New Ways to Kill Your Mother (19 page)

In reality, Moore’s father, aged seventy-four, worked day and night during the air-raids and frequently slept in the hospital, worried that he would not be able to get there if there were further
attacks on the city. ‘My father,’ Moore said, ‘who was pro-German, when he saw what the Germans were able to do, when he saw what modern warfare was really like, when they blew up your home, that was all, things were over.’ In the novel, the father’s change of heart is rendered as another, almost comic aspect of his pomposity; in the real world, Dr Moore’s change of heart is more likely to have occurred slowly and silently. In the novel, the cowardly and hypocritical father returns to hear news of his heroic son, who has braved the bombs to bury the bodies. The book ends: ‘His father seemed aware of this change. He leaned his untidy, grey head on Gavin’s shoulder, nodding, weeping, confirming. “Oh Gavin,” his father said. “I’ve been such a fool. Such a fool.” The new voice counselled silence. He took his father’s hand.’ In the novel, the playboy of the Antrim Road got to kill his father. In the real world, Moore’s father died in 1942 ‘thinking I was a wimp, that I was a person who wasn’t going to achieve anything in life and that was very sad. I’ve had to live with my father’s disappointment.’

Brian Moore had an interesting war. In 1942 he left the ARP and joined the National Fire Service in Belfast and from there he got a job with the Ministry of War Transport in Algiers. After Algiers, he became assistant port officer for Naples, following the Allied taking of the city. Later, he was posted to Marseilles and Sète near the Spanish border. From January 1946 to November 1947 he worked in Warsaw with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He saw the camp at Auschwitz and then witnessed the Communist takeover of Poland. He did not write immediately about these events: ‘In Europe,’ he said, ‘I had been a spectator at events that were not my events.’ More than forty years would pass before he wrote his terse dramas about belief and power and treachery in Poland and France in
The Colour of Blood
and
The Statement
. Nonetheless, these experiences affected him, made him sceptical and wary, a hardened
observer. ‘Working with Polish government officials I discovered that Polish Communists were almost always as anti-semitic in their views as the rest of their countrymen.’ He began to develop an eye for detail, for the exotic:

Above all, Warsaw was for me … an exciting visual confirmation of my readings of Tolstoy, Gogol and Dostoevsky. Here were
drozhki
, the horse-drawn street cabs we had read about in Russian novels. Here were filthy peasants in fur-trimmed coats, driving long carts through the muddy streets; here were Russian soldiers singing gypsy chants, bearded beggars (or were they priests?) begging alms outside ruined churches. Here was the heart-stopping sound of a piano playing Chopin on a quiet Sunday morning in a deserted square.

Moore spent five years in Europe. It is not hard to imagine his plight when, at the end of 1947, he was forced to return to Belfast and to his family, once more with no job, no prospects, no qualifications. In the 1930s, as Moore later recalled, Sean O’Faolain argued that the only possible dénouement of an Irish novel was that ‘the hero gets on the boat and goes to England’. Moore, who from an early age had wanted to be a writer, had two reasons for going to Canada. One, he had fallen in love with a Canadian woman; two, in his interview for a visa, he was told that he could become a journalist. In 1948 he started his long North American exile.

He began in Toronto, trying to find newspaper work, his love affair falling apart, but moved soon to Montreal, where he was hired, like Ginger Coffey in his novel, as a proofreader. He liked the city; its provincial energy and divided culture reminded him of home. Slowly, he found better newspaper work and a group of friends. In 1951 he married a fellow journalist, Jacqueline Sirois; their son was born in 1953. That year, too, he became a Canadian citizen. He began to write thrillers for money. Published under pseudonyms, they were immensely successful. They financed the
writing of
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
and subsequent literary novels, and together with his work as a journalist and his personality, which was modest, hard-headed and non-flashy, they helped establish his prose style, which increasingly favoured the non-poetic and pacy, the clear and terse, the brisk and sharp.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
won instant critical success in England, Canada and the United States. It was banned in the Republic of Ireland, and this, at the time, was also a kind of critical success. The letter Moore received from his mother in Belfast concentrated on the more sexually explicit parts of the novel: ‘You certainly left nothing to the imagination, and my advice to you in your next book is leave out parts like this.’ That, too, was part of the rite of passage for an Irish novelist of that time. In her recent memoir,
Stet
, Diana Athill describes Moore in London in 1955:

He was fat because he had an ulcer and the recommended treatment in those days was large quantities of milk; and also because Jackie was a wonderful cook … They were both great gossips – and when I say great I mean great, because I am talking about gossip in its highest and purest form: a passionate interest, lit by humour but above malice, in human behaviour.

In 1959 the Moores moved to New York. In Canada, Brian had become friends with many writers, especially Mordecai Richler; now he became friends with Philip Roth and Neil Simon. He and his wife divided their time between Manhattan and Long Island. Moore won prizes, sold movie rights and began to achieve a sort of fame, but he lived in those years in a world he grew to distrust: ‘I lived in Greenwich Village … and I noticed that the serious writers there were quite interested in bestsellerdom, publicity, immediate personal fame, that they were … shameless little puffers-up of their talents and muggers-in-public for anyone who would write them up.’ This world gave him the background for
his protagonist Brendan Tierney in
An Answer from Limbo
, but the novel is damaged by Moore’s raw disapproval, and is wooden and not quite credible.

Brian and Jacqueline Moore met Frank and Jean Russell in New York in 1963, and the two couples, all of them interested in journalism and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
. Frank Russell, who had won a Guggenheim for his nature writing, also left New York. Brian and Jean became lovers that summer, and not long afterwards Jacqueline and Frank also became lovers. Brian dedicated
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
to Jean (as he would all his subsequent books) as Frank Russell dedicated his next book to Jacqueline and Michael. It all seemed neat and amicable, but slowly, in fact, became bitter and difficult. Moore broke with friends who supported Jacqueline, including Diana Athill and André Deutsch, to whom he wrote a letter announcing that he was going to find a new publisher.

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