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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

In all his wanderings he was consistently distressed by the hard-hearted society which he thought the prevailing social Darwinism had generated: ‘If we tread upon the feeblest competitor and have the misfortune to crush the life out of him, we are merely illustrating the law of natural selection.’ He still hated the gloomy dogma of the Church he had been reared in, but he feared that the end of Christianity inevitably meant a great flowering of egotism. We could not hope for happiness in this world or anywhere else. The least bad course was ‘to cultivate our perception of man’s weakness. Let this excite our tenderness.’

Gissing worshipped classical civilisation and came closest to happiness when he was clambering over some ancient ruins in an unspoilt wilderness with a view of the Mediterranean. Delany does not seem to grasp, though, that in his outlook Gissing was anything but classical. Greek moderation and Roman self-control were alien to him. He was in fact a Christian post-Christian, for whom suffering-with was the supreme imperative. When we read about the lives of the five women who were murdered in Ipswich, should we be so quick to condemn Gissing’s project to rescue Nell?

It is natural enough to compare him with Orwell, who died at the same age, 46, and who was such an enthusiast for Gissing’s work. But even the appreciation that Orwell wrote in 1948 shows the difference. There he advances Gissing’s novels as a reason ‘for thinking that the present age is a good deal better than the last one’. The poverty and squalor that Gissing describes so relentlessly had become, if not unimaginable, at least rare in post-war Britain. Gissing himself would not have been so easily satisfied. He would have detected all sorts of deeper cultural and spiritual ailments which Mr Attlee had not yet cured. He was, as he said himself, not a realist but an idealist, and an unappeasable one.

None of which prevented him from being a domestic disaster area. Nell and Edith are not the only unhappy writers’ wives to have suffered from living with a man who writes ten hours a day and hates social life. But Mrs Hardy, Mrs Milton and Mrs Shakespeare did not, I guess, at the same time have to endure being told that they were coarse and vulgar and in need of a complete social and intellectual make-over.

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