Symbolic self-portrait of Bob Becker? This is an uncaptioned, uncredited illustration in Where to Surf the Biggest Waves in the World(American Oceans).
I’ve worked continuously on George Moore Interactive for the past two years. Well, almost!
I deliberately took my foot off the pedal in November in order to forge ahead on Resurgam where I am Executive Director, Chief Cook and Bottle Washer. I thought I could fulfill my lagging responsibilities to Resurgam in just four uninterrupted weeks, but I was wrong. Six weeks later, I still haven’t closed the gap though it’s smaller now. I need another six.
ResurgamNFP.org has been majorly overhauled. I won’t go into details here, but I did in a recent newsletter named Wisdom featuring a birdbrain. If you can spare the time, have a look at that and do what it says at the end (if you want to be exceptionally nice). Resurgam is the not-for-profit that fundraises for George Moore Interactive and other projects that save the humanities.
You may not have known that the humanities needed saving, and if that’s the case I’m afraid you too haven’t been keeping up. The humanities are dying. GMi is one of the first-responders, probably not the most effective or capable, but nonetheless determined to do what it can to restore the patient to functional health.
Why are the humanities like a dying patient? That question is too lofty for me. I need to chop it into more tangible, experiential, addressable questions, such as:
Why are pupils no longer reading books?
Why are working people not reading much of anything?
Why are educators not slowing the decline of literacy?
Why do scholars exist in a self-serving bubble?
Why are many poems and novels totally inscrutable?
Why is the Fourth Estate going extinct?
Why won’t septuagenarian rockers leave the big stage?
Why are movie theaters struggling to stay open?
Why do publishers fawn over hackneyed bestsellers?
Why do studios fetishize dimwitted blockbusters?
I could go on, but you get the idea, maybe. My questions also raise the specter of cultural illiteracy (my list referred to the language kind). I watch the vulgar and stupid rise, the gifted go into professional exile, the salt of the earth get sprinkled on gold-flaked avocado toast. The humanities are dying because we humans are letting go of them!
So bring on the machines! Machines to the rescue! As I reflected on the journey so far of George Moore Interactive, I decided that the image at the top of this post pretty well captures my feelings about it.
There I am (figuratively speaking) perched on a ten-foot board, just in front a speeding, potentially crushing, monumental cascade of falling water. I see that wave as generative artificial intelligence (figuratively speaking). I am racing to shore before the water can smash me into the sandy floor, as if it wants to.
But it doesn’t want to. Instead the wave is turbocharging my job, providing the height and slope and motion that move me onward without making me paddle or do anything, really, except stay focused, balanced and pointed in the right direction. The wave of generative AI is frightfully powerful and dangerous, imposing awesome risk and responsibility, but it is essentially a blessing, not a curse
I felt this over and over again during my work on Resurgam. I spent hours in conversation with the chatbot. It never told me what to do. Instead it clarified my goals and explained optional ways to fulfill them.
It was usually spot on, but sometimes it told me things that seemed implausible or incorrect. Every time that happened, I followed with more Q&A in which the subject of conversation was scrutinized, reframed, compared and finally resolved to the satisfaction of me and the chatbot.
Because the chatbot was scrupulously judgmental about its answers as well as my questions. It had this delightfully nonhuman trait of admitting it made a mistake and trying again, without shame. At times after long stretches of Q&A, I wanted to apologize for boring the chatbot’s insanely well-informed neural network. When I did literally apologize, it thanked me for persistence and admitted pride in our collaborative results.
This is how I do my think-work now, with a chatbot that knows me and remembers what we’ve talked about, and is ready for anything I toss against the wall between us. And this, IMHO, is how that dying patient of the humanities will likely be restored to functional health.
In the case of GMi, for example, a chatbot that has learned much that George Moore knew, and also knows much that was going on around him, that views reality from George’s privileged but narrow perspective: GMi’s custom chatbot will converse 1:1 with readers, students, educators, artists and anybody else who calls.
What occurs in a call will be as unlike a monologic lecture or dialogic seminar as it is possible for me to imagine, because I don’t have to imagine it. I am enjoying it every day as I work on GMi and on Resurgam. The chatbot has the power to throw open doors of perception. It empowers me and others like me to walk through to the other side.
And what lies on the other side? In a word: the humanities. Literature, art, and music brought back to the life they once lived and want to live again: spontaneously talking with people in their own language, helping them understand and feel what a creative genius did in years past, helping them glimpse how a creative genius would understand things, not just of antiquity, but of today’s reality.
For example, I want to ask George Moore, who died in 1933, what he thinks of Thomas Pynchon, whose first novel came out 30 years later. The Pynchon door has remained closed to my impatient, sardonic mind. I want the help of someone I trust to open it.
I have learned to trust the chatbot. Bring on the machines! 🤖
Next Up
Eight weeks with my head down on Resurgam conclude in December. I’ll have more to do in 2026 along with, rather than instead of, George Moore Interactive. Hold on George, I’m coming back!
I will add the second part of his duology, Sister Teresa (1901) to the GMi digital bookshelf. I will also transcribe, edit, annotate and publish George’s letters of 1899.
He was in his late 40s when he wrote those letters and that novel. In his prime, you could say, except his prime was still to come.
At the turn of the century he was feeling the way I feel now when I view the spectacle of moral turpitude in Washington. He was disgusted by corruption and hypocrisy in imperial London. He soon decided he’d seen enough and left for his native Ireland.
Separation (1896), oil on canvas by Edvard Munch in the Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway (Wikimedia Commons). This unnerving picture was finished the year after George Moore published the bleak stories of Celibates (1895), a book that extended and put some finishing touches on morbid fancies he anatomized in the 1880s. George’s stewing pessimism later resonated with the gloomy dreamscape in Edvard ’s “The Frieze of Life” (of which Separation was part). Both Norwegian artist and Irish novelist embodied tragic themes of love and loss in their work. Is Edvard ’s female figure, as she faced an ominously dark sea, the departing soul of the crazed Kitty Hare? Is she the panicked Agnes Lahens fleeing to a convent shelter after her gross brush with worldliness? Or is she the disconsolate shell of Mildred Lawson, gravitating back to her sterile home in England sans virtue, vocation, and fortune? All three characters and their male counterparts seem to live in Munch‘s picture, though the artist and novelist did not know each other. Still, they observed life from likewise dreary perspectives, wrestled with insoluble problems. and anguished over tensions that fragmented the human condition during the Fin de Siècle.
GMi Worlds and Letters have been on two tracks of development, running parallel from month to month but nowise in sync. These tracks are about to intersect, albeit briefly, before resuming their separate ways.
My curation of Celibates this month brings the digital archive of George’s world-building up to 1895. There are still a few gaps to be filled, but after Celibates George Moore kept mostly out of sight as a world-builder until 1898, when he published Evelyn Innes.
Coincidentally this month, with my curation of George’s correspondence of 1897, my digital letters archive is poised to expand into 1898. Our world-builder and letter-writer are going to converge in October!
I’m not promising revelations from the convergence, since the letter-writer rarely aired the creative process and unresolved concerns of the world-builder. His letters tell us where he was, what he was doing, whom he was with on a given day, but they don’t reveal many particulars of his literary inspiration, research and composition.
I infer from this reticence that the man of the world who wrote letters and the author who wrote novels were two different beings in the same body; Jekyll and Hyde, so to speak. That’s somewhat paradoxical, because the novelist mined his real-world experience for character and plot, all the time!
Much as George expropriated his activities, relationships, and domiciles for use in his fiction, he generally didn’t share details about his writing in letters to his social network. For the most part, he let his creative writing speak for itself.
That may be why family and friends were surprised to find themselves turned into literature. At least in his letters, George didn’t tell his models what to expect in his books and evidently preferred to ask forgiveness rather than permission for his treatment of them.
The Kind of Person
What kind of person was George Moore? I’m not asking about his biography, but the man himself.
As far as I’m aware, this question has not been answered convincingly. We have memoirs of George by those who met him, and researched accounts by those who didn’t. All have this in common: latent subjectivity.
Under a mask of objectivity, they reveal as much about the observers as the person observed. They replace a human being who lived once upon a time with an artifact that didn’t.
Take for example the substantial biographies of George Moore by Joseph Hone and Adrian Frazier, published about sixty years apart. What readers found between the covers were two artifacts rather than a singular person: two scorecards that allow readers to check the conventional boxes of narrative portraiture.
But they didn’t find the vital subject, the man himself.
This is not surprising. There is no “definitive” biography of George Moore (or any great writer); and I doubt there ever will or should be. When it comes to literature and art, the word “definitive” is nonsensical in any case.
All we really have in these and similar biographies are portraits of the artist from points of view that were brought to bear, rather than sprung from the subject itself.
This is obvious in the Iconography of George Moore and uncontroversial. The painters and photographers who rendered George actually produced many different and dissimilar images. Each was self-expressive, none was definitive; nor would anybody want or expect them to be. The absence of certainty and uniformity in the visual portraiture is a strong indication of the subject’s complex and elusive humanity.
With all due respect for “complex and elusive humanity,” to me the question about what kind of person remains crucial. If we somehow get and make use of an answer, it might further activate our understanding and appreciation of George’s phenomenal literary legacy.
It might free his legacy from stodgy and hackneyed opinions that pin him to stultifying intellectual boulders or float him over our heads like a pedagogical piñata.
Because — let’s face this fact together and tediously say it again — George Moore has been underserved by caretakers of his legacy (including me).
His creative achievements are today mostly ignored, his contributions are explained away, his books and articles are generally unread except by curious garbage pickers. The once-vibrant voice of the grand old man is now unheard or marginalized to a fraction of its historic scope and worth.
And that has been true for more than 50 years, at least since the time I started paying attention.
Given George’s seemingly irrevocable obscurity, why did I start GMi (now summing up to nearly 2,000 web pages and rapidly growing)?
As I may have said before, I didn’t do it to shore up the author’s flagging reputation or free him from critical trammels. Those things really don’t matter to me.
I did it, specifically, to empower George to do all of that (and more) for himself!
In his own words and voice (not mine or others), to rejoin conversations that he left many years ago and which continued without him; and to participate in fresh conversations that are just getting started.
Not to ventriloquize George with my picayune theories and discoveries, but to empower him to speak for himself about himself.
That’s a revolutionary agenda with benefits that could spread across the humanities with the aid of advanced technology. Just imagine for any author or artist:
To empower [fill in the blank] to speak for themselves about themselves
Get it? Empowering George Moore is not a destination; its the first leg of an epic curatorial journey.
What Kind of Person?
This brings me back to my initial question, “what kind of person?” The enabling technology of empowerment I mentioned is simulation.
A high-fidelity simulation of George, grounded in GMi, may help to restore his voice and agency. It may wipe the blackboard clean, so to speak, and send Pooh-Bahs packing when the author himself gets his turns to speak.
After all, wouldn’t you rather listen to a fabulous author talking about his life and work than somebody who never even met him? Good, I’m glad we agree about that.
But to simulate George, I’ll need to do more than “check the conventional boxes.” I’ll need to ascertain “the kind of person” he was in real life and will now become in a second life.
That will involve identifying or approximating his personality quirks, body language and facial expressions, the sound of his voice and movement of his hands as he spoke, his eyes when he looked intently into another’s or looked away when his patience famously expired.
Real people pay very close attention to details like these when they’re with somebody and present in the moment. Ironically or necessarily, such quirks and foibles are largely missing from scholarly accounts of historic figures. As if they don’t matter, but they more than matter; they’re crucial.
