Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a book published four or more years ago.  

“CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG MAN” by George Moore (written 1886; first published in 1888; revised version first published in 1926)

I’m in the mood for cannibalising something I wrote on this blog nine years ago (in 2012). I was introducing George Moore’s novel The Lake and I wrote this about the man and his work:

“He was a very contradictory and annoying person, was George Moore (1852-1933). Of Irish Catholic background and education, he nevertheless had the attitudes, instincts and habits of thought of the Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry. He certainly wrote some novels and stories about Ireland (A Drama in Muslin, The Untilled Field). In some ways his most accessible production is his gossipy, and often very bitchy, three-volume memoir of Irish and Dublin literary life Hail and Farewell, the separate volumes being entitled Ave!, Salve! and Vale!  But George Moore was really more at home in Paris, where he’d trained as a painter and absorbed the influence of Zola; and in London, where he lived for the last twenty or so years of his life. One of his first major novels A Mummer’s Wife, was a Zolaesque account of alcoholism among a travelling acting company. It has an English setting. The novel that is often considered his best, Esther Waters, is set among raffish bookies and touts at English race-tracks. Anyone reading these two would assume the author was an Englishman, not an Irishman. To compound the confusion, when Moore’s memoirs of his Paris days, Confessions of a Young Man, were translated into French, their title became Confessions d’un jeune Anglais.”

Since I wrote that, I have written on this blog about Esther Waters, Hail and Farewell, A Mummer’s Wife and A Drama in Muslin. Now, at last, I get around to Confessions of a Young Man, Moore’s autobiography of his early years as writer and artist in Paris and London in the 1870s and early 1880s, by which time he had discarded his family’s Catholicism and was assuming that he would never have to visit Ireland again. As it turned out, he did return to Ireland for quite a long stretch, whence comes his Hail and Farewell trilogy; but the youngish Moore didn’t yet know that.

Two warnings before I plunge my surgeon’s knife into his work. First, like the majority of autobiographies written by authors, there is a great deal of self-praise and some encomia of his own work. For comparison, you can look up on this blog comments about other authors’ autobiographies, such as Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombardiering, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast ; parts of Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography ofAlice B. Toklas; and if you are so inclined C.K.Stead’s You Have a Lot to Lose and What You Made of It, or David Lodge's laborious autobiographies Quite a Good Time to be Born and its sequel, not to mention George Moore’s own Hail and Farewell. You will certainly find much self-praise in Confessions of a Young Man, though one sometimes suspects that Moore is deliberately provoking readers to give an outraged response. Second, like Henry James, George Moore had the dreadful habit of revising his fiction and non-fiction years after it was first published. I have read Confessions of a Young Man only in the revised 1926 version, but I surmise that some of the more critical things he says about his literary contemporaries would have been less frank in the earlier 1888 version when his targets were all still alive. (Mind you, in Chapter 12 he makes very rude comments about the still-living Thomas Hardy: “Mr Hardy was but one of George Eliot’s miscarriages.”) More annoying, Moore had already annotated and revised this book in 1904 and 1916.

So much for my introduction to Confessions of a Young Man. Let me now impose upon you a brief synopsis.

At about the time of his father’s death, young George Moore leaves his Irish home, and seeks to study and learn as a painter in Paris. He renounces home, religion and all they stand for. As he says in Chapter 8: “The two dominant notes in my character – an original hatred of my native country, and a brutal loathing of the religion I was brought up in. All aspects of my native country are violently disagreeable to me and I cannot think of the place I was born in without a sensation akin to nausea.” In Chapter 9 he rails against “pity, the most vile of all vile virtues” which he says is corrupting the world because of “the pale socialist of Galilee; and this is why I hate Him, and deny His divinity…” (Methinks the young man had been reading Nietszche.)

In Paris, he throws himself into painting, but he does not proceed as well as he had hoped and is soon outshone by his companion and fellow-painter Henry Marshall. So he turns his attention to reading, and attempting to imitate precious, “decadent” French verse. Without giving any explicit details, he hints at sensuous attachments and visits to Parisian brothels. There is talk of an unspecified duchess. He claims to be the bohemian who could mingle equally with low criminals and with the highest of society. (At which point I question how much of this is the young man’s self-dramatization as mimicked from Parisian novels of the Romantic era. It sounds awfully like the posing and posturing of Alfred de Musset or the young Alexandre Dumas fils.)

He discovers the novels of Emile Zola and switches his allegiance from the Decadents, now declaring that the greatest of all writers to be Honore de Balzac. He will be a realist dealing with the material facts of life. Nevertheless, he does not drop all his own dandyish ways, suggesting a desire to epater la bourgeoisie. Thus from Chapter 5: “I bought a Persian cat and a python that made a monthly meal of guinea pigs”; and in his apartment he had “an altar, a Buddhist temple, a statue of Apollo and a bust of Shelley” – all the accoutrements of a neo-pagan of his era. As the piece de resistance of his dandy decadence, he speaketh thus in Chapter 7: “A Japanese dressing gown, the ideality of whose tissue delights me, some fresh honey and milk set by this couch hung with royal fringes; and having partaken of this odorous refreshment, I call to Jack, my great Python crawling about after a two months’ fast. I tie up a guinea pig to the tabouret, pure Louis XV. The little beast struggles and squeaks, the snake, his black, bead-like eyes are fixed, how superb are the oscillations… and now he strikes: and with what exquisite gourmandise he lubricates and swallows.” Does one’s flesh creep at this? No, one’s flesh does not, so clearly is young George Moore straining to equal Joris-Karl Huysmans (or Oscar Wilde), but not quite making the cut.

