I loved the detail of the bell, too. Another favorite: Jasper's clean-shaven look that is "of bureaucratic type." Reminds me of John McPhee once writing that someone's mustache "seems medical, in that it spreads flat beyond the corners of his mouth and suggests no prognosis, positive or negative."
I recently read Spark’s “A Far Cry from Kensington,” which feels like it was an apt prelude to this! “To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity”--akin to Mrs. Hawkins’s favorite epithet (“pisseur de copie”). Love the tensions at work from the jump: between Jasper and his sisters, Maud and her mother, Reardon and Jasper, “Sunday-school prize books” and George Eliot (!), literature and trade. As a writer and a bookseller I am gleefully all in!
The dialogue around the prodigal son, Jasper really sparkles! His inability to keep thoughts to himself causes his sister Maud to rebuff him, which reminded me of a time in China when I pointed something unsavory to my Korean friend who then reprimanded me, why did you have to show me ?
What I didn't expect is family conversation hour about hangings. Won over on page 1. We follow the initial spotlight on Jasper holding court like many sons/brothers, with a great picking-apart of Jasper by his sister Maud and his mother. A kind of main character focus on Jasper that lets us know that we need to hold him accountable, maybe harshly. Even just his name is unneeded attention.
And the remark that Reardon was just the type to “end by poisoning or shooting himself,” with the interspersed comments about boiling milk and passing toast! There is nothing subtle here, and so far (in regards to the banality of life, nothing new.
What a start to the novel! Public hangings chatted about with toast and jam, homemade please, at the breakfast table. I will never forget this beginning, rather like a rough and tumble Jane Austen. Gissing really know how to hook in his readers.
It's easy to think of the impact on mass media on art and literature as recent. But New Grub St shows that's not the case. "But our Grub Street of to-day is quite a different place: it is supplied with telegraphic communication, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy.’" See the classic essays Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by Adorno and Horkheimer. And The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin. Hard to read at times but worth it https://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2013/12/adorno-and-horkheimer-culture-industry.html
In particular, the Benjamin essay feels the like the non-fiction version of Grub St. In it Benjamin describes the process by which modern technological reproduction strips art of its iconic aesthetic authority.
One of my favorite lines so far: “The Optimist was practically a failure.” Distills Jasper’s approach to the business of literature and the shameless honesty of his character. Very interested in the questions about art and literature already presented: how art should interact with the market, who is responsible for supporting art and what counts as work. Many straightforward, physical descriptions of characters: “Maud, who was twenty-two, had bold, handsome features, and very beautiful hair of russet tinge; hers was not a face that readily smiled.”
Love that the book opens with a comically cynical character like Jasper. Very "non Victorian" language and a blunt know it all regarding how to make money writing and yet still needs to ask his mother for money!
"I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies. But it needs skill, mind you: and to deny it is a gross error of the literary pedants. To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity."
“I have the honor to be a tolerably long-headed individual. I know what I’m about.” What a magnificent, funny, confident character here!
I love that the book immediately pulls you in to Jasper’s musings and then flings you back to Maud’s view of the reality of her brother’s financial situation and perhaps the emptiness of his ambitions, when he’s just been so sure and unwavering that success is right around the corner. So much fun to start a book and not know just quite who you will “side with” over the coming days.
New Grub Street, Chapter 1: “A man who comes to be hanged,” pursued Jasper, impartially, “has the satisfaction of knowing that he has brought society to its last resource. He is a man of such fatal importance that nothing will serve against him but the supreme effort of law. In a way, you know, that is success.”
Success is Milvain's obsession.. He admires it ("impartially") even among those to be hanged, ending life on a peculiar high note. (Gissing's dark humor has me already.) I’m also intrigued by the immediate focus on writing as “trade” and production on Grub Street.....I admire how the characters’ physical descriptions, ethics, and motivations are so deftly laid out (or so it seems) from the start.
Aah! The witty repartee! I wonder how I would fare in polite company of the time. Many of the conversations are word-duels with witticisms and clever turns of phrase the ammunition.
