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Review: REREADING: On the money: It's harder than ever to make a living from writing, so an excellent time to revisit George Gissing's classic novel of impecunious hacks, New Grub Street. How did its author manage to get by, asks Anthony Quinn
[July 25, 2014]

Review: REREADING: On the money: It's harder than ever to make a living from writing, so an excellent time to revisit George Gissing's classic novel of impecunious hacks, New Grub Street. How did its author manage to get by, asks Anthony Quinn


(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The allure of the writing life is powerful to non-writers, and no wonder. You can do the work from home or on the fly, you can choose the subject, and the hours are unbeatable. It is still just mysterious enough to retain a low-level sort of glamour: to say that "I'm a writer" is at once to claim a privilege and to raise a smokescreen against the inquisitive, who would like to know what you do all day.



It's a good life, writing. But is it a good living? In the present day that's increasingly hard to judge. For a few, it still is, but for many it is barely sufficient to keep body and soul together. The tension between writing as a noble vocation and the cold necessity of making it pay lies at the heart of George Gissing's New Grub Street. It is a great novel about creativity and money and marriage, and its greatness lies in the subtlety with which these three subjects become co-dependent on each other.

Like all great books, it deepens with rereading. On first encounter the story traces a simultaneous rise and fall, set against the London of the 1880s - a city of choking fogs, obscure garrets and starvation suppers. Edwin Reardon is a novelist who once enjoyed a minor success but has since lost all confidence in his talent. He clings to the love of his wife, Amy, an ambitious middle-class woman who urges him to be pragmatic. "Art must be practised as a trade," she tells him, a sentiment echoed by their friend Jasper Milvain, an enterprising young litterateur who sees his way to opportunity through self-promotion. In contrast to Reardon's faltering integrity, Jasper is cheerfully cynical about the marketplace, maintaining a prodigious output of "rubbish" for magazines and periodicals while ingratiating himself with editors and influential patrons. The difference in temperament between the two men is marked from the start, though it is their contrasting moral outlooks that prove more significant to Gissing's purpose.


The narrative works its way around an ensemble of types - novelists, journalists, editors, publishers, even a newfangled "agent" - who strive to earn a living by the pen. Nearly all of them represent a kind of warning. Alfred Yule is an ageing literary journeyman embittered by his hasty marriage to a meek but uneducated wife; ashamed of her lowly origins (she has disreputable relatives in Holloway), he has refused to introduce her to polite society and now blames her for his exclusion from it. His daughter, Marian, works as a drudge for him at the British Museum, all too aware that her father's domestic tyranny is born of his disappointments as a bookman and his nursing of professional slights, imagined or otherwise. In consequence she has become soul-sickened by the dreary routines of literary manufacture and haunted by its insect-like toil. In a famous passage she sits in the museum's reading room, oppressed by a vision of the readers at the radiating lines of desks as "hapless flies caught in a huge web".

Not all are so discouraged by the challenges of Grub Street. Ironically, Reardon's friend and fellow classicist Harold Biffen is the character nearest of all to destitution yet, until the very end, he presents the bravest face. A keen chronicler of the "ignobly decent", he is writing a minutely realistic and magnificently hopeless novel entitled Mr Bailey, Grocer. Like Reardon, Biffen is a man unsuited to the "practical" demands of living, but unlike him, he works on irrepressibly. He may well be the inadvertent hero of the novel. In his reverent admiration of Amy Reardon, one discerns in him an essential innocence, and the almost certain prospect of failure: "A woman's love was to him the unattainable ideal; already 35 years old, he had no prospect of ever being rich enough to assure himself a daily dinner; marriage was wildly out of the question." A knowledge of the author's own life lends an ominous perspective. Born the eldest of five children in Wakefield on 22 November 1857, Gissing was raised in a modest but respectable lower-middle-class household, quite different from the slum conditions his early novels would investigate. He was close to his erudite father, a pharmacist with interests in botany and poetry, and suffered more on his early death (in 1870) for having little in common with his distant "incurious" mother. As a brilliant student of Latin and Greek, the 18-year-old Gissing seemed destined for an academic career until, in May 1876, his life changed dramatically and for ever. He was caught stealing money from the cloakroom of Owens College, Manchester, convicted and sentenced to a month in prison. The money (five shillings and twopence) was intended to help out an alcoholic prostitute, Nell Harrison, whom he later married in the hope of redeeming her. It proved a terrible miscalculation, and, after repeated salvage attempts on his part and much abusive behaviour on hers, he left her for good. The next time he saw Nell, in March 1888, she was lying dead from syphilis in a Lambeth boarding house.

To make one disastrous union is a misfortune; to make two looks like recklessness. For Gissing, the questions of marriage and money were intimately linked. He felt himself disqualified from marrying "well" in the belief that no respectable middle-class woman would be willing to endure poverty. He dramatised the impossibility in the case of Amy, whose faith in her husband's future success has proved illusory. After months of desperate economising, penury has them in a chokehold. When Reardon finally declares himself fit only to be a clerk, Amy refuses to be dragged down with him and leaves. It is pathetic but, in Gissing's view, inevitable: "Man has a right to nothing in this world that he cannot pay for. Did you imagine that love was an exception? Foolish idealist! Love is one of the first things to be frightened away by poverty." Jasper has foreseen this problem from the start and has determined to attach himself to a woman of substance. He believes he has found one in Marian, who appears to have secured a small inheritance on the death of a relative. In a twist typical of the novel, the promised money fails to come through, and Jasper, true to his self-serving philosophy, wriggles free of their engagement.

