SUMMER BOOKS
The Hateful Profession
BY KINGSLEY AM IS IF Gissing were alive today he would not find many people around who satisfied his require- ment of the novelist : that he should have starved. There was Orwell, of course, as Mr. G. W. Stonier Points out in his whimsical introduction to the World's Classic New Grub Street,* but Orwell's starvation was voluntary, and it had little favour- able effect on his fiction. Apart from him, every- body is firmly shored up with salaries from adver- tising agencies, commissions from glossy trade Journals, or even (ssh!) stipends from universi- ties: too firmly to be in much danger of falling into Gissing's bread-and-dripping, four-pair-of- stairs world. The contrast goes some way to discredit the plea that 'our society' does nothing for the artist. He does plenty for himself. If you really want to starve nowadays you had better Pick some metier that our patrons have no use for —sculpture, say, or microtonal music—because if you can hold a pen you will be home and dry before you can say ten guineas a thousand. The only other way is to be like the novelist Edwin Reardon, Gissing's protagonist, and destroy your- self, not through having integrity and genius (for genius will always make its own way), but through having integrity and not being all that good.
That Reardon is in some ways a pessimistic self- Portrait emerges clearly enough from a reading of The Private Life of Henry Maitland.t This is actually a biography of Gissing dating from 1912, and originally published with thin pseudonymous disguises—Wells appearing as 'Rivers' and so on --that make but a feeble show of conciliating per- sons still living at the time. The author, Morley Roberts, was a n-ovelist of some repute in his day and later became W. H. Hudson's first biographer. (He also had the habit of carrying Sartor Resartus around with him on his extensive travels, though fortunately without allowing it to influence his Style.) The Gissing book is marred by Roberts's Yielding to the temptation to pu his own experiences and attitudes on a level with those of his subject. Thus we learn that 'Maitland' had -no Colourful objects in his rooms, but Roberts had lots; 'Maitland' stuck to London, but Roberts was restless for overseas; 'Maitland' was disinclined to metaphysical speculation : not so Roberts. This is topped up by an irritating air of self-congratula- tion over Gissing's regular non-avoidance of pit- falls that Roberts had gone out of his way to warn him about in advance, and a snobbish disdain for, among others, Gissing's second wife—'many of her locutions were vulgar, and she had no natural refi nement.'
But Roberts was no fool, as is shown by his incidental remarks on Dickens and on English novelists in general (so many of them 'have on every occasion shirked the great dramatic scene
„ * NEw GRI.111 STREET. By George Gissing. s. 6d.) t THE PRIVATI1 LIFE OE HENRY MAITLAND: A Por- trait of George Gissing. By Morley Roberts. (Richards Press, 21s.) just when it was expected and needed'). Despite its faults of presentation, his portrait of Gissing is clear and full, and if no rhyme or reason is found in the latter's despairs and his marital fatuities, then in a sense this was the whole point about him. Most important of all, Roberts had shared the evil-smelling Bohemia which bounded Gis- sing's existence and which he charted with such triumphant clarity in New Grub Street—pub- lished, by the way, in the same year as The Picture of.Dorian Grey. If he is so minded, the reader of Maitland can trace how Gissing transferred his own experiences in America to a minor character in the novel, Whelpdale, and how he was describ- ing his own predicament when he chronicled Reardon's helpless struggles to get his stuff written in time, or even at all. Further, in the passage where Reardon imagines himself married to 'some simple, kind-hearted work girl' and receives a de- flating harangue from his friend, Biffen, it is impossible to escape the feeling that this is Gissing haranguing himself. There is a deadly accuracy in Biffen's gloomy diagnosis which renders his creator's history doubly puzzling. It is not difficult to guess, again, that the embittered pedant of New Grub Street, Alfred Yule, represents the author's proleptic vision of himself after a lifetime in the literary rat-race, and that Yule's poor, cowed, stupid wife is a corresponding account of the woman with `no natural refinement.' And to round the thing off Gissing's death-bed delirium un- mistakably recalls the visions he had attributed to the dying Reardon twelve years earlier.
An interpretation of this sort would be all very well, and indeed there is a sense in which the noting of biographical resemblances in such a case is inescapable. New Grub Street asks to be con- sidered as the true record of a soul trapped in a network of agonies—poverty, self-doubt, sexual discomfort, the 'huge shop' of London—but it is a record vitiated in part by its author's tendency to slip from poignanecomplaint into repetitious grumbling. Fortunately, however, not everybody in the novel is an analogue of Gissing or his wives, and its material is not just what he did with him- self in reading-rooms and attic bed-sitters. Its liveliest sketch is of Jasper Milvain, the egotist who chisels his way on to review pages and into editorships with a devoted skill to which even con- temporary Grub Street would be hard pressed to find a parallel. The delineation of the minor literary bores, especially the older ones, recalls the wit of George Eliot as well as displaying what Gissing everywhere displays, an honesty and a fairmindedness equal to hers. And the dramatic centre of the book is not so much Reardon's rela- tions with his cowardly wife as the push-and-pull between Yule and his devoted but mutinous daughter, an admirable character who has her own good reasons for regarding literature as 'the hateful profession.'
Just as Don Juan may require the reader to for- get all he knows about Byron (and, for the oppo- site reasons, let us throw in the Idylls. and Tenny- son), so we must separate Gissing from his work to see it straight. Otherwise we are in danger of thinking, as Morley Roberts clearly thought, that Gissing was a man who went under as well as dying at forty-six. But he did not go under : he wrote New Grub Street.
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