Stet

by Diana Athill

  It was Mordecai who introduced me to Brian Moore in that he told me that this friend of his had written an exceptionally good book which we ought to go after; but I must not deprive André of his discovery of Judith Hearne. As André remembers it, he was given the book by Brian’s agent in New York on the last day of one of his – André’s – visits there; he read it on the plane on the way home and decided at once that he must publish it. I think it likely that he asked to see it, having been alerted, as I had been, by Mordecai. But whether or not he asked for it, he certainly recognized its quality at once; and when he handed it over to me, it came to me as something I was already hoping to read, and its excellence was doubly pleasing because Brian was a friend of Mordecai’s. The two had got to know each other in Paris, and in Canada, where Mordecai was a native and Brian, an Ulsterman, had chosen to live in common – although the Moores moved to New York soon after we met.

  Before Brian wrote Judith Hearne (later retitled The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne for publication in paperback and in the United States), when he was scrabbling about to keep a roof over his head, he had written several thrillers for publication as pocketbooks, under a pseudonym, which he said had been a useful apprenticeship in story-telling because it was a law of the genre that something must happen on every page. But however useful, it came nowhere near explaining Judith. With his first serious book Brian was already in full possession of his technical accomplishment, his astounding ability to put himself into other people’s shoes, and his particular view of life: a tragic view, but one that does not make a fuss about tragedy, accepting it as part of the fabric with which we all have to make do. He was to prove incapable of writing a bad book, and his considerable output was to include several more that were outstandingly good; but to my mind he never wrote anything more moving and more true than Judith Hearne.

  When he came to London in 1955 for the publication of Judith, he came without his wife Jackie – perhaps she was in the process of moving them to New York. He was a slightly surprising figure, but instantly likeable: a small, fat, round-headed, sharp-nosed man resembling a robin, whose flat Ulster accent was the first of its kind I had heard. He was fat because he had an ulcer and the recommended treatment in those days was large quantities of milk; and also because Jackie was a wonderful cook. (Her ham, liberally injected with brandy before she baked it – she kept a medical syringe for the purpose – was to become one of my most poignant food memories.) When I asked him home to supper on that first visit he was careful to explain that he was devoted to his wife – a precaution which pleased me because it was sensible as well as slightly comic.

  Few men would be considerate enough to establish their unavailability like that. (Perhaps I was flattering him: it may have been a touch of puritanical timidity that he was exhibiting, rather than considerateness. But that was how I saw it.) Once he was sure that I was harbouring no romantic or predatory fancies, the way was opened to a relaxed friendship, and for as long as I knew him and Jackie as a couple there seemed to be nothing that we couldn’t talk about. They were both great gossips – and when I say great I mean great, because I am talking about gossip in its highest and purest form: a passionate interest, lit by humour but above malice, in human behaviour. We used often, of course, to talk about writing – his and other people’s, and eventually mine – but much more often we would talk with glee, with awe, with amazement, with horror, with delight, about what people had done and why they had done it. And we munched up our own lives as greedily as we did everyone else’s.

  In addition to seeing the Moores when they came to England (once they rented a house in Chelsea which had a Francis Bacon hanging in the drawing-room) I spent half a holiday with them in Villefranche (the other half had been with the Richlers in Cagnes), crossed the Atlantic with them on board the France, stayed with them in New York and twice in their summer house in Amagansett. It was from Brian himself that I heard, in Villefranche, the story of how he came to move to Canada.

  It was a painful and romantic story. Immediately after the war Brian had got a job in the relief force, UNRRA, which had taken him to Poland, and there he fell in love with a woman older than himself (or perhaps he had fallen already and went there in pursuit of her). It was a wild passion, undiminished by the fact that she was an alcoholic. The only effect of that misfortune was to make him drink far beyond his capacity in an attempt to keep up with her: he described with horror waking up on the floor of a hotel bedroom lying in his vomit, not knowing what day it was; crawling on his hands and knees to the bathroom for a drink of water; getting drunk again as the water stirred up the vodka still in him; and finally discovering that he had been unconscious for two whole days. And there had never been anything but flashes of happiness in the affair because he had never known where he was with her, whether because of the swerving moods of drunkenness, or because she despised the abjectness of his obsession, I am not sure. He remembered it as an agonizing time, but when she told him it was over and went away to Canada, although he tried to accept it, he couldn’t. He followed her – and she refused even to see him. And thus, he said, he learnt to detest the very idea of romantic passion.

  Thus, too, he made his break with his native Ulster, and became distanced from (he never broke with) his rather conventional Catholic family, which gave him the necessary perspective on a great deal of the material he was to use in his novels. Not that he began at once to write seriously. Among the ways he earned his living during those early days in Canada was proof-reading for a newspaper, during which he met Jackie, who was a journalist. Then came those useful pocketbook thrillers – which must have paid pretty well, because by the time he felt secure enough to settle down to writing what he wanted to write, Jackie was able to stop working. Their son Michael was about two when I first met them, and although the comfort the Moores lived in was modest, it was comfort.

  They gave the impression of being an exceptionally compatible pair: as good an advertisement as one could hope to find for liking one’s spouse as opposed to being mad about him/her. They got on well with each other’s friends; they shared the same tastes in books, paintings, household objects, food and drink – and, of course, gossip. They laughed a lot together and they loved Michael together. They were delightful to be with. I remember trying to decide which of them I found the better company and settling for a dead heat: with Brian there was the extra pleasure of writing talk, in which he was simultaneously unpretentious and deeply serious; with Jackie the extra amusement of woman talk, in which she was exceptionally honest and funny. I used to look forward to our meetings with whole-hearted pleasure.

