Out of the Provinces

...Miss Drabble remarks, always leaves her with "the sense that life is full ot possibility ' Gissing's ruinous history induces the opposite mood He was a born victim as well as a born exile from Edwardian society, a glutton for tragedy The son of a pharmacist, he too was raised m the industrial north, by desperately ambitious parents who considered a gentleman's classical education the indispensable ticket to success Unfortunately, at 18, Gissing was caught stealing money for his girl, an alcoholic grisette, and was sent to prison Afterward, he spent a year in America Only Gissing, a lemming to the core, would have come back and married the person who had caused his disgrace Predictably, the union was a squalid disaster, and domestic misery was to hound Gissing A second wife, also lower-class, eventually went mad But he turned out an extraordinarily steady lot of work, for writing had become his single, precarious means of livelihood Since his themes were plucked whole and unadorned from the calamity-ridden bleakness of his experience, Gissing was both acclaimed and reviled during his lifetime for his "modern realism," for the daring sordid-ness of his material Indeed, he was one ot the first English novelists to write with unsentimental directness about London low-life, he was never tempted into the comic grotesquene that Dickens brought to poverty Despite strongly appreciative essays by Virginia Woolf and George Orwell, Gissing was for decades after his death dismissed as an obsolete Victorian?except, as Miss Tindall notes, in "that literary underworld of a diffuse, unorganized, often solitary yet purposefully telepathic and collective movement" Beginning in the mid-1950s, however, he became something of a cult, or at least an academic lodestone, and today Gissing monographs and biographies outnumber the readily available editions of his lesser efforts "What a farce is biography...

...Miss Drabble affectionately tells us, he was "one ot the kindest and most unselfish of men " In this patient and loving account, Bennett is not the crass success-monger he has often been made out to be but a fascinating jumble of contradictions The staunchest of friends, he quarrelled continuously with publishers Even in his silliest potboilers, he managed to be perceptive, attentive and funny about English life and the English character Although he could grind out such self-help treatises as How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, he was also an ardent defender of modernist writers like Joyce, Ehot and Lawrence At his sleekest and most comfortably celebrated, he was never entirely out of touch with the insecure young man from the provinces he once had been, and he never allowed himself to forget the bleak, stony north that made him M Jennett...

...Gissing once wrote to a friend "The only true biographies are to be found in novels " This is exactly how Gillian Tindall has approached her subject Her book is a brilliant, lively, argumentative interweaving of his novels and fact that makes shrewd use of criticism as an aid to biography, and of reality as a guide to fantasy Her method is particularly apt for Gissing because he had an eerie habit of foreseeing disaster in his fiction that he then proceeded to enact in his life The poverty of the declasse is the spectre that haunts Gissing's vision—the penurious abyss lurking in menace beneath the unsteady feet of his genteel characters, whom the author described, in a famous comment, as a "class of young men distinctive of our time—well-educated, fairly bred but without money " Out of this insoluble disquiet came his remarkable picture, in New Grub Sheet, of the late-Victorian world of letters in which literature and literary journalism had become a mass-produced commodity If the harsh necessities ot literature as a vocation were thrust upon him by what he called "malignant Fate," Gissing nevertheless produced a number of books much ahead of their time, containing astringently honest and passionately bitter portraits of men and women forced to live beyond the pale of blinkered convention In addition, for a man whose choice of wives was consistently suicidal, Gissing, in such novels as The Odd Women, recounted the problems of women's existence in the 19th century with farsighted clarity, and with a sensitivity and compassion few Victorian males would have dared betray Two very different beings, Miss Tindall persuasively demonstrates, were at war within George Gissing The one was an altruist and social idealist who cared with deep intensity about improving the lot of the poor and ignorant, the other was perpetually driven with masochistic cunning toward, in Miss Tindall's phrase, the "escape downwards"—slatternly wives and self-imposed isolation from his intellectual peers We must approach Gissing, as Virginia Woolf insisted, through his life as much as through his work, and this is at once his weakness as a writer and his poignant appeal as a man It is wrong, however, to confuse the life with the work, and so derogate Arnold Bennett with the familiar tic of scorn The fact is that Gissing never wrote a masterpiece equal to Bennett's Clayhonger series...

...Writers & Writing OUT OF THE PROVINCES by pearl k bell T M hough the British novelists Arnold Bennett and George Gissing were more or less Edwardian contemporaries—Gissing was born in 1857, Bennett a decade later—and came from roughly comparable lower-middle-class provincial backgrounds, it would be difficult to think of two more dissimilar temperaments and literary careers Bennett's rise from lowly law clerk to world-renowned novelist and playwright is one of the great literary success stories of the 20th century, and one reason why he has been dismissed as coarse and commercial by such tastemakers as F R Leavis and Virginia Woolf In stark contrast, Gissmg's short life (he died in 1903, at the age of 46) was an almost unmitigated round of financial troubles and personal misfortunes, of self-destructive blunders in choice and judgment Still, he was enormously productive, and of his 20-odd thick novels at least three—New Grub Street, Demos and Born in Exile—have not only had an underground reputation for many years, but partly because of Gissing's tragic life, are often called works of gemus Yet it has been far too easy to base one's opinions on extrinsic evidence rather than on the literary output itself, to dismiss Bennett for his prosperity and praise Gissing for his suffering Now two new biographies by two English women novelists—Margaret Drabble's Arnold Bennett (Knopf, 379 pp , $10 00) and Gillian Tindall's George Gissing The Born Exile (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 295 pp , $10 00)—correct this form of critical sentimentality Miss Drabble's charmingly personal book is as much a labor of love as it is an exemplary piece of scholarship, for her own roots are close to Bennett's Like him, her mother's family came from the Potteries (or the Five Towns, as he named the center of England's ceramic industry), and she inherited the stern Protestant ethic that shaped ner subject's own attitudes Enoch Bennett, his father, armed with the tanatic Methodist appetite for hard work, had escaped the life of factory drudge by studying at night to become a solicitor He expected his eldest son, Arnold, to follow in his enterprising footsteps But by the time the boy reached maturity the simple Protestant ethic had become a mask for greedy, hypocritical respectability, and Arnold couldn't wait to shake the dust of his provincial upbringing At 21 he went to London, where he had a precocious success as a journalist and began writing fiction because someone suggested there was good money to be made at "sensational" novels Only when he was well into his 30s did he recognize the superb material he had in the Potteries, locked tidily in his memory and ready tor a lifetime of use Bennett may have rejected his family's Methodism, but its habits and manners remained incurably in his Mood Methodical, dedicated, insatiably industrious, he was always something of a literary bookkeeper, pedantically recording in his journal the exact number of words written each day, letters received and answered, contracts signed, subjects covered in the weekly newspaper column he churned out To the world, he offered a self-consciously theatrical, faintly ludicrous image, with his tufted forelock, buck teeth and dandy's dress, all earned off m a spirit ot indestructible, it nervous, efficiency (Throughout his life Bennett suffered from an appalling stammer that Virginia Woolt mocked with cruel Bloomsbury snobbery ) He loved money, France, dancing, opulent yachts, sumptuous travel, grand country houses—whatever luxury his indefatigable toil at writing could bring At the same time...

...The Old Wives' Tale or Rtteyn,an Steps And in the final analysis, it was Bennett—nice, coarse, successful, practical, industrious, with his bottomless talent for assenting to reality—who was the greater novelist, capable of sustaining a view of the variety of human experience that is large and true and intensely memorable...