A revision of my lecture “The Contrarian George Moore” in George Moore and the Quirks of Human Nature, ed. Maria Elena Jaime de Pablos and Mary Pierse (Bern: Peter Lang, 2014)

In Death

These days, paying one’s respects to the late George Moore is no easier than finding his out-of-print books, or reading them, or researching his life and legacy.

Paying one’s respects today is no easier than it was to be his parent or sibling or child or nephew either; no easier than it was for contemporaries to enjoy his friendship, collaborate, do business with him, or to know what he liked or stood for over the course of his career.

Despite fairly deep study, it has never been easy for me to draw conclusions about his position in Irish, English, European and American letters; certainly no easier than it was to pay my respects at his grave — something I attempted on three occasions, failing the first time and subsequently succeeding after strenuous effort. 

The first time I tried, after traveling hundreds of miles from my home in London, I gave up just short of the goal. The remoteness of Moore Hall, and the greater remoteness of his grave, filled me with consternation.

Why was it so hard getting to George Moore? That question may be asked of the man and his legacy. 

On my second try a few years later, I did reach the grave on the shores of Castle Island, in the middle (so it seemed) of the large and placid Lough Carra. This time I wasn’t traveling alone; I was with Moore’s bibliographer Edwin Gilcher, his wife Elizabeth and their neighbor, a dairy farmer from upstate New York. We rowed a small boat to Castle Island. 

I doubt I had ever seen a more isolated, neglected and utterly lonely thing than the tiny cairn and tombstone, situated so far from the Moore family cemetery (within easy walking distance of the big house) and so far from any road or path used by the living.

Why were George’s ashes brought here, all the way from London, and intentionally dropped into oblivion?

My third visit to Moore Hall came decades later. My son Sam and I rowed the same little boat across Lough Carra , but somehow we couldn’t find the grave. The neglected little island was a riot of scrub that made it hard to see anything.

After crisscrossing every which way, we rowed back to the dock and shared our disappointment with the boat’s owner. He took pity, plopped us into a motor boat and sped us right back to our original destination.

With his help we located the tombstone on a cairn with the epitaph: GEORGE MOORE / Born Moore Hall 1852, Died 1933 London / He forsook his family and friends / For his art / But because he was faithful to his art / His family and friends / Reclaimed his ashes for Ireland / VALE.

This epitaph was written by survivors who managed both to censure and appreciate the deceased with his oscillating strengths and weaknesses. In that epitaph, they forged a key for unlocking the puzzle of a literary legacy: 

• a gifted writer who did not read and was now not read
• an artist who was painted but did not paint
• a thought leader who was not followed
• a nationalist who ridiculed his country
• a Catholic, then a Protestant, who deplored religion
• a Casanova who promoted the dignity of women
• a lover who was unloved
• a father who didn’t parent
• a landlord without real estate
• the head of a family who repelled his kin
• a storyteller who ran from his readers
• an avant-gardist who became archaic

He was a man with nothing who wanted for everything, and at the same time a man who had everything and wanted for nothing. Hard to figure him out.

This is the contrarian George Moore: a writer who emerged far ahead of his time and departed far behind it; a meandering writer and thinker whose constant star could, conceivably, twinkle again in our contemporary literary firmament — or remain forever as dark and obscure as it’s been for years.

An Irish Punk

If George Moore had been born a hundred years later, I have little doubt he would have drifted into punk subculture. Born as he was in 1852, he still may deserve to be called Ireland’s prototypical punk: a cultivated young man perversely opposed to everything that might otherwise have defined, oriented or limited him; a stylish creature wholly and ironically consumed by self-actualization and self-abnegation. 

He was born in a wretched West of Ireland in the year the Great Famine purportedly ended. More than a third of the local indigenous population had been decimated. As a percentage of the population, just his birth county of Mayo suffered 50% more avoidable casualties than occurred in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994; and yes, the Great Famine was genocide.

Thus he was born in an Ireland cratered by economic and social catastrophe. Myself as a child of Holocaust survivors, I can easily imagine the odor of suffering and death and decay that boy George might have breathed. It has a profound effect on child development.

His family feared, resisted and tried to prevent the cratering. The Moores of Moore Hall, members of the Catholic landed gentry, had produced a martyr of the 1798 Irish rebellion against British administration. Fifty years later his father was a political activist and parliamentarian representing Co. Mayo in Westminster. Fifty years after that, his brother was a political activist and senator in the new Irish Republic.

