The Teller Not the Tale: George Gissing and Biographical Criticism

The Teller Not the Tale: George Gissing and Biographical Criticism DAVID GRYLLS University of Oxford "THE STORY OF GISSLNG," wrote Russell Kirk in 1950, "is better than any of his novels." The opposite view was expressed by Walter Allen in 1948: "the novels of Gissing, one suspects, have been obscured by the legend of Gissing the man."1 Despite their different judgments, what both writers recognised was the dominance in Gissing studies of the biographical tradition. Although, since 1950, Gissing criticism has diversified, as Pierre Coustillas's "Recent Work and Close Prospects in Gissing Studies" demonstrates, this tradition has remained very powerful. Even those critics who object to it are likely to succumb to its influence. In his George Gissing: A Bibliography, published in 1975, Michael Collie expressed opposition to "the heavy biographical approach to Gissing's work"—the fact that the novelist was "at the mercy of people more interested in his wives than in his work." Yet in 1977 Collie himself published a biography of Gissing, and in 1979 a critical study heavily reliant on biographical contentions. Both books contained numerous biographical errors: several of the most remarkable related to Gissing's wives.2 Few critics of Gissing would wish to assert the absolute irrelevance of his life to his work, yet the sheer persistence of the biographical perspective requires explanation and analysis. It is certainly more resilient than with most other authors. New Critical manifestoes on the autonomy of the artefact appear to have left Gissing studies untouched; more recent poststructuralist annulments of the author have had only limited impact. This article will canvass some possible explanations—the personal "voice" in Gissing's fiction, the sensational episodes in his life, the achievements of Gissing scholarship—while offering a historical overview of the biographical tradition, an assessment of its strength and weakness. My conclusion will summarise Gissing's own views on the relationship between life and art—invoking biographical evidence to counter biographical readings. The practice of treating Gissing's books biographically could only become well established, of course, once the facts of his biography were known. In his lifetime some crucial events were kept secret and 454 GRYLLS: George Gissing and Biographical Criticism most reviewers were not anxious to reach beyond the works. Gissing was the only first-rank writer, declared the Echo in 1893, "about whom the outside world has never evinced any unusual curiosity."3 This statement—which reads rather poignantly now—was not quite true even then. As well as some inaccurate "interviews" and feature articles,4 we can easily find contemporary reviews which indulge in biographical guesswork or personality-inference. The former venture was riskier and more often wrong. A reviewer of Gissing's first novel, Workers in the Dawn, correctly deduced that its author must be young (57). But a reviewer of The Unclassed seemed to think that "George Gissing" was a nom de plume like George Eliot ("the work plainly shows a female hand"), and a reviewer of Thyrza similarly declared: "we would like to relieve ourselves publicly of the firm conviction that 'George Gissing' is of the feminine gender" (69, 104). In 1896 Kate Woodbridge Michaelis, asking "Who is George Gissing?" in the Boston Evening Transcript, piled up a whole paragraph of biographical speculation: Formulating the man from his books, I should describe him as unhappily married to an unappreciative wife, blessed with a large number of unpleasant women friends and relatives, I should add that children, either his own or other people's, were to him an unknown quantity, that he was absolutely destitute of the saving grace of humor, that he had never been instructed in the fundamental principles of the Christian religion, etc. (270) Probably most of this was untrue, Michaelis added winningly—and, as it happens, justifiably, though the point about marriage was a shrewd enough conjecture. More common among contemporary reviewers was the attempt to infer not the facts of the writer's life but the outlines of his personality . That Gissing was gloomy, sensitive, sincere, fastidious, conscientious , idealistic, was frequently surmised by reviewers. Only rarely was it suggested that Gissing's work lacked the stamp of the author's personality. A few critics complained...