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!
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.
Norham Castle, Sunrise (1845), oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner, in the Tate Britain, London (Wikimedia Commons). I was wondering about imagery that could symbolize the word RESURGAM. What are things that rise, that give and renew life, that help people know themselves and the objects of there desires? The sun, of course! The sun also rises every 24 hours and performs uncountable miracles without blinking, while we do other things. Having settled on the sun as my thematic image for Resurgam NFP, almost immediately I thought of the artist J.M.W. Turner. He was an unclassifiable genius who painted Impressionist art before there was Impressionist art — “My job is to paint what I see, not what I know.” Turner’s aesthetics and practices resonate with George Moore’s, and George fully appreciated Turner’s brilliance. So here is a sunrise by Turner, one that George himself enjoyed looking at, one that says with colors as George said with words, “RESURGAM — I shall rise again.”
As we approach the dawn of 2025, today I’ll begin by thanking my heroes — volunteers and donors — who stepped up in 2024 to help the cause. I want to see more of them as GMi flourishes next year. Whether or not I do, I warmly appreciate their demonstrated good will and support.
Samuel Becker
Charles Deane
Kheir Fakhreldin
Kathi Griffith
Mark Samuels Lasner
Ken Long
Richard Miles
Michael O’Shea
Michele Reardon
Claudette Walsh
James Walter
As of this writing, GMi has published 1,286 meaty web pages and 11 full-length ebooks of George Moore’s first editions. Heroes, we’re amazing!
Resurgam NFP
In November, I announced the formation of Resurgam NFP. I have now completed registration of the new not-for-profit corporation in the State of Illinois.
Resurgam has a board of directors, articles of incorporation, a federal employer identification number, and a web domain; website to follow.
Bylaws
My very next step is to draft the bylaws. These are principles and practices that will govern Resurgam in the conduct of business and fulfillment of its mission.
Part of writing bylaws is deciding the kinds of people who may join Resurgam as officers and members of the corporation. Resurgam is going to employ a few talented individuals with credentials in:
tax accounting
legal council
communications
grantseeking
technology assessment
None will start with a salary; each will begin as a volunteer although in time I expect officers and members of the corporation to be compensated in line with our not-for-profit charter.
We’re Hiring
Do you have time and talent to spare for a cause? If you have a passion for art and literature of yesteryear, and if your skills happen to align with the functions listed above, please contact me to discuss joining Resurgam.
I should add that Resurgam has formed to help kickstart the literary legacy of George Moore, but not only for that. The mission is more inclusive: to provide funding for legacies in addition to George’s.
For example, I would love to do something for the legacy of Joris-Karl Huysmans of France, Robert Louise Stevenson of Scotland, and Ralph Waldo Emerson of the United States. All three are literary titans whose fame is not matched by their accessibility and utility. They and many more like them are ready for a kickstart in the digital age.
You may have different favorites whom you’re working on or wondering about. Resurgam NFP will soon be able to welcome your proposal.
Tax Exemption
After Resurgam directors sign off on our bylaws, my next step will be to prepare an application to the United States Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status. Compared with formation at the state level, IRS certification at the national level is more complex and deliberate.
Not a problem though. I have studied the instructions, they are not rocket science. I plan to finish my IRS application by the end of March 2025. After approval, institutional grantseeking will begin.
Targeting
Even before bylaws are written and tax exemption is secure, I will join Forefront, the organzation here in Chicago that helps grantmakers and grantseekers find each other.
Having dabbled in grantseeking in the past, I know how bewildering and time-consuming it can get; like navigating a maze! Forefront will provide Resurgam with community, context and counsel for finding our way to the money. By the time Resurgam is tax-exempt, we should have a qualified list of grantmakers to approach and an understanding of how to approach them.
Off Comes a Fig Leaf
George Moore serialized his freshest essays about Ireland in a French newspaper, Le Figaro, July-September 1886. He wrote his essays in English; his handwritten text was translated into French by somebody named M.F. Rabbe and published under a collective title: Lettres sur I’lrlande.
(By the way, if you know anything about M.F. Rabbe, you are way ahead of me. Like Bernard Lopez, Rabbe is an important figure in George’s biography who is AWOL from the historical record.)
Soon after Lettres sur I’lrlande, George augmented his series for book publication. Still written in English, and still translated by M.F. Rabbe, the expanded essays werepublished as Terre d’Irlande in Paris, March 1887.
Not long after Terre d’Irlande, George’s original English manuscript was published in London as Parnell and his Island, May 1887.
