The Dear Departed: Brian Moore’s short stories reveal a writer’s journey

The Dear Departed: Selected Short Stories

Author: Brian Moore

ISBN-13: 9781916254701

Publisher: Turnpike Books

Guideline Price: £10

I am always worried that Brian Moore will be forgotten. There’s no reason why he should be, while novels like The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and Lies of Silence are still read, but most of his other novels - he published 20 under his own name - slip in and out of print, and his best novels (The Doctor’s Wife, The Emperor of Ice-Cream) seem barely known these days.

It’s not just - I hope - a sort of northern chauvinism that makes me rate this fellow Belfast man as one of the 20th century greats: his protean qualities and his faultless blend of character analysis with plot mark him out from his peers. But I didn’t know about his output of short stories, and this slim collection from Turnpike Books collects the bulk of it.

All the stories here were written between 1953 and 1961, that is, from the years when Moore was writing thrillers under pseudonyms to fund his “serious writing”, through to the period when he wrote his first three mature novels: Judith Hearne, The Feast of Lupercal and The Luck of Ginger Coffey.

Shades of Brennan

There are a lot of elements that we can see fed into his novels - in one case literally. With Moore an exile from both Ireland and religion, and so many of his books featuring characters seeking a substitute for God, it’s fitting that the first story, A Vocation, tackles this head on.

“In the beginning was the Word. And the Word was ‘No’.” The story, showing the misery and hypocrisy the church inflicts on a Belfast boy, takes the form of a catechism: most likely a borrowing from Joyce (whose work Moore admired) before he moved away from that influence. “To my mind,” he said in a 1973 interview, “one cannot write truly experimental books unless they are masterpieces.”

The second story is also on familiar Moore territory, of a woman in a moment of crisis: Grieve for the Dear Departed runs through the head of Dublin widow Mrs Kelleher as she navigates the death of her husband and the return of her son, with shades of Maeve Brennan. Patricia Craig’s biography of Moore tells us that this story was “salvaged from a much-worked and abandoned novel of the mid-1950s”; the sharp focus it retains in this fragment form suggests it was a salvage job worth undertaking.

A few of the stories show their age. Lion of the Afternoon is about an acrobat with achondroplastic dwarfism, who finds that “the curiosity, the smiles that met his every waking moment were assets now” as he performs before a rapt audience of disabled children. But the dated language of “crippled” and “spastics” - commonplace in 1957 but offensive now - makes it difficult to read the story as the empathetic engagement Moore intended. And Off the Track, which describes a couple who have a shocking encounter while holidaying in Haiti, has an element of “white saviour” vs “primitive natives” to it.

‘Only human’

Without question, the outstanding story in the collection is the longest: Uncle T, first published in GQ magazine in 1960. (At the time of writing, the top story on GQ’s website is Best Adidas Shoes You Can Buy Right Now. Not all change is good.) Uncle T is pure Moore, filled with impulsive decisions, regrets, and people making themselves out to be something they never were. (Think of Judith Hearne’s threadbare self-deception.)

The story describes an excruciating evening where Vincent Bishop and his wife Barbara, newly arrived in New York from Ireland, have dinner with Vincent’s uncle Turlough, who has promised Vincent a job in his publishing business. As the night wears on, it becomes clear that Uncle T may have oversold his prospects. “But that’s only human, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Vincent?”

The twin “Irish weaknesses,” as Moore has it, of drink and self-deceit make Uncle T not only piquant and brutal reading, but also a lovely reminder of the force Moore achieved in his novels despite the understated style.

There are a couple of very uncharacteristic stories. Fly Away Finger, Fly Away Thumb, the earliest story here, is a horror story complete with framing device. And the last story, Preliminary Pages for a Work of Revenge, is daring and strange, with a false ending and playful form.

As a story, true, there’s not much happening - it’s a sort of semi-formed howl of hatred by the writer against those who have done him wrong - but, curiously, Moore found a better place for it in his fourth novel, An Answer from Limbo. Much of Preliminary Pages appears in the opening section of Limbo, as would-be novelist Brendan Tierney reflects on the frustrations of his writing career.

By this time - 1962 - Moore was more or less finished with the short form. His novels are the major work, but these stories are a reminder of the steps, with varying degrees of success, he took along the way.