George Moore and New Testament Biofiction: The Brook Kerith

George Moore was by no means the first to write a life of Jesus. The best known among his predecessors was Ernest Renan, whose Vie de Jésus (1863) attempted to strip back Jesus’s life to bare facts. But Moore was among the first to subject the figure to the fictionalizing and aestheticizing treatment that had already been seen in accounts of other biblical characters, notably Edgar Saltus’s Mary Magdalen: A Chronicle (1891) and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1891). But whereas Wilde wrote Salomé in French because he could not have published it in English at that time, Moore by contrast faced relatively little protest to the publication of The Brook Kerith (1916); his most significant opposition came, ironically, from Lord Alfred Douglas, who had translated Salomé into English.¹ For the rationalist commentator Chapman Cohen, the muted reaction to The Brook Kerith attested to increasing tolerance of novels of its type. Douglas’s outrage, he suggested, was a minority view:

Naturally, most of the reviewers have told Mr. Moore that he ought not to have done it. But with many one can detect a smile behind the reproof. . . .[N]one of them have been greatly shocked—except Lord Alfred Douglas. . . . Fifty years ago, such a work—even if it could have found a publisher—would have been received with howls of execration; it would almost certainly have been made the subject of a prosecution. Today a reputable firm gives it to the world, and “respectable” papers review it as a matter of course.²

The Brook Kerith might then be viewed as a watershed in the history of biblical biofiction, after which it seemed clear to many that even the life of Jesus could be treated as a subject. Indeed, one hundred years later, as this essay will suggest, the choice of Jesus as the subject of biofiction seems to some to be hardly more significant than the choice of any other historical character. Moore’s book and its reception marks a midway point; the question of what it meant to write a fictional life of Jesus was still live, even if not as the scandalous proposition it might once have been. Yet the task itself brought challenges that do not pertain to writing about other historical individuals. This essay describes some of these challenges and suggests that in relation to Moore we need to retain a sense of the difference it makes to choose Jesus as a subject when, as Winifred Holtby sees it, “New Testament stories [were] booming.”³

In his essay “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction,” Michael Lackey suggests that biofiction differs from biography in prioritizing the story over an accurate retelling of the subject’s life: “While authors of traditional and fictional biographies seek to represent the life (or a dimension of a life) of an actual historical figure as clearly and accurately as possible, biographical novelists forgo the desire to get the biographical subject’s life ‘right’ and use the subject to project their own vision of life and the world.”⁴ In traditional biography authors use fiction in the service of fact; even the most scrupulous of biographers resort to some degree of invention to fill the gaps in the historical record and to give life and interest to their subjects. For the author of biofiction, by contrast, the facts often serve the fiction, or, as the novelist Colum McCann explains in an interview published in this issue, the historical and biographical elements matter less than character and the particular truth that might be communicated through a figure in the novel.⁵ In Vie de Jésus Renan explains that he has supplemented the known facts of Jesus’s life with “une parte de divination et de conjecture” (guesswork and conjecture), but since his purpose is to give a more accurate picture of the historical Jesus, such speculation can take him only so far.⁶ Specifically, as Graham Holderness suggests, Renan thought that the life of Jesus must finish on the cross.⁷ The Brook Kerith does not end...