Both St. Bernard and Pascal tell us that we wouldn’t look for God unless God had already found us. Brian Moore’s fiction suggests that such searching and such discovery are perilous indeed. Perilous and inescapable if human beings are ever fully to find themselves, as they are meant to, in the heart of the creator.
Mr. Moore’s imaginative context is richly Roman Catholic—the list of his titles is suffused with a vocabulary which is, sadly, becoming merely nostalgic: passion, temptation, feast, limbo, heaven, etc.—but the dilemmas his most complex characters face are too serious, too intricate, too important to be contained within an established institutional context. The church as such is woven deep into the fabric of Moore’s fictional world, but, even for characters who are priests and nuns, the institution is never a sufficient mediator between suffering, uncertain men and women, and the mystery of God. At the end of a journey into the pagan wilds of seventeenth-century Canada, Laforgue, a Jesuit in Moore’s Black Robe, contemplates a statue of the Virgin: “He looked at the empty eyes of the statuette as though, in them, some hint might be given him of that mystery which is the silence of God.”
Moore makes us face the reality of the church in our lives in this time: the force of the church is diminished as an intellectual, imaginative backdrop to, or moral arbiter in, any literature which might self-consciously want to claim itself as “Catholic.” The English critic and “Catholic novelist” David Lodge has described the dilemma faced by Roman Catholic fiction writers in the era after the Second Vatican Council. “I don’t think that one can talk of the Catholic novel in quite such sharply-defined terms any more.... The church no longer presents that sort of monolithic, unified, uniform view of life which it once did.” The remedies for alienation and acedia and despair in the works of Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene, for example, were not only clearly spiritual in character, but also deliberately Roman Catholic in practice. Greene’s gifts are still intact, which is real grace for us all. Waugh’s eccentricities were clear even before the Vatican council, but he was hit hard by its innovations (”... 1965 was a bad year for me in a number of ways—dentistry, deaths of friends, the ‘aggiornamento.’ I try to face the new wars with resignation.”) There was clarity and fidelity within that eccentricity, however. Waugh’s dissections of the vacuous and terrifying Modern Age, especially as it pertains to the church, appear increasingly resonant.
Waugh and Greene remain significant Catholic writers despite their differences: Waugh was clearly more interested in sin, Greene in sinners. Their serious work describes human behavior and its consequences in the vocabulary—sin, forgiveness, grace—of a Catholic culture that seems to have eroded.
Brian Moore has inherited a serious legacy from such writers, but not their world of social and religious certainty, of judgment and forgiveness, of manageable mystery. Moore has been left on his own, alone. In The Doctor’s Wife, Moore’s novel in which a Belfast woman flees her husband and secure respectability for love and the chance to find an identity of her own, her brother, a physician, faces his sister’s problem. “If this were 1935 and Sheliah were my father’s younger sister, the whole discussion would have been conducted in the context of sin. I can talk about it only in the context of illness. My father would have talked of the moral obligations involved. I can only surmise the emotional risks.” Such a woman has been oddly victimized by theology. “The word (God) usually came to her lips these days as a meaningless ejaculation. She no longer prayed. She remembered when all that had changed, at the time of Pope John. It had begun when people lost their fear of hell and damnation. If you no longer feared damnation, you no longer had to believe in heaven.”
Moore’s characters face a moral realm in which the church’s judgments on right and wrong are no longer the last word. Good and evil are no less apparent, but while we still confront the uncertainties of our lives and the certainty of our deaths, ambiguity abounds. ‘“Are we supposed to be happy in this life?’ And she laughed and accused me of still being a Catholic. But I said to her, ‘No seriously, do you think it’s possible for anyone to be more than intermittently happy in life? Continual happiness just isn’t a possible state for anyone with a brain in their heads.’” Moore’s characters walk on the tightrope of mystery without that net of Catholic definitions that now seem so arcane. His work conveys an understanding of the nature of loneliness better than that of any writer I can think of. His particular concentration on the various mutations of loneliness, oddly enough, gives his work its particularly Catholic identity. Brian Moore’s characters are enmeshed in the evil of loneliness, his novels draw a map of loneliness, a modern hell which is no less punishing nor less perduring than Lucifer’s resting place.