I have hypothesized that George’s quotidian language and ideas may be reliably inferred from his literature. Why? Because as a writer, he was always self-expressive.
He modulated his prose in a spoken idiom, presumably his own. I speculate that the style of his written language was also the way he talked. I can think of no other explanation for his remarkably fluid prose and penchant for dialogue.
Because George wrote as he spoke, his memoirs seamlessly crossed the line into worldbuilding; his fiction crossed the line into recollection. He was not undisciplined or egotistical, far from it. He was integrative.
I think it will be possible to abstract a high-fidelity simulation of his conversational syntax, cadence, vocabulary and rhetorical finesse from his literary legacy. After the legacy is fully curated, with the help of machine learning and large language models.
His reanimated self in GMi should be able to say pretty much what the living George would have said a hundred years ago, even when discussing subjects that are new to him. And say it in a lifelike manner.
Outlandish? Of course. Technically feasible? You bet. Certain to succeed? Not even close. Worth trying? God yes!
Don’t Touch Me
Writing last month about Celibates: “I vaguely recall that doleful collection of stories as a throwback or piece of unfinished business, a collection of ideas that escaped the wastebasket. But was it?”
Now that I’ve reread the book, I’m sure it is not what I misremembered! You can decide for yourself. The text is live on GMi as an archive of Google Docs, an ebook, and a portfolio of four PDFs that you may upload to AI apps for guided analysis and interpretation.
I have elsewhere written that naming was not a core strength of George Moore, and Celibates was no exception. I won’t speculate how many readers in 1895 would enthusiastically reach for a new book under that title, but probably not many. The implicit subject matter lies somewhere between mundane and repellent!
However that’s not why I object to the title. Instead it’s because the title doesn’t really intimate the subject of the book.
Consider the dictionary definition of a celibate (the noun):
a person who abstains from marriage and sexual relations
Though details were not explicit, Mildred Lawson seems to have had sexual relations with one or two men before accepting the marriage proposal of a third.
Kitty Hare had no objections to sexual relations and accepted the marriage proposal of John Norton. On the other hand, John Norton identified with Peter Abelard (page 451), hardly a paragon of celibacy.
Agnes Lahens was only sixteen years old when she left her parents’s home for a convent, but not to avoid sexual relations or marriage. She was too immature for both.
If Celibates was not really about celibacy per se, then what was its subject?
For Mildred Lawson, the likely answer is this:
For her chastity was her one safeguard, if she were to lose that, she had always felt, and never more strongly than after the Barbizon episode, that there would be no safety for her. She knew that her safety lay in her chastity, others might do without chastity, and come out all right in the end, but she could not: an instinct told her so. (page 247)
Chastity is not a synonym of celibacy. Turning again to the dictionary for help, I find that chastity is:
the state or practice of refraining from extramarital, or especially from all, sexual intercourse
As I understand the word, chastity does not preclude sexual relations and marriage, it merely shelters them in a protective moral shield.
Mildred’s chastity was not a vow of celibacy but a lifestyle choice that ensured her autonomy and agency. She needed independence and freedom; she needed “self-realisation” (page 279); her aversion to sexual relations and marriage was triggered by men who threatened rather than reinforced her legitimate needs.
Kitty Hare was a virgin until her rape, and violence destroyed her, but I don’t think she was crazed by the loss of her virginity per se. Labeling Kitty as a celibate would be a misreading of her character.
Kitty’s fiancée John Norton was the titular celibate in the story, except that egomaniac might be a better description of him. “He was as unfitted to the priesthood as he was for marriage”; neither celibate nor chaste, but a sort of obsessive-compulsive wanker.
As already mentioned, the adolescent Agnes Lahens was not old or self-conscious enough to opt for celibacy. She did not rush back to the convent to preserve her virginity, but to escape the vulgar claptrap of her disgusting parents.
True, she did not like the role of debutante in a first season, but that wasn’t the issue. The issue was her mother trying to pair her with creepy older men with money.
If Not Celibates?
So what was the real subject of Celibates and what might have been a better title?
The subject, I would say, was personhood: the challenges faced by people, especially young women wanting to be themselves in a male-dominated society that has other ideas for them.
I could elaborate, but so can you if you read and ponder the stories from your own perspective. Or ask AI to help.
And a better title? Don’t Touch Me seems more fitting than Celibates. The book is really about why that phrase is spoken by practically every young woman who assumes she will be respected and reinforced as she grows, until she isn’t.
That Question Again
I want to return for a moment to my earlier question: what does Celibates say about the “kind of person” George was?
I think he was one who didn’t think carefully or strategically about the titles of his books. And also one who thought very deeply about their meaning and consequences.
A pretty cool person, to be sure.
Next Up
By now it goes almost without saying that George Moore’s letters of 1898 are going on the workbench in October, along with his novel Evelyn Innes (1898).
George was in middle age, secure in his reputation, at the end of a massive effort to write a novel that seemed beyond his artistic reach and the ability of readers to fathom. We’ll see how that turned out out.
I haven’t forgotten my promise to curate the first edition of A Modern Lover (1883) for GMi, but I don’t own a copy to scan. Every copy that has come up for sale while I was watching was purchased for a relatively insane amount of money, not by me.
However a sympathetic collector is having his copy scanned for GMi, and the results should arrive soon. This will be the first time that the first edition of A Modern Lover has been digitized.
Racehorses: Training (1894), pastel on paper by Edgar Degas in the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain (Wikimedia Commons). The impressionist artist finished this landscape with racehorses around the time that his friend George Moore, after years of research and writing, published the celebrated Esther Waters (1894). There is no known connection between the picture and novel, but it looks as though Edgar visited Woodview, in the environs of Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex in order to paint the Barfield stable in the weeks before the Chesterfield Cup. “At the end of the coombe, under the shaws, stood the old red-tiled farmhouse in which Mrs. Barfield had been born. Beyond it, downlands rolled on and on reaching half-way up the northern sky.” — Esther Waters (1894, page 372). Is Silver Braid one of those mounts? Is the Demon one of those elfin riders?
In last month’s newsletter, I promised to post a clean PDF of every book by George Moore published by GMi. My PDFs may facilitate the uploading of books to a generative AI application for guided analysis and interpretation.
While keeping that promise, I had to make a new Apple Book of Martin Luther (1879); what had been the last Kindle edition remaining in the GMi Shop; also the only ebook with a price higher than zero.
When I revisited my transcription of Martin Luther to make an epub, I decided this time to strip out the byzantine page layout and typography of the printed original that made it hard to use. The new ebook is now more readable by humans and machines, and the price of course is zero. Yay! (Google Docs of Martin Luther are unchanged.)
Every book transcribed so far for the Aesthetics pillar and Worlds pillar of GMi now has a downloadable PDF on its menu page. Every new book that is added to the site gets the same treatment, starting today with Esther Waters.
I am recommending Google’s Notebook LM as a superb AI research assistant, but you can use the PDFs with any AI application you like. You have options, but please don’t stubbornly resist the call of AI!
Generative AI is scary-good. It’s the fast-approaching future of textual analysis and literary criticism, not to mention pedagogy in the humanities. And there is no better way to use AI than as a very smart crowbar on the literary treasure chest of George Moore.
Revving the Search Engine
This section of the newsletter is about the mechanics of GMi — a subject of interest to practically nobody other than me. Still, it’s important and leading to a minor breakthrough. At a minimum, Bob Becker is excited!
Before I rev, please note the definitions of two keywords: page and document. The former in this context means a WordPress webpage. The latter means a Google Doc. That is what page and document mean every time I utter them.
NB. WordPress is a brand shared by WordPress.org and WordPress.com. GMi subscribes to .com’s proprietary, feature-rich authoring apps and hosting services; .com licenses .org’s open-source content-management system.
When you type georgemooreinteractive.org in a browser, WordPress.com servers sling the GMi website to your desktop or handheld device (they know the difference). I made and continue making the website with WordPress.com software.
Most GMi pages are dichotomic, meaning they’re dynamically comprised of two discrete parts:
Part One is white text and colorful imagery on a black background. This is the page.
Part Two is black text on a white background. This is a document that is separately published to the web and embedded in the page.
Embedded means that the page, as it opens, calls the document from a remote server — so fast that you can’t see it happen. The page and document pop to your screen from different servers, even from different parts of the world, like a magic rabbit pulled from a hat.
Both page and document display text. That said, you might ask: why not just put all the text in the page and omit the document?
Good question!
The simple reason is that text in documents is easier to edit and manage than text in pages. Moreover lengthy text in documents makes the GMi website lighter, faster, and nimbler as it grows larger and more complex. The design of GMi content is “object-oriented.”
A lighter, faster, nimbler website is great for visitors who know what they’re looking for. They use menus to find data; it comes quickly to their screens.
But menus only list topics that are relatively abstract. Many visitors can’t find what they want using menus, or they can but it takes too long. Instead of menus, they would prefer to use keyword search to find what they need.
There is already a WordPress search bar in the footer of every GMi page for just that reason. Seems reassuring, but it isn’t. Keywords entered there are found in pages, but not in documents.
Why? Because WordPress search reads only words in pages; it can’t read words in documents. You and I can; it can’t.
Up to now, the only way to search documents on GMi has been to open a page and use the search or find option of the browser. That option can read the document displaying on the screen. However it can’t read the documents elsewhere on the website.
If you follow this convoluted explanation, you may see the problem. What’s lacking at present is the ability to perform keyword search on all pages and documents published by GMi: millions of words, instantly, all at the same time, from anywhere on the website.
I didn’t know how to fill that gap. WordPress advisors didn’t know how to do it. Consultants I asked didn’t know how to do it. But ChatGPT figured it out in a few seconds.
The solution (efficient, but still to be implemented and tested) is a Google Programmable Search Engine (PSE).
I must create a PSE that can read Google Drive folders where the documents are saved and published to the web. I add more documents to this Drive almost every day, and that’s okay: the PSE keeps up with changes.
So far so good, but because there is valuable information in pages as well as documents, I must configure the PSE to read pages too. Ergo every word that George Moore wrote and every word that I have written about George gets indexed by the PSE!
When this is done, the last step will be to place a new search bar in the footer of the GMi website, always there for visitors when it’s needed.
That, my friends, is what I call revving the search engine. Not only will it make a literary legacy more accessible and usable, it will also add a quantum leap in interactivity to the simulation of George Moore that is already on the horizon and heading our way.
Call the Midwife?
Nearly a century after George Moore wrote his brilliant autobiographical trilogy, an English nurse named Jennifer Worth wrote one of her own.
George’s was named Hail and Farewell! in three volumes: Ave (1911), Salve (1912), and Vale (1914). You’ll find them all on GMi (plus PDFs to share with your AI study-buddy).
Jennifer’s was named Call the Midwife in three volumes: Call the Midwife (2002), Shadows of the Workhouse (2005) and Farewell to The East End (2009).
Though Jennifer never mentioned George (to my knowledge), her trilogy had much in common with his novel Esther Waters (1894). In their books, both authors were inspired, with indignation and empathy, by “how the other half lives.” Both acknowledged, candidly described and honored the struggles of women in a society that objectified and mostly took women for granted.
