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knew the marketplace and understood that novels were commodities
as well as art. Gissing could never manage that double vision; he
was a genuine classic, and his way of signalling that he was happy–
a sufficiently rare occurrence - was to chant a chorus of Sophocles.
His multiple self-portrait in
New Grub Street
gives a fair impression of
Gissing's notion of the fate of the bookman in a world where writing
and reading have, like everything else, to meet a market; a world in
which men who would prefer to be writing essays on Harington's
Oceana
or on some Latin poet must toil endlessly at novels . Lost in
this new world of mercenary publishers , fickle readers , ruse agents ,
and, worst of all, admen, he resigned himself to a sort of wretched
one-man Bohemia. As is well known, he had particularly strong
adverse feelings about women , not only because the kind one might
want would not stoop to marry penniless novelists , but also because
they were a large part of the reading public and lowered the level of
its intelligence. According to Gissing, the average intelligence of
women was about equal to that of male idiots.
Whether Gissing's obsession with poverty arose from his social
and sexual difficulties , or the other way round, is not now my sub–
ject. He was at all events a man ofletters, born , as he thought, out of
his time, with what he came to think an irrelevant interest in that
classical tradition to which Bennett paid his less-learned respects .
(No work of Gissing's says more about this side of him than the
novella,
Sleeping Fires ,
in which a man is united with his lost son by a
chance encounter with the boy and his tutor in Athens. The man
had not married the boy's mother [it was a firm principle of Gissing's
that sexual misery should not be compounded by shotgun mar–
riages] and his youthful indiscretion had cost him the love of a
woman he did wish to marry. Moreover, the boy dies, in Greece, of
a fever. But against this background ofloss the story of the establish–
ment of a tie between generations by the catalytic action of
Greece - the real thing, mountain and temple but also a language
bathed in Ionian light- indicates what for Gissing was the impor–
tance of the past in the formation of a civil modernity, past and pres–
ent in dignified interdependence .) Gissing could not have borne a
future which assumed literature , indeed art in general, to be possible
without that relationship with the tradition. He shared with Bennett
a friend who could very easily bear that thought, namely H. G.
Wells . Wells felt no conscious duty to a literary past; his famous in–
sult to Henry James was an insult to that past and the sensibility that
might accrue from its contemplation. His friendship with Gissing
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