New Ways to Kill Your Mother (18 page)

In early 1938 Beckett reported that Joyce was very worried about Lucia; the footnote informs us that she was ‘in treatment for mental illness’. In April 1939 he wrote: ‘I see the Joyces now & then. I go every week to Ivry to visit Lucia, who I think gets slowly worse. She sees nobody but her father & myself.’

The edition of the first volume of Beckett’s letters has been annotated with knowledge and care, using vast research. It will, for the most part, please admirers of Beckett’s art and satisfy those who respect his wishes that only letters that have bearing on his work should appear. There is no spilling the beans, or mad gossip; it was not his style. There is no detailed account of what it was like to be a witness in the Gogarty libel action. Nor is there much fanfare when Beckett meets Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, with whom he was to live for almost half a century
and with whom he would spend the war years in France, the years immediately after this first volume of letters. In April 1939 Beckett wrote to MacGreevy with his typical dry, stoical wisdom: ‘There is a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, and who is very good to me. The hand will not be overbid. As we both know that it will come to an end there is no knowing how long it may last.’

Brian Moore: Out of Ireland Have I Come, Great Hatred, Little Room

In the second chapter of Brian Moore’s early novel
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
, Miss Hearne gets to know her fellow boarders, especially the landlady’s brother, the returned Yank, Mr Madden. They discuss the difference between men and women in Ireland and America. ‘Guys beating their brains out to keep their wives in mink,’ Mr Madden complains. ‘It’s the women’s fault. No good … Me, I wouldn’t have nothing to do with them.’ Miss Hearne, deeply alert to nuances of education and class, thinks to herself that he can’t be very well educated if he can speak like that. And then she replies: ‘Oh, that’s not like Ireland, Mr Madden. Why, the men are gods here, I honestly do believe.’ As Mr Madden continues, Miss Hearne becomes aware of his maleness: ‘He was so big, so male as he said it that she felt the blushes start up again. His big hand thumped the table.’

Brian Moore began to think about Judith Hearne when he was twenty-seven, in exile from Belfast, and trying to write short stories in a remote part of Ontario: ‘I thought of this old lady who used to come to our house. She was a spinster who had some Civil Service job to do with sanitation and she lived most of her life with her “dear aunt”. They’d not been “grand” but they had pretensions, and she had very genteel manners.’ The novel is full of Joycean moments. It is set in a Catholic Ireland that is half-genteel and oddly insecure; it allows Judith Hearne’s vulnerable consciousness great dramatic power; it uses different tones and cadences and voices; and it takes from ‘Clay’, the most mysterious story in
Dubliners
, the idea of a single, middle-aged woman visiting
a family and finding both comfort and humiliation there. As Moore moved from a short story to a novel he wrote to his sister in Belfast (as Joyce wrote to his sister in Dublin looking for details of the city) asking for her memories of Miss Keogh, the visitor on whom Judith Hearne was based. However, he disregarded most of what he was told. (The original Miss Keogh had a job, for example.) He used merely the ‘speech and mannerisms’ of the original and he surrounded them with something else, elements of his own isolation as a non-achiever in a family obsessed with achievement, and as an emigrant in Canada. His own loss of faith becomes hers, and his memory that his original had ‘a little weakness for the bottle’ becomes her alcoholism.

Yet none of this explains the intensity of the novel, the versions of spiritual suffering and abject despair set beside tiny instants of pure social embarrassment and nuanced social observation. The novel manages to make the large moments in the book – Judith running at the tabernacle in a Catholic church in a fit of drunken despair, for example – as credible and powerful as the smaller pieces of self-delusion and social comedy. ‘It is also a book about a woman,’ Moore wrote to his publisher, ‘presenting certain problems of living peculiar to women. I wrote it with all the sympathy and understanding that I am capable of.’