And of course, both authors were awestruck by the moral and aesthetic paradigm of mother and child. If she had read Esther Waters, Jennifer would surely have endorsed what George wrote about his protagonist:
Hers is an heroic adventure if one considers it: a mother’s fight for the life of her child against all the forces that civilisation arrays against the lowly and the illegitimate. She is in a situation to-day, but on what security does she hold it? She is strangely dependent on her own health, and still more upon the fortunes and the personal caprice of her employers. Esther realised the perils of her life very acutely; she trembled when an outcast mother at the corner of a street stretched out of her rags a brown hand and arm, asking alms for the sake of the little children. Three months out of a situation, and she too would be on the street as flower-seller, match-seller, or — (Esther Waters, 1894, page 163)
As a flower-seller, yes. but not one like Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913). Esther was a creative force, not a man’s creation. “I should ’ave liked quite a different kind of life, but we don’t choose our lives, we just makes the best of them” (page 294).
Unfortunately Esther couldn’t be dolled up by an egomaniacal professor to live happily ever after. In life, as her author understood it, no one ever is.
On Television
Every year since 2012, a series on television based on Jennifer’s memoirs has been broadcast in the UK and the USA. I’m a fan; I have watched it from the beginning and want it to continue forever, God willing.
Just prior to Call the Midwife, its producer Heidi Thomas revived Upstairs, Downstairs, a hugely successful television series of the 1970s. Upstairs, Downstairs is another analog of Esther Waters, likewise set in London just a few years later and focused on the servant class (or caste). You can stream the original and the reboot (I did).
It’s too bad that Heidi didn’t consider Esther as her next project. Maybe there’s still time?
Actual to Plan
I promised last month to transcribe A Modern Lover (1883) for GMi, but printed book scanning at UDelaware is taking a while. Rather than sit around twiddling my thumbs, I shifted to Esther Waters: it is now available on GMi in various formats.
Esther Waters was many things, among them a fresh beginning for its hard-working but frustrated author. The story once again took place in Sussex and London, but gone were several unpleasant characters that George had reprised since his career as a novelist began with A Modern Lover.
Gone too was the short sprint. Esther Waters had 142,000 words in 49 chapters. It was George’s largest project since A Mummer’s Wife (1885) with 174,000 words in 30 chapters.
Esther Waters is far too rich in meaning and drama to be summarized here. In my opinion, it’s a masterpiece and magnum opus. I must only mention the striking minor character of Sarah Tucker, whom I forgot until revisiting the novel and now keep thinking about.
Sarah is a decadent counterpoint to Esther, almost the subject of a different story that George didn’t write. Sarah is perhaps truer to life than Esther is; she may be our dour and pessimistic author’s reminder that hardship and sacrifice don’t necessarily, or even usually, lead to redemption.
After Esther
Esther’s illegitimate son Jackie was mostly raised by Mrs. Lewis, a foster parent who lived at 13 Poplar Road, Dulwich. I mention that here because George’s next big project, a duology he took several years to write, featured a heroine who also called Dulwich home.
As age and solitude overtake us, the realities of life float away and we become more and more sensible to the mystery which surrounds us. And our Lord Jesus Christ gave us love and prayer so that we might see a little further. (Esther Waters, 1894, page 369)
So said the devout Mrs. Barfield to her worldly son. So may Evelyn Innes say in George’s new story about to be written.
In the afterglow of success and celebrity with Esther Waters (1894) and after taking care of unfinished business with Celibates (1895), in 1896 George pivoted to full-time research and development of his ambitious duology Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901).
He was no longer a writer of realistic or psychological fiction (his brand) or a columnist in the London press (his job). Instead he self-consciously became (truly what he always was): a dreamer. He threw himself wholly into spiritual, ethereal and symbolist themes.
His immersion in Wagnerism catalyzed the pivot, and his excitement about the revival of ancient music cemented it. He became more mindful than ever of intangible, invisible, nonverbal powers that spring from and act upon human nature.
He could feel Yeats coming around the corner!
His pivot also offered an escape hatch from fin de siècle decadence and growing feelings of revulsion from materialism (feelings that triggered his repatriation to Ireland at the turn of the century).
On a less lofty level, the pivot satisfied the needs (according to me) of our inveterate contrarian to avoid doing the logical, expected, normal, agreeable, self-aggrandizing thing. Rebel-producer George always enjoyed finding ways to break things and remake them with a difference.
According to me, 1896 was also the year his daughter Nancy Cunard was born. Her birth isn’t mentioned (at all) in the letters. His affair with her mother was a carefully guarded secret, but an acknowledged fact nonetheless. We can only infer what Nancy meant to him from his future devotion to her, and perhaps from the loving testament to parenting he wove into Esther Waters.
Letter to Tolstoy
A gratifying achievement among the letters of 1896 is the inclusion of George Moore’s only letter to Leo Tolstoy.
I learned about it 45 years ago but hadn’t seen it until yesterday when the Leo Tolstoy State Museum (Moscow) sent me photographs. They also sent a revealing letter to George that he was honored to receive and proud to share with the great Russian novelist. Both letters are here.
George’s well-known first love of Balzac was certainly not his last. He was a huge fan of Tolstoy and Turgenev, and Dostoevsky to a degree. The Russian masters provided a roadmap away from French naturalism towards his emerging ideal of symbols and spirit.
Next Up
Having just renewed my acquaintance with the spinster Miss Rice in Esther Waters, I’m now looking forward to meeting her kith in Celibates (1895). I vaguely recall that doleful collection of stories as a throwback or piece of unfinished business, a collection of ideas that escaped the wastebasket.
But was it? Best way to find out is to put it up on GMi, and help my human and machine readers form their own opinions.
I have also got the letters of 1897 on the workbench. I can’t promise anything as surprising as a letter to Tolstoy, but we are not about picking and choosing the tastiest morsels at the banquet. Let’s enjoy it all!
Ophelia (1890), oil on canvas by Jules Lefebvre (Wikimedia Commons). Jules was an instructor at Académie Julian in Paris when George Moore studied there; afterwards he surfaced in George’s art criticism and memoirs. He painted Ophelia around the time George wrote his seventh novel, Vain Fortune (1891). Picture and story exude similar morbid sensuality. Though she was not mentioned by the theater-obsessed author of Vain Fortune, Shakespeare’s Ophelia evidently inspired his construction of the deranged Emily Watson: one of three main characters doomed to striving after wind. Like Ophelia in Hamlet and Kitty Hare in A Mere Accident (1887), Emily was a beautiful girl driven mad by circumstances beyond her control.
One of the (many) nice things about publishing digitally is that new data (such as more letters) may be added instantly, at any time, and not have to wait on the vagaries of print publication.
Moreover stakeholders such as scholars and collectors, who may have fresh data, now have a digital place to put them. That’s not the old-school way of doing things. It’s a better way!
Based on a glance at the bibliographic record,1895 looks like a quiet interval for George Moore. He was basking in the critical and commercial glow of Esther Waters (1894). He had correctly predicted that novel would be his masterpiece while writing it, though it followed a long line of “not-quite” projects.
From a scholarly perspective it looks like George by 1895 was comfortably settled in his new reputation of distinguished man of letters. The contrarian rebel-producer finally got a seat in Parnassus! He published only one new book in 1895, the precious Celibates, and that was partially a redo of an earlier novel.
But the real action in 1895 was genetic rather than literary. The love affair George had started in 1893 with Maud Alice Burke, when she was 21 and he was 41, blossomed into heady adultery in April 1895, after she agreed to a loveless marriage with the improvident and financially stretched Sir Bache Cunard, 3rd Baronet. The letters show that George and Maud were enjoying sexual relations around the time their daughter, Nancy Cunard, was conceived in June 1895.
The question of George’s paternity has remained open over the years. He claimed in the 1920s that he was Nancy’s biological father; Nancy denied it in the 1950s; Maud was ambivalent; Bache was a passive cuckold, happy to have his young wife’s money, if not her loyalty, in a marriage of convenience.
Since there is no possibility of genetic testing of descendants, we shall have to believe what we choose to believe. IMHO, George Moore was, without a doubt, Nancy Cunard’s father.
Pesky Essays
At the request of Resurgam directors, last month I submitted nine “fundable” GMi projects for consideration. By fundable I mean theoretically worthy of investment by virtue of intrinsic and extrinsic values. The board recently met to discuss and choose the first project to develop.
That project is the same as one I targeted with a lame Gofundme Campaign: acquire 83 essays of George Moore uniquely stored at the British Library for the Aesthetics pillar of GMi. My Gofundme Campaign didn’t raise nearly enough money for this. Time to try again.
Once those 83 outlier essays are rounded up, digitized, edited and published, all of George Moore’s art and literary criticism will be restored to his living legacy and freely accessible to everybody who wants to read it (including machine learners).
I’m talking here about ±600 essays averaging 2,000 words apiece: around 1,200,000 words altogether. That is a huge slice of George’s output that we are restoring in the digital age, as we never could before.
The next question (of several) to decide: will I myself travel to London to curate the 83 outliers in the Reading Room of the British Library? Or will Resurgam recruit a contract laborer who lives in London to curate the outliers on my behalf? The first option incurs travel expenses but no labor costs. The second option incurs labor costs but no travel expenses.
I’ll let you know in August what we decide. Meanwhile, if you’d like to make a tax-deductible donation to the project, or provide contract labor in London, contact Resurgam with your offer.
Striving After Wind
“I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” — Ecclesiastes 1:14 (ESV)
Much of George Moore’s autofiction of the 1880s is now live on GMi. That said, his comédie humaine stretched well beyond Mike Fletcher (1889) into his next novel Vain Fortune (1891), the novel after that Esther Waters (1894), and his collection of stories Celibates (1895).
He didn’t stop there, of course. His duology Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901), which he began writing in mid-1894, was also autofiction, but I vaguely recall that his characters and settings were all new.
(Not sure about that because it’s years since I read the duology. I’ll confirm after GMi publishes both titles later this year.)
Like the novels and memoirs that preceded it, Vain Fortune was the vision of a contrarian rebel-producer on the fringe. The novel is difficult to summarize briefly because it tells a bifurcated story, consisting of two parts that have little to do with each other.
Part the First
The first part is largely set in the Fitzrovia (Bloomsbury) neighborhood of London. The main protagonist is a middle-aged writer named Hubert Price: a clever but marginal playwright who strives to become the English Ibsen.
Hubert writes serious plays for a groundbreaking literary theater that doesn’t exist except in his imagination. There was no such a theater in London at the time. The closest Hubert got to one was a gratuitous production by actor-manager Montague Ford at the Queen’s Theatre in the West End.
Early readers of Vain Fortune would have recognized Montague Ford as a simulacrum of Herbert Beerbohm Tree, a prominent actor-manager at the Haymarket Theatre. From time to time, George Moore tried to interest Tree in his writing and ideas.
Hubert was a simulacrum of George Moore himself — at least the very large part of George’s ego that wanted to write plays.
George’s pretensions to a literary theater started long before Vain Fortune. They dated all the way back to his composition of Martin Luther (1879), which he tried (unsuccessfully) to have performed in London.
A bit later in his career, A Mummer’s Wife (1885) was not about literary theater per se, but nonetheless it was literature about theater. Still in the zone!
More recently George’s pretensions had taken the form of advocacy. He promoted André Antoine’s Théâtre Libre in Paris and co-founded J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre in London.
A few years hence, he would also get sucked into the Irish Literary Theatre (predecessor of the Abbey) as a co-founder with W.B. Yeats and Edward Martyn.
Though George was a skilled and moderately successful novelist and essayist, he persistently (and futilely) sought to expand his range as a playwright too. Why did he bother?
