Taking a firm step towards building the Letters pillar of George Moore Interactive, I’ve made a new page — actually an old one — under the title Editing Letters.

(All my pages are listed in a site menu — tap the icon in the upper left corner. What you’re reading now is a post rather than a page. Who knew?)

Editing Letters is my lecture on that subject written, performed and published forty years ago. How time flies when we’re having fun! Before publishing the page, I revised to make it reflect how I think today, which strangely isn’t very different from how I thought a long time ago. 

Though my ideas still seem relevant and true, and the arguments valid, I’m not really as verbose as I was in my youth. Verbosity is an academic privilege, and when I was an English professor I went on and on until the house lights came up. Rather than shorten the lecture today, I kept all the content and even added some. I hereby apologize for channeling Pooh-Bah. 

There’s a practical reason for exhuming my lecture. It explains how I’m going to transcribe the letters of George Moore for digital publication. You may say that no explanation is necessary because nobody will read either the letters or my page about transcribing them, but that would overlook one reader who certainly will: me.

By explaining my approach, I’ve in effect installed guardrails and signposts for the virtual journey I’m taking, and that others may choose to join. The page makes me accountable not just for results, but for how I achieve them.

One overarching question that hasn’t been answered: Why publish literary  letters in the first place? They weren’t written for publication; they’re not creative or scholarly; they’re not made for storytelling or argumentation; they’re addressed to individuals who are no longer alive; they reference a world that has ceased to exist. 

Most of the folks who have edited literary letters are pedagogues, and their answer to Why would be that letters provide information (though often useless) about a letter-writing author. Letters can teach readers about an author’s life and work, like biography minus the narrative. That is not my answer.

I publish letters of George Moore not in defense of his literary legacy, but as a component of the legacy. Letters as an art form that he made on thousands of sheets of paper, with his own hands, from his own mind and heart. 

The letter pictured in this post is one such. Moore is 46 years old, living in London, a bestselling novelist after years of reaching for but fumbling the brass ring. He writes to his 26 year old girlfriend, an American heiress who is married to an English aristocrat, living in what amounts to a palace. She’s the mother of Moore’s unacknowledged but beloved daughter who is two years old and will grow up to become one of the most fascinating women in the European avant-garde.

The letter-writer is sad, he’s frustrated, he’s lonely and angry, yet he slogs on with his next novel not knowing if it will succeed because, as always, he is writing at the outer limits of his skill and imagination rather than to lazy expectations of the public. One can read a letter like that for the information it conveys or the spirit it preserves. In that second and preferred way, it’s a work of art.

Be that as it may, here’s my transcription of Moore’s letter in case you can’t decipher his hurried handwriting:

92 Victoria Street, Feb 14^th 1898

I send you the proofs — I fancy that they are about a third of the book. I am feeling so depressed that I cannot come to tea; you would only think me hateful. Do you know what a black melancholy is? If there was only a reason but it is the sorrow of life, the primal sorrow. This sounds melodramatic, exaggerated, pedantic… Indifferent as the fiction doubtless is it is better than the horrible reality known as George Moore

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The Price Is Right

I say in Editing Letters that the right price for a literary legacy is free. Rather than printing letters in crazy expensive volumes, they should be accessible to everybody online, for nothing at all. That is how I’ll publish George Moore’s letters. More power to George!

On the other hand, holographs are not free and rarely even cheap. Here is an example of a letter written by a favorite son of Oak Park, Illinois, who was born and raised up the street from where I’m writing. The letter contains information that was its purpose for the recipient. Today, information is not what makes the letter worth a quarter of a million dollars.

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Manet/Degas

Turning our attention back to Aesthetics and Iconography for a moment, I’ll mention the Manet/Degas exhibition that is moving from Paris to New York September 24, 2023–January 7, 2024.

You may know that those two artists were dear friends of the young Moore and among his strongest influences. I plan to attend the exhibition and view the paintings through the eyes of their fervent Irish disciple.

Their fervent Irish disciple is quoted in the New York Times review of the exhibition. 

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