highly in a letter to my Aunr. I also remembered that, five or six years before, I had been recommended to read Demos, an~ had not done so because I imagined it was a novel with a purpose, and I liked my science to be science and my novels novels. I bought r.he book - 'Jhe Nether World - and was held fast from r.he firsr page. I remember that in the train, when I had already read a good deal of r.he book, I had a disrincr apprehension, almost fear, rhat r.he aurh or needed me ; rhat no one, or very few, would be able to see how great his work was. Next day I bought D emos, and at rhe British Museum I searched in r.hc caraloguc, and found that there were many or.her novels by r.he same author I had never read. Thar afternoon I was ar rhe Denison Club, and Mr. E. C. Price told me rhat he had to bring our r.he C. 0. Review r.he following week (r.he l Sr.h Ocr. ) and had

184

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II absolutely nothing to put in it. I offered a notice ofG. G'.s novels, andh~ ~ccepte~it:j By the end of the week I had read all the published novels except A Lifes ilforn~ng,., which I was too exhausted to read and have never yet read, and had written the article,, for the Review. k d · th From the literary side I never attempted to criticise them. My wor urmg e• · fi y ars had trained me to understand their scientific value, and to see that prev10us ve e . l · b •.· they were as far above the work ofinvestigators like myself as Michael Ange o 1s a ove the best students in an ordinary Art School. Then, notwithstanding th_e great str~ ' laid on poverty, it was obvious that the writer's tests. >~ere not ~f the ordmary maten'.' alistic kind, although at the same time orthodox relig10us feeling w'.15 absent. A little while alter, I was asked to read a paper to the Ethical Society at Essex Hall, and one on G. G'.s novels was accepted. At the meeting when the paper w'.15 read and discussed, a Mr. Spencer Hill said that the writer had had a very unhappy hfe, ~ut was , happier now. I had seen no signs in his books of any improvement. An acquamtance, · who was there, went home with me and told me that a man whom I knew also had been at Owens College >vith G. G .... As a fact this man went to Owe_ns Coll~ge alter G. G. had lefi: it. I asked for no particulars and avoided any opportunity ofbemg told them. The Unclassed from the first had disturbed me. The writer was never more sy~­ pathetic to me than in that book, but it was clear to me, from all the novels, that it was not as a scientific investigator that G. G. had lived amongst these people. ~d nothing could present itself to me in explanation. I made no attempt to communicate with him. [ ] In 1893, in the spring, my work took me to Manchester, and I asked Mrs J~es Worthington3 for G. G'.s story. She and her husband told me that p~ of ~e ternble tragedy which was known to the young students at the time. ~ey ~med ~Im greatly and said the whole calamity was due to his being allowed to live m lodg1~gs. After his release he had gone to America and they knew.nothing further about him except that they had read his novels. Of the circumstances leading to the catastrophe I knew nothing for many years. . . . relations Of course then I understood that he had been cut off fromf mnmate h" h >vi th honourable men. And at the same time I felt that, in spite o everyt mg, : ':as greater than they were, and that the truth was in him more than in any other hvmg writer. I decided to write to him. . On my way back to London I read The Odd Women which had JUSt come out. For the first time I was repelled by the writer. He seemed to me to have suffered a_mor~ deterioration, to have coarsened in some way.4 For a time I hesitated as ~o making his acquaintance. But the terrible story excused everything and I wrote to him ..I ~ve _lost his first letters. He wrote to me that he was in Exeter where he.had be.en ~vmg smce ·age In his second or third letter he said they were commg to live m London, . h 1smarn. h tld" d he mentioned Walter as being eighteen months old. After t ey were set e m ;rixton he came to Richmond to see me, and went on the river with me, as I h~ asked him to in my invitation. I went to Richmond from the office by the 5.2? tram (I think), and as I expected it to be almost cert~n rhat ~e w~uld go by th~t tram too, I looked at the crowd at Waterloo Station and med to pick him out from .1t. Only two people in the whole number seemed to me possible persons, and, five mmutes ~er I had reached my rooms, one of these two arrived and we went out at once on the nver.

Brixton

185

I sculled up to Teddington and back. I forget whether I invited him to supper or not. I think not. I remember his saying in the boat that he was resigned. And I laughed and said resignation was a vice. I asked leave to call on his wife.

As Clara Collet herself puts it, Gissing first mer her at her home in Richmond, 34 Hill Street, on 18 July 1893. He noted the circumstances in his diary, where Teddington in her account of the meeting becomes Kingston. Of their conversation only some echoes are extant. Undoubtedly he gave her a hint of his domestic worries, for she at once offered to find ways of relieving them so that he might enjoy the peace of mind he needed to concentrate on his writing. On the same evening he summed up his impressions, which partly corrected the image that had formed in his mind after receiving her portrait in early June, a gesture from her which showed how unconventional she was by Victorian standards: 'Miss Collet younger than I had expected. She wishes to come and call on E[dith], but I fear'. She must indeed have impressed him that he should be almost ready to accede to her request. She returned Gissing's visit on 2 August, dining with the family, and was soon in a position to perceive that one of the causes of friction between the writer and his wife was the loneliness from which she confessed she suffered. As a first attempt to remedy this she asked Edith over on 10 August for the whole day, so that in turn Edith spent an afternoon on the Thames, Gissing looking after his son at home. With admirable tact, Clara Collet soon managed to gain the confidence of both husband and wife - no small task considering the difference in character between them. She exchanged small gifts with Gissing and made him read her own publications in the Economic journal and the journal efEducation besides her articles, commissioned or not, in the Charity Organisation Review. She bravely took Edith to the theatre and gave toys to Walter, apparently without demur on his father's part. On 16 September, while the two women were at the Globe Theatre, he received an extraordinary letter from his new friend, whom, to the end of his life, he addressed in proper Victorian fashion as Miss Collet. Could he promise that, should he ever find himself in financial straits as a result of failing health or loss of creative power, he would allow her to defray all the expenses of Walter's education? His reply of the next day expressed his warm gratitude. Clara had made the kindest suggestion ever made to him: One thing you have done which you desired to do: you have made my mind very easy in the thought that, if my own life were to be as short as that of my father, (who died at 42, and when I, his eldest son, was not fourteen,) my dear little boy would have not only a sincere, but a very capable, friend to stand by him. I know only too well the miseries and perils of a child lefi: without strong, wise guidance.

This was venturing as close to the tragedies of his childhood and adolescence as he ever did orally or in writing with any of his familiars. He dared not fear that

186

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

there might come a day when pecuniary assistance would be necessary: 'My constitution is good', he wrote self-confidently, 'and there is still a great deal of work in me'. Still more eloquent of his emotion perhaps were his concludingwords: 'Is it not something that you make me think more kindly of the world than is my habit?' This secret exchange of letters, no reference to which is to be found in their subsequent correspondence, sealed their friendship. George and Clara, as they never called each other, shared their secret mutely and went on corresponding and meeting as though Clara's spirit-stirring offer had never been made. What feelings may have prompted her to act in the way she did is a question which has invited speculations. Jane Miller, her great-niece, suggests in several of her books that she was unavowedly in love with him, but over against this view, which it is easy enough to support, her strong dislike of all forms of sentimentality must be stressed. Her self-confidence could express itself dauntingly, a fact that Gissing noted early on in their relations and of which his consciousness transpires in his important letter of 17 September 1893. 'Not nearer', the watermark of some of his letters to her seems to read. Her type of beauty, which appears at its best in a portrait of her made in her early thirties, did not attract him. She had given him what he called 'the highest proof of friendship'. H e thanked her with his head, short of doing so with his heart. As to financial insecurity, which he seemed in the way of reducing palpably, he no longer needed to dread it so much.

II. On arriving at Brixton on 23 June, Edith and 'Grobsey' alias 'Grobs' having been whisked off to Mrs Phillips's farm at Brampford Speke pending the new installation in Burton Road, Gissing himself had seen to the furni shing of the flat, making a few concessions to his wife's taste. He had bought carpets, curtains, linoleum and even, for good measure, various plants which, in a Brixton middle-class drawing room were de rigueur. He had also invested a few pounds in furniture and in a selectio n of engravings representing his favourite authors, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Daudet, George Sand and others, together with artists such as Michael Angelo and Turner, whose names Walter began to learn the following April.' But Gissing soon began to fear he was indulging in 'rash expenditure', particularly as on 21 June he had observed that he only had £116 4s. 9d. left in the bank and there was still the removal to pay for. These circumstances, which he excusably inclined ro magnify, must have reminded him of the subject of a short story which he had once sketched in his American notebook and which he was to develop the following year in 'Their Pretty Ways'. 6 He engaged a servant, and after a vain attempt, o nce Edith and Walter had joined him on 30 June, at using the British Museum reading room as a study, rented for three shillings a week a garret at 38 Cranmer Road, Kennington. There at least,

Brixton

187

with furniture consisting of a table and chair and a square of oil cloth he could not feel guilty of extravagance. His satisfaction is noticeable in his letter to his younger sister of 3 July: 'At rwo minutes' distance is a very nice park', by which he meant Myatt's Fields Park, 'for Grobsey, and all the roads about are broad and tree-y. No squalor discoverable in this region'. But the child was troublesome; he would not play by himself for one moment and could not be out of doors for long at a time. Gissing's return to the London area enabled him to meet old friends acrain b and to make a few more acquaintances. H e had not seen Hudson since the days of the 'Quadrilateral', but there was no hope of this being ever resuscitated, as Hartley was then in Norway and Roberts, though currently in London, was too ofien roaming about the world. Gissing invited to his home Hudson and his wife, Emily, an apparently ageless woman who was actually eleven years his senior and therefore unlikely to reawaken in her host the complex of the man with an unpresentable wife. During the long conversation they had, Hudson, who rated highly Algernon's novels, though certainly not by artistic standards comparable with George's, asked why Algernon did not put to use his knowledge of country. life in the North and the Midlands in essays fo r provincial newspapers (not a few of which did publish that kind of literature) instead of producing novels which taxed his imagination heavily and, besides, brought him in but a mere pittance. The valuable suggestio n was promptly relayed to Algernon on 13 August with attractive comments. The exan1ples to be followed were Richard Jefferies, whose volume The Open Air he had read the year before, and the rwo authors of essays signed 'A Son of the Marshes', whose work Gissing had read in provincial papers. If you could write sketches - with or wirhour figures - of rhe length of a column to a column and a half of rhe P[all] M(all] G[azme] - skerches of srrong local colour, - they could surely be disposed of ... I see rhat a paper like the Leeds Mercury constantly admits such sketches ... Concentration and originality are rhe things to be aimed at. A man may be as subjective as he likes - provided the subjectivity be made interesting. The idlest fancy in a country road, to one wi rh knowledge, can be made excellent literary material.