Moore knew that you could achieve certain effects by writing about a woman in the Ireland of his time that you could not achieve in writing about a man. A man can swagger with drink, his drunkenness, even in a genteel context, will not bring disgrace, but pity maybe, or tolerance, or a sort of liberation. A middle-aged woman, however, who gets drunk alone in her room in a genteel boarding house and does not remember that she sang all night and has to face her landlady and her fellow boarders the next day is a piece of dynamite. In a society where, as Miss Hearne says, men are gods, how do you go about dramatizing them? In a society where female vulnerability is open and public,
where women are alert to their shifting position, watchful, under the bony thumb of the Church, in charge of intimate domestic details but nothing else, women are a godsend to a novelist, living, as Moore told an interviewer:

in a personal world, a very, very personal world. Men, I find, are always, as they say in America, ‘rolling their credits’ at each other. They come on telling you what they’ve done, and who they are, and all the rest of it. Quite often, women don’t do that, because life hasn’t worked out that way for some of them. But when a woman tells me a story about something that happens to her, [I] often get a sudden flash of frankness which is really novelistic. It is as if a woman knows when she tells a story that it must be personal, that it must be interesting.

It is no coincidence, then, that the three finest novels to appear in Ireland between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s were about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
(1955), John McGahern’s
The Barracks
(1963) and Aidan Higgins’s
Langrishe, Go Down
(1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett and Francis Stuart, or offered elaborate comedy, as in Flann O’Brien. In Irish fiction after Joyce, the women suffered and the men were antisocial, and the tone is one of unnerving bleakness.

The problem for Moore, McGahern, Higgins and many others was how to create a male character who was neither comic nor lying on his back in the dark. In a society that was merely half-formed and had no sense of itself, a society in which the only real choice was to leave or live in a cowed internal exile, the failure to create a fully formed male character in fiction was emblematic of a more general failure.

The four novels that Brian Moore wrote after
Judith Hearne
struggle with this, and all of them bear the mark of the problem
more clearly than any sign of its resolution. These novels are
The Feast of Lupercal
(1957),
The Luck of Ginger Coffey
(1960),
An Answer from Limbo
(1962) and
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
(1965). The last of these is a coming-of-age novel set in wartime Belfast; the second and third have as protagonists Irishmen in exile in North America; and the first tells the story of Diarmuid Devine, a teacher, who stayed behind in Belfast.

‘The climate of Northern Ireland … is such as to encourage weakness of character,’ Moore wrote.

The interesting thing about Devine was, compared to Judith, who had all the bases loaded against her, he has some choice and therefore is a less admirable character, because you feel he is in some way master of his fate, which she really wasn’t … I wanted Devine to be a character who had choice, and who had failed in the choice.

Devine has something in common with Mr Madden and Bernard Rice, the landlady’s son, the two male figures in
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
. He is underimagined; there is a crudity and lack of subtlety in his creation. When he overhears two colleagues undermining his masculinity, we are told that ‘he had never been so mortified in his life’ and, a few sentences later, ‘He was very upset.’ Devine’s response to every single moment is predetermined by the author’s vision of him: thus his response is always dull and afraid; his consciousness, through which we see the world, is limited in a way that Judith Hearne’s is open-ended. Like Judith and Mr Madden, he, too, has views on the man/woman question: ‘Character assassins, every blessed one of them,’ his mind tells us. ‘That was a thing he couldn’t help noticing about women, they always had a bad word for one another. Men had far more sense, at least they shut up when they didn’t like a person.’

This last passage seems to offer us a key to the problem with these four novels. The men’s attitudes are not only stereotyped
and tiresome but dated in a way that Leopold Bloom’s responses to women, or Stephen Dedalus’s, don’t seem dated. There is no element of richness or surprise, and there is a terrible ironic distance and jauntiness (more noticeable in
The Luck of Ginger Coffey
and
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
). Clearly, the passage quoted above could not be easily written now, but Devine would be a more interesting figure had these words not been put into his consciousness in the first place.

