"The Untilled Field" by George Moore

Last time, we traced the roots of realism and naturalism back to one of its sources, Russian author Ivan Turgenev. On this St. Patrick's Day, we're going to look at what  effect Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches had on the development of the Irish short story, specifically George Moore's 1903 collection of stories, The Untilled Field.


The Untilled Field (1903) by George Moore

First, a subjective opinion: This is an excellent collection of stories and it's a crying shame that George Moore's work has been so neglected. His prose is perfectly measured and his characters draw you in. There is subtle wit,  real compassion and outrage within its pages, and the way the stories dovetail one another gives a satisfying feeling of completeness. If it were a pop-up book, opening its pages would reveal an intricate, interwoven whole, like a piece of Irish literary origami.

George Moore was allegedly influenced by Ivan Turgenev's collection of short stories, A Sportsman's Sketches, a book focused on the plight of the Russian peasantry at the hands of landowners in a feudal system that was nearing its close. The narrator of those stories is detached, the characters are allowed to tell their own stories amidst lush natural surroundings, and the stories themselves are loosely connected by a single narrator.

By contrast, Moore's book centers around the plight of the Irish peasantry at the turn of the twentieth century--a time of great change as Ireland struggled for independence and to form its own identity. Turgenev's influence can be seen more in concept and form than in style. Both works center around the lives of oppressed rural people in a time of great economic and social change. The narrative voice shifts, although detachment is maintained, symbolism and allegory are frequently employed, and taken together, the stories are more cohesive. 

The presence of nature so prevalent in A Sportsman's Sketches is not as important here. Rather, priests and parishioners are engaged in a struggle of reason versus instinct that typifies Ireland's problems. Landlordism was outlawed in the year this book was published. Ireland had very little industrial infrastructure and much poverty, and its population seemed to move en masse to America for lack of opportunity and want of personal freedom. Incongruously, new churches were being erected as villages emptied. Clerical life was a way to escape poverty, but as the church acquired more and more land, built more churches and absorbed more of the remaining population into celibacy, the prospect of repopulating and rebuilding Ireland looked dim. Moore openly questions the church's role in Ireland's decline and looks at the lives of those who still remained.

There are thirteen stories here. "In the Clay" begins the collection, telling the story of John Rodney, a Paris-trained sculptor who has been commissioned by Father MacCabe to create a statue of the Virgin and Child for a new church. He enlists a nude model for the work, the beautiful seventeen-year-old Lucy Delaney, the daughter of a cheese-monger. Unaware that artists need to use live models for even sacred works, MacCabe, while visiting Rodney's studio, recognizes Lucy's face when he sees the work in progress and informs her parents. Rodney enters his studio to find the statue destroyed, suspecting the priest, but learning that it was in fact Lucy's brothers who defaced it after overhearing their parents and the priest discussing her involvement. Rodney, convinced that puritanical Ireland is no place for an artist, decides to leave his home country for good. This sets the tone of the book: As Ireland struggles for a new beginning, the best and brightest are driven from its shores by attitudes and practices out of step with the changing modern world. This story and "The Way Back" begin and end the collection, the latter providing some closure on what happened to the artist and his model after leaving Ireland for London.

"Some Parishoners" is about Father Maguire, an overly zealous priest who has taken it upon himself to police his parishioners, decrying their fancy for dance and drink from the altar, confronting and separating men and women from walking together and even arranging marriages between those in his care whom he considers to be disruptive to the moral order of the community--usually beautiful and outspoken single women.  Maguire charges impoverished villagers exorbitant fees for performing marriage ceremonies, mostly to raise money for the construction of a new church. Biddy, an elder chicken farmer, has managed to save enough money to pay for a stained glass window in the new structure. Her fixation on the new window is a source of irritation, but the rapturous visions she sees when the window is installed pays dividends by drawing attention and prestige to the parish. We see a priest detached those he serves and whose priorities are skewed away from their spiritual health and towards the solvency of his parish.

"Julia Cahill's Curse" is another story of one priest's failed plan to protect his parish from the influence of a beautiful and independent woman. "The Exile" and "Home Sickness" deal with the tantalizing allure of America and the beckoning of a new life that make the here and now of Ireland even more unbearable. "Letter to Rome" is a charming and dryly funny story of a priest who decides that the best solution to Ireland's problems is to allow priests to marry. Reasoning that a population with an inordinate number of celibates faces a very limited future, he writes a letter to the Pope asking to give his idea consideration. "So On He Fares" is a touching story of a little boy who leaves his abusive mother to become a river bargeman, only to return home a decade later to find another little boy with the same name living in his place, and "The Clerk's Quest" takes the form of a parable in which a middle aged office clerk is driven to ruin after becoming obsessed with a woman he knows only through her perfumed checks.

The longest and most engaging story is "The Wild Goose", in which the internal struggle of Ireland to come to terms with itself are embodied in the relationship between a man and a woman. Ned Carmady is an Irish American journalist who returns to Ireland with high hopes for reform after his experiences in Cuba fighting against the Spanish. He meets Ellen Cronin, a beautiful, educated and religious girl who sees in Ned the potential of being Ireland's political savior. They marry, and Ellen begins to prime him for public office, writing speeches for her husband. But a rift develops between them about religion. Carmody sees the clergy as the source of Ireland's troubles, and as his anticlerical viewpoint becomes more publicly pronounced, his marriage suffers. Their failed marriage is an apt allegory for the schism that troubles the country.

Through Moore's eyes, we see a nation unable to reconcile its Gaelic roots, language and traditions with a religion that seeks to blot out its proud pagan past at the expense of the present. Both the Catholic church and America cast long, imposing shadows over the Irish people, forcing them to move into the light by either embracing or abandoning their country and their faith.