  *

  We were to publish five of Brian’s books: Judith Hearne in ’55, The Feast of Lupercal in ’58, The Luck of Ginger Coffey in ’60, An Answer from Limbo in ’63 and The Emperor of Ice Cream in ’66. Why, having made this good start with him, did we not go on to publish all his books?

  Well, we might have lost him anyway because of the frugality of our advertising. Book promotion, before the ways of thinking and behaving bred by television became established, depended almost entirely on reviews, which we always got; and on advertising in newspapers. Interviews and public appearances were rare, and only for people who were news in themselves, as well as writers, like our Alain Bombard who crossed the Atlantic in a rubber dinghy to prove that shipwrecked sailors could live off the sea if they knew how. A novelist had to stab his wife, or something of that sort, to get attention on pages other than those devoted to books. So when a novelist felt that his publisher sold too few copies, what he complained about was always under-advertising.

  Publishers, on the other hand, knew that the sort of advertisements that books – even quite successful ones – could pay for were almost useless. Inflate them to the point at which they really might shift copies, and they would then cost more than the extra copies sold could bring in. Two kinds of advertisement did make sense: descriptions of all your forthcoming books in the trade papers, to which booksellers a
nd librarians turned for information; and conspicuous announcements in big-circulation broadsheets, devoted to a single book provided it was by an already famous author. The run-of-the-mill ad, a six or eight or ten inch column (sometimes double, more often single) into which as many books as possible had been squashed . . . For my part, I only had to ask myself: when had I even looked at such an ad (except for one of our own, to check that nothing had gone wrong with it), to say nothing of buying something because of it? It was reviews, and people talking enthusiastically about books that made me buy them, and why should other people be different? Yet we went on running those pointless, or almost pointless, ads – as few of them as we could get away with – simply so that we could keep our authors happy by reporting ‘Your book was advertised in newspapers A, B, C, D, E and F’, hoping they would be enough impressed by this true statement not to ask ‘And how many other books were in the same ad, and how big was the space, and where was it on the page?’. Often they were sufficiently impressed; but Brian quite soon began to be not impressed enough. By his third novel he had started to think that it ought to be treated like a novel by Graham Greene.

  Given the quality of Brian’s books, if we had indeed given them big solo ads in big-circulation newspapers, and done it often enough, we would no doubt have made him as famous as Greene. But a) it would have taken quite a long time to work, b) all our other writers would meanwhile be going into conniptions, and c) we could not afford it. Or so André was convinced. And in André Deutsch Limited no one but André Deutsch himself had a hope in hell of deciding how much money was to be spent on what. When André dismissed the idea of shifting the advertising of Brian’s work into the big-time category as nonsense, all I could do – all, I must admit, I ever dreamt of doing – was convey his opinion to Brian in less brutal words. And up to the publication of The Emperor of Ice Cream in 1966 Brian did no more than mutter from time to time, and then appear to forget it.

  Not long after that publication I went to New York for the firm, saw the Moores as usual, and was invited by them to spend a few days in Amagansett. The misery of New York in a heat-wave gives those easy-going Long Island seaside towns great charm: their tree-shaded streets, their shingled houses set back from the streets and far apart, among more trees – how pretty and restful they are! The English pride themselves on having evolved in the eighteenth century a perfect domestic architecture, but I think the Americans beat them at it with the unpretentious, graceful, welcoming wooden houses that are so respectfully and unpompously preserved in New England. The house rented by the Moores was not particularly distinguished, but the moment you were through the front door you were comfortable in it – and ‘comfortable’ was the word for Amagansett as a whole. It has (or had then) a life of its own apart from accommodating summer visitors, although that was what it chiefly did; and it wasn’t smart. Its regular visitors insisted a little too much on how they preferred it to the snobby Hamptons, where the vast country retreats of the robber barons still stood, and where the big money still tended to go; but I thought Amagansett really did deserve preference. It was favoured by writers and medical people, particularly psychiatrists. When I arrived this time Brian and Jackie were full of a party ending with a moonlit swim, during which four or five drunk psychiatrists had been so relaxed and happy that, as they bobbed about in the sea, they had confided in each other their most intimate secrets: which were not, as ordinary people’s might have been, what they did in bed, but how much they earned.

  I was not the Moores’ only guest. They had become friends with a couple whom I had met a year or so before, and liked: Franklin Russell, who wrote good and successful nature books, and his very attractive Canadian wife Jean, who was an actress – a good one according to the Moores, although she found it impossible to get parts in New York because Americans never took Canadians seriously. Frank was travelling in some inhospitable place for one of his books, so Jean needed cheering up and was therefore with us. The two couples had become so close that they had just pooled their resources and bought a country place in New Jersey: the Moores were going to live in the old farm house, the Russells were converting its barn. This venture was the summer’s big excitement.

  I was there for three or four days which were as enjoyable as our times together always were. On one of the days Jean took over the kitchen and cooked a supremely delicious shrimp dish, for which she was famous, and on another day she and Brian had to make the long drive to the new property, to sort something out with the builders, so Jackie and I made an outing to Sag Harbor. On my last day, as we were all strolling to the beach, Jackie and ten-year-old Michael leading the way, I caught myself thinking ‘Perhaps darling Jackie is letting her indifference to appearance go a bit far’. Like Brian, she was fat, and she had recently become fatter – her ragged old denim shorts were too tight. And she had been neglecting her roughