Category: Correspondence

Where Angels Fear to Tread

July 24th, 2024
“In Sight of Death” is a short story by George Moore in the Illustrated News of the World (New York, 27 August 1892, pages 202-203). This imaginative rendering of an angel investor in startups is one of four unsigned illustrations of the story. Just kidding, angel investors are flightless. My transcription of the story, along with its later incarnation as “A Flood,” will soon appear in the Worlds pillar of GMi. The only other place you’ll find it, maybe, is in a distant library. (Courtesy of Kathi Griffin)
Roundup of Outliers

The Aesthetics pillar of George Moore Interactive has bulked up nicely.

It now contains 227 essays of art criticism and 215 essays of literary criticism originally published in periodicals and books during the author’s lifetime. That’s a total of 442 essays — but not a grand total.

I have yet to acquire 90 outliers: 22 essays of art criticism and 68 essays of literary criticism squirreled away in periodicals that have not been scanned or stored in a conveniently located library. Convenient to me, that is; I’m situated in Chicago.

To acquire these 90 outliers, I must leave my virtual tower and travel to the British Library in London. Once ensconced in the Reading Room, I shall order up the periodicals, one at a time, so that I can locate, transcribe and edit the essays I need, and use them to complete the Aesthetics pillar.

At that momentous milestone, there will be 532 critical essays — the whole shebang — live on George Moore Interactive. As always, they will be freely accessible to readers (human and machine) all over the world.

I know, know, it’s about time.

Assuming that the 90 outliers are similar in length to essays already acquired, I estimate that each contains an average of 2,000 words. That being the case, the completed Aesthetics of George Moore will contain 487,191 words of art criticism and 732,924 words of literary criticism for a grand total of 1,220,115 words.

That is obviously more than most people will ever get around to reading or even skimming. However it should take just a few minutes for machine learners to suck all 1,220,115 words into a large language model.

Not long after that, a reanimated George Moore will resume speaking for himself in response to questions about the art and literature of his time, and of ours. Pretty cool!

Can’t Go Yet

I’m fully prepared to go after the needed 90, but the British Library is not ready to host my visit. You may have heard that cyber criminals kidnapped the Library late in 2023 and held it for ransom. Their dastardly behavior is described here and here.

I pause to ask myself: who would want to attack a library, any library, for money? What lowlife would choose to attack the British Library, of all libraries, a pinnacle of western civilization?

I don’t have any answers, but I’m generally aware that some of our fellow citizens rarely hesitate to do any awful thing that lines their pockets and strokes their egos. A library today. The planet tomorrow.

The ransom wasn’t paid, thank heavens, but the cyber criminals didn’t undo the damage they caused; instead they wound up damaging the British Library for free.

The Library has been in recovery mode ever since, rebuilding their legacy information technology so that even the remote collections I want to browse can be accessed once more.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, though I don’t know how far off it is. My plan is to visit London in the spring of 2025 when, hopefully, all Library systems will be go.

Where Angels Fear to Tread

My trip to the British Library will not be nostalgic.

In the 1970s I spent five years under the luminous dome of the old Reading Room, that hallowed Victorian temple of the human spirit. Back then I was a graduate student from the University of Reading in Berkshire, trundling down to Bloomsbury and over to Colindale on my motorcycle, rain or shine, from my quaint mews house in Hampstead.

Though the luminous dome is still attached to the Museum in Bloomsbury, the Library long ago moved to a modern campus headquartered in St. Pancras. That’s my new destination, half a century after my innumerable visits to the original.

Based on the average time that orders take to reach readers in today’s British Library, and the limit on how many orders may be submitted in one day, I have planned a stay of two full weeks to acquire the outliers.

Even as an American citizen, my use of the British Library is to be free of charge; but airfare, hotel accommodation, meals, and ground transportation are not. And by the way, London is not the cheapest town to dally in.

Hence my wish for an angel investor to help cover the travel expenses. What is an angel investor? Somebody who proffers a small amount of capital for a short time, say three years, in order to make 10x return on that investment. Doesn’t sound very angelic, does it? More like usurious, but I didn’t invent the moniker.

Unable to promise 10x or even 1x to a so-called angel, I’ll instead create a crowdfunding campaign to cover the travel expenses. What is crowdfunding? That’s when individuals (and maybe institutions) pledge small donations to kickstart an untested venture, and in return donors receive a tangible thing of value.

My crowdfunding campaign will most likely offer donors a collectible: for example, a signed, maybe illustrated hardcover of select, uncollected essays of George Moore. A fine limited edition that could retail for more than $50 and over time appreciate to multiples of that.

Collectors of George Moore and his period may covet a copy of the book for their physical shelves. My goal is to raise enough small donations to cover all or most of my travel expenses and costs of manufacturing the book.

My crowdfunding campaign will make clear that donations help complete the Aesthetics pillar of GMi; and more importantly move the project closer to its noble goal of kickstarting literary legacies in the digital age.

The limited edition will not be a commercial product, but a token of appreciation to folks who volunteer their support.

Ireland Redux

Spending two weeks from morning to night, head-down in the British Library, eating takeout tandoori when I return to my rented garret, must be balanced by a personal reward of some sort; otherwise my sparkle may dim.

The reward I have in mind is a visit to Ireland, my first in about 20 years. My daughter Elayne may join me to celebrate completion of her third novel (you should read or listen to the first two, they’re great).

In Dublin I may meet Michael O’Shea at Joyce’s Martello Tower for a chilly spring skinny-dip. I may drive around both Irelands as I did more than once upon a time, admiring the beauties and puzzling over the personalities.

Confessions of an Irishman

The other day Michael managed to find a copy of Terre d’Irlande (1887), a cornerstone of any rare book collection of George Moore. I was just then finishing my edit of Confessions of a Young Man (1888) for GMi and still undecided about what to slate next for the Worlds pillar.

My memory of the English translation of Terre d’Irlande, entitled Parnell and His Island, was admittedly poor and not very positive. I had a vague feeling that it was a nasty little rag about a beloved emerald island.

But is it? I decided to check.

Fast forward to now: all sixteen chapters of Parnell and His Island are published in the Worlds pillar of GMi. And I do declare, they are fine: thoughtful, beautifully written, not nasty though occasionally arch. They cover more than a dozen thematic aspects of mid-nineteenth century Irish culture from a biased, Anglo-Irish, eyewitness perspective. I love them all.

Moreover I think Parnell and His Island is intriguing when juxtaposed with Confessions of a Young Man. Both are nonlinear collections of essays that appeared one after the other and were probably written at the same time.

Parnell is all worldbuilding, Confessions is half worldbuilding, half criticism. Together the volumes reflect the perspicuity and sensibility of an emergent author testing his elastic limits.

Next up in Worlds: “In Sight of Death” (1892), later called “A Flood” (1911); the earlier text courtesy of the collection of Kathi Griffin.

Agon of the Agora

Having uploaded first edition texts of Parnell and His Island and Confessions of a Young Man to George Moore Interactive, I’m now wondering if I should also publish them as Kindle editions.

I already have four Kindle editions in the GMi Shop, so I’ve had enough experience of that marketplace to form personal opinions. So far they include:
- Kindle Create is lame desktop publishing software
- Kindle Direct Publishing is slow and time-consuming
- The Kindle Store is a big box rather than a boutique
I’m not sure how much time I have wasted making Kindle editions, but it’s beginning to add up. What’s worse, it’s been neither fun nor profitable for me.

Is there a better way? I have decided to explore other options for ebook and audiobook creation, production and sales.

If I learn it’s possible to increase the quality of GMi editions in any of those three categories by changing platforms, I will. That will mean moving my wares from the big box to a boutique, but I think that will be okay. More my style anyway.

Responsive Web Pages

A quick technical note about embedded Google Docs on the GMi website.

There are now nearly 1,000 live GMi web pages, most of them containing embedded Google Docs of what scholars call primary source material. The embedded docs display in a white box on this standard dark background.

I have discovered that embedded Google Docs display perfectly on computers and mobile devices held in landscape orientation. All good.

However due to technology that I don’t control, embedded Google Docs do not display properly on mobile devices held in portrait orientation.

One fix for this is to spend boatloads of money to write custom code. Another is for people visiting the GMi site on a phone to hold the device sideways, in landscape orientation, to view the embedded content.

For obvious reasons I opt for the second solution. However if a skillful code developer with a literary bent wishes to volunteer to write that custom code, the job can be theirs. If they succeed they can license the code to WordPress or Google, who could sure use it!