On a philosophical level, like Hubert in Vain Fortune, he wanted to reform commercial theater in London, endowing it with artistic and educational affordances. On a practical level, also like Hubert, he simply wanted to write really good plays that would fill seats and make some money.
Neither ambition was fulfilled, though this “striving after wind” was noble and culturally beneficial.
I don’t understand why George Moore the novelist and essayist wanted so badly to be a dramatist as well, but a study of Hubert Price in the first part of Vain Fortune would probably help to explain.
Hubert’s philosophy, his writing techniques, his relations with theater people, his excellent dramatic ideas that somehow failed to materialize in a script, his views of the acting profession and tastes of the public — all of this fiction reads to me like an actual conversation with George Moore as he strived for his own just-out-of-reach breakthrough dramaturgy.
For a time he thought he achieved a breakthrough with his play The Strike at Arlingford (staged in February 1893 but developed as he wrote Vain Fortune). He was disappointed, not by critical reviews, which were positive, but by his own scruples.
Part the Second
Midway through Vain Fortune the storyteller pivoted. Hubert the impoverished genius inherited the “fortune” of the novel’s title. He moved to his inherited property of Ashwood Park in Sussex, where the “vain” of the title would be worked out.
Ashwood Park is a simulacrum of Buckingham House, the beloved home of the Bridger family near Shoreham-by-Sea. We’ve been there before, under different names in previous novels, and we’ll return again in Esther Waters (1894) where it will be named Woodview.
Ashwood Park (and its other incarnations) was an idyllic country house and farm, spun into a venue for twisted ambition, quiet suffering, unrequited love, and meaningless death. Weirdness in a pastural setting!
By the way, my colleague Michael O’Shea recently visited the ruins of Buckingham House and shared his photos on GMi. Its dilapidated condition is even worse than Moore Hall, but nonetheless holy ground for readers of George. You can view some of Michael’s pictures here.
The second part of Vain Fortune is practically a different story from the first; the two are barely related, a fact the author recognized during the book’s initial publication and hastened to correct.
Vain Fortune thus became the first project in which George Moore obsessively revised his text on the proof sheets and between successive editions. From 1891 onwards, he behaved somewhat like a manic nitpicker: a potter who couldn’t bring himself to remove his formed clay from the wheel but needed to keep improving it.
Female Trouble
There is much fine writing and thematic development at Ashwood Park. The most curious and meaningful part of the novel, according to George himself, was a basket case named Emily Watson.
She is an extreme striver after wind, an Ophelia-like victim whose mental illness is ever present though ambiguous and just a bit out of focus.
Beautiful, desirable, intelligent, intensely sensitive, young and innocent, lacking agency, irritating, demanding, vulnerable, resentful of the male gaze: Emily is the real subject of the novel, one that the author backed into, not realizing her importance until most of the book was already written.
She is the quiet counterpoint to Rose Massey of the first part, as though George had two stories about young women to tell and didn’t know where to begin.
The more profound story in the second part of the novel is about Emily Watson and also her older companion Julia Bentley. We get an inkling of the problem in Julia’s confession:
My life has been essentially a woman’s life, — suppression of self and monotonous duty, varied by heart-breaking misfortune … You think you know the meaning of poverty: you may; but you do not know what a young woman who wants to earn her bread honestly has to put up with, trudging through wet and cold, mile after mile, to give a lesson, paid for at the rate of one-and-sixpence or two shillings an hour. — Vain Fortune (pages 287-288)
This depressing revelation will linger in George Moore’s imagination and get resolved, less pessimistically, in Esther Waters.
For now though, all is vanity. As in the fiction that preceded it, there is no happy ending in Vain Fortune, only an unsatisfying consolation:
“Hubert!” It was Julia calling him. Pale and overworn, but in all her woman’s beauty, she came, offering herself as compensation for the burden of life. — Vain Fortune (page 296)
Should you decide to read the first edition of Vain Fortune on GMi, remember that the book underwent significant revisions as soon as it was published (actually, even before).
Read the first edition as a draft and the editions that followed as truer expressions of the author’s intentions. The revised editions are not on GMi (yet).
Beyond the two regular ways to engage with Vain Fortune there is a third way which may be best of all. I call it Vain Fortune AI.
This is a PDF of the novel that you can download from GMi and upload to Google Notebook LM (or the AI assistant of your choice, though none is better than Notebook LM).
Uploading the PDF to Notebook LM will enable you to interrogate and interpret the text with machine intelligence, which sadly is greater than yours or mine; and also do some transformational things that I’ll leave you to discover.
Mind you, uploading to Notebook LM is not a substitute for reading the text (though it could be for people in a hurry). It complements reading.
Speaking metaphorically (as I have before), submitting a text to Notebook LM is comparable to turning a still image into a moving picture. The experience brings a novel to life!
Vain Fortune AI adds so much value to George Moore Interactive that I have decided to create AI versions of all the titles I previously published. I will do that over the next few weeks and continue when new titles are added.
AI versions will make it a little easier and more fun for casual readers to engage with George Moore’s literary legacy! And for scholars to investigate.
Next Up
Next month in addition to making AI versions of books on GMi, I will publish the first edition of A Modern Lover (1883).
No digital scan of this novel — George Moore’s first — is available on the Internet. Thanks to the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware Library, that’s about to change!
Beyond these two milestones, I will put George Moore’s letters of 1896 on the workbench.
From 1896 until the turn of the century, George’s love affair with “Saxon” England waned and his flirtation with “Celtic” Ireland became more and more irresistible.
In Chapter 12 of George Moore’s Spring Days (1888), Frank Escott tells Lizzie Baker, “I want to paint you in a white dress sitting on a garden seat with a background of azaleas — something very faint in white and pink.” Frank and his creator George may have been inspired by Auguste Toulmouche’s Woman and Roses (oil on canvas, 1879), now at the Clark Art Institute (1955.877) in Williamstown, Massachusetts: “A young woman in a spotless white dress has paused, while strolling through a well-tended garden, to enjoy the fragrance of a cluster of pink roses.”
Resurgam NFP is the grantseeking and grantmaking organization that kickstarts literary legacies in the digital age. If you wish to donate to George Moore Interactive, please send your money to Resurgam and earmark it for GMi.
This deft two-step will ensure that 100% of your donation gets used according to your wishes. Your donation will be objectively managed and accounted for, and the tangible results of your generosity will be reported back to you with thanks.
The two-step will also ensure that your donation is tax-deductible (if you’re located in the United States), which would not be the case if you donated directly to GMi. Here’s a Resurgam page that explains how it works.
Resurgam is an independent, 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation that echoes and reinforces the aims of George Moore Interactive but with a difference. The difference is this: GMi is kickstarting one particular literary legacy, whereas Resurgam wants to animate every legacy — literary, artistic, musical — bequeathed to our world by creative geniuses of the past.
The technology for kickstarting literary legacies has already been invented; it is known by the rubric generative artificial intelligence and is doing amazing things, though not the things that GMi is pioneering. Visit Resurgam’s Comparisons page for more about that.
With useful technology that is now available and the reliable promise of more powerful tools to come in the next few years, all that remains for George Moore to live again is to put our human feet on the kickstarter and push down forcefully.
My foot has been pushing forcefully for George Moore. Now with around 1,700 pages and posts on this website, and more appearing day by day, I can feel the rumble though the handlebars in my grip. I’m thrilled and ready to take the next steps.
But readiness begs the question: what are the next steps? How far into the future can I see when claiming that I’m poised to accept your donation? To be honest, not very far.
I founded GMi with a concept rather than a program; a vision rather than a plan. I wanted to make stuff like a builder rather than talk about stuff like a professor. That action-orientation allowed me to leapfrog important questions such as: What is my program? What is my step-by-step? What are my milestones and endgame?
The recent formation of Resurgam has forced me to step back and consider. Before now, I was happy just to crank out content, with a methodology and a sense of direction, but without a program per se. That has changed.
It changed because, after starting a Gofundme campaign that fell short of my goals, I’m now planning to ask Resurgam for financial support, and I can’t do that without a program; in other words, without short and long term plans.
I realized this as I prepared Resurgam’s bona fides as a legal not-for-profit. Part of that involved joining Forefront, and as a result of joining Forefront I joined Candid. Candid is the organization that runs the Foundation Directory and Guidestar.
To cement my membership in Candid, I needed to state Resurgam’s own program. I did that by pondering the (nonexistent) program of GMi as I had never done before.
The result is not one but four linear Resurgam programs, each of which represents fundable activities that are sanctioned by Resurgam’s mission and for which Resurgam accepts donations.
Resurgam may evolve into other programs as well, but these four are a complete statement of the work being done and planned by GMi.
Consider:
Program 1: Digital Curation
Digital Curation (DC) locates, organizes, scans, transcribes, edits, annotates, illustrates, and preserves the meaningful and influential contents of aesthetic legacies. Legacies prioritized by Resurgam are literary, artistic and musical from antiquity to the twentieth century. DC is foundational to more advanced programs supported by Resurgam.
Program 2: Access to Cultural Heritage
Access to Cultural Heritage (ACH) follows our DC program. ACH publishes and otherwise disseminates the contents of curated legacies in machine- and human-readable digital formats. ACH is limited to formats that are free and easy to use by the general public and compatible with the training of large language models owned by corporations. ACH permits few (if any) technical, financial, and geographic barriers to entry to a curated legacy.
Program 3: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (MLAI) follows our DC and ACH programs. MLAI engineers curated and published legacies to ensure they are open to computerized and human-prompted textual, visual and quantitative analysis. MLAI optimizes digital legacies for self-assembly, self-correction, self-validation, date-stamping, cross-referencing, interpretation, elucidation, and correlation with the critical heritage. MLAI synchronizes different digital legacies that have overlapping content.
Program 4: High-Fidelity Simulation
High-Fidelity Simulation (HFS) follows our DC, ACH, and MLAI programs. HFS enables curated, published, and engineered legacies to speak for themselves (by demonstrating autonomous self-awareness and dynamic self-expression). HFS manifests in interactive, lifelike conversations between aesthetic legacies and human interlocutors. HFS may be achieved in digital modalities including chatbot, natural-language processing, speech synthesis, virtual- and augmented-realities, and computer-generated imagery (CGI).
✱ ✱ ✱
Up to the present, everything GMi has achieved aligns with Resurgam Programs 1 and 2, though a lot more remains to be done in those programs. Programs 3 and 4 are still prospective, but here they are defined whereas before they were dreamlike.
When I submit my grant applications to Resurgam, and when you tender your donation, we will have to be clear about program fit. No longer happy to crank out content for its own sake, the work that may be deemed worthy of funding must explicitly advance a program objective.
The Worst Novel?
Last month I corrected my mistake in calling George Moore’s A Mere Accident (1887) the worst novel ever written. That dubious distinction purportedly belonged to Spring Days (1888). Worst according to a literary critic whom George respected; worst according to the bewildered author himself.
I promised to transcribe, edit and publish Spring Days, my way of exhuming the victim of literary malfeasance and performing forensic analysis. I have performed it, and now so can you.
My personal opinion of Spring Days is not rancorous. To me, it isn’t a terrible novel; it’s not even a bad novel. As usual when surveying this part of George’s legacy, I’m calling it an experimental novel.
Our ambitious author had a modernist axe to grind, a serious thematic purpose, a good dramatic idea, characters that live on and between the lines, and a richly colored mise en scène.
That said, it is also true that the novel didn’t cross the finish line as a memorable achievement. Not then, not now.
