The passionate genius of a neurotic

One of the great neurotics among 19th century English urban novelists is George Gissing, a writer who lived on intimate terms with an ego so damaged that it forced him into a shabby isolation of his own making from which, paradoxically, came books of luminous intelligence and a startling timeliness. To read Gissing today is to find oneself in the company of a contemporary spirit. His style is plain, his obsessions sex and money, his resentments undisguised. We know this man. Of all the writers of his generation -- Thomas Hardy, Henry James, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad -- it is Gissing alone whose angry, brilliant projections most persuade us that a man recognizable in our time is writing.

I first came to Gissing’s work 25 years ago when a friend urged on me “The Odd Women.” I reread the book every six months for years. Great books about “new women” had been written by men of Gissing’s time and place -- within 20 years there had been Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure,” James’ “Portrait of a Lady,” Meredith’s “Diana of the Crossways” -- but, remarkable as these others were, this was the one that spoke most directly to me. I could see and hear the characters as if they were women and men of my own acquaintance. I knew intimately what was tearing these people apart. What’s more, I recognized myself as one of the “odd women.”

The novel is set in London in 1887. Mary Barfoot, a gentlewoman in her 50s, is running a secretarial school to prepare middle-class girls for occupations other than that of teacher or governess. Her colleague is Rhoda Nunn, 30, darkly handsome, intellectually superior, uncompromising in her contempt for love. Against these two are set a group of friends from Rhoda’s girlhood: the three Madden sisters, daughters of a country doctor whose death has left them nearly penniless and fit for nothing, all their hopes pinned on a successful marriage for the youngest, pretty Monica. Enter Edmund Widdowson and Everard Barfoot -- the first a timid clerk in his 40s, just come into a modest fortune, who picks Monica up on a Sunday afternoon in the park; the second, Mary’s smart, well-to-do, strong-willed cousin, whose intellectual sparring with Rhoda (the glory of the book) becomes steadily, and mutually, eroticized.

These two couples -- the one progressive, the other conservative -- are the heart of the novel. Monica will marry Widdowson only to learn what a life sentence marriage to a narrow, frightened man can be. Rhoda will not marry Barfoot, who challenges her to a free union that, in the end, she has neither the trust in him nor the confidence in herself to make. The story of these four is the one that Gissing tracks, with neither sympathy nor contempt but with skill, patience and immense understanding. Ultimately, the men are undone by their need to master and the women by their lack of courage. Monica and Widdowson come to disaster, Barfoot makes a conventional marriage, and Rhoda retreats into a sexless feminism that passes for independence. For one brief moment only, a small part of each of these people reached out to embrace the difficulty of struggling toward the self-awareness required to form a “new” alliance -- and then fell back, in anxiety and confusion, to that place in the spirit where it is acceptable to no longer go on making the effort.

Now, of course, this is exactly what happens in the great Hardy, James and Meredith novels too, the crucial difference being only that Gissing is the master realist among them. It’s the sheer verisimilitude of the talk in “The Odd Women” that makes the book so exhilarating. The conversations are extraordinary for their length and breadth -- their pace, fluidity, powers of observation -- and for the excitement of this particular exchange flying back and forth among well-matched protagonists.

It is especially exciting to follow Rhoda Nunn as her polemics and her emotions flare and as we see that she cannot rise to the consequences they have set in motion. Hardy’s Sue Bridehead, James’ Isabel Archer, Meredith’s Diana are magnificent creatures, one and all; but in Rhoda, Gissing captures the fears, anger, smarts and untested bravado that so characterized a generation of American women who came of political age during the 1970s women’s movement. As Rhoda moves inexorably toward the moment when she fails to reconcile the distance between declared independence and achieved independence, she becomes a walking embodiment of the gap between theory and practice: the place in which so many of us have found ourselves, time and again.

Gissing did not write “The Odd Women” because he was a feminist. He most definitely was not; neither was he a socialist, as is commonly thought. He wrote it, as he wrote all his books, because he identified profoundly with proud outsiderness, understood its psychology down to the ground and was forever brooding on the failings of a social system that forced men and women into an emotional incapacity that ensured a spiritual isolation toward which he felt all life was necessarily tending.

He was born in 1857 in Yorkshire, the son of a druggist who died young, consigning a wife and five children to genteel poverty. George, however, was a gifted student who won a scholarship to a college in Manchester that was to prepare him for the university. Here he did extraordinarily well, carrying off all the prizes and honors and discovering that he was a born academic. Yet at 18 his future derailed when he met and fell in love with a young prostitute named Nell Harrison. On the eve of graduation, he was caught stealing from his fellow students, expelled from the college and sent to prison for a month; the money had been meant for Nell. Released from prison, Gissing was sent off to America for a year; he traveled aimlessly, wrote his first stories and nearly perished of the loneliness that was to become his life’s companion. He returned to England, went looking for Nell Harrison, found her and, astonishingly, married her. They went to London and moved into “lodgings,” and Gissing began both his struggle to write and his accommodation to the stigma of social punishment that had left him, in his own eyes, beyond the pale of respectable society. The marriage, of course, turned out to be pure hell, and within a few years the couple had separated.

