I was halfway through reading New Grub Street—in fact, I had brought the book with me—when I happened to sit down for lunch at a neighborhood restaurant in downtown Manhattan. The tables were so close that it took only a few moments for me to gather (it was impossible to avoid overhearing) that the young man and woman at the table beside mine were in the book-publishing business. All through their meal, they exchanged, with breathless intensity, the latest literary gossip: which editor had been hired by which house, which agent now represented which writer, how disappointed a famous biographer was over his new book’s lukewarm reception, who had reviewed whose novel (so nastily!) in an influential journal.
There is, as far as I know, no word for the peculiar sensation (it most nearly resembles déjà vu) of having read a passage of dialogue in a novel (especially one written more than a century ago) and going out into the world and hearing that same dialogue issuing from the lips of living, breathing human beings. But such was my experience on that otherwise ordinary afternoon as I eavesdropped on two strangers who were not merely echoing but almost precisely repeating the tropes, the rhythms, the substance of the talks in which George Gissing’s characters engage—tirelessly, obsessively—throughout his 1891 novel.
If one purpose of fiction is to remind us of how much remains the same despite superficial changes in manners and customs and regardless of the passage of time, New Grub Street fulfills that function perfectly. All these years after its composition, it still seems like reportage, faithful to its moment and descriptive of our own. Gissing’s novel is one of those books that confirm our gloomiest suspicions and most dismaying observations about the nature of the larger world in general, and the literary world in particular; and yet there is always something perversely affirming and encouraging about such confirmation. New Grub Street is a marvelously brave book in its refusal to equivocate about the darkness it perceives, its vision of the essential baseness of human motivation. The marvel is that it manages to be, at the same time, so engrossing, so entertaining, so well made, and—in its ability to take us out of ourselves and convey us to another realm that so eerily resembles our own—so unexpectedly cheering.
There’s something immensely endearing about the person who emerges from the facts of Gissing’s biography. The impecunious son of a pharmacist, he received a scholarship to Owens College, Manchester, and seemed headed for brilliant success—a promise he effectively scuttled, at the age of nineteen, by stealing money to help reform a prostitute named Nell Harrison. His impulsive, reckless, youthful behavior suggests the sort of conduct one might expect from any gifted, rebellious, and fiercely idealistic teenager of today. Clearly, no one could have been less like New Grub Street’s coldly calculating and self-serving Jasper Milvain than the young Gissing, who, after being expelled from school and serving a month in prison, left for America, where he supported himself by teaching and writing short stories. On his return to England, a modest bequest from an aunt enabled him to marry Nell Harrison—a predictably disastrous union that lasted only four years.
Gissing’s literary fortunes were not much happier than his romantic ones. New Grub Street was his ninth book, and though it was more favorably reviewed and popular than his previous works, he failed to profit much from its success, having sold the copyright outright to his publishers. It did, however, establish his literary reputation and enable him to write himself out of the grinding poverty he had been enduring. According to his diary, Gissing made seven false starts on New Grub Street, then began yet again and managed to complete the novel in two months.
Perhaps that’s why the novel has such an air of urgency and immediacy, the sense of an author so eager to tell us what he knows and wants to say that a considerable portion of the book’s plot is foreshadowed and encapsulated within the very first chapter. Like the (similarly wicked and sobering) novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, this one begins at the breakfast table, with what we are led to believe is a typically rancorous conversation between Jasper Milvain and his two sisters, Maud and Dora. It’s one of many unpleasant family chats in a novel that fails to provide one single example of domestic sweetness, harmony, or accord, but rather presents us with a virtual panorama of the brutal hells that can—and do—exist between husbands and wives, parents and children, unloving and competitive siblings. The first sound we hear is the tolling of church bells, followed by Jasper remarking, somewhat unnecessarily but with great “cheerfulness,” that “there’s a man being hanged in London at this moment.”
What Jasper—who is not merely a shallow, soulless opportunist but also a consummate narcissist—finds so inspiriting is the thought that this sad fate is not happening to him, a response that Maud correctly diagnoses as symptomatic of “your selfish way of looking at things.” Soon enough, the arrival of a letter from Milvain’s friend Edwin Reardon turns the conversation to the current situation: this struggling novelist, who—Milvain rather breezily predicts—will ultimately have no choice but to poison or shoot himself. In fact, though Reardon will briefly consider suicide, it will be Harold Biffen—an even more hapless author who, as Milvain says of Reardon, lacks the adaptive and practical skills required to turn writing into a “paying business”—who will eventually poison himself.
After foreseeing this dire fate for his friend, Milvain happily (“The enjoyment with which he anticipates it!” comments Maud) goes on to suggest that Reardon’s marriage will come to grief, since his “handsome wife,” an acquisition that Milvain envies, has already refused to “go into modest rooms—they must furnish a flat.” And lest the reader still fails to grasp the profound and essential dissimilarities between the two friends, Milvain plainly spells them out:
He is the old type of unpractical artist; I am the literary man of 1882. He won’t make concessions, or rather, he can’t make them; he can’t supply the market. . . . I am learning my business. Literature nowadays is a trade. . . . Your successful man of letters . . . thinks first and foremost of the markets; when one kind of goods begins to go off slackly, he is ready with something new and appetising.
