BIOGRAPHY: In a short note on "The Pleasure of Reading" written in 1992, the Belfast-born novelist Brian Moore identified three books from his teenage years that greatly influenced him.
The Faber Book of Modern Verse, the original edition of Michael Roberts's anthology "which became for me, as for many of my generation, our introduction to Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane and others". Joyce's Ulysses, which Moore borrowed from a cousin who had
"smuggled it in from Paris" and which he (Moore) never returned. And The Sun Also Rises: "At the age of eighteen," Moore recalls, "I lay one day [c.1939] on top of Cave Hill, the mountain which overlooks my native city.
I was reading The Sun Also Rises, lost in Hemingway's perfect evocation of a Spanish bullfight fiesta and the
Left Bank café life of expatriates in the 1920s. I realised that Jake Barnes,
like Stephen Dedalus, was a writer of sorts and that both were half in love with lands which were not
their own. Looking back now I think that reading these two books formed my desire to leave Ireland and become a
writer. Which I did."
Indeed he did. Twenty novels from The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) to The Magician's Wife (1997), along with some money-making pulp fiction under a pseudonym, and one novel under way before his death in 1999 at the age of 77. As Patricia Craig informs us in this neat, fluent and clear-sighted biography, Moore's 21st novel was
"based on Rimbaud's life in Africa". That note on "The Pleasure of Writing" tells us much about the contours of Moore's life, which Patricia Craig has shaped into a coherent, uncomplicated and moving narrative.
Her understanding of Moore's professionalism as a writer does not cloud her critical insight into the artistic achievement of his writing. Often patronised as a good "story teller", Craig's very readable book suggests
why there is much more bite to Moore than this cliché.
The Moore family background is sketched in without fuss – the typical mix of Northern hybridity (a mother from Cresslough in Donegal, father from Co Antrim with Presbyterian forebears); the middle-class Catholic upbringing in north Belfast and the social world radiating from north to west to south to Dublin to Moore's famous nationalist uncle, Eoin MacNeill. (Not
the "300-odd miles" from Belfast to here, it should be noted!)
The schooling at St Malachy's Grammar School becomes a bug-bear so that when the young Moore fails a university entrance exam he decides to uproot himself and leave Belfast and so, in his early 20s, he is on "his way to
North Africa with the [Allied] troops".
The Belfast which he left behind tells its own story to which Moore will return in his fiction. The Clifton Street family home in which he had grown up and which provided a fulcrum for his life is blitzed in 1941 and the family relocates. (Having been refurbished after the war as a Home For Fallen Women, administered by the Sisters of Mercy and the
Legion of Mary, Moore's home fell into disuse, becoming "in its final incarnation" a refuge of glue-sniffers. A motorway did the rest and the house no longer exists.) His father dies in 1942.
The known familiar world of north Belfast wherein he had been an avid player – the Antrim Road stroll, the Waterworks, Alexandra Park, Cave Hill, the Zoo, Bellevue – all is left behind as the compass shifts dramatically
for Moore. The war takes him to Algeria, Poland and France. He sees the devastation that war brings at first hand. The riots and sectarian warfare of Belfast become part of a much wider frame of reference. Thence to Canada (and Canadian citizenship in 1953) and a journalist's life until his decision to resign and devote himself to his writing.
Patricia Craig's biography summarises the story of the writer's life, the novels as much as the life itself, with energy and common sense.
In a particularly telling, though rare, intervention in the narrative, Craig remarks: "Brian Moore remains elusive. This 'elusiveness', indeed, has to do with his playful ducking out of ponderous obligations: the obligation to be
attached to a particular country, or credo, or style of writing." Alongside the elusiveness Craig also portrays a flinty, urbane, stylish and generous man whose North-American Belfast accent had all the wry self-mocking of some one who had been through a lot and had reached in his writing a point of mastery. Both The Statement (1995) and The Magician's Wife (1995), his last two published works, are – in this reader's mind at least – the best he had written. But when one looks down through the back-list – at random, from the 1960s, The Emperor of Ice Cream, I Am Mary Dunne, from the 1970s, The Great Victorian Collection, The Mangan Inheritance; Cold Heaven and Black Robe from the 1980s – one soon realises that in his own elusive way Moore's achievement is second to none. Essential reading, for sure, and that goes for Patricia Craig's authorised biography as well.
Gerald Dawe's collections of poetry include The Morning Train (1999). Gallery Press will publish his new collection, Lake Geneva, next year. He teaches at Trinity College, Dublin.