Essays:Dining with Lady Gregory in 1899, George Moore was described by a fellow guest as looking like a boiled ghost.
Debate over Moore's reputation retains something of this heated transparency. The roots of past conflicts between Moore and his contemporaries remain visible in current criticism, much to the frustration of Moore's biographer, Adrian Frazier, whose spiky, entertaining account of Moore's present status begins this collection. Frazier's dismissal of Denis Donoghue's labelling of Moore as a fake, in possession of no singular style by which to establish himself as a great artist, has all the relish of Hail and Farewell, the aesthetic cloaked in the personal, the intellect in polemic.
Understanding Moore is, and was, notoriously difficult. Changing style from book to book, living between languages and countries, Moore's kinetic imagination needs energy to follow. Frazier brought this composite character to brilliant life in his biography, as he does again here: Moore deep in conversation with Degas and Manet in the Café Nouvelle Athènes; his journey from Co Mayo to Paris, London and Dublin a thread to follow in each of the 18 essays collected here. Such transnational perspective makes this collection generally provocative, locating Moore as an agent of transformation in the Anglophone novel, sensing connections between his family situation in Co Mayo and the world beyond. There are innovative readings of his work throughout, readings that survive a disappointingly error-strewn production. At their best, these essays test the Moore we know against the Moores we don't.
This vagrant flitted between literary styles, genres and places, entering one coterie to be rejected by another. The surprise of this collection is the effort that Moore invested in his transition, his eye for the passing moment a recognition of his society's provisional bonds. Lucy McDiarmid finds this in her reading of Moore's bicycle tour of Tara and Newgrange with George Russell. Hot enough to hide behind a hedge and take off his underwear, Moore settled on a peasant cabin for a drink of milk that stops on his lips when he sees the child of the house looking at him, as if in rebuke. Having no money to pay for what was offered as a gift, Moore, in writing the moment, captures perfectly the tainted exchange between author and subject that plays into so many of his characters' search for self- representation in art.
Págraigín Riggs follows a different translation in Moore's short-story collection of 1902, An t-Úr-Ghorta. Moore's translators were Tadgh Ó Donnchadha, later professor of Irish at University College Cork, and Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin, one of the many people in this book who reads like a Moore character. Ó Súilleabháin was a Trinity student who formed a club called "Na Draoithe", or the Druids, and welcomed a royal visit to Dublin in 1903 with blaring music and a green flag. Ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1904, Ó Súilleabháin was no success with his Belfast parishioners. As Riggs persuasively suggests, Moore's translation had probable impact on Pádraic Ó Conaire's only novel, Deoraíocht (Exile). Moore's long life is full of unlikely connections.
He shared the same London publisher for Parnell and his Island with Karl Marx's Capital. Mary Pierse argues for a lasting sympathy between Moore and his reforming landowner father in her essay on politics. If this erases the late-century textures of the younger Moore's advanced beliefs, it also refigures the cultural geography of post-Famine Ireland, Pierse preparing the reader for Moore's reading of Dalkey as a modern-day Babylon, the decaying villas of the mortgaged aristocracy hanging like faded gardens from the Dublin coast. Perceptively, Pierse sets Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles against Moore's Esther Waters. The three years that separate the two novels' publication suggest a renovation of Victorian morality best described in Moore's case as revolutionary, tragedy refused as the proper punishment for what society deemed to be female flaws.
Manet's early portrait, George Moore au Café, outlines a writer and thinker in development, the wide cuffs and loose collar opening on to a career to which Moore looks across the table, attentively disputatious. George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds is an engaging portrait of this figure in literary perspective.
Nicholas Allen is associate professor in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the editor of the collected essays of Gerald Dawe, The Proper Word: Ireland, Poetry, Politics, just published by Creighton University Press
George Moore: Artistic Visions and Literary Worlds Edited by Mary Pierse Cambridge Scholars Press, 246pp. £39.99