This heritage brims with distinctions, none of which deeply affected the contrarian George Moore, but all of which fueled his inclination to oppose — an inclination that emerged in the cradle and persisted for eighty years. 

He opposed his heritage by growing up apolitical. Political activism and public service never occurred to him. He may have felt a love of Ireland, a resentment of local British exploitation, a compassion for the peasant poor, but there is little evidence that he did. Nor is there any evidence that he identified with his own privileged class. On the contrary, his oeuvre and biography indicate that he dissociated from it. 

He was a social misfit in his native milieu: a child of the stable who lived in the big house, a bookworm in his father’s library who may have had learning disabilities, a dreamer in a country rousing from historical nightmares.

His parents required no deep penetration to realize that their oldest child lacked form. They sent him to prep school in England, his father’s alma mater, wanting to mould him into a character who could lead the family when he came of age.

As rigorous and programmed as high school was, it did not promote George’s cognitive development. He seems to have left school as stubborn, ignorant and alien as he entered. 

The teenager who graduated from Oscott College near Birmingham didn’t follow his father’s footsteps to university, didn’t qualify for a profession, a vocation, or a trade. He became an art student in London, for which he had no credentials. This move was a dip into counterculture, like what many rock stars would do a century later. He then left London for Paris to learn how to paint better. 

Much may be said about Moore’s sentimental education in London and Paris in the 1870s, when he was in his early to mid twenties, and Moore himself said a lot in his imaginative memoirs. One thing that should not be said is that he had a serious purpose. 

The ludic young adult, the ersatz punk, went to Paris mainly not to be elsewhere like London or Dublin or — God forbid — Ballyglass in County Mayo. He was in Paris in order not to be among his family or class, not to pursue a career or start a family, but instead to oppose everything that might otherwise have defined or oriented or limited him.

I think if electric guitars had existed at that time, he might have rented a garage and formed a band.

The literary output of these formative years is interesting, not because it has intrinsic merit but because it reveals a protopunk in the turmoil of rebellion. His poems in Flowers of Passion and Pagan Poems are vicious and cynical expressions of moral turpitude. His play Martin Luther was likewise an act of rebellion by the Catholic lad from Ireland, somewhat comparable to GenX German youth sporting swastikas on their club clothes. 

The crucial difference between punks of the twentieth century and Moore in the nineteenth is that he resolutely grew up. As he approached his thirtieth year, he moved from Paris to London: not as an artist or poet would — to Soho or Hampstead or Kensington or Bloomsbury or Chelsea — but to the East End and Fleet Street.

He arrived with a preposterous ambition to make a living from his pen and become a creative force, a self-conscious force to be reckoned with, a rebel producer.

Rebel Producer

When George Moore was in his thirties and forties from 1880 to 1900, he was a type of contrarian known as rebel producer.

A rebel producer works outside the core group, opposing the status quo and desiring a new order or if not, no order at all. He is not necessarily an idealist, because his vision may be ambiguous and inconsistent, and in any case vision is less compelling to him than mission.

His mission is to unhinge, unhook, unlock, undermine, sabotage, displace, disturb. What we know as “move fast and break things.” What the rebel producer actually makes is less important than the process of making it, less important than kindling possibilities as the old order begins to wobble.

There are many examples of the rebel producer in twentieth- and twenty-first century arts; in fact, it may be the most popular creative type. The young George Moore was a step ahead of it.

The nine published works of fiction by this rebel producer, between 1880 and 1900, are all products of a realist or symbolist or naturalist impulse in French letters that Moore adapted from Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola and others in literature, and from Manet, Degas and others in painting. His fiction of this period includes A Modern Lover, A Mummer’s Wife, A Drama In Muslin, A Mere Accident, Spring Days, Mike Fletcher, Vain Fortune, Esther Waters, Celibates,  Evelyn Innes and Sister Teresa. 

A Modern Lover appeared when Moore was twenty-nine years old. The novel is a sort of Yellow Book ten years before there were Yellow Books. Incongruously issued as a Victorian three-decker for prim circulating libraries, it was banned by the libraries. Most of the first edition burned in a warehouse and thus became the rarest of collectables in the Moore canon.

I still don’t own a copy; call me if you’d like to sell yours.

A Modern Lover was soon republished in one volume and went through several printings. Moore continued developing the story and forty years later, in his sixties, he changed the title to Lewis Seymour and Some Women for his collected works.

