George Gissing - New Grub Street
It wasn't love at first page though. I took a while to warm up, because the main character in the first section was the wholly unlikeable Jasper Milvain. Some quotes to give you an idea of his cynicism:
People have got that ancient prejudice so firmly rooted in their heads—that one mustn’t write save at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. I tell you, writing is a business. Get together half-a-dozen fair specimens of the Sunday-school prize; study them; discover the essential points of such composition; hit upon new attractions; then go to work methodically, so many pages a day. There’s no question of the divine afflatus; that belongs to another sphere of life. We talk of literature as a trade, not of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. [...] What the devil—I mean what on earth is there in typography to make everything it deals with sacred? I don’t advocate the propagation of vicious literature; I speak only of good, coarse, marketable stuff for the world’s vulgar.
I maintain that we people of brains are justified in supplying the mob with the food it likes. We are not geniuses, and if we sit down in a spirit of long-eared gravity we shall produce only commonplace stuff. Let us use our wits to earn money, and make the best we can of our lives.
Ugh... all this is anathema to many writers, yet it's true. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote as much in his Letter to a Young Gentleman.
The real story kicks in a few chapters later, when we are introduced to the novelist Edwin Reardon, who, as a frugal bachelor working as a clerk, wrote a lauded debut novel. He fell in love with Amy, who married him, believing Reardon to be a great literary man, and is now struggling to produce something new that lives up to his "promise".
What follows is pages and pages of arguments driven by the tension between art and money. Amy genuinely believes Reardon is a good writer and tries to get him to just write something, anything - it doesn't have to be high literature; something that sells would be fine. But Reardon isn't built that way:
Of course it isn’t only for the sake of reputation that one tries to do uncommon work. There’s the shrinking from conscious insincerity of workmanship—which most of the writers nowadays seem never to feel. “It’s good enough for the market”; that satisfies them. And perhaps they are justified. [...] How well I can imagine the answer of some popular novelist if he heard me speak scornfully of his books. “My dear fellow,” he might say, “do you suppose I am not aware that my books are rubbish? I know it just as well as you do. But my vocation is to live comfortably. I have a luxurious house, a wife and children who are happy and grateful to me for their happiness. If you choose to live in a garret, and, what’s worse, make your wife and children share it with you, that’s your concern.”
My favourite character by far is Reardon's buddy, Harold Biffen. Biffen is kind of what Reardon would have become had he not gotten married - an old bachelor living in poverty, plugging away at his revolutionary novel of social realism, Mr. Bailey, Grocer. (Biffen eventually commits suicide after publishing his magnum opus, quite peacefully.)
Throughout the book Biffen and Reardon, whenever they hang out, talk about money. Not in a covetous way, but in a fantastical and philosophical way, with plenty of awe. Here is Reardon on money:
The power of money is so hard to realise; one who has never had it marvels at the completeness with which it transforms every detail of life. Compare what we call our home with that of rich people; it moves one to scornful laughter. I have no sympathy with the stoical point of view; between wealth and poverty is just the difference between the whole man and the maimed. [...] To be sure, most rich people don’t understand their happiness; if they did, they would move and talk like gods—which indeed they are.
and:
The difference [...] between the man with money and the man without is simply this: the one thinks, “How shall I use my life?” and the other, “How shall I keep myself alive?”
Towards the end of the book the narrator inserts himself. Anticipating the reader's antipathy towards the two idealistic paupers, he mounts a defence of Reardon and Biffen:
You are made angrily contemptuous by their failure to get on; why don’t they bestir themselves, push and bustle, welcome kicks so long as halfpence follow, make place in the world’s eye—in short, take a leaf from the book of Mr Jasper Milvain? But try to imagine a personality wholly unfitted for the rough and tumble of the world’s labour-market. [...] These two were richly endowed with the kindly and the imaginative virtues; if fate threw them amid incongruous circumstances, is their endowment of less value?[...] The sum of their faults was their inability to earn money; but, indeed, that inability does not call for unmingled disdain.
It's hard to believe New Grub Street was published in 1891 - almost a century before Margaret Thatcher, who would most certainly have forced Reardon and Biffen into work. It's one of those eerily prescient novels, somehow perhaps even more relevant now than when they were published.
For example, here's a side character's idea for a new publication capitalising on the growing middle class and its taste for brevity and inconsequential content:
I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated; that is to say, the great new generation that is being turned out by the Board schools, the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains and on ‘buses and trams. As a rule they care for no newspapers except the Sunday ones; what they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information—bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches. Even chat is too solid for them: they want chit-chat.
And here's Milvain talking about how important fame is to your chances of getting published. (The fame paradox: "You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame.")
You have to obtain reputation before you can get a fair hearing for that which would justify your repute. It’s the old story of the French publisher who said to Dumas: “Make a name, and I’ll publish anything you write.” “But how the diable,” cries the author, “am I to make a name if I can’t get published?” If a man can’t hit upon any other way of attracting attention, let him dance on his head in the middle of the street; after that he may hope to get consideration for his volume of poems.
Frothy bite-sized content to consume on the train... An obsession with fame rather than merit... Sound familiar?
I will end this collection of quotes with one from Marian Yule, who helps her father - a self-proclaimed man of letters but really a stick in the mud and unable to progress with the times - write literary essays. As she is forced into literary toil, her view of the publishing world diverges completely from that of Reardon, Biffen, and Milvain.
When already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here was she exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market. What unspeakable folly! To write—was not that the joy and the privilege of one who had an urgent message for the world? [...] She herself would throw away her pen with joy but for the need of earning money. And all these people about her, what aim had they save to make new books out of those already existing, that yet newer books might in turn be made out of theirs? This huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print—how intolerably it weighed upon the spirit!
I've been thinking about these words a lot lately. For a long time since I quit full-time work, I felt I ought to write a book or at least publish something - otherwise how could I justify my taking so much time off? But when there is so much content out there in the world already, production isn't morally superior to consumption, George Gissing reminds me. And I'm glad I took the time to consume New Grub Street.
For future consumption: Henry James' The Tragic Muse and Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now. Also, the movie American Fiction.
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