by Colm Toibin
But the letter did not end there. It went on for another page and a half, and what it said, in what appeared to be a fever of self-righteous spite against the woman he had dumped, was that I had sided with Jackie, and no one who had done that could remain his friend … Mordecai [Richler] told me at the time that other friends of the Moores had been taken aback by this ‘He who is not with me is against me’ attitude.
Within a year Brian and Jean had begun their long sojourn in California, having been enticed there by Alfred Hitchcock, for whom Moore wrote the screenplay of Torn Curtain. (Moore, after all, knew much more about corpses than Hitchcock.)
The California the Moores inhabited was an isolated stretch of coast at Malibu. Moore worked hard on his novels. He had written five, all of which dealt in various ways with his own background. Now he needed new styles, new subjects and no interruptions. The Moores travelled a bit each summer, going to the West of Ireland, the South of France and Nova Scotia, but mainly they lived in solitude and isolation. Consciously and with deliberation, they both withdrew from the world. Denis Sampson writes superbly about some of the strange elements of Moore’s transformation:
As I examined the notes Moore wrote in 1965–66, during the first year of their life together in California, I was struck by a sudden change in his handwriting. For more than fifteen years, the journalist-turned-novelist recorded his thoughts in a quick scrawl written with a fine-nibbed fountain pen or typed headlong, the text replete with misspellings and crossings out. Suddenly, notes for the novel he is working on take on the character of a monk’s script. The novelist becomes a calligrapher, practising his self-conscious and stylised lettering on the back of plot outlines. By summer 1966, the transformation is complete: he now writes personal letters in a carefully crafted hand and signs with a new signature.
It is unclear whether Moore ever believed that he had lost anything by his long exile. He certainly believed that he had gained a great deal. In the 1970s, in a review of John McGahern’s collection of stories Getting Through, he wrote:
For those writers born and brought up within its shores, Ireland is a harsh literary jailer. It is a terrain whose power to capture and dominate the imagination makes its writers for ever prisoner – forcing them, no matter how far they wander in search of escape, to return again and again in their work to the small island which remains their true world.
Brian Moore did not witness things changing in Ireland, except as a tourist, and he also missed the slow changes in the way men were treated in Irish writing. In the 1960s playwrights such as Eugene McCabe in King of the Castle, Tom Murphy in A Whistle in the Dark and John B. Keane in The Field began to work on the mixture of violence and impotence in the Irish male psyche. And in the 1970s John McGahern published two novels, The Leavetaking and The Pornographer, that opened new ground. The Leavetaking tells almost exactly the same story as The Feast of Lupercal: the protagonist is a teacher and the background is a fearful, authoritarian and Catholic Ireland. In The Leavetaking McGahern found a tone that was poetic, melancholy, slow-moving and serious to describe an adult male protagonist living in an Irish city. More and more, McGahern focused on a tiny territory, using the same motifs, the same landscape down to the same trees and the same shadows, the same set of emotional circumstances. If Ireland was a harsh literary jailer, then McGahern had become its model prisoner.
In the solitary confinement of his own choosing, Moore worked hard during his years in Malibu. Between 1968 and his death in 1999, he wrote fifteen novels. He had clearly discovered certain things about his own talent. The last fifty pages of The Emperor of Ice-Cream showed that he had extraordinary skills at pacing, handling time and action, creating credible excitement. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne showed how good he was at dealing with failure, isolation and loneliness.
The first novel he wrote in his new guise as recluse and cosmopolitan was I Am Mary Dunne, and it was his first since The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne to deal with a woman’s drama, his first story with North American characters, and of all his books the most fraught and intense. The scene between Mary and her friend Janice in a Manhattan restaurant is a display of pure skill: full of careful revelation, memory and reflection, placed beside the comedy of being in the wrong restaurant at the worst table. The two women are bright and upmarket; Mary is perhaps too obviously on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Yet her own account of her adultery and sexual treachery is breathtaking in its detail. This story would be enough for any novel; beside it, the story of Mary’s paranoia and breakdown and loss of identity is not as convincing. In other words, her North American fate of ruthlessly seeking happiness is more dramatic and interesting than her fate as victim, as imagined by an Irish novelist – what Brian Friel, in a letter to Moore, called ‘Gaelic gloom’.