For a long time, little was written about literary and artistic accomplishments in these books, mainly because they were unread and unstudied, not highly regarded or understood. However a new generation of scholars has been changing that (see my post Critical Heritage). The results are impressive.

Moore wrote fiction to stand out and be different, challenging readers to leave their comfort zones. Ninety years after he died, his works still challenge. It’s easier now to become immersed in a conventional Victorian novel whose author has no inkling of the future, than to engage with an early modernist who lamely aspires to the uncertain future that is us.

The nonfiction of George Moore as rebel producer is also contrarian but arguably more accessible. After all, he wrote most of it for newspapers and magazines whose readers had to be engaged quickly or not at all. His greatest achievement of the 1880s and 1890s, by volume at least, is his art criticism. 

As a columnist and features writer, Moore attacked what he considered the stale and stupid paintings of the establishment British Academy and French Salon, and promoted the French avant-garde with force, eloquence, humor, brevity, flair and authority. A few of his articles were collected in Impressions and Opinions and Modern Painting. All of his articles will be published online by George Moore Interactive.

Other nonfiction books of the period were equally contrarian. They include Literature At Nurse, Confessions of a Young Man and Parnell and His Island.

Confessions of a Young Man is the most curious book of this group, partly because it’s really fun to read, but mostly because it augurs the central achievement of the next period in George Moore’s career. His Confessions focused a wide creative lens on himself. 

Through analysis, distortion, extravagant interpretation and audacious invention, the living George Moore made himself a character in imaginative memoir: not a hero, but an antihero; a ‘man of wax’ who was later drawn by another comic contrarian, Max Beerbohm.

Moore is the most frequently drawn figure in Max’s cartoons, and the drawing is telling. True to Moore’s literary self-portraits, the caricatures give us a man who is impossibly inhuman, an outsider, an alien, a freak. 

Beerbohm was one of Moore’s few lifelong friends. Moore loved both art and artist because Max understood and appreciated his modus operandi: to be different and to cause differences to occur. 

Life in Art

In the first decade of the twentieth century, having come this far as a rebel producer, it was time for a code-switch. Instead of overtly opposing the mainstream, he would seem to support it; instead of standing apart, he would join with others. A social science term for this stage of his development is generative. 

Moore closed his home in London and moved to Dublin in order to help build a nation. At least that is how it may be viewed from close up. From a wider and more detached perspective, there is plenty of continuity with the rebel producer.

He changed his professional focus and location, but his deeper motives and behavior did not change very much at first, and eventually not at all. He was no political activist.

I call this period Life in Art because in returning to Ireland George Moore essentially looked homeward and inward. Ireland was an exciting stage on which to perform self-actualization and self-abnegation, but was not itself the subject of his creative agenda. 

Try as he would to blend in and become useful to emerging Ireland, he failed. Instead, he spent his energy highlighting differences and exploiting creative opportunities that came from those differences. Some of his finest writing to date was the result.

His Life in Art was recorded in Memoirs of My Dead Life, and in the autobiographical trilogy Hail and Farewell. In these memoirs, he continued the metamorphosis begun in Confessions of a Young Man fifteen years earlier and extended in Avowals. 

Once more, he appears as an antihero, a figure opposed to moral and political conventions. Instead of praising and promoting Irish nationalists, he mocked them. Instead of joining the struggle on behalf of fellow patriots, he spurned their initiatives and friendship, and caused some to spurn him. 

But his was not a destructive attack on Irish colleagues. In fact Moore was a constructivist member of his national tribe. Like Swift, he believed in the opportunities afforded by breaking things and putting them back together in new, more meaningful and authentic ways. It was not systemic nation building that fired him, but free-wheeling cultural transformation.

A similar agenda is evident in his fiction of this period. The Untilled Field and The Lake are unromantic evocations of contemporary Ireland. They hit hard at the dominion of the Church, the stupor of the folk, the hypocrisy of the intelligentsia.

Why write such stories if his purpose was to promote a language and literary revival in Ireland? One answer seems plausible: his deeper aim was not to advance a formal revival, but to be an agent for unscripted change.

Still Crazy After All These Years

The final period of George Moore’s career lasted about twenty years. The seed of contrarian genius in this phase actually sprouted while he was still in Ireland, when he wrote a play called The Apostle, later to become a novel called The Brook Kerith, and still later to morph into another play called The Passing of the Essenes.

