On Reading George Gissing’s "New Grub Street" beside the Acropolis
Too much “there” there.....
I keep talking about George Gissing’s New Grub Street, with people I run into. I talked about the book at a writer’s meeting I attended last week during a discussion about the movie American Fiction and accidentally got everyone excited about it. I have been thinking about how to write about the book here. The book is somewhat of a classic though few people seem to know of it. There is a whole academic field of Gissing Studies. And yet, for me, George Gissing’s New Grub Street falls into the very strange category of being one of the best of books I’ve read but don’t recommend others read. I’m writing this newsletter, in fact, to try figure out why I feel this way.
New Grub Street, set in London in 1882, shows the lives of writers publishing during a time of immense industry change. Novel writing was becoming a trade, with hack writers producing in quantity alongside those fortunate enough to be writing for “art’s sake.” Paper was more readily available. On the real New Grub Street, novelists churned out novels in three volume sets, which often went to “circulating libraries” as most of the reading public couldn’t afford to buy their own books. The most famous library was Mudies, which also acted as a conservative tastemaker. Publishers were getting greedy–Gissing rarely held the copyright for his works, receiving instead an upfront fee. On top of that, literary agents were becoming to be a thing for those poor novelists who couldn’t handle the increasingly complicated business angle of the trade. For context, “old” Grub Street was that of Samuel Johnson and his Richard Savage, figures that somehow linger throughout the gloom and fog and badly lit rooms of New Grub Street.
All the above I’m more cognizant of and interested in because of Gissing’s novel, which was churned out in two months in 1890 as one of those three volume sets, and sold for £150 without copyright, £150 Gissing needed to avoid poverty.
I read New Grub Street with the novelist Yiyun Li and APStogether, an online book group hosted by A Public Space on Substack, which I’ve participated in since the beginning of the pandemic. This group (which I do recommend) is made of a consistently smart impressive group of readers. Like any good book group, I like it because I read and finish books I wouldn’t otherwise gravitate toward, such as New Grub Street. And now, I’m writing about this book (which I still don’t recommend), spending even more time with it, reading ancillary material, trying to understand why George Gissing and his novel affect me so profoundly.
George Gissing’s life echoes the doom of many characters in New Grub Street. Born in 1857, he self-sabotaged his intellectually brilliant start with a flourish, losing a prestigious scholarship after he was caught stealing in attempt to help his penniless girlfriend Nell leave of a life of prostitution. This led to his being expelled, convicted, imprisoned for one month, and then making an escape to the United States where he began publishing stories in newspapers, made friends with Socialists, and then returned to London where he reunited with Nell, who still struggled with mental stability and alcohol. Back in London, he began churning out novels and never stopped.
One focal point of New Grub Street is socioeconomic, preoccupied by the struggle of the middle-class writer striving to find “respectability” and social standing in London’s class system, either through artistic recognition or by marrying someone with money who can both elevate and support the art. More interesting to me, however, is the book’s question: does churning out fiction meant to appeal to tastes of the growing popular market kill the spirit of writers who, by merit or nature, can only be personally fulfilled by writing artistically satisfying work?
Gissing’s answer in New Grub Street: yes.
The two characters unable to write books fast enough die. Edwin Reardon, realizing he can’t just mechanically write books on demand, in particular those with easy dramatic plots, gives up on writing entirely and takes a job as a low wage clerk, horrifying his bourgeois wife Amy who takes their child and leaves him with their child. Angry at Amy for choosing to rely on her family’s money instead of living in morally-superior poverty, Reardon dies of TB due to his meager living conditions. Harold Biffen, referred to as “the Realist,” commits suicide after he publishes Mr. Bailey, Grocer, the one great book he has in him. The cause for his suicide is not, however, a result of the book’s critical reception. Biffen chooses “the open door” because he can no longer endure living alone in poverty and cannot afford to support an educated, cultured woman who might bring him happiness.
Idealists to the end, Reardon and Biffen both die regretting having never gone to Greece with each other to see the Acropolis. Both die hearing the famous line from the Tempest, spoken by the lonely artist-creator Prospero: We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
Gissing’s writing often veers into the sentimental.
