How to Read Gissing

188 HOW TO READ GISSING By John Halperin (University of Southern California) No English novelist put more of his own life into his novels than George Gissing. To read his books without a detailed knowledge of his biography is to read blindfolded. The critic who attempts to deal with Gissing's fiction phenomenologically or from a narrow structuralist approach has little chance of understanding him. Gissing's work offers an unrivalled challenge to biographical criticism to show what it can do. No more than a sketch of the life can be given here. Gissing's father was a pharmacist, an amateur botanist, and a dabbler in local politics - an intelligent and sensitive man. Gissing's mother was apparently less sympathetic - religious, narrow, unimaginative . Born in Yorkshire in 1857 into this lower-middleclass family (two brothers, two sisters), the future novelist received a classical education at a local school and at 14 was awarded a scholarship at Owens College, Manchester. After doing brilliantly there and passing the matriculation examination for London University, Gissing was expelled from the Manchester school for stealing money. He had become romantically entangled with a young prostitute, Nell Harrison, and wanted to help her. He was sent to prison at hard labor for a month and of course had to abandon any idea of a university career. After this he spent a year in America teaching, writing, and nearly starving to death. When he returned to London he took up with Nell again, and married her in 1879 - despite the fact that he had probably contracted syphilis from her several years earlier. Gissing lived with Nell until 1883. hy which time her promiscuity and her alcoholism with its attendant incipient lunacy had destroyed his small stock of peace of mind. He left her, and lived alone for the next seven years (Nell died in 1888). By the late 1880s Gissing's writings were beginning to earn enough for travel abroad; still, he never realized enough from them - even during his years of comparative comfort in the mid-1890s - to relax for long, or to stop working for more than a few weeks at a time. In I890 in a fit of loneliness he picked up Edith Underwood, a working-class girl, married her in I89I, and lived with her until I897. when her bouts of violent temper and her inability to ru,n their household exasperated him beyond recall. Once again, he left his wife. The marriage had produced two sons. One lived with Gissing's sisters in Yorkshire; the other stayed with Edith until 1902, when she was institutionalized (he then joined his brother; Edith died in 1917)· Gissing spent his last years in France in a common-law union (somewhat less stormy than the others) with Gabrielle Fleury, the French translator of New Grub Street, and seeking acclimate congenial to his weakening lungs. He died in I903I of pneumonia, in France. Gabrielle lived on until 1954. The elder Gissing son died in World War I, the younger lived until 1975· These bare facts, plus some knowledge of the man's neurotic temperament, are indispensable to the would-be Gissing critic. 189 A fatalist who in his twenties looked in his handkerchief when he coughed and at thirty was sure he was about to die, Gissing believed that peace and happiness eluded most men, and certainly had eluded him. A compulsive reader, a student of languages, an accomplish classicist, the fastidious, hypersensitive Gissing craved order and solitude yet frequently complained of loneliness. Simultaneously a recluse and a clastrophobe, he rarely introduced his friends to one another and thought the custom of people living in close proximity to each other was monstrous. A hypochondriac, he had all kinds of dietary fetishes (he thought Gabrielle's mother was systematically trying to kill him with her cooking), worried constantly about the weather, and never rested. He tried riding a bicycle for exercise but found it made him too nervous. When his friend H. G. Wells wrote that "the genre of Gissing's novels is nervous exhaustion,"! Wells was referring to the atmosphere in which the novels were written as well as to the books themselves. Despite his tendency to...