From the beginning of Moore’s career a problem existed that came increasingly to damage his novels – a willingness to work in broad strokes. Some of Mary Dunne’s perceptions as she moves around New York are crude and hackneyed. So, too, in his later novels about women, The Doctor’s Wife (1976) and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981), the social detail, the dialogue and even the characters are brisk, with a strange lack of nuance and shadow. Sheila, the doctor’s wife, has various conversations with her husband that read like early, hastily written drafts. Her American lover has no presence in the book, and the two observers of the scene in the South of France are pure fictional contrivances. Similarly, the rich Northern Irish Catholics in The Temptation of Eileen Hughes are created in very broad strokes indeed, and Eileen’s first sexual experience is a jaded Irish cliché.
Yet there is something fascinating in all three novels. Moore is able to render consciousness itself, the mind’s free flow, as a sort of innocence. Nothing his women do in these books seems worthy of judgement or blame. They appear to the reader as they do to themselves; we experience them at first hand (even though The Doctor’s Wife and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes are written in the third person). All three are books about quest, about intense yearning, and there is a core of deep and sharp feeling in them that survives, after a long struggle, the quickly fixed fictional world around them.
Moore did not lack confidence. He said of The Doctor’s Wife that the character of Sheila, who abandons her husband, had to be Irish and not Californian
because there is really no past to escape in California; it wouldn’t have had that ring I wanted in the book. I wanted, as I’ve done before, to contrast the American and the Northern Irish character and the crucial thing is that you have to be very strong in your feelings for both these lifestyles. For example, I couldn’t do a middle-class English woman, because I don’t have her speech rhythms, I couldn’t hear her voice; but I know that I can still create Irish characters because it’s in my bones and I know that my ear won’t mishear them.
In a 1967 interview there is a chilling sentence about the mother in An Answer from Limbo, who comes from Ireland to New York to look after her grandchildren and save her son and his wife some money: ‘I could do the mother with my eyes closed.’ The mother is, in fact, a collection of stereotypes out of central Irish casting. Moore may very well have had his eyes closed when he imagined her. His sense of Irish character and Irish speech becomes weaker and weaker, culminating in Lies of Silence (1990), a novel set in a contemporary Belfast that has as much truth and local flavour as a CNN news report. Also, many of Moore’s North American characters have a strange hollowness and lack of urgency.
He had left the Irish prison and sat alone in his cell in an odd imaginative nowhere. The house in Malibu became even more isolated when the State of California decided to clear that stretch of coast of its inhabitants. The Moores refused to leave, but by 1976 all their neighbours had gone and they were alone. Their nearest friends were Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. In her essay ‘Quiet Days in Malibu’, Didion described ‘the most idiosyncratic of beach communities, 27 miles of coastline with no hotel, no passable restaurant, nothing to attract the travel
ler’s dollar’.
Moore’s two best novels since The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne are set in wildernesses, where no knowledge of a society, its mores or manners or peculiar speech rhythms is required. The first of these is a very short novel, Catholics, published in 1972. It deals, in oblique ways, with the concerns of Moore’s earlier novels, especially the relationship between the Catholic mother and the agnostic son in An Answer from Limbo and Judith Hearne’s loss of faith. The novel is set in the future, there has been a fourth Vatican Council, but a small band of monks on a remote Irish island are adhering to the old traditions. A man is sent from Rome to deal with them, and the novel tells the story of his confrontation with the Abbot, who is created with the same complexity and richness as Judith Hearne and a subtlety absent from many of Moore’s other novels.