Anyway, his time in Paris is curtailed when remittances from his estate in Ireland dry up and he is no longer able to sustain his life as boulevardier, bon viveur, poseur and aesthetic provocateur. And here we are reminded that George Moore was, after all, an Irish landlord with the attitudes thereof – for he rails at his tenants, the wretched Irish peasant farmers and the miners who are now refusing to (read: unable to) pay their rents and keep him him in comfort in Paris. See what I mean about living the role of an Anglo-Irish landowner, even if that wasn’t his roots?

So he has to lower his sights and (about halfway through this autobiography) moves to London, books into a modest boarding house, and tries to learn how to write in English without French locutions and overtones. (In Chapter 10 he gives us a brief anthology of the – dismally mediocre – poems he has written in both language). He begins to observe, as interesting case-studies, humbler portions of humanity, such as the ignorant serving girl Emma at the boarding house. Such English wretched-of-the-Earth will make their appearance in his later realist novels. He takes the time to launch diatribes against stuffy Victorian theatre, the deadening effect of education, and the silly censorship of Mudie’s powerful circulating library (especially when, at the same time, the newspapers are so salacious). In contrast, he praises the frank and open vulgarity of the music-hall.

And at this point in his autobiography, having become a regular book-reviewer, he takes the time to give his views on eminent writers in England. Thomas Hardy he dismisses. George Meredith gets his qualified approval. But having been given a copy of The Portrait of a Lady to review, he deals with Henry James (in Chapter 12) thus: “I will admit that an artist may be great and limited; by one word he may light up an abyss of soul; but there must be this one magical and unique word. Balzac, sometimes, after pages of vain striving, gives us the word. Tourgeneff [Turgenev] gives it always; but Henry James only flutters about it, his whole book is one long flutter near to the one magical and unique word, but the word is not spoken; and for want of the word his characters are never resolved out of the haze of nebulae.” As always in this autobiography, this is dandy talk, though I think Moore is diagnosing accurately the obfuscation, evasion and long-windedness there are in so many of James’ novels – though if he thought The Portrait of a Lady was heavy going, then he would have been totally stumped by the impenetrably ponderous novels of James’ late period. Indeed, I wonder if this comment was bulked up by Moore in the 1926 edition of Confessions of a Young Man, given that Henry James had died in 1916. Back in the 1880s, Moore holds particular scorn for that he calls “villa” novels of adventure (meaning more-or-less what we would now call thrillers) and (Chapter 12 again) he gives this back-handed comment on Robert Louis Stevenson: “I aver that Mr. R. L. Stevenson never wrote a line that failed to delight me; but he never wrote a book.” But then he discovers Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean and has a literary orgasm. It is “the book to which I owe the last temple of my soul… I too love the great pagan world, its bloodshed, its slaves, its injustice, its loathing of all that is feeble.”

Can you now, dear reader, perceive the complete aesthetic and ethical muddle that is the mind of young George Moore? On this side the admiration of Balzac and Zola and hard social realism; on that side the would-be dandy and aesthete wanting to be Huysmans and Mallarme and Pater with a touch of superman Nietzsche thrown in. Put more simply, here is a desultor leaping from fashion to fashion like the impressionable young man that he is.

In one extended passage, he gives us a peroration on the young man (i.e. himself) as the key to nineteenth century culture. But he also includes a dialogue between himself and his conscience, berating himself for wasting so much time now that he is in this thirties. He engages in journalism. There is an amusing account of how he tried (but failed) to become involved in a duel, simply to garner some notoriety. The last words of the book are “The cold air of morning blew in my face, forcing me to close the window; and sitting at the table, overworn and not a little haggard, I continued my novel.” Implication: a great writer is now beginning his literary career.

Here are some interesting side issues to round off this review.

When he speaks of Henry James in Chapter 12, he includes this snarky comment: “The interviewer in us would like to ask Henry James why he never married; but it would be vain to ask, so much does he write like a man to whom all action is repugnant.” Even in George Moore’s day, the tag “he never married” always implied “he was homosexual”, as it did until quite recently in obituaries in the London Times. But in Chapter 13, Moore is rejoicing in being a bachelor and condemning people who dare to bring children into the world. The hearty heterosexual front he always wanted to display now seems very defensive indeed, increasing my suspicion that his tales of libertinism in Paris are probably built on fiction.

Then there is the very telling reaction he got from writers he admired.

In his preface, Moore tells how he sent a copy of this book to Walter Pater, and he quotes in full the congratulatory note that Pater sent in reply. But among other things, Pater remarked perceptively: “I wonder how much you may be losing, both for yourself and for your writings, by what, in spite of its gaiety and good nature and genuine sense of the beauty of many things, I must call a cynical, and therefore exclusive, way of looking at the world. You call it only ‘realistic’. Still!...”

Much sharper is the outcome of George Moore’s interaction with Emile Zola. To fill out the volume of the (final) 1926 edition of Confessions of a Young Man, Moore includes some essays. One, called “A Visit to Medan” tells of his two visits to Zola, who had agreed to write a preface for Moore’s Zolaesque novel A Mummer’s Wife. But then Zola read frivolous comments Moore had made about him in the French translation of Confessions of a Young Man, and he promptly cancelled his agreement to write the preface. Moral? If you want to make nasty comments about people from whom you expect a favour, make them in gossip behind their backs. Don’t commit them to print.