W hether Algernon tried to follow this advice immediately is not attested, but short stories rather than essays by his pen have been exhumed from newspapers and periodicals for a later period. 7 Meanwhile, however, he stubbornly kept to the routine of one novel a year and loans from rel atives and friends scarcely ever to be repaid. In fact, as George knew since his brother consulted him, he already had manuscripts ready for potential editors but George had frowned upon rhem. In late July Gissing mer Roberts by appointment at the Authors' Club, a place which he, like Clara Coller, recoiled from as being the headquarters of literary

188

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

and artistic gossip where no serious work could be attempted, but where Roberts himself could always expatiate co advantage on his mysterious travels. A few days later the two friends had lunch at the Cafe Royal with John Davidson, the author of Fleet Street Eclogues, whose acquaintance Gissing made on the occasion. They remained in couch for a few years, but Gissing was eventually to give Davidson the cold shoulder. Nonetheless, Davidson was to remember him as a scholar, as a 'cheerful' man, who 'loved wine, gaiety, bright skies, and blue seas'. 8 As Gissing was now within easy travelling distance of central London, he was also in a position to follow more closely the sales of his books by visiting Lawrence and Bullen. They continued rather disappointing: only fifi:y-seven sets of The Odd Women had been disposed of in July, and it was soon obvious that coo many copies had been printed, the first three-volume edition being neither intended for nor purchased by private buyers. Reflecting upon this, Gissing gave up all hope of increasing his income only through the sale of the first editions of his novels. So he determined chat, if he must in future go on writing novels, the mainstay of his reputation, he must also produce shore stories for which there was now a ready market in the numerous magazines, let alone a few daily and weekly newspapers. His first thought once he had settled down in his new abode was to begin another novel. 'Miss Lord of Camberwell' occurred to hin1 as a possible title afi:er a walk in the neighbouring Camberwell district on 10 July. However, five days later he returned co 'The Iron Gods', meaning co rewrite it entirely. Time went by and, while reading Maupassant, Oscar Wilde and Henry James (Mademoiselle Fifi, The Picture oJDorian Gray, The Real Thing), he revised a few dozen pages of his manuscript. Then on the 26th a letter from Clement Shorter, who had just published 'Lou and Liz', cooled for good his already declining zeal. Shorter wanted a story for the Christmas number of the Illustrated London News. Straightaway Gissing hit upon a subject and so as to collect material for it got up the very next day at 3.30 a.m. to visit the City at night and see off the newspaper train at Waterloo Station. On 29 July 'Fleet-footed Hester' was ready and despatched to Shorter. ' The Iron Gods' disappeared woefully from the diary afi:er 1 August and, although he assured Berez a few weeks later that he had not given it up altogether, the story per se vanished for ever. Shorter had started him on a new course. Whereas Gissing had declared a decade before that he would never acquire the knack of short-story writing, he now abruptly showed signs of an astonishing facility in this medium . In August alone he wrote no fewer than seven scories,9 more than he had published since his return from America. He was quite aware of the danger looming ahead. On 29 September, by which time he could look back rationally upon his recent work in that - to him - practically new artistic field, he sUil1IDed up the gigantic step he had taken: 'I am entered 10 upon the commercial path, alas! But I shall try not to write rubbish'.

Brixton

189

Gissing was now convinced chat short stories were more lucrative than novels. 'Fleet-footed Hester', 6,000 words long, had earned him twelve guineas. With his appetite thus whetted, he began co exhibit a commercial acumen which had ofi:en failed him in earlier days. Of the two methods at his disposal for verifying the market value of his stories, that is, dealing either direct with magazine editors or tluough an agent, he wisely opted for the second. Naturally, there would be the 10 per cent commission to pay, but experience was co prove that all the stories negotiated on his behalf were accepted whereas, had he chosen to dispense with the services of an agent, he himself would have been sure to yield to discouragement afi:er a few unsuccessful attempts co place his work. This time he applied to William Morris Calles, who as director of the Authors' Syndicate can1paigned against the exploitation of writers by publishers and was known to be, Gissing thought, more active than Watt. A forty-two-year-old graduate of Cambridge, he had been called to the Bar in 1880 and had been on the staff of the Standard for a few years in the 1880s. His Authors' Syndicate had been launched about 1890 when he joined the Council of the Society of Authors. In his useful though sketchy study of literary agents, James Hepburn observes that in the early days the Syndicate's services were available only to members of the Society of Authors, a situation which, considering Gissing's determination to keep aloof from such corporate bodies, pleaded against membership. Placing his own shorter writings was his sole concern. Calles replied eagerly to his enquiry: 'Will you let me express my admiration of your work', he added. 'It has for years been to me a revelation'. 11 The two met the next day and Gissing, as appe~s in his diary, was pleased: 'Calles cordial; a fat, red-faced, vivacious man, and great talker', an impression which matches that of Frederic Whyte in his book on William Heinemann: 'A big, burly, bearded lawyer, with a wheezy infectious laugh - a sore of well-spoken, decent-minded, entirely respectable, nineteenth-century Falstaff '. 12 Calles assured Gissing chat 3 guineas per thousand words for the British rights should be reckoned a minin1un1 fee. ln1mediacely the agent found himself entrusted with five of the seven stories written in August. With Colles's words in mind, Gissing then endeavoured to make Shorter promise 18 guineas for each subsequent story if he waived all his rights. Shorter, however, became evasive: one story at 12 guineas would do for the present, he would see about others later. He astutely lefi: it to time to work for him, and in December, feigning acceptance of Gissing's point, asked him for six stories at 12 guineas each, the author retaining American rights, but as these would be awkward co sell, Gissing abandoned them to Shorter, who slyly managed to dispose of some of them off and on to American and other edicors.13 He fared better with Calles, who sold tluee of his manuscripts to the National Review for £1 S each less the usual commission, a transaction which may well have been facilitated by the fact that the editor, Leopold James Maxse, was the husband of Gissing's former pupil.

190

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

Kitty Lushington, who knew about his difficult circumstances and was anxio to show her gratitude, however discreetly. I4 It was becoming evident that ·..••. work commanded a price on the literary market, and the knowledge helped t restore his self-confidence. He advised Bertz, who still hesitated to make use . his American vagaries in Das Sabinergut, to throw off such scruples. The fiasc. of the Tennessee community venture belonged to history, Gissing thought, an provided he lefi: real names out, Bertz was fully entitled to draw on his mem ries. Besides, times were changing and current events demonstrated how fie and forgetful the public could be. In 1889 Henry Vizetelly had been fined £10 for publishing translations of Zola's works and had been imprisoned for thre months for obscene libel though they had been expurgated for the demure English audience. Now, in September 1893, Zola was received officially - and very respectfully - by the Lord Mayor, and fawned upon by the very press and p~blic that had previously hurled insults at him. No wonder Gissingwaxed sarcastic.

III. At last, on 1 September he had laid the foundations of'Miss Lord of Camberwell:. but his chance of making headway was spoilt by a number of trivial occurrences~ First of all, seeing that Shorter wanted a portrait of him for the Sketch, he had to sit to Alfred Ellis, the photographer of artists and men of letters, on 2 Sep~ tember, but the portrait was not used until 9 January 1895 to accompany a long review by L. F. Austin of In the Year ofjubilee, unpromisingly entitled 'A Study in Drab'. Then, as he could not work properly in his Kennington garret, he took another one at 32 Crawford Street, Camberwell, but just as he was turning once more to his novel his attention was again diverted. While reading in The Times a review of The Social Problem: Its Possible Solution, by the Reverend Osborne Jay, he realized from a quotation that the author had used without acknowledgmen~ a paragraph out of chapter 28 of The Nether World. Amused rath~r than vexed, he wrote forthwith to The Times: 'Was it, peradventure, Mr. Jays purpose, to honour me by quoting from "The Nether World", and has he, perchance, forgotten to insert the usual signs of quotation?' On the 9th Gissing's letter appeared under the heading 'Borrowed Feathers' and on the same evening the Star and the fVestminster Gazette made fun of the incident. The latter paper reprinted the two extracts and concluded ironically: 'Macaulay remarked that the authors who "borrowed" from other authors usually marred the matter in the process. This.· cannot be urged in the present instance, for the resemblance is complete - a fact which undoubtedly favours Mr. Jay'. The abashed clergyman in turn wrote to The Times, laying all the blame on the printer, whom he had instructed to correct the proofs in his place, whereupon the printer himself owned up publicly to h~ving lefi: out quotation marks and some names. On 13 September the Globe pomted