As he worked on the novel Moore wrote to the Irish Jesuit Michael Paul Gallagher: ‘I find myself sympathetic to both sides of this argument (the Ecumenical and the Traditional) and so perhaps the story will work out.’ The drama is between the Abbot’s own worldly authority and the monks’ aggressive faith, between his wavering conscience and his wavering leadership. The tone is dark, the conclusion is poetic rather than forced, and the general atmosphere in its intensity and its interest in poetic moments is very far indeed from most of Moore’s work, and closer to the work of other Irish writers such as John McGahern and John Banville.
In an interview about Catholics quoted by Sampson, Moore is almost prepared to solve the riddle of why this book and the later Black Robe work in ways his other fictions do not:
I’ve felt as a writer that man’s search for a faith … is a major theme. For one kind of novelist it’s the big and ultimate theme. If you’re an English novelist you write novels of manners, novels of society, novels of class. If you look at Ireland and Irish literature, there are very few Irish novels [of this sort] because society and class don’t operate the same way in Ireland. And so I think that this Irish tendency is to pick on the meaning of life. The Gael is interested in the meaning of life and he’s usually pessimistic about it.
In the 1970s Moore made contact with other Gaels interested in the meaning of life, among them the poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon and the playwright Brian Friel. He had met Friel for the first time in Ireland in 1969 and the two began to correspond. They had much in common. Both had attempted works in which young men deal with their fathers. Both were interested in faith and exile; both were also interested in the creation of women characters. Both had reinvented themselves as distant and reclusive figures. Friel admired Moore’s courage in writing I Am Mary Dunne and wrote a screenplay for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, in which Katharine Hepburn was to play the lead. (It was never used; many years later the role was played by Maggie Smith.) Moore wrote to Friel: ‘I know this sounds un-Ulster and extreme, but as it is much easier for me to say it in print than to your face, I am first among your many admirers.’ The correspondence contains a great deal of the banter that passes for communication between men in Ireland and elsewhere. When Moore took a job one day a week at UCLA, Friel wrote: ‘We’ll overlook the shabby detail that you’ve gone over to Them. As long as you are handsomely paid and the pool is convenient.’ When Moore bought a fancy car, Friel wrote: ‘I can’t see you in that Mercedes Sports (you’re a Raleigh and trousers-and-socks man at heart) but Jean is born for it.’ Sometimes Friel was more serious and supportive: ‘I am genuinely concerned about your reaction to other people’s reaction’ to The Great Victorian Collection, the novel Moore published in 1975. (‘I have had this experience so often. One fluctuates between despair and arrogance.’) When Moore wrote to Friel about his play Faith Healer, Friel replied:
I was delighted with your response … Because, as you know, one finally holds the press/reviewers/critics in disdain; and the reaction of one’s fellow artists is the important response. And it occurred to me that there are many similarities – in attitude, in objectivity and by God in overall gloom – between F. H. and The Great Victorian Collection.
When the film of Judith Hearne was postponed, Friel wrote:
You know, of course, that what has screwed up the whole thing ever since John Huston was a nipper is your lousy ending to the book. What is needed is a Beautiful Upsurge – Judith as international president of AA, or plunging back into the arms of mother church and becoming a stigmatist, or eloping with the Professor’s wife … I’m sick of them all [film producers]. They don’t believe in anything. They know the value of nothing. They are all sustained by the energies of their own pretences.
The late 1970s was a period of astonishing creativity for Friel. Although Faith Healer did not win critical acclaim when it was first performed in New York with James Mason as Frank Hardy, a later production in Dublin with Donal McCann in the part made clear that Friel had created one of the most subtle and memorable male characters in Irish writing. But it was his play Translations, first performed in 1980, that seems to have made the greater impact on Moore as he began to work on what is probably his own best novel, Black Robe (1985). Both works deal with a central moment in the colonial drama, Friel with the changing of place names in nineteenth-century Ireland, Moore with the arrival of the Jesuits in seventeenth-century Canada. Both deal with the idea of an intact native culture colliding with a more technologically advanced colonial dream. Both bring the colonist and the native face to face; there is a powerful sense of the two watching each other, with violent and tragic results. Both works represent a great stylistic departure for the two writers.
