Cave's Annotated HAIL AND FAREWELL: Useful, But

206 Indians themselves like Chaman L. Sahni in "the Marabar Caves in the Light of Indian Thought" or those written.by critics of Jainist persuasion (like Benita Parry in Delusions and Discoveries, 1972). Das does much in a short book and demonstrates the inevitable coherence of Förster's thought about India, in his extensive corpus of writings about the country dating from 1913-1914 until late in his life. From now on, readers of Passage will have to consult Das to be fully informed about the references in the hovel to the world outside it and about Forster's own views on multi-faceted India. 1. Cave's Annotated HAIL AND FAREWELL: Useful, But Richard Cave (ed). Hail and Farewell, by George Moore (Toronto: Macmillan, 1976). Richard Cave's edition of George Moore's trilogy Hail and Farewell is both an admirable and a flawed work of scholarship. He has intelligently annotated the text with a total of 625 mostly informational footnotes and has provided an extensive index. He has also written a cogent general introduction, though several critical assertions are open to question: (a) "The Lake ... is one of Moore's finest works" because "there is no overt didactic intention" (p. 22) - no overt didacticism, perhaps, but didactically anti-Catholic nevertheless; thus a better explanation is needed why it is one of the "finest works"; (b) "Moore, like Yeats and Henry James, was an avid reviser of his work; unlike the revisions made by his two contemporaries, Moore's were usually sound improvements of his original text" (p. 43) - while often true for style, the comment is arguable in reference to his many tinkerings with structure and characterization and surely cannot be said for Lewis Seymour or Muslin or Vain Fortune. But Cave's major flaws are his casual dismissal of documentation and his confused and inaccurate presentation of the publishing history of the text, which together make his edition much less useful than it could have been. In his prefatory "Note on the Text" Cave states "It would have been an Alexandrian task to have annotated all the notes, citing the source of the information given there; instead a detailed bibliography of the works consulted in preparing this edition is included in the Appendices" (p. 44). This seems a bit disingenuous , for that bibliography is headed "Select Bibliography of the Principal Sources Consulted in Preparing the Notes to this Edition" and consists of only thirty titles, most of them standard. Documenting all 625 footnotes is, of course, clumsy and usually unnecessary, yet in some of them Cave provides apparently unique and authoritative commentary that is not gleaned from the cited references nor from other conventional sources that I am familiar with. Footnotes I67 on p. 697 and 184 on p. 749 are cases in point. In note I67 he identifies the "Stella" of the text as Moore's mistress Clara Christian, gives a brief sketch of her life and their relationship, then 207 remarks that few of Moore's "Dublin acquaintances were aware of the relationship; those who did meet her, held her in profound respect and were discreetly silent about her in their writing and conversation." Later, in note 184, Cave tells of Moore's separation from Miss Christian in 1904, speculates about the causes and effects, then reports her subsequent marriage to a Charles MacCarthy and her death in childbirth in 1906. It would be helpful to subsequent researchers to know where Cave got such information, especially since he himself admits that Dubliners were so uncommonly discreet about her. I suspect he picked it up here and there from personal contacts with other scholars and from digging around in various libraries. That seems implied in the "Note on the Text" where he thanks Alan Denson "for his unrivalled knowledge concerning AE and his circle readily communicated in his witty correspondence " and the late T. R. Henn "for his inspiration and encouragement over many years in pursuing my study of George Moore" (p. 44). But those acknowledgments do not constitute documentation by any means, and we are left to wonder at times about his sources. An equally vexing problem is his presentation of the publishing history...