Interesting that some readers found this chapter humorous or satirical. I myself couldn’t help feeling dread on behalf of the daughters who truly are at desperate financial risk. I hope though that they find greater financial security-so long as they don’t marry someone awful for money! As for Jasper, I hope he evolves into a worthy human being, not a lazy, gabby mansplainer who takes advantage of his weak mother.
Jasper redeemed himself a bit for me toward the end of that chapter with his observations of Yule and his niece - he demonstrated the writers’ eye, which told me that he hasn’t just been wasting his time and is committed to the writing life. I agree with Amy about the poor prospects for the sisters, But Maud lost me with the way she lobbied against support for Jasper, and her apparent deaf ears when he suggested that she might earn some money by writing, too! Please don’t read that as a lack of sympathy for a woman’s place in that era. It’s sad to see all of them clinging to frayed appearances.
I read in my preface that Gissing was a bit obsessed with Eliot- and I do feel as if we’re being introduced to the tension found in Middlemarch, between the idealism of the artist/scholar and the pragmatic practicality of the business man. In Eliot I think she strikes a balance between them -though Dorothea fares better than Lydgate!
When is the last time you were "pinching and stinting to keep [someone] in idleness”? I appreciate Maud's salty push back against the "female fade" - refusing to become a backdrop to another's [dare I say, "man's"] ambitions.
Jasper can certainly turn a phrase. I don't much care for him, but he is intelligent and exasperatingly witty, as well as obnoxiously confident, even when asking for money. I guess we'll find out what's underneath all that cleverness. I sympathize with Maud, though she is far less compelling as a character.
I loved the detail of the bell, too. Another favorite: Jasper's clean-shaven look that is "of bureaucratic type." Reminds me of John McPhee once writing that someone's mustache "seems medical, in that it spreads flat beyond the corners of his mouth and suggests no prognosis, positive or negative."
just when I thought john mcphee was old hat, he pulls out a zinger like that. so good.
Love John McPhee. His voice is so disciplined and clinical--pardon the pun--and then, yeah, he zings you.
I recently read Spark’s “A Far Cry from Kensington,” which feels like it was an apt prelude to this! “To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity”--akin to Mrs. Hawkins’s favorite epithet (“pisseur de copie”). Love the tensions at work from the jump: between Jasper and his sisters, Maud and her mother, Reardon and Jasper, “Sunday-school prize books” and George Eliot (!), literature and trade. As a writer and a bookseller I am gleefully all in!
The dialogue around the prodigal son, Jasper really sparkles! His inability to keep thoughts to himself causes his sister Maud to rebuff him, which reminded me of a time in China when I pointed something unsavory to my Korean friend who then reprimanded me, why did you have to show me ?
What I didn't expect is family conversation hour about hangings. Won over on page 1. We follow the initial spotlight on Jasper holding court like many sons/brothers, with a great picking-apart of Jasper by his sister Maud and his mother. A kind of main character focus on Jasper that lets us know that we need to hold him accountable, maybe harshly. Even just his name is unneeded attention.
Family conversation about hangings...when such things were not so uncommon. Terrifying in that that regard how recent it is..
And the remark that Reardon was just the type to “end by poisoning or shooting himself,” with the interspersed comments about boiling milk and passing toast! There is nothing subtle here, and so far (in regards to the banality of life, nothing new.
What a start to the novel! Public hangings chatted about with toast and jam, homemade please, at the breakfast table. I will never forget this beginning, rather like a rough and tumble Jane Austen. Gissing really know how to hook in his readers.
It's easy to think of the impact on mass media on art and literature as recent. But New Grub St shows that's not the case. "But our Grub Street of to-day is quite a different place: it is supplied with telegraphic communication, it knows what literary fare is in demand in every part of the world, its inhabitants are men of business, however seedy.’" See the classic essays Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception by Adorno and Horkheimer. And The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin. Hard to read at times but worth it https://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.com/2013/12/adorno-and-horkheimer-culture-industry.html
In particular, the Benjamin essay feels the like the non-fiction version of Grub St. In it Benjamin describes the process by which modern technological reproduction strips art of its iconic aesthetic authority.
