Allusions to Gissing in George Orwell

ALLUSIONS TO GISSING IN THE COMPLETE WORKS OF GEORGE ORWELL ed. Davison et al

It is more than a decade since the Complete Works (CW) of George Orwell started publication, and now the last eleven volumes have appeared.[1] This extraordinarily comprehensive edition, edited in minute detail by Peter Davison and others, contains the definitive texts of all of Orwell’s books in nine volumes plus, in the volumes just published, “all Orwell’s known essays, poems, plays, letters, journalism, broadcasts and diaries”. It contains, in fact, virtually every extant scrap of Orwell’s writing, as well as a series of appendices on such matters as the contents of Orwell’s library. Its crowning touch is a cumulative index so comprehensive that the entry for “Muriel (goat)” is followed by 15 page references and an editorial footnote.

That Orwell greatly admired George Gissing above most novelists and owed a large literary debt to him has long been recognised. Mark Connelly recently published a book tracing out some of the connections, though unfortunately he wrote without access to CW.[2] There are, to start with, the odd biographical coincidences and similarities in character and interests. Orwell was born in 1903, the year Gissing died (their lives overlapped by about six months), and both died of lung disease at just the same age, 46. Their careers lasted for not much more than twenty years, and both were prodigiously hard-working; yet both suffered pangs of guilt about their productivity. Orwell put it best. In an entry in his last literary notebook he wrote that “there has literally been not one day in which I did not feel that I was idling, that I was behind with the current job, & that my total output was miserably small. . . . I have never been able to get away from this neurotic feeling that I was wasting time. . . . But as soon as a book is finished, I begin, actually from the next day, worrying because the next one is not begun, & am haunted with the fear that there will never be a next one – that my impulse is exhausted for good & all” (20, p.204). It is hardly necessary to explain why such an insecure writer should feel attracted to the creator of Edwin Reardon. Indeed, he once said half-jokingly that New Grub Street ought to be kept right out of the hands of any professional writer.

There are other similarities: both were great social investigators, and shared a propensity to go slumming in disguise in search of low-life material. They had the same unerring eye for the repellent physical image. Orwell’s infamous detail of the full chamber-pot under the breakfast table in his lodging-house is just the sort of thing Gissing might have included, if he had had the nerve. Each one had a spare, sardonic sense of humour. Orwell admired Gissing’s lack of the English literary vice, facetiousness: “great virtue, no sense of humour” he said in his telegraphic “Geo. Gissing” notes, which are printed in these volumes for the first time (19, p.353). Finally, the two men produced two valuable short studies of Charles Dickens. Orwell’s famous essay, written in 1939, has three allusions to Gissing’s book Charles Dickens, which he certainly read carefully; he praised him here and elsewhere as “the best of the writers on Dickens” (12, p. 21).

It is true, of course, that the radical differences between the two are equally striking. Orwell, though Eton-educated, had no special liking for the classics, or any romantic feeling for the past, whereas Gissing was almost mawkishly in love with antiquity. Gissing would have abominated Orwell’s working assumption that “all art is propaganda”, though he would surely have read Animal Farm with a grim chuckle, as confirming his misanthropic view of human nature and political reform. It is easy to imagine what he would have thought of Orwell’s ‘wasting’ some of his best years in making cheery wartime broadcasts to the Empire. For his part, Orwell despised Gissing’s lack of political engagement and specially recommended his books for the insight they provide into the lower middle class roots of Fascism.

But what Orwell admired in Gissing’s work was its determined flatness, its pervasive grayness, its dogged investigation of genteel poverty among the “ignobly decent”; and these are exactly the qualities which he sought to emulate in his own novels. His novels of the 1930s, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming up for Air, are Gissingesque to a remarkable degree, especially the second, which reads, as Jacob Korg has said, rather like a ‘prequel’ to New Grub Street, with the unclassed Gordon Comstock as a version of Reardon in the easy, reckless days before he has taken the disastrous step of marrying Amy Yule.

Whenever it was that Orwell first fell under the influence of Gissing, the effect certainly persisted for the rest of his life. Indeed, unlikely though it may appear, I believe the master’s influence is still detectable in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is interesting to remember that Orwell was actually working on Nineteen Eighty-Four when he wrote his essay “George Gissing” in mid-1948. Could that be why he starts off the latter on a rather unexpected note, by talking guardedly about the merits of the immediately post-war world? “It is not easy to talk confidently about progress,” he admits; but progress is what he sees when he looks back sixty years. “There are many reasons . . . for thinking that the present age is a good deal better than the last one” – a opinion which he then substantiates by looking into the lost world of Gissing’s society. For what he was doing simultaneously in his embryonic novel was (in part) reverting to and recreating that world. When Orwell goes on in his essay to describe the quintessential Gissing flavour – “the grime, the stupidity, the ugliness, the sex-starvation, the furtive debauchery, the vulgarity, the bad manners, the censoriousness” (19, p.347) – this fits the ambience of Orwell’s last novel with remarkable fidelity as well.