This place -- the one beyond the pale -- was the one Gissing clearly needed to occupy, as he duplicated it relentlessly throughout his short life (he died in 1903 at age 46). His books had begun to sell by 1884, and he was making a living from them as well as acquiring a reputation, but these developments brought him neither peace nor the society he craved. Although literary people began to seek him out (H.G. Wells insisted on becoming a friend), Gissing continued to experience himself as poor and alone, condemned to the company, if any, of the half-educated. “It is my fate,” he wrote to an acquaintance in 1890, “to be known by the first class people and to associate with the second class -- even the third and fourth. It will always be so.” It was self-created loneliness, but of course that is not how it seemed. Later, to this same person, he wrote, “This solitude is killing me. I can’t endure it any longer.... I must resume my old search for some decent working-girl who will come and live with me. I am too poor to marry an equal, and cannot live alone.”

Sure enough, Nell Gissing died, alone in a London slum, in 1888, and three years later Gissing picked up a servant girl in the street who became his second wife and provided him with yet another disastrous marriage, this one ending in rage and mental instability instead of alcohol and prostitution. Needless to say, he could never invite anyone to the house.

A character who appears in most of Gissing’s books is based on himself: the literary man of taste, educated and fairly bred, but with no money. Without money he cannot hope to marry a decent girl or make a home to which he can invite friends. Thus, Gissing’s protagonist is destined for solitariness and sexual starvation, both of which drive him into the complex circumstance that forms the plot of the novel wherein -- whether the book is set among the London poor or among the London middle class -- Gissing makes a thorough exploration of both the external and internal miasma into which poverty has plunged our man. The most brilliant of these is also the most famous.

“New Grub Street” is Gissing’s “Middlemarch.” Into this book he put every kind of person -- from those whose developed sensibilities preclude success to those whose mild talent and shrewd manipulations ensured success. The scene is London’s vast scribbling life in the 1880s. The characters are writers of all sorts: journalists, novelists, scholars, book reviewers and hangers-on who act as “editors” to those intent on vanity press publication. The shared view: If you write trash, you succeed; if you write authentically, you fail. (Do you ever fail!) The major characters are Edwin Reardon, a painfully high-minded author of serious novels (Gissing’s stand-in), and Jasper Milvain, an up-and-coming literary journalist with a strong sense of the marketplace. Their women are a pair of cousins, Amy and Marian Yule. Amy is bright and shallow, Marian thoughtful and sensitive. Jasper and Amy will prevail, Reardon and Marian go under. Around these four is grouped a cast of characters, minor and major, that very nearly rivals Dickens for its horrifying and inventive juiciness; and once again, the conversations are richly long and psychologically satisfying.

What makes “New Grub Street” remarkable, though, is Gissing’s depiction of London literary life in the 1880s. There is not a writer alive who will not be startled, even frightened, by its life-likeness: the descriptions of commercially blunt publishers, nasty editors running small-minded quarterlies, literature produced by the pound and paid for by the pound, the economic evil of the royalty and advance system, the soul-destroying insecurity of writers, both marginal and successful. No one has captured this life as fully, as lucidly, as madly as Gissing has here, in this extraordinary work.

He wrote 22 novels, most of them filled with remarkable, plain-speaking life, all of them characterized by an emotional intelligence of a high order, and nearly all riddled through with the rage and regret of a protagonist who believes heart and soul that a malevolent fate has consigned him to deprivation of a monumental order. These novels are the work of a man whose emotional damage had the great good luck to mesh with a world of social realities only too happy to mirror his troubled soul.

In “Born in Exile,” the most openly autobiographical of his novels, Gissing comes closest to acknowledging that “the system” alone cannot really be held accountable. Here, the major character -- an impoverished young man, intellectually superior, living alone in lodgings, boiling over with misanthropic unhappiness -- thinks he is a prickly misfit because society will not permit him to prosper. On the other hand, it is clearly because he is so prickly that he cannot gain the affection of those who might help him on his way. In his bitterness, he brings the world down on his own head so precipitously, so rashly, so unnecessarily that it is impossible for the reader not to conclude that some deep inner fragility, meeting up not with the malevolent but with the indifferent world, is at the root of his misery. Now and then, the protagonist has a flash of insight about his situation. “My strongest emotions,” he observes, “seem to be absorbed in revolt; for once that I feel tenderly, I have a hundred fierce, resentful, tempestuous moods. To be suave and smiling in common intercourse costs me an effort. I have to act the part, and this habit makes me skeptical, whenever I am really prompted to gentleness.”

Sometimes when I read Gissing, I feel like the skeptical analyst around whom the talented analysand is running intellectual rings, and in a burst of exasperation I find myself thinking, “You want me to believe this happened to you, not because of you?” But then the exhilaration of the writing rises up, hot and strong, sweeping all reservations before it.

Gissing’s work is one of the clearest examples we have in English prose of the value of a medium-sized literary genius coupled with an impassioned intelligence and intensity of need, transforming the homely materials of neurotic grievance into a power of thought and feeling, often profound, that no amount of analytic complaint can put in its place.