BREAKING NEWS 2024-07-26. The technical issue described above was solved by code developer Onur Demir through Codeable. GMi pages with embedded Google Docs now display properly on mobile devices held in portrait or landscape orientation.

Letters 1863-1901

My unpublished PhD dissertation The Letters of George Moore, 1863-1901 contains about 1,000 annotated letters with other scholarly stuff.

The time has come for me to have it scanned as a first step toward integration in the GMi project. I may also produce an ebook of its massive content, since I don’t plan to put “stuff” on this website.

My preferred book scanner in Missouri seems to be AWOL. I can’t seem to get his attention. As soon as I qualify a new vendor for scanning, Letters production will proceed.

Three heavy oversize volumes are not the easiest things to mount on a book scanner, so my choice of a new vendor must be cautious.

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One Voice

June 5th, 2024
Detail of a picture of Westport House in County Mayo, Ireland, painted and signed by G. Moore in 1761. Property of the Westport Estate.

Hi Reader. This post comes from George Moore Interactive. As usual there are bits and pieces of project news. Please subscribe to receive notifications.
Westport House

The Places gallery of the Iconography of George Moore tells an emerging story about Westport House in County Mayo, Ireland.

Westport House was the ancestral home of Louisa Browne Moore (d. 1860); Louisa was the author George Moore’s grandmother. Her father-in-law, the author’s great grandfather also named George (1729-1799) seems to have painted Westport House in 1761, while he was living nearby at his family estate of Ashbrook. Decades later, after retiring from business in Spain, he created the new demesne of Moore Hall with his considerable fortune. Moore Hall is where his grandson the author was born in 1852 and buried in 1933.

Was that confusing? Here is a birds-eye view of the Moore family tree reflecting movement from Ashbrook to Moore Hall.

I said the great grandfather seems to have painted Westport House because there are two landscape pictures hanging there that are are signed G Moore and dated 1761. A daughter of the eleventh Marquess of Sligo, the artist Sheelyn Browne who grew up at Westport House, remembers her father identifying the painter as a Moore of Moore Hall (so-called starting in 1795; before that, of Ashbrook).

As told in the Iconography, I haven’t found documentary evidence for my attribution of the paintings, but I think it’s plausible. I know of no other G Moore who was close enough to the Brownes to paint their home and create a family heirloom!

Okay, fine, but is the attribution important? I think it is, because it suggests (however faintly) that a century later the author George Moore’s aberrant ambition to become a painter, and his lifelong passion for the visual arts, was an inherited characteristic — likewise inherited by his father before him.

LitCrit

“The fact that he is something of a storm-centre for criticism lends additional interest to his views.” So said the Freeman’s Journal about George Moore in “The Irish Literary Theatre,” 13 November 1901.

In recent weeks I have transcribed several more essays of George Moore’s literary criticism, including the one just quoted, from horrendously muddy facsimiles provided by Newspapers.com and the British Newspaper Archive. These photo images are readable, often just barely, by a diligent human like me but not by a machine — even a smart machine like Textract; hence without manual transcription the essays cannot enter the digital age.

(Cue the trumpets) Stand back everybody, the essays are coming…!

Of course I am biased, but George Moore’s essays — even when pulled out of the mud and laboriously cleaned — are consistently edifying and enjoyable. For example, many essays describing his passion for theater are profoundly original and consistent over the decades they were written.

As the essays begin to circulate online after years in archival limbo, I hope that folks who are interested in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, and the National Theatre in London, will learn a little something new about origin stories. George Moore was among the builders! Likewise I want fans of W.B. Yeats — Fintan O’Toole, I’m looking at you — to read Moore’s criticism for a greater appreciation of why Yeats collaborated with him. The tail didn’t wag the dog!

Avowals

In my previous post I wrote that Avowals would be the next book in the Worlds pillar of George Moore Interactive. I messed up. Not remembering Avowals accurately, I assumed it was worldbuilding, but only two of its sixteen chapters are; all the rest are literary criticism.

So for that reason, Chapters 12 and 15 of Avowals are now in the Worlds pillar of GMi; the others are in the Aesthetics pillar as literary criticism of 1919 (the year that Avowals came out). A GMi Kindle edition of Avowals, all 107,000 words, will be published later this month.

