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I recently discovered an unknown Gissing story in the Chicago Daily News of 1877, a story dating from his year of American exile. The search for Gissing's youthful lost fiction has lasted now some two-thirds of a century. His best-known novel, New Grub Street (1891), provided the earliest clue: the minor character Whelpdale, a resilient London hack, tells of first getting published during an ill-considered trip to America's Middle West. With almost no money remaining in his pockets, he wrote a short story and had it accepted by Chicago's largest newspaper. "For some months," Whelpdale adds, "I supported myself in Chicago, writing for that same paper, and for others."[1] In 1912 a thinly disguised Gissing biography by his friend Morley Roberts, The Private Life of Henry Maitland, asserted that Whelpdale's
Shortly after the First World War, a group of researchers including George Everett Hastings, Vincent Starrett, Thomas Ollive Mabbott, and Christopher Hagerup found eight Gissing stories in the Tribune just as Roberts had foretold: three signed "G. R. G." and five without signature. The publication dates ranged from March 10 to July 29, 1877. Both manner and theme identified even the unsigned pieces as Gissing's. Next, Whelpdale's last words caught the eyes of the researchers—"for that same paper, and for others"—and they shifted their investigation to the rest of Chicago's press. Sure enough, they found three more stories in Chicago dailies other than the Tribune—all unsigned but clearly by Gissing. The publication of these extended from April 28 to June 2, 1877.[2]
In the late 1920s and the early 1930s, three further stories cropped up from Gissing's American stay: "An English Coast-Picture" in Appletons' Journal (New York) (July 1877); "The Artist's Child" in the Alliance (Chicago) (30 June 1877), an obscure religious paper; and "A Terrible Mistake" in the National Weekly (Chicago) (5 May 1877), an even more obscure and ephemeral publication. All three of these pieces appeared under the pseudonym "G. R. Gresham"—the name of a villainous character in Workers in the Dawn (1880), Gissing's first novel. Then, after a lapse of almost fifty years, Pierre Coustillas and I found two more Gissing stories in Chicago's Alliance: "A Mother's Hope" (12 May 1877) and "A Test of Honor" (2 June 1877). Like the previously uncovered story in the Alliance and also like those in Appletons' and in the National Weekly, these two newest finds bore the pen name "G. R. Gresham."[3]
My latest discovery of an unknown Gissing story comes from a paper ignored till now in the search for Gissing's fiction—the Chicago Daily News. I found my clue in Professor Mabbott's description of where he and others had looked: the Tribune, the Journal, the Post, the Times, the Inter-Ocean, but, curiously enough, not the News—Chicago's largest evening paper in 1877.[4] When I read through the News of Gissing's American year, I found an unsigned story that I thought undoubtedly his—"Too Wretched to Live" (24 April 1877, p. 2). The gloomy theme and the journeyman prose have the unmistakable ring of Gissing's early work. And in the News of May 18,
Struggling to earn his keep from one week to the next, Gissing apparently gained a second payment for a story already published by a rival Chicago daily. The News piece remains essentially the same as that appearing in the Journal. The few alterations in scattered words and in a single phrase could easily have occurred during simple recopying. For many years later, Gissing retained the habit of submitting his work in longhand. Obviously, he could not have sent the News the clipped-out published version, for that would have exposed it as an already-used story. He could have recopied either the Journal's printed version or his own hand-written draft. One other possibility remains: simultaneous submissions of slightly different manuscripts, followed first by publication in the Journal and then by Gissing's failure to withdraw his story from that paper's local rival. In any case, the title change from the Americanized "Warden" to the British form "Warder" argues against a mere case of literary piracy by the News's American staff—a piracy without the awareness of the young man from England. Most importantly, the appearance in the News of this known Gissing piece establishes that the editors had a taste for his fiction—circumstantial evidence that tends to support his authorship, as well, of "Too Wretched to Live."
The publication date of "Too Wretched to Live"—April 24, 1877—falls well within the period of Gissing's other known stories from Chicago: March 10 to July 29, 1877. More specifically, Mabbott and Starrett established that Gissing's fiction had appeared in dailies other than the Tribune from April 28th through June 2nd. Indeed, "Too Wretched to Live" came out in the News four days before his first other extant non-Tribune story—"The Warden's Daughter" (the Journal, 28 April 1877). In view of the News's prominence and its extensive use of fiction, Gissing's turning to that paper soon after the Tribune seems just what one would expect from a struggling young writer in Chicago of the late 1870s.
"Too Wretched to Live" contains marks of Gissing's handiwork at least as compelling as the external evidence. Consider, for example, the jilted Lilian Frasier's suicide by drowning. In Gissing's early fiction and even in works from the '90s, the plot device of drowning recurs like an obsession. In his very first story, "The Sins of the Fathers" (1877), the heroine commits both suicide and murder by drowning herself and her former fiancé. The heroine in "Brownie" (1877) avenges the murder of her poor drowned sister by driving the villain into drowning himself too. Watery suicide also turns up in the novelette All for Love (written 1880; pub. 1970) and in two short stories from about this same period: "The Last Half Crown" (written 1879-1880; pub. 1970) and "Cain and Abel" (written 1880; pub. 1970). Accidental drowning occurs in "The Quarry on the Heath" (written 1881; pub. 1970) and, most memorably, in a piece from Gissing's maturity—"The Day of
The broad narrative subject of "Too Wretched to Live"—the hero's abandonment of one woman for another—also serves to mark the story as Gissing's. He uses this theme in his early, middle, and even late fiction. At times he provides mitigating details to help excuse man's fickleness, but at others he presents the most extreme cases: males who engage themselves to an alternative woman while still engaged to a first. His earliest story, "The Sins of the Fathers" (10 March 1877), has the hero discard his old love for a new one, but with many extenuating circumstances. A variant of this theme appears in Workers in the Dawn (1880), when the hero tries to abandon his false love for his true one but is blocked by the inconvenience of having unwisely bound himself as husband of the rival female. Interestingly enough, the protagonist in Workers has the same first name, Arthur, as the inconstant young man in "Too Wretched to Live." A rather sympathetic treatment of the fast sexual shuffle occurs in both The Unclassed (1884) and in A Life's Morning (1888). By the time of New Grub Street (1891), however, Gissing depicts male fickleness with rueful comedy and by Our Friend the Charlatan (1901) with broadly satiric ridicule. In embryonic form, then, "Too Wretched to Live" contains a persistent and basic Gissing theme: off with the old love and on with the new.
With its stiff formal prose interspersed with attempted lyricism, the style of "Too Wretched to Live" provides a further mark of the youthful Gissing's authorship. Like many others of his early short stories, this one sets the scene with a flowery description of landscape, sky, and sun: "The sun was just setting as he turned the corner of the house and both sea and sky were bathed in a crimson splendor. . . ." This purple patch bears a strong resemblance to an opening passage from "A Mother's Hope": ". . . The long track of sunlight, which gleamed from the horizon to the limits of the wet sands, kept ever spreading as the sun rose higher, . . . till the whole sea and shore exulted in the splendors of the new day."[5] Similar effusions about splendid suns or overarching skies open other stories from the writer's early period: "An English Coast-Picture," "A Test of Honor," "The Death-Clock," and
Another of Gissing's stylistic quirks—the pedantic term imported from Latin or Greek—appears near the climax of "Too Wretched to Live": "As he glanced at the handwriting, a woman's delicate chirography. . . ." From the Greek root kheirographon, that bookish final word intrudes upon a scene of supposedly high emotion. The former classics student from Owens College, Manchester, never lost his taste for ink-horn phrases. To the end of his writing career, he retained a preference for erudite words over plain ones—for visage or physiognomy over simply face. Even in Born in Exile (1892), one of his finest novels, we find a broad sprinkling of learned expressions: "susurration," "sequaciousness," "intenerates."[6] Thus the fancy word chirography in the Daily News story provides further evidence of George Gissing's authorship.
From a biographical viewpoint, "Too Wretched to Live" has a special connection with "The Sins of the Fathers," Gissing's first story. Both pieces construct troubled fantasies out of his guilty feelings at having left Nell Harrison on the other side of the ocean—his prostitute love for whom he had besmirched himself back at Owens College. In Gissing's later life, his romantic guilt undid him: he returned to Nell after one year abroad and eventually married this unreformed and alcoholic streetwalker. They lived together unhappily, though not quite ever after, for they separated at last in 1883.
In "The Sins of the Fathers," Nell Harrison's fictional counterpart walks the streets of an English city very like Manchester. Though the hero saves her from becoming a prostitute, his father falsely tells him that she has suddenly died, and the hero marries instead a pretty American schoolgirl. At the end the Nell-like figure becomes an avenging "Medusa"—a word used to describe her in the very first paragraph. In effect, the protagonist has much justification for feeling relieved when he thinks her dead—good riddance of a wild female. Yet in "Too Wretched to Live," the egoistic hero has no excuse at all but snobbery. He abandons a sweet and respectable young farm girl for a fashionable beauty who sings drawing-room opera—a beauty whose last name even suggests nobility: Earle. Then he discovers, too late, that he really preferred his dead former love to her more elegant rival. In a final touch of Gissing lugubriousness, the protagonist marries the rival woman anyway but lives unhappily ever after.
The contrast between the "Medusa" avenger in Gissing's first story and the tender-hearted suicide in the newly discovered piece illustrates a weakness running through his early work. The youthful writer tended to depict all women as one of two extremes: idealized angel or deplorable man-trap. His early novels usually contain both a female saint and a slut: seraphic Helen Norman versus drunken Carrie Mitchell (Workers in the Dawn—1880),
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