Something Old

“THE LAKE” by George Moore (first published 1905; revised 1921)

Comments by guest reviewer PROFESSOR BRIAN BOYD

If you are a regular reader of Reid’s Reader, you might have given a double-take to see George Moore’s The Lake once again featured as “Something Old”. After all, my comments on the novel appeared only two weeks back [see index at right]. In response to that earlier posting, however, Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd of the University of Auckland sent me the following missive, as well as the article which follows it. With his permission, I reproduce both here. They are both as much about James Joyce’s Ulysses as about George Moore’s The Lake.

Hi Nicholas,

            I was fascinated to see your generous response to George Moore’s The Lake, which I haven’t read for almost forty years. You note that Moore knew “the famous Irish wit and author Oliver St. John Gogarty, and chose the name of the hero of The Lake in mockery of his friend, who otherwise had nothing in common with the hero of the novel in either temperament or outlook.” That’s an understatement: Gogarty was famous for his obsessive blasphemy, or at least is so through the portrait James Joyce draws of him in the character of Buck Mulligan, as close as Ulysses comes to having a villain. If not a villain, then the antagonist of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter-ego in the novel.

            My first publication, in 1978, was on the relationship between Father Oliver Gogarty in the ending of The Lake and Buck Mulligan at the start of Ulysses. One other fact about the real Gogarty was drawn on by both Moore and Joyce: he was an excellent swimmer.

            The article that follows is a little over-compacted, and written for a specialist audience who know their Joyce very well, but perhaps I can stir the soil to let in a little air for curious bookworms. Joyce constructed each chapter of Ulysses with a parallel to a different phase of Homer’s Odyssey for, and in the first chapter, Stephen Dedalus, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and an ironic portrait of the young Joyce, is designated “Telemachus” (the son of Odysseus-Ulysses) and Buck Mulligan “Antinous” (the chief of the suitors of his mother, Penelope, freeloading outrageously off the Ithacan court while Odysseus’s absence stretches toward its twentieth year, at the start of the Odyssey). In real life, Gogarty and Joyce had rented a Martello tower at Sandymount near Dublin, as Mulligan and Dedalus do in Ulysses. In the opening chapter of Ulysses, Dedalus feels Mulligan is ejecting him from the tower, and mutters to himself, in the last word of the chapter, as he heads away from Mulligan swimming at the swimming-hole near the foot of the tower: “Usurper.”

            The article that follows suggests that the more important usurpation in the first chapter of Ulysses is not the tower, but the role of hero. The exuberant and self-admiring Mulligan tries to hog centre stage, but he can never be a hero. Dedalus, who in A Portrait saw himself becoming, as an artist, a priest of the eternal imagination, in effect sees (through the eyes of Joyce, at least) Mulligan as an anti-hero, an anti-priest of the imagination or the anti-imagination. I argue that Joyce picked the idea up from Moore, and quietly acknowledges his debt to the older writer.

            The Stanislaus I mention is Joyce’s brother, who later wrote a memoir My Brother’s Keeper.

            Regards

            Brian

[Professor Boyd’s article follows]

"A Plain Clothes Priest”

Brian Boyd

James Joyce Quarterly, 15:2 (Winter 1978), 176-79:

            Silent and unnamed, a priest clambers up from the water into which Buck Mulligan will plump. Why? Joyce's subtle attention places in counterpoint the discreet priest emerging to dress and the ostentatious mock-priest disrobing to immerge: "Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his boots. An elderly man shot up. . . ." (U 23) Blatant, bleating Buck "nodded to him self as he drew off his trousers and stood up, saying tritely: —Redheaded women buck like goats." By word and gesture he commands attention as he unveils himself:

            He broke off in alarm, feeling his side under his flapping shirt.

—My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I'm the Uebermensch, Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen. He struggled of his shirt and flung it behind him to where his clothes lay.

            Meanwhile, the silent priest has withdrawn into a niche to dress. Mutely Stephen observes the contrast: "Dressing, undressing" (U 24). It is this image of the priest, indeed, that finally hardens his disinclination to return to the tower into a resolve: "The priest's grey nimbus in a niche where he dressed discreetly. I will not sleep here tonight." Stephen has had his own situation mummed before him by the priest whom mock-priest Mulligan has relegated to a bit part. Stripping with the brazen confidence of the star, stripping all down to mere body, Buck upstages the real priest donning the robes of conscience and eternal imagination with the pudency of a supernumerary. As he takes note of the priest, Stephen sees he has let his own nimbus be confined to a niche, and seeing this, he knows he must resist such demotion.