Next up in the GMi canon: Conversations in Ebury Street. I expect this book to contain only literary criticism for the Aesthetics pillar and Kindle edition. I may be mistaken. Stay tuned.

By the way, the difference between worldbuilding and criticism was not scrupulously managed by Moore. He tended to mingle genres and not stay in his lane in his writing projects.

So just to be clear: the Worlds pillar of GMi is for George’s imaginative worldbuilding. The Aesthetics pillar is for his philosophy of art, which I have divided into art criticism and literary criticism.

You could say that Worlds is subjective (interior, fictional) writing and Aesthetics is objective (exterior, factual) writing. Not sure that’s always true but it may help GMi readers to perceive the difference though the author himself sometimes ignored it. His memoirs are especially tricky.

One Voice

To me one of the endearing qualities of George Moore is his voice. I find his writing voice to be personal and personable, genuine and candid, coherent and confident, conscientious and consistent, fresh across genres and decades. George the writer was a cool guy.

But what about his speaking voice? How did the living George sound in conversation? I don’t know, and that needs to change.

This project is heading towards George’s re-animation as a life-like character in this website; one who will spontaneously discuss topics with visitors, about his world and theirs.

Sounds like a lot of fun, but how good can it be if the new digital voice doesn’t even try to sound like the actual man?

I will to try to make the written and spoken voices sound alike, and there’s a good chance I’ll succeed. There are two complementary ways forward for re-animating George Moore with one authentic voice.

One way is to use the linguistic resources in George Moore Interactive to fabricate speech that says things the way George did, and would if he were still alive. A voice that gets his idioms, grammar and semantics right.

Another is to sample voices of living human beings whose identity and background have something in common with George’s, and letting a vocal simulation emerge by averaging the samples. Getting his timbre, tone, pace and pronunciation right.

Gathering and averaging samples is necessary because there are no extant recordings of George Moore speaking, at least none that I know of.

However the technologies for synthesizing his voice do exist at companies like Elevenlabs and OpenAI. Here’s what is going to happen with their help:
- GMi will synthesize a voice that simulates the historic George
- That synthetic voice will converse with visitors using generative AI
- The voice will also perform published texts (e.g. Avowals) on command
- And later it will dialogue with other re-animations (Wilde, Joyce etc.)
If you imagine yourself in a three-way conversation (not a chat) with George Moore and William Butler Yeats, you can see the future approach. Fast.

Relevance

I mentioned earlier how Moore’s voice continues to resonate despite the years that have passed since he died. Here’s an example of his rhetoric that snagged my attention in one of those muddy facsimiles:

“People who begin by believing absurdities are soon ready to commit atrocities.” Mr. George Moore on Ireland. The Observer, 29 September 1918.

That aphorism was coined more than a hundred years ago. Here in stop-the-steal USA in 2024, I can totally and anxiously relate. It is so now!

A lot more now is in the pipeline.

Letters to the Editor

I mentioned in an earlier post that letters to the editor would be included in the Letters pillar of George Moore Interactive, and that is true. However I have decided to double-post them in Aesthetics as well, because that is where a large part of their context lives. This process has already begun.

Get Involved

At some point more people like you may become involved with George Moore Interactive. The project is large enough to welcome them, and offer meaningful ways to help.

To that end, here is a Volunteer page where they can step up, if they feel like it. The page lists several ways to donate their time, including “other” if they want to add a new one.

And here is a Donate page for those who have more money than time to spare. Their donations would pay for technical services that are required to build this site (already 900 web pages and growing).

And finally here is a Shop page that announces a commercial initiative. Eventually it will open into a bazaar for themed merchandise and experiential services like education and travel. Buyers and sellers welcome!

See you next time!

Type your email…
Set Them Free

April 15th, 2024
Undated photograph of Honor Woulfe (private collection). Honora Euphrasia Woulfe (1871-1951) was a vivacious and independent Irish-American business woman and aspiring writer in Waco, Texas when she traveled to Dublin and met George Moore in 1907. It seems they had an intimate affair that inspired George’s fantasy Euphorion in Texas (1914). Their warm friendship continued for the rest of his life. More details
Iconography

In the past month I have added a gallery of Girlfriends to the Iconography of George Moore. These 22 women were his pals, not necessarily his partners; and they seem too few for a guy who claimed he “had thousands of women.”