Or was it? The correct answer is, not quite.
By their own account, his London publisher Messrs. Sonnenschein “mutilated” the text of Terre d’Irlande before publishing the first and only English edition. Their reasons were commercial rather than literary.
By self-censoring the text, the publisher hoped to avoid yet another book ban by English booksellers and librarians. All of George’s books had been banned up to that time. (And guess what: the expurgated Parnell and his Ireland would be banned as well!)
Ban or no ban, on its way from Terre d’Irlande to Parnell and his Island, George Moore’s manuscript was expurgated before it was printed, without his help and over his objections.
No unexpurgated text of Parnell and his Island has ever been published. But GMi is about to change that.
Our first step will be to make a GMi ebook of Terre d’Irlande. An ebook will kickstart the French text in the digital age so it can be treated to the same textual analysis as the rest of the canon, by humans and machines.
The second step, a bit more nuanced, will be to translate Terre d’Irlande into something that looks, sounds and feels like George Moore’s English. That process will require preserving the author’s unexpurgated English, and restoring the expurgated text from the earlier French translation.
Because no manuscript is extant, it will be necessary to synthesize two different printed texts, in two languages, that have survived.
The printed texts are:
The augmented second publication in French
The expurgated third publication in English
I’m unsure whether it is also necessary to analyze the earliest serialized text in French, which may be regarded as the true first. That is to be determined.
Parnell and his Island (1887) and Confessions of a Young Man (1888) are rarely read together, but they’re really two peas in a pod.
They’re both autobiographical, both meditations on the author’s origins and values, both written at about the same age, both published at nearly the same time by the same publisher, and both for the same purpose: to turn the attention of a realistic novelist inward, upon himself, and to make of himself an entirely new aesthetic proposition.
Both of these books belong side by side on your digital shelf.
Progress on Letters
The Letters pillar of GMi now encompasses 1863-1887. All extant letters written during the emergence of George Moore as a memoirist are freely available. They’re somewhat revealing, helpful to a degree, and will become even more helpful when the letters of 1888 are added. Those are already on the workbench.
Speaking of “his Island“
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (2018) is by Patrick Radden Keefe. I haven’t read the book, but I recently watched a nine-hour series based on it that is streaming on Hulu. It is brilliant, but so very, very uncomfortable!
My own first visit to Ireland occurred in 1976, only four years after the pivotal murder of the book’s title. Struggling to sense and relate to Irish culture, which was all new to me, I remember saying to myself without knowing why: “I have come among crazies; this alien nation proverbially “is and it isn’t.”
Say Nothing reprises that feeling, only with the book and film, it is possible for me to see more behind the curtain and begin to understand behavior that, at face value, didn’t compute.
One example of “it is and it isn’t” comes at the end of every episode of the series, when a disclaimer concerning Gerry Adams fills the screen.
Indeed, Adams was and he wasn’t, is and he isn’t. Or as George Moore may say when we’ve re-animated him, not everything has changed on his Island.
More books for George
Soon after my November newsletter, I finished reading Certain Artists, by Joris-Karl Huysmans, in the vivid translation by Brendan King (Sawtry: Dedalus, 2021).
Certain Artists is the second of two volumes of Huysmans’ art criticism from the same translator. Like the first, Modern Art, it throws exquisite light on the obscure rise of French Impressionism and decline of Neoclassicism.
In Certain Artists, Huysmans wandered into some of the weirdest and most unsettling byways of modernism that I’m aware of; actually, that I wasn’t aware of until now.
George Moore also observed and explored that terra incognita, but with less vigor, rigor and candor. After all, he was British! How wonderful now to imagine a conversation between JK and GM; and even more than imagine, to create a simulation of their conversation with generative AI.
GMi is inching towards that simulation, and the conversation is going to include all of us!
Certain Artists is a masterpiece by any standard: a must-read for everybody who cares about visual arts in the late nineteenth century and the culture that formed a background for George Moore’s life and work.
When I said as much to Brendan, he replied that his translation of yet another volume of Huysmans’ art criticism is in the works. Bravo!
Two portraits by John Butler Yeats in the National Gallery of Ireland. On the left is Edward Martyn in 1899. A patron of the arts and author, Martyn is George Moore’s foil in Hail and Farewell! Ave (1911). On the right is George Russell in 1898. An artist and author who used the pseudonym Æ, Russell is Moore’s foil in Hail and Farewell! Salve (1912). These two volumes of the great trilogy are now live on GMi.
Last month I enthused about Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The exhibition epitomizes art during George Moore’s formative years without mentioning him. (He studied painting in Paris in 1874, but was 22 years old and hadn’t cracked his shell.)
Today I’m enthusing about Anka Muhlstein’s The Pen and the Brush (2017). Like the exhibition, her book helps me see George’s emergent aestheticism in shimmering context!
She doesn’t seem to mention George Moore (I’m not sure because the book is not indexed). Moreover she opens with an erroneous claim that “In England, [Virginia] Woolf would be the first to write about the influence painting had on literature.”
Nonetheless The Pen and the Brush is a marvelous account of reciprocity between nineteenth century painters and novelists, starting with the beloved Balzac and including other French writers who incubated George Moore and got him to hatch.
The Hungarian original may also be unreadable; I don’t know about that. My mother was Hungarian but didn’t teach me her native language. Csak angolul beszélek.
I haven’t read Herscht 07769, yet I know it’s unreadable because its 400 insane pages consist of a single sentence. László may be emulating Jimmy, the Irish genius who wrote famously unreadable novels a hundred years ago and who purportedly said, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”
Setting aside the pedagogical question, who cares what he meant? we may wonder if ensuring one’s immortality is a priority, or even the business, of a novelist? If you’re a professor, perhaps you think it is. Your job is explaining enigmas and puzzles to kids and colleagues.
Others like myself think not. The priority and business of a novelist, from my point of view, is to delight and edify, in that order. Meaning the right to edify is earned with a passage through delight.
Readers may be delighted and edified by many different literary things (for me it’s the prose of George Moore). Nonetheless, I’m pretty sure that a 400-page sentence ain’t one of them.
Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic indirectly reinforced my view in her essay about “Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books.”
We know that college English studies have been a slow moving train wreck for half a century. Now adding to its chronic woes, according to Rose, is the discovery that undergraduates cannot, and don’t want to, read immortal texts that were written for their teachers; texts that have to be explained to be understood; texts that have to be studied to be enjoyed; texts that meander for countless pages without a period or paragraph break.
Experts suggest that this new problem may be caused by technology, or by mentally limited readers, or anything other than the texts themselves. Thus they recognize the symptoms of educational decadence, but I suspect that they miss the cause.
And what else can we expect when Garth Risk Hallberg, the author of that Times book review, ranks László as a “master” and László’s novels as bona fide “masterpieces.”
Thanks perhaps to James Joyce and his acolytes, the unreadable often feels like the acme of serious literary publishing; befuddlement is the bar to which serious novelists aspire in order to ensure their immortality.
George Moore did not aspire to immortality. He did not try to confuse readers and he didn’t care about professors one way or another. His artistic goals were to delight and edify, in that order.
Why George?
I recently started my first Gofundme Campaign. The purpose is worthwhile, the goal is modest and attainable. So say I!
Donors will share credit for bringing an important part of a fine writer’s canon out of the analog crypt, into our world of art and literature, and back to life (digitally).
After launching the Campaign I decided to use my voice and face to do some of the asking. I drafted the video script that I’m sharing below.
The script may change before the camera rolls, but if you approve the draft — your donation is always welcome.
The Script
I met George Moore nearly forty years after he died.
Not George in the flesh, of course.
I met his legacy as a venerable and eclipsed man of letters.
I started reading his novels and stories, then memoirs, then plays and poems, then essays, and even read his bibliography line by line.
Finally I read some of the unpublished letters he wrote to friends and family and many others.
And I was smitten.
My reading for pleasure morphed into research.
Research morphed into editing.
Editing morphed into publishing.
(I’ve overlooked collecting — about 500 volumes so far!)
On and off for about 50 years, George has been a friend.
Actually more than a friend.
He grounded and centered me as I matured and changed.
Even when I changed almost beyond recognition, he held a mirror that showed who I am.
Ironically I guess, this transformative and contrarian author has been my compass and safe harbor.
He inspired a pastime, a vocation, a hobby, and ultimately a lifelong passion.
And he did all that without ever telling me why.
The question is still open: Why George?
Why have I devoted such time and resources to him?
Why should others care enough to donate?
Nobody has an economic or moral incentive, so why bother?
This question hasn’t occurred to me before now.
That may be because, by nature, I do what I want.
And rarely pause to explain why, even to myself.
But now it’s different.
When accepting donations on behalf of George, I have a duty to explain why him, and also why me?
Not because George is the greatest writer of his generation, or his tradition, or his country, or even the greatest writer I’ve read.
George isn’t “the greatest.”
Superlatives have nothing to do with him (or with me).
