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blatc · 5 months ago

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[Published in the Los Angeles Reader on September 2, 1983]

By Tom Christie

Between 1943 and 1945, Brian Moore, a young Irishman from Belfast, worked in the combat areas of North Africa and Italy as a port officer for the British Ministry of War Transport. When the war ended, he moved on to Poland where he worked two years for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. While behind the Iron Curtain he fell in love with a Canadian girl and followed her home where, he says, she hastily rejected him. Stuck in Canada with no money, he found work in a lumber camp. And then, because he'd always been good at writing in school, he tried to find work as a newspaperman. The Montreal Gazette hired him as a proofreader and he eventually became a reporter. He began to write detective novels, mostly under the pseudonyms Bernard Mara and Michael Bryan, among them Wreath for a Redhead, A Bullet for My Lady, and This Gun for Gloria. Moore's first serious novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, was published in 1955 to great critical notices. He received a Guggenheim fellowship to go to America in 1959 and settled in New York. His thirteen novels include An Answer From Limbo (1963), The Emperor of Ice Cream (1965), The Doctor's Wife (1976), The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960) and Catholics (1972). He also wrote The Revolution Script (1971), a documentary novel about the kidnapping of a British official by the Front de Liberation du Quebec (FLQ) in Montreal in 1970. His new novel, Cold Heaven, will be available in September. Moore has also scripted four films, including the CBS Playhouse 90 production of Catholics starring Trevor Howard and Martin Sheen, and The Blood of Others, currently being filmed in Paris by Claude Chabrol. Moore lives with his wife Jean on the bluffs above the beach near Point Dume, where we met recently.

Q: You came to Los Angeles in 1964 to write Torn Curtain for Alfred Hitchcock and ended up staying. How did that happen?

A: Hitchcock had read some of my early books and he was a Catholic. He wanted originally to do a film about a defector to Russia seen from the point of view of the defector's wife. As I was supposed to be able to write about women, I was hired to do this script. I always intended to go back to New York and then some things happened that changed my mind. My wife loved it here, I discovered that I was getting a lot more work done here, that I was becoming more solitary as I got older, and that I could live the monastic life I wanted to. Also, my father was a doctor and we used to rent a house on the Irish sea every summer, so the idea of being able to look out on the sea has always appealed to me. Then I was offered a Regents' Professorship at UCLA. That's all – I'm like top seed: It grew and I stayed.

I assumed you had come here purposely, that California was the ultimate place for the "writer in exile," as you're often called. You didn't have any thoughts of coming here before this happened?

No, not at all. I came here originally when they made a film of one of my books, The Luck of Ginger Coffey. I had the usual experience: I stayed in the Valley, it was hot, I went to Universal a couple of times, I went downtown, I saw Forest Lawn and I was quite happy to go home, because I hadn't seen the city. I think one of the problems with people who come to Los Angeles is that it's not a possible place to see; it's like the elephant and you're like the blind man and there's no way that you can get a fix on it.

Yes, it takes a while to discover its virtues, I think.

Well, it hasn't too many virtues but its one big virtue that counts a lot for me is that it's the least parochial city in America. New York is parochial. If you tell New Yorkers that their city is not one of the greatest cities in the world, they become infuriated. If you tell Parisians their city isn't great, they become infuriated. You could tell an Angeleno – native or otherwise – anything about the city and he's uninterested. That's a lot of shit to him. He doesn't care. And I think that's refreshing. That makes it an unusual city, in that way. It doesn't want to defend itself, therefore why should I defend it?

New worlds have always been important to your fiction. Do you have any thoughts of moving on?

Well, I'm so nomadic, I don't know. I've lived here longer than I've lived anywhere, strangely enough. I can't believe I've lived seventeen years here; it's amazing to me. But I've been able to do that because my style of living in America and Canada has always been to spend a major portion of the year here and a part of the year in Europe. If I didn't have a foot in both doors I would become a different person, and it's important to me to contrast my past life with my present life.

The awful thing about Los Angeles as a literary place is that, if you write about it, the Eastern literary establishment immediately categorizes it as a 'Hollywood novel,' whether it's about Hollywood or not.

Belfast, Montreal, and New York have been near-characters in your fiction, but you haven't written much about Los Angeles specifically, even though you've lived here so long. Why?

I've never lived in Los Angeles. I've lived in Malibu. I never met a payroll or had a proper job in Los Angeles. My theory of writing is that you cannot write about a place unless you've really lived in it, been part of it, and gone to work in the morning, to know what it's about. I tend to think that Los Angeles is a difficult city to write about. The really good books written about L.A. will be written by people of your generation who've really been brought up or lived here.

Why do you think Los Angeles is a such a difficult city to write about?

Because it is many cities. And the other awful thing about Los Angeles as a literary place is that, if you write about it, the Eastern literary establishment immediately categorizes it as a "Hollywood novel," whether it's about Hollywood or not. Another reason it's tricky to write about is that Los Angeles does not have a literary persona. New York has one, Moscow has one, Paris has one, even Boston has one, but Los Angeles does not have one. Therefore, you have to describe it to people because they're sitting in Ireland or someplace – they don't know what the Valley is. So, you have to load the novel with journalism explaining the city and these sociological facts put into a realistic novel are boring.

By "literary persona," do you mean, for instance, that because people have read about New York so much, they feel they already know it?

Exactly. People don't know about New York but they think they do; it presents a sort of literary image of itself. The Los Angeles image is a filmic image. The beach on which I live is a beach you've seen in a hundred films, but played as a European beach, not as the beach it actually is. Los Angeles is like an imitator, an impersonator of other places. Films have made it impersonate other places.