Could one imagine a bolder contrarian step than to de-sanctify Jesus and the Church? That is what the plays and novel intended to do. They amount to profound heresies; and thus lead to the story of heretic Pierre Abelard in his next novel .

Moore wanted to launch the biggest attack of his life in The Brook Kerith, and to do that he needed to get the details of his target exactly right. The prospect enticed him so much that he travelled all the way to Palestine during the First World War to research local color. 

Of course, getting the meteorological, anthropological, geographical, topographical and architectural details right only matters if people are going to read the book. By adapting an oral, quasi-bardic prose style for The Brook Kerith, one that some people found problematic or even unreadable, Moore appeared to be opposing his own agenda. He could write a tour de force and not get noticed.

His style of this period has been compared to toothpaste squeezed out of a tube — rather reminiscent (to me) of the styles of Marcel Proust and James Joyce who were squeezing their own tubes. If at the start of his career, Moore repelled some readers by being lascivious, towards the end he was still finding ways to repel them, only now it was with style as well as subject matter. Ever the modernist!

Other finely wrought works of fiction in this period include A Story-Teller’s Holiday, Héloïse and Abélard, Daphnis and Chloe, Peronnik the Fool, Ulick and Soracha, and Aphrodite in Aulis. His gender abnormative short story Albert Nobbs in A Story-Teller’s Holiday — made into an Academy Award nominated film in 2012 — was also written in this period. 

Like The Brook Kerith, these stories are archaic, exclusive and precious confrontations with the reading public. It was as though George Moore had come to realize that nothing mattered more to an artist than opposition or disruption. His agenda was to be different, to cause differences to occur. In that way, he is like most great modernists, though he does not enjoy their bewitched fandom. 

Along with beautiful archaic novels, Moore wrote In Single Strictness and Celibate Lives — two exquisite story collections that are, in effect, about the death of love. The roué who claimed to be a passionate lover of “thousands of women” now turned his creative force against sex, exploring ascetics and the limits of carnal joy.

Religiously offensive subject matter and unreadable prose are formidable acts of aggression in his later years, but George Moore didn’t stop there. He also turned his back on popular publication, the medium of novels since novels were invented. His books would now be printed on handmade paper, with antique handset type, in fine bindings, sometimes with gorgeous illustrations, in small limited editions signed by the author. 

One interpretation of Moore’s fondness for the precious printed book is his repugnance at throwaway books that most people actually buy. This former disciple of Zola, who fought to free fiction from the clutches of circulating libraries, was now running in the opposite direction, seemingly against the popular sales of disruptive fiction he had helped secure.

The correct explanation is more complicated. After legal suppression of The Brook Kerith for heresy and a libel suit filed by a real Lewis Seymour on the publication of Lewis Seymour and Some Women, Moore retreated to the safe zone of private limited editions. He even invented the “publisher” Cumann Sean-eolais na h-Eireann (Society for Irish Folklore) to cover his tracks.

“Still crazy after all these years” is Paul Simon’s lyric describing a sentimental attitude in middle age. Bruce Springsteen still lives that lyric in old age. It is the pose of an incorrigible rebel producer, the kind of artist that has great appeal for us today. 

Walk through any gallery of contemporary art, listen to any collection of contemporary orchestral or synthesized music, attend any indie film festival — and what does one find but the artist doing what Moore did beginning in his 20s: opposing established order, contesting everything that makes art easy and comfortable, daring to be different and causing differences to occur.  And all that jazz!

And Moore was relentless, never anything but true to himself and “faithful to his art.” That’s why, when you visit his lonely grave on a tiny island in a big lake in the remote West of Ireland, you may feel you have actually come to a good place — a place reserved for the spirit of truth and beauty — and that George Moore’s survivors got their contrarian friend and brother exactly right:

Epitaph

GEORGE MOORE

Born Moore Hall 1852, Died 1933 London

He forsook his family and friends

For his art

But because he was faithful to his art

His family and friends

Reclaimed his ashes for Ireland

VALE

Afterword

Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars

I fear I’ll do some damage one fine day

But I would not be convicted by a jury of my peers

Still crazy after all these years

Oh, still crazy

Still crazy

Still crazy after all these years *

* Paul Simon, Still Crazy After All These Years lyrics © Peermusic Publishing, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Universal Music Publishing Group, Warner Chappell Music, Inc.