Intro & Preface & Contents
Previous: IX. Independence, forsooth!
Mentally and physically, I must be much older than my years. At three-and-fifty a man ought not to be brooding constantly on his vanished youth. [Gissing was 46 when he died] These days of spring which I should be enjoying for their own sake, do but turn me to reminiscence, and my memories are of the springs that were lost...
On the whole, however, I had nothing much to complain of except my poverty. You cannot expect great comfort in London for four-and-sixpence a week -- the most I ever could pay for a “furnished room with attendance” in those days of pretty stern apprenticeship... I have been often richly contented in the squalidest garret. One such lodging is often in my memory; it was at Islington, not far from the City Road; my window looked upon the Regent’s Canal. As often as I think of it, I recall what was perhaps the worst London fog I ever knew; for three successive days, at least, my lamp had to be kept burning; when I looked through the window, I saw, at moments, a few blurred lights in the street beyond the Canal, but for the most part nothing but a yellowish darkness, which caused the glass to reflect the firelight and my own face. Did I feel miserable? Not a bit of it. The enveloping gloom seemed to make my chimney-corner only the more cosy. I had coals, oil, tobacco in sufficient quantity; I had a book to read; I had work which interested me; so I went forth only to get my meals at a City Road coffee-shop, and hasten back to the fireside. Oh, my ambitions, my hopes! How surprised and indignant I should have felt had I known of any one who pitied me! ...
Oh, it is wonderful to think of all that youth can endure! What a poor feeble wretch I now seem to myself, when I remember thirty years ago!
Alpha.
I can play this game, though I moved only rarely, perhaps six times over 20 years. My first room when I moved to the city was tiny with only a window onto a light-well of an old Victorian building of flats, then being rented out by the room. Gissing would have recognized the layout if not the redwood construction. Since I had moved here on the bus with only what I could carry, the small room was about right for my few possessions. I shared a wash room -- merely a small sink set in a marble slab with a small closet to the right holding a hot-plate and a few pans and pots -- with the larger bedroom at the back of the building.
After a matter of months, I moved into the larger bedroom which featured a bay window overlooking the neighborhood and also a gas heating stove. I built a storage unit out of shipping pallets to hold a toaster oven, and there was a very solid little table I used as a desk, also a comfortable upholstered chair I placed near the window. The best thing about the room was that the window faced south so, especially in winter, I could luxuriate in the warmth of the sun on even the coldest (if sunny) days. On summer afternoons I could watch the fog roll in over the hills to the southwest.
In those rooms I had an under-counter size refrigerator, and electric lights of course, but no telephone. To make a phone call, I would use the payphone at a local park on top of the hill. There was only one, claw footed, tub with a shower hose, shared among the six or seven rooms, but there were two toilets. If there was ever a problem with access to the bath I don’t recall it now... though I do remember that other tenants neglected to clean out the bath when they were finished. From there I eventually moved into a larger apartment across town with a three quarter bath and also a real kitchen with full sized appliances. But I still miss the sun radiating through that window and the expansiveness of the view.
At 62 I am nearly 10 years older than Ryecroft (and still older than Gissing), but if anything I feel younger than my age. In large part this is because I am in the best physical shape of my life. I only wish my body had been in such good shape when I was younger. I know, looking ahead, that age will eventually catch up with me, but I have yet to see any physical evidence of that. I keep expecting to have to reduce my workload, or the weights I lift in the gym, but so far, with the exception of a few instances relating to injuries, I continue to lift more weight and to work harder.
Aside from the back problems I’ve had since high school, I’m mostly fit and healthy. I don’t share the perspective on life of a person (like Gissing, or Proust, or Nietzsche) suffering from chronic disease. This will come up again with regards to Thomas Mann’s fascination with the subject of disease.
Beta.
This might be the place to talk about the world Henry Ryecroft lived in. For one thing, he still lived in the Coal Age, though the Oil Age had technically started in 1901 at Spindletop in Texas. When Gissing was a boy, people believed diseases like Cholera -- which repeatedly swept through Europe and America during his lifetime -- were carried on the wind. The process by which disease is spread was only understood a few decades before the turn of the century, and the resulting public health and sanitation infrastructure and technology was still quite new when this book was published. Darwin published On the Origin of Species when Gissing was two. Bell invented the telephone when he was 19. Edison invented the lightbulb when he was 22.
At the time The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft was published, Einstein was still two years from realizing that matter and energy were basically the same “stuff,” while the Wright brothers were also two years from their first flight, and Henry Ford was seven years from building the first Model T. Women, at this time, could vote in Finland, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado and almost nowhere else.
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