This final post is the second one responding to a passage from chapter four of Confessions of a Young Man:  Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me. In my last post, I examined what the word 'perverse' is doing in this passage. I suggested that Confessions draws upon a number of different meanings associated with the word ‘perverse’ that were floating around at the end of the nineteenth century. It is a ‘perverse’ text in form and contents, I claimed. And I want to say something very similar about the word ‘morbid’. Like ‘perverse’, several different meanings of ‘morbid’ are relevant to this passage from Confessions; and like ‘perverse’, the word ‘morbid’ acquired pa

I've been putting off writing this post for a bit now. When I started this blog, I explained that I hoped to use the exercise of writing about George Moore and Confessions of a Young Man to jumpstart a project that had been delayed by COVID. The aim was to write up some of the ideas that I'm going to use for a general introduction to a critical edition of Confessions . And so far that has worked fine (for me) - Moore is a fascinating and interesting person and Confessions is a complex and provocative text: all kinds of influences run through it. But one of the problems holding me back has been the crafting of a logical hook upon which to hang all the different ideas and topics that I'd like to fit into the introduction. The solution that I have in mind is to use the following passage from chapter four of Confessions: Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am

The critical edition of Confessions of a Young Man that I'm preparing is based on the text of the second book version that George Moore published in 1889 (only a year after he published it as a book). One of the major changes he made for that version of the book was the insertion of additional chapter, just before the end of the book. That chapter - chapter 12 of the 1889 version of Confessions  - is another example of how Moore experiments with narrative form in his book. It is set up for the most part, like the script of a play and it consists largely of a dialogue staged between the narrator and his own conscience. The chapter has no subtitle in the English version of the text, but Moore first published this chapter within a French translation that appeared in 1888. In that version the chapter was subtitled 'Examen de Minuit' (Midnight Examination or Thoughts at Midnight).  Some parts of Confessions deliberately complicate our understanding by introducing new or diverse

The Strand, 1887 (c) British Transport Museum As discussed in previous posts, much of Confessions of a Young Man is set in Paris and focusses upon different aspects of the literary and artistic scene in France at the end of the nineteenth century. However, half-way through the book the protagonist leaves Paris and moves to London. Whilst Confessions offers important space to consideration of English-speaking writers, such as Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson, it nevertheless remains strongly focussed upon France and French writers. Take Chapter 12, entitled 'Thoughts in a Strand Lodging', which opens: Awful Emma has undressed and put the last child away – stowed the last child away in some mysterious and unapproachable corner that none knows of but she; the fat landlady has ceased to loiter about my door, has ceased to pester me with offers of brandy and water, tea and toast, the inducements that occur to her landlady’s mind; the actress from the Savoy has

Having discussed some issues around the presentation of self in previous posts through particular influences and examples, this post is going to be a little more abstract. I'm going to consider some of the claims made by Max Saunders in his book, Self-Impression: Life-writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Writing (2010). This lengthy study examines the emergence of certain kinds of Modernist writing in the twentieth century out of late nineteenth-century biographical and autobiographical texts. Saunders' book is very handy because of the deft way in which it manages some of the terminology around these topics, considering labels such as biography, autobiography, life-writing and autobiografiction (I'll return to the latter in a bit). One starting point for Saunders is Philippe Lejeune's concept of 'formal autobiography' or 'contractual autobiography', 'in which real author, narrator, and the name on the title‐page all coincide, and seek

Caricature of Huysmans In my previous post on Moore and Huysmans I suggested that A rebours (1884)   and Confessions of a Young Man (1887) share a sense of equivocation or ambivalence that might be, in some respects, more truly Decadent than any reference to vice or excess. Another shared connection here is their relation to autobiography. Huysmans' creation, Des Esseintes was frequently taken to be modelled upon himself by critics. And  Confessions of a Young Man presents itself as an autobiography - from the second English edition of 1889, the narrator even shared the same name as the author. In both cases, however, autobiographical identifications are important, but complex and hard to sustain at certain points.*  So, in this post and the next, I'll explore some points around Confessions and its vexed and complex status as autobiography. My starting point is passage from early in chapter 1: I came into the world apparently with a nature like a smooth sheet of wax, bearing no

In the two previous posts, I discussed George Moore's relationship with Émile Zola, suggesting that Confessions of a Young Man reflected a change from admiration and emulation towards a more qualified, even distanced attitude by Moore towards the French novelist. In this post, I'm going to look at the links between Moore and another contemporary French writer, J-K Huysmans. For there are important parallels to be drawn here.  Huysmans is now best known for A rebours (1884), which relates the proclivities of a corrupt and ailing aristocrat, Jean Floressas des Esseintes. Forced into early retirement from Parisian social life by ill health, Des Esseintes retires to his Fontainbleau, where he puts his considerable resources to use in order to indulge his every whim and taste. This ranges from his cultivation of an extreme bibliophile (he commissions bound copies of Baudelaire's work for every day of the week), to sexual excesses (he pursues a complicated relationship with a ven