In Grub Street
Benny Green
London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian London: The Diary of George Gissing Edited by Pierre Coustillas (Harvester £28)
Gissing kept a journal for fifteen years, displaying in its compilation the same dogged obstinacy which characterises the writing of the novels. Unlike the novels, however, the diaries are inartistic to an almost perverse degree, so that most of the entries consist of three or four lines giving a brief summary of meteorological conditions, some statistics a la Arnold Bennett of daily wordage and pieces of Work completed, with perhaps the addition of a grumble about something and a list of books read or flung aside. Gissing Was not quite the little sunbeam of late Victorian writing, and the ability to stay with his diaries demands both a sense of duty and an appetite for doom-ridden trivia Which quite possibly died with Gissing
There is a sub-section of the com
munity which ought to be made to read at least a few pages of Gissing's diaries every morning after breakfast for one Year, at the end of which period the said Members of that sub-section will be asked if they have any desire to remain part of !t. I refer to all those who earn their living by writing, 'the trade of the damned', as Gissing playfully described it. If there are any parents worried by the intention of their children to take up literature, let them pass this book around the family; if there
are any school prize essaywriters who think the door is wide open. let them read this book; if there are still People who dream of best-seller lists and andatory reviews in erndite periodicals like the one which the reader now holds In his hand, let them read this book, and guarantee they will all be cured of their
unfortunate affliction forever. As a matter of fact, so powerful a deterrent from the literary life is this book that there were moments while reading it when I Suspected a plot by the Society of Authors to prevent overcrowding in a depressed industry.
For poor Gissing combined with a
coMprehensiveness almost too bad to be true all the characteristics to guarantee a miserable life. He was a painstaking craftsman who wrote and rewrote and rewrote ,.again; he was pained by the idea of releasing tor publication any work which did not he up to his own exalted conceptions; 11:e found the physical act of writing uncomfortable and the mental energy it required Painful and debilitating; his stolid joy
lessness as a storyteller precluded him from the fleshpots; he was under-capitalised; he was cursed with a frail constitution; and finally, cruelly, he combined a deeply sensuous nature with a gift for alliances with precisely the type of women likely to make him even more wretched than ever. He was, in effect, perhaps the most deserving case of his generation. Deserving of what? Our sympathy and compassion, perhaps. But posterity tends
to be brutally short on both virtues when it comes to dead writers. I find, in the entries covering the period between 22 November and 23 December 1896, that Gissing has drawn on the word 'gloom' sixteen times, and has thrown in for good measure two 'dulls' and a 'gloomy'; ID this same period he has a had cold, his cough is very bad, his new spectacles are useless, he finds it difficult to dig up his artichokes, and there is an earthquake at Hereford. Sympathy and compassion only stretch so far. On 16 August 1892 he reports a swollen eyelid; on 20 June 1896 he grumbles because J. M. Barrie is 'a small, slouching boyish fellow' instead of the 'rather tall, rather elegant man' he had imagined; he describes a writer like Anstey as 'very poor stuff, but perversely continues to read him for some time to come.
And so it goes on, this chorus of unremitting woe, and always in the background the terrible vision of Sisyphus rolling the stone up hill; another page finished, another section, another chapter, another volume, another novel; the five pages that he has written with his heart's blood on Monday, all have to be rewritten on Wednesday, and again on Thursday. The labour is endless, the reward pitiful, the cost frightful.
In a sense, Gissing was the very worst of diarists because he lacked utterly that urbanity which detects sudden significance in the apparently trivial. Arnold Bennett possessed it intermittently, the Goncourts had it to excess. But the reader will trudge in vain across the desert of Gissing's like in search of revelations. A few literary dinners, a fragmented account of the friendship with Wells, but nothing of consequence. At a weekend party he reports Hollman Hunt's version of the Ruskin-Effie Gray marriage, and someone tells him that John Morley receives £1000 a year as reader for Macmillan. He meets Meredith and Hardy at the same supper, decides that Hardy is 'vastly the intellectual inferior of Meredith', and crassly explains this by referring to 'the coarseness of Hardy's humble origin'. A few snatched days of happiness on a seaside holiday, pleasure in the doings of his beloved small son, the occasional favourable response to his work, but for the rest it is sadness, sadness all the way. And yet Wells writes of him that 'he loved laughter' and could be 'easily shocked to mirth'. No hint of this ever surfaces in the diaries, and it is the saddest comment of all on so harrowing a life that its end should so effectively have been used by another novelist — Wells again — for one of the most celebrated death-scenes in English literature, the passing of Uncle Ponderevo in Tono Bungay. Gissing died of double pneumonia at the age of fortysix, with his wife grumbling about the number of handkerchiefs he was using. His diaries comprise one of the most forbidding literary documents of the last hundred years, and I cannot help wondering if Gissing would have been grimly pleased by that thought.
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