A Peculiar Biography: George Moore

BOOK REVIEWS A Peculiar Biography: George Moore Tony Gray. A Peculiar Man: A Life of George Moore. London: Sinclair-Stevenson , 1996. vii + 344 pp. £20.00 AS MOORE'S BIBLIOGRAPHER it was with great anticipation that I opened this book, hoping it would be a worthy replacement for Joseph Hone's excellent, but now somewhat outdated, A Life of George Moore (1936). The need for a new biography, incorporating the significant amount of scholarship devoted to him and his works since his death in 1933, has long been recognized in spite of current neglect by the general reading public. Although the Anglo-Irish author, of whom it has been said that he "twice recreated the English novel" and who also was an important figure in the Irish literary revival at the turn of the century, has routinely been neglected or dismissed by modernist and postmodernist critics, he is still held in high esteem by many commentators, as can be seen by books about him in several languages and in the numerous articles in literary periodicals such as Cahiers Irlandais, Eire-Ireland, and ELT. As I started to read A Peculiar Man: A Life of George Moore by Irish author and journalist Tony Gray, I was in full agreement with his statement that Moore is "a very considerable writer whose work deserves to be far more widely read than it is today." When he went on to state that the aim of his book was "to reawaken interest of ordinary readers in an extraordinary man and his works" I was impressed and eager to proceed, but soon could not see how his sneering attitude toward his subject could help him reach his stated objectives. In the introduction, Gray explains that the book was written (compiled would have been a better word) to answer questions raised following the 1994 Cheltenham Festival of Literature, where Moore's Esther Waters was named winner of a "spoof centennial 1894 Booker Award, chosen from a group of six books originally published that year, and which had been reissued for the occasion as a special promotion by Everyman Paperbacks. Seemingly the general reaction to the announcement of the winner was "George Who?" It is indeed unfortunate that Gray's endeavor to answer that question and to remedy the neglect of a significant writer did not induce him to be more painstaking in the book's compilation, for it soon became apparent that his narrative is extremely slipshod and repetitive, with sources misread and editions frequently confused. The jacket states that Moore's life and career are "reconstructed" using his "own words and those of his contemporaries." 325 ELT 40:3 1997 True, for the book is essentially an assemblage of quotations and frequently inaccurate paraphrases of material from Hone's Life, his Moores of Moore Hall, books by other authors, and Moore's own writings, chiefly his published letters and autobiographical works. The result is an unreliable rehash of Hone and others, with far too much fiction and speculation interwoven in Gray's confused narrative. The book, like its subject, can best be described as "peculiar." It did not take long to realize that this obviously hastily written text is a glib travesty of authentic scholarship, worthless to any serious student of Moore, and a prime example of the slipshod technique of contemporary scissors-and-paste biographers. Questions regarding the book's accuracy began with the jacket and continued in the text where, in describing other titles considered for the award, two are listed that were not among those in the running; one of these, in fact, was published in 1892 and not in 1894. Expectations had by now turned to disillusionment as one error after another was noted. In discussing the lack of consistency in Moore's spelling of proper names in Confessions of a Young Man, Gray inquires, "Did he not have a copy editor or proofreader?" The same question certainly must be raised regarding this book, which is grotesque in the number of errors in quoted material, to say nothing of frequent fallacious interpretation of those quotations, unsubstantiated conclusions, and major errors of fact and dates for which there seems to be no logical...