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The Gissing Newsletter THE GISSING NEWSLETTER “More than most men am I dependent on sympathy to bring out the best that is in me.” – George Gissing’s Commonplace Book. ********************************** Volume VI, Number 1 January, 1970 ********************************** -- 1 -- Henry Ryecroft’s Trick A. H. Griffing University of Hawaii Recently while rereading Virginia Woolf’s essay, “The Sun and the Fish,” and enjoying once again her ingenious use of mental associations, I was reminded of a passage in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft which had arrested my attention some years ago. In it Ryecroft speaks of “a trick of mind” which could transport him in time and space and bring before his eyes scenes from earlier years, and not their sights only but also the moods that had accompanied them. I recall that this passage struck me with particular force on first coming across it as it seemed to me then that Gissing had hit upon the same Bergsonian relationship between *************************************************** Editorial Board Pierre Coustillas, Editor, University of Lille Shigeru Koike, Tokyo Metropolitan University Jacob Korg, University of Washington Editorial correspondence should be sent to the editor: 10, rue Gay-Lussac, 59-La Madeleine-lez-Lille, France, and all other correspondence to: C. C. Kohler, 141 High Street, Dorking, Surrey, England. Subscriptions Private Subscribers: 12/6 per annum ($1.50) Libraries: 25/- per annum ($3.00) *************************************************** -- 2 -- perception and memory (1) used so effectively by Proust, but only to note it as a curiosity and pass on without making any further use of it. But this last was a mistaken impression as a subsequent rereading of Ryecroft assured me. The divisions of the book entitled Summer and Autumn make considerable use of such associations, and there is a further instance in Winter, the last division. The passage in Ryecroft referred to above is the first one in the Autumn division, and is so unmistakably a conscious use of the mental phenomenon that it commands especial attention. Section III opens: “Everyone, I suppose, is subject to a trick of mind which often puzzles me. I am reading or thinking, and at a moment, without any association that I can discover, there arises before me the vision of a place I know.” He suggests that if he is busy doing something else the triggering device must be “an object seen, an odour, a touch”; and indulges the speculation that “perhaps even a posture of the body suffices to recall something in the past.” (2) Then Ryecroft reports the experience that gave rise to this reflection: he had been talking to his gardener and all at once found himself looking upon the Bay of Avlona. He was not able to determine what had triggered this experience, but the remark about bodily posture perhaps being the effective connection in some of these experiences is a striking one, especially to the reader who recalls the incident in The Past Recaptured when Proust’s Marcel, stepping backward out of the Guermantes’ driveway to avoid being hit by an oncoming automobile, suddenly finds himself in Venice. He realizes later that on one occasion when in Venice he had moved backward in order to look up at St. Mark’s and stepped on a broken paving stone, and that when he had stepped out of the way of the automobile he had also stepped on a broken curb stone, and that this was the connection. (3) It becomes even more striking when one remembers that Gissing’s book was written about a dozen years before even the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past was published, and over twenty-five years before the publication of The Past Recaptured. (4) This passage from Part III of the Autumn division is far from being an isolated instance of Bergsonian association employed in Ryecroft, though it does contain the most extensive discussion of the phenomenon. There are at least six clear uses of the device. I use the term -- 3 -- “device” because it seems definitely established that Ryecroft is sufficiently other than Gissing himself to lead to the conclusion that while most of these instances stem from Gissing’s own experience they are not found in Ryecroft in the form in which Gissing experienced them or are only in a general way based on his experience. (5) Gissing may of course have experienced the phenomenon of “association” as presumably everyone has. I recall most vividly a fascinating, even weird, transportation to New York harbor by the sound of a ferryboat whistle heard far inland where locomotives had for some reason been equipped with them. The phenomenon itself needs no proving. There are three instances of the use of this type of association in the Summer division of the book. Indeed, this division begins with one as though Gissing had the matter in mind and had decided to make use of this device. Pure conjecture, true, but this was 1900 (or at the latest early 1901) and Bergson’s Matter and Memory (1896) had been out for four years and must have been discussed at least to some extent, particularly in France where Gissing was living at the time, (6) though there is no mention of Bergson in his commonplace book nor in books about Gissing of which I have knowledge. The Summer division opens: “Today, as I was reading in the garden, a waft of summer perfume – some hidden link of association in what I read – I know not what it may have been – took me back to schoolboy holidays; I recovered with strange intensity that lightsome mood of long release from tasks, of going away to the seaside... I was in the train...” (p. 77). The next instance, also in this division of the book, involves a flower, the restharrow: “Now I have but to smell it,” he says, “and those hours come back again. I see the shore of Cumberland, running north to St. Bee’s Head...’ (p. 90). More specifically pointed up is the next instance: “By some trick of memory I always associate schoolboy work on the classics with a sense of warm and sunny days... My old Liddell and Scott still serves me, and if, in opening it, I bend close enough to catch the scent of the leaves, I am back again at that day of boyhood... when the book was new and I used it for the first time. -- 4 -- It was a day of summer...” (pp. 91-92). The striking opening of Section III of Autumn has already been discussed. The beginning of Section XV of this division is interesting, but is a questionable instance of association: “Blackberries hanging thick upon the hedge bring to my memory something of long ago” (p. 152). It is questionable in that Ryecroft goes on to speak of having had a meal without paying, something so unusual in his experience of days of poverty in London that he remarks upon it, but this is only indirectly connected with association in the sense in which it is being used in this paper. (7) Section XIX of Autumn is more closely akin: “I was at ramble in the lanes, when, from somewhere at a distance, there sounded the voice of a countryman – strange to say – singing. The notes were indistinct, but they rose, to my ear, with a moment’s musical sadness, and of a sudden my heart was stricken with a memory so keen that I knew not whether it was pain or delight... The English landscape faded before my eyes. I saw great Doric columns of honey-golden travertine...” He was seeing Paestum (pp. 160-161). It is interesting, even instructive perhaps, to compare this passage with its original in the commonplace book: “This afternoon (Sept. ’92) walking near Heavitree, a still, autumnal air, I heard a man shout far off in a field, and his voice had a note like that of a peasant singing at Paestum. It was terrible!” (8). The changes introduced in order to be able to employ an actual experience as another of those mental “tricks” seem to argue that Gissing here makes conscious use of the device. It is difficult to explain the alterations on any other basis, except to suggest that perhaps the original offended against the total tone of Ryecroft and was therefore “doctored” to bring it into harmony with the rest of the book by being rendered more pleasing. In the final division, Winter, there is one more instance of the use of the device. Section V begins: “Walking along the road after nightfall, I thought all at once of London streets, and, by a freak of mind, wished I were there. I saw the shining of shop-fronts, the yellow glistening of wet pavement, the hurrying people, the cabs, the omnibuses – and wished I were amid it all’ (pp. 180-181). This, indeed, may be pure nostalgia, and succeeding paragraphs would support this; -- 5 -- nevertheless, the germ, the kernel, of association is there – “by a freak of mind” is equivalent to “trick of mind” and there is the give-away “thought all at once” – surely indicative of the device being employed yet again. These, then, are the instances. How to account for them in the absence of anything but conjecture to go on – that is the problem we are left with. We can suspect that Gissing had experienced and reflected upon similar (or even in given instances the same) happenings in his own life, but his commonplace book does not truly support any such idea, though it does contain the germ of Ryecroft, a suggestion for a book to be called “Thought and Reverie.” (9).
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