“It seemed to him that the greatest happiness attainable would be to creep into some dark, warm corner, out of the sight and memory of men…”
“Out of the sight of men” is one thing; “out of the sight and memory of men,” another. Every once in a while Gissing has a sentence that sends a chill down a reader’s spine. Such acute understanding of a specific kind of despair.
“And to think that people will skim over it without a suspicion of what it cost the writer!”
Even a mediocre writer like Reardon understands the real pain of writing: a writer’s words always carry more weight, more memory, and more meaning for the writer than to the readers.
What happens between Amy and Reardon—allow me to use a word I never use—it’s so profoundly predictable, and yet so profoundly sad.
Join us on December 13 for a virtual discussion of New Grub Street with Yiyun Li.
"His desire was to impress Amy with the bitter intensity of his sufferings; pathos and loving words seemed to have lost their power upon her, but perhaps if he yielded to that other form of passion she would be shaken out of her coldness. The stress of injured love is always tempted to speech which seems its contradiction. Reardon had the strangest mixture of pain and pleasure in flinging out these first words of wrath that he had ever addressed to Amy; they consoled him under the humiliating sense of his weakness, and yet he watched with dread his wife's countenance as she listened to him. He hoped to cause her pain equal to his own, for then it would be in his power at once to throw off this disguise and soothe her with every softest word his heart could suggest."
Amy's response to this was predictable. However many countless times men have yielded to the impulse to do this has, it ever but alienated her?
'Can I think of a single subject in all the sphere of my experience without the consciousness that I see it through the medium of poverty? I have no enjoyment which isn't tainted by that thought, and I can suffer no pain which it doesn't increase. The curse of poverty is to the modern world just what that of slavery was to the ancient. Rich and destitute stand to each other as free man and bond. You remember the line of Homer I have often quoted about the demoralising effect of enslavement; poverty degrades in the same way.'
Edwin is powerful and eloquent on the subject of poverty and wealth. He should write an essay about that. But here it probably doesn't help his cause with Amy.
Amy's solution of a temporary separation so he can write in the country in solitude seems like sensible last resort, but may have ulterior motive. She may have reached the end of her rope.