Rather than “the greatest,” to me he’s just sympatico.
Sympatico means I get him as easily as I breathe, and I believe he gets me in my pose as a skeptical reader.
He knows that I have zero tolerance for insincerity, or vulgarity, or triviality and foolishness, and he likes that about me.
It’s something we have in common.
As a writer, despite his flaws, he made his own life and mine more beautiful.
Not better, because better isn’t the point for somebody like George Moore.
His forte is beauty for its own sake; the proverbial gem-like flame.
This is why I’m trying to bring him back to life with technology.
The second volume of George Moore’s autobiography Hail and Farewell! is named Salve. Along with the first volume Ave, it is now a free ebook in the GMi Shop.
All the chapters of both volumes are also posted in the Worlds pillar of this website, where they can be read, searched and commented. Ave has 104,958 words; Salve has 107,454.
I was intrigued by the way George wove his memoirs around the identities of two boon companions: Edward Martyn in Ave and George Russell in Salve.
Each man was an archetype of the Irish Literary Revival that George witnessed and joined for a time. They are foils to an author whose archetype is different, uncertain and still emerging.
Next up for GMi is the third volume of Hail and Farewell!Vale. With that, I will have placed all of George’s autobiographical writing online, in one place, in a way that is useful to human readers and tomorrow’s machine learners.
Detail from an undated photograph of George Moore with Édouard and Marie Dujardin to his right and Wanda Landowska to his left, at Dujardin’s home Le Val Changis near Fontainebleau, France. I scanned and colorized a black and white print in my collection. See the Iconography of George Moore for more images and information.
Shelves in the GMi Shop are (awkwardly) kinda bare. Remember though, a shingle was hung only yesterday!
But check this out: a few things are now in the shop window: e-books of Martin Luther (1879), A Mummer’s Wife (1885), Avowals (1919), and Conversations in Ebury Street (1924). Each is edited by me, contains the text of the first English edition, and costs about the same as a cup of morning joe.
What? that’s too expensive? I agree, the price really should be free, but for structural reasons I can’t give titles away in the Kindle Store. Instead I do that in George Moore Interactive. The contents of these e-books are published hereabouts in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars, for free.
The dual publications are not duplicative. Readers who want to enjoy Moore’s writing will do that better with Kindle editions. Those digital texts are faithful to the printed originals; moreover they aren’t cluttered with new introductions that tend, in my experience, to prevent the average reader from enjoying what follows.
Instead of opening with a pooh-bah’s footnoted explanation of what the book means to him or her or them, readers of these e-books dive in and decide what it actually means to themselves. An experience of engagement and discovery, lofted by canonical text, is attainable.
This is partly what I mean when I talk about “kickstarting literary legacies in the digital age.” Empowering everyday readers to read what and how they want, primarily for the sake of personal enjoyment rather than edification. I am guided here by (George) Moore’s Law that “education is of no help to anybody except teachers” (see Chapter 17, Conversations in Ebury Street).
Yet there is more than enjoyment to reading in the digital age.
Readers who also want to scrutinize and interrogate the canon, and explore its larger historical context, will do that better on the GMi website. Here they can see what Moore was working on before and after each of his books came out. Here they can search his texts for keywords in order to find and connect dots of particular interest to themselves (and the author).
They can even share their thoughts by attaching questions and comments to canonical writing for fellow readers to ponder and discuss. And they can view pictures of their author around the time he wrote; of people who turn up in his writings; and of places where he wrote. For an immersive experience of the “life and work.”
Of greater importance to me (text maven that I am), they can point out errors in my transcriptions of the canon — typos, formatting — that I may correct and thus make better for readers who come after. (I say maycorrect because some errors appear to be intentional and self-expressive; beyond my reach.)
Readers can do all of those sticky things on the GMi website. I have also unlocked the gates to GMi stacks in the cloud where all of my transcripts and scans of printed and handwritten texts are filed. Unlocking the gates allows readers to search the canon globally, rather than one document at a time.
You can tell if you glanced at my uniform e-book cover design, my goal is to publish the entire GM canon in George Moore Interactive and the Kindle Store. That way, when future visitors to the website converse with the great man himself (AI generated), and he says something intriguing or puzzling (true to form), they can follow up by seeing just where he was coming from. Instantly and for free!
Next up for digital kickstart: Confessions of a Young Man. This remarkable expat memoir of 1888 (the author was 36) is the first (to my knowledge) Irish portrait of the artist as a young man. James Joyce followed some 30 years later (when he was 34) with the second.