Brixton

191

the moral of the affair: 'The author who delegates these duties to gentlemen with such strange notions ofliterary courtesy must expect to be pilloried'. Gissing not unnaturally called Jay's defence 'preposterous'. To him the whole thing was a big joke and good advertisement. Is ., Much like the year before with The Odd Women, Gissing made a very laborious start on 'Miss Lord of Camberwell: Only a graph could give a proper idea of the bewildering succession of ups and downs, of sudden impulsive spurts followed by melancholy returns to the starting point. The whole of September was practically wasted as far as composition was concerned. He spent much time in the newspaper room at the library and made several exploratory trips to Camberwell in the hope of collecting useful material. Current events favoured him when he wished to send his leading male character, Lionel Tarrant, to some outof-the-way place, for the Bahamas were much in the news at the time, and in his daily reading of the Echo he came across an article on 'Law, Life and Politics in the Bahamas: I6 This gave him a cue, and late in September, he gathered additional information on these tropical islands from a book by one Louis D. Powles called The Land ofthe Pink Pearl. There his investigations stopped, at least temporarily, for he had to write at Shorter's request a short story for the Christmas number of the English Illustrated Magazine. This was 'The Muse of the Halls: which has remained uncollected. I? Until mid-October 'Miss Lord: which he had begun again on the 3rd, scarcely made any progress. He was intrigued by an article signed N.O.B. on Walter Besant (whose admiration for his own novels Colles had lately reported), wherein he was compared quite fairly with the father of The People's Palace. This was one of a series of articles about contemporary English novelists, and Gissing must have been more than pleased with the survey of his own work by the same critic a fortnight later since he sent copies of it to his Wakefield relatives and to Bertz.I8 The unidentified N.O.B. stressed the estimable singularity of Gissing's situation on the literary scene, 'a writer of the first rank ... about whom the outside world has never evinced any unusual curiosity: and who, unlike R. L. Stevenson or Walter Besant, never took the public in his confidence in newspaper interviews or by newspaper confessions. Whereupon he addressed the main themes and characters of the novels. Gissing was also deflected from his course by several travel books like Layard's Early Adventures in Persia and Van Lennep's Travels in Asia Minor, I9 which set him dreaming of the South and the East, immense regions that he imagined as a continuation of his own travels to southern France, Italy and Greece. Mentioning Daudet's Lettres de man Moulin in connection with a request from Clara Collet, he expressed his exotic frustrations, which carried him away from his major task in hand, namely the reconstruction of the London atmosphere in the year of the Golden Jubilee:

192

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II To me, the only objection to the book is that it makes me languish insufferably for that southern scenery which it describes, - it brings back with dteadful vividness the valley of the Rhone as I saw it in late autumn, when the poplars were of deepest gold and the vineyards above them a mixture of all richest colours.2°

Bue the necessity of sticking co work bade him take up his novel, and he had been working away cheerfully enough for a week when a request for sketches of London types for Jerome K. Jerome's magazine, To-Day, stopped him short on 26 October, pitifully minute blotches of 500 words each! Jerome had liked 'Under an Umbrella', which he purchased from Colles in late October ac the rate of 3 guineas per thousand words, and he was anxious to secure other stories in the same vein. Gissing had in his mind or in his Scrapbook plenty of ideas ready to be turned to account, but he dared not lee the project interrupt his current work, and it was not to take shape until mid-1895. Dissatisfied with his progress, which he depressedly called in his diary a 'hopeless struggle', he suddenly decided on 27 October co take a week's holiday and go che next day to Willersey. His activities while he stayed with his brother are only sketchily documented. The phrase 'cheerful idling' is but one sign among a few others that all went well. Young Enid, now an infant of school age, was growing up, contentedly learning the basic subjects of primary education. The cwo brothers went to Stratford and Shotcery to see Anne Hathaway's cottage and its Shakespearean associations; he went alone to Evesham, read two novels by William Dean Howells, the second of which, A Fearful Responsibility, he dismissed as 'inane triviality' and, before returning home, had dinner with Emma Shailer and his cousin Mary Bedford. So as co help Algernon temper his culcural isolation, he arranged with him to lee him have the use of his Brixton Library ticker. Surely Algernon's current work was discussed, notably A t Society's Expense, a title that George had suggested as more euphonious than 'Ac the Expense of Society', with its three initial unaccented syllables, also his next threevolume story, A Vagabond in Arts, for which Blackett at first offered che sum he normally paid for a cwo-volume novel, after Heinemann had declined co publish it. 'The day of cash', as Gissing had put it to Ellen on 13 September, seemed co be 'as far off as ever'. Two further attempts to resume writing in November - ac home, for he had given up his room in Crawford Street ac che end of October - came to grief, and che situation cook an alcogecher new turn when on 4 December he visited Shorter. By his own account their talk opened somewhat brusquely: Gissing, who stood out for punctual payment from his publishers, complained of Shorrer's dilatoriness in chis respect, bur as Shorter liked plain speaking, the clouds soon dispersed. Gissing went home with an order for a serial to run in the Illustrated London News to commence in a year's rime or so. By the lase pose on the same day he was surprised co receive a note reAeccing che editor's impulsiveness:

Brixton

193

would Gissing, as previously noted, write six more short stories for the English Illustrated? Shorter declared himself 'exceedingly glad' at this prospect, hoping his correspondent would be able to dine with him shortly and visit him more often. It was then chat Gissing, who could not contemplate selling the American rights of his short stories himself, waived them to the unpredictable editor. The commercial value of his serial fiction was gradually being recognized. Next day he set to work at chis series which, apparently with the greatest ease, was completed before the end of che year. 21

IV. The last few months of 1893 were characterized by a growing interest in travel literature especially concerned with Asia Minor, perhaps an offshoot of Eastern Life and Scenery by Mary Adelaide Walker, the great-aunt of his ephemeral lady-love Bella Curtis. Layard and Van Lennep had recently shown him che way recently. They were followed by no fewer than nine volumes which helped him co escape from his drab suburban environment. With E. L. Mitford he went mentally to Ceylon forty years before. He then went to Morocco thanks to an unidentified volume, accompanied H.F. Tozer to che Aegean Islands, Mrs ScoccStevenson in Our Ride through Asia Minor, Henry Baker Tristram in The Land of Moab, namely che ease side of che Dead Sea and che Jordan. He wandered with James Bryce to Transcaucasia and Ararat, experienced with W F. Harrison the adventures of che Euphrates expedition, visited Syria with Ellen E. Miller and co ncluded his exotic peregrinations with W G . Palgrave's Narrative of a Yea r's journey through Central and Eastern Arabia. 'Delightful travels', he called them. Ac chis stage he may have become aware chat this persistent if intermittent course of reading, combined with no less intermittent bouts of concentration on short fiction, could only be harmful to a smooth resumption of his efforts to give further substance to 'Miss Lord'. A lengthy visit from Algernon from 7 December to 13 January did not mend matters, but George, though he still found it troublesome to work on a long-term project when there were visitors under his roof, however observant of his peace they might be, took the inevitable disturbance of his routine in his stride. His capacity co shut his mind for hours together to all that was not his writer's work was indeed exceptional. He went out with Algernon frequently - to che Brixcon reading-room, where he had become well known to a member of the scaff, 22 co Westminster, to Alfred Hartley's studio at 14 Aubrey Walk, Campden Hill, to Gacci's restaurant, where Hudson came to lunch with chem, to Streacham Hill and probably ocher places of interest. Together with Edi ch, who still seemed to behave fairly rationally in chose days, he received visits from Clara Collet, whose tactful presence was always a comfort to him and a joy for Walter. After about six

194

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

months of confident friendship with the couple, the role she was playing begari to assume tangible forms. She made praiseworthy efforts to bring some variety( into Edith's humdrum life, which was mainly due to her mental limitations and incapacity to interest herself in anythingworthwhile. Besides, from the momen\ in early August when she was on visiting terms with her new friends, the di~ testifies that Gissing, experimentally at least, took his wife to places which to her, might mean some sort of pleasure. Already on 25 July Edith had come to meet him at the British Museum and they had visited part ofit together. On the 30th the family went out to Streatham Common, George carrying 'old Grohs' in his.. arms from Streatham Hill Station to the Common, where they had tea. Three days later, Miss Collet responded to the couple's invitation and passed the even- • ing with them, on which occasion she asked Edith to spend the next Thursday · with her at Richmond. On the 5th he took Edith in the evening to the Gardening and Forestry Exhibition at Earl's Court, 'a squalid affair'. Next day saw him take wife and child to Westminster Bridge, walking as far as the Temple and going back home by steamboat. Undoubtedly, the image of Edith kept cooped up in Brixton must be at least touched up for the early Brixton d~ys. Hudso.n'.s visit with his wife on 9th August, referred to above, and the day Edith spent with Clara Collet and their boating up to Kingston are other patches of the record, as is an afternoon trip to the National Gallery on 2 September, but if Gissing011j that particular day chose to catch a fresh peep of Cornwall Mansions, his old. home, he went on his own and, incidentally heard from the manager, John Lant!, . that his successor at 7K had committed suicide, 'not at home but in the City: a•• fact noted in his diary with this lurid but lucid comment: 'The atmosphere I left · behind me, some would say, overcame the poor man'. Yet another initiative was•.• taken by Clara Collet in mid-October when, being by now aware of Gissing's lik~ ing for the satirical plays of Gilbert and Sullivan, she asked her friends to attend a performance of Utopia, Limited. Bravely and unselfishly though she tried to cultivate her relationship with the barely articulate Edith, she had by late October begun to feel some unease which : is reflected in Gissing's letter to her of the 26th of that month. She wrote to both . husband and wife, bur the wife scarcely ever responded in writing. The burden of• correspondence, if it was a burden as it undoubtedly was in some difficult cases~< always lay upon him. 'Do not think that Edith disregards your letters: he reluc- ·• tantly explained. 'But she has long since given up the hope of learning to write: by which he meant writing fluently as educated people do. 'So I will answer for her'. Strictly speaking, he hardly did in the present letter and became confidential. The recent developments in his career filled him with doubt: The man Jerome wants me to do something for him. I will confess to you that I feel it something of a degradation to be in any way associated with him. This is my vanity, you see. Hitherto I have avoided to the utmost all grossly popular papers and

Brixton

195

magazines; I don't think my work adapts itself to that medium. But what ifl utterly deceive myself? It is certain that the better kind of periodicals care nothing for me, and perhaps I should be in place among the Idlers and that kind of thing.

