Birch, Bell and Book

Brian Moore, pronounced Bree-an, started his life in Belfast in 1921 and ended it in Malibu, California, in 1999, and that journey – and all that it implies – is the central thread of his fiction. He wrote twenty novels. I have read them all. I bought most of them in hardback the moment they came out. Indeed he was my favourite living novelist.

Rather more famously, he was also the favourite living novelist of Graham Greene and you can see why: realistic dialogue, strong and thrilling narratives, Catholic guilt and sin, ambivalence, the moment of moral choice and the drama of the soul. The big difference between the two writers was that they went in opposite directions, Graham Greene towards Rome and Brian Moore – as fast as his legs would carry him – the other way. If I mention a random few of Brian Moore’s novels they may ring a bell: I Am Mary Dunne (1968), Black Robe (1985), Catholics (1972), The Doctor’s Wife (1976), Cold Heaven (1983), The Colour of Blood (1987), Lies of Silence (1990). He was shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. Yet go into a bookshop now and try to find one of his books and you will be lucky. Yes, there is fashion in literature, as in all things, and reputations rise and fall, particularly after a writer’s death, but this baffles me. His first two novels were The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) – about an alcoholic woman for whom life is a let-down – and The Feast of Lupercal (1958) – about an ineffectual male schoolteacher for whom life has in some ways never really started. Both are set in the 1950s, in rainy Belfast, on Moore’s overcast home turf, on drab days when frustration and exasperation are the norm. Despite this, both are wonderfully accomplished, droll fictions. They have a distinctive Mr Bleaney voice, a voice like Larkin’s: a true voice. And let’s face it straightaway, for someone who was educated in an all-boys school and then taught English in one, The Feast of Lupercal is too close for comfort. Diarmuid Devine (‘Dev’) is a 37-year-old English graduate. He teaches at a boys’ Catholic school, part boarding, part day pupils. Indeed he had been a boarder there himself. The college is run on traditional lines by a mixture of priests and lay staff, and run with plenty of sarcasm and cane to restore order. As had been the case for centuries in schools, the birch and the book keep constant company. Even the bell makes its coercive point. Every forty minutes ‘an electric bell, deafeningly loud, screamed out in the corridors, crying unheard in empty dormitories, echoing across wet playing fields to die in the faraway mists over Belfast Lough’. That sounds familiar. The story opens with Dev locked in a cubicle in the masters’ lavatory, where he overhears two colleagues talking about him. He wonders whether he should cough or something. One of them calls him ‘that old woman’ who ‘wouldn’t know anything about what a fellow feels about girls’. The other colleague chuckles. Dev sits in silence, his face getting hot. He has never been so mortified in his life. Did they mean that he was odd or a pansy? Flushed and shamefaced, he hurries to his next class – Macbeth, Act Two, Scene One – where he is sharp with his pupils. Seizing the first opportunity to take it out on someone, he punishes two boys who have not completed their homework. (The novel begins with a caning and reaches its climax with one.) The cane whistles down on Deegan. Then it whistles down on McAleer. Deegan is asked to read the part of Macbeth ‘if he has recovered from his fearful torment’. Later in the lesson, McAleer is handed the role of Lady Macbeth. Back in his bachelor digs Dev takes his twice-weekly bath. He looks at his white body. He has never had much luck with girls. He does not have far to look for the reason: it is not his body, it is the education in Ireland, the priest-ridden education he knows only too well. After all, he’d been a boarder himself, ‘shut off from girls until he was almost a grown man. It was a matter of ignorance, pure and simple.’ As for thinking about women, he is sure he is perfectly normal. Though I do not pretend to all the parallels, The Feast of Lupercal took me back to my own schooldays in Wales. It’s more or less the same world: a boys’ school, a religious foundation with a chapel that dates from the thirteenth century, mostly boarding, but with some day pupils, and set in a place that had once been a Dominican priory. And as well as taking me back to my Welsh schooldays – to Classics, to Macbeth, chapel, rugby and caning – the Irish novel also took me back to my early years as a teacher in a boys’ Scottish boarding school – to Classics, Macbeth, chapel, rugby and caning. For those of us who have grown up and then stayed in the system, the failed sexual encounter between Dev and Una Clarke in his bachelor digs is more than a tour de force. Every detail of it makes me wince. Did I mention a girl? Yes, because at a party given by a colleague, Dev falls for Una. She is a 20-year-old from Dublin, a Protestant on the rebound from being mixed up with a married man. With Protestants, with people like Una, an affair with a married man is possible. That is the Catholic view because with Protestants ‘anything was possible’. Protestant girls are fast. Una is a Protestant girl, a Protestant girl with ‘a past’. Hot stuff. Everyone knows that. And Una likes Dev. She smiles at him. She talks to him. Filled with joy Dev is drawn into a relationship which develops promisingly. He coaches her for a part in a play which she does not get because ‘this city was made up of cliques, drama cliques, religious cliques, school cliques, and God knows what else’. Never mind, he thinks about her all the time. He has a right to live. They drink. They go dancing. He is in love. They end up tip-toeing into his digs:

Fumbling, as though he were drunk, he pulled off his tie and collar. Shirt over his head. Socks off. It was cold in the moonlit room and as the cold chill of the linoleum touched his toes, another coldness came upon him. He would fail. He did not feel able. Desire was a fantasy, a sinful, secret lusting that ran wild with unfulfilment. Desire was a mental lusting, a making of improbable dreams. But this was no dream: reality was getting ready in the next room. Naked, waiting to be sinned with; waiting to be touched, to be dominated, to be lain on. Oh, let her not come. At least, until he got these things off. Now. Shove them under the bed.

But now, in the dresser mirror, his long pale body was shamefully exposed. His legs seemed knock-kneed, and his hair was tousled like an idiot’s. He backed into the shadows behind the bed. Was that her? Yes, he could hear her coming up the hall. Would she laugh like the girl in the pub last night? Would she?

‘Where are you, Dev?’

Tragically, comically, nothing happens. Or rather everything that matters happens. On one level, of course, Brian Moore is taking his revenge on blinkered Belfast respectability, on the non-life of his priest-ridden education at St Malachy’s College. He is shaking it off, all of it. If you ever can. His later novels, written as a naturalized Canadian, and then as a resident in California, are notable for their secular settings, for their sexual liberation and for the centrality of the female role. Indeed, I Am Mary Dunne (1968) and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981) are seen from the woman’s point of view, and he explores female erotic experiences in The Doctor’s Wife. Moore writes spare, quiet, dispassionate prose – prose that reverberates but does not posture. It stays in the mind. He has a nose for a story, for riveting plots and for conscience-stricken characters. He is interested in lives that are at risk, in people whose safety may be dramatically threatened by violence or those who are in a slow spiral down. A creative chameleon, he writes about faith and its loss, church and state, marriage and marital problems, sexual frustration and domestic deceit, revolutionary violence and suburban boredom. He is, in short, a sympathetic virtuoso, an expert who has somehow disappeared off the literary map to be replaced by many who can’t write as well or have as much to say. I’ve long thought there is something of Montaigne about Brian Moore, something solitary, deeply sceptical, something in his make-up that never really settled. Moore entertained doubt. He depended on his own eyes and his own judgement. He never signed up for anything, apart from trying to say it as he saw it. I have always warmed to people who are not too hand-in-glove with their community or flock or tribe or religion, and above all to those who do not know the answers. I met Brian Moore only once, if you can call a book signing a meeting. After he had been interviewed on stage I stood in a long queue with a small selection of my hardback copies: I was too embarrassed to hold up proceedings by opening my bulging plastic bag and plonking the full load down. He signed the small selection and said thank you and gave me a wry smile. He was a writer, and in many ways a man after my own heart. Or so I like to imagine.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 49 © Jonathan Smith 2016