One problem is the title, which sucks (as usual). If you read the book you may wonder, on page after page, why is it named Spring Days? That vague, not catchy title has nothing to do with the plot! The actual words “Spring Days” turn up once, at the very end of the last chapter, almost like an afterthought or the relic of a different novel that was never written.
Another problem is inconsistency. Chapters range in length from 1,000 to 22,000 words. Granted there is no rule that chapters of a novel must be similar in length, but the disparities here look like flaws of construction, reminding me of the Buster Keaton movie One Week (1920) except the movie is funny and this novel isn’t.
A more serious problem with Spring Days is the changing subject matter. At first the story is about the Brookes family: the widower James, his young adult daughters Grace, Maggie and Sally, and his son Willy. The three sisters are foregrounded, like Alice and Olive Barton in A Drama in Muslin.
But no, the narrative soon drifts away from the girls in favor of their pathetic though genuine brother Willy, at first a minor character who unexpectedly grows into a significant moral presence. But that too doesn’t last.
Willy’s friend Frank Escott, at first little more than a colorful detail in the background, suddenly becomes the novel’s main protagonist.
Each of these human loci would be fine as the subject of his or her own story, but the succession of stories, without much in the way of segues, tested this reader’s enjoyment of Spring Days.
If Frank Escott truly is the unrivaled protagonist of Spring Days, that would make sense because he walks and talks like an author surrogate, somewhat like John Norton in A Mere Accident and John Harding in A Drama in Muslin.
Don’t get me wrong, these three men have as many differences as similarities, but a case can be made that George Moore performed in these novels as a ventriloquist whose speech and perceptions were at least partially embodied in Escott, Norton and Harding.
Of course it isn’t necessary for an experimental novelto have a main protagonist because, in my opinion, this novel’s raison d’être is a fictional rendering of the author’s real-life friends the Bridger family and their homes near Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex.
That helps explain Frank’s rented home in nearby Southwick, where George Moore actually lived while writing Spring Days. From this point of view, it is easier to explain the purported differences between Celt and Saxon, that bubbled to the surface of the novel from time to time.
Frank and George living in Southwick were Irish, the Brookes and the Bridgers living in Shoreham were English. Exploring the evident ethnic differences between these tribes is probably what made Spring Days a worthy project for a renegade disciple of Émile Zola.
(Coincidentally while preparing Spring Days for GMi, I acquired cartes de visite of Harry Colvill Bridger and his daughters Florence and Dulcibella. They are published on the Bridger pages of the GMi Iconography. Use the search bar to find them.)
As mentioned earlier, apart from biographical and sociological interests, Spring Days exhibits a serious novelistic purpose. The purpose is intimated in the following quote, one of several in the book that wax philosophical:
A man’s struggles in the web of a vile love are as pitiful as those of a fly in the meshes of the spider; he crawls to the edge, but only to ensnare himself more completely; he takes pleasure in ridiculing her, but whether he praises or blames, she remains mistress of his life; all threads are equally fatal, and each that should have served to bear him out of the trap only goes to bind him faster. A man in love suggests the spider’s web, and when he is seeking to escape from a woman that will degrade his life, the cruelty which is added completes and perfects the comparison. A man’s love for a common woman is as a fire in his vitals; sometimes it seems quenched, sometimes it is torn out by angry hands, but always some spark remains; it contrives to unite about its victim, and in the end has its way. It is a cancerous disease, but it cannot be cut out like a cancer. It is more deadly; it is inexplicable. All good things, wealth and honour, are forfeited for it; long years of toil, trouble, privation of all kinds are willingly accepted; on one side all the sweetness of the world, on the other nothing of worth, often vice, meanness, ill temper, all that go to make life a madness and a terror; twenty, thirty, forty, perhaps fifty years lie ahead of him and her, but the years and their burdens are not for his eyes any more than the flowers he elects to disdain. Love is blind, but sometimes there is no love. How then shall we explain this inexplicable mystery; wonderful riddle that none shall explain and that every generation propounds?
Spring Days (1888), pages 361- 362.
By this point in the novel (the end), Frank Escott the amateur painter was becoming a novelist, exactly the life trajectory of his creator.
His mind was absorbed in a novel, which he narrated when Willy came to see him. It concerned the accident that led a man not to marry the woman he loved, and was in the main an incoherent version of his own life at Southwick.
The letters of George Moore, published on GMi, are now complete through the year 1893. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of George’s life in 1893 was his hard, experimental work on Esther Waters (1894). This time, the experiment ended in success!
I cannot begin to fathom how George rose, in just a few years, from the bucolic South Downs of A Mere Accident and Spring Days to the urban contest of Esther Waters, except to note that there was a segue: Esther Waters opened in a fictional version of the Bridger home, Buckingham House.
In my view, the most plausible explanation of George’s rise from A Mere Accident and Spring Days to Esther Waters (by way of Mike Fletcher and Vain Fortune) may be found the old saw: he pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
His ability to do that again and again over the course of his career is probably what endeared him most to fans like me. George was an experimentalist and, like a lab scientist, his failures were as numerous as his successes; even more numerous (maybe)!
Somehow he was not deflated or discouraged when he missed his mark. Like Samuel Beckett in another generation, he concluded with “I’ll go on.” Or to put that in George’s words:
I shivered; the cold air of morning blew in my face, I closed the window, and sitting at the table, haggard and overworn, I continued my novel.
Confessions of a Young Man (1888), page 357
Next Up
Letters from 1894-1895 will be next up in the Letters pillar of this website.
By the way, thousands of George Moore’s letters are preserved in known institutional libraries, but an unknown number of others are in private collections. For example, I own a few MSS.
Privately owned letters have turned up over the years in bookseller catalogs, but not otherwise found. I have not figured out how to track them down in the digital age, but my intuition is that there is an efficient way. Suggestions are welcome!
The novel Mike Fletcher (1889), another miss for George, will be next up in the Worlds pillar of this website and the GMi Shop. I first read it a long time ago and have zero memory of it now. Bracing myself!
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818), by Caspar David Friedrich in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (Wikimedia Commons). According to curators of The Soul of Nature at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (until 11 May 2025), this romantic artist notably “reimagined European landscape painting by portraying nature as a setting for profound spiritual and emotional encounters.” Nicely put, and much the same could be said about the novelist George Moore when he wrote A Mere Accident (1887). Yet George was not a romanticist; he was an avant-garde experimentalist sundering the shackles of French naturalism. Tired, perhaps, of observing nature for its own sake, he pivoted to an examination of character as lofty, complex and unsettling as Friedrich’s mountains. With mixed results.
I’ve heard that “April is the cruelest month,” but I don’t really believe it. Good things happened here in April 2025, starting with three ebooks that turned up in the GMi Shop:
A Mere Accident (1887)
Impressions and Opinions (1891)
Modern Painting (1893)
The chapters of these ebooks are also available online: A Mere Accident in the Worlds pillar of this website, the others in the Aesthetics pillar.
Humans can freely download or read George’s writing online. Machines can autonomously ingest it into search engines and large language models, where incredible new value will surely be unlocked.
That unlocking is an example of what I mean by kickstarting literary legacies in the digital age.
My priority up to now has been George’s nonfiction — what he wrote about himself and his lived experience. Most of those horses are now in the barn.
I’m still chasing 88 print essays that are uniquely preserved in the British Library. They’re the target of a sleepy Gofundme campaign to cover the cost of fetching them.
Although now, there’s a new turbocharged fundraising initiative in the works!
Resurgam NFP
In April 2025, the US Internal Revenue Service endowed Resurgam with tax-exempt status as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit Illinois corporation. This milestone completed the bona fides of Resurgam as a grantseeking and grantmaking enterprise.
Foundations, businesses, and individual benefactors all over the United States can henceforth deduct their grants, gifts, and contributions to Resurgam from federal and state tax returns. Additionally, Resurgam will be exempt from paying sales tax in Illinois on purchases that support its mission.
But what is the mission? Resurgam’s specific aim is kickstarting literary and artistic legacies in the digital age. That’s a concise way of promising to use advanced information technology to curate, publish, animate and simulate creative masters and masterworks of the remote past.
The aim is underpinned by three formal purposes, each with a particular meaning, protocol, and impact:
Educational
Literary
Scientific
I’m so excited about Resurgam that I’m tempted to write about nothing else today. But I don’t need to do that.
Why? Because a new website is emerging online that tells the story. After the static pages are published, I will start writing monthly newsletters from there. With my collaborators, I will also produce prototypes, demos, and proofs-of-concept of various ways the mission will be fulfilled.
My Role with Resurgam?
Yours truly, Bob Becker. is the executive director. I am one of five directors on the board. In addition to board duties, I lead operations. In the foreseeable future, operations are entirely about communication and fundraising. After successful raises, they will expand to board oversight of funded projects.
Resurgam and George Moore Interactive?
Resurgam formed to address the exciting and formidable needs faced by projects like GMi. It exists to nudge any worthy historic literary or artistic project towards futuristic technological goals.
“Projects like GMi” does not mean limited to GMi. The kind of research and development I do for George Moore’s legacy can be done by others for other legacies that are completely different and equally deserving.
For example, a friend of mine has a project on the bibliography of Max Beerbohm. Another friend has a project on the paintings of John Lavery. If they chose to kickstart Beerbohm or Lavery, Resurgam would consider helping them.
Likewise I have two friends (who may be reading this newsletter) who deeply appreciate the legacy of James Joyce. Oh, what a ripe subject that puzzle-maker would be for a kickstart, IMHO!
Caveat: Resurgam will not go looking for projects to back, but it will consider assisting people who come calling with an understanding of our mission.
If you’re a potential donor to, or partner of, Resurgam, I invite you to follow the new website. Likewise if you’re a researcher, writer, artist, publisher, engineer or scientist seeking funding for a bold venture in the digital humanities, let’s get coffee.
Kant or Cant?
George Moore researched and wrote his experimental novel, A Mere Accident (1887), while living among friends near Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, under the South Downs near Brighton. He dedicated the novel thus:
To My Friends at Buckingham.
Nearly twenty years have gone since first we met, dear friends; time has but strengthened our early affections, so for love token, for sign of the years, I bring you this book — these views of your beautiful house and hills where I have spent so many happy days, these last perhaps the happiest of all.
G.M.
Buckingham House (Thornby Place in the novel) was home to the Bridger family, who nicknamed their friend “Kant” because of his relentless philosophizing. The same behavior is (unfortunately) evident in the novel.
A Mere Accident is a bildungsroman about John Norton, owner of Thornby Place. He has unexplored affinities with John Harding in A Drama in Muslin (1886). Both characters model an aestheticism that interested their author. It is tempting to view the Johns as projections of their author’s ego, but I don’t know about that.
John Norton is probably not a caricature of George Moore, but he has George’s contrarian independence and ambition to figure things out for himself. And by things, I don’t mean screwing in a lightbulb.
John wrestles with “the hideous laws of the world and the flesh, ever at variance and at war, and ever defeating the indomitable aspirations of the soul” (A Mere Accident, page 165).
Yikes!
Alternately thrilled and tormented by religion, art, architecture, and moral philosophy on one hand, and by love, sex, furniture, property management and nature walks on the other, John is a kind of juggler with a lot of balls in the air. I didn’t notice many that dropped.
I could go on and on about this good bad novel, but instead I am going to let generative AI do the talking for me. If you are fairly new to creative uses of AI, this demo may be a nice surprise.
To prepare for the demo, I uploaded my transcript of A Mere Accident to Google’s miraculous Notebook LM in the cloud and asked the app to create a podcast about the novel.