But he realized that he was being unfair to himself, as a quick look at the friends in his literary circle made it patent. Roberts for instance, who was once again in the news and whose instability caused many eyebrows to rise. In August, though his socialism was very much to be doubted, he had gone to Ziirich as a delegate to an international socialist conference. A little later he told Gissing that he contemplated standing for Parliament, a prospect which soon vanished, considering that finding a constituency likely to accept him demanded more staying power than he had, then he fell silent and when he turned up again his arrival was announced by a telegram - he had been for a few weeks in Paris, and Gissing was shocked by his boasting that he had not entered the Louvre once. Persevering through tasks of some length was beyond his power. One week he might be in Naples, the next in Scotland or South America. Yet, Gissing saw as much of him as he cared to. Thus on 30 November he was called by telegram to the Authors' Club, where he renewed his acquaintance with the artist A. D. McCormick (who told him he had come across some of his books in India, probably Colonial editions published by Petherick) and met Henry Hyde Champion, who had published Roberts's article about him in his Novel Review. Still more surprising was Roberts's next appeal to him. This time, only a fortnight later, it came from Genoa. The inveterate traveller told him that he had run away with Mrs Hamlyn whom, in this little world of theirs, he had introduced to Gissing on 24 October 1889, when Roberts had taken him to a Shakespeare Society reading held in the home of a family named Fennessy, in Hyde Park Mansions. On reflection Gissing only saw logic where he had at first found a matter for surprise, since Roberts also asked him to forward a note to Mrs Fennessy, Mrs Hamlyn's sister. 'Now: Gissing commented in his diary, 'I suppose there'll be the devil to paY: 23 Bur fate decided otherwise. The cuckolded husband obligingly died a natural death within a couple of years and Roberts was able to marry the widowed Mrs Hamlyn in 1896, by which time Gissing's own marital situation had deteriorated considerably. The visit to the Authors' Club should be placed within a framework of social engagements which show Gissing in a more humane light than that in which he must of necessity be presented until he left Exeter. Fighting shy of practically all literary men had so far been as much an obligation as a choice. Partly under the influence of his new friend Clara Collet, partly through the realization of the originality of his works by eminent fellow writers like Meredith and Hardy or popular ones like Walter Besant, bur also thanks to the commercial flair of some editors like C. K. Shorter, publishers like A. H. Bullen and even a literary agent

196

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

like Colles, he was breaking the hard crust of anonymity. Hitherto very few cultured persons could remember having seen his face or his figure. He had just been 'discovered' by Alfred Ellis, one of the well-known photographers of the day; his portrait was going to be for sale to the public and to be reproduced in literary weeklies and monthlies which had hitherto rarely carried photographs of literary figures alongside portraits of actors and actresses. This dinner at the Authors' Club was a premiere of sorts. McCormick, the talented artist, and H. H. Champion were men he liked spontaneously, and it is well-known that they shared his sympathy. McCormick was an intermittent link with the world of arc, and Champion, a former political agitator with a chequered career, with that of journalism and books. He was, later in the decade, to review several of Gissing's works in his Australian papers, the Champion and the Book Lover, and missed no opportunity to publish flattering paragraphs about his activities and movements. Their amicable relationship was sealed by a second meeting on 29 December when Chan1pion sent him a telegram to come for dinner to the New Travellers' Club in Piccadilly, where Roberts, just back from Italy, joined them. If during this second meeting, as is very likely, Champion discussed his forthcoming em igration to Australia, where he planned to make a new start in life, Gissing looked as much towards the past as he did - professionally at least - towards the future. His longstanding friend A. ]. Smith, who had lefi: Woolwich and now lived in the Midlands, was in London at Christmas time, and he spent the evening with the Gissings on Boxing Day. On the 28th A. ]'.s brother Watson, also a chemist, returned the invitation on his behalf The visit is described in the diary. Gissing was favourably impressed by Watson's wife, Suzanne, in the spacious home at 34 Upper Park Road, Haverstock Hill. Originally a Swiss peasant girl, she had become 'a strong, amiable, energetic woman with seven children'. Watson was the only one of the Smith brothers who was making his way successfully in life. On leaving Owens College, he had studied at Heidelberg University, become a manager in works and factories and a professor of applied chemistry at University College London. No doubt Gissing must have been led to think of what he hinlself might have become in the academic world ifhe had not thrown caution to the winds when Nell had crossed his path. In this atmosphere of leisurely work and occasional visits, paid or returned, Gissing accepted with a good grace a request from Pearson's weekly for details of his work and tastes in literature. He was aware of the feeble standard of this popular paper with its motto 'To interest, to elevate, to amuse: and its quartereducated readers whom he had trounced in New Grub Street, but he chose to look on his reply 'as an advertisement'. Apparently George Moore, Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle among others must have reasoned as he did. Of his writings he declared he liked New Grub Street best, his favourite novels being Villette, The Ordeal ofRichard Feverel and The Return ofthe Native. Contempo-

Brixton

197

rary French and Russian authors had possibly influenced him and he owned to a partiality 'for the old authors, the old leisurely men, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, the essayists and Sam Johnson'. 24 In his quieter moods he savoured the progress he was making and the testimonies of esteem the mail brought him, impressions he sometimes shared with Clara Collet, his sole sophisticated interlocutor with whom he could discuss such matters with appropriate lucidity in his own sitting room or in writing. A fairly recent example had occurred in the previous August when one Philip Bergson, a young man with more enthusiasm than intelligence or common sense, asked him to explain the last words of Thyrza, where he thought there might be a printer's error. Gissing's account of the letter he received on the 18th, in which the novel was pompously assessed as 'one of the most remarkable of the century: his comment for Clara Collet's benefit, his reply which explains away rhe supposed need of a conjectural emendation and Bergson's thanks for his writing books which 'continue the qualities of Shakespeare, Marlow and Euripides' make entertaining reading. Then came the correspondence triggered by the imbroglio in which Osborne Jay had ludicrously involved hinlself And lately an unwise barrister of the Outer Temple named Albert Bachelor had complained that he had used his name in the short story just published in the Illustrated London News, 'Fleet-footed Hester'. Later again a more genuine devotee, Robert A. Hamilton, a member of the Philomathic Society of Paisley, asked hinl for biographical details that he could use in a lecture on Demos. Gissing relished the Society's eclecticism - the preceding lecture had been on the Canterbury Tales. Interestingly, at chis stage of his career, he indulged in a confession which bore the stamp of a global condemnation of English literary criticism in the 1880s. 'If it be of any interest to you: he told his correspondent, I may add that the beginnings of my literary career were hard enough to have discouraged most men. In those days, (opinion has meanwhile advanced very greatly,) I met only with abuse because I tried ro depict the world as I saw it. I am raid that there still exists a prejudice against me among ordinary readers; though the intelligent people of ro-day only charge me with undue timidity in handling the facts of life.25

Two days later he joined the Society of Authors, not so much to confirm his place in a profession over which he never cast a romantic veil as because he was reluctant to employ Colles without subscribing to a Society which the agent supported with enthusiasm.

In the meantime Lawrence and Bullen had announced The Emancipated in October, bur the author did not receive his copies until December. Like A. and C. Black in the case ofBorn in Exile, they refrained from mentioning on the title page that it was a second edition and only one of the eight reviews which have been exhumed from the English press shows the writer's awareness that this was

198

The He1·oic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

a one-volume revised reissue of a three-volume-novel. 26 When Gissing read the review in the Star he apparently regretted the omission. Albeit the narrative had been shorn of what he had come to deem superfluities, the Saturday Review, which had reviewed the first edition and objected on principle to anything that was not storytelling pure and simple, deplored the overcrowding of the early chapters, an opinion which was shared by Miss Dillwyn in her anonymous appraisement in the Spectator. She would have preferred a lighter and livelier style. 'Novel-readers in general are not likely to relish the substitution of mental analysis and reveries for plot and incident, - of which there are absolutely none'. The other reviewers offered more enlightened judgements, some of the negative remarks they contained being at least redeemed by the respectful critical approach. The Daily Telegraph rightly observed that the announcement of a new novel by Gissing invariably aroused pleasurable expectation in the breast of the discriminating novel-reader, who could 'confidently look forward to the enjoyment of an intellectual feast', and be sure 'never [to be] subjected to disappointment by this fertile and thoughtful novelist'. The Guardian, which seems to have played down its Anglican commitment, was content to observe that Gissing took it for granted that Christianity was gone and focused his strictures on puritanism. As for the Scotsman, it found matter for praise in all the aspects of the novel - characterization, plot and narrative art - and acknowledged the strong impression of power left by the book upon the reader's mind. In retrospect it is hardly debatable that the novel did more good to Gissing's reputation than to his purse. Lawrence and Bullen, doubtless because they had to purchase the rights from Bentley the cheater, made no advance to the author, with whom the profits, if any, would be shared. Gissing had to wait until June 1895 to be able to claim £5 3s. Od. By 1903 The Emancipated had brought him in only £18 3s. Od., plus £1 I ls. 3d. produced by the sale of copies to Way and Williams of Chicago. Lawrence and Bullen were content to print small editions ( 1,500 copies in 1893 and another 1,500 in 1895), while Bell and Sons, the Colonial publishers, bought from them 905 copies in sheets, according to Lawrence and Bullen's statement of December 1894, and 700 within the next two years.

v. After months of groping, 'Miss Lord of Camberwell' was given another chance on 1 January 1894. Despite all the news, good or bad, that reached him during the winter, Gissing co ncentrated heroically on his task, but the manuscript is one of the most heavily corrected we have from his pen. Writing on average three to five pages a day, he completed the first volun1e in twenty-six days. Often enough he had to go back a few pages. On 13 January he accompanied his brother to

