Gorgeous George Gissing

My latest pin-up.

I think I've found him: the male Victorian novelist who can write female heroines. It's such a relief. I've had a Dickens-shaped bee in my bonnet ever since writing that post on 6th February (The Visible Woman). I hope I'm not an essentially unforgiving person, but I find it difficult to overlook Dickens's saintly child-women on the grounds that he was a terrific story-teller, humanitarian, Genius...etc, etc. I mean, can any of that actually excuse the existence of Agnes Wakefield, "ever pointing upward...ever leading me to something better; ever directing me to higher things"? Ever making me wish I'd never got up today. Ever making me reach for the bottle. And if that's what a woman ought to be, according to the most incisive chronicler of the age...

Then along comes George Gissing and single-handedly rehabilitates Nineteenth Century Man. Well done, George. Granted he was forty-five years younger than Dickens, but he died in 1903 which makes him a bona fide Victorian gent in my book. Please, if you haven't already, read The Odd Women (how can you could resist the title?) and New Grub Street and the zillion others I haven't got round to reading yet. Gissing's women are wonderful. They can defy their fathers, abandon their husbands, even declare themselves as out-and-out feminists, and still retain moral complexity. Yes! I know! Can you imagine how Dickens would have dealt with a woman who leaves her husband for financial reasons and then (once he's dead) pilfers her own cousin's fiancé? Or an unashamedly intellectual single woman, bitterly opposed to the institution of marriage, who falls in love with but ultimately turns down our handsome hero? They'd be cardboard cut-outs, and as readers we would be expected to unite with Dickens in amused disapproval. Disapproval doesn't come into it for Gorgeous George, he just presents his readers with ordinary, complicated people and stands back without comment. I like that kind of modesty in a novelist.

By the by, his biography (or the little I've gleaned of it from Wikipedia) suggests to me he was a loveable chap. Maybe my criteria for lovability are a bit skewed, but this paragraph in particular made me want to hug him. See what you think:

"Gissing's academic career ended in disgrace when he fell in love with a young orphan prostitute, Marianne Helen Harrison, known as Nell. He gave her money in an attempt to keep her off the streets and when funds ran short he stole from his fellow students. The college hired a detective to investigate the thefts, and Gissing was prosecuted, found guilty, expelled, and sentenced to a month's hard labour in Belle Vue Gaol, Manchester in 1876."

Oh George.

What to Read when the Weather's Draughty-Dampish

Castletown (IoM) gets a hammering at New Year

I find it funny, and a little bit sad, how my attitude to stormy weather has diluted over the years. When I was a teenager, storms were pure Romance. My bedroom was in the attic (very nearly a genuine artist's garret, if only my parents hadn't been so prosaic as to insist upon central heating and a wall-to-wall carpet) and there was nothing I liked better than a good gale thrashing through the garden, whistling round the eaves and chucking rain at my Velux window. It never crossed my mind to worry about storm damage; that was mum and dad's problem. I was too busy feeling snug under my duvet and channelling the spirit of Emily Bronte.

But now, when the wind is sweeping off the Irish sea of a February night, it isn't Heathcliff and Cathy who spring to mind so much as the wheelie bin (what if it takes flight, lands in the middle of the road and causes a major pile up?); the garden fence (ditto); the roof (will it even be there in the morning?) and so on. So far we've been lucky: a fence panel fell over and three tiles blew off the roof, but nobody died and the house is still standing. It must be frightening and deeply depressing to have your home flooded or otherwise wrecked, and my heart goes out to people living in the Somerset levels and elsewhere, who are experiencing just that. Any lingering feeling for the allure of stormy weather would be extinguished forever, I should imagine, in the heart of anyone who's watched their prized possessions floating round the sitting room in a stinky, brown soup. Heathcliff himself would be yearning for a getaway break to the Med.

So I feel slightly embarrassed to be gushing about this beautiful Ted Hughes poem, Wind, which I discovered in an anthology the other day. The glamour of a gale is perhaps better appreciated when your chimney stack is not flinging itself across the garden. But I'm going to copy it out anyway. If the thought of celebrating bad weather is just too grating, and you can't afford a foreign holiday, can I recommend you read The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim instead? It's one of the most cheering books ever written. That moment when Lottie Wilkins opens the shutters on her first morning in Italy...I defy you not to feel real, live sunshine on your skin. It's much less hassle than a holiday, and you can read it in your wellies.

Anyway. That Ted Hughes poem...

