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 cliche.
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 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