In contrast, business-savvy Jasper Milvain, writes prolifically and quickly because he doesn’t get tied up in knots over craft, moral intentions, or quality. He keeps in mind the short attention spans of readers who are commuting from one place to another. He excels at making connections in publishing, calculating where profit lies, and socializing. Whelpdale, a clownish character, also does well in publishing. Lack of artistic talent does not prevent Whelpdale from publishing an “author’s guide” or manual for fiction writing, foreshadowing the many available today, “sells splendidly.” Whelpdale also makes a business of teaching fiction writing to students he knows will not be successful in addition to turning to literary agenting. Remember, this is 1882.
Other writers lurk in the background. By this I mean women writers, of course. True to Gissing’s time, the women writers often don’t sign their names to their work. They write articles assigned by fathers and brothers and spend countless hours in the Reading Room at the British Library, referred to as “the valley of the shadow of the books.” They write Sunday school texts and stories for romance journals. Jasper Milvain describes “the modern literary girl”: “Simpatica. . . very delicate, pure complexion, though morbid; nice eyes; figure not spoilt yet.” One of these “literary girls” fears she will lose her job to an imagined automaton or “literary machine.”
Yet Gissing’s women fall more in love with the craft and industry of writing more than any of the male writers. It’s the women who send each other letters and articles for critique. They do the work and, perhaps because they have no work credited them, don’t get caught up in making a name for themselves. (A few in our reading group considered Gissing’s other book, The Odd Women, but I need something else, first, to counteract Gissing’s doomed reality.)
In short, in New Grub Street, the writing goes on at feverish pace. Writers get frustrated. They don’t write. They review each other’s books. They write again. Marriage proposals come and go. Two women get inheritances. Reardon and Biffen die. The London fog circles each one of them. One writer finally goes blind. Writers keep writing, the financially successful ones scheming well while writing. The reader sees letters exchanged; however, the actual articles and books being written throughout these hundreds of pages are rarely shown. We are not meant to assess how mediocre, terrible, or skilled at writing these characters are. Gissing’s book instead focuses obsessively on each character’s character.
Something important lands on these 400 plus pages, impulsively written in two months. Something about publishing about books about art. About artistic survival and what can and cannot be sacrificed. About why writers write. About living up to one’s own ideals and considering when ideals need to be re-evaluated. About how writers perish and most are forgotten. Like most books. Like most art.
On Frenemies, Biographies, and Virginia Woolf’s “George Gissing”
Gissing died 1903 at age 46 due to respiratory issues, perhaps after catching a chill during a walk in France. He’d found stability in a common law marriage with a woman who brought him financial security. He’d written 23 novels, twelve collections of stories, one travel book By the Ionian Sea, literary essays, and a critical study on Dickens.
Nine years after his death, his friend or “frenemy” Morley Roberts wrote a fictional biography of Gissing titled The Private Life of Henry Maitland. Gissing’s supporters were outraged, believing the book denigrated his life and career. It evidently emphasizes his later life conservatism. H.G. Wells was among those who defended Robert’s book. Here, perhaps, the field of Gissing Studies began.
But reading through excerpts of Gissing’s journal and Morley’s fictional account, both anthologized in my Delphi Classics, The Complete Works of George Gissing, of the psychological theme of the overworked writer is painfully clear.
The arch almost farcical tone of Morley Roberts book also made me think of two pseudo biographies, both far superior in writing and more elegantly aimed, A.J.A. Symons’ The Quest for Corvo (1934) and Lytton Strachey’s more contemporary Eminent Victorians (1918). Which, of course, also made me want to read what Virginia Woolf, a writer who preoccupies me often, writes in her Common Reader: Second Series in an essay, “George Gissing.”
Published in 1932, “George Gissing” is classic Woolf, cutting snobbishness mixed with unsettling truth. But clearly, Gissing’s presence persevered enough for Woolf to feel it necessary to contend with him decades after his death. In the essay, Woolf draws from the New Grub Street’s doomed main character Edwin Reardon to suggest Gissing’s education and intellectual acuity was cause for his pain, having made him aware of ideals and a way of life he had no means to attain.