Brixton

199

Paddington Station without having had to deplore interruptions detrimental to his progress, and he called on Shorter on the 15th. The agreement for the serialization of a 60,000-word story in the Illustrated London N ews was confirmed, the author's fee to be £1 SO. Prompt payment for the seven short stories he had written for that magazine and the English Illustrated was promised, but no cheque (for £88 4d. Os.) reached him until 24 February, dilatoriness being frequent enough with the editor. On the 21st, after reading in the National Observer some correspondence occasioned by an unfair review in which a lady novelist, Elsa D'Esterre-Keeling, was taken to task for making grammatical mistakes which were in fact committed by her characters, he courageously wrote to the editor, W. E. Henley, denouncing incompetent reviewing, and rejoiced to see his letter printed on the 27th. 27 Next came a seemingly depressing account of the sale of Macmillan's editions of Denzil Quarrier and The Odd Women in America until June 1893. Of the former title only thirty-five copies had been sold since June 1892 and while 915 copies of the latter had been printed, a mere 349 had been sold at a royalty of 10 per cent to Bullen. But the printers' bill - a fact that Gissing may have overlooked - covered the plates of the one-volume edition which Bullen, then Sidgwick and Jackson, were to use in the next twenty years, reducing considerably the future English printers' bills. So the bill for £53 l 2s. l ld. presented by Macmillan to Bullen was not an alarming one, and Gissing need not have had any scruples in accepting the cheque for 25 guineas that Bullen sent him on account of royalties for the one-volun1e, six-shjJling edition of The Odd Women that was published within the next month. This imbroglio notwithstanding, volume 1 of 'Miss Lord' was finished on 26 January. Domestic difficulties, however, soon arose in his way. Walter being in bed with a cold, the family doctor said that it would be well to take the boy away from London for the rest of winter - an example of the supposedly beneficial change of air so dear to Victorian doctors. Straightaway the child's father sent off an advertisement for rooms to a Hastings newspaper, but as none of the thirty or so replies proved acceptable once he had rushed to Hastings, Clara Collet flew to his rescue and he took rooms she recommended at 23 East Ascent, St Leonardson-sea. Once the landlady, Mrs Gardner, a dull-witted woman, had understood that Gissing had armounced the previous day the possible arrival of a child's cot, and not a cat, things went well, and Gissing owned that they were 'remarkably comfortable in these lodgings'. He had a room at the top of the house and could go on writing his novel. If anything, the news given in the Athend!um that A. and C. Black were publishing a third, cheaper edition of Born in Exile, rather stimulated hjm, though his financial interests were in no way involved. Clara Collet joined the Gissings for a week during which her congenial company and her deep understanding of her friend's predicament did much to comfort him. On 22 February he completed the second volun1e, having done his best to stick

200

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

to his daily quantum, despite the condition of the child, to whom the chang· of climate, if such could be noticed when you merely moved from Brixton ~ St Leonards, had done no perceptible good. The first two volumes were poste to Bullen. Gissing's sole satisfaction for the moment was that all the short st ries he had written in the last few months had found or were finding purchased and were being paid for with no undue delay, those purchased by the Nation

Review in particular. As time went by, Gissing began to wonder whether the climate of St Leonard§ did agree with Walter, for the child soon suffered from swollen tonsils. WheR his tenancy of the rooms expired, he would take his family to some ocher sea-' side resort. Meanwhile, he plodded away at 'Miss Lord', reckoning that the story would be about 210,000 words in length and warning Colles chat the manu~ script would first go to Lawrence and Bullen. He was very explicit on the subject: in his correspondence with Miss Collet; whatever the agent's allurements might be, he was determined to be loyal to Bullen. To Colles, who was insistent, he had explained as early as 4 February: 'I have promised my friend A. H. Bullen that: he shall have chis book, and, what is more, our personal relations preclude any thought of injustice on his side or of discontent on mine'. He had to cultivate candour a little more vigorously on 10 February. Of what Lawrence and Bullen received from sales he emphasized chat he was entitled to no meagre proporc tion. The copyrights remained his own; he received half-profits on all foreign issues and a royalty on all English sales; also substantial payments on account. 'I . become in truth', he concluded, 'what you desire an author should be, a partner in the commercial undertaking'. Since 1886, chat is, since the publication ofDemos, he had succeeded in living by his pen without ever trying to please the public and indeed, he remarked both truthfully and sadly, he had only pleased 'the minutest fraction of it'. Having clarified the situation for Colles's benefit, he struggle on with two aims in mind: having 'Miss Lord' ready by early April and the seri for Shorter, which was to run thirteen weeks in the Illustrated London News, in· its final form in late June or early July. Obviously the prospect of finding a neW; home more suitable to his son's health weighed on his mind and Mrs Gardner's; rooms had to be vacated on 21 March. 'Thank heaven the end of book is in view',. he noted in his diary on 15 March. 'Think it won't be bad, on the whole, and. it has been written under fearful circumstances'. On the 21st the family lefi: for Eastbourne, where they took two rooms at 6 Grove Road, opposite the station, for 25 shillings a week. Working there being out of the question, Gissing put the novel aside till his return to Brixton, and bought Balzac's early book-length essay La Physiologie du Mariage, whose flippancy and cynicism fit in quite well with the theories and behaviour of Lionel Tarrant in his own novel. This fortnight's · stay in Eastbourne was for him a genuine relaxation. He admittedly had a weakness for the place and, as in his earlier days, rambled over the Downs, sometimes

Brixton

201

taking his son with him, elated by the vast horizons that opened up before him seawards as well as inland. Seen from Sussex in the spring, the Brixton flat looked very dreary, and Gissing more than before dreamed of a further removal. 'After midsummer I shall take a house', he wrote to AJgernon on 25 March. 'No ocher mode ofliving is possible'. As Walter was now much better and he had ceased to make alarming noises during his sleep, Gissing very much regretted having ever thought of St Leonards as a temporary home for medical reasons. 'The air here is grand ... Since coming here we have had a shrewd east wind every day, and the result is that the boy skips like a lamb: He himself felt a lightness he had not known elsewhere. Eastbourne was the best seaside town he knew in England. He visited or revisited old neighbouring villages like Wilmington, Jevington and Pevensey, and when alone, began to think of his serial for Shorter, whether in the Sussex lanes or at the top of Beachy Head. The 4th of April saw the family back at Burton Road, Brixton. He had imagined himself facing his professional obligations as early as 25 March, when he wrote an interestingly sagacious letter to Bertz, who had just moved to Berlin. Bertz had recently published a fairy tale in Der Bar which had reminded his friend of the days, a decade or more before, when he listened to him reading gracefully imaginative German tales chat he had himself, no less gracefully, evoked in Isabel Clarendon when describing the cultural atmosphere of the Rev. Vissian's home. But the present soon obliterated the past and he admitted, despite his meditations in Sussex, that he was not yet clear even as to plot and characters of his serial story though, as we know, he was bent on using 'The Iron Gods' as a quarry. At the moment he could not help lamenting that his Greeks and Romans should now be lying untouched on his shelves, thus proving the truth of Hardy's casual statement that 'novel-writing makes one so illiterate'. Completing his book demanded a mighty effort. 'To-day', he wrote in his diary on 12 April, 'I sat down to the final chapter of "Miss Lord", and wrote 2V2 pp. with indescribable struggle. I am utterly tired of the thing, and within a page of the end cannot realize that it will ever be finished'. This pessimistic note notwithstanding, he wrote the last page of the 'intenninable novel the next day and forthwith took the manuscript of volume 3 to Bullen. The accompanying letter betrayed some ill-humour provoked by the St ]ames's Gazette which on 12 April had - with remarkable insolence and incompetence - accused him of being a 'confirmed optimist' and a 'superficial observer'. 28 Despite this assertion Gissing declared his conviction that 'Miss Lord' [was] not without value as a study of a well-defined social class. And let me beg of you to regard it steadily in this light. Ifl had omitted dreary and disagreeable things from 'The Nether World' and 'New Grub Street: would it not greatly have damaged those books in the eyes of serious readers? I have much more hope for this

202

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II new novel than I had for any of its predecessors. Hope to be disappointed, perhaps; but do, I beg, see it as an honest picture of something that exists.29

And Bullen, who seems to have feared that the novel might be a lengthy one, was told (quite truthfully) that the manuscript was not longer ,than that of New Grub Street. This time Gissing, who had not forgotten Bullen s remarks on The Odd Tf'Omen, was having his say first. H e was firmly resolved not to let a p~b­ lisher make the comparatively small sales of his books an excuse for compelling him to tone down his text. Indeed, perhaps Bullen had no inclination to do anything of the kind ; he was genuinely appreciative of Gissing's originality, which, if anything, the passing of time has increased rather than obscured. The most Bullen suggested was one or two changes when the proofs arrived. On 1.June he sent Gissing the memorandum of agreement with a cheque for fifty gurneas. Another fifty guineas paid on publication in the autumn would make up the usual advance. The author was to draw a four-shilling royalty on the three-volume edition of 600 sets and 1 shilling on each copy of the one-volume reprint. As previously, the profits from sales in America, on the Continent and in the colonies would be shared equally between author and publisher. 30 Probably at his request, Gissing had the manuscript returned to him, and he went over it carefully from 16 to 21 July, while staying at C levedon,_ then changed the title to Jn the Year ofj ubilee. On hearing this C lara Coller raised a most unfortunate objection which seriously disturbed him. I am vexed that you so dislike the new title, for, afi:er vast correspondence with Bullen, he and I both thought that this last idea was a happy one. That it should strike you as 'prettyish' shows me that you have taken the phrase in a sense I never thought of. It is satirical, and in keeping with the tone of the book.

