"Alms-Giving" and "So He Fares" by George Moore

"Alms Giving" (1903, 12 pages, included in The Untilled Field)
"So He Fares" (1903, 15 pages, included in The Untilled Field)

The Irish Quarter-March 11 to July 1

A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

A Few Days with George Moore

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Posts by Participants

Prior Post on George Moore

Please consider joining us for The Irish Quarter,  Year Two.   Everything you need to participate is in the resources page, including links to 1000s of short stories, from brand new ones to stories now in the public domain.   Guests posts are also welcome.

This will be my last post during The Irish Quarter Year Two on stories included by George Moore in his great work, The Untilled Field.   There are thirteen items in the collection, three of them are over sixty pages and I will for sure come back to this collection and read them at some point in the future.   I am very close to adding George Moore to The Reading Life list of Great Short Story Writers of All Time.   I plan to read very soon his consensus best novel, Esther Moore and as many of his shorter works as I can find online.   I have praised Moore highly in my other posts on him and here I am just going to briefly remark on two of the shorter works in the collection.   

"Alms Giving" is a very interesting story about the relationship of a man of at least comfortable financial status and a blind beggar.  I think the greatness in this story is the way Moore shows how the richer man comes to see the humanity in the beggar, to see him as a person in many ways surprisingly like himself.   He begins to give the beggar every day a very small to him donation, placing a coin of the lowest denomination in the box in front of the beggar.   He sees the beggar suffers the terrible cold and deprivation and he begins to wonder if it would be better to give him nothing so he will die sooner or even push him in the river.   Then he begins to talk to the beggar, something no one else ever does.  He finds the beggar lost his eyesight to small pox years ago, and that he has a wife and a son.  His son drops him off at his spot every morning and picks him up at night.  The beggar tells him he can get almost two days worth of food from the small coins the man gives him.  I have not done justice to this great story and I hope some will one day read it.

"So He Fares" is another great story that I cannot imagine anyone reading and not loving it.   The story cover about thirteen years of the life of a may who ran away from home at age ten and returned thirteen years later.   The story is told in the third person and starts out telling us about a boy who mother has forbidden him from wandering the roads or playing with other children from his neighborhood.   His father is in the army and wears a red coat. (There is three hundred years of history in that coat.)  His mother is, in the ten year old boy's mind, very harsh with him.   There is a commercial boat canal very near their home and he has been given strict orders never to go near the ships.  Like any ten year old boy, he has to do all these forbidden things.   One day his mother catches him near the boat canal so she puts a bee into his shirt and laughs as he cries in pain.   Telescoping a bit, he runs away and ends up for three years at the home of a very loving motherly widow who takes him in and treats him with great kindness.   She dies when he is thirteen and he ends up working for ten years on boats that circumnavigate  all the ports of Ireland.   We learn he lived a rough life in this years, it is just a sign of the genius of Moore that he can put so much in just a sentence.   He decides to go home.  I just do not want to tell the rest of this story as it is just amazing.

"Please consider joining my
event"-Carmilla

Mel u

George Moore: Three Great Stories from The Untilled Field

The Irish Quarter-March 11 to July 1

A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

A Few Days with George Moore

"The Exile" and "Julia Cahill's Curse"

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Posts by Participants

Stories covered in this post

"A Playhouse in the Waste"
"The Wedding Gown" 
"The Clerk's Quest"

Please consider joining us for The Irish Quarter,  Year Two.   Everything you need to participate is in the resources page, including links to 1000s of short stories, from brand new ones to stories now in the public domain.   Guests posts are also welcome.

I have decided to change the name of this event from Irish Short Story Week to The Irish Quarter.   A lot of the stories have been about emigration and most emigrants first lived in an Irish Quarter, whether they landed in Boston or Buenos Aries.  The event is also about a quarter of a year long.  Also calling it Irish Short Story Week as causing some potential participants to feel they did not have time to join us. 

"A Playhouse in The Waste" is the seventh short story from George Moore's 1903 collection of interrelated short stories, The Untilled Field, which I have so far read.   I really am amazed how great the stories I have read so far from this collection really are.    Moore was very much a self conscious artist, deeply schooled in the visual arts and French literature.   He was born into massive money and was able to devote his entire life to self-cultivation with a bit of serious dissipation thrown in.   James Joyce acknowledged him as an influence and it is easy to see it in The Dubliners.  I am pretty close to adding George Moore to my list of world's greatest short stories.   In a quick comparison, I am also currently reading through the short stories of Edith Somerville and Violet Martin in Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. and the are good fun to read stories but they seem a bit juvenile next to the work of Moore.   