I did no heavy lifting.
I did not tell Notebook LM what to think or say. It may have reached some arguable conclusions, but even if it did, the resulting conversation is nothing short of delightful. Certainly more lively and entertaining than what I and a stuffy professor would sound like on a panel.
And mind you, Notebook LM took about 30 minutes to read the novel, analyze it, script and record a 15-minute conversation between two voices that sound like real people (they are not).
So have a listen. If you like what they say about A Mere Accident, download the book or dip into it online.
If you like what AI does with literary material, subscribe to George Moore Interactive.
Next Up
Last month I reported that A Mere Accident was the worst novel ever written. I was mistaken. That distinction belongs to George’s next novel, Spring Days (1888). Please forgive me.
This is what George wrote about Spring Days:
Everybody is abusing Spring Days. The papers say it is the worst book I have ever written, and one well-known critic says it is the very worst novel he ever read. A writer may elect to put his life into one book (Baudelaire did this in his Fleurs du Mal). Or he may elect to spread himself over fifty volumes (Balzac did this in the Comédie humaine). But once a writer elects to spread himself over a number of volumes it seems to me that he must not only create new methods but he must from time to time recreate old ones. I am a great admirer of Jane Austen and I said to myself, “I will recreate Jane Austin’s method in Spring Days. It was an attempt not to continue, but to recreate, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, etc. Apparently I have failed horribly. Fortunately I have an article in the Universal Review for this month entitled “Mummer Worship”, which is attracting a good deal of attention, and this may help to sell Spring Days. [Letter to Clara Lanza, 1888-09-23]
I feel bad about inadvertently dissing A Mere Accident, so to make up for that, next month I will resurrect Spring Days from its (well-deserved?) tomb. And then I will ask AI if, in fact, it is the worst.
Can any novel in history be worse than Richardson’s Clarissa or Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake? Hard to imagine, we’ll have to see.
Hateful Ebooks
A friend from long ago recently published an essay in The Atlantic entitled “Ebooks Are an Abomination.” He advanced the concept of bookiness, by which he meant the physical properties of printed books that resonate with readers, most of which are lacking in ebooks.
He loves the tangible aesthetics of bookiness.
As a publisher of ebooks and a believer in their utility, who is also a lifelong collector and reader of printed books, I can see his point and also disagree with it. Not because of personal preferences, which long ago I decided have no bearing or interest beyond the tip of my nose.
I dispute the attractions of bookiness for these reasons:
Many people no longer read books, of any kind, at all
Of those who do read books, many read only the tidbits they care about
Many publishers do not invest in beautiful book production
Many titles are expensive and hard or impossible to acquire
George Moore seems to have loved bookiness. He invested a great deal of his personal time and energy in the production of physical books that matched his literary standards.
At the same time, he abhorred low-rent bookiness: books of cheap paper, cramped typography, and flimsy binding.
Yet the bottom line on bookiness for George is that he didn’t collect books or read many. It’s fair to say that a book for him was only the idea he or another author dreamed up and put into words.
He wanted the physical thing to be nice looking, but as readers of his own editions made from hand-made paper, handset type, and vellum covers can attest, good looking is not the same as readable. Those editions are kind of a nuisance to hold in your lap while pondering the idea.
I revert to the term utility to justify ebooks in the GMi Shop. They may not be beautiful, but they are readable, portable, indestructible, updatable, searchable, printable, and potentially interactive.
Keep Those Letters Coming…
In April 2025, I also ressurected another set of letters on GMi. I transcribed, edited, annotated and published George’s extant letters from the first half of 1893. I would have done more, but sadly dropped some balls despite my best intentions.
(For one thing, I had trouble seeing my computer screen!)
Buying an overhead book scanner last year has turned into a very sound investment. And not just because I got it before the American Mad Hatter put tariffs on China, where Czur scanners are made.
Mainly it’s because the scanner works extremely well. It letts me scan and perform OCR on bound faded typescripts of George’s correspondence with phenomenal clarity and few defects.
Using a Czur scanner is also making me a better user, as is often the case with new technology. Heuristics! My digital publishing process is quite different from what it was a year or more ago, and it’s getting better all the time.
In May, I will finish publishing George’s letters of 1893 begin those of 1894. In George Moore’s hero’s journey, 1894 was the year of leaving the blistering desert and rising to the snowy peaks of Esther Waters. Figuratively speaking.
Like Caspar David Friedrich’s model at the top of this newsletter, gazing at the mountaintops, George had confronted problems that nearly drained him and finally figured things out, for himself, in the blessed year of 1894.
Dublin Streets: a Vendor of Books, 1889 (Wikimedia Commons) by Walter Osborne in the National Gallery of Ireland, depicting a bookseller on Aston Quay, with O’Connell Bridge and Custom House in the background. I can’t make out the titles of books on the stall, but sensing the avid interest of customers it seems reasonable to suppose that the stock included the recently published Parnell and His Island, by George Moore. Like his friend Walter, George mostly adhered in the 1880s to avant-garde Realism and Impressionism. And like George, Walter struggled to establish a market for his art. Both young men were “neglected innovators” who were later recognized as modernist masters. George’s essays about Irish town and country first appeared in France under the titles of Lettres Sur Irlande de George Moore (1886); then expanded as Terre d’Irlande (1887); then expurgated in Parnell and His Island (1887). All of those essays are now published by GMi.
May I have your attention please? The James Joyce Tower & Museum is about to host a spring lecture in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland. If you’re in, or somewhere near Dublin on 6 March 2025, go to the architectural gem known as DLR Lexicon Library for the event entitled George Moore — A Neglected Innovator. The event is organized by Michael O’Shea and presented by George’s esteemed biographer, Dr. Adrian Frazier.
Rather than showing up unexpected, you may reserve a seat online at the James Joyce Tower and Museum. That way you won’t have to stand at the back of the Studio, wishing life were more fair.
Since one ocean and half a continent separate me from this rare event, I cannot join you there. However as an academically trained snob of sorts, it may be my professional duty to quibble with something, anything, lest I seem uncritical and therefore unthinking.
So I’ll quibble with that adjective, “neglected.” Clayton Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997), taught me long ago that all innovators are not just neglected, but also opposed, by incumbents who have invested in the status quo and by a conservative public that resists change.
To call George a neglected innovator is therefore, how shall I say, redundant, since all literary innovators (Joyce included) were neglected (or worse) until they were not (usually postmortem).
George is obviously postmortem, though probably not forever. As you know, GMi is trying to bring him back to life, reanimating him, returning him to conversations he began but didn’t finish, adding him to others he never had, at least to my knowledge. In all things, letting George speak for himself!
Today as in many years past, readers neglect and even oppose George Moore because they must. Like early viewers of Impressionist art, ordinary readers have been led elsewhere, on golden leashes by incumbents in ivory towers.
And unlike Fagin in his cinematic slum, when it comes to George Moore readers rarely or willingly avow, “I think I’d better think it out again.”
And that is fitting. When George is no longer neglected, he will no longer be innovative. He will instead be canonical. That apotheosis is inevitable, alas, but for now you can attend Adrian’s lecture in hopes of having a (potentially) risky, disruptive, unheard of, unsettling epiphany by the time it’s over.
Adrian’s may be comparable to a lecture about the heretic Jimmy Joyce before his legacy became fodder for conformists and pedagogues. Go there, don’t be square, and find out for yourself!
Innovator or Heretic?
I shouldn’t mention Clayton Christensen without also hailing Art Kleiner, author of The Age of Heretics (1996). Both men were public intellectuals — so-called thought leaders — not long after I left my job as a dorky English professor for a hectic career in educational technology.
This was the era of the New Economy when designers, makers and users strove for game-changing innovation in everything (including learning).
Steve Jobs became the poster child of that era — you may remember his 2005 commencement address at Stanford — but he was not alone. I remember my surprise at the intellectual vigor and rigor I found beyond the ivory tower, so much more enlightened and pragmatic than what I experienced in it.
The Age of Heretics made a thrilling case for contemporary innovation by tracing its roots to heretics who, against all odds, refused to conform. One such was Pierre Abelard, also the endearing subject of George Moore’s novel Héloïse and Abélard (1921).
I think it helps to understand George Moore as a heretic, rather more than as an innovator. Heresy involves rocking foundational assumptions, beliefs and aspirations, and that is what George strove to do again and again in his writing and aesthetic activism.
In contrast, innovation is usually more about praxis, about changing the way things are done versus how they are understood and desired.
George Moore was an accomplished innovator in Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian England — he never stopped rocking the boat! And he somewhat relentlessly set aside his commercial interests for the sake of undermining or sabotaging authority and paradigms that triggered him.
For example, soon after finishing Parnell and His Island, his London publisher (who had preemptively expurgated the manuscript) called George out for being self-defeating instead of building his base.
Was George chastened? He was not.
Intead he parted ways with his publisher William Swan Sonneschein, insisting that he would remain true to himself regardless of consequences. The consequences were commercially and critically disastrous.
Yes, of course, George committed these mistakes as an innovator, as an unconventional writer, but even more he did it as a heretic, a disruptive thinker, and perhaps for that reason he shall (as he predicted) rise again.
La Terreur de la Terre
AI-generated voice recording of La Terreur de la Terre
Last month I admitted my failure to scan the French text of Terre d’Irlande. Scanning is the first step of transcription, but it went nowhere. Complicating factors were:
The frail, 138 year-old binding of my physical copy.
Typography on printed pages that tricked my OCR.
Mellifluous French letterforms that defy Gertrude Stein.
Printer’s errors in pagination that were unacknowledged.
It was Gertrude in Paris who wrote that “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Okay fine, but in French the letter a is an a is an à is an á is an â is an ä etc. etc. and so forth. Enough to cross the eyes of an English-only reader and his trusty machine sidekick.
It would not surprise me to learn that my copy of Terre hadn’t been opened since publication. It was as stiff and reluctant as yours truly after spending hours making transcriptions that nobody may ever read or care about.
I take that back: at least one person must read and care: the angelic Claudette Walsh, native French editor (in Ireland) who is line-editing my transcripts.
Anyway, before Claudette could edit George’s lines, I had to provide lines that were as visually readable to her as a printed book.
It took a while, and the experience taught me this: that not all OCR is created equal! Before Terre, I had been scanning to pdf, figuring that the OCR in Adobe Acrobat was best in class. It is not.
My breakthrough came when I scanned not to pdf but to docx, the format of Microsoft Word. This was not intuitive to me because I’m a Mac and I hate MS Word; I can’t stand its preposterous ribbons full of icons that make me feel I’m looking at my document through a kaleidoscope!
But MS Word was the key! Using my magical CZUR overhead scanner to create bitmaps of page spreads, I converted those images to single pages of machine and human readable Word docs, one doc per chapter (each chapter around 3,000 words).
The results were impressive! The OCR software recognized that a rose is not necessarily a rose, and I was able to develop transcriptions in Google Docs that are close enough to perfect to enable Claudette to wave her wand over the French text. A final sprinkle of pixie dust!
The results of my 40-hour terreur with the Terre are now live on GMi. All twelve chapters, plus the Preface, plus the Conclusion. When Claudette finishes her French review, I will also publish an ebook using Walter Osborne’s lovely painting of a bookseller as the cover art.
Will anybody actually read Terre d’Irlande? I don’t care, and that’s not the important question for me. What matters is, for the first time in 138 years:
Terre d’Irlande will be accessible and readable to anybody who wants it.