These are Moore’s themes: loneliness and the search for God. A reader might suspect that the search for God would relieve loneliness by supplying lives with purpose, but Moore’s literary imagination is too spiritually complex, his religious sensibility too grounded in sharp, ordinary human perceptions to allow for any easy satisfactions to arrive in the shape of religious fulfillment. In Moore’s novels, human loneliness is often the consequence of hiding from God’s searches for his creatures. (The psalmist’s words echo in Moore’s novels, “O where can I go from your spirit, or where can I flee from your face? If I climb the heavens you are there. If I lie in the grave, you are there.”) If God ever is found, he confounds all expectations, but loneliness is never avoided.
Moore is adept at creating dark nights for unwilling souls; his inclinations are decidedly mystical, and his allusions in his works to St. John of the Cross and the Carmelite tradition reinforce his characterizations. Moore writes about how God and men and women, in the very intensity of their searchings, often seem to remain unrecognized to each other. Over and over in reading the fifteen novels Moore has written during the past thirty years, I was reminded of a sentence in a letter from the French worker priest Henri Perrin in the mid 1950s (around the time Moore was writing his first novel), “We must try to do our best to break through loneliness, which is the thing most opposed to God.”
Moore’s novels are distinguished by the ways different sets of characters cope with the struggles between their hopes and their imperfections. No struggle is denser or more heartbreaking than the one portrayed in that astonishing first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Miss Hearne, even in her spinsterish middle age, is an orphan, abandoned by family and fate and faith, whose only comfort is in her fantasy and in her bottle (which frequently fuels the former).
A product of a respectable middle-class upbringing in her aunt’s Belfast home, educated at “the Sacred Heart,” but worn into financial and emotional penury by her aunt’s prolonged final illness, she is reduced to boarding in bed-sitting houses where, inevitably, the clientele contributes to her sense of the cross she is bearing. Having discovered the solace of drink late in her life, she surrenders to its lure during increasingly frequent binges. As a result, she loses the few piano students she teaches and is constantly changing digs in acquiescence to the offended sensibilities of parents and landladies.
In her latest loneliness, Miss Hearne’s fellow boarders include her landlady’s son, Bernard (a grotesque not-so-young university student who continues to milk his mother’s generosity while he’s seducing the teen-aged parlor maid) and her brother, James Madden. Madden is recently returned from America, where he’d worked as a hotel doorman in Times Square, after obtaining a modest sum from an insurance company in an accident settlement.
Unfortunately, Madden and Miss Hearne radically misread each other. Her bearing and polished manners indicate wealth to him; his curiosity and attention, romantic interest to her. After they arrange to spend an evening together, Madden “hurried off across the street as though he were afraid she would change her mind and tell him so. It was, she realized, the way she herself left others, after a successful theft of their time, after a promise, so terribly wanted, a promise that she could come again.” The phrases are short and strung together in such a way that one feels her tentativeness and her fear.
Miss Hearne is unused to receiving more than cursory attention from anyone, especially from men. Madden appears to be an answer to her prayers. “She gave thanks to the Sacred Heart that he had sent her the trials and tribulations of her last lodgings that she might move to Camden Street and meet Mr. Madden.” Obviously, Miss Hearne’s prayers have not been casual:
She had followed her Aunt D’Arcy’s lead.... Church affairs, her aunt once said, tend to put one in contact with all sorts of people whom one would prefer not to know socially. Prayer and a rigorous attention to one’s religious duties will contribute far more towards one’s personal salvation than the bickering that goes on about church bazaars. Miss Hearne had her life-long devotion to the Sacred Heart. He was her guide and comforter. And her terrible judge.... Religion was there.... You could pray for guidance, for help, for her good intentions. Her prayers would be answered. God is good.
Alas, each discovers the other’s intention; no one’s prayers are answered. Miss Hearne has only one sober bulwark left.
Though she expects rejection from every other front, and is steeled for it, Judith Hearne assaults heaven with her petitions for release from her loneliness and from her sin, the drink:
O Sacred Heart forgive me, she prayed, her eyes on the small golden door of the tabernacle Deserted God, she thought, you wait alone each night while men forget you.... O Sacred Heart, please, I need your strength, your help. Why should life be so hard for me, why am I alone, why did I yield to the temptation of drink, why, why has it all happened like this?.... You, only you know the things I wanted, the home, children to raise up to honour and reverence you.... You have shared my suffering, you know that I love you, please dear Lord, give me a sign, give me strength.
