On His Honor: George Moore and Some Women

On His Honor: George Moore and Some Women ADRIAN FRAZIER Union College IN JULY of 1934, Joseph Hone, at work on his biography of George Moore, learned that the novelist's brother, Maurice, had received a most kind and affectionate letter of condolence from an American woman, Honor E. Woulfe, posted from Green Bay, Wisconsin. So he wrote asking if she perhaps had any of Moore's letters, or perhaps could supply him with memories of her friend. When Hone's query arrived, Honor Woulfe was no longer in Wisconsin; eventually, it was forwarded to her in Chicago. She had suffered setbacks, been the victim of accidents ; not until late February in 1936 did she answer Hone's letter, and by then the biographer was preparing the final state of his manuscript for Macmillan. Yes, she had some of his letters (thirteen in all),1 and she had her memories; what part of these might interest Hone, she could not say. She herself had written an essay on the kindly side of Moore, a side lost in the small set of hoary old anecdotes about him, told by Whistler and Wilde, Yeats and Susan Mitchell, depicting Moore as ignorant, gauche, malicious, or sexually inept. She knew another Moore altogether. Such remarks naturally excited the biographer. Hone had an April deadline for final insertions of new material, and he was eager to get whatever Honor Woulfe could tell him. On March 10, he sent off a more specific list of questions. Would she send him her essay as a guide to the kindly Moore? Could he quote from it? Could he publish letters GM had written her? Was there perhaps a portrait of her in one of Moore's writings and when did their relation begin? Only one of GM's friends had failed to be helpful, Hone wrote (thinking of Lady Cunard); all the others had been most kind—surely Honor would be too, he implied. No doubt, Maurice Moore and Hone both suspected that this Honor Woulfe, so kindly disposed to the kindly Moore, was the original of "Honor" in "Euphorion in Texas." This tale seems the most far-fetched, 423 ELT: VOLUME35:4 1992 the most bizarre of GM's fantasies. The ageing novelist sits in "an hour of firelight and memory," dreaming over letters that lie in his Sheraton bookcase, little packets of correspondence from women who, having read his books, wrote to seek his love.2 There was "Gabrielle," a lady from Austria, who asked him to come to Vienna and register under the name of Mr. Dayne, GM's pseudonym in the first editions of Confessions of a Young Man; "Emily," an Australian who after coming to Europe in her teens and marrying a man without charm from Frankfurt, asked the author oÃ- Evelyn Innes to meet her in a little town in Bavaria where she had earlier held assignations with a young lover; and an "American poetess" who sent the author snapshots of herself bathing in a mountain stream, and then, years later, met him in a Paris hotel. Searching for the letters of the American poetess, GM comes upon handwriting that he's nearly forgotten, that of Honor, a woman from Texas, who came from Austin to Dublin in order to conceive a child by the author of Sister Teresa, so that she might bring a great literature to Texas. Most of the story dwells upon the awkward and delicate, but quite touching negotiations between the nervous and idealistic American on her high mission, and the even more nervous but deeply flattered author. However, after his long account of the episode of the woman from Texas, he leaves little doubt that, in spite of this nearly disabling nervousness, they managed very well together during her six weeks in Dublin, and she left carrying his child back to America. What's more, she tells GM before going that he has been very kind, the very man she had expected from his books. "Conventional English education," Max Beerbohm observed of Moore's habits of amorous recollection, "instils into us a prejudice against that kind of disquisition."3 The prejudice is apparent in many of those...