As "A Playhouse in the Waste" opens the narrator is traveling on a muddy poor excuse for a road in one of the poorest parishes in Ireland.   He is being taken about by a driver, in a horse carriage who turns out to be an incredible talker with a deep insight into life and Ireland.   Everywhere they go they see evidence of terrible poverty, almost all of the houses are mud huts.  When you go inside, there is a good chance someone will be laying in the corner dying.   Lots of places are just deserted.   The tenants have go to America and the landlords can find no one to take their place.   He does notice that there are some roads built through the bogs, going no where, that seem ti just stop for no reason.  He asks the driver what to make of this and he is told these are relief projects, make work jobs.   He then is told the attitude of many government officers is that it is just cheaper to let the people leave the country.   The man comes up with the idea of building a playhouse out in the wastes and training the local people to be actors on the idea that this might produce revenue when people come to the show.   Much of the rest of this simply marvelous story is spent debating the validity of this idea.   It is just a flat out great story.   So far I like "Lady Cahill's Curse" best but this is a close second.  

"The Wedding Gown" is a very entertaining story.  In the hands of a lesser writer the story of an old woman driven mad by loneliness and her devoted granddaughter would be a cliche, in the hands of Moore it is a joy to read.   It is also about family ties and lets us see  how people dealt with mental illness in the era of the story.   Much of the fun of this story is in the plot so I will leave it untold.  

"The Clerk's Quest" sort of reminded me of "Alfred Nabbs" in that it is about a man who stifles all of his emotions and ambitions and lives for a simple job, in his case that of a bank clerk.   He works for the same firm for thirty years, never late, never asks for a day off and never has a personal life to talk about.  Then one day among the checks he is processing is one which smells of an intoxicating perfume.   He learns who the woman is and begins to fantasize about her.   He spends a lot of his life time savings sending her jewelry along with very demure love letters.   She returns the gifts and tells him if he persists she will complain to his employer.    He continues on and is warned by his employer and at last is fired.   The ending is just so sad.  I will not tell it all but it is very well done and another proof of what a great writer George Moore really is.

George Moore Two More Stories from The Untilled Field

The Irish Quarter-March 11 to July 1

A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

A Few Days with George Moore

"The Exile" and "Julia Cahill's Curse"

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week

My Prior Posts for ISSW Year Two

Posts by Participants

Please consider joining us for The Irish Quarter,  Year Two.   Everything you need to participate is in the resources page, including links to 1000s of short stories, from brand new ones to stories now in the public domain.   Guests posts are also welcome.

I have decided to change the name of this event from Irish Short Story Week to The Irish Quarter.   A lot of the stories have been about emigration and most emigrants first lived in an Irish Quarter, whether they landed in Boston or Buenos Aries.  The event is also about a quarter of a year long.  Also calling it Irish Short Story Week as causing some potential participants to feel they did not have time to join us.  I thank Suko for her feedback on this name change.  






"Julia Cahill's Curse" (1903, 32 pages) is a great story.   Frank O'Connor said "Homesickness" was a perfect work of art.  William Trevor said "Alfred Nobbs" was a master work.  I am not going to say they are wrong, because of course they are not and who am I to say such a thing anyway but "Julia Cahill's Curse" is to me a better work of art than "Homesickness", a better story than "Alfred Nobbs" and has a tremendous amount to teach us about Ireland.   It also does show very clearly why Moore did not like Catholic Priests all that much!.   When I first began to read the stories of George Moore it was sort of in the spirit of OK here are some historically important short stories so let us read them.   It is a very Irish story but it could be retold in many other periods and places and be just as powerful. It also goes deep into the heart of Irish folk ways and beliefs and lets us see how these interact with  the Catholic faith   Just like here in the Philippines we have a very devoted to the Catholic faith population who also believes firmly in lots of ideas from older cultures (of course Catholicism is not as old here as it is in Ireland) so the same can be said of Ireland.  The basic plot of the story is not hard to follow.   There is a priest who wants everyone to be totally obedient to the church and its doctrines.    Frank O'Connor said that one of the underlying causes of the massive emigration from Ireland, besides the famines, was a desire to escape from the rule of the priests.  Julia Cahill is a young woman  who is so beautiful as to take the breath away and full of the joy of life and not afraid to argue with the priest when he tells her she must marry so as not to be a distraction in the community.   I hope at least a few people will read this story so I am going to stop telling the plot here.  The ending was very open and just a marvel.   It is a very sad cruel ending but still it is wonderful and let me in awe of Moore.  


"The Exile" is also a very good story and it  also centers on the trouble caused by priests, who seem to love to cause petty misery in the lives of the people they are supposed to look after in order to make up for the emptiness of their own lives.   It is also about how marriages come about.  The priest was very opposed to the idea of young people arranging their own marriages and when ever he saw a young couple "walking the road" together he at once condemned them and reported them to their parents.  It is also a another story about emigration and those left behind.


You can download for free The Untilled Field from Manybooks


I will be doing three or four more posts on George Moore soon.  I will talk a bit more about his life and career then.


Mel u