Jasper goes on to espouse his decidedly unromantic view of love and marriage (“When I have a decent income of my own, I shall marry a woman with an income somewhat larger, so that casualties may be provided for”). There follows a somewhat more specific discussion of probable inheritances and financial prospects, and finally a speech that falls somewhere between a rousing, visionary sermon on the subject of the state of literature and the sleaziest sort of self-justification: “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.”
And there it is; there it all is. For Jasper is not merely a hack writer but a sort of prophet—a man with impeccable instincts about the debased and degraded (though, in his view, glorious) future that awaits him, his family, and his friends. As the novel progresses, events will transpire more or less as he predicts in this initial conversation. The only surprise lies in seeing how it all goes down and in discovering that the reality of New Grub Street is even grimier and less attractive than Jasper Milvain’s repugnant calculations.
Anyone who has ever written, or considered writing, or who has the faintest interest in literary gossip will find much in New Grub Street that is all too familiar. Here, for example, is Whelpdale describing plans for a foolproof moneymaking scheme, a guide to “novel-writing taught in ten lessons”:
The first lesson deals with the question of subjects, local colour—that kind of thing. I gravely advise people, if they possibly can, to write of the wealthy middle class; that’s the popular subject, you know. Lords and ladies are all very well, but the real thing to take is a story about people who have no titles, but live in good Philistine style. I urge study of horsey matters especially.
Both Milvain and Reardon and their colleagues are almost constantly (if from very different perspectives) discussing the fact that success has less to do with the intrinsic value of a book than with a writer’s social position and connections, with the ability to give and attend elegant dinners and parties—the sort of activities that now fall under the rubric of “networking.”
Literary ambition, disappointment, rancor, jealousy, and despair are presented with chilling accuracy. Reardon and his creator know exactly how it feels to receive a rejection letter. (“Mr. Jedwood regretted that the story offered to him did not seem likely to please that particular public to whom his series of one-volume novels made appeal. He hoped it would be understood that, in declining, he by no means expressed an adverse judgment on the story itself, &c.” And anyone who has ever worked in magazine publishing will cringe upon reading Whelpdale’s opinion on the best way to accommodate the culture’s rapidly shrinking attention span:
I would have the paper address itself to the quarter-educated . . . the young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. . . . What they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information—bits of stories, bits of description, . . . bits of statistics, bits of foolery. . . . 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.
Yet Gissing’s analysis of the literary scene is only part of his vision of the larger society, a world ruled by greed and money and wholly determined by the interests and pressures of social class. His feeling for—and his ability to represent—the nuances of class difference is pitch-perfect. Indeed, one of the subthemes of the novel is the inherent difficulty, the problems and perils occasioned by marrying across class lines, a subject that Gissing presumably knew about from painful personal experience. Some of the book’s most affecting scenes involve the hideousness of domestic life chez Alfred Yule, the numerous instances in which Yule (who has married considerably “beneath him”) patronizes, punishes, and blames his innocent, good-hearted, long-suffering wife for the failure of his own ambitions and hopes. Unsurprisingly, he fears that his daughter, Marian, may be
infected with her mother’s faults of speech and behaviour. He would scarcely permit his wife to talk to the child. . . . And so it came to pass that one day the little girl, hearing her mother make some flagrant grammatical error, turned to the other parent and asked gravely: “Why doesn’t mother speak as properly as we do?” Well, that is one of the results of such marriages, one of the myriad miseries that result from poverty.
So New Grub Street painstakingly documents the “myriad miseries” of a world in which class snobbery is as powerful—and as primal—as some sort of alternate life force, a world in which the struggle for survival hardly, if ever, takes the form of physical combat but rather of scheming, calculation, and, especially, psychological manipulation. Few writers are as attuned as Gissing was to the ways in which we manipulate one another for our own self-serving purposes; one of the book’s most subtle and artfully orchestrated scenes is the one in which Jasper rather brilliantly maneuvers Marian into breaking off their engagement.
The ultimate irony of New Grub Street is, of course, that a novel that so gloomily and confidently predicts certain failure for any work that does not distract, amuse, lie, and flatter its “quarter-educated” audience has, in fact, not only succeeded and survived but become a classic. The triumph, for Gissing, was to have written a book that tells the truth as he saw it—the bitter truth, without sugarcoating—and to have found so durable and wide an audience. Even as the novel chills us with its still recognizable portrayal of the crass and vulgar world of literary endeavor, its very existence provides eloquent, encouraging proof of the fact that a powerful, honest writer can transcend the constraints of commerce, can speak louder than the clamor of the marketplace. How inspiring and comforting that a voice as clear and pure as Gissing’s has managed to rise above the static and buzz that, he seemed to fear, might keep it from being heard at all.