It seems to me that, although you flirted with fantasy in earlier books, it was only in the California novels that fantasy began to play a major role.

That's quite right. I think you're the first person to mention that to me; no one has mentioned that. I think it's true. It's funny that when I came to California, it was here that I began to deal with the questions of fantasy and mystical experience. I think the reason for it was because California seemed so secular and prosaic and because these great national forests like Los Padres are always in the background, you feel anything could happen in a way you don't – or I don't – feel it anywhere else.

A perfect example of California to me was...I was in Carmel once, driving through, and I decided to spend the night there. I went to bed in a motel and I had a dream that when I woke up in the morning the parking lot was filled with objects of antiquity. Driving along the Big Sur coast on the way back the next morning, I started telling my wife about this dream I'd had, and it became almost like a reality. I really believe that if I had been driving along a New York turnpike it wouldn't have happened. I thought, What if something miraculous or extraordinary happened in California? California is the place that would change it and assimilate it and make it different. The whole idea of The Great Victorian Collection came out of that, and the idea of my new novel, Cold Heaven, which is about a miraculous experience, came because when I'd done The Great Victorian Collection I was dissatisfied – I didn't deal with a truly miraculous experience or how it would be treated here.

For someone whose books were once banned in Ireland, you show a great deal of respect for some of your religious characters. The saintly old nun in Cold Heaven, for instance, is one of your strongest minor characters.

Well, I've always been interested in truly saintly people. There are a few of them around and they aren't necessarily Catholics [laughing], but true sainthood is something that is absolutely fascinating. An interesting thing makes Cold Heaven very topical now: The Catholic church can't get priests, it can't get nuns; there are no vocations. The only vocations coming up strong are for contemplative nuns. Nuns who are in ordinary callings want to leave them, to no longer be nurses or teachers, and to go be contemplative nuns, which is a terribly hard life. But they want to do it. So I think what I'm trying to say in Cold Heaven is that there is a great hunger for mystical experience, for sainthood, in all of us today, although we don't recognize it as that.

It seems to me that the most emotional of non-believers are perhaps those closest to believing, or at least wanting to, but there's some...

Barrier that keeps them from doing it. I'm really amazed at myself because when I was sixteen or seventeen I was very left-wing. I never joined the Communist Party but I was a left-wing Marxist sort of person and totally uninterested in religion, the opiate of the people, I thought. But I discovered that I was very interested in religion. While living in a communist country [Poland], I became disillusioned with what was happening. I discovered that whatever it was that made me go toward the revolution solution, it was the same idealistic impulse that would have made me religious if I'd gone the other way, and I was quick enough to recognize that in myself as a writer.

One of your great strengths as a novelist, as noted by the English critic Christopher Ricks, is that your books make themselves "accessible to everyone...but concentrating simply, directly and bravely on the primary sufferings and passions that everybody feels."

What Ricks said then is the thing that has both worked for and against me, which is that my books are easy to read. They're a good read, which I'm grateful for. I work hard for that but in this day and age they're often academically slighted because they are a good read. The interesting thing about Cold Heaven was that I wanted to write a book in which for the first seventy or eighty pages – until he was hooked and couldn't leave it – the reader thought he was reading a thriller.

What can you tell us about Michael Bryan and Bernard Mara?

Nothing. Who are they [laughing]? No, no, I'll tell you quite simply. When I was trying to get started, I had no money and I also hated detective stories – my father read them all the time. But I decided that there was money to be made writing under a pseudonym. I got Dashiell Hammett and Chandler, and I made them my models. I simply sat down and wrote one of those things in two and a half months and made a year's money out of it. I wrote Judith Hearne with the proceeds from those books. They were just clones, imitations. But all writing, even hack writing, teaches you something. They taught me the genesis of the thriller, which I've used years later in Cold Heaven. I couldn't have done it skillfully if I hadn't been an old practitioner.

How have things changed in the last thirty years for the writer?

When I first started writing, people like Flannery O'Connor were writing and if we made $5,000 a year and got a Guggenheim we were made because we went off and we simply wrote whatever we wanted to and if we gave them a book and it sold 10,000 copies, the publisher was delighted because we were good names to have on his list. In those days there was such a thing as a literary writer; now there's a thing called a "name" writer. There's a big difference.

This is the change: When I started writing, if your book was sold to the Book-of-the-Month Club, your friends said, "Shit, what's wrong with it?" because the Book-of-the-Month Club was junk; everybody knew it. Now even the "best" writers want Book-of-the-Month Club selections more than anything; they hunger for it. They hunger for big sales. The distinction between being good and being rich has narrowed down.

I was somewhat amazed recently to see in the window of a bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London a display of "California imports" – Black Sparrow and some of the other small presses.

Small publishing, actually, is going to be a part of the future, because writers are still honest and still want to do good work. And young writers' only chance of getting published will probably be to go with a small publisher and forget all this fame and fortune crap, which is terribly insidious and bad anyway. I don't think writing is going to die; I just think the distinction should be made more often between financial success and artistic success. Artistic success, as Cyril Connolly said, is when your book stays in print for ten years, and that's still a pretty good wavelength. For instance – not to tout myself – but Judith Hearne has always been in print, for twenty-five years.

[Note: As of this republishing, Judith Hearne remains in print.]

#brian moore #judith hearne #lonely passion of judith hearne #irish writers #Torn Curtain #Alfred Hitchcock #Michael Bryan #Bernard Mara #Malibu #Cold Heaven #The Luck of Ginger Coffey #Los Angeles #Literary Los Angeles

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