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Tuesday 2 December 2008

George Gissing: A Life

The downfall of a pessimist

Ferdinand Mount reviews Paul Delany's biography of George Gessing

Having thus nailed down the Kaiser, Mussolini and Hitler, Gissing was no more hopeful about the prospects of improvement at the individual level. A century before the age of celebrities and hedgefunders, he diagnosed the new elites as ‘incapable of romantic passion, children of a time which subdues everything to interest, which fosters vanity and chills the heart’.

At the same time, he was not blind to what he himself was like. He traced the unhappy story of his life to ‘my own strongly excitable temperament, operated upon by hideous experience of low life.’ A change of circumstances would not, however, perk him up: ‘It will never benefit me to take change of air. I am a hermit wherever I go; I merely carry a desert with me’. Delany tells us that Gissing was ‘trapped in a particularly English kind of shabby-genteel poverty’. What’s so particularly English about it? Think of Balzac’s clerks, or Gogol’s. And he was trapped only in the sense that a potholer gets trapped, as an occupational hazard. Gissing plunged into the lower depths because he felt that there was no other way to write truthfully or, just as important, to live honestly. He had, after all, explored the upper reaches of genteel literary society too, staying with his patrons, Mrs Gaussens in the Cotswolds with her pre-Raphaelite connections and the Positivist Frederic Harrison in Bayswater, and was soon as ill at ease there as with Nell Harrison in Kings Cross:

Reflecting upon those more cultured grades which I have also known, I was shocked by the gap between the two classes — not in the mere commonplace matter of material comfort, but in the power of comprehending each other’s rule of life.

Just as he had insisted on returning to Nell and marrying her, so later he deliberately chose to move to Brixton to join the lower middle class which had escaped the misery of the slums into lives which he saw as pinched, phoney and vulgar.

Other writers such as Orwell have briefly descended into the social underclass, but not many of them have chosen to live south of the river. Between A. C. Swinburne (who was dreaming of the Aegean rather than Putney) and J. G. Ballard, offhand I can think only of Thomas Hardy in Tooting Bec and V. S. Naipaul in Stockwell, and they were just passing through, not engaged on a mission as Gissing was.

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