We can now trace Orwell’s interest in Gissing in far more detail than was possible when the only printed source was the four volumes of the misleadingly-titled Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (CEJL) published in 1968.[3] In terms of crude statistics, the quantity of information about the relation between the two writers has, in fact, just about doubled. In the CEJL Gissing is mentioned in 12 distinct items, whereas in CW he appears in no fewer than 22 items, many of which have not been printed before. They augment our picture of the literary relationship rather than alter it. Among other things is printed Orwell’s first, shorter essay, “Not Enough Money: A Sketch of George Gissing” (15, pp. 45-47) which was published in Tribune in April 1943 and therefore predates the much more familiar “George Gissing” essay-review by five years. The wealth of editorial commentary is also invaluable. .

Unfortunately, even CW throws no more light on when exactly when Orwell first became acquainted with Gissing. Surprisingly, the name does not appear anywhere in volumes 10 and 11 of CW, which take Orwell up to the age of 36 and past the years when he wrote all the novels mentioned above. It could not have been later than 1935, for in his novel A Clergyman’s Daughter Orwell gives his heroine Dorothy Hare Gissing's The Odd Women to read as she eats her dismal, lonely Christmas dinner under a tree for the want of anywhere better to go.

Rather disconcertingly, even when he responded to a request in April 1940 from the editors of a guidebook to note some of the key influences on him as a writer, he listed Dickens, Charles Reade, Samuel Butler, Zola and Flaubert; and he particularly singled out Somerset Maugham. The name of Gissing would have fitted in quite well in such company, but Orwell did not mention him. How he got from there to the point of wanting to heap extravagant praise on his predecessor – in April 1943 he called him “perhaps the best novelist England has produced,” and to quell the reader’s raised eyebrow immediately adds defiantly, “I am not speaking frivolously” (15, p.45) -- is a minor mystery which even this edition cannot elucidate.

However, what we can do now is to make a more educated guess at how much of Gissing Orwell had actually absorbed. CW (20, p.291) reveals that at the time of his death Orwell owned only six works by him: Charles Dickens, In the Year of Jubilee, A Life’s Morning, New Grub Street, The Odd Women and The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. It does not seem very much – he owned far more Conrad, Henry James and Trollope – but the list is rather misleading. For one thing, it certainly reflects the sheer unavailability of editions in the first post-war years. He never read Born in Exile, for instance (“which some say is his masterpiece” said Orwell) because he could not find even a library copy. However, we know for sure that he read Demos, because he summarises its plot in “Not Enough Money” and possibly, but much less certainly, The Whirlpool and The Nether World because he mentions them very casually in “George Gissing”. In April 1946, he had someone type up a list of thirteen Gissing novels (18, p. 251), presumably with a view to trying to acquire them or as a note for reading; unfortunately the editor does not include the text of this list. By this time Orwell had only a few years left to him. In the last months of his life, when he was very ill and bedridden, he mentions Gissing repeatedly in his letters. The new letters printed in CW confirm how strong an effort he made in 1949 to find a copy of New Grub Street for himself in America, and how he repeatedly urged his influential friends to pull strings to get the best novels reprinted. He tried to retrieve the typescript of his Gissing essay from the journal Politics and Letters, which had folded before it could appear, but without success: in some of the last notes he made for his will about his books and essays, he recorded it as “LOST. . . . Have never been able to secure return of the MS, but should be printed if recoverable” (20, p.228). The editor supplies a full account of its recovery in 1959 and now reprints it from the original typescript, but without any significant changes to the familiar version (19, pp.347-352).

Undoubtedly Gissing's life story was on his mind in his last months. He said, for example that a proper biography of Gissing was “a job that is crying out to be done” and commented that he himself had had to turn down a publisher’s offer to commission one (19, p.400). He knew the salient facts in any event, not only from Roberts’ Private Life of Henry Maitland (even though he calls “that silly [biography] in the form of a novel” (19, p, 400) ) but from the grim account of Gissing’s last days in Wells’ Autobiography. It is surely it is not fanciful to suppose that, as he passed his 46^th birthday in his sanatorium, Orwell must have compared his predicament with Gissing’s at the same age.

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[1] The Complete Works of George Orwell . . . edited by Peter Davison Assisted by Ian Angus and Sheila Davison, 20 vols. London: Secker & Warburg, 1986-1998. References in the text to this edition are by volume and page number.

[2] Mark Connelly, Orwell and Gissing. Peter Lang, 1997.

[3] The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell . . . Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 4 vols. London: Secker & Warburg, 1968.