I’m not sure why George purportedly said that; probably to create a reality distortion field. To judge from his memoirs and biography, he was not horny; he was no Casanova or Marquis de Sade, and Don Juan wasn’t his alter ego.

I think he said it because he wanted to seem familiar and engaged with many women, though not to marry or have children with one.

The Girlfriends gallery may still be incomplete. I am relying on others to identify women I have overlooked. But even as it is now, the gallery indicates that George was enchanted by creativity and spunk rather than curves when he made friends with the opposite sex; he was normally courteous, discreet, empathetic, evidently something of a feminist, and he wasn’t a philanderer.

Another gallery named Cronies is coming soon to the Iconography. Probably men only in that case, and not too many either, because George didn’t seem to encourage male bonding beyond what I would call “work friendships.”

Fair use

Each page of the Iconography of George Moore displays one or more images that I mostly found on the Internet. Most are vintage pictures in the public domain, but that hasn’t prevented some owners of the physical media from claiming copyright.

Not being a lawyer, I wasn’t sure what to make of their claims. Imagine if I likewise claimed copyright in the oil portrait of George Moore by Henry Harris Brown that I own? I would not do that because I have no such right; nor do other owners like me, in my opinion.

That said, the copyright question may be moot within a legal framework of “fair use.” You can read about that in Wikipedia as I did. In order to do the right thing under fair use, I have linked every picture to its owner when I know it; and published only low-resolution reference images that can’t be reused for commercial purposes.

History says the doctrine of “fair use” originated in common law during the 18th and 19th centuries as a way of preventing copyright law from being too rigidly applied and “stifling the very creativity which [copyright] law is designed to foster.” Fostering creativity is important to me, but my primary MO is to find and freely share new knowledge.

Aesthetics

Also in the past month I have acquired 66 additional scans of essays for the Aesthetics pillar of George Moore Interactive. I got them from the British Newspaper Archive, Newspapers.com, and HathiTrust.

Many of the scans are of inferior quality, with muddy and faded text because the pages are lifted from old microfilms. Yes, I can read them on my screen, but no, I can’t run them through a gamut of optical character recognition (OCR) to make them machine readable.

Sample of muddy text from old microfilm. OCR software hates this stuff.

I know of two ways to overcome muddy text in order to kickstart literary legacies in the digital age. One is labor intensive: manually transcribe each publication. The other is efficient: run big batches of crappy text through AWS Textract in order to distill machine-readable text.

The efficient way isn’t free of manual housekeeping chores. But one way or another, these 66 essays will soon show up in the Aesthetics pillar as hitherto uncollected art and literary criticism of George Moore.

In addition to the aforesaid 66, I recently identified 79 articles in 19 vintage periodicals that need to be scanned for the first time ever; 33 of these articles are in the Hawk newspaper, edited by George’s brother Augustus.

No microfilms have paved my way here, so I will have to order new digital scans from institutionally archived hardcopy. This is slow, expensive, a damned nuisance, but probably the only way to finish the Aesthetic pillar with every known article ever written by George Moore.

The only way unless you come to the rescue! In case I have overlooked the existence of previously photographed or scanned periodicals that you have seen, here’s a list of what I need. If I listed anything you recognize, please leave a comment.

Thankfully I have located hardcopy of these 19 periodicals, so come hell or high water I will rope them in. There are four more periodicals that I haven’t located because my friend Edwin Gilcher, Moore’s bibliographer, didn’t say enough about them to tell me where to look.

I am listing them below in case you can tell me what and where they are.
- Burlington (1881)
- Evening Post (1920)
- Phoenix (1899)
- Time (1887)
You can read more details about these four outliers in the Periodical Publications section of the Bibliography.

Bibliography

If you’re very familiar with A Bibliography of George Moore you’ll recall that letters to the editor are included in Periodical Publications. I have excluded letters to the editor from the Aesthetics pillar of this project, feeling that a better place for them is the Letters pillar.

For that reason, you can find hundreds of essays of art and literary criticism in Aesthetics, but no letters to the editor. Such letters are listed in Periodical Publications of the Bibliography but not yet available for your reading pleasure.

Time now to tip my hat to a colleague who has proofread the Bibliography and confirmed a reasonable degree of fidelity to the printed original. She prefers not to be named at present, but her contributions to the mission have been huge.

