The Source of the Christian River: The Function of Memory in George Moore's The Brook Kerith

%0 26 THE SOURCE OF THE CHRISTIAN RIVER: THE FUNCTION OF MEMORY IN GEORGE MOORE'S THE BROOKKERITH By Thomas C. Ware University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Almost no reader of George Moore's "naturalistic" novels in the 1880s and '90s could have projected the remarkable phases his career would undergo in the twentieth century. Already in his late forties by the turn of the century, and by anyone's standards one of the ranking authors in the English-speaking world, Moore would, over the next three decades, continue to develop new directions, new interests, new modes of literary expression; but in the process he would also alienate himself from many of his colleagues and contemporaries—certainly most of his Irish contemporaries—and ultimately from much of his potential audience. Although he was frequently crass and vindictive in his social behavior, few authors have seemed so willing as he to take great risks to forgo popular success, to abandon established personal relationships, or to create animosity towards himself, principally for what he regarded as discoveries about art: in his case, the art of fiction, but whatever the genre, Art with a principal "A." In June of 1903, Moore wrote "Life has no other goal but life, and art has no other end but to make life possible, to help us to live. As soon as one puts one's hopes in another world, life becomes dreary and ugly and art makes itself scarce."1 This passage comes from a letter to his friend Edouard Dujardin, who was then Professor of the History of Primitive Christianity at the Sorbonne and embarked on a study of Judaic origins: its title to be La Source du Fleuve Chrétien. The argument of Dujardin's book, as described by Richard Cave in his study of George Moore, focused on difficulties in gospel accounts of the Crucifixion, arising from the evangelists' attempts to conflate the ritual of the "hanged god" (common in Middle Eastern religions) with a historical judicial execution, performed by the Romans.2 From what we now know, the very title of Dujardin's book—with its metaphorical possibilities of flow and movement—ravished Moore, who had immersed himself in Biblical exegesis and had become fascinated by the historical figure of St. Paul, whom he regarded as the real progenitor of Christianity. In 1903, Moore was living in Dublin, having returned to his native land in search of new ideas and new subjects to fuel his smoldering literary career. At the time he wrote this letter, Moore was at work on The Lake, a novella 27 Ware: The Brook Kerith about a provincial Irish priest who ultimately rejects his religious vocation and escapes to America.3 Joseph Hone, GM's foremost biographer, noted that in this story Moore was guilty of two engaging larcenies of nomenclature.4 His priest-character bore the twin-dactyllic name of Oliver Gogarty, familiar certainly to many Dubliners. (For the uninitiated, he was the real-life prototype of Malachi Mulligan, the "Buck Mulligan" of James Joyce's Ulysses.) Another of Moore's characters in The Lake, a scholar named Ralph Ellis, who never appears but of whom much is heard, has authored a work of exegesis called The Source of the Christian River. The character of Paul and the "source" of Christianity would continue to pervade Moore's imagination. Shortly before leaving Ireland for good, he published a hastily written work entitled The Apostle, first in the English Review of June 1910, and later, in 1911, as a book of the same title. Though subtitled "A Drama in Three Acts," it should more properly be regarded as a scenario, issued, as Moore's bibliographer Edwin Gilcher has asserted, to stake out and protect the idea later to be developed in his novel The Brook Kerith.5 This idea, intriguing, preposterous, haunting, and heretical, was the accidental meeting of Paul of Tarsus and Jesus of Nazareth, who in this "drama"—as in the later novel—remains alive some twenty years after his crucifixion at Golgotha. It would be another half-dozen years before Moore's development of this concept would be completed; but even as he left Ireland to...