Escaping Realism: Harold Biffen in ‘New Grub Street’

Writing about the act of writing is a funny thing. At worst, it can come across as an act of self-aggrandisement for an author – Pygmalion being inspired to work by gazing into a mirror – or otherwise a shallow attempt at wish-fulfilment. Whether the protagonist-author is successful in their endeavours, or becomes tragically martyred at the feet of their cause, it can all feel a bit like the creator-author’s ego-trip.

Every tendency has an exception, of course, and I am delighted to find this one. George Gissing’s 1891 work ‘New Grub Street’ was recommended to me about a year ago, and it has taken me this long to get round to it, although I wish I’d made more of an effort sooner.

Situated in London’s booming journalism industry (Grub Street was initially a geographic location from Samuel Johnson’s time, populated by opportunistic and unscrupulous news-hawkers) Gissing takes us through the (mostly) tormented lives of aspiring writers who navigate their delicate careers through the ever-increasingly popular appetite for sensation and scandal. Over them looms the omnipresent spectre of obscurity and impoverishment – some rise, others fall, and those who prevail sometimes aren’t those whom we feel deserve it.

When wondering whether there was anything I could put down about Gissing’s work, one of the characters took my notice in particular; not the rational and unprincipled Jaspar Milvain, willing to sacrifice all else for career gain (as Queenie Leavis pointed out, a character with such a name could only be the villain) nor the idealistic, doomed Edwin Reardon, chained almost Byron-like to his insatiable yearning of writing art that befits his aspiration.

Instead, I am drawn to consider the minor character Harold Biffen. When we first meet Biffen, he is described as an eccentric and destitute writer acting upon a theory that ‘ordinary vulgar life’ should be treated with ‘fidelity and seriousness’ (something that, in his mind, no other contemporary author has fully achieved). For him, the ultimate aim of realism should not be to embellish, but to capture the untampered ‘sphere of the ignobly decent’.

This philosophy drives him to deal with the ‘essentially unheroic’, an essence that he argues Zola’s characters fail to embody within their ‘deliberate tragedies’; as for Dickens, his ‘tendency to melodrama’ and ‘humour’ restricts him from this as well.

To Biffen, the method of reaching this paradigm of realist literature is simply to ‘reproduce’ reality ‘verbatim’, steering clear of any authorial idealism or narrative indulgence. Of course, he accepts such a work would be ‘unutterably tedious’ – frankly he embraces the fact, proclaiming this quality of insufferableness to be the ‘stamp of the ignobly decent life’.

In the market-driven world of New Grub Street, such a novel would not only be tedious, but also impossible to sell. Biffen has great experience of this, first being likened to a ‘living skeleton’, and his destitution only deepens as he dedicates his life to the most esoteric of works, Mr Bailey, Grocer (a play-by-play reporting of the life of his neighbour with the same name and occupation. Is such a thing even fiction at this point?).

And yet, as Gissing points out, whilst we may denigrate Biffen for this ludicrous, fruitless project, ‘he would have vastly preferred to eat and be satisfied had any method of obtaining food presented itself to him. He did not starve for the pleasure of the thing’. It is not his fault that he was compelled in such a manner, or that the particular society he found himself in happened to not reward such a work with riches; one cannot blame the scorpion for stinging, as it is its nature.

Now, above everything else, after the description I have provided one might be tempted to view Mr Biffen as… a bit dull. The man himself likely would have agreed, even rejoiced in the perception. Which makes it all the more interesting that Gissing chose to place this specific character at the heart of the most sensationalised, romanticised, and heroic action in the novel. Indeed, not only is it the most cinematic of excerpts in New Grub Street, it is the only passage with such a quality; more than fitting into this grimy, unglamorous work, it could be at home in a Tom Cruise movie.

Those who have read the novel will know what I am referring to, and those who haven’t shortly will. But it is no exaggeration to say it’s probably the most affecting passage I’ve read in literature for a while – largely down to its complete incongruity.

In the latter half of the work, Biffen’s ramshackle apartment at the top of a multi-storey is set on fire, with the only copy of the completed Mr Bailey, Grocer on the table inside. And without thinking, Biffen rushes into the flames to save it. An uncharacteristically reckless and impassioned act from an otherwise reserved and severe man, one might think. I assure you, it only gets more eyebrow-raising from there.

He runs, then staggers, then practically crawls through the fire up each staircase, makes it to the room where the manuscript lies miraculously unscathed, breaks through the trapdoor onto the roof moments before the smoke overcomes him – pause for breath – when on the roof he wraps the manuscript in his coat and hurls it over a chimneystack onto the next roof, but is unable to clamber over it to safety himself, until a neighbour pokes his head between the chimneys with a ladder handy for Biffen to use. But as soon as he is away from the flames, there is disaster still, for the manuscript has fallen into the street below! Surely it is stolen along with the coat it was wrapped in – Biffen despairs, but a helpful bystander discovers it in a yard and returns Mr Bailey, Grocer safe and sound.

