Recently, I read New Grub Street by George Gissing, published in 1891. It's a novel about the literary life among several writers living in London, yet to "make it."
While hand-to-mouth, material hardships of struggling writers gave the novel an appealing texture, I found the phrase "genial coarseness" leaped out at me.
Three male writers--Edwin Reardon, Harold Biffen, Jasper Milvain--figure prominently in the novel's unfolding. All three have varying success in their relationships with women.
Edwin Reardon is married, but comes to separate from his wife when Amy can no longer accept an impoverished life being married to a struggling writer. She takes their young son and moves in with her mother.
Reardon struggles on in squalor, though sending his wife token payments he cannot afford. When his wife gains an inheritance after an uncle's death, Amy offers to reunite with Reardon, but he refuses, knowing too many past arguments and hurt feelings.
It's when their son is desperately ill and Reardon is forced to see his wife that writer friend Biffen steps in and advises:
"The art of living is the art of compromise. We have no right to foster sensibilities, and conduct ourselves as if the world allowed of ideal relations.... Genial coarseness is what it behoves [British variant of behooves] men like you and me to cultivate."
Perhaps ironic that Biffen plays the practical foil to Reardon's quixotic idealism, for Biffen's pursuit of women is notably hopeless. Still, his insight into ineffectual idealism lets him realize:
"What right have we to make ourselves and others miserable for the sake of an obstinate idealism? ... Why will you go cutting your loaf with a razor when you have a serviceable bread-knife?"
What Biffen seems to be saying is, How can compromise ever square with pig-headed idealism? The latter so often is solipsistic. That is, one person's idealism is often not absolute, but relative in another's eyes.
Amy has certainly dropped her need for ideal relations and will take her husband back "as is." But Edwin won't have it.
If for Biffen, the end justifies the means, he's also right: The marriage would work if Reardon accepted Amy's offer. Even if acceptance had a genial coarseness:
"Ask yourself what the vulgar man would do, and do likewise; that's the only safe rule for you."
Without giving away the ending, the third struggling writer, Jasper Milvain, in New Grub Street negotiates his writer life with a genial coarseness by holding out and marrying for money.
Image credit: wikipedia.org
Read Charlie Dickinson's story collection (and feel free to share with a friend) The Cat at Light's End, as an ebook in these downloadable formats:
.mobi (Kindle)
.epub (most other readers)
.pdf (for PCs)
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