Lettres Sur Irlande de George Moore in Le Figaro will be viewable side by side with the pages of Terre that came later.
Expurgations of Parnell and His Island will be detectable by comparing the French text and the English that came later.
A talented writer (Colm Tóibín?) who is looking for a cool project may restore the expurgated text and reverse the censorship.
By this time next month, the ebook of Terre d’Irlande will be in the GMi Shop. And I’ll have moved on to other things.
Starting the Next Decade
Letters of George Moore on GMi now run from 1863 through 1889. Thanks to Claudette, George’s sloppy French is now as readable as his sloppy English (we both corrected paragraph breaks, spelling, punctuation and capitalization).
The 1880s were a thrilling and depressing decade for the young writer. After his juvenile (but proficient) forays in shock-poetry, he came out as a debut novelist with A Modern Lover, but it failed to sell.
Then unexpectedly (even to himself) he scored a bestseller with A Mummer’s Wife. It signaled that a formidable author had emerged from his false starts. But the rest of the decade dimmed that signal, with books that few people bought, and that caused many people to dislike the author peremptorily.
If one word comes most to mind when I look back on letters of the 1880s, it is resilience. George Moore’s response to being repeatedly knocked down was to pick himself up, dust himself off, and try again harder.
As Bernard Shaw (who turns up in letters of this decade) later noted, no writer ever worked harder, with fewer extrinsic rewards, than George Moore. Yet through it all, he stayed calm and carried on, believing in the right and responsibility of the artist to observe truth in beauty, in his own way.
George was a self-conscious innovator, a proud and stubborn heretic, whose intense aspirations seemed to be fortified by failure. After A Mummer’s Wife in 1885, his next commercial success was not in fiction but memoir.
Confessions of a Young Man once again signaled the presence of a formidable author. It pointed towards a future that would someday include Hail and Farewell! That sublime Irish trilogy quietly resonates with the gritty heresies of Terre d’Irlande. Now you know.
George’s letters of 1890 are on my workbench; publication on GMi shall be completed by this time next month!
“I Shall Rise Again”
During the past month, Resurgam added a fifth member to its board of directors, fashioned and refashioned its bylaws, engaged and parted ways with a fundraiser, appointed a treasurer, retained a CPA, and drafted our application to the United States Internal Revenue Service for certification as a 501(c)(3).
A busy month, full of progress, very little inertia and disappointment, all for the sake of Resurgam’s educational, literary and scientific purposes.
The angels who donated to my Gofundme Campaign for travel to the British Library can rest assured: my travel has been delayed but it shall occur! Among myriad other priorities, Resurgam will try to cover expenses that GoFundme couldn’t cover because not enough donations came in.
The Gofundme Campaign is still open and ready to receive your donation, should you decide to jump off the fence. You too can have a hand in exhuming an invaluable portion of George Moore’s literary legacy from the subterranean analog stacks of the British Library, making it freely accessible and useful forever to people everywhere.
But apart from financial support, you can also volunteer your time and skills in meaningful ways, a little or a lot, to advance the bold mission.
For example, I would be delighted to meet an engineer of machine learning who can advise Resurgam on ways to cross the chasm that divides digital publishing from expert systems.
That chasm is already coming into view. Our team needs to prepare for getting to the other side.
Next in the Shop
I long to publish The Brook Kerith on GMi, not because readers are asking for it, but because I only faintly remember it.
My faint memory suggests that The Brook Kerith is a novel whose time has come. In a world where oligarchs, criminals and charlatans are hurting people in the name of Jesus Christ, it is time for a “real” Jesus to get up and knock them down (as he does in The Brook Kerith).
That said, after I add Terre d’Irlande to the GMi Shop, I’m going to stay in the nineteenth century for my next mini project. Having finished work on George’s Irish essays, a next milestone may be A Drama in Muslin (1886).
This was an Irish story written in the afterglow of A Mummer’s Wife, when George was on the cusp of commercial success as a novelist. Alas, he would dangle there for another ten years.
The sun rises over a book in the logo art of Resurgam NFP, a new fundraising organization for projects like George Moore Interactive. Resurgam in Latin means “I shall rise again.” It was the title of the final chapter of Memoirs of My Dead Life (1906) where George pondered his origins and legacy during a visit to Moore Hall. The leaves of the open book are blue, like the rippling waters of Lough Carra where he imagined his funeral (and where he was later buried). The covers of the book are green, like woodland and meadow that surround the lake still. The red sunrise says change is coming. This logo symbolizes the specific aim of Resurgam: to kickstart literary legacies in the digital age.
I was taken aback at the end of Michael Chabon’s essay, “The Midnight World,” in the New York Review of Books (19 December 2024). He wrote:
“It takes a rare kind of mind to care so deeply, for so long, with such discernment, about something whose worth and significance have been so thoroughly neglected, and then to persevere in the piecemeal, painstaking work of ending, at a stroke, that neglect.”
Though Michael was characterizing Glenn Fleishman, the author of How Comics Were Made (2025), he seemed to be talking about me!
Lest you think I’m preening or gloating when I say that, I hasten to add that “a rare kind of mind” may not be a brilliant mind. It could be anything as long as it’s different.
If my own mind is rare (arguable), that’s probably because it is centered, calm, independent, deliberate, and orderly. I believe those are the drivers of my perseverance with George. I make no loftier claims.
Researchers like Glenn Fleishman, who likewise strive to kickstart literary legacies, have minds that are different from each other’s. Each has a unique blend of strengths and weaknesses that make a noble and seemingly Quixotic mission not just feasible, but profoundly satisfying.
I take my hat off to Glenn and everyone like him, or like me. We follow, however obscurely, the footsteps of heroes in that famous Apple commercial. We are not changing the world, but we do think different.
In turn I bow to the occasional applause from folks in what is always a nearly empty theater. The show — the piecemeal, painstaking work — must go on, and it does.
Letters of 1888
Since last month’s newsletter I have published George Moore’s extant letters from 1888. That was a disappointing year for him, though I’m not sure how he felt about it.
The year began with the failure of an experimental novel, A Mere Accident. It ended with the failure of a conventional novel, Spring Days. Yet another futile novel, Mike Fletcher, was emerging on his desk under the working title of Don Juan. George’s publishers so hated the manuscript submission of Don Juan that they parted ways, most likely with hurt feelings.
What the heck was George up to in 1888?
The answer for me is self-actualization. George admitted to a journalist in 1888 that he was a wannabe — an improbable, accidental man of letters. Lacking a liberal education and technical training, spinning like a pinball between English and French language and aesthetics, his writing looks like a chockablock process of stymied heuristics.
Intrinsically motivated as he was, almost selfless in his dedication to modern art and literature, he was nonetheless a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian — a “righteous apostate” — from tip to toe and morning to night, almost entirely lacking in what contemporaries would have called genius and purpose.
Yet somehow he bumbled into self-actualization in his memoirs of this period. It seems almost laughable now, that a Nobody like George in his mid 30s should publish any memoirs at all, and yet he did, twice. Parnell and His Island in 1887 was followed by Confessions of a Young Man in 1888, the latter somehow achieving the rank of untoward masterpiece. (Both books are digitally published by GMi.)
In 1888 George the budding novelist hit his stride most improbably, not by writing career-advancing fiction, but by reinventing himself as a “man of wax” and reporting out the results. He self-actualized like a genie springing impulsively from a bottle that nobody had bothered to rub.
For readers like myself who find his surprising behavior oddly charming, his novelistic failures are no less fascinating than his autobiographical successes. They all have the charisma of eggs in a nest about ready to hatch. They just didn’t hatch as planned.
Near the end of 1888, a reviewer in a prestigious London newspaper wrote that Spring Days was the worst novel he had ever read. George calmly noted that appraisal, filed it, and carried on.
My AI Buddy
I have talked about reanimating George Moore with generative artificial intelligence. During the past couple of years since launching GMi, those aspirations have turned into pragmatic intentions, but not because of anything I did.
AI is now so accessible, powerful, capable and adept that the technical challenge of reanimating George is low-hanging fruit. The groundbreaking stuff still to accomplish — digital curation, integration and preservation of George’s lapsed literary legacy — is where the action is today.
That’s not to say that I’ve set AI aside while I perform mundane editorial tasks. Indeed I am performing the mundane tasks with the help of AI.
Take for example the logo art of Resurgam pictured at the top of his post. Not too shabby? I am not a graphic designer, yet I designed that logo in a few minutes, and the results speak for themselves.
How did I manage that?
I did it with my first AI buddy, ChatGPT. As mentioned two months ago, after pondering the meaning of the word resurgam — wondering what sort of tangible, visible object would connote the behavior of “rising again,” I settled on the sun as my metaphor. The sun rises everyday for everybody and makes life possible. Good choice!
But how to associate a rising sun with the notion of literary legacy? I asked ChatGPT to work that problem. I prompted it to design a logo for Resurgam that combined a sunrise with a book (a literary artifact). Very basic direction. Mere seconds later, voilà. The sun rises from the leaves of an open book and it looks just fine to me.
Staring at the bitmap, much impressed, I asked ChatGPT if I must pay a fee to use it? Does the copyright of the logo belong to somebody or something? Mere seconds later, the answer: Bob Becker owns the copyright. The logo is my intellectual property. I am gobsmacked.
Picking myself up off the floor, I then asked ChatGPT for a vector of the bitmap it had made for me. I wanted to be able to scale and manipulate the art, not just publish it. Mere seconds later, ChatGPT delivered an EPS file of the logo, along with its original PNG, that I can scale and manipulate to my heart’s content.
The final step of logo creation was to color the monochrome design that ChatGPT generated. I did this in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, completing the metaphor that is described at the top of this post.
I pause now to reflect.
None of this creativity would have been possible for me on my own. Based on my experience, it wouldn’t have been possible if I had engaged an artist to make a logo, but I would have spent a lot of time and money finding that out.
All of this was possible because AI is available to extend my thinking capabilities into areas formerly off limits: designing, drawing and painting.
Other Uses
Profoundly impressed by ChatGPT, I decided to test whether I had benefitted from beginner’s luck. I created three more logos for different brands on my LinkedIn profile, following the same steps as before: think, prompt, refine prompt, edit. In every case, I produced good results (IMHO), fast and free.
I was again on the floor, picking myself up and wondering, what’s next? I have all the logos I need for now.
I turned to the bylaws of Resurgam. Bylaws are needed after registering a not-for-profit corporation in the State of Illinois, before qualifying for tax exemption at federal and state levels. Because of legal PTSD, I had been dreading the prospect of engaging an attorney to draft the bylaws.
Instead a got back with my AI buddy and prompted it, first for general guidance and templates, then zooming into particular questions, all related to composing bylaws of a not-for-profit Illinois corporation that is compliant with IRC regulations for a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation.
Two dozen prompts later (each followed by mere seconds of artifical cogitation), I had all my answers.
The answer to each prompt was followed by my own writing and editing. I customized my text to the specific needs of Resurgam.
When all of my human writing was done, and a complete draft of bylaws was on my desktop, I took one more cautious step before sharing the bylaws with Resurgam’s board of directors.
I uploaded my entire draft to ChatGPT and requested a quality check. Mere seconds later, I received a few tweaks to my 14-page draft along with solid confirmation that everything I had composed should fly with the Internal Revenue Service when I apply for tax exemption.
Yay!
As with designing logo art, drafting corporate bylaws was rapid, easy, downright enjoyable and free, with good results and with assurances that what I created in this step of corporate formation is a strong foundation for the next step.
