"Best or worst, novels are all the same. Nothing but love, love, love. What silly nonsense it is."
It's not that there isn't talk about love: that's Amy Reardon above and she has just been discussing with her friend Edith why it is divorce is so difficult in England at the time. She had loved her husband Edwin at one point, but that point is probably past, beaten down by the couple's unbearable poverty.
So what it is, is a novel of money, or more, the lack of it. Balzac is referenced several times as a novelist writing on the right kind of subject.
Edwin Reardon is a novelist, maybe aspiring to be what we would now call midlist. And as in Balzac, we learn about the finances; in this case what it takes--and what you can make--as a novelist. Reardon's biggest success brought him £100, an amount that is the barest minimum for a respectable existence in London for a year. That was for a so-called triple-decker, a novel of 200,000 words or 600-800 pages. Think Middlemarch in size. He needs to write one of those a year, and with no guarantee he'll meet the demands of the moment. He can't. Book reviewing? Articles for the magazines? These pay, but not well. Reardon writes a shorter novel with a sensationalist plot; he hopes to get £75 for it, but nobody is willing to buy.
Reardon is not the only writer; the novel is set among a circle of writers. There's Whelpdale:
"And what's more, he made six guineas in the first fortnight; so he says, at all events. Now that's one of the finest jokes I ever heard. A man who can't get anyone to publish his own books makes a living by telling other people how to write!"
There's the nearly heroic Biffen, who lives in utter poverty in a garret, has (almost) no hope of marrying, toiling away on his novel: Mr. Bailey, Grocer. Nobody expects it to be read when he does finish it. Biffen himself says of it, "The result will be something unutterably tedious...If it were anything but tedious, it would be untrue." A nod to the naturalism still mostly in the future in English?
Amy Reardon's uncle Alfred Yule writes for the magazines with the aid of his talented daughter Marian. Someday he hopes to edit his own magazine. But until then:
"Seeing him in the title-lists of a periodical most people knew what to expect, but not a few forbore cutting open the pages he occupied."
Dora and Maud Milvain (and mostly it's Dora) write religious stories for magazines; once their mother dies, and her annuity with her, that's what they will have to live on. Dora finds the work beneath her, but she is good at it. Her brother Jasper tells her: "Oh, if you can be a George Eliot, begin at the earliest opportunity."
The other main character is Jasper Milvain. He can't write 'stories' he says, but he sees making his way in the writing trade, via magazine articles, then an editorship:
"First of all, my qualities are not of the kind which demand the recognition of posterity. My writing is for to-day, most distinctly hodiernal. It has no value except in reference to to-day."
And he knows how to go about it:
"Art must be practiced as a trade, at all events in our time. This is the age of trade."
Milvain is a goer, and it's he who largely makes the plot go. At the beginning of the novel Milvain and Reardon are friends, with the impractical, somewhat older Reardon, having had some success. Milvain tries to get him to capitalize on it, but to no avail, with little effect other than increasing Amy Reardon's dissatisfaction. They don't become enemies, but their differening trajectories pull them apart.
Milvain meets Marian Yule (Amy Reardon's cousin) and falls in love with her. He certainly can't afford to marry when he first sees her, but if one or the other of them should ever come into enough money? But until then Milvain cannot acknowledge his love to anyone, scarcely even to himself. And maybe he could marry an heiress?
"You have to become famous before you can secure the attention which would give fame."
How to get around that conundrum? That's Milvain's problem and he intends to solve it. There's an inheritance to be sorted out, and there are marriages--though are any of them for love? (I'd say maybe one. If you've read it, what did you think?) Milvain's a bit of a monster, but not entirely. Milvain's advice to Reardon is sound, if unhelpful. When Mr. Bailey, Grocer finally does appear in print, Milvain does what he can to puff it.
The book was my Classics Club spin book, and I finished it last month, but I've only now gotten around to the post. (We went on vacation--though since I'm mostly retired, what exactly was I vacationing from? Blog posting, perhaps.) The novel is dark, but funny, complex, and engaging. It portrays a believable segment of society in interesting detail, different from today, but maybe not so different: even today midlist authors today scramble to publish articles, get grants, teach writing, all in order to achieve a bare middle-class existence, if that.
It's one of those novels I've known of for a long time, more read about than actually read, and I pulled off the shelf a couple of things I'd previously read to remind myself what they had to say.
Woolf's essay from the second volume of The Common Reader is a little harsh on Gissing, I thought, even though she remains positive. Her complaint is Gissing is a novelist who can only write about himself, unable to create other characters. Despite the current fashion for auto-fiction, I would agree if this were true it would be a valid complaint. Give me Middlemarch over Leaving the Atocha Station. But I don't feel it applies to New Grub Street. Edwin Reardon is no doubt a roughly accurate self-portrait of Gissing. But Jasper Milvain, Amy Reardon, Marian Yule, Dora Milvain are also rounded characters. Even a comic type like Whelpdale has some substance to him. (Woolf's may be a more fair charge for something like Gissing's The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.)
But she also writes, "Gissing is one of the extremely rare novelists who believes in the power of the mind, who makes his people think," and this is quite true. He's not Dostoevsky, but his characters do think, do have ideas, those ideas come into conflict, and nobody is tendentiously given the right answer ahead of time. Milvain is perhaps shallow, but Reardon is unable to function.
As for Orwell, I feel Gissing is all over him, and the index of my four-volume Collected Essays, Letters, and Journalism backs me up. Well, one would expect the author of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier to be deeply interested in a novelist of poverty. But in 1948 Orwell was requested to write an essay on Gissing for the magazine Politics and Letters on the occasion of the reissuing of two lesser-known Gissing novels. The magazine went bankrupt before the article appeared, and Orwell had difficulty recouping his manuscript from the empty offices. The article only appeared in 1960, so it was Orwell's heirs who got paid, an ironic outcome Gissing would have darkly appreciated, I'm sure.
Orwell separates out what Gissing does from picaresque novels and other earlier types of narrative.
"A true novel...will also contain at least two characters, probably more, who are described from the inside and on the same level of probability..."
The very criteria for which Woolf faulted Gissing. But Orwell writes:
"But merely on the strength of New Grub Street, Demos, and The Odd Women I am ready to maintain England has produced very few better novelists."
I think Orwell has the better of this argument.
From the last page:
"'Ha! Isn't the world a glorious place?''For rich people.''Yes, for rich people. How I pity the poor devils.'"