            But the careful counter-pointing of Mulligan and swimming priest is also a parody of the ending of George Moore's The Lake (1905). [1] In the climatic closing section, the only scene in Moore's novel Joyce found piquant, "Father Oliver Gogarty" abandons the priesthood but conceals his apostasy by allowing his parish to think him drowned. He sheds his sacerdotal attire on one side of the lake, swims across, puts on the civilian clothes he has stowed on the other (Joycetown) side, and rounds off the novel with an aphorism on attaining emancipation. Joyce reported the passage to Stanislaus: "Father Oliver Gogarty goes out to the lake to plunge in by moonlight, before which the moon shines opportunely on 'firm erect frame and grey buttocks': and on the steamer he reflects that every man has a lake in his heart and must ungird his loins for the crossing" (Letters II 154). What particularly titillated Joyce was Gogarty's undressing, symbolically elevated by Moore but lending itself equally to concrete visualization (the real Oliver St. John Gogarty's moonlit buttocks) or merry deflation: "I wish some-one would send me a pair of Father Oliver's small-clothes that he hid among the bulrushes" (Letters II 155). Instead of a priest, "Gogarty," sloughing off his clerical investiture, entering the water and at the other side emerging to assume civilian clothes, Joyce in Ulysses has a priest emerge from the water to resume the garb of his office as the mock-priest (Gogarty) disrobes before plunging in. In Moore a priest enters the water and a layman emerges; in Ulysses a priest emerges, then a layman enters.

            Joyce no doubt hoped by this little parody to preserve the memory of the ending of The Lake in all its incongruity: Father Oliver naked, "tall and gray in the moonlight—buttocks hard as a faun's" (p. 331), and the grotesque caudal epigram, "And every man must ungird his loins for the crossing" (p. 334) [2] At the same time Joyce's parodic subscene graciously signals his gratitude to Moore for Father Gogarty, the germ of Mulligan as asperser priest. Moreover in his opening chapter Joyce establishes his relation to the dominant poet and the dominant novelist of Ireland in Bloom time. With the passage "Woodshadows floated silently by" to "Wavewhite wedded words shimmering on the dim tide" (U 9) he pays homage to Yeats but proclaims his own beauty of phrase, fidelity to the actual, and richness of context to be greater. Similarly Joyce's use of Moore is at once a token of respect for the man he was displacing from preeminence ("George Moore, an intellectual oasis in the Sahara of the false spiritualistic, Messianic, and detective writings whose name is legion in England"(CW 171), and a demonstration of superior power in handling the same fictional image, Gogarty as priest.

            Moore was obviously delighted to bestow the irreverent Gogarty's name on his initially pious priest. Even after his faith has ebbed, Father Oliver retains an ethical seriousness alien to proto-Mulligan's frivolity. He wishes neither to abandon the vocation to which he is pledged nor to pursue it emptily: "I can imagine nothing more shameful than the life of a man who continues his administrations after he has ceased to believe in them, especially a Roman Catholic priest, so precise and explicit are the Roman Sacraments" (p. 274). While his intellectual restlessness forces him to leave the priesthood, his probity makes him wish to protect his parish from the potentially demoralizing news of his desertion: hence the expedient of crossing the lake to drown an old identity and assume a new. Joyce knew that Moore, in naming his priest, enjoyed the inappropriateness of Gogarty's irreverence, but in recasting the swimming episode Joyce suggests an even greater inappropriateness: Gogarty's (Mulligan's) contentment. Restless and driven, Father Gogarty must flee the necessity of forever repeating a round of hollow ritual. Buck Mulligan, by contrast, never tires of his ceaseless impiety: he is as smug and con tented in his unbelief as Father Gogarty had been troubled and inquiring in belief. At the end of The Lake Father Gogarty swims away from the shore of the past and exhausts himself to arrive at the shore of the future. At the end of Ulysses' opening chapter Buck Mulligan plunges into the ocean of the present, to remain wallowing there (unmindful of "the incompatibility of aquacity with the erratic originality of genius"?) while a priest of the Church readies himself for the day and a true priest of the imagination readies himself for his future life by resolving on the exilic state of the artist.

            Joyce takes up the one trait Moore had borrowed from the actual Gogarty—his swimming prowess—and with it points to a gap between "O. St. Jesus" and Father Oliver more damning than irreverence: Gogarty is too smug to be a hero. The heroic mantle may in a sense descend from Father Oliver (restless if feeble) to Stephen Dedalus (restless from strength). But since the complacency of denial is in the long run as barren and boring as the complacency of faith, Buck Mulligan should not occupy center stage: he usurps.

[Professor Boyd’s endnotes follow]

 [1] London: Heinemann, 1905.

