George Moore and Esther Waters: A Play

318 works of Woolf and Joyce, Beerbohm's channel can now be seen to run parallel to the course of such writers as Nabokov and Borges. . . . beneath the immediate satire there is a residue of sensitive social criticism. Few writers have explored as penetratingly as Beerbohm the roles of the writer in the modern world: the writer as artist, seer, celebrity, and producer of consumer goods, (p. 164) Less lively, certainly, than John Felstiner's wideranging The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohm's Parody and Caricature (1972), which jumps from fascinating tidbit to conversational tribute, Grushow's book moves carefully along a theoretical description of Max's technical development. It proceeds historically, with the major omissions indicated above, to examine Max's career in terms of his increasing skill in dealing with the various changes to be rung on the concept of "the imaginary reminiscence," concluding with the opinion that, in exhausting the possibilities of the form. Max had virtually exhausted what he himself frequently described as his small gifts. Following Grushow's progress in tracing Max's work to this end is a thoroughly rewarding, though occasionally arduous, journey. Pespite the narrowed limits of the discussion and the paucity of its graphics, the book is certainly required reading for the true "Maximi11ian." Carl Markgraf Portland State University 8. GEORGE MOORE ANO ESTHER WATERS: A PLAY W. Eugene Pavis. The Celebrated Case of Esther Waters. Lanham, MP., New York, and London: Univ. Press of America, 1984. Cloth $22.75 Paper $10.50 George Moore's position in the literary pantheon appears secure in spite of some critical neglect following his death in 1933 and he continues to be of interest to many scholars. In fact the Anglo-Irish author and his books have been the subject of critical attention by reviewers and commentators for more than a century. The full range of this interest will be evident with the publication of George Moore: An Annotated Bib!iography of Writings About Him (AMS Press, 1985) . Even with this vast amount of material, the explication of his works has not yet become the "cottage industry" lavished on two of his compatriots, Yeats and Joyce, though scholarly interest continues at a slower pace. Recently four 319 books have been published, each contributing to a better understanding of Moore and his works, with two containing previously unpublished material by him. The most recent of these, apparently aimed specifically at Moore specialists, is The Celebrated Case of Esther Waters by W. Eugene Pavis, which is not another study of the famous novel. A truer description of the book's contents is in its subtitle, The Collaboration of George Moore and Barrett H1 Clark on "Esther Waters: A Play". The original play (produced in London in 1911 and published in 1913) was an unacknowledged collaboration, as it was no secret that Lennox Robinson had worked on it. Years later he related that "in the end my only contribution to it was the second act—the baby farm scene, written in my most realistic Cork manner." As Pavis notes, Moore's almost lifelong preoccupation with writing for the stage generally involved collaboration. So it was natural that in the early 1920s when he decided to rewrite his earlier play for inclusion in a projected (but never published) volume, he should seek a collaborator and turned to the young American Barrett Clark for assistance, at the same time possibly envisioning a profitable production in the United States. It is this failed effort that Pavis deals with in his book, as he did previously in two article published in Papers on Language J1 Literature (13:1, Winter 1977) and ELT (24:4, 1981). Included here are the texts of the two versions of the play that emerged, one that Moore claimed to be wholly his own (although the evidence shows that it was not) and the other by Clark "based on George Moore's novel." In his introductory discussion, Davis gives the salient points of his previous research, plus a more detailed account of the collaboration than that given while Moore was still alive by Clark in "George Moore at Work" in American Mercury (February 1925). This article was...