Is it a golden rule of fiction that an author cannot create a character whose way of noticing is significantly and emphatically less rich than the author’s own? The problem always is: what colours and nuances to leave out, what tricks and twists of voice or consciousness to throw aside? This question arises when reading the four novels Moore published between 1957 and 1965 and reading Denis Sampson’s biography. Moore became increasingly fascinated by failure, by the idea of the painful case, the more successful he became. All four of these novels deal in failure, and he himself, from early on, was alert to what dull failure in a novel looked like compared to melodrama, say, or, in the case of Judith Hearne, a sort of tragedy. In 1957 in a letter to Diana Athill, his editor at André Deutsch, he wrote:

I always want to give my character more diversity, more intellectual strength – something of that wonderful Dostoevskian quality of the unexpected, which, on examination, turns out to be the logical, the underlying truth in their behaviour. But, so far, each time I simply lack the ability to bring this off and, lacking it, settle for what my pessimism and my experience tell me is possible. So the characters become smaller, duller in a way and without the stature of tragedy.

Brian Moore was born in Belfast in 1921 into what can almost be described as a ruling-class Catholic family. His father was a surgeon, the first Catholic to be nominated to the Senate of Queen’s
University Belfast and a pillar of society. His father’s sister Agnes was married to Eoin MacNeill, who became leader of the Irish Volunteers on their foundation in 1913, countermanded the order for the 1916 Rising and later became Professor of Early Irish History at University College Dublin. Moore’s mother, twenty years younger than his father, had been a nurse at the hospital where his father worked. She came from an Irish-speaking background in Donegal, from a family of nineteen children. ‘My mother seemed to be more in sync with me,’ Moore later said. ‘I was very fond of my mother. I think the fact that I had six sisters and that I was one of my mother’s favourite sons, if not her favourite son, had an effect on me.’

All his life Brian Moore loathed his old school, St Malachy’s in Belfast, and he attempted revenge on it in several of his novels. The tone and quality of this loathing must have been enriched by the fact that his father was founder and president of the past pupils’ union. His father was also, Sampson writes, ‘custodian of the prestige and tradition of the school, and so his expectations of his sons’ behaviour and academic achievement carried this burden in addition to the common expectations of an academically successful parent’. Moore took his own academic failure and his loss of faith in Catholicism immensely seriously. He became a socialist in a deeply conservative household, in a city where more than sixty years later mild socialism is still a sour dream. ‘I began to think of myself as a failure at an early age,’ he said, ‘and I began to think of myself as someone who was concealing something.’

Moore shared the dream of many adolescents worldwide: he wanted to blow his homeplace sky-high. The difference was that his homeplace already had its explosive elements. Moore said that he ‘reacted against all that nationalistic fervour’, because he saw that his father’s and uncle’s ‘dislike of Britain extended to approval of Britain’s enemies’. In
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
, which
he described as his most autobiographical novel, Moore dramatized the gap between Gavin’s idealism (and failure to study for exams) in the early years of the war and his family’s conservatism. Gavin’s mother thinks that General Franco is a saint and Gavin’s father is jubilant about Hitler’s prospects, just as our young hero, a member of the ARP, a local defence unit, comes more and more to understand what is happening in Europe. Moore offers perfect set pieces between father and son. (‘I won’t go into the fact that you’re the first member of this family to fail any examination, I won’t mention that when I was your age anything but honours marks would have been inconceivable to me.’ And then: ‘Wipe that grin off your face. After your performance today, I see nothing to smile about, do you?’) A Christmas Day scene between father and son during the early years of the war must have been impossible to resist, and as he smokes cigars after his Christmas dinner, Gavin’s father tells him that the war will soon be over: ‘Oh, the English are going to find out that their troubles are only beginning. Mark my words, Hitler won’t be an easy master. He won’t spare them, not after the way they turned down that perfectly reasonable offer he made last summer.’

The last fifty pages of the novel deal with the German air-raids on Belfast in 1941. Brian Moore, like Gavin, worked in the morgue. ‘I found myself being punched from adolescence into a volunteer job coffining dead bodies for weeks. And that experience naturally had a strong effect on me.’ The father in the novel flees Belfast for the safety of Dublin with all the family except Gavin, but not before he has a sudden, crude and unconvincing change of heart: ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The German jackboot is a far crueller burden than the heel of old John Bull.’