 [2] As others have shown, both of these phrases from Moore reappear in Ulysses. The "gray buttocks" balloon into Father Malachi O' Flynn's "grey bare hairy but tocks" (U 599): see Robert Adams, James Joyce: Common Sense and Beyond (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 160 and Albert J. Solomon, "A Moore in Ulysses," James Joyce Quarterly 10(1973), p. 219. "Every man must ungird his loins" shrivels, in the second sentence of Ulysses, to the word "ungirdled" (U 3): the suspicion "that Father Buck Mulligan may have derived the adjective 'ungirdled' . . . from that phrase 'must ungird his loins' " was first voiced by Robert Boyle, in "The Priesthoods of Stephen and Buck" (Approaches to "Ulysses," ed. Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock [University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970], p. 59). One can confirm Boyle's suspicion by noting how the first paragraph of Ulysses is recast in the camp mass, the lines from "Introibo ad altare diaboli" to "buttocks" (U 599). That "ungirdled" alludes to one of the two phrases from The Lake which Joyce recalled in his letter to Stanislaus (Letters II 154) as surely as ''grey bare hairy buttocks" alludes to the other is made plain by the close echo of "A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him" in "Raises high behind the celebrant's petticoats, revealing his grey bare hairy buttocks." Both sentences include: (1) a Gogarty figure (2) in un-sacerdotal robes (dressinggown, petticoat), which (3) are lifted up behind. Given this meticulous parallelism, it would seem safe to add, in both cases: (4) an allusion to the final scene of The Lake. Each of the allusions momentarily refleshes the moonlit rump of Moore's Father Gogarty; through the more oblique but saliently located "ungirdled" Joyce records his debt to Moore for the situation of his opening chapter, the domination of a mock-clerical Gogarty.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE LAKE” by George Moore (first published 1905; revised 1921)

           

            Fifteen or twenty years ago, I had one of my odder excursions in reading. For some reason I began to read my way systematically through the works of  three late- nineteenth/early-twentieth century authors, each of whom once had a considerable reputation; but each of whom has subsequently fallen into relative obscurity. By coincidence (and not because I was trying to make some satirical point) each of them happened to be called George. There was the fastidious, over-intellectual George Meredith. There was the desperate, struggling realist George Gissing (whom in the end I judged to be the most sympathetic of the three). And there was George Moore.

            I ended up reading nearly all the works of all three.

            I’ve written about Meredith and Gissing before on this blog [look ‘em up on the index at right], but I have not yet ventured into Moore-land.

            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.

            Yet in the novel I choose as this week’s “Something Old”, The Lake, Moore deals with a very specifically Irish theme and situation.

            Like Henry James, Moore had the unlovely habit of attempting to re-write and bring out new editions of his works after they had already been published. As somebody said, he was always “looking for the perfect literary style”. This meant the last years of his life were spent tinkering with his own texts and sending out pompous newsletters to friends. As you will note from the heading, The Lake was first published in 1905, but was revised for a later edition in 1921, and it is only in this edition that I know it.

            Father Oliver Gogarty is a rural parish priest in the west of Ireland. He has become a priest partly through the influence of his two sisters, both of whom are nuns, and partly because he does not wish to follow his father into the dull life of being a country merchant. A village gossip, Mrs O’Mara, tells Father Oliver that Nora Glynn, the parish organist and schoolmistress, is pregnant. Father Oliver confirms that this is true when he confronts Miss Glynn. Imprudently, Father Oliver preaches a fiery sermon on the virtue of chastity when he knows that Nora Glynn is in his church.

            Nora flees from the parish.

            Months later, Father Oliver receives a letter from Father Michael O’Grady, a priest working in London, reproving him for his all-too-common and uncharitable course of action, and telling him how Nora and her baby are faring in London. Father Oliver is now wracked with remorse for his own intolerance. He ham-fistedly tries to make amends. At this stage, he still thinks in terms of saving Nora from her sins. When he hears that Nora has become secretary and companion to an agnostic literary gentleman, Walter Poole, who is doing sceptical research on the origins of Christianity, Father Oliver fears for Nora’s soul and wants to draw her back into the Catholic faith. More urgently, he fears that she might be Walter Poole’s mistress.

            When he discovers she is indeed Poole’s mistress, Father Oliver has a flash of insight. He at last acknowledges that the real cause of his anxiety for Nora was his own sexual attraction to her. Faced with this realization, his own sense of vocation and religious faith slowly slide away.

