Mr. George Moore on America

The Observer, 17 December 1916, page 5, 1,215 words

A Coming Visit.

Trouble Over and Early Novel.

Mr. George Moore is making plans for a visit to the United States during the coming year. He has never before been to America, where, like some other English authors, he has probably his largest audience.

“Major Pond has been after me for a lecture tour in America for a long time,” he said in an interview yesterday. “He made me an offer which called for thirty lectures in six weeks. This proposal I referred to a friend who knows the United States well. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is a very tempting offer. I only make one suggestion. It is that you should take your coffin with you. For you certainly will return in it if you attempt to carry out this programme.”

“From what he added,” Mr. Moore went on, “I can imagine what I should have had to undergo. I am a bad railway traveller. A journey of twenty-four hours would annihilate me. I can picture myself arriving, after such a journey, in some strange city — probably in the rain! I am told that I should not be able to go to a hotel — that there is always some well-known citizen who receives the lecturer. I should have to be his guest. In the spare room; probably with a gas-stove!

“And there I should be surrounded by all the paraphernalia of somebody else’s happiness! Introduced to crowds of people! And to deliver a fixed lecture. Toshery about Walt Whitman (though I admire him greatly) or something like that. After the first two or three times it would bore me to death. It would be chilling at my age — at any age!

“No,” he added, “I am most anxious to go to America, but not in such a fashion. I should like to go to visit the Eastern States — what I call Anglo-America. I am not interested in meeting Japanese-America or Polish-America. I should like to visit New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington — Boston, of course, and then to go on to Quebec and Montreal. That would satisfy me. If I lecture, moreover, it will not be on some set theme, over and over again. I shall want to say something useful, and I think I could say something useful. That is my plan, and I shall carry it out as soon as it becomes possible.

“One of the Worst Books Ever Written.”

In the meantime, Mr. Moore is conducting an interesting quarrel with an American publisher who wishes to republish one of his early works. The publisher, it seems, is issuing a new and luxurious “definite” [sic] edition of George Moore’s novels, and in the cases of several of the earlier ones, their author, deeming them, though immature, not without merit, has taken them in hand and revised them to such an extent that as they stand to-day, they are practically new works. He has done this in the case of “A Modern Lover,” which he first published in 1883, and has now re-named “Lewis Seymour and Some Women,” and in that of “A Drama in Muslin,” dating three years later, which he now calls simply “Muslin.”

But “Mike Fletcher,” the other early novel which the American publisher desires to include in the edition, is, according to its author, on an entirely different footing. He says that it must be one of the worst books ever written, and that he can’t for the life of him understand anybody’s wanting to resurrect it.

“What is the book about?”

“I don’t know,” came the unexpected reply; “I can’t conceive! I can’t re-write it for the very reason that I can’t discover what it is about.”

“It’s a novel, I suppose?”

“It says so on the title page,” replied Mr. Moore, “but I personally can’t discover that it has any subject or any merit whatsoever. I must have written it in some fit of mental aberration, and I certainly shall not sanction its re-publication. I’ve delivered a kind of ultimatum to the publisher. I’ve told him that I will consent to this re-publishing ‘Mike Fletcher’ if he will let me write a preface to the new edition showing how worthless it is. But I hardly think he’ll consent to that.”

The Case of Henry James.

“Do you know personally any leading American authors?”

“Do you consider Henry James an American?” replied Mr. Moore. I knew him very well. A strange case that of James! He was a delightful, extremely cultured gentleman, with almost no originality of thought, and no real gift for fiction. You know that in my “Confessions of a Young Man” I say that James came abroad and read Turgenief, and that Howells stayed at home and read James.

“The amazing thing in connection with Henry James, however, was that the thing in his writing which latterly impressed people most was really nothing else than a symptom of disease of the mind. Up, say, to fifty-five (he was seventy-three when he died), he was clear at all events. After that he became unintelligible. His later books, like ‘The Wings of a Dove,’ ‘The Golden Bowl,’ and the rest, are simply the literature of a decayed mentality. In these and all his subsequent books he tried to create characters by making other people talk about them. In every one of them various persons sit down and discuss somebody else. And because of this his characters are fashion-plates, not human beings. We hear names all through his books, but we never visualise the individuals.

“James and I,” Mr. Moore went on, “were once yellow-guests at a certain country house. It was while I was revising the proofs of my ‘Ave.’ In it I had written a line that I feared, as I had put it, might give offence to an old friend. It was on the simplest of subjects — about a Professor of Trinity College, Dublin. I asked James if he would write another sentence for me with which to replace it, and I shall never forget the effect this request had upon him. He rolled his eyes like a man in convulsions. Then he snatched the proof from me and started for his room with it. Finally he came down, having composed a line and a half. It looked profound, but what it meant I had no idea. However, I put it in. When my secretary came to type it, she asked me if it was written correctly, as she could make no sense of it! Later, when the book was being set up, Heinemann, my London publisher, came to me with the proof containing that sentence. ‘Will you please tell me what you mean by this?’ said he. ‘Neither I nor my reader can make out.’ I told him that I couldn’t, and then explained to him who had written it.

“I can never think that,” Mr. Moore added, “without recalling my first meeting with that great French master, Jules Lemaître. At that time he had read nothing of mine, and he said, ‘Tell me, are you clear or are you obscure?’

“‘I am clear, Monsieur Lemaître.’ said I. ‘I have not talent enough to be obscure.’ That remark seemed to please him.