Needy Authors, Literary Hacks

In a tiny seventeenth-century cottage, fashioned from stone stables, I found the Idle Bookseller. Not that Ros Stinton lives up to her trade name, presiding as she does over the largest collection of books and pamphlets by or about the Victorian novelist George Gissing to be found anywhere. The shrine-cum-bookshop is up a steep flight of stairs at the back of her home, in Town Lane, Idle, once an ancient village but now swallowed up in the suburbs of Bradford. To the rear, which would have suited the mildly reactionary novelist, is the Idle Conservative Club. Down the road is the Idle Working Men’s Club, for which I imagine there is a long, if rather desultory, waiting list.

Gissing himself could never have been accused of idleness. In a short and mostly unhappy life, he wrote more than twenty novels chronicling Victorian England, before dying in the south of France at the age of 46. He was also the author of the first serious literary study of Dickens, volumes of letters, travel and autobiography, and a diary not published until 1978. His masterpiece, New Grub Street, a grim tale of London’s shady literary world first published in 1891, has hardly ever been out of print and has been described as ‘perhaps the greatest novel ever written about the collision of the creative impulse with material considerations’. That was the story of his life. Grub Street was a real place, the haunt of needy authors and literary hacks in London’s Moorgate from the seventeenth century. Ironically, it was later renamed Milton Street. In the novel, the locale is reinvented as bitter commercial reality, a state of mind rather than a point of geography. Reardon, the scholarly novelist hero, is never able to earn enough to satisfy the social ambitions of his wife Amy. She leaves him, and he dies of congestion of the lungs, a terrible portent of Gissing’s own end. The anti-hero, fellow writer Jasper Milvain, is perfectly attuned to the needs of the market. He prospers, and marries Amy. The book resonates with the clash of high-minded literary aspiration and the corruption of Victorian commerce. Grub Street is a different place to that in Sam Johnson’s day: ‘supplied with telegraphic communication, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy’. Reardon and Milvain represent two sides of Gissing: the virtuous writer ground down by poverty, and the cynical Jasper of the facile pen who makes money and gets the woman, but whom he could never be. While this is autobiography as fiction, it is also of a high order. You can buy a first edition of the three-decker New Grub Street for £750 or a paperback for a fiver in Ros Stinton’s attic, which for lovers of Gissing is an Aladdin’s Cave. Her catalogue lists 806 publications, ranging from a three-volume first edition of his first novel, Workers in the Dawn, at £2,500, to Japanese translations, and she sells all over the world. ‘The people who buy are passionate about him,’ she observes. As, indeed, is Ros, confessing, ‘This is heresy, but I think he’s better than Hardy. His women are very good.’ There is a minor Gissing industry, chiefly academic, but global. His greatest exponent is a Frenchman, Pierre Coustillas, and the American professor John Halperin has written what I think is the best biography, Gissing: A Life in Books. If ever there was a novelist whose life was his literature, it is Gissing. And he is due for another revival. This year marks the 150th anniversary of his birth, above his father’s chemist’s shop in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, on 22 November 1857. The industrial revolution was in full swing, and what had been known as ‘the Merrie Citie’ in medieval times was now a centre of coal-mining, manufacturing and woollen mills. His birthplace has become a small museum, with a display of his life and works. Some years ago, it was uncharitably exposed as the least-visited museum in the country, understandable when you know its opening hours – two hours every Saturday afternoon between May and September. It is run by the Gissing Trust, which also produces a quarterly publication about the city’s great literary son. Anthony Petyt, the trust’s secretary, showed me round the exhibits. A retired local government officer, he could have been a minor character in one of his hero’s books: quiet and unassuming, but passionate about his subject. Gissing himself did not stay long in his native city, where his father was a noted scientific and educational figure. A brilliant student, he won a scholarship to Owen’s College, the forerunner of Manchester University. He later lamented, ‘it was a cruel thing that I, at the age of sixteen, should have been turned loose in a big city, compelled to live in lodgings with nobody interested in me’. As his biographer Halperin notes, turned