            He still has things that tie him to his village parish. There is the simple trust of the country people. There is the fact that he has to be moral mentor and guide to his alcoholic curate Father Moran, who looks up to him. More than once he has had to deter Father Moran from drinking bouts. Even while coming to see women as the life-force, he still has many priestly habits of thought, and sometimes lapses into seeing the hand of God in many events about him.

            But he cannot continue to live in bad faith. The question becomes – how can he disengage himself from the parish and the priesthood without destroying many people’s trust and without himself becoming an object of scorn and calumny? The answer comes from the lake, about the shores of which he often wanders, meditating. He conceals civilian garb on the far side of the lake. Under a full moon he strips off his priestly clothes and leaves them on the side of the lake near the parish. Then he swims across, naked, dons the civilian garb and flees, leaving the parishioners to believe he has drowned.

            Under another name, he makes a new life for himself as a journalist in America.

            When it comes to the novel’s ending, the symbolism of the lake is fairly obvious. It represents a sort of baptism as Oliver leaves one life and is initiated into another. (Like Fred Henry falling into a river, and later fleeing across a lake, in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms). But the lake features frequently in this novel long before the ending is reached. More often, Moore presents it as an image of the private soul, reflecting only oneself, to which one should be true in spite of the pressures of society. I’m also sure that an author so conscious of his symbolism as Moore would not have chosen to call the agnostic writer Poole by accident. Poole is the pool into which Nora sinks. The lake is the new life in which Oliver immerses himself.

            There are some oddities about the novel’s style and structure. The main event of the story (Nora’s pregnancy and Father Oliver’s intemperate denunciation of her) has happened before the novel begins. As Moore says in his introduction to the 1921 edition “the one vital event in the priest’s life happened before the story opens”. We learn about this anterior action not only via Father Oliver’s agonised thoughts, but in letters exchanged between Father Oliver, Father O’Grady and Nora herself. The novel is thus an odd combination of the epistolary and the stream-of-consciousness.

            This does not always work. Some of Oliver’s letters are written in a self-revelatory, heart-on-sleeve style that is hard to reconcile with the way he is otherwise depicted. Then there are Moore’s elisions. We are told of, but do not have dramatised, a key illness and fever into which Oliver sinks and from which he emerges with a completely new religious perspective. It is as if we have been cheated of a key step in the character’s development.

            And yet the novel as a whole works. The logic of its development is flawless, from the priest’s unthinking zealotry to his doubts to his self-understanding to his quest for a new life. Moore would not be Moore if at least part of his purpose was not only anti-Catholic polemic, but also a vague sort of pagan affirmation of Nature in all the descriptions of lake and shore and woods. There is this “pagan” note in the moment where Oliver is about to jump into the lake and “stepping from stone to stone he stood on the last one as on a pedestal, tall and grey in the moonlight – buttocks hard as a faun’s, and dimpled as a faun’s when he draws himself up before plunging after a nymph.” [Chapter 14]. Moore’s master Zola had taught him the ways of anti-clerical polemic with his novel La Faute de l’Abbe Mouret; and Moore himself later wrote his agnostic novel about Jesus, The Brook Kerith. Indeed the character of Walter Poole in The Lake could be in part a self-portrait.

            But The Lake is not crude anti-church polemic. Father Moran (despite his alcoholism), the kindly old Father O’Grady, and Father Peter (who preceded Oliver in his parish) are all shown to be good and sincere men by their lights, genuinely concerned for their parishioners. But Moore can’t resist moments where formal religion is presented as something for the ignorant peasants. Just before Oliver swims the lake, there is a raucous scene of low comedy where peasants scuffle over whether a baby should be baptised Catholic or Protestant. There is also one delightful scene of more subtle comedy where Father O’Grady visits Father Oliver from London, and the two priests circle about the problem of actually talking about Nora, when that is really what they are most interested in talking about. In this scene, Moore seems to be gently suggesting the insufficiency in celibate priests’ approaches to women.

            The Puritanism of Irish Catholicism and the drawbacks of clerical celibacy are things that Moore obviously has in his sights. But he knows the country and the situation too well to serve us stereotypes.

            The Lake is still a key Irish novel.

Two cheeky footnotes:

            (A.) Moore was acquainted with the famous Irish wit and author Oliver St.John Gogarty, and chose the name of the hero of The Lake in mockery of his friend, who otherwise had nothing in common with the hero of the novel in either temperament or outlook. I have this information from Ulick O’Connor’s biography Oliver St.John Gogarty (1964).

           

            (B.) There is something strange about Moore’s criticism of clerical celibacy when Moore himself never married, seems to have lived most (and possibly all) of his life celibate, and wasn’t very good at intimate personal relationships. Motes and beams, I guess.