One of my favorite lines so far: “The Optimist was practically a failure.” Distills Jasper’s approach to the business of literature and the shameless honesty of his character. Very interested in the questions about art and literature already presented: how art should interact with the market, who is responsible for supporting art and what counts as work. Many straightforward, physical descriptions of characters: “Maud, who was twenty-two, had bold, handsome features, and very beautiful hair of russet tinge; hers was not a face that readily smiled.”
Love that the book opens with a comically cynical character like Jasper. Very "non Victorian" language and a blunt know it all regarding how to make money writing and yet still needs to ask his mother for money!
"I would produce novels out-trashing the trashiest that ever sold fifty thousand copies. But it needs skill, mind you: and to deny it is a gross error of the literary pedants. To please the vulgar you must, one way or another, incarnate the genius of vulgarity."
Jasper would fit right in in a Wilde scene: cynical and vulgar, as you note--and unrepentant.
Yes!
Ah, yes ... Jasper's hubris is striking: "There's a certain satisfaction in reflecting that it [the one being hanged] is not oneself."
“I have the honor to be a tolerably long-headed individual. I know what I’m about.” What a magnificent, funny, confident character here!
I love that the book immediately pulls you in to Jasper’s musings and then flings you back to Maud’s view of the reality of her brother’s financial situation and perhaps the emptiness of his ambitions, when he’s just been so sure and unwavering that success is right around the corner. So much fun to start a book and not know just quite who you will “side with” over the coming days.
New Grub Street, Chapter 1: “A man who comes to be hanged,” pursued Jasper, impartially, “has the satisfaction of knowing that he has brought society to its last resource. He is a man of such fatal importance that nothing will serve against him but the supreme effort of law. In a way, you know, that is success.”
Success is Milvain's obsession.. He admires it ("impartially") even among those to be hanged, ending life on a peculiar high note. (Gissing's dark humor has me already.) I’m also intrigued by the immediate focus on writing as “trade” and production on Grub Street.....I admire how the characters’ physical descriptions, ethics, and motivations are so deftly laid out (or so it seems) from the start.
The dark humor...yes! I chuckled through the entire chapter. So far, I read New Grub Street as scathing satire.
Aah! The witty repartee! I wonder how I would fare in polite company of the time. Many of the conversations are word-duels with witticisms and clever turns of phrase the ammunition.
Love the idea of "word-duels with witticisms"!
Interesting that some readers found this chapter humorous or satirical. I myself couldn’t help feeling dread on behalf of the daughters who truly are at desperate financial risk. I hope though that they find greater financial security-so long as they don’t marry someone awful for money! As for Jasper, I hope he evolves into a worthy human being, not a lazy, gabby mansplainer who takes advantage of his weak mother.
Jasper redeemed himself a bit for me toward the end of that chapter with his observations of Yule and his niece - he demonstrated the writers’ eye, which told me that he hasn’t just been wasting his time and is committed to the writing life. I agree with Amy about the poor prospects for the sisters, But Maud lost me with the way she lobbied against support for Jasper, and her apparent deaf ears when he suggested that she might earn some money by writing, too! Please don’t read that as a lack of sympathy for a woman’s place in that era. It’s sad to see all of them clinging to frayed appearances.
I read in my preface that Gissing was a bit obsessed with Eliot- and I do feel as if we’re being introduced to the tension found in Middlemarch, between the idealism of the artist/scholar and the pragmatic practicality of the business man. In Eliot I think she strikes a balance between them -though Dorothea fares better than Lydgate!
When is the last time you were "pinching and stinting to keep [someone] in idleness”? I appreciate Maud's salty push back against the "female fade" - refusing to become a backdrop to another's [dare I say, "man's"] ambitions.
Jasper can certainly turn a phrase. I don't much care for him, but he is intelligent and exasperatingly witty, as well as obnoxiously confident, even when asking for money. I guess we'll find out what's underneath all that cleverness. I sympathize with Maud, though she is far less compelling as a character.