IF ever a man could be said to have created himself, that man was George Moore, to such an extent that it can be difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction in his life.
A child without promise, a failure as an art student, unsuccessful as a journalist, the author of some dire poems and unreadable plays, he deserved to be forgotten; but in his middle 20s he applied himself to literature with "single minded ferocity" and taught himself to become a successful novelist.
His greatest achievement was his self portrait, that mixture of fiction and autobiography he called Hail and Farewell it is a comedy whose hero is George Moore and whose subsidiary characters or caricatures are such notable figures of the Irish literary Renaissance as W.B. Yeats, George Russell, Lady Gregory, Douglas Hyde etc.
There is, of course, a gap between what George Moore was and what he would have liked to be, and in this new biography Tony Gray, though always sympathetic, contrasts fact with fiction (Moore obligingly provides more than one version of events) in such a way as to underline the comic relationship between the imaginary and the actual.
George Moore was born in 1852, son and heir of Moore Hall in Co Mayo. The Moores were English Protestants who had settled in Ireland in the early 1600s, but George Moore's greatgrandfather had been a wine merchant in Spain and had found it expedient to become a Catholic, so Moore had been brought up in that faith.
Irritated by what he called "a religion that degrades the human mind", Moore became a Protestant and publicised his conversion in the papers in order to create maximum offence.
He does not seem to have been happy as a child, and his parents lack of sympathy may have been the cause of his feelings of inadequacy, especially where women were concerned.
One cannot feel too sorry for him, however, as after his father's death in 1870 he inherited the estates which brought in rents worth £4,000 a year. After deductions" this dwindled to £500 a year, but that represents £25,000 in today's money, "not a fortune exactly, but by no means a bad income for a young man of eighteen".
He immediately left the military academy where he had been dumped and went to continue his artistic studies in Paris, more for the sake of opportunities to study the female nude than because of any marked talent. His money enabled him to keep a valet and gave him the entree into polite society. He cultivated a friendship with Manet, but failed to ingratiate himself with Zola.
The Land War in Ireland reduced the value of his rents and he had to leave Paris, where in six years he had learned enough French to spoil his English. He settled in London and learned to write, but never mastered spelling.
In Paris he had also learned that it was fashionable to boast of amatory conquests, so boast he did, though there is no evidence that he ever had a proper love affair.
Any conquests he made were by letter and to the end of his life he kept up a correspondence with, many young female admirers, the wealthier and younger the better. In these letters he does not hesitate to overstep the limits of decorum; he begs for the most intimate details and recommends oral sex.
It is hard to know whether Moore sought notoriety more than it sought him, but The Brook Kerith, published in his 64th year, makes up for the tedium of its style by the shock of its subject matter. It was a fifth gospel which told not of the Resurrection of Christ, but of his Resuscitation.
Gray, who shows by his careful selection of extracts from Moore's writings that he is both discerning and enthusiastic in his admiration, says that this novel must be read as dialect; it will then be seen to be a comedy.
Whether one agrees or not, it is far from being as richly comic as Hail and Farewell. Moore's greatest comic creation was himself, and A Peculiar Man is a very amusing book.