The Untilled Field was written twenty years before Irish independence, giving us several views of complex economic and cultural forces in at the heart of Irish rural life. In 1914, James Joyce would publish Dubliners, another collection of short stories that looks at the urban middle class and their struggle to forge a new identity and understanding of itself. We'll look at that short story collection next time.

Download The Untilled Field from Project Gutenberg

Naturalist Roots: Ivan Turgenev's "A Sportsman's Sketches"

In the last post, we looked at a handful of books written in the naturalist style. Now I'd like to trace the realist and naturalist influence back to one of its sources, the Russian author Ivan Turgenev.


A Sportsman's Sketches (1852) by Ivan Turgenev

Nineteenth century Russian books have a reputation for being long, difficult works with far too many characters and impenetrable cultural contexts that might bewilder new readers. But if you're curious about Russian fiction, this collection is a good place to start. The individual stories in A Sportsman's Sketches are intense and entertaining, and taken together they form a satisfyingly unified whole. While this book is very much of its time, the sheer humanity of its characters cuts across cultural and temporal divides. Much of what you need to know about history to appreciate this collection can be found within the text itself.
 
Turgenev wrote about a feudal system in decline; landowners were once prosperous, but the glory days have long since passed. Many once thriving estates are crumbling and the descendants of wealthy landowning families find it increasingly difficult to manage their properties successfully--often because of their own shortsightedness. 

Pastoral Russia is as much a character in these stories as anyone residing in its woods. Turgenev's vibrant descriptions of the natural world are some of the most lovely and engaging of their kind in all of literature, and his style and tone had a pragmatic as well as aesthetic advantage; by employing the naturalist device of the disinterested narrator, he was able to get provocative ideas past the censors to speak directly to his audience about the many injustices of Russia's feudal system.

Each piece is about the people the narrator meets and the stories he hears while hunting in the countryside. In "Raspberry Water", the narrator encounters two elderly men fishing, both former house serfs, who embody the region's fading past. Styopushka, a homeless former serf is humble and directionless, foraging for his daily bread and living on the former estate of a wealthy landowner through the charity of a peasant family who currently lives there. Tuman (Russian for "frog"), is a freed house serf who tells stories about his former master's abundant estate and his sometimes severe manner with the servants. While talking to the two old men, another serf, the middle aged Vlass, arrives home from a long journey visiting his landlord in Moscow. Joining the conversation, he laments the recent death of his son and his inability to get his absentee landlord to allow him to move to a smaller piece of land that he can afford. His landlord reprimands him for not taking the issue to the bailiff first. Vlass' story gives us a glimpse of the plight of peasant farmers who can barely make a living under the feudal system and were subjected to many abuses by landowners and their employees. In "Bailiff" we learn about the kind of blackmail and manipulation often committed by those who manage the landowners' estates, giving us a pretty good idea of why, in the earlier story, Vlass was reluctant to deal directly with his master's employee.

"Two Country Gentlemen" gives us a closer look at the landed gentry. Retired General Hvalinsky is a man of austere habits with a serious countenance who is an inept manager of his affairs. He keeps his inferiors at arm's length and supplicates his betters, but prefers to play cards with his inferiors. He enjoys his status, but is self-conscious about appearing to be too ostentatious. The opposite is true of Mardary Apollonitch, a jovial, friendly man with only a superficial interest in the affairs of his large estate. He is a landowner of the old style to whom appearances are of primary importance while in stark contrast, his servants live in squalid, ruinous huts overlooking his property.

Turgenev also brings in elements of traditional folklore in "Byezhin Prairie", a charming story about a group of boys by a campfire telling each other tales of faeries and ghosts. There is dark humor in these stories as well: "Lgov" is about a fishing trip gone wrong as a party of fisherman capsizes in a borrowed boat led a foolhardy fisherman named Vladimir.  "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District" lampoons the pretensions of the landowning elite through the story of one of their ranks who has realized the meaninglessness of his social standing, and "Tatyana Borisovna and her Nephew" is a wryly comic story of a woman whose nephew is whisked away to St. Petersburg by a rich benefactor. He leaves his aunt's home as an art prodigy and returns as a boorish, lazy, drunken lout. Now that's realism!

The longest piece of this collection is the two part story found in "Chertopkhanov and Nedopyuskin" and the sequel, "The End of Chertopkhanov", It is a tale of misfortune and existential terror in the heart of a landowner whose family and fortunes are on the wane. In these stories can be found, part and parcel, the very stuff of Russian storytelling: destitution, death, torrid romance, a fine horse, obsession, loss, drunkenness and insanity.

I found a wonderful contextual clue while researching this book: A Sportsman's Sketches was published in the same year as Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Both of these works highlighted the injustices of slavery. The popularity of Turgenev's collection helped to raise awareness of the plight of Russia's peasantry, leading to an abolition of serfdom in 1860. The realism of Stowe's novel brought the horror of the enslavement of blacks into the public consciousness of Americans, and the change in public opinion ultimately led to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. Both authors used clear language to communicate stark truths that influenced the social and economic trajectories of their respective countries. The combination of plain words, good intentions and a willing audience can actually affect real change.

This is, of course, a best case scenario. Individual results may vary.


Download A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg

Download A Sportsman's Sketches, Volume 2 from Project Gutenberg

A note on the digital edition: Project Gutenberg has continued to revise their catalog by creating digital editions that work better with modern eReader devices. Currently, this book exists in two volumes, the second of which has yet to be formatted for such devices although it is available in plain text that can be converted to other formats using free eBook authoring software like Calibre. Let's hope that this classic is reviewed and revised into a nice eBook that contains both volumes. They're very busy folks who are doing good work, so we'll give them a break.