With proofreading in the rear view mirror, she has turned our attention to collecting new entries for the Bibliography; by new we mean entries that postdate Edwin’s Supplement in 1988.

Are you the editor of an edition of George Moore’s writing that is not in the bibliography? Can you identify particulars of any such editions? If you meet either of these criteria, please email your suggestions to have them included.

Worlds

The Worlds pillar currently has two titles of creative writing: Martin Luther (1879) and A Mummer’s Wife (1885). I created three prototypes of each, not being sure which would best serve their users.

Recently I learned that dynamically embedded Google Docs on GMi are searchable using the Find command of any desktop browser. That was a eureka moment because of my false belief that dynamically embedded Google Docs are not searchable in the WordPress environment. But they are!!

Now that I know better, I have removed one of the prototypes of each title and kept the other two. Prototypes of dynamically embedded Google Docs (in a white box, as shown above) remain; their text can be keyword searched using the Find command in a browser.

By the way, if a user wants to keyword search the entire canon rather than a particular part of it, I have published instructions for how to do that as well.

I should explain that “dynamically embedded” means that text in the white box is filled with a Google Doc in the cloud. That text is easily updated, so readers can be sure that the text on their screen is the latest and greatest.

People who don’t want to keyword search text but simply read an ebook can get one in the Kindle Store. The texts of my Google Docs are identical to the Kindle editions I published; and both are faithful to printed first editions.

Next up in the Worlds pillar is Avowals (1919).

Participatory Publishing

George Moore Interactive is a paragon of “participatory publishing.” That means: I do what I can to make good content accessible and useful to people like you, and I rely on people like you to fill the blanks and connect the dots.

That’s why at the bottom of every GMi page you’ll find an invitation to “Leave a comment.” Not a smile sheet. Heaven forbid! I don’t need to be told what I’ve done well, but rather what I should do better! When you notice opportunities to improve a page, please “leave a comment” at the foot of that page and be specific.

If your feedback is not about a page, but an aspect of the project as a whole, you should surrender to your participatory urge on the Contact page. Write your suggestion, or at least identify an opportunity to do better, and I shall do my best.

Pedagogical Dilemma

Here is an interesting quote from “Llamas, Pizzas, Mandolins,” by Paul Taylor reviewing The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, by Fei-Fei Li :

Li’s conviction that universities are the best place to make a difference in AI is rather wonderful. I only wish I had a clearer idea about how we should be educating the young people who come to us, now that so many of the skills we teach are susceptible to automation.
London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 6 · 21 March 2024

Now that so many skills being taught are susceptible to automation, what are your ideas about how to educate young people? Mine are implied in the title of this post, which you may recognize from an old song:
```
If you wanna keep something precious
Gotta lock it up and throw away the key
You want to hold on to your possession
Don't even think about me
If you love somebody
If you love someone
If you love somebody
If you love someone, set them free
(Sting)
```
Folks who enjoy George Moore’s literary legacy probably love him. Love is a strange word to use for our feelings, but I think it fits.

And if you accept my premise, that people like ourselves love George, then also accept Sting’s advice and set him free. Empower him and his readers to meet each other on their own terms, for their own reasons, and then let them go. Magic awaits!

Resubscribe

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- georgemooreinteractive.blog where I publish newsy posts
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Sometime after this post goes live, I plan to export all my posts to the .org site where they will join the seven pillars.

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Belles-Lettres

September 8th, 2023

The book George Moore Letters to Lady Cunard 1895-1933 was edited and published by Sir Rupert Hart-Davis in 1957. Twenty years later I photocopied the holographs for my Complete Letters of George Moore, but I doubted — and continue to doubt — I have all that survive. For example the one shown here is an unpublished autograph letter in ink, purportedly to Lady Cunard, that I purchased from a London dealer in the 1970s. It came with an undated autograph letter in pencil from Lady Cunard to Sir Shane Leslie, declining to show Moore’s letters to him, or to allow the letters to be published because “I can’t bear my name to be in print now or even later on.” What happened to those letters “in a Bank far away”? Could this be one of them?

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

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.

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.
Collecting Letters

December 1st, 2022
Letter of George Moore aet 71 to Sir Rennell Rodd, a friend of Oscar Wilde, later a well-traveled diplomat and MP. The manuscript is loosely inserted in my copy of Aphrodite in Aulis (1930), by George Moore.

