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Progress was unexpectedly rapid. On 9 May he was able to inform his friend Eduard Bertz that ‘I have got to work again, quite seriously, and have done three chapters of my new book’. There were more domestic upheavals, sparked by Edith’s habit of conducting shouting matches with the servants, but after a family holiday at the end of July, Gissing was back in the routine of his eight-hour working days: most of The Whirlpool’s 180,000 words were written by the middle of December. If this should seem an extraordinary rate of production, even by late-Victorian standards, then New Grub Street (1891) had been finished in a bare six weeks.
In the letter to Bertz, Gissing notes that ‘the theme is the decay of domestic life among certain classes of people, and much stress is laid upon the question of children’. But while there are several gloom-laden aphorisms on the inadvisability of marriage, and some poignant scenes that clearly reflect Gissing’s attachment to his elder son, very little of The Whirlpool is straightforwardly autobiographical, if only because it is set in a social sphere several rungs above the one which Gissing himself inhabited. As such it belongs to the second, or even third phase of his career. Gissing’s early novels are essentially pieces of slum reportage. The clutch that followed them, notably New Grub Street (1891) and Born in Exile (1892), are largely about humbly born but intellectual types trying ineffectually to tug free from the shackles that constrain them, a task rendered doubly dangerous by its social dimension. From the angle of the late-Victorian reviewer, The Whirlpool is outwardly a more conventional work: a story of middle-class manners, and middle-class morals, with a hero to match.
Diffident Harvey Rolfe, with his £900 a year – twice as much as Gissing was earning throughout most of the 1890s – and his library full of books is not so much Gissing himself as the person that Gissing wanted to be, and the upper-bourgeois world whose margins he laconically treads is clearly one that his creator knew only at a distance. There is, consequently, something rather self- conscious about the paraphernalia of the novel’s drawing-room scenes, its string quartets on genteel display, and its accounts of society – even society of a rather questionable kind – in action, the thought of newspaper gossip columns and musical gazetteers being robbed for supporting detail.
On the other hand it would be a mistake to assume that Gissing was ignorant of the world on which he sardonically reports. Rather, his absorption in late-Victorian social life is a mark of his artistic conscientiousness, his determination to tether his characters to the world of which he imagined them to be a part, and his interest in how much money a ‘lady’ might spend in keeping up her wardrobe in 1886, the year in which the novel is set, stems from the same impulse that led him to file the forensic reports on how to live miserably on nothing a year that are such a feature of The Odd Women (1893).
At the same time, the world in which The Whirlpool is established – the world of gentlemen’s clubs, West End bun-fights and private incomes – offers a perfect vehicle for some of the anxieties he had begun to cultivate about the moral direction of late-Victorian life and its effect on the individual sensibilities gathered up in its slipstream.
G. K. Chesterton once said that nearly every writer will at some point in his career produce a book whose title sums up his attitude to life. Dickens’s, naturally, was Great Expectations; Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather. Judged by this yardstick, Gissing’s is Born in Exile – a phrase that all too faithfully conveys his sense of having been detached by circumstance from the life he most wanted to lead – but The Whirlpool, with its homilies on the precariousness of human existence, the constant danger of being swept away into a maelstrom from which there is no return, runs it a very close second.
Unusually for Gissing, who generally avoids prompt cards of this kind, the words of the title echo through the book. At an early stage in the proceedings Rolfe assures his friend Hugh Carnaby that he feels ‘as if we were all being swept into a ghastly whirlpool which roars over the bottomless pit’. Later on his wife refers half-jokily to their rented house at Pinner, a convenient 30- minute train-ride from the West End, as being ‘on the outer edge of the whirlpool’. When Rolfe makes the unwelcome discovery that for the first time in his life he has financial cares to worry him he talks immediately of ‘being drawn into the whirlpool’. Finally there is a dramatic exchange between Carnaby and Rolfe, after the former has accidentally killed a man he wrongly believes to have seduced his wife: ‘The whirlpool!’ Carnaby laments. ‘It’s got hold of me, and I’m going down, old man – and it looks black as hell.’
Each of these signature remarks gives the novel a terrific feeling of suppressed anxiety, the thought of people who fear the future, whose security is constantly imperilled, whose assumption that their comfortable existences are in danger is heightened by their inability to anticipate precisely what form the danger will take. Part of this nervousness is simply a general presentiment of doom, the suspicion that life is changing for the worse, and at such a rapid rate that it is beyond the capacity of the average human being to resist it. As Rolfe puts it to Carnaby in one of their meditative conversations: ‘There’s something damnably wrong with us all – that’s the one thing certain.’ Another part is to do with an awareness of England’s changing place in the world, and the call of an Imperial destiny – a subject which Gissing, as an arch-liberal and Kipling-mocker in the field of foreign policy, can be wonderfully ironic.
But a third arises from the characters’ sheer inanition. A few domestic servants excepted, nearly everyone in The Whirlpool is either a member of the leisured classes or clinging desperately to their subsidized fringes. The men, in particular, are uncomfortably aware of their superfluity, their fatal want of occupation, here in a world where women are beginning to claim a degree of social freedom that would have been unthought of half a century before. Several of the Rolfe-Carnaby dialogues turn ruefully on the fact of female liberty, and the danger that it may turn into licence.
What follows, whether set in the West End concert halls or in the shadow of the Welsh mountains to which the Rolfes briefly decamp, is at one level a study in how people ought to behave, with a marked emphasis – Gissing being Gissing, with two unhappy marriages behind him and a desperate yearning for high-class female companionship – on how women ought to conduct themselves. Rolfe, a reformed rake in his late thirties – exactly Gissing’s age when he came to write the book – is a confirmed bachelor, given to pious reflections on the disadvantages of the married state, and the particular misfortune of being attached to someone whose tastes and temperament you fail to share. At one point he muses on ‘the supreme folly of hampering himself by marriage’; at another he formulates the general principle that it is ‘an act of unaccountable folly to marry a woman from whom one differed on subjects that lay at the root of life’.
Alma Frothingham, the woman who eventually breaks down this reserve, is the orphaned daughter of a financier driven to suicide; a statuesque girl with musical tastes and a hankering for fashionable life, whom Rolfe assumes, in one of those glacial judgements in which Gissing’s fiction abounds, to have ‘absorbed the vulgarity of her atmosphere’. Despite his good intentions, Rolfe is duly ensnared (‘all his manhood was subdued and mocked by her scornful witchery’) and the couple depart for North Wales, Rolfe assuming his wife’s feigned enthusiasm for the simple life, living frugally and cultivating high ideals in close proximity to nature to be the real thing.
Alma, alas, is not worth her husband’s interest, neglects her children, the second of whom dies, admits to herself, if not to anyone else, that her desire to be a professional violinist stems from vanity rather than a love of music, and whose destructive effect on the people around her is compounded by jealousy. Carnaby’s fatal assault on Cyrus Redgrave, the oily Croesus with whom Alma intrigues, takes place in the darkness of a suburban bungalow when, in a fit of passion, he mistakes Alma for his wife. Alma is only there because she suspects that Sybil Carnaby is bent on undermining Redgrave’s support for her professional debut. Later, when she discovers that her husband is paying for the upkeep of two abandoned children, her first thought is that the boy and girl are products of a mésalliance that he is determined to keep quiet.
Meanwhile, the reader’s opinion of Alma – never very high to start with – is being constantly recalibrated by wounding comparisons to the other women in whose orbit she moves: her stepmother Mrs Frothingham (conventionally minded but anxious to compensate those ruined by the bank smash out of her own resources); Sybil Carnaby (extravagant but, we infer, principled) and worthy Mrs Abbot (laid low by the financial crash but capable of finding new employment as a school-mistress). The most injurious contrast of all is with virtuous Mrs Morton, the wife of Rolfe’s childhood friend, who lives modestly in the country, is meekness personified and devotes herself to housekeeping and her children.
One forgives Gissing his bromides about Mrs Morton, her selfless devotion to hearth and home and the domestic idyll in which she and her husband calmly repose, in the knowledge that they are the result of a frustrated idealism. He would have liked nothing better than to live a reclusive life in a country town with a gentlewomanly helpmeet who was clever enough for him to talk to, rather than labour on in Epsom with the cantankerous and increasingly unstable Edith. That, in the end, none of these immensely pointed critiques turns Alma into a caricature is a tribute to the sureness of Gissing’s psychological touch.
The scenes in which she prepares for her professional unveiling, for example, or tries to impress a sympathetic Mrs Abbot with the range of her accomplishments have an objectivity, a sense of the kind of person Alma is, that some of her husband’s assessments of his wife’s character rather lack: restless, dissatisfied, always searching for an excitement that child-bearing and servant-handling will never provide, forever trying to shore up her personal mythology of artistry and moral scrupulousness. As it is, Alma betrays herself from one utterance to the next, but her awareness of the tricks she is playing, both on herself and the people around her, give her a complexity she would otherwise struggle to acquire.
It is the same with her recourse – half careless, half grimly determined – to the ‘fashionable narcotic’ that will help her sleep, with consequences that the experienced reader of Victorian fiction can see coming half a dozen chapters off. Neither, strictly speaking, are the various catastrophes Alma provokes altogether her fault. A stronger-minded husband than Rolfe would have taken her in hand, curbed her impetuousness, taken her away from the London charivari of malign influences and fairweather friends.
If all this makes The Whirlpool sound like a case study in late nineteenth-century environmentalism, then Gissing’s insistence that we are conditioned by the company we keep is ultimately a false trail. More than one contemporary critic observed that his keenness on the debasing influence of milieu – as striking here as it is in his slum novels – is deceptive, for the relentlessness of his naturalism implies that most human beings will be unhappy wherever they live, and that the only solution to life’s miseries is a resolute stoicism. Rolfe at one point argues that the best kind of education for Walter would be one ‘which hardened his skin and blunted his sympathies… The thing is, to get through life with as little suffering as possible.’
Just as one of the novel’s satisfactions lies in its undeviating procedural line, so another rests in the knowledge of what awaited Gissing in the last six years of his life: a period in which failing health was to a certain extent compensated for by the attentions of Gabrielle Fleury, the intellectual companion whose vision he had pursued for most of his adult life. Written in the shadow of a disintegrating marriage, bitterly opposed to nearly everything that the late-Victorian age held dear, barely disguising a fatalism that is as much personal as philosophical, The Whirlpool is a convincing argument for Gissing’s claim, quite as credible as Hardy’s, to be regarded as the last great Victorian novelist.
George Gissing’s The Whirlpool, with a foreword by D.J. Taylor, is published by Penguin Classics
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