I, for one, am convinced that Gissing must have been laughing all the way through this scene. It is sensational to the point of ludicrousness, and not to mention completely ironic for the reasons I have outlined.

It must be said that (perhaps unfortunately) this exhilarating event does not awaken a long-dormant heroism in Biffen. Soon after, he doubles down on his horror of dying in such an ‘ignoble’ manner (choking to death on smoke) and instead wishes to see the end of his days ‘at home’ as a ‘schoolmaster in some small town’. In an agonising rejection of poetic justice, Gissing does not allow Biffen to be reimbursed for his superhuman efforts either – Mr Bailey, Grocer is universally panned and scarcely sells for anything. One critic even spits that Biffen ‘seems not to understand that a work of art must before everything else afford amusement’ (a personally shuddering assertion).

But if we are to widen our gaze from the words on the page to the novel in our hands, it is clear that the perception of Biffen as a character has benefitted greatly from this occurrence, as antithetical to his philosophy as it is. I certainly know that, as time passes and my attention turns to other books, whenever I see New Grub Street on my bookshelf my mind will conjure images of Biffen’s reckless, admirable effort to save a manuscript he knows offers nothing but personal fulfilment.

Thus, I believe this to be the true, wicked irony that Gissing was hoping to achieve with Mr Harold Biffen. He is bitter proof that, even concerning a man whose greatest energies went towards rejecting the sensational and embracing the unremarkable, the defining episode of his life will prove to be one of action, drama, and quite contrived triumph. Biffen’s was a salvation of deus ex machina-proportion; it might well have been Jacob’s ladder thrown over the chimneystack to his aid.

Furthermore, it is little wonder why the reader laps up such moments of unabashed heroism. In the hum-drum of their own lives, a little escapism into a world where they can project themselves onto exceptional feats is no bad thing. To bring this Scribbling to a close, though, I would like to focus our lens inward once more from the totality of the reader to the particularity of the character – for there is also evidence that, beneath his austere exterior, Biffen is quite the romantic too.

There is an intriguing interaction between Biffen and Reardon before the realist’s ‘fiery adventure’ (as he calls it, in a wording that we can presume is intended as derogatory). The latter writer, as the embodiment of the idealistic yet ineffectual artist, is reminiscing about his experience travelling in Athens. The sheer, flowing poetry of the passage is breathtaking, and also revealing, suggesting as it does the true potential of Reardon’s literary capability – if he could only get out of his own way.

But Biffen, when faced with this magnificent onslaught, begs his friend to ‘Stop!’ lest he clutches him ‘by the throat’, for he cannot stand these reminisces.

Rather than indulge in these high-artistic sensibilities as Reardon does, Biffen’s entire constitution; from his refusal of anything beyond the unexceptional in his work, to his inability to allow himself to pursue the women he loves (going as far as the point at which the idea risks growing ‘hateful’); seems predicated around an abhorrence of picturing any sort of reality for himself beyond the most meagre of existences. Parallel to Reardon’s chronic case of writer’s block, it appears Biffen is tormented by a block of sheer nourishing optimism.

By the novel’s end, the poor health brought on by Reardon’s impoverishment claims his life. As he slips away, he quotes Shakespeare’s ‘we are such stuff as dreams are made on’. Left alone, Biffen too succumbs to his impoverishment of hope, walking up the wooded Putney Hill and quietly taking his own life. And it just so happens that on these few pages, the final few that we spend with this tragic figure, we find another incongruous passage of poetic description to match the quality of Reardon’s Grecian reminisces.

Gissing is clear that we see this portrayal through Biffen’s eyes, as he ‘watch[es] the river with a quiet smile’ and ‘enjoy[s] the splendour of the sky’. Via him, we see the ‘sun-smitten clouds’, the ‘perfect globe’ of the ‘new-risen moon’, and feel his mood of ‘ineffable peace’. His mind is filled with ‘Only thoughts of beautiful things’ from before he imposed upon himself this ‘mission of literary realism’ – and the final phrase that flits through his darkening mind, is the same Shakespeare that last passed Reardon’s lips.

At the very end of it all, outside of industry and beyond the markets, we see that Biffen had the same Romantic idealism within him as his lost literary friend. Perhaps it was the self-tyrannising stymying of this super-ordinary font within him that caused his fatal act.

Gissing is kind to Biffen and Reardon. He writes that they were ‘richly endeavoured with the kindly and the imaginative virtues’, and it was not their fault ‘the world has no pity on a man who can’t do or produce something it thinks worth money’. For such a titan of realism as Gissing, he who was coined England’s answer to Balzac, it is an intriguing thought that his most revered novel suggests the pursuit of true realism is unnatural, at odds with the human spirit, and even harmful.

If not this, then New Grub Street is at the very least an imploring to look beyond the material fixations of post-Industrial society, and to appreciate those unfortunate souls who, in another life, another reality, might even have been viewed as fortunate to possess the sensitivities that they do.

(Do you think I am alluding to myself? Well – far from falling prey to my own warning, I wouldn’t want this to come across as too much of an ‘ego-trip’, would I?)

Thank you for reading,