Gemini
I’m tempted to admit that ChatGPT and I are now a thing. We’re going steady, man. Only I have strayed a little from the straight and narrow and started a ménage à trois.
The other day, in order to access some amazing and needed features in Google Meet, I upgraded my Google Workspace for GMi. Google Workspace is one of my main toolsets for curating and writing content in the cloud.
In addition to gaining those nifty features in Google Meet, my upgrade brought the Google Gemini large language model into all of my Workspace apps.
Now with a click or a tap, I can do the kinds of things I did with ChatGPT, but within Google apps. Integration! I have not even scratched the surface of these AI capabilities, but who knows, when I do, I may be able ask an AI buddy to write my newsletters for me.
Nah, that would be weird. It’s one thing to make an artist or an attorney redundant, but a human still needs to be here. To persevere.
Coming Soon
Claudette Walsh in Ireland has looked at a sample transcript of my scan of Terre d’Irlande. As I feared, my transcript is unusable.
In order to create the first unexpurgated edition of Parnell and His Island in English (and the first-ever e-book of the original French text), I must go back to square one.
The problem here is that my OCR of the scanned pages is crappy, making my transcript useless. I will have to rescan the physical book with different scan settings, to improve the OCR somehow. One way or another, Claudette and I shall persevere. Stay tuned!
Also coming soon, the letters of 1889 are being prepared for publication on GMi. My speed is increasing lately despite temporarily impaired eyesight, so hopefully I will be able to stay ahead of Claudette.
As you may recall, she is correcting George Moore’s very sloppy French letters, so that they are as readable and meaningful today as they were to his original correspondents.
Finally, by this time next month I may be on the cusp of filing Resurgam’s application for tax exemption. I am not nearly there at present, and I don’t know what I don’t know, but what I have seen so far is not frightening. “I think I can, I think I can.”
I’m not an artist; I’m not an attorney; I’m not an accountant; but somehow, according to me, where there’s a will there’s a way.
The cover of an ebook — 40 years in the oven and still not ready to come out — with a portrait of George Moore aet. 36 by William Strang (see Iconography). This etching was the frontispiece in an edition of Confessions of a Young Man where George admitted “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” (Chapter 7). Why do I find that endearing? It’s a puzzlement.
I believe in crowdsourcing; in particular the crowdsourcing of quality.
We know that quality can mean almost anything. Here it refers to the high fidelity of transcribed text to sources.
My sources are pages printed more than a century ago, that have aged ever since on the shelves of librarians and collectors. Sources are also handwritten sheets that were never printed, but likewise ossified in archives and attics.
The purported fidelity of my transcriptions is a promise of accuracy. A promise that the language I found on yesterday’s paper is accurately reflected in today’s digital media.
But transcription ain’t replication. The higher calling is to represent both evident and latent intentions in sources, not just copy them like a Xerox machine.
In more than 1,000 web pages on George Moore Interactive, I’ve gone a long way to assuring quality by adhering to Deming’s cardinal rules of process control. Every text of George Moore that you read on GMi is the outcome of systematic steps that should have prevented defects from creeping in.
Should, but not must. There’s no doubt in my mind that errors are present in what I have published.
That’s where crowdsourcing comes in. I admittedly publish imperfect texts that are as high in quality as I can make them, given my rapid pace of development. I am relying on the crowd — people who use the texts — to tell me when they suspect errors.
That’s why every GMi webpage (including this post) has its own comment box. When somebody reads something that doesn’t seem right, they needn’t wonder. They can leave a question or suggestion for me to investigate.
My vision, my design and development of George Moore Interactive are founded on a belief in crowdsourcing. The ultimate success of the mission hinges on it.
% Complete
George Moore’s literary legacy is being reconstructed for the digital age in seven august pillars. They are the main menu items listed on the GMi home page. Here’s a quick recap of where things now stand:
Aesthetics: 80% complete
Iconography: 100% complete
Worlds: 10% complete
Letters: 0% complete (see below)
Bibliography: 100% complete
Chronology: 0% complete
Collections: 0% complete
By complete I don’t mean finished, dead and buried. Complete means “the best I can do until the crowd steps up to make GMi better.”
GMi Ebooks
My anticipated migration out of the Kindle Store has begun. Loyal fan of Amazon though I am, I have little respect for their ebook business.
Currently in the GMi Shop there are seven ebooks. Five are Apple Books and two are Kindle editions. I’ll soon create Apple Books to replace the Kindles so that all GMi ebooks can be downloaded from the store I prefer.
At the start of this migration, I decided to price GMi’s Apple ebooks as free. Why? It seems that charging even a small fee to download an ebook may create friction for potential readers while being inconsequential to me. It feels better to give the ebooks away.
Apple Books are not for everybody. To ensure digital rights management, they can be downloaded only to Apple devices (as far as I know). Remember though, the text of every GMi ebook is also available for free on the GMi website, in a different format.
The next ebook in the pipeline is A Communication to My Friends. Coming soon.
GMi Audiobooks
I had a dream that one day George Moore’s fine stories and essays would be released as engaging audiobooks. It may no longer be a dream. It seems to be happening.
During migration to Apple Books I stumbled upon technologies for generating audiobooks out of ebooks. Who knew this was possible? The audiobooks purportedly have naturalistic digital voices — not perfect, not famous, not Her — but not bad either. Moreover these generative audiobooks are fast and easy to make when a producer comes on board.
While I wait for Saoirse Ronan and Colin Farrell to get with the GMi program, I will proceed with this crazy AI alternative. GMi audiobooks performed by non-human, humanlike voices will not be free to download, but they will be reasonably priced and perhaps help me land George’s literary legacy more firmly in the digital age.
Letters Launch
Thanks to new and affordable scanning technology (described below), my work on the Letters pillar of GMi has begun. This pillar is designed to hold careful transcriptions of George’s 6,000+ extant letters: handwritten, typed, and printed between 1863 and 1933.
I located most of those letters around 40 years ago. The Letters of George Moore 1863-1901 was my unpublished doctoral dissertation at the University of Reading, England. I transcribed many more letters as an independent scholar at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, a postdoc at the University of Pittsburgh, and a naive professor at Emory University before deciding that I’d had quite enough of the ivory tower.
I suddenly stopped work, stored everything in the unlikely event that I would ever want to see it again, and went looking for a real life. (I found one.)
Before that extinction event of scholarly aspiration, all of my independent and academic work had been accomplished without a personal computer, without a printer or scanner, and without the Internet. I owned a portable Smith Corona typewriter, a desk and chair, a file cabinet; and honestly not much else. Bob Becker in those days bore a striking resemblance to Bob Cratchit.
So you may imagine my excitement and trepidation when I unboxed and organized my old files a few months ago, suspecting that the time for reviving the Letters was approaching. I spent many hours resurrecting my dormant analog office — minus the typewriter — so that I could once again see what I have, what I had created, what I needed to make sense of and work on.
I didn’t get far beyond that. I was stymied by a question: how can I digitize so many letters without doing what I generally hate to do: seek funding. George Moore Interactive is self-funded, but there is a limit to my generosity, even to myself. Making stuff and giving it away is deeply satisfying to me, but not rewarding. I didn’t wish to spend thousands more dollars to carry the letters of George Moore across the chasm into the digital age.
Instead I spent hundreds. Overhead scanners that I serendipitously discovered a few weeks ago triggered the first of two eurekas. I read about how they worked, marveled, settled on a make and model that seemed to fit the needs of GMi, and quietly murmured “Eureka?” After much anxious self-doubt of the too-good-to-be-true variety, I plunked down the cash.
Not an obscene amount of cash, because I would live on even if the scanner failed to live up to expectations. But I suffer from anti-early-adapter syndrome, which causes me to avoid purchasing bad shit because I don’t want to feel like a fool afterwards.
Anyway, I cleared space in my office for the scanner and it arrived the following week. It stayed in the box for a week after that, like a UXB, until my courage (fortified with single malt Scotch) returned.
Then in no time at all, the box was open, the tech was configured, the minimal documentation was read, and a test was conducted. “Eureka!” I exclaimed. The scanner does just what it’s supposed to do — that well, that fast, that easily.
What I had foreseen as a slow, expensive, cumbersome Letters project was transformed into fun and elegant. Many details must still be decided, about how to publish the letters in a way that complements the GMi mission, but those are good problems to have and to solve.
Breakthrough Scanning
The maker of my overhead scanner is a Chinese firm named CEZUR (pronounced caesar). They have a very light footprint in the United States, basically a warehouse on the West Coast, and that initially worried me.
Why aren’t they everywhere? Where are the resellers? How will I obtain service? My emailed questions were answered in English by HQ in China. To my satisfaction, though I still had doubts. Fear of the unknown.
The scanner is overhead rather than flatbed. An elevated arm floods the scanning platform (a black mat) with just the right kind and amount of light, from multiple angles.
An image of the targeted object appears on my computer screen. Using software controls I optimize the image and then press to scan it; pressing either a button on my screen, a button on my desk, or a pedal on the floor. That pedal expedites scanning of multi-part objects.
Anyone familiar with flatbed would be amazed, as I was, by the speed of this machine. Each scan takes about one second.
CEZUR ET24 Pro scanner configured by GMi for the Worlds and Letters pillars.
If the object I’m scanning is an open book (often it is), CEZUR software automatically corrects the position of the book and the roll of the pages. These two factors are death stars to optical character recognition, as I know from painful experience. Like magic, software makes a scanned object appear perfectly straight and flat on my computer screen, no matter how awry it is on the mat.
The magic continues with advanced OCR that transforms a two-page spread into separate consecutive pages. I can configure OCR for different languages.
The French language in many of George’s writings has been a minefield for me, because the conventional OCR I was using didn’t recognize uniquely French letterforms. That minefield is now clear. Electric sheep can graze there.
At last I batch export my optimized scans to Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word; the former is for reference images, the latter is to open in Apple Pages for initial editing (I prefer Pages to Word) before importing pristine text into Google Docs for final editing.
To those who have never suffered the technical woes of flatbed scanning or the time and expense of outsourced book scanning, this overview may seem trivial and boring. Everybody else may stand up and shout “Hail CEZUR.”
By George he’s got it!
I have previously mentioned A.O. Scott of the New York Times. He was formerly a movie critic, now he’s a literary critic of exceptional ability. Like Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books, he never fails to write well, no matter what the topic, and he always writes things that I find interesting if not inspiring. Take for example this quote from a book review:
“She belongs in an as-yet-undefined and perhaps undefinable class of prose artists who blend feeling and analysis, speculation and research, wit and instruction as they track down the elusive patterns and inescapable contradictions of modern experience.” 1
I wrote to Mr. Scott after reading his startling review, explaining that George Moore was a member of the distinguished class, perhaps even a founding member. He replied by assuring me that George is now on Anthony’s reading list!
I hope George won’t disappoint. Given Anthony’s exquisite taste, I doubt that he will. Because George wrote about himself, before Anthony or I were born, anticipating that we would someday come along:
“Other men write for money, or for fame, or to kill time, but we are completely disinterested. We are moved by the love of the work itself, and therefore can make sacrifices….” Hail and Farewell! Ave, (London 1911, page 73).
“An Ode to Gardens That’s Also a Bouquet of Idea,” by A.O. Scott in the New York Times, reviewing The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, by Olivia Laing. ↩︎
Detail of a picture of Westport House in County Mayo, Ireland, painted and signed by G. Moore in 1761. Property of the Westport Estate.
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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.
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.
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:
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!