Hi Reader! My study of George Moore sprouted in New York City when I was just a big kid. After graduating at New York University and taking a grand tour of faraway places, in January 1975 I hunkered down in the reading room of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, at the main branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. I was neither a student, nor a professor, nor a gainfully employed commoner; I wasn’t even self-aware. I behaved like an itinerant explorer seeking truth about the life and work of an obscure and fascinating man of letters. Without any prerequisites, training, encouragement or supervision, I launched a Nowhere Man project called The Collected Letters of George Moore. That project is now a pillar of George Moore Interactive.

This Correspondence pillar includes at least 6000 letters written by George Moore, located in places that I will identify in another pillar of George Moore Interactive named Collections. “At least 6000” because I’m sure I haven’t found all of Moore’s extant letters — and doubt I ever will. Instead I am building a digital lounge where I can share the material I’ve got, and more that will eventually surface. This dynamic Collected Letters has neither beginning, middle nor end. It has only a center that holds together the disparate parts and expands over time.

The “parts” are source materials: handwritten letters, typed letters, printed letters. By letter I mean any instance of George Moore writing what’s on his mind on a blank sheet, or letterhead, or card stock, or newsprint, and addressed to a particular individual or group. Literary letters are basically a person communicating to his friends. Moore’s last book, published just after he died, is A Communication to My Friends (1933) — and yes, according to my definition, that book is a letter and included. For similar reasons, my friend and mentor Rupert Hart-Davis included De Profundis in his Letters of Oscar Wilde (1963).

There are two ways to experience a letter. One way is to view and handle the original, tangible object (as I did at the Berg Collection and many other places). The other way is to read a printed or typed transcription. Transcribing any manuscript is a transformative process that not only makes the original writing more legible, coherent, and nowadays machine readable; it also changes the intrinsic quality of a text. Scholars and editors have argued endlessly about the give and take between these experiences: of the thing versus a representation of the thing.* For me the debate ends here and now, because George Moore Interactive presents BOTH a photographic image of each manuscript with its provenance AND a transcription in typography that is optimized for screens. Isn’t it amazing, what’s feasible when paper and ink are excluded from the publishing process!

The text of a transcription cannot stand alone. It has to be annotated, as you would expect; otherwise the meaning of words written in haste a hundred years ago would be elusive, to say the least. But “text” in my transcriptions does not manifest in ink. It’s hypertext that manifests in light, making each item of correspondence a container for keywords that are pregnant with context, inferences, implications, and capable of generating fresh meaning. Hypertext itself is “responsive to inquiry” as no printed page or author or editor ever was or can be. It turns Moore’s letters into an interactive system, rather than a cabinet of curiosities or the hobbyhorse of experts.

Ergo: The whole of Correspondence is greater than the sum of its parts!

Here on the threshold of engineering the dynamic system, my immediate next steps are clear:
- Scan my three-decker PhD dissertation with nearly 1000 transcribed letters. The dissertation was typed in 1979. No digital copy exists, to my knowledge. I’ll make one.
- Scan thousands more transcribed letters written after the cutoff date of my dissertation. I typed these in the 1980s from images I made of the manuscripts. Microfilm. Microfiche. Photocopy.
- Key in some number of manuscripts (hundreds? thousands?) that I imaged way back when but never got around to transcribing. Every one is documented on a handwritten notecard. The old fashioned way.
These steps will make letters of George Moore machine readable, intelligible and ready for 21st Century editorial treatment (the topic of a different post). Altogether this is an incredibly exciting prospect that’s been a very long time coming into view.

* For a peek at this debate, see my paper on “Challenges in Editing Modern Literary Correspondence” in TEXT: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship (New York: AMS Press, 1981), pp. 257-270.

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Category: Correspondence

Where Angels Fear to Tread

Roundup of Outliers

Can’t Go Yet

Where Angels Fear to Tread

Ireland Redux

Confessions of an Irishman

Agon of the Agora

Responsive Web Pages

Letters 1863-1901

One Voice

Westport House

LitCrit

Avowals

One Voice

Relevance

Letters to the Editor

Get Involved

Set Them Free

Iconography

Fair use

Aesthetics

Bibliography

Worlds

Participatory Publishing

Pedagogical Dilemma

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Belles-Lettres

The Price Is Right

Manet/Degas

Collecting Letters