Her desperation is as compelling as her humiliation, and her spirit simply begins to collapse, in the wake of these prayers, when she’s turned out of church by a sacristan who’s closing it for the night. “When the lights went out it seemed as though the tabernacle were empty.... What if it meant nothing, nothing?”
Miss Hearne can rationalize her travail with the apparatus provided by what she refers to as, “the Faith.” In a rigid structure with firm judgments and sure rewards, she has a place. However, if the judgments aren’t grounded in a theological reality, “what if the godless were right, what if it all started back aeons ago with fish crawling out of the sea to become men and women?.... In that world, what place had a God who cared for suffering?” She has relied on the church for the sustenance she couldn’t find among human beings, and the church thwarts her. The faith is as disappointing and false as every other missed connection in a life that is desiccated and friendless.
The breakdown she suffers involves a frontal, physical confrontation with the Real Presence in the tabernacle. “What is to become of me, O Lord, alone in this city, with only drink, hateful drink that dulls me, disgraces me, lonely drink that leaves me more lonely, more despised? Why this cross? Give me another, great pain, great illness, anything, but let there be someone to share it. Why do you torture me, alone and silent behind your little door? Why? ‘I hate you,’ she said, her voice loud and shrill in the silence of the church.”
What is understandably hateful is the fact that Judith Hearne has been conditioned to equate her experience of the church with the experience of God. Her life implodes on a set of social structures that are as much informed, and perhaps more informed, by the church as they are by the world. She is isolated by the complacency of an organization that, rather than anticipating the urgency of doubt, only registers irritated surprise when it surfaces. The novel indicts all the forces-religious, cultural, emotional-that have conspired to circumscribe Judith Hearne’s aspirations, desires, and hope. Miss Hearne’s shrill voice is all the more remarkable and haunting for the skill with which Brian Moore has created the wilderness in which it cries.
Moore is adept at charting the courses of his characters’ inner weathers; when they are women, his eye is extraordinarily acute. I happened to have a copy of I Am Mary Dunne with me one evening in a theater. Waiting for the performance to begin, the woman sitting next to me noticed the book and said that at the time the book was published (1968) it seemed more immediate and more real to her own experience than anything she’d ever read; her memory of the book was detailed and affectionate.
Written thirteen years after Judith Hearne, I Am Mary Dunne is a mirror image of the former book. It is a novel of intense reminiscence in which a day in the life of one woman, whose sensibility is inordinately heightened by premenstrual tension, is played against her past in a series of jarring juxtapositions that undermine her fragile, endangered sense of herself. Whereas Judith Hearne seeks to contain her interior terror by wallowing in the memories of her past and in her piety, Mary Dunne hopes to find out who she really is by escaping from hers. Miss Hearne is, almost literally, petrified; Mary Dunne is so diffused that she feels in danger of not being able to keep hold of her sanity, much less her identity. Compared to the black hole into which Judith Hearne falls, so dense that no light can escape, each perception Mary Dunne has is a catalyst that leads to an inevitable terror of reflection:
People who get on the bus at the Seventy-ninth Street stop are usually people who have been to the museum.... But the woman who sat beside me today with her little daughter on her knee—I doubt if she had even been inside the Met. She seemed Puerto Rican, with a tired yellow face.... Hers was the Juarez face: it could be Mexican. No matter which country they came from down there, they are Indians, with an Indian face, the face of the three little girls of my Juarez dooms....
Mary Dunne’s dooms are attacks of fundamental forgetful-ness: she forgets her name. “I am a changeling who has changed too often, and there are moments when I cannot find my way back.” Hers is a ghost story. She’s haunted by her past character(s), those Mary Dunnes who maneuvered through work and love and infidelity without finding satisfaction, without finding out who she was.
In serious flight from a devout, provincial Canadian background, Mary Dunne explores all the, formerly forbidden, ambiguities of desire. Her third husband, Terence, is her salvation, in that he seems to provide stability and sensuality. Dunne is fearful that the one thing she hopes to hold onto will not be able to withstand the whirlwind of her own uncertainty: ”.. .he was alive, he was life, not death. I held him and I thought, he is my savior, he restoreth my soul. I heard him ask again what was wrong and all the unreasoning, unreasonable emotions of my state spilled out beyond my control and I held him, kissed him, weeping, saying, ‘Tee, Tee, I love you, please love me?’”