Stochastic Dialogue
Creative writings like plays (Martin Luther) and novels (A Mummer’s Wife) are internally all of a piece. Their linear narratives are bookended by opening and closing acts; and their mass — from 20,000 to 150,000 words — is all one thing, date-stamped on the day of publication.
Critical writings are different. Avowals and Conversations in Ebury Street are nonlinear; their various chapters are discrete essays in art criticism, literary criticism, and worldbuilding; most are in English, one is in French, several are generously endowed with French interpolations; some essays were previously published in periodicals, others appeared for the first time in hardcover; but all were ultimately arranged in no discernible order.
The essays may be read in any order; their published sequence is neither chronological nor prescriptive and does nothing to enhance the meaning or coherence of each one. In effect, the placement is random.
GMi Kindle editions of Avowals and Conversations in Ebury Street preserve the placement of essays in the printed books. Not so the pillars of George Moore Interactive, where each essay is handled as separate document (what it is, in fact).
The rhetorical format of some essays in Conversation in Ebury Street is (as you’d expect) a dialogue between people. What you might not expect, given the book title, is that some essays are not dialogues, but straightforward articles.
Same goes for Avowals, which also veers from the straight and narrow path implied by its title into the format of dialogue or a lecture written entirely in French (years before revised publication in this book).
The bottom line is this: like much of George Moore’s writing, these two books of criticism don’t follow any rules. What they have in common are contrarian principles of self-expression and open aesthetic inquiry.
The essays are “all over the place” yet somehow present in the moment, and always “wholly and irreparably given to art” as Moore wrote about himself. They are confessional, yes, for sure; and also meandering like a conversation you would enjoy with an old friend in the garden or in front of a fire.
French agon
“Shakespeare et Balzac” is the lecture in French that appears as Chapter 13 of Avowals. A bit challenging for me to transcribe with the French alphabet, but a walk in the park compared to another essay that I recently published in the Aesthetics pillar: “Le Poète Anglais Shelley.”
I obtained a human-readable scan of this 1886 article from RetroNews, but since it was not machine-readable, I had to type all 3,200 French words. This was a bona fide agon between my old and young selves.
I think I got it right for the most part. If a French-fluent volunteer wishes to check my transcript for errors and send me corrections, I will be more than a little grateful. Step up on the Volunteer page of the GMi website.
At Le Val Changis
Speaking of context, years ago I visited the elderly Marie Dujardin at her home in a suburb of Paris. She is the unnamed young woman pictured in Joseph Hone’s The Life of George Moore (facing page 400):
She was previously mentioned in Chapter 14 of Conversations in Ebury Street; that chapter was George’s impressionist memoir of Le Val Changis, the home of Marie’s much older husband Édouard Dujardin. The memoir evokes the splendor and charm of the place, where George was an annual guest for several years.
Before my visit ended, Mme. Dujardin pulled a box from under her bed and retrieved the photograph that I placed at the top of this post. I call it Les lauriers sont coupés for obvious reasons. I asked Marie what George was like, as a friend and fellow writer and houseguest, and she answered with only one word: égoïste.
I can relate…
My personal fondness for George began in the early 1970s when Professor Warren Herendeen at New York University told me to read Esther Waters. I was already fascinated by modernism, without even knowing what it was; and this novel, by this author, seemed like the acme of that “transitional” movement.
A few years later, after earning my PhD in England with research on the letters of Moore, and after a postdoc and stints of undergraduate teaching, I decided to leave academia for a lot of good reasons, which we won’t go into. My work on GM ceased and I became just a collector.
Sure as I was and am about the wisdom of that decision, now that I am back in a wholehearted quest for George Moore, I am reliving the fascination that hooked me at the beginning. And thinking about roads not taken, as one should from time to time.
All of this is preamble to a quote I stumbled upon in Chapter 8 of Conversations in Ebury Street, a quote that illustrates a point I like to make about this project: that George Moore is a major writer whose legacy has much, very much to offer readers today.
In this quote he describes himself pivoting from a first choice of career to a second. He did not regret it, he did not second-guess it, but he acknowledged that the experience helped to make the man he became:
A man who leaves his profession faces the world naked and ashamed — ashamed because to leave the road he has chosen to walk in is a confession of failure, naked because he has to put off the old man (exact knowledge), and live henceforth amid ecstasies, dreams, aspirations; humble aspirations, mayhap, but aspirations after all. Think, reader, what a shock it is for a man to leave one self without knowing that he can acquire another self. I shed tears, and the bitterest.