Wind by Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

The Visible Woman

The reason I blogged about Nobles Park last month was because I was thinking about the relationship between walking and writing, and the reason I was thinking about the relationship between walking and writing was because I'd just finished reading Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, which is a novelishly good biography of the great man by Simon Callow. (It might also explain why I've started writing interminably long sentences, containing interminable numbers of clauses, which is a dubious tendency even if you do happen to be Charles Dickens.) Anyway, the point is that Dickens not only wrote a lot; he also walked a lot. And I don't mean half hour rambles. 'Going for a walk' in Dickens-speak means pounding the streets of London for a minimum of three hours a day at an average pace of 4mph. And he did it because it nourished his writing. "It was," writes Simon Callow, "one of Dickens's maxims that a given amount of mental exertion should be counteracted by a commensurate amount of bodily fatigue...As he marched through the great metropolis, he drew energy from its energy and his absorption of its life replenished him."

The divine Mary Hogarth

Which is all well and good, only as I read I couldn't help wishing that Dickens had done a little less walking and put in a bit more time with his wife. I know you shouldn't judge other people's marriages, and I know Victorian women didn't lead the most dynamic lives at the best of times, but Catherine Dickens does seem to have put up with one hell of a lot. Not least bearing ten children to a man whose ideal woman was a virginal adolescent with angel's wings more or less sprouting from her shoulder-blades. As if such a generalised ideal weren't tiresome enough, Dickens had a specific tendresse for Catherine's very own younger sister, Mary Hogarth, who died aged seventeen, "the age at which for him a woman was at her most perfect: she never grew fat, dull, tired, tedious." Mary appeared in novel after novel (think Agnes Wicklow in David Copperfield, Rose Maylie in Oliver Twist, Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit): ever youthful, attractive, gentle, pure...ever aggravating.



Catherine Dickens in 1852

So there's Catherine, in futile competition with one dead sister and another live one (Georgy, who came to live with the Dickenses at the age of sixteen, when Catherine was a mother of four heading into her thirties...) Dickens's genius - as generous and imaginative as it was in its effects on society at large - monopolised the lives of his family, especially his wife. Everything he did - from walking, to writing, to campaigning on behalf of the disadvantaged, to fathering children - he did with a sort of manic excess. No doubt he was an exhilarating friend, acquaintance or patron but he must have made an oppressive husband. I felt depressed on Catherine's behalf as she trudged stoically through life in his wake, putting up with his eccentricities and his massive popularity whilst bearing children right, left and centre. Finally, after twenty-two years of marriage, Dickens abandoned her in favour of eighteen year old Ellen Ternan.

Catherine doesn't seem to have interested biographers or historical novelists*, any more than she interested her husband. I suppose the bare bones of her story - from pretty and loved to old and unloved - is not exactly rom-com material. I see there's a new film about Ellen Ternan called The Invisible Woman, based on the biography by Claire Tomalin. I'm sure it will be fascinating - of course it will, the clue's in the title. Much better (in film and literature, if not in life) to be The Invisible Woman. All that sexy mystique. But you have to feel for Catherine. After all, somebody had to play the thankless role of Dickens's All-Too-Visible-Wife. I hope someone writes a sympathetic account of her life some time soon, if only on the basis that visible lives are every bit as mysterious as invisible ones.  

* With the exception of Lillian Nayder. The Other Dickens : a life of Catherine Hogarth was the only item of Catherine Dickens literature I could find.

A Walk in the Park

"I prefer winter and Fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." ~Andrew Wyeth

I don't suppose Nobles Park in Douglas would make it onto anybody's list of Most Inspirational Manx Walks; not with all those glens and coastal paths to compete with. Nevertheless, it's only a couple of minutes away from school and I often amble round before collecting the children at half three. For all it's municipal feel, I love it, especially in winter. In winter it has that expectant feel that Andrew Wyeth is talking about; it makes me feel as though I'm on the brink of writing something brilliant. (Plus it gets busy in summer and you can't stare into space with the same lack of self-consciousness for fear of tripping over a toddler or a bevy of bikers.)

If I'm lucky I've been writing for several hours just before I arrive, so perhaps that explains things. The muddle that is my plot; the gothic tower of St. Ninian's church; the hissy-breath of the sea; a sun that's as good as given up for the day; biro leak on my fingers (wish I'd brought gloves); bare trees like etchings; an old man with a Jack Russell on a lead; high school kids in their blue and red strip trudging off the football pitch; the tragic elder sister in my story (she ought to wear glasses! Of course!).... it's all a happy jumble in my head.

Good Novels are Pointless

If there's one piece of writing advice that I try to abide by, other than read, read, read (see post on 18.09.13) it is Do not write fiction in order to convey a Point.*

I've just abandoned Tolstoy's Resurrection, having sauntered through the first quarter, plodded through the second and slogged lamely through the third. I just had to stop; I couldn't make it any further; I was dazed and achy from being bludgeoned over the head with Tolstoy's Moral Message.