She refers to one section of New Grub Street, in which Reardon laments his fate as a writer of low-brow novels, a man of knowledge reduced to writing fiction:
That vast broadening of my horizon lost me the command of my literary resources. I lived in Italy and Greece as a student, concerned especially with the old civilizations; I read little but Greek and Latin. That brought me out of the track I had laboriously made for myself; I often thought with disgust of the kind of work I had been doing; my novels seemed vapid stuff, so wretchedly and shallowly modern. If I had had the means, I should have devoted myself to the life of a scholar. That, I quite believe, is my natural life; it’s only the influence of recent circumstances that has made me a writer of novels. A man who can’t journalise, yet must earn his bread by literature, nowadays inevitably turns to fiction.” (From New Grub Street)
Woolf, the never-shallow Modernist, responds:
Here in Gissing is a gleam of recognition that Darwin had lived, that science was developing, that people read books and look at pictures, that once upon a time there was such a place as Greece. It is the consciousness of these things that makes his books such painful reading; it was this that made it impossible for them to “attract the subscribers to Mr. Mudie’s Library”. [His books] owe their peculiar grimness to the fact that the people who suffer most are capable of making their suffering part of a reasoned view of life. (From Virginia Woolf, “George Gissing”)
Biffen and Reardon’s suffering, the martyrdom and chosen lifestyle of suffering for one’s art, Woolf clearly has little patience for such preoccupations. She writes dismissively yet brilliantly:
…we are faced by another of those problems with which literature is sown so thick. The writer has dined upon lentils; he gets up at five; he walks across London; he finds Mr. M. still in bed, whereupon he stands forth as the champion of life as it is, and proclaims that ugliness is truth, truth ugliness, and that is all we know and all we need to know. (From Virginia Woolf “George Gissing”)
We could say Gissing’s and Woolf’s styles and tastes differed. Ironically, both suffered, perhaps fatally, for their art.
. . . Too Much There There
I began reading New Grub Street while in Athens, Greece writing in the Reading Room at the Nordic Library at the foot of the Acropolis. Throughout New Grub Street, Edwin Reardon and Harold Biffen plan their idealized trip to Greece together. Ever impractical, they dream of creating and writing art that will endure like the classics, whether Romantic or Realistic. Reardon and Biffen are happiest when reciting works in Latin or Shakespeare. Their ideals prevent them from being able to continue, let alone finish, projects that matter to them. Their awareness of the pristine world of classical beauty does perhaps confuse them as Woolf suggests. They are frustrated by a comfortable world that is closed off to them and by their idealized conception of how a good life should look and feel, a perfection that cannot and does not exist in the murk of the everyday world, certainly not in the world of New Grub Street.
Was it this disillusionment Gissing wanted the reader to feel with this novel, this clash between dream and reality? Or did he just need to get the book–written for a publisher as one of the three volume sets he uses to kill off his writer Reardon–finished?
Many books, essays, and writing projects are pushed out and freed because of contractual deadlines and external pressures. I suspect many of the beautiful and brilliant books we swoon over are the fruition of even larger ideas that couldn’t be seized, pages might not have looked so polished or perfect to the frustrated writer alone with the words that never reached their intended aim. Much of what we read may be something that simply had to be turned in.
New Grub Street is a brilliant 400+ page slog. The dialogue is often wooden, characters speak in ideas more than they speak in conversation. The book’s prescient view of the writing and publishing industry and of readers with short attention spans in 1882 can make one want to give up on writing entirely. Yes, Virginia, “ugliness is truth, truth ugliness, and that is all we know and all we need to know.”
But Gissing's life, his labor, his mystery, and his trove of material appeal and fascinate me. Like all great books, New Grub Street showed me a gleam of light beneath “a door I didn’t even know existed.” Reading the book also tempts me to fall into the bad metaphors fast fiction is known for, a “door” I’d like to keep closed. I’d rather re-read Strachey or Woolf. Yet my reading of them has deepened by being more aware of those writers working in the artistic periphery of Bloomsbury, writers who worked themselves to death for other audiences.
But if I started to read more Gissing, I’d have to read so much more Gissing. To abuse Gertrude Stein’s famous line: with Gissing, there is too much there there.
Jennifer's, Thank you so much for your summary and reflections of NGS. I confess that at the same time APStogether began the novel, I also was in process reading two other books with two other groups. One was O'Connor's Wise Blood (with A Public Space founding editor, Elizabeth Gaffney in her writer's space, the24hourroom.org) and the other was Woolf's Night and Day, (with the #woolfpack in the space formerly known as twitter.) Both of those books demanded my attention in a way NGS could not compete. I tried staying with it, but while I appreciated the themes, found little to enjoy or admire in the prose, and after about 100 pages I dropped out. I still have it on my kindle, maybe I'll return to it someday! And hope we'll read something else (aps) together again soon! xx
I was struck by this rather prescient line:
”One of these “literary girls” fears she will lose her job to an imagined automaton or “literary machine.””
ChatGPT, anyone?