As he was given an opportunity to make his point, with a vengeance, he unseale~ his friend's eyes, probably for life : ' The year of Jubilee signified so much that is contemptible - snobbery, blatant ochlocracy, shams gigantic and innumerable _all thrown together into an exhibition of hun1an folly not often surpassed for effectiveness'.31 Kindly enough, he told his friend that she would see better what he had aimed at when she had read the novel, a piece of advice which, between other people, could have seemed cruel, though fully justified. By the time this exchange of letters took place in the summer Gissing could look ba~k on the last few months with some satisfaction concerning his work, bur with growing anguish concerning the home he yearned for. His diary shows that ~hen he took the last third of his manuscript ro Lawrence and Bullen on 14 April, he visited with both interest and emotion the sole standing house where Samuel Johnson was known to have lived in Gough Square. A fortnight later he went to see C arlyle's house in Chelsea and was pleased to find on the front a marble

Brixton

203

tablet with the writer's head, but he already knew by then that the days of the thundering prophet's cultural popularity were past, and that if the man's name was sure to remain alive, his works would soon sink into the limbo of unread literature. When at leisure he resumed his reading of travel books such as Joseph Thomson's Travels in the Atlas and Southern Morocco and Lady Anne Blunt's Pilgrimage to Nejd in Arabia. A couple of days' visit from his sister Ellen, who caught her first peep of her sister-in-law and nephew, was another delaying factor on the way to the writing of the serial for Shorter. The family, so as to relieve boredom, attended a performance of Tweijih Night at Daly's Theatre in which the renowned actress Ada Rehan appeared as Viola. The event was to prove a landmark in his growing dislike of the late Victorian drama. 'The most offensive performance I ever sat through', the diary entry for 25 April reads in part. 'Only 3 acts were given, and then, to fill up the time, a concert followed! The Viola very absurd in slow tragic utterance. The Maria an impudent barmaid. Sir Andrew a circus clown, and so on'. After this and various outings with Ellen, and the attendance of a service at St Paul's - a concession he made to his sister - he made a half-hearted attempt to work, only to find that he had 'no grip of the story'. A new subject had to be thought o( In early May, by which time Ellen - who had been spending some time in Norbiton with one of Algernon's sistersin-law - had called at Brixton one evening with Ethel Hick, before going back ro Wakefield two days later, by which time also Gissing had received Roberts's and Hudson's new books, The Purification o/Dolores Silva and Lost B1itish Birds, rhe author, unsatisfied with the initial part of his srory, lefi: it aside and began at a later point. But this fresh attempt was of no avail; his brain had not been given proper rest and, after the bracing atmosphere of the coast, he could not breathe in Brixton. Wondering whether he would ever have a chance of settling down permanently, he inquired about furniture warehousing rares and started dreaming of rhe northern shores, of Filey and the neighbourhood of Whitby. From 4 to 18 May, working steadily, he filled about forty pages which he discarded ro pursue a new idea. Hudson had advised against 'A Patch of Purple' as a title, seeing that journalists had done the phrase to death, and Gissing for a whole week thought of adopting ' The Woman-Queller'. 'Shorter looms before me, like C aesar's ghost before Brutus', he had written to Clara Collet on 25 March. Two months later the figure assumed gigantic dimensions. Still, the choice of a new home absorbed him as much as did his novel.

VI. On 26 May he lefi: home at 3.30 a.m ., walked to Liverpool Street Station, breakfasted Alfred Yule-like at the coffee stall, and took the 5.10 train to Southwold, just in case the small Suffolk seaside town could solve his problem. But why this

204

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part If

particular place, which he at once found of no use? He may well have thought of visiting for the first time his father's childhood haunts, which were known to him only through very hazy reminiscences. As the railway junction for Southwold was Halesworth, his father's birthplace, he unhesitatingly went there and got the sexton to show him the register of births, which actually recorded the dates of baptism, in which he read with affection: 'June 27th, 1830. Thomas Waller Gissing, son of Robert Foulsham Gissing and Jane Hall'. All doubts vanished when the sexton, Robert ]army, told him that his father, aged sixty-seven, remembered having gone to school with a Tom Gissing. The neighbourhood was delightfully rural and it set Gissing searching his memory: he was unclear about the links between his family and Saxmundham, Badingham and Frarnlingham, place names respectively associated the first two with his paternal gr.U:dparents, the third with the publisher of Margaret, and Other Poems. Uncertain also about the nan1e of the village to which his father had taken him one very cold winter day in his infancy, which research has proved to be Dunwich, where his great-grandfather Tobias had been found drowned in August 1852. 'Altogether', Gissing wrote with nostalgia in his diary that same evening, this visit to Halesworth pleased me much. I had dinner at the Swan [an inn still extant], with a beautiful view of the church from the window. Old, quiet town. Boys and men on the road still touch their hats to a stranger.

He ended in a melting mood: At the railway station I bought the June English Illustrated where Shorter has printed one of my stories ['The Honeymoon', which should have been 'A H oneymoon'] (without having sent me a proof). H ow proud he would have been, the dear, kind Father! How linle could he dream, when a lad running about lanes and fields, that, more than half a century hence, his son's literary work would be sold, to that son himself, at Halesworth !

Eventually, when his lease at Brixton was cancelled at the end of May and his furniture stored, it was neither on the north nor the east coast that he went to reside, but on the Bristol Channel, at Clevedon, as in the sUil1Iller of 1891 and at the same address, c/o Mrs Elston, 84 Old Church Road. ' Three rooms for 20/- a week. Much cleanliness and good temper', he told Ellen on 4 June. He did not feel in the mood for work, but the weight of necessity lay heavy upon him. So he fell to and wrote his serial at a stretch, completing it on the 29th. He scarcely had time to complain. More than once he succeeded in covering four pages a day. He filled his evenings with reading, Thomas Hardy, Plutarch, Shakespeare and Kipling's collection of short stories Many Inventions, from which he selected 'The Disturber of Traffic' and 'Love o' Women' for special praise. As in the case of New Grub Street, working against the clock turned out more beneficial than

Brixton

205

otherwise. The judgements he passed on his current story varied. If in a letter of 17 June to Miss Collet he accused himself with typical exaggeration of producing complete trash, five days later he admitted in his diary that he was now more confident about the value of the story: 'It may not be utter trash, after all'. The art of understatement was to remain one of his fortes to the end of his life. Pleasant news was scarce, bur W. T. Stead doubtless pleased Gissing when he asked him, as one of the foremost of the novelists of Great Britain, to sign a memorial in the International Peace cause, a signature which the ardent pacifist he was could not refuse to give. It was also while he was pressing on with his serial that he heard from Ella Gaussen about her forthcoming marriage to major Frederick Hugh Gordon Cunliffe, the last occurrence of the Gaussen family in Gissing's correspondence and papers. As he approached the end, he noted his usual difficulty in finishing, then on the last day chose the title, Eve's Ransom. 'A poor title, but my head whirls', and he posted the manuscript to Shorter on the 30th. Writing this short novel in lodgings, far from any place which he could call his home, must be regarded as a new feat, illustrative of his capacity, admired by Thomas Hardy among other fellow writers, to produce distinguished literary work under almost any circumstances. The next two months, July and August 1894, were among the most disorderly in his writing career. No acceptable home, it seemed, would present itself to him in any town chat could not be styled unpleasant or awkwardly situated. Apart from house-hunting, his activities that sUillil1er were exceedingly varied. Early on, while revising 'Nancy Lord', he received Algernon's new book, A Vagabond in Arts, and as usual sent a detailed criticism which may have been read by the recipient as rather de haut en bas, bur, if viewed objectively, shows how clear-sighted he was. The novel, George said, was decidedly good: 'It held my interest throughout, and, what is more, my interest grew as I went on'. He found the characters 'distinct, well-conceived, well-presented', and came across no lay figures among female characters, as he had done in his brother's previous novels. The landscape painting he pronounced 'remarkably fine', but criticized the style in a way which suggests that in the art of writing Algernon was still an apprentice. One detail in his letter of 21 July offers a typical example. Ten or a dozen times George had found that a character, trying to attract another's attention, 'touched his shoulder'. 'It is exactly', he commented, 'this kind of thing which should strike one's eye in reading proofs'. By the time he wrote this he had once more visited Algernon, Katie and Enid at Willersey, from where he described his brother's domestic arrangements as idyllic compared with his own in Brixton. 'This is the only civilized dwelling I have entered for a very long time', he confided to Clara Collet on 7 July. On an income less even than my own, these people manage to keep a really beautiful little house, excellent taste with great sirnplicicy - a contrast indeed ro my hovels at

206

Ihe Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II Exeter and in London. I sit down to meals without feeling ashamed of the necessity of feeding - so delicately is everything arranged, and so skilfully prepared.

But Willersey was only a stopping place on his way to Hitchin, a Hertfordsh, market town with which the names of George Chapman and John Bunyan.. associated, which he found would not do as a permanent abode. His appefi for reading was as eclectic as ever. From Plutarch he passed to Homer, fro. Andrew Carnegie's Triumphant Democracy to Edward Clodd's Story of Cre tion, from Barrie's Little Minister to Marion Crawford's Katherine Lauderda. >.'. and William Black's Judith Shakespeare. While walking from Cheddar to Well~; which he liked better than ever, he excogitated three short stories, 'The Fate o[: Humphrey Snell', written in the following October, probably being one of them; It being rumoured, doubtless through Shorter, that ~e had j~st writte~ a se~fal. novel for the Illustrated London News, A. D. McCormick got m touch with GISS; ing, that the illustrations of Eve's Ransom might be entrusted to hinI, but it _was • Fred Barnard, whose skilful work on Dickens was well thought of, who was give~ the commission. Also on the publishing front, where his name assumed increas.~ • ing significance, he had more and more to view and shape his career in terms of tactics. Though in no way encouraged to do so, Colles once more approached .·. him about placingEve's Ransom in volume form, preferably with o~her publis~­ ers than Lawrence and Bullen, honest people no doubt, but lacking power m their trade. Through Colles Gissing heard that Algernon Stedman, the founder in 1889 of Methuen & Co. and a pushy publisher, would have liked to handle •·· his works. Indeed, as early as April he had declared himself ready to discuss terms for bringing out Eve's Ransom, of which not a line was yet written. More and more embarrassed by Colles's zeal, Gissing cleverly managed to retain his liberty. of action without flatly refusing an offer which in former days he would have welcomed. It was agreed that if the sales of In the Year ofJubilee failed to satisfy · him, he would give Stedman the first option on Eve's R,znsom. During the several months thus gained the situation would doubtless ripen. As a matter of fact, the whole system of novel-publishing in England underwent a sudden change in the summer of 1894. Early in July Charles Edwin Mudie and W H. Smith directed to all publishers a circular letter which precipitated the downfall of the three-volume novel. The two most powerful circulating libraries laid it down in the first place that they would refuse to pay, from 1 Januarv 1895, more than twelve shillings for any 'three-decker', and secondly that p~blishers should not in future issue cheap editions within a year of the d~te of the original three-volume edition. The majority of publishers of course refused to knuckle down. The Society of Authors put a further nail in the coffin of the venerable 'three-decker' when it declared on 23 July that the advantages enjoyed by the writer under the existing system (income three or four tinies higher than

