The Oscillating Text: A Reading of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft

30 THE OSCILLATING TEXT: A READING OF THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF HENRY RYECROFT By Andrew Hassam (University College, Cardiff) The first of the following quotations comes from George Gissing's commonplace book, the second from his The Pr i vate Papers of Henry Ryecroft. The similarity between the episodes they describe demonstrates the extent to which Gissing was prepared to transpose a record of his own experiences into his most popular yet most equivocal book: This afternoon (Sept. '92) walking near Heavitree, a still, autumnal air, I heard a man shout far off in a field, & his voice had a note like that of the peasant singing at Paestum. It was terrible.1 I was at ramble in the lanes, when, from somewhere at a distance, there sounded the voice of a countryman--strange to say—singing. The notes were indistinct, but they rose, to my ear, with a moment's musical sadness, and of a sudden my heart was stricken with a memory so keen that I knew not whether it was pain or delight. For the sound seemed to me that of a peasant's song which I once heard whilst sitting among the ruins of Paestum.2 Such a correspondence between the commonplace book and Ryecroft poses the problem of how far the latter work is fiction or factual autobiography. If Henry Ryecroft shares experiences with Gissing, to what degree i_s_ Henry Ryecroft Gissing? Of course all works of fiction rely to some extent on the experiences of their author and the question of how far art mirrors life is by no means new. However, in Ryecroft the correspondences with Gissing's own "private papers" (his diaries, the commonplace book, his letters) are so close and so extensive as to produce in the reader an uncertainty about the actual status of Ryecroft as fiction. It is true there are important verbal differences between the correspondences, and these have an effect on the meaning or the sense of the episodes narrated. But these differences do not of themselves indicate whether the work is to be read as fact or fiction, and most readers would agree that both extracts above refer to the same event. Indeed, the whole notion of "autobiographical" depends upon such a recognition. It is these correspondences, then, that produce the uncertainty about the status of Ryecroft and an examination at 31 this level, whilst it might not solve the problem of where fact ends and fiction begins, will at least provide a focus for it, a new focus which has become increasingly relevant with the publication of the papers of other writers, such as Virginia Woolf and Evelyn Waugh. What I propose, therefore, is to use Ryecroft as a starting point for a reappraisal of an old problem, looking first at the uncertainty of critical opinion (which reflects the uncertainty of most readers), and then trying to locate the specific causes of this unease. Finally, having reformulated the problem, I shall extend the discussion to consider the implications of this uneasy reading upon our notion of authorship in general, implications which threaten the very distinction between fact and fiction. In 1957, Jackson I. Cope, arguing against the general thrust of previous criticism, wrote that Ryecroft's "personality reflects Gissing's no more accurately than Gissing's actual career paralleled Ryecroft's."3 For Cope, the character of Henry Ryecroft is not autobiographical but a fictive creation subordinated to the larger concerns of Ryecroft as a book, and this view of the relationship between Gissing and Henry Ryecroft has been reinforced steadily since. Jacob Korg, for instance, states in 1965 that "Though it is often difficult to tell where the character, Ryecroft, ends, and the real Gissing begins. . . . the important fact remains that Ryecroft is a fiction distinct from his author";4 whilst Gillian Tindall in 1974 calls Ryecroft a piece of "pseudoautobiography ": "it is not a novel but a piece of bogus autobiography and blatant wish-fulfilment. . . ."5 Thus by 1975 Adrian Poole is able to assert with confidence, "The argument about the extent to which Ryecroft ¿s_ Gissing need not detain us," Ryecroft being essentially a "fantasy" which "embodies Gissing's image of satisfied desire...