New Ways to Kill Your Mother (20 page)

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 traveller’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.

In the early 1990s Moore and his second wife began to build a house on the coast of Nova Scotia where Jean had been brought up. The house was finished in 1995. Thus Moore spent his last summers in sight of the Atlantic Ocean: ‘It’s beautiful. It looks out on a bay that looks just like Donegal. It’s very wild there and empty. I love it for its emptiness. It’s like Ireland probably once was. Now that I’m old it seems so crazy to build another house, I know. Especially there. But I’m very happy I did all the same.’ That October, he revisited Belfast, walked through his old school for the first time in sixty years and saw the site of the family house on Clifton Street, which he had first described as the professor’s house visited by Judith Hearne forty years earlier. The house had been demolished a month before his visit:

I think as a writer it is very symbolic. Your past is erased. Now it’s as if it’s completely died. I was here a few years ago to film a documentary and I stood in front of the shell and I could remember my father’s brass plate at the door, the patients to-ing and fro-ing. Now what is it? It’s a paradigm of man’s existence on earth. The earth remains and man does not.