NOVELIST'S FIGHT TO FINISH A BOOK.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18450, 28 April 1928, Page 4

NOVELIST'S FIGHT TO FINISH A BOOK.

SICK BED DRAMA OF GEORGE MOORE—RISKS HIS LIFE FOR ART. LONDON, March 4. In a quiet room in a London nursing home Mr George Moore, the veteran Irish novelist, poet and playwright, has been through a more poignantly dramatic experience than he has ever conceived in his novels. Fighting against a painful and critical illness he has been making a gallant but vain effort to complete the last chapter of his last novel. A year ago he determined to close his career as a novelist with a book that would rank as one of his greatest —“Aphrodite in Aulis," the story of the adventures of a young Athenian in the time o.f Pericles. Plea for Grace. For months he worked on it, and then on the very day he started the final chapter he was taken seriously ill, Ilis doctors advised an immediate operation: Moore pleaded for two months’ grace to complete the book. He had to choose between his art and his health—probably his life—and he chose the former. “I don’t care what happens,” he said, “after the last chapter has been written.” But in the nursing home, racked with pain, and thinking always of the coming operation, he found it difficult to work to his satisfaction. lie redictated tho first chapter once more, but the final chapter still eluded him Another Hand. Finally, on the advice of Miss Mona Kingdom his secretary, he sketched a scenario for the last chapter, remarking: “In any case it will keep it alive. Ideas, if laid aside, are often dead when the storv is taken up again." He appeared to realise that another hand might have to complete the tale. lie ir. now too weak to undergo the operation, and it may be weeks before it can be carried out. I ntil he has gathered sufficient strength he is to be moved to his house in Ehury Street.