It's not that I object in principle to a novelised critique of a corrupt society, but in order to be readable the satire should, I think, emerge organically from the characters and their interactions. It shouldn't be foisted on them. It's a novel not a pamphlet; the characters are the main event, not the author's opinions. In Resurrection it's as though Tolstoy decided he couldn't be doing with all the complexities of characterisation. Prince Nekhludoff, Maslova and the rest only exist in order to illustrate his philosophy. Their thoughts, feelings, actions and conversations are insignificant except in as far as they persuade people that a non-Tolstoyan world is a disgusting world.

In Resurrection, when the Prince's potential fiancée, Missy, makes a banal remark at dinner you feel that she is doing so because she represents (along with Turkish towels, perfumed mouth wash and feather-beds) everything that's wrong with the world. That's all she's for. She's not allowed to come alive and do surprising things, so she turns out two-dimensional.  In a great novel, like Anna Karenina, people aren't written off like that. Karenin, Vronsky and Anna are all alienating at times, and then at other times they're deeply lovable. You can't boil them down, put them in a nutshell or otherwise sum them up.

You can't sum up a good novel, either. The question, What's this novel about? should provoke interminable argument, not a tidy précis. One of the functions of fiction is to probe moral questions, not to close them. When he was an old man Tolstoy rejected Anna Karenina and War and Peace as 'degenerate', 'elitist', 'counterfeit art' and took to writing overtly moral works such as The Kreutzer Sonata and Resurrection. In other words he was fed up with the amoral intricacies of novel writing; fed up, as he saw it, of putting aesthetics over morals. Better, he felt, to use his literary genius to lambast all the things he hated most: sex, the government, the church, the judiciary, private property and the aristocratic way of life. I wonder why he stuck with fiction at all. It's a curious instrument to choose; rather like picking up a scalpel when you're minded to cudgel someone's brains out.

 

Tolstoy looking like a man with a message

*People issuing writing advice always begin by claiming there are no hard and fast rules. They then go on to say, Oh, except for this hard and fast rule, and that one, and that one...I've now gone and done the same thing. Bother.

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures?"

"Bless the child", my ten year old self thought when she read the opening paragraph of Alice in Wonderland. I, for one, was growing up. I was leaving Shirley Hughes and Beatrix Potter behind and heading for an adult world of wall-to-wall text without pictures. Mentally I patted Alice's tiny blonde head.

Now I am grown up and:
a) I suspect Lewis Caroll was more or less on Alice's side in this question. (after all, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is, itself, an illustrated book....) and therefore the joke was on me when I thought I was allying myself with the forces of wisdom and maturity.
b) I find I still have a lot of use for books with pictures. Some are breath-taking works of art in their own right, which is why I often find the children's section the most alluring part of the library. (Mind, I tend to use my daughter's baby-pink Junior Reader card when I take them out. I wave it ostentatiously under the librarian's nose as if to say, "Obviously, I'm not borrowing this for myself! I'd use my grown-up, white library card if it was for me! This is for a child!")

Though how anyone could be ashamed of borrowing Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, illustrated by Angela Burnett, I don't know. I'd been through life without ever reading The Snow Goose until a couple of months ago this edition, on the children's display table in Douglas library, made me do a double-take. I can't imagine it in any other format now. The text would be a bit baggy and untethered on its own, it seems to me. Angela Burnett's wistful illustrations make the book a complete and lovely thing.


I wonder why illustrated fiction is reserved, by and large, for children? (I'm not talking about graphic novels, which have their own kudos, I mean books where pictures serve a written narrative.) Obviously there are sound, practical reasons why children's books are illustrated; it would be difficult (impossible?) to learn to read without pictures there to prompt comprehension, turn a mind-boggling string of words into a story and generally keep things lively. But after childhood? Given that a good picture is a lot more than a mere vocab prompt?

I wonder whether artistic snobbery is part of the answer, i.e. a sense that 'proper art' isn't illustrative? That 'proper art' is its own justification and shouldn't be subordinate to a text? After all, much twentieth century art was the heir of Impressionism, which consciously rejected an (admittedly tired and over-prescriptive) tradition of narrative painting in favour of capturing light, movement and the beauty of the incidental. It's been a while, I know, but out-moded prejudices can linger....


At any rate the Victorians were very keen on marrying words and pictures: the Pre-Raphaelites gorged themselves on Shakespeare, Dante and Malory, while Establishment figures like Lord Leighton and Edward Armitage were reworking stories from the Bible and Greek Mythology. The Victorians also illustrated their books and newspaper serials without worrying that they were doing anything odd or childish - think of Phiz's illustrations for Dickens novels or Sidney Paget's definitive Sherlock Holmes.



Paget's Holmes teetering over the Reicenbach Falls

Illustrations are irresistible to me, even the maddening one's that get it all wrong. It's always fascinating to know what someone else has made of a story, especially if it's a story that I know and love. It's the same kind of pleasure you get from talking about books or watching them adapted for TV. I suppose there's an argument that you risk stunting your own imagination (so, for example, Mr. Darcy no longer manifests himself in a million different imaginary incarnations but is forever possessed of the dripping face and torso of Colin Firth circa 1995) but I'm not convinced that good illustrations work like that. They are more suggestive, oblique and mood-enhancing. They give a few sidelong glances at the story; they meld into it; they don't warp or swamp.

It's partly my new Kindle that's made me think about all this. I was reading a freebie copy of Peter Ibbetson by George Du Maurier: the illustrations weren't there but, oh so tantalisingly, the captions still were, so that the text was interrupted here and there with [Illustration: "Good old Slade!"] or [Illustration: "Ominous birds of yore."] Now that throwaway paperbacks are giving way to electronic books, I wonder whether physical books will tend to be of the carefully-crafted, hard back type that people buy as a luxury? If so, might illustrations come back into vogue? Susannah Clarke's 2004 novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell with its lovely, smoky drawings by Portia Rosenberg, gave me some hope. But then again, the story is set in the early 1800s, so maybe they were included to give the book a retro feel. I don't want illustrations to be rare, retro novelties I want them (in case you haven't gathered) to be unsurprising and normal. Not universal; just normal.

An illustration by Portia Rosenberg for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell

Awkward Encounters with Myself

It was reassuring to hear Zadie Smith talking on Desert Island Discs about how much she hates re-visiting her own books. Re-reading the first twenty pages of White teeth, she said, is enough to 'induce nausea'. Good. That makes me feel a bit better about the fear and loathing I entertain for some of my old stuff.

Actually I got rid of all my teenage diaries, and despite the occasional twinge of regret I think, on the whole, I was wise. It's not as if they comprised a Pepysian record of British Life in the 1990s. They didn't even record the events of my own life, in the sense that when I was writing I rarely lifted my gaze very far from my own navel. No, my teenage diaries documented the tedious ups and downs (mostly the downs) of my inner life. I only ever bothered to make an entry when the entire fabric of the universe had imploded (the unrequited Love of my Life failing to notice my murmured 'hello' at the church fundraiser barbeque, for example). 'Less is more' meant nothing to me; I never held back with my adjectives, under-linings, exclamation marks or general hyperbole.

Oh yes, I was definitely right to destroy those diaries. What if I were to go under the proverbial bus tomorrow? How awful to think of my children inheriting a pile of spiral bound notebooks filled with nothing but teenagery howls of angst. They might think it was actually me talking.

I found an exercise book full of adolescent 'poems' the other day. They're awful; goodness knows how they escaped elimination over the years. Self-pitying, melodramatic, humourless...and they don't even scan. I do remember feeling, in those far-off days, that I was a Victorian person born into the wrong century (which is what comes of taking Jane Eyre too seriously) and that's evidently the spirit in which I wrote these poems. I can't quite bring myself to quote, but let's just say there's an awful lot of death and unrequited love; epic imagery involving stars/fires/hell/blood/angels; words like "Alas!" and "thou" and plenty of personified abstract nouns ("Oh, Love!" "Oh, Hate!" "Oh Desolation!" etc. etc.). Greek gods and goddesses appear here and there - my attempt, I suppose, to salvage things with a bit of classical razzle-dazzle. Oh, and then there's the poem I wrote when our dog was put down, which references the death of Patroklos in The Iliad...

Teenage diaries and poems are one thing; at least they are private and easily destroyed. Published words are another matter. I used to think that being published would be like being vaccinated against self-doubt. Not so. Mere publication doesn't, in fact, have the power to turn nonsense into quality literature. What's worse, you no longer have the luxury to sigh, "Alas, what a complete fat-head I was when I wrote that," as you impale your notebook on a poker and shove it to the back of the wood-burner. It's out there and, if you let it, it will haunt you. The tiniest typo can make you wonder how you will ever show your face again, let alone all the soul-baring stuff that really matters. The potential for self-torture is massive. You start trying to work out what other people are thinking about you, which is a pointless, pompous, paralysing exercise.

Not all rediscoveries are nasty, though. I like finding cryptic notes-to-self that I dashed off years ago; things that must have made perfect sense to me at the time but have become pleasingly mysterious now that the context is forgotten. Scrawled at a funny angle across the cover of an A4 refill pad, for example:  'it's - disheartening (she went on). Strand of her hair'. What was that about? Or, 'Strong hand being pulled along by ghostly one? Possibly' They sound like clues for The Times crossword. It's nice to be intrigued by my own former self. At any rate, it makes a change from thinking: "Oh no! Not that self-obsessed teenager again! Maybe if I walk past quickly without meeting her eye she'll think I haven't seen her..."