Mary Dunne bears scars from her sexual involvements—indeed, some of Moore’s characters bear deeper, bloodier such scars—and the erotic is an enormously potent force in Moore’s work. (Whether one loses oneself in pleasure or in God, the desire for transcendence permeates all of Moore’s novels.) Moreover, the complications which make it difficult for Mary Dunne to find any mooring in her life don’t, on the face of it, seem very religious. The supernatural, in fact, doesn’t seem at all to apply. However, the composition that she seems intent on putting together from the fragments of her longing and her regret is profoundly, instinctively spiritual. She mimics the first act of the first humans, reported in Genesis; she seeks to mitigate the unknown by giving it a name: “in a few hours I will begin to bleed, and until then I will hold on...I have not changed, I remember who I am and I say it over and over and over, I am Mary Dunne, I am Mary Dunne, I am Mary Dunne.”
Fifteen years after Mary Dunne, Moore took an ingenious chance with another novel about a woman intent on escaping from the intricacies of her choices. Cold Heaven is a simple story: Marie Davenport wants to leave her brilliant, overbearing husband Alex, a doctor, so that she can marry another physician, Daniel Bailey. But Marie has had a vision of the Virgin. Moore is far too skillful to allow this odd occurrence to appear comic. Clearly he’s suggesting that amid all the possible manifestations of God’s presence in the world, in nature, in art, in human relationships, it is perhaps impossible entirely to avoid the direct and demanding intrusion of the divine into our lives.
Replaying a more or less familiar scenario—even as the apparition at Medjugorje attracts attention from charters and cable television—Marie is told that the Blessed Mother wants the site of the apparition, on the California coast near Carmel, to become a place of pilgrimage, and that she must “tell the priests” what she has seen. When she resists and finds herself in the middle of an astounding series of circumstances, including her husband’s recovery from what had seemed a fatal accident, Marie is sure that she’s engaged in combat with the Other World. In order to accomplish “their” plan, “they” hold the health of Marie’s husband, and her anticipated future happiness (with a new husband), hostage. How strange it sounds in the retelling; how strange in the reading. However, Moore is dead serious in his portrayal of the varieties of religious experience. The novel is peopled with unbelievers, ascetic nuns, a posh monsignor (“God’s improbable functionary in his green madras slacks and purple tennis shirt”), and lovers simply trying to connect. Yet this spiritual circus is not absurd.
God appears to individuals; all persons, with the eyes to see, have their own capacities to translate that appearance. Flannery O’Connor wrote, “For the writer of fiction everything has its testing point in the eye, an organ which eventually involves the whole personality and as much of the world as can be got into it.. .for the Catholic (the roots of the eye) stretch far and away into those depths of mystery which the modern world is divided about-part of it trying to eliminate mystery while another part tries to rediscover it in disciplines less personally demanding than religion.” Marie Davenport is taxed for what she has seen, but can finally only surrender to the promise of what she can do. “She thought of that life, that ordinary, muddled life of falling in love and leaving her husband and starting over again: that known and imperfect existence that she had fought to regain against ineluctable forces, inexplicable odds.... She had been returned to ordinary life, to its burdens, its consequences.”
Mr. Moore has a large heart for his characters. In a world where God seems, at best, elusive, and loyalty to a church that distrusts human instincts is exhausting, men and women would seem to be severely handicapped in their yearnings for meaning and love. Some of Moore’s characters appear fearful of accepting the truth that to flee from one’s deepest desires and needs is to flee, as well, from God.
Perhaps even more unnerving is the realization that implicitly occurs again and again in Moore’s novels, whether the theme is specifically “religious” or not: if God created his son with a Sacred Heart, all of our hearts are sacred. For some of his characters the realization is inchoate; some, in The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Catholics, Black Robe, or The Color of Blood, for example, embrace it and suffer the consequences. Most of Brian Moore’s characters, and I daresay most of us, flee from such an understanding of the self and its possibilities. Understandably.