‘I’ve discovered that the narrative forms – the thriller and the journey form – are tremendously powerful,’ Moore said. ‘They’re the gut of fiction, but they’re being left to second-rate writers because first-rate writers are bringing the author into the novel and all those nouveau-roman things.’ And also:
I went into the wilderness of this book I suppose, compared to my other books, because I’d never written a book like this before. I didn’t want to write a historical novel because I don’t particularly like historical novels … I wanted to write this as a tale. I thought of it in terms of authors I admire, like Conrad. I thought of Heart of Darkness, a tale, a journey into an unknown destination, to an unknown ending.
He also said in an interview that ‘the whole thing could be a paradigm for what is happening’ in Northern Ireland.
Originally, I’d have said that wasn’t true, but maybe subconsciously I was thinking of it. The only conscious thing I had in mind when writing it was the belief of one religion that the other religion was totally wrong. The only thing they have in common is the view that the other side must be the Devil. If you don’t believe in the Devil, you can’t hate your enemy and that may be one of the most sinister things about Belfast today.
Moore’s view of the art of fiction and those ‘nouveau-roman things’ takes him close to the man on the golf course in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: ‘You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story.’ Although this view was to be the making of Black Robe, it was to ruin his subsequent work. The landscape of Black Robe was very close to him: ‘I would go into my room and my mind would go back to the Montreal winter I remember and the cold and the St Lawrence River. When I thought of the river I could see it, because I had gone up and down it so many times.’ As he was writing the novel, Moore also visited, according to Sampson, ‘various sites and museums of Iroquois, Algonquin and Huron cultures, in particular Midland, Ontario, where the original Jesuit mission of Sainte Marie among the Hurons has been reconstructed, complete with Huron long-houses and villages’.
Moore managed in Black Robe, in a way that Conrad did not in Heart of Darkness, to make the natives, as he says, ‘among the strongest characters in the book’. But the figure of the Jesuit Father Laforgue remains a towering and haunting presence. Moore allows him to be the central consciousness of the book. He gives him faith, but more importantly, he gives him fear. Moore was
interested in clashing systems of belief, but it is the sense of the physical in the book – the river, the forest, the cold – and the sense of threat and violence that gives Black Robe its power. The violence is terrifying, almost unbearable. Against a background of implacable nature and inevitable disaster and with the immediacy of Moore’s tone, Laforgue’s faith and the reader’s knowledge of who will finally prevail seem very small things indeed.
Moore was in his mid-sixties when he published Black Robe. ‘I’m entirely conscious that most novelists don’t do their best work past sixty and often seem to run out of material. What keeps me going as a writer is the belief that I can write new kinds of books,’ Moore said in 1995, four years before his death. After Black Robe, he produced five more novels, set in Poland, Ireland, Haiti, France and Algeria. He adapted the style of the thriller and the tale, using clipped sentences, briskly set scenes, dramatizing crises of conscience for individuals and societies. Economy was all. He did not revisit Poland to write The Colour of Blood, but used scenes from Graham Greene’s account of his visit in the 1950s. (A review by Greene gave him the original idea for Black Robe. He and Greene admired each other greatly.) He did not visit Haiti to write No Other Life. ‘There’s too much information in most novels,’ he said. ‘Novelists showing off.’
Brian Moore was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a novelist showing off. In the sentences he wrote and the life he lived, he almost made a display of avoiding show. He remains a fascinating case because he had nothing to go on when he began, no tradition to call on, no example except that of Joyce, who was not much use to him save as an example of sheer dedication. Moore was clearly damaged by exile because the sort of novel he wanted to write required a detailed knowledge of manners and morals; imaginatively, he lost touch with Ireland and never fully grasped North America. Yet he could not have stayed in Ireland: his independent spirit and questing conscience had no place on either side of the Irish border. Out of this sense of loss and exile and displacement, he produced three masterpieces and an emotional territory filled with loners and failures, faith and unbelief, cruelty and loss of identity and a clear-eyed vision of man’s fate.