Old wives' tale
J. G. FARRELL
Born in Exile George Gissing (Gollancz 50s) Memoirs of an English Officer Daniel Defoe (Gollancz 50s) The Manchester Man Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks (Gollancz 50s) Consider a young man, of humble birth but exceptional gifts, who educates himself by winning one scholarship after another until, about to fulfil his ambition of going to Ox- ford, loneliness drives him to fall in love with a young prostitute. He spends his meagre resources on a sewing-machine so that she may ply an honest trade. Then, penniless and unable to help her further, he yields to the temptation of stealing from his fellow-students. Caught in the act! expelled, obliged to go to America, disgraced! A year or so tater he returns to make an honest woman of the prostitute. This might be the plot of a Victorian novel. Instead it is the debut of a Victorian novelist, George Giss- ing. Few writers can have begun their careers more disastrously.
Oddly enough this particular incident does not appear to have hampered him greatly.
If he had managed to resist the impulse to marry the girl, who was an alcoholic to boot, the practical effects might have been swiftly forgotten. Their marriage was a total failure and as a result Gissing was obliged to write his early novels in conditions that would have sunk most young writers with- out trace. They were turned out of one wretched lodging after another because his wife periodically reverted to prostitution to get drink.
When at last freed by her death Gissing promptly made another self-destruc- tive marriage, and more titanic feats of domestic endurance followed (together with two children) before he at last managed to separate and find some peace in a third liaison with a French woman of more re- finement, education and intelligence than either of his previous companions.
The social realism of Gissing's early novels was distressing to the reviewers of the time, nurtured on the bland pap con- sidered suitable for Mudie's circulating libraries which were then exercising a bale- ful influence on the book business. They found his work painful or depressing, though they conceded that in writing about slums he knew what he was talking about._ Gissing, however, was more interested in his own situation than in the welfare of the urban slum population and in New Grub Street turned to the rigours of the writing profession. In 1892, the following year, Born in Exile was published.
Virginia Woolf chided Gissing for writing too directly about himself and it is true that the hero of this novel, Godwin Peak, is a personification of a problem that obsessed Gissing all his life: inability to wed his intellectual superiority with social inferior- ity. Not only is Peak, like Gissing, a bril- liant young man of working-class origins who craves the comforts of middle-class society: in many respects his early struggles to achieve an education are identical in de- tail to Gissing's. Elsewhere there are tactful parallels: at the crucial moment when Peak seems close to enjoying the fruits of his academic endeavours he has them snatched from his grasp (a vulgar uncle announces his intention of setting up tea-rooms opposite the college and Peak—a snob of no mean dimensions—flees the social disgrace). Peak then moves to London where we see him as a nihilist and agnostic who professes that for someone who does not believe in the Christian dogma hedonism is the only rational creed.
The particular gratification that interests Peak was also one that Gissing yearned for. Peak exclaims: 'I have no other ambition in life—no other! Think the confession as ridiculous as you like; my one supreme de- sire is to marry a perfectly refined woman. Put it in the correct terms: I am a plebeian and I aim at marrying a lady'. Gissing, less optimistic than his character, lamented to a friend that he must find 'some decent work- girl' and, for his second wife, did so (H. G. Wells called her .a servant girl). The way Peak sets out to solve his problem is ingeni- ous: 'There is a case in which a woman will marry without much regard to ber husband's origin. Let him be a parson, and he may aim as high as he chooses.' Peak then abandons the society of his radical friends and removes to. Exeter to study for the Church whose dogma he rejects. Gissing makes the most of this collision between Peak's formal hypocrisy and the logical pursuance of his utilitarian creed.
At this remove it is hard to be sympathetic to Gissing. Orwell remarked that Gissing's London seems almost as remote as that of Dickens. Class barriers have largely dis- solved and religious conformism is no longer an issue. Nor is disgust with the pro- letariat any longer fashionable. dissing's idealisation of middle-class women is frankly ludicrous and his prose is frequently hard to tolerate: for example, Peak takes shelter from the rain with two girls returning from a walk. 'He admired the physical vigour which enabled them to take delight in such a day as this, when girls of poorer blood and ignoble nurture would shrink from the sky's showery tumult . . .' The superficial charac- terisation and welter of plot coincidences are also liable to exasperate the modern reader.
Yet there is one respect in which this is an important novel. In the strictest sense it is a novel of ideas. A philosophical attitude to life is embodied in the main character and allowed to run its course, argued out rigor- ously (if inconclusively) through the other character.: and plot. Moreover Godwin. Peak is acting on his theories, which makes- him both powerful and unusual when compared with the heroes of the modern novel: the most telling of these tend to be passive even when embodying an idea (Camus; Beckett, Musil), disappear altogether (Robbe-Grillet) or at best get caught up helplessly in the toils of aristocratic conundrums (Joyce, Nabokov, Borges, Pynchon). The result is that, as Walter Allen suggests in his fine introduction, Gissing's affinity, in this novel at least, is with Dostoievsky and Turgenev. It would be a hard man indeed who refused Peak permission to share, however humbly, the same stable as those two vigorous, thoroughbred nihilists: Raskolnikov and Bazarov.
The publishers have performed a valuable service in reprinting Born in Exile (Orwell, incidentally, complained that he could not get hold of a copy). In the same series of neglected classics (edited by Martin Sey- mour-Smith)- appear respectively, a further demonstration of Defoe's ability as a literary chameleon, Memoirs of an English Officer, and The Manchester Man by Mrs G. Linnaeus Banks, a romance with interesting historical detail and a simple-minded plot, stiffly starched together with Victorian ideals.
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