Irish fields, London drawing-rooms
Isabel Colegate
A PECULIAR MAN: A LIFE OF GEORGE MOORE by Tony Gray Sinclair-Stevenson, f20, pp. 344
ghastly dinner supposed to be literary,' wrote Harold Nicolson is his diary on 21 July 1930 after an evening at Lady Cunard's, . . . GM talks rubbish about all great writers having lovely names, instanc- ing Shelley, Marlowe, Landor. I ask him what about Keats? "Keats" he answers, "was not a great writer". What a silly old man!' By that time George Moore had become something of a fixture in London society, prolix, `provocative', Lady Cunard's pet pussy cat. He had devoted his life to the pursuit of literary style, and despite his success never felt himself quite sufficiently appreciated. He compared himself to Shakespeare and Milton, and resented the fact that James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man won the acclaim he thought his own earlier Confessions of a Young Man should have had.
His greatest popular success was Esther Waters, a realistic novel about a servant girl which was published in 1894 and went through countless editions; at the 1994 Cheltenham Festival a panel of judges awarded it a so-called 'Booker Prize for 1894'. The downfall of Esther Waters' feck- less husband is brought about by his gam- bling, something which was familiar to George Moore from his Irish boyhood among betting men. The merit of Tony Gray's biography — the first since Joseph Hone's in 1936 (on which it largely draws) — is that it makes little of his London social life and places him firmly in his Irish background, showing how, for all his partic- ular eccentricities, his love-hate for Ireland, and its concomitant hate-love for England, were not untypical of Irish Ascendancy atti- tudes of the time.
The Moores of Moore Hall in County Mayo were an old Irish Catholic family. George Moore's father was a politician as well as a racehorse owner and his brother Colonel Maurice Moore became one of the four Ascendancy Senators to sit in the first Irish Free State Parliament. The young George Moore spent his boyhood as far as possible with horses, and after a brief period as an art student in London went to Paris, where he lived a bohemian life with a rather sinister character called Lewis Marshall, whose life and loves featured in several of his subsequent novels. He came to know several of the impressionist painters, and perhaps as a result recognised that he was unlikely to be any good as a painter himself. Instead he began to write, and soon realising that he was not much good at that either he applied him- self with great dedication to improving his style.
Called back to Ireland by the news that his tenants at Moore Hall were refusing to pay their rents, this being 1879 and Co. Mayo, the birthplace of the Land Wars (Colonel Boycott was a near neighbour of the Moore family), he returned in a rage to find himself unexpectedly appalled by the conditions in which the peasantry were liv- ing. His father, who had long ago decided that the day of the landlord in Ireland was over, had been on good terms with his ten- ants and George Moore struck a satisfacto- ry deal with them without much difficulty, but he then wrote a series of vividly descriptive articles for Le Figaro, later pub- lished as Parnell and his Island, which reflected his newfound sympathies.
However, it was not until after several years as a literary man in London that he suddenly felt a call to go to Dublin and become part of the Irish literary revival. He tried to collaborate with W. B. Yeats in writing a play based on Irish legend, but the project foundered on the two writers' inability to agree on a language which sounded authentic; Yeats suggested that the best solution might be for Moore to write the play in French and for Lady Gregory to translate it. Moore later claimed to have invented the language used by J. M. Synge, and could certainly turn it on at the drop of a hat — 'for it's the grand judge entirely he is of the shape and the colour and the sound of words.' When he came to write his three volumes of auto- biography he was highly critical of what he came to see as the pretension of the Irish Literary Movement, and caused much indignation among his Dublin friends as a result.
Tony Gray writes knowledgeably of Moore's Irish life and character. He calls him a typical Irish bachelor of the time, in that, without being in the least homosexual, he appeared to be interested in women only to the extent that he liked to look at them naked as often as possible, but may quite possibly have died a virgin. Obviously his love for Lady Cunard, which lasted for 40 years and extended to her daughter Nancy, who remained fond of him even after she came to detest her mother, was a deeply felt emotion, but it seems his many descriptions of other amorous affairs may have been largely fantasy, fed by multitudi- nous correspondence, sometimes with women he never met.
His biographer's evident impatience with this side of George Moore's life leads him to give short shrift to some of the women about whom one might have liked to know more, such as Pearl Craigie, with whom he collaborated in a play and with whom he apparently broke off relations after a quar- rel in Regent's Park during which he imprinted the dusty mark of his boot on her black-clad backside. There are one or two odd slips and non sequiturs in the book, which may be attributed to inexpert editing, and the young man whom Nancy Cunard married briefly in 1916 was not Evan Morgan but Sydney Fairbairn. Not everyone would agree with Tony Gray's insistence that The Brook Kerith, which explores the idea that Jesus did not die on the Cross but survived among a sect of Essenes and which Moore himself certainly took very seriously indeed, is 'hilarious'. Some might find themselves more inclined to sympathise with Bernard Shaw: I read about 30 pages of The Brook Kerith. It then began to dawn on me that there was no mortal reason why Moore should not keep going on like that for 50,000 pages, or 50 mil- lion for that matter.
Previous page
