In 1928 the American literary scholar William Lyon Phelps visited the Irish novelist George Moore, then aged 76, in his London home. In his autobiography, Phelps recalls that Moore’s conversation ranged over various topics including art, sex and ‘the utter worthlessness of the writings of Thomas Hardy’. In relation to his own work, Moore was preoccupied by the extent to which he had succeeded in improving his publications by correcting them and rewriting them, often many times over. ‘Just as I believe that the worst of all sins is bad writing’, Moore told Phelps, ‘so I believe that the highest virtue is found in corrections, in an author’s revisions. If you wish to estimate the true value of an author’s art, study his revisions’ (Phelps 1939, 820).
It may be, of course, that Phelps’s recall of Moore’s comment was not word perfect. But its general tenor certainly rings true with other things which Moore possibly said and definitely wrote about composition, and also with what is known of his own practice as a creative writer. Moore corrected, revised and rewrote his work constantly. First manuscript versions or, in later year, transcriptions of dictation, were scored through, over-written, and often abandoned altogether. Proofs generally afforded Moore the opportunity for the type of wholesale rethinking and revising that most authors would reserve for early rough drafts. Perhaps most strikingly of all, Moore rewrote nearly all of his novels after the apparently definitive process of publication had taken place. In several cases, he returned to his texts time and again, rewriting them successively over a period of years or even decades. His writing practice bore out his professed belief that literary style was the product entirely of hard work and not at all of inspiration; ‘unless’, as he explained to the writer Geraint Goodwin shortly after his encounter with Phelps, ‘the inspiration is in the corrections’ (Goodwin 1929, 23). A little later still he confided in Charles Morgan that ‘nothing that he wrote was of value unless it was revised’ (Morgan 1935, 3).
This book is about George Moore. Without attempting anything like a comprehensive study of the author or of his writings, it concentrates on a few of the works which he returned to after publication, and on some of the specific textual changes he made when he did so. One aim, then, is to find out something about the process of Moore’s writing, about why ‘the corrections’ which he mentioned to Goodwin were so important to him, a topic about which he was generally and uncharacteristically reticent. It is not possible, of course, to establish definitely what was in Moore’s mind as he made the corrections or what he was aiming to achieve: to determine the post-publication authorial intentions in his writing. But the traces of those corrections are there to be observed in the concrete differences between the various published versions of a single work. Their effects on style, on meaning and on reading process are open to discussion and interpretation, and this in turn can offer some reflected insight into why they might have been made.
More generally, then, this book is about the very specific procedure in literary creativity of ‘rewriting’, a term that will be used here exclusively for the process of revising a text after publication. For Moore in particular, rewriting became an essential component in his mode of operation as an artist. Malcolm Brown described Moore as developing ‘a philosophy of revision, which he came to consider not as a drudge chore but as an essential creative act, and at times he suggested that it was the only creative act’ (Brown 1955, 45). In the analyses of Moore’s work offered in the later chapters of this study, individual occasions of rewriting are considered as prime examples of exactly this type of creative and motivated act.
Following on from Brown’s observation, the individual instances of rewriting are considered here as specific linguistic acts, in the vein of the ‘speech acts’ identified and demarcated by the philosopher J. L. Austin. For every instance of saying something, Austin distinguished the ‘locutionary act’, or the actual form of words used and their associated meanings, from the ‘illocutionary act’, which is determined by the way in which or the intention with which that form of words is used (Austin 1962, 99). This in turn leads to, although it may not straightforwardly determine, a ‘perlocutionary act’, which is the effect on ‘the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience’ (Austin 1962, 101). In the same way, an individual act of rewriting takes a specific form on the printed page, was undertaken for a particular reason and will affect in perhaps several different possible ways how readers respond to the text. It is not possible to know why an author undertook a particular act of rewriting. But the ‘locutionary’ aspect of that act is evident from a comparison of two different published versions of a text and the ‘perlocutionary’ effect is available for introspective evaluation by the reader. If the author can be credited with knowing what he or she was about, something can be inferred about the possible ‘illocutionary’ intention with which the act was produced. In this way, studying rewriting can make a contribution to our understanding of the literary creative process.
This book is also about pragmatics. It trials an application of pragmatic theory to a new and very specific type of data, namely individual acts of post-publication literary rewriting. Pragmatics is the field of linguistic study which is concerned with the relationship between meaning and context. That is, it understands meaning not as a closed system but as negotiated in real time, a product not just of the language itself but of its speakers and hearers too. Pragmatic theories are attempts to explain how such potentially complex negotiations take place. To some extent they can be understood as attempts to explain systematically the gap between Austin’s locutionary and illocutionary acts, or more informally the gap between what our words literally mean and what we as speakers mean when we use those words. Much of present day pragmatic theory is concerned with some version of the distinction between what is made explicit and what is implicit, or left for the hearer to infer. Such a distinction in communicated meaning is of course a familiar enough concept, even a commonplace. But the daring claim of pragmatic theory is that it can be explained and systematised in relation to certain general principles of human behaviour, perhaps even of human cognition. Focusing on changes made in individual acts of literary rewriting allows for a close scrutiny of how the balance between the explicit and the implicit can be manipulated and altered. It therefore concentrates attention on the relationship that the reader is encouraged to establish with the text. Arguably, it tells us something about the literary style of a particular text, and about how it has been honed and developed during the process of rewriting.
As just one example, for now, consider the difference between initial and rewritten versions of a passage from Moore’s short novel The Lake. When he first published it in 1905, Moore described an experience of his protagonist, Father Oliver Gogarty, as follows:
Rewritten and republished in 1921, the passage reads as follows:How beautiful was everything—the white clouds hanging in the blue sky, and the trees! There were some trees, but not many—only a few pines. He caught glimpses of the lake through the stems; and tears rose to his eyes, so intense was his happiness, and he attributed his happiness to his native land and to the thought that he lived in it. (Lake, 1905, 76)
Moore’s single act of rewriting here has been to delete the five words ‘so intense was his happiness’; the passage otherwise remains unaltered. But as a result of this simple deletion the balance has shifted between what the reader is explicitly told about Father Oliver’s state of mind, and what the reader is expected to recover by inference. The link between Father Oliver’s tears and his happiness is still there, but it has to be worked out in an albeit straightforward process of relating his reaction to the natural beauty around him and his reflections ...How beautiful was everything—the white clouds hanging in the blue sky, and the trees! There were some trees, but not many—only a few pines. He caught glimpses of the lake through the stems; and tears rose to his eyes, and he attributed his happiness to his native land and to the thought that he lived in it. (Lake, 1921, 47)