`The dullness of the great writer is not the dullness of the ordinary; it is deeper, more intense, more virulent, and often more persistent." No one could turn George Moore's judgment on Wordsworth against himself: he sacrificed a good deal, in terms of friendships and reputation, in order not to be dull, and he never was. His greatness as a writer is less generally agreed, but Adrian Frazier's dazzling book should bring him back into the limelight. It is the biography Moore deserved: sprightly, astute, often wildly funny, psychologically perceptive, endlessly quotable, and all built on a solid substratum of extremely hard work. Just like Moore himself.
It should also bring the fiction back into the limelight. Frazier is tough on Moore's failed experiments, but his contextualisation of the novels and stories reminds us, not just of the power of Esther Waters, but the lacerating realism of A Mummer's Wife, the Wagnerian grandeurs of Evelyn Innes, the strangeness of The Brook Kerith, the modernity of The Lake. Frazier shows how an Irish "distancing" from England pervades Esther Waters, and analyses Moore's early novel about the Land War, A Drama in Muslin, as "harsh, brilliant, experimental"; but he also makes a powerful case for the late collection Celibate Lives, which "achieves a full treatment of themes uniquely Moore's own - the poignant, strange destinies of those for whom fulfilment is impossible in a heterosexual, marrying society, and the secret workings of sex in those who don't have sex".
This is the key to the life as well as the work. This biography at last confronts the question of Moore and sex, and gets away from Susan Mitchell's too-influential gibe that gentlemen kissed and didn't tell, whereas Moore didn't kiss, and told. Frazier's close reading of texts, and heroic work in archives and letters, delineates a portrait of a man who was certainly a lover of many women, while remaining simultaneously (and sometimes mischievously) conscious of his own homoerotic inclinations.
Indeed, he usually sublimated his crushes on men into gleeful taunting (Yeats is a prime example) or deliberate feuding; while his relationships with women were often conducted at a bizarre but obsessive distance. Thus Frazier analyses his correspondence with the American novelist Clara Lanza: "Moore was thrilled by the most attenuted forms of eroticism: sex through the transatlantic post, or voyeurism redoubled, as in seeing the image of Lanza in the lustful eyes of his male friend." Moore's own writing is full of such complications, here explicated as never before. At the same time he wanted to make women assert themselves: especially to write, and to attain (as does the heroine of Muslin) economic independence. Significantly, he got his friend Eleanor Marx the contract to translate Madame Bovary, and she introduced him to Ibsen's A Doll's House.
These are the aspects of Moore less well known to Irish readers, and Frazier's book is a wonderful guide to censorship in late-Victorian literary London, experimental theatre, and most of all Paris in the 1870s, Moore's "university." He drank at the Cafe Nouvelle Athenes, studied painting and painters, met and admired the as-yet-unknown Mallarme, and was influenced for life by his close friendship with Manet and more difficult relationship with Degas. Finally, he adopted Zola as his cher maitre, which fixed his own scandalous reputation in Britain for good. But his early realist fiction is far more than a reflection of French manners: if Kate Ede in A Mummer's Wife is a sort of Emma Bovary, A Modern Lover precedes Maupassant's Bel Ami (which closely resembles it) by two years. And Moore emerges as a key influence on Joyce, who shaped Dubliners on The Untilled Field, and whose tribute to Moore in the late 1920s constitutes an extraordinary accolade from the least respectful of geniuses.
By then Moore had been through several "lives", as he himself would have put it. Around this time he told a would-be biographer: "the story you have to tell is not of a man who wrote this book or that . . . Your story is of a man who made himself because he imagined himself." Only after determined effort did "his imagination pair with his nature". The ambiguities riddling his life were not just sexual: a rich Cathollic landlord, liberated by his father's death, fleeing his mother but sending her extraordinarily frank and confiding letters, a believer in the Land Acts, a London-dwelling Francophile who famously rejected England at the time of the Boer War but returned to Ireland only to make Dublin too hot to hold him, instituting a hilarious and deliberate sequence of relationships gone awry, unforgiveable jokes, and public confrontations.
This is the Moore we think we know, delineated by himself in Hail and Farewell - his acknowledged masterpiece. In it he immortally ridicules Yeats, "dances around" Edward Martyn's homosexuality - in Frazier's words - "like a mincing banderillo around a stumbling bull", travesties Augusta Gregory as a proselytising landlord, claims Synge is an invention, and outs Hugh ("Petticoat") Lane as a cross-dresser. At the same time, the atmosphere of Dublin in its Edwardian Indian summer has never been better captured. This book, along with Moore's riveting Confessions of a Young Man and Memoirs of My Dead Life, began a long line of unreliable memoirs by master-fictionalists, deadpan and teasing at once, currently represented in Martin Amis's Experience. Over and over again, we see Frazier's hero as an originator, not a copyist.
But there are darker and deeper waters too. The hilarious saga of Moore's attempts to become a Protestant, begun as a camp posture, lurches into the frenetic anti-Catholicism which estranges Moore from his brother: a story that Frazier rightly describes as "terrible". The alienation of friends, and the saying of unforgivable things, becomes a sort of compulsion. (Yeats said Moore was enabled to wreak havoc among his friends because he possessed "the terrible gift of familiarity".) And the man who made a fetish of being against marriage and children was, as Frazier shows with a novelist's perception, constrained all his life by his love for the bewitching but worldly and hard-as-nails Maud Cunard, whom he met when she was 22. "The real loss of his lover did not come at once, with her marriage or with the arrival of [Sir Thomas] Beecham on the scene, but again and again, a long slow defeated yearning, in which he never gave up and she never gave in. They were linked by a desire he would not let die, a past she did not wish to recall, and a daughter she did not acknowledge as his."
The putative daughter was Nancy Cunard, and Frazier's treatment of his strange, sad, close father-daughter relationship is one of the glories of this book. But there are many: the brilliant demonstration of how Schopenhauer's philosophy shaped Moore's world-view, and surfaces in the novels as influentially as Wagner's melodic line; a masterly ability to find unfamiliar anecdotes, and reinterpret familiar ones; a Jamesian analysis of how Moore's obsession with Yeats is entwined in his creation of the character Ulick Dean in Evelyn Innes ("the problem was not with Ulick as a character; it was with Yeats as a man"); a wonderful reading of Orpen's great group portrait "Homage to Manet", and indeed of all the many portraits of Moore by his astonishing range of artist friends. (In an otherwise handsomely-produced book, why have Yale not put these in as coloured plates?)
Art is at the centre, in every sense. Recalling the trauma of realising he could never himself be a gifted painter, Moore wrote "Think, reader, what a shock it is for a man to leave one self without knowing he can acquire another self." To navigate through these transitions of the self, evaluating both the pose and the reality, and illuminating the work that emerges as well as the life that is lived, requires biographical bravura of the Ellmann class, and it is here in abundance. In such hands "familiarity" becomes not a terrible gift, but an enhancing one.
Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford, and is currently at work on the second volume of the authorised life of W.B. Yeats