Brixton

207

that yielded by a six-shilling one-volume edition, and the assured custom of the lending libraries) could not outweigh its drawbacks (the insuperable barrier to a vast circulation). While he watched these epoch-making developments with great attention, Gissing could not help wondering where his interests lay. In his diary entry for 9 August he perceptively noted that they were 'entirely dubious', as were indeed those of 'poor Alg: As his own works appealed only to a limited public, his first attitude was one of self-defence: he deplored the dull prospects which awaited certain luckless writers and wondered whether he would not be well advised to tum to essay writing. The greater diversity of his works from the mid-90s onwards - short and long novels, a collection of short stories, a travel book, a critical study, a volume of semi-autobiographical reflections - constitutes a partial answer to his question. His contention to the end that his books were read primarily through lending libraries remained well-founded; yet their circulation extended appreciably after 1895, owing to lower prices, and his royalties rose accordingly. 32 Such was the background against which was resumed the quest for a suitable home which he must needs find before the very last day of August, when Mrs Elston would receive new lodgers. After his flat failure at Hitchin, which he found sordid and evoked with Latin brevity - 'veni, vidi,fugi', in a postcard to his brother - he ventured to enquire at Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk. The town appealed to hinI, but no house to let proved available, so he travelled back to Clevedon, where the first proofs of Eve's Ransom awaited him. Shorter wanted publication to start on 6 October, provided the illustrations were ready, which by 4 August did not seem likely at all. Shorter himself had doubts, which appear obliquely in Gissing's diary for that day. Neither the sketch for Dengate nor that for Hilliard would do; so the author sent suggestions to the artist. But about a month later, the man having broken down, it became obvious that the serial could not start until the following year. Nor did the quest for a house in which intellectual work could be conducted in moderate comfort produce tangible results in the height of summer, a period which saw him reading or rereading miscellaneous literature like Augustus Hare's Memorials of Lady Canning and Lady Waterford and the Life of Dean Stanley. On 27 August Gissing started out once more in search ofan abode. He first of all tried his luck in Herrfordshire at Berkhamsted, Boxmoor and then St Albans, but he decided the county was too damp and therefore unsuitable for Walter. He went on to Surrey and visited Leatherhead, Ashtead, Wimbledon, more and more infuriated at finding nothing to his taste and raging at hiniself for having left at Ashtead a deposit of ten shillings for two rooms over a corn-dealer's shop and then inmiediately changing his mind. In what he described as torrid heat, he tried Sutton, where everything was far beyond his means, and Dorking, where he booked two rooms for a fortnight at 3 Clifton Terrace for 25 shillings a week.

208

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

These lodgings, close to the house which he was to occupy in 1898-9, could not be anything but provisional, but they enabled him to send for Edith and Walter, who had remained at Clevedon. 'Another week such as this would kill or madden me', he groaned in his diary on 30 August. He notified Bullen of his change of address and, acting on a piece of advice from him, he was soon able to give up the nomadic life he had been leading for the past six months. On 4 September he found the longed-for house on chalk and gravel soil in Worple Road, Epsom, for £40 a year. It remained to have the furniture removed from Dougharty's and to engage a servant, which was done for £1 4 a year. Afi:er all the horrors of moving in, Gissing's morale, which had been sorely tried while he was house-hunting, improved rapidly. In his house, called 'Eversley', he could enjoy the advantages of town and country alike. The servant, recruited by Edith through the local registry office, he soon rejoiced to say, could 'positively cook a joint and boil a potato! ... It is incredible', he wrote to his younger sister on 26 September. He was only half joking, as we know from Henry Ryecroft how he resented being served with an ill-cooked roast or potato. Walter, who had frequently coughed during the sun1mer, quickly recovered his health. His father recorded with pride and amusement in his diary the boy's smart sayings and first display of creditable sentiments. He began to take him out for walks along the Surrey lanes, always on the lookout for evidence of his budding intelligence. On the professional front, too, gloom was lifting. Packets of proofs were reaching him, not only of his two forthcoming novels, In the Year ofJubilee and Eve's Ransom (miscalled Eve's Pardon in the Athen.eum), but of some short stories. Even if Denzil Quarrier and The Odd Women were selling modestly, his career could objectively be described as in the ascendant. Bullen told him on 8 September that he had sold to George Bell and Sons for their colonial library 1,200 copies of Denzil Quarrier and 750 of The Emancipated in quires at lOYid a copy, and that the same firm would also purchase 1,500 of In the Year ofjubilee at 1/ - a copy. American editions of these titles were contemplated. One day before the housing problem was solved, he was 'vastly cheered' by learning from a review that Augustus Hare had quoted his description of West Dean, the picturesque Sussex village, in his new book on that county. As time went by he had unpredictable opportunities for relieving his loneliness and widening his circle of acquaintances. Shorter invited him to meet William Robertson Nicoll, editor of the Bookman and the Nonconformist British Weekly, and like Colles asked him for more short stories. Seeing that the demand for such items bade fair to exceed in number what he could reasonably supply, he was now in a position to decline mildly attractive offers like that which came to him from the Northern Newspaper Syndicate through Colles. 33 Between January and September 1894 five of his short stories had been printed, 34 and Colles had sold all those put into

Brixton

209

his hands. There now remained for Gissing to turn out those sketches he had undertaken to write for Jerome K. Jerome. Contemporary publications continued to receive much of his attention. Thus, about the time he settled in Epsom, we find him reading H ardy's collection of short romances, A Group ofNoble Dames, which seems to have left him indilferent, R. D. Blackmore's Perlycross, a gift from his former landlord, C. W Tinckam, and the extraordinary bestseller by Hall Caine, The Manxman, issued in one volume now that the hoary system of multi-volume publication of fiction was abruptly failing out of fashion. This last book drew from his pen comment to which posterity has not given the lie. To Bullen, whom similar sales for In the Year ofjubilee would have elated, he wrote on 8 September: Eithe r I am bemused with envy, or the clamorous praise of rhe reviewers is urrerly preposterous. I am unable ro find a single poinr in the book which merits h igh laudation; it seems ro me always commonplace and ofi:en vapid. Scott and Thackeray never had higher eulogy than the papers bestow on this production'.

All this tallied with the judgement in his letter to C lara Collet of2 1 August in which he condemned the book vigorously: ' Th e plot is very poor, the characters are weakly conceived and very conventionally presented ... The poor man must suffer for the indiscretion of his friends'. Gissing made a wry face at the hot sexuality displayed in the melodramatic story, at the crude narrative mechanisms at work in it throughout, and at the author's showy pretentiousness. Had he lived long enough to know of Caine's being knighted, his dislike would have been intensified. As the middle of the decade approached, in one sphere only could a wellinformed observer like Clara Collet have found a serious reason for anxiety, that of the home where husband and wife were slowly drawing further and further apart. The arrival in Epsom foreshadowed sombre developments.

7 EPSOM: THE UNSOUGHT CONQUEST OF PUBLISHERS AND EDITORS (OCTOBER 1894-JULY 1895)

'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it'. Oscar Wilde , 1he Picture ofDorian Gra_y, chapter 2

I. During the three years he spent at Epsom Gissing shed his professional reserve to a greater extent than in his Brixton days. He no longer was at the mercy of publishers of the old school, standing on their dignity as makers and distributors of books, chary of information regarding the sale of his novels which, those with the Bentley turn of mind thought, could have bur a corrupting influence on readers. He had enlisted the help of a literary agent who was active and competent, which did not prevent him, on occasion, from dealing direct with magazine editors. He was on friendly terms with Colles as with Lawrence and Bullen; yet, tactfully but firmly, he would assert himself whenever he felt that he was unfairly criticized. 1 From that time also, his work began to assume a deeper significance in the eyes of critics; news of his activities was treated as that of a man of consequence, and he was asked for stories in a style and of a type all his own. His income rose: from £193 12s. 6d. in 1893 it reached a total of £438 6s. Sd. in the following year2 (of which £157 ls. Sd. came from short stories alone, i.e. more than he had ever earned in any period of twelve months until the year of New Grub Street). The fear of starvation receded - in 1894 his expenses barely exceeded one half of his receipts. Afi:er settling in Brixton he had diffidently moved in literary circles for a while and paid visits ro old friends. Soon, however, only Bullen and Shorter had seen him now and again in their offices. As for Miss Collet, it was invariably she who called, for she had her part to play with Edith. In the latter half of 1894 signs were not lacking of Gissing's emergence from his relative obscurity as a writer and also as an individual. 3 Paragraphs and articles on his work multiplied in the press; cultured Americans took to reading his

- 211 -

212

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part 11

novels; he personally came into closer touch with journalists and, to a certain degree, with the public, hence a quicker diffusion of his books. From then on, afi:er fifteen years of professional writing, his name became familiar to newspaper and periodical readers. In a letter to Bertz of24 November he himself admitted that times had changed: I am beginning to have a literary past; in meeting the young writers of to -day, I fed a veteran. And how mange a thing it is when, in walking about the screets of London, I pass the screets where I lived in those days of misery! Of course that man and I are not identical. He is a relative of mine, who died long ago.

Doubtless he had solid reasons for going out more often, and the main one was to be away from his wife. The atmosphere at home was soured and grew heavy with all sorts of bitter recollections and unappeasable resentments. Until then few entries in the diary had reported serious domestic quarrels; at most he had expressed resentment at Edith's behaviour to the servant or to Walter. At Epsom, with a servant in the house again, a new state of affairs developed in which clashes became more open. On 10 October, in wrathful indignation, he recorded two fresh incidents: one an altercation between Edith and the servant, whom she would not allow to get on quietly with her work of boot cleaning, the other a burst of invective such as she hurled at Walter every day. And he concluded: 'But for my poor little boy, I would not and could not, live with her for another day. I have no words for the misery I daily endure from her selfish and coarse nature'. A catalogue of Edith's deficiencies and habits which wounded his sensitive nerves would run to great length, but her morbid love of dispute, her insincerity, her rough and often faulty language would doubtless deserve to head the list. A number of remarks about women entered in the Commonplace Book during the 1890s were inspired by Edith, whom Gissing now looked upon as a grotesquely offensive social phenomenon. For instance: 'Hatred between men is not common, and when it exists is due to the most various causes. Hatred between women is universal, and always due to one cause - wounded vanity'. Or again: 'Herodotus begins his history with a search for the original cause of quarrel between Europe and Asia, - and finds it in Woman. Perhaps, as Heine suggests, symbolical of all history'. 4 His wife's pronunciation, the wrong meanings she gave to certain words were an offence to his keen sense oflanguage: she would use the word 'amusing' for 'interesting', did not know that Henry and Harry were the same name, and had never even heard of The Pilgrims Progress. As the years went by, any disgust caused by Edith's vulgarity was dimmed by anxiety for his son's future. On this point the novels are revealing: the fears of Arthur Peachey in In the Year ofjubilee and later those of Harvey Rolfe in The Whirlpool are as good an index to Gissing's thoughts and feelings as any entry in his diary. There is a prophetic strain in the description of Peachey's domes-

Epsom: The Unsought Conquest ofPublishers and Editors

213

tic imbroglio as there was in Workers in the Dawn about the relations between Arthur Golding and Carrie Mitchell. Chapter IV, Part IV of In the Year ofjubilee is a transcript from life coupled with an anticipation of the turn events were to cake in 1897. Like his creator, Peachey is a fundamentally scrupulous man who lives only for his son. His wife Ada does not possess any more than Edith did the slightest notion of her responsibilities, she knows nothing about her domestic duties and is totally incapable of appreciating simple pleasures. Religion, harmful as it could be in many ways deplored by Gissing, was no longer there to act as a curb on the evil instincts of such creatures. Lastly Peachey, as the author was to do, Bees from home and puts his son in the care of his sister in the country to save him from the influence of an unworthy mother. Edith's spiteful temper and her cruel treatment of Walter haunted Gissing and quickened his vision of children deprived of tenderness and protection: 'The misery of children in poor homes. They, indeed, feel the results of poverty. Their sufferings from idiot mothers: perpetual slapping, scolding, weeping'. 5 Anxious to rescue Walter from his mother's ill-temper, Gissing took him out for walks in the neighbouring countryside whenever he could, explaining things they met with on the way. Any feature which distinguished the boy's character from his mother's made the father rejoice in secret. On 8 October he noted Walter's apparently excellent memory, his recollections of the family's seaside visits, for instance. When less than three years old he had learnt by heart within a fo rtnight Struwwelpeter [Shock-headed Peter] by the Frankfurt doctor Heinrich Hoffmann, a present from C lara Collet. His budding sensibility went straight to his father's heart as did his willingness in all things. He noted the child's curiously anguished responses to words he heard and situations he witnessed ('the cow with the crumpled horn', 'the bent tree' he had seen at Clevedon troubled him much). An anecdote in the diary entry for 6 December makes touching reading: 'He saw a child going to school, and said: "When I go to school, I will work hard" - with a pathetic little earnestness.' If Edith happened to be away, it was Gissing who looked afi:er Walter all day, fed him, put him to bed and never regretted the hours spent away from his desk. Those who knew Gissing in the mid-90s and saw him away from his home could never have imagined the anguish he was in. William Robertson Nicoll, the irrepressible commentator on the social life ofliterati, described him one day as 'accessible, genial and friendly' and recalled how cheerfully Gissing chatted with him about Professor William Ramsay's recently published 'book on The Church in the Roman Empire, which he had been reading with the keenest zest.'6 The truth is that when away from home there always lurked in his mind the fear that Edith might cause some trouble, the extent of which he would discover on his return. He began to defer to social conventions: his dress, for instance, now mattered more to him again, as it had done in the days of the Harrisons and

214

The Heroic Life ofGeorge Gissing, Part II

the Gaussens. He had a new evening suit made, also an Inverness cape; a photograph (reproduced in Jacob Korg's biography and in the collection of Letters to Gabrielle) shows him in this dress, hat in hand, looking a trifle melancholy but calm and dignified. He discovered, however, pastimes closer to his ideal of the country life. During his years at Epsom he took up gardening and more than once applied to Algernon for advice on the growth and preservation of this or that vegetable. At such moments the two brothers' thoughts turned to the late 1860s when the paterfamilias would take them to the hired garden where he grew potatoes and the like. Some reminiscences of these unliterary activities found their way into The Private Papers ofH enry Ryecro.ft. Largely to satisfy his wife's fancies, he also did his best to improve their home in point of comfort and decoration. 7 The dinner given by Shorter at the National Liberal Club on 26 September remained in Gissing's memory as an important occasion. There he met three editors who henceforth contributed to bringing his name before a larger public. Besides Robertson Nicoll, who to his surprise proved a very genial Scotsman but later behaved treacherously to him, Shorter had invited H. W. Massingham, political editor of the Daily Chronicle, Joseph Benso n Gilder, the editor of the New York Critic, and the Woolwich solicitor and man ofletters George Whale, who was destined to become one of his intimate friends. Whale was well-read in the literature, philosophy and history of the last three centuries - he had 25,000 volun1es on his shelves - and his conversation was a regular treat for Gissing. Like Edward Clodd, who also became one of Gissing's familiars, only a few months later, he knew how to put people at ease, delighted in perceptive intellectual company, chose his friends carefully and was liked by them. 8 Another new acquaintance of these early Epsom days was Eliza Orme, a conveyancer with offices in Chancery Lane - she was the first woman to earn the degree of LLB in 1888 at the University of London - as well as a social investigator, to whom Gissing was introduced by Bullen on 7 November. Aged forty-six, she was a prominent, though not nationally known, public figure, very active professionally, a distinguished contributor to the major English journals on suffrage and employment for women. Most of her readers admired her as an ardent, enlightened feminist. Why Bullen and his partner H . W Lawrence, whose sister Reina Emily Lawrence was an intimate friend and partner of Miss Orme, wished Gissing to make the acquaintance of this remarkable woman is a matter for speculation which should not be influenced by the great services she did him from 1897 onwards. The four diners met at the Adelphi Restaurant, then retreated to the publishers' offices in Henrietta Street, where they all smoked, 'Miss Orme taking a cigar as a matter of course', Gissing noted in his diary on 7 November. That he subsequently deleted half a line again invites speculation. Doubtless he chose to leave out a remark through which future generations might have read

Epsom: The Unsought Conquest ofPublishers and Editors

215

some indelicacy or ingratitude. An incidental jab at her made by Miss E. M . A. Savage in a letter to her friend Samuel Buder of 21September1880 must be deno unced as prompted by jealousy: the only photograph of Eliza Orme extant, gives the lie to Miss Savage's venomous words: 'I am happy to say that she is horribly ugly.' 9 A third social function punctuated Gissing's progress towards the still-distant literary firmament. On 19 November, at Colles's invitation, he attended a house dinner at the Authors' Club which was another (distinctly negative) landmark in his literary life. The honoured guest, Anthony Hope, was a young man who, if public comments meant anything, bade fair to become a celebrity and whose just-published novel, The Prisoner ofZenda, was to prove the corner stone of the Ruritanian romance. Gissing had read its predecessor, The God in the Car, whose hero aims to buy up extensive properties in South Africa, and found it 'vastly inferior' to what reviewers had led him to imagine. He discovered on the occasion that Hope was a relative of his former pupil Walter Grahame. Some forty writers were present and the description of the meeting in the diary amounts to an indictment of such professional assemblies. It was as dull an evening as ever I spenr. A mere gathering of tradesmen, and very commonplace tradesmen ro boot. Oswald Crawfurd in the chair; his speech ludicrously feeble .. . I sac near ro Besant, and talked wi th him. His face precisely that of an owl - a resemblance strengthened by hi s gold-rimmed pince-nez. Commonplace to the lase degree; a respectable draper. Talked a liccle with H ope, of whom little is to be expected.

Attending this soporific reunion nonetheless carried with it a few satisfactions. Crawford asked him to contribute a short story to Chapman's Magazine ofFiction , a new periodical which he was shortly to edit, so that 'His Brother's Keeper', still in Colles's files at the time, found a home in it the next June. R. H . Sherrard, the biographer of Wilde, Daudet and Maupassant and translator of Pierre Lo ti, whom he described as a walking skeleton with warts on his face and neck, may have hinted at their common interest in contemporary French literature. Last but not least, he was delighted with a request for his address from his old, grateful acquaintance, the actress Julia Gwynne, now the wife of the manager of the Empire, George Edwardes. 10 This Authors' C lub experience was not to be renewed, and he said as much co Algernon on 20 November. Mixingwim such people was enough to make one realize how low modern English literature had sunk. No, no; literature will retire inro far away corners, and live there for its own satisfaction, without regard ro the mob. - Of course, there is a bette r circle. A man lli