Gissing the writer is quite clear-sighted about the dangers of marrying above (in Reardon's case) or below (in Yule's) one's social or intellectual level. Yet Gissing the man could not heed his own warning. This much becomes sorrowfully apparent on considering his letters and diary entries during the summer of 1890 when he was trying (and failing) to start on New Grub Street. Always of a fragile temperament, he had suffered recent trials of loneliness acute even by his standard. Having made overtures to one or two women "of a better kind" that came to nothing, he wrote to his friend Eduard Bertz in August 1890, "This solitude is killing me . . . In London I must resume my search for some decent work-girl who will come & live with me. I am too poor to marry an equal, & cannot live alone." Then, on 24 September, his "search" paid off: at the Oxford Musical Hall he picked up a Camden work-girl named Edith Underwood, whom he described in a letter to his sister Ellen as "peculiarly gentle and pliable", adding that she was "not unintelligent". Not an enthusiastic assessment, nor, as it transpired, an accurate one.

In the short term, though, his creative blockage was resolved and the book on which he had made a number of false starts began to flow. Through the autumn he wrote at a pace that poor Reardon could only envy. On 6 December he recorded in his diary "finished New Grub Street". It had taken him just over 10 weeks. Meanwhile, life had been keeping a close distance to art. When Reardon muses that he ought to have married a "simple work-girl", Biffen admonishes him: such a girl, once disappointed, would have grown spiteful and vicious, he says, misconstruing everything he said and did. "The effect upon your nature would have been degrading. In the end, you must have abandoned every effort to raise her to your own level, and either sunk to hers or made a rupture. Who doesn't know the story of such attempts?" Who indeed? Gissing was reading his publisher's proofs of the novel when, on 25 February 1891, he married Edith at St Pancras Register Office. She proved to be in every particular the harridan he feared, mean-tempered, quarrelsome, suspicious, violent towards servants and nurses. He followed the example of Yule in keeping her away from his own society. The birth of two sons exacerbated the tension in the household, and at times Gissing even feared for the children's safety. A typical diary entry in mid-May 1892 runs: "Uproar in the house, owing to breakage of plates and dishes. Misery." The tumult came to an end only on their separation in 1897. The second Mrs Gissing died 20 years later in a Dorset mental asylum.

Gissing's mind as evidenced in the fretful pages of his diary seems detached from the one that coolly unpicks the psychology of his characters. Few novels have been more subtle in plotting the course of a married couple's agonised estrangement. Some commentators have likened Amy Reardon to Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch, a woman who, in pursuit of social elevation, marries very much for better, not for worse. Yet Amy is no genteel parasite. She is beady and sometimes cold, but for the most part sympathetic; she is perhaps more tolerant than many a wife would be faced with a husband as needy and despairing as Reardon.

Jasper and Marian are also superbly drawn, both separately and as a couple. At the beginning of the novel, Jasper cuts an attractively insolent figure, abounding in charm and energy. Marian is the gentlest of the story's literary toilers, the most loving, and the most grievously traduced. It is telling that when news of her inheritance comes out she blooms, and surprises Jasper with a new-found confidence. Money fortifies her self-esteem. If Biffen can be called the hero of the book, she is its heroine. Her yearning for Jasper chafes poignantly against our suspicions of his unworthiness. Some readers may be tempted to wonder how it might have been if Reardon had fallen for Marian instead of her cousin Amy.

There is no getting around how deeply pessimistic a novel New Grub Street is. Wilde's droll definition in The Importance of Being Earnest - "The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means" - is exactly reversed here. I have not read a more affecting account of a death than Reardon's - the Calvary of his feverish journey to Brighton, the racking torment of his decline in a "hired chamber", Amy's tearful attendance, and the arrival at his deathbed of Biffen, faithful unto the last. With a ruthless irony, Gissing entitles the chapter "Reardon Becomes Practical". (He dies of congestion of the lungs, the same disease that would kill the novelist 12 years later, exiled in France). Biffen's own fate is handled in a chapter of hardly any less pathos.

Reading the novel today, one is likely to be struck by its freshness and pertinence. True, London is seldom shrouded in those impenetrable fogs, horse-drawn omnibuses no longer clop around the streets, and gentlemen have ceased to sport chimney-pot hats on their social calls. Publishing and journalism have changed, too, of course, and are still changing against the wild frontier of the internet. In Gissing's day, Amazon was still only a long river in South America. Blogs, social networking websites and self-publishing have spawned legions of would-be writers. The idea of writing as a professional skill is losing its constituency and becoming something else - self-advertisement, confessional therapy, "feedback". It's becoming, in a word, free. An ink-stained tide is loosed; the centre cannot hold. Thus we return to the crisis outlined at the start: more and more people are writing, while fewer and fewer are being paid for it.

Parts of New Grub Street live on in a different medium. The names of its protagonists are honoured in the brilliant Radio 4 comedy series Ed Reardon's Week, whose penurious title character scrapes a living as ghostwriter/freelance-dogsbody while keeping an envious eye on his hated friend and rival "Jaz" Milvain. Where Reardon once toiled over his three-volume novels in rooms off Regent's Park, his 21st-century counterpart shares his Berkhamsted flat with a cat named Elgar. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But the want of money remains the same.

New Grub Street is published by Vintage Classics on 7 August.

Captions: Impenetrable fogs and horse-drawn omnibuses . . . a detail from John O'Connor's 1881 painting of Pentonville Road, London (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited.

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