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George Gissing: A Life

The downfall of a pessimist

Paul Delaney
Weidenfeld, 472pp, £25,

Ferdinand Mount

Wednesday, 5th March 2008

Ferdinand Mount reviews Paul Delany's biography of George Gessing

Gissing then endures a solitude so all- consuming that he speaks to nobody but his landlady for weeks. In a frenzy of loneliness, he rushes out into the Marylebone Road and picks up the first girl he sees. This is Edith Underwood, a stonemason’s daughter, who after a long courtship, platonic according to Gissing, becomes his second wife. There is no evidence that she was on the streets in any other sense, although Delany likes to fancy that she might have been, or alternatively that Gissing thought she was and was disappointed to find that she was more respectable than he bargained for. By now Delany seems to have come to dislike Gissing quite strongly, almost as strongly as Gissing came to dislike Edith. The second marriage was as disastrous as the first. Edith gave George hell and vice versa. They separated and she spent the last 15 years of her life in a mental asylum.

Delany is now growing impatient with Gissing’s lack of upward mobility and has begun complaining that ‘his inability to convert the reputations of his books into social success was a chronic handicap in building his literary career’. If he hadn’t insisted on his ‘perverse choices’, ‘there was no external reason why he should not have found a loving young woman who could have helped him up the ladder.’ Yes, and bought a lovely home in South Ken and joined the Authors’ Club, or even the Garrick.

Gissing might be bitter, solitary and self-destructive, and he might be vulnerable to romantic illusions, but what Delany seems uncomfortable with, or bewildered by, is that he was also fiercely intelligent. He was always quick to see the shape of the future. He could see, for example, that Wilhelm II coming to the throne ‘might in all probability lead to wars of incalculable duration’. In Berlin in 1898, he found ‘rampant militarism everywhere about’. The Italy which he loved was ‘being very quickly ruined, owing to the crazy effort to be a first-class power’. He did not share the optimistic hopes about democracy, which he saw, on the contrary, as ‘full of menace to all the finer hopes of civilisation’, and likely to be much worse when combined with the revival of monarchic power based on militarism. ‘There has but to arise some Lord of Slaughter and the nations will be tearing at each other’s throats.’

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jeffrey manley

March 6th, 2008 6:48pm

When mentioning prominent South London authors, I'm surprised Mr. Mount does not name Henry Williamson. The fisrt volumes of his Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight describe his early life in and around Lewisham. And Mr. Mount is surely familiar with his work since he calls his own series of novels Chronicle of Modern Twilight. These latter by the way should have received more attention than they have.

Markus Neacey

March 11th, 2008 10:13pm

Gissing was not the self-defeating, self-pitying, or hopelessly pessimistic individual so many generally misinformed reviewers imagine him to be. Had he been so he would have hanged himself in his prison cell. Yet, having sacrificed his career and reputation to save a common prostitute, he did not wallow in despair. Instead, by sheer determination and imcomparable industriousness, not to mention courage, he resurrected his life and made of it beauty from ashes. For, during twenty-five years of literary activity, he produced a body of work, whose power and humanity resounds to this day. As Orwell in his day and his many admirers today recognise, that is hardly the legacy of a defeated pessimist.

Tom Luke

March 28th, 2008 4:57pm

I'm left gessing as to the quality of spelling.

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