Thoughts in a Strand Lodging

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 ceased to walk up and down the street with the young man who accompanied her home from the theatre; she has ceased to linger on the doorstep talking to him, her key has grated in the lock, she has come upstairs, we have had our usual midnight conversation on the landing, she has told me her latest hopes of obtaining a part, and of the husband whom she was obliged to leave; we have bid each other good-night, she has gone up the creaky staircase.

This paragraph seems to root us in the particular details of the narrator’s living circumstances in London. It sets the scene by recapitulating details provided in the previous chapter about the other people living in and around the lodgings that the protagonist rents, just off the Strand. These include the servant girl, Emma and his landlady and an unnamed actress, who lodges in one of the other rooms. The hints about her marital history help to confirm the seedy milieu of this chapter and the narrator's life in London.


J.K. Huysmans
Although rooted in London, the narrator’s thoughts in this chapter keep turning back to Paris as a kind of antidote to his present circumstances:
Sometimes, at night, when all is still, and I look out on that desolate river, I think I shall go mad with grief, with wild regret for my beautiful appartement in Rue de la Tour des Dames.

Fretting at his current living arrangements circumstances, the narrator's thoughts about Paris turn most frequently to recent French literature. ('I wish I had a volume of Verlaine, or something of Mallarmé’s to read.') For this reason, the chapter incorporates lengthy paraphrase and loose translation from work by J.K. Huysmans, the master of French Decadence. Eager to revive his previous Parisian life, he digs out old copies of the magazine La Vogue and translates two prose poems by Mallarmé from it into English.

Edouard Manet, 'George Moore' c. 1878
(c) Metropolitan Museum
The French connections in this chapter of Confessions stretch deeper though: they reach beyond such explicit surface references. The very form of the chapter is suggestive of French influences too. Note the way that the passage I quoted above is written in the first person and takes us into the present moment of narration (‘Awful Emma has undressed’ etc.). Compared with other chapters of the book, ‘Thoughts in a Strand Lodging’ is written in this way to capture a sense of the narrator’s immediate situation and his responses to the world around him - at the moment of narration. The text of the chapter is divided by extended dashes into groupings of such moments within the narrator’s thoughts.

This form is similar to the fragmented approach Moore adopts in the ‘Synthesis of the Nouvelle Athènes’ chapter I discussed in a previous post. That chapter seeks to capture the collective voices of the clientele in a Parisian café. In contrast, (as the title suggests) ‘Thoughts in a Strand Lodging’ is designed to convey the interior world and subjectivity of a single character - the narrator.

J-E Blanche, 'Portrait of Edouard Dujardin'
Moore is adopting here a technique known as ‘interior monologue’, which was pioneered by his friend Edouard Dujardin in Les Lauriers sont coupés (published in 1887 as Moore was working on Confessions). This transformation of a character's thoughts into a free-flowing internal monologue form would later be perfected by Moore’s Irish compatriot, James Joyce in Ulysses (1922).

In conclusion, I want to note how these further, deeper, formal connection with Dujardin complicate our understanding of Moore’s literary affiliations in this chapter. Huysmans was linked with Decadence; Mallarmé was linked with Decadence, but also with Symbolism. In comparison, Dujardin’s approach is more strongly connected with literary Impressionism. So into which of these literary categories, if any, should we fit Moore?

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