No such thing. Gissing returned, having gained nothing from his year in the US ‘except to have studied with tolerable thoroughness the most hateful form of society yet developed’. American readers should not take too much offence at this. Gissing was a great hater of wherever he happened to be. After his stay in Exeter, he told Nell that, ‘I should fancy no town in England has a more unintellectual population. And the country people are ignorance embodied.’ After an evening at the Authors’ Club, he recorded that ‘to mingle with these folk is to be once and for ever convinced of the degradation that our time has brought upon literature’. Brighton was ‘simply a lump of wealthy London put back to back with a lump of Whitechapel and stuck down on a most uninteresting piece of coast, a more hideous and vulgar sea-side town the mind of man has not conceived’.
Anyway, far from giving up Nell, he poured more money down her throat, and since they could not share lodgings while unmarried, and despite his hatred of the Church, he married her in St James’s, Hampstead Road.
Through all this process – a decidedly gruelling one, to put it mildly – Professor Delany has been tut-tutting and pursing his lips and shaking his head. ‘Many Owens students made an occasional visit to a brothel, with no harm to their future careers,’ he sighs in his broadminded way. Gissing, though, ‘brought doom on himself by deciding to save Nell from her way of life’, for ‘if she was just an ordinary girl of the streets, Gissing had been a great fool.’ Even writing to her from the States ‘showed that he had learnt nothing from being sent to prison’. Nothing like the treadmill to prevent prostitutes from finding husbands.
Why on earth could he not settle down with a nice middle-class girl and write nice middle-class novels for the circulating libraries? ‘He might have suffered much less from loneliness and sexual deprivation if he had chosen women whose status was closer to his own,’ Delany tells us in his worldly-wise way. ‘All Gissing needed to do,’ he explains, sounding more and more like one of those ads on the back page which promise you the infallible recipe for turning out bestsellers, ‘was study his market and then meet the demand for material.’
Nell and Gissing eventually separate and she dies in ghastly poverty at the age of thirty, although he never stops sending her what little money he has (at one point he is supporting no fewer than fifteen members of his family from his scant earnings – Delany calls him ‘a soft touch’). The cause of death was probably the syphilis for which she had been receiving treatment, although the death certificate used the frequent euphemism of ‘acute laryngitis’.
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 fifteen 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.’
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 Gaussen 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.
In all his wanderings he was consistently distressed by the hardhearted 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 civilization 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 in 2006, should we be so quick to condemn Gissing’s project to rescue Nell?
It is natural eno
ugh to compare him with Orwell, who died at the same age, forty-six, 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 makeover.
We see Gissing at his most unpleasant when he refuses to allow Edith to answer letters from a middle-class friend, claiming that ‘she has long since given up hope of learning to write, so I will answer for her’ – when in fact perfectly coherent letters from Edith survive to this day. He was almost as horrible to their two sons. Walter, the elder, was ‘deplorably ugly’, as well as being ‘ill-tempered, untruthful, precociously insolent, surprisingly selfish’. He never saw the boys or Edith for the last five years of his life, which he spent at Pau with Gabrielle Fleury, a French literary groupie who acted as his third wife, though Edith was still alive. They settled in the Pyrenees in the mistaken belief that the climate was good for his lungs. In fact, what he was dying of was syphilis, probably contracted from Nell all those years ago in Water Street. In the Pyrenees, he yearned for the lanes round Guildford.
VIRGINIA WOOLF: GO WITH THE FLOW
What if a writer is more interesting than the stuff he or she writes? Worse still, what if she isn’t (let’s leave the men out of this) but the reading public mistakenly thinks she is?
Virginia Woolf was alert to this problem, if that’s what it is, because she was alert to most things she was reading. In reading Byron, she said, it was always ‘difficult to be certain whether we are looking at a man or his writings’. While analysing Aurora Leigh for the Yale Review, she noted that the Brownings’ love story attracted more attention than their poetry – and then she got hooked herself: ‘I lay in the garden and read the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh and I couldn’t resist making him a Life.’ Hence Flush, which naturally turned out to be a runaway success with a nation of dog-lovers. Woof, Woolf.
But this will not do if we are to cement Virginia Woolf into the modern pantheon. If she really is ‘the greatest of all British women writers’, as it says on the dust jacket of Julia Briggs’s book, then we must concentrate our minds on the dedicated artist and iron-willed feminist and not let our attention stray to the gossipy, bitchy, serpentine, snobbish, occasionally raucous, intermittently anti-Semitic, quintessential Bloomsberry. If Woolf is to be canonized as the patron saint of gender studies, then we may countenance her affair with Vita Sackville-West (though perhaps raising an eyebrow at its more skittish upper-class moments), but we must airbrush anything which suggests that now and then she took a more favourable view of marriage and conventional life. For example, when Leonard stopped her from going to Paris to comfort her grief-stricken sister whose son Julian had just been killed in Spain: ‘Then I was overcome with happiness. Then we walked round the square love making – after 25 years we can’t bear to be separate. It is an enormous pleasure, being wanted: a wife.’ You would need a stony heart too not to be touched by her reflection a decade later on their decision not to have a child (mostly Leonard’s and taken on very dodgy medical advice): ‘A little more self-control on my part, and we might have had a boy of 12, a girl of 10. This always makes me wretched in the early hours.’
Julia Briggs is too conscientious and fair-minded a biographer not to let us see these sides too, but for the most part she sticks to her mission, which is to show us Virginia Woolf not only in a room of her own but on her own in it. Although evidently a highly sociable person, Briggs tells us, ‘it was what she did when she was alone, walking or sitting at her desk, for which we now remember her’. An odd formulation this, one which would go without saying for almost any memorable writer whether male or female, from Pascal to P. G. Wodehouse, from Jane Austen to George Eliot, but which somehow does need to be asserted in the case of Virginia Woolf, as though there would otherwise be something shaky or blurred in the case for her greatness, as though even after taking Mrs Woolf out of Bloomsbury we were still worrying whether it would be possible to take the Bloomsbury out of Mrs Woolf.
This is a Virginia with little or no Lytton or Carrington or Duncan or Maynard or Saxon. The Stephens and the Stracheys hardly get a look-in. We start with Virginia, at the age of twenty-one, just after the death of her father, walking along the down by the edge of the sea at Manorbier, Pembrokeshire, wanting to write ‘a book – a book – but what book?’ There right at the beginning of her career we may sniff a clue to both the splendours and the poverty of Woolf’s writing. Other people start out wanting to write a book about Venice or the discovery of sex or the trade-union movement. Virginia Stephen just wants to write a book.
Professor Briggs’s method is to take us through the books she did write, devoting roughly a chapter to each: how they were composed, the wearisome series of drafts they went through, their critical reception and their sales. We are told what Leonard thought of each one, what Morgan thought, what Tom Eliot thought. At the end of each chapter, the dust jacket by Vanessa Bell is reproduced – the principal appearance by the sister who in most portraits of Virginia plays such a key role.
This resolutely literary approach to Virginia’s life has both an enhancing and an unsettling effect. Julia Briggs brings out Woolf’s sterling qualities: her courage in dealing with her recurrent overwhelming depressions, her determination to do her very best and not to let her work slip down towards mediocrity as she defined it, her soldiering on in both life and letters.
But Briggs cannot altogether exclude the other, more frivolous and wilful Virginia, whose sudden bursting-in gives us quite a shock, since we have been given so little warning of her existence: the Virginia who says ‘I do not like the Jewish voice, I do not like the Jewish laugh’; the Virginia who, walking along the towpath, shudders as she has to pass a long line of ‘imbeciles’ – ‘It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed’; the Virginia who wearies of her serious feminist friends going on about the massacre of the Armenians – ‘I laughed to myself over the quantities of Armenians. How can one mind whether they number 4,000 or 4,000,000?’; the Virginia who cannot see what her sister sees in Clive Bell, ‘that funny little creature twitching his pink skin’, before herself making up to the funny little creature, now her brother-in-law, and being disappointed that he doesn’t kiss her. We are spared here the stream of complaints about the vulgarity and stupidity of the lower orders that fill her diaries, although Briggs does mention that when Woolf’s annoying but devoted cook, Nellie Boxall, went into hospital for a kidney operation, Virginia instantly advertised for a replacement in Time and Tide.
Briggs sometimes excuses her subject’s more startling callousnesses as a sign that she is about to go mad again. The treatment here of this subject, admittedly a very difficult one, is not entirely consistent. We are given first to understand that its origin is largely inherited. Virginia’s father was a depressive. Her half-sister Laura spent most of her adult life in an institution. Her cousin, J. K. Stephen, the heroic scholar and athlete, went mad and cut his throat. Within the family Virginia herself had been notorious as a child for her uncontrollable rages – ‘Goat’s mad’, the cry would go up.
At other times, though, Briggs toys with Laingian ideas of the dysfunctional f
amily being the cause of supposed insanity (goat = scapegoat), and even with the notion that ‘the very practice of her art required her to adopt a position as a critic and outsider, even as “mad”, if the society she criticised defined its particular prejudices as “sane”’. This is surely to brush aside Virginia’s own agonized accounts of the horrors of her condition and to caricature the robust and plainspoken quality of her critiques of society – usually appreciated as such by those who might not necessarily agree with them.
Nor will it do to blame Leonard Woolf, as her more fanatical admirers like to do. She herself constantly repeated that the ‘twist in her head’ came from way back. And it was with Leonard’s unflagging help that, after her catastrophic breakdown and overdose of Veronal in 1913, she managed to keep on anything resembling an even keel for nearly thirty years until her final breakdown and suicide. It is hard to imagine how any companion of either sex could have done more to make her life seem worth living than Leonard did. And she knew it and said it.
Julia Briggs makes me think better of Virginia Woolf as a person – in her own style gallant, sympathetic, stoical – while leaving, perhaps without meaning to, a trail of fresh clues as to why I find most of her novels in some way unsatisfying, especially those which are widely regarded as landmarks of modernism.
English Voices Page 12