loose he was, but he did most of the unfastening himself. He won many prizes for English, Greek, Latin and German and was preparing for an illustrious career at London University, when he took up with a 17-year-old prostitute, Nell Harrison, whom he’d met in a public house. Gissing was at this time a fascinating young man: ‘curiously bright, with a mobile face . . . abundant masses of brown hair combed backwards over his head, grey-blue eyes, a very sympathetic mouth, an extraordinarily well-shaped chin and a great capacity for talking and laughing’. Young George was not the first man to believe it his duty to ‘save a fallen woman’, but he must rank as the one who lost and found most by his actions. Infatuated by the alcoholic Nell, he bought her a sewing-machine with which to make and sell clothes. She preferred a less onerous way of earning a living but took his money all the same. Rushing headlong into disaster, Gissing determined to marry her, and began stealing money from fellow students when his funds were exhausted. The college authorities laid a trap, and he was caught. Gissing was convicted, jailed and sent down. London University was now out of the question, and his life was in ruins. The cause of his ruination became the theme of his life’s work: sex, class and money. In his novels, his ‘guilty secret’ is played out over and over again in different guises. Men attracted to low-life women who yearn for respectable, intelligent (but not excessively cultured) women. Men without money frustrated in their desire to make a decent life. Men trapped by their unchangeable station in life. They are mostly men, though his women are more thoughtful and realistic than most Victorian heroines, and they are mostly the author in different masks. And, au fond, there is the great grinding perplexity of sexual relations in a society in the grip of hypocritical, cash-driven morality. Nowhere is this more painful than in New Grub Street, where Reardon laments: ‘Love is one of the first things to be frightened away by poverty.’ Gissing did marry his Nell, greatly to his emotional and financial cost, and when she died he married another woman of similar stripe. He was driven to repeat his life in his work, and his work in his life. While he acquired a solid literary reputation and was on dining terms with the finest writers of the age, his works never sold very well and he was repeatedly dunned by his publisher. Eventually, he made enough money to travel, to Italy, where he wrote what has been called the most joyless holiday book ever produced, By the Ionian Sea. His last years, from 1898, were spent in greater happiness than he had ever known, with a Frenchwoman, Gabrielle Fleury, who originally approached him with a proposal to translate New Grub Street. She read books and she played the piano. He fell passionately in love with ‘the crown of my life’ (the title of a novel he was writing), left his shrewish wife Edith and eloped with Gabrielle to Rouen. Their unwedded bliss did not last long. Gissing developed emphysema, and a move to the healthier air of the French Pyrenees could not stave off the inevitable. He died on 28 December 1903, after catching pneumonia on a walk, and is buried in the English cemetery in St Jean de Luz, overlooking the Bay of Biscay. Gissing will never be the literary giant that Dickens and Hardy became. Apart from the Idle treasure house, his works can sometimes be found in second-hand bookshops, and the Harvester Press reprinted a number of his better-known works in the 1960s. The burghers of Wakefield apparently have no plans to celebrate his 150th anniversary, except by way of a quotation from The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, inscribed in the stone paving of a piazza in the city centre. Even this was not to be attributed to the author until the indefatigable Mr Petyt pointed out that it came from Gissing’s autobiography. One can only sigh at civic attitudes that the Russians would call ne culturni. Professor Coustillas is planning an event, but that will not be until next spring, and it will be in France. This is scant recognition for a writer of whom George Orwell wrote: ‘I am ready to maintain that England has produced very few better novelists. Gissing was not a writer of picaresque tales, or burlesques, or comedies, or political tracts: he was interested in individual human beings, and the fact that he can deal sympathetically with several different sets of motives, and make a credible story out of the collision between them, makes him exceptional . . .’ Despite being largely out of print, six of Gissing’s books were found in Orwell’s library at the time of his death, a tribute of sorts that book lovers could profitably emulate today.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 16 © Paul Routledge 2007