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. ‘The days are past when a man watched over his wife’s coming and going as a matter of course,’ Carnaby assures his friend, and in many ways Carnaby is more of a victim of his time than Rolfe – a frustrated man of action, married to a well-born woman with expensive tastes, whose foreign travels and business ventures are undertaken largely with the object of giving him something to do.
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 by the collapse of the rather ominously titled ‘Britannia Loan, Assurance, Investment, and Banking Company, Limited’; 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 mesalliance 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 Britannia disaster 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.
D. J. Taylor, 2015
PART THE FIRST
One
Harvey Rolfe was old enough to dine with deliberation, young and healthy enough to sauce with appetite the dishes he thoughtfully selected. You perceived in him the imperfect epicure. His club had no culinary fame; the dinner was merely tolerable; but Rolfe’s unfinished palate flattered the second-rate cook. He knew nothing of vintages; it sufficed him to distinguish between Bordeaux and Burgundy; yet one saw him raise his glass and peer at the liquor with eye of connoisseur. All unaffectedly; for he was conscious of his shortcoming in the art of delicate living, and never vaunted his satisfactions. He had known the pasture of poverty, and the table as it is set by London land-ladies; to look back on these things was to congratulate himself that nowadays he dined.
Beyond the achievement of a vague personal distinction at the Metropolitan Club, he had done nothing to make himself a man of note, and it was doubtful whether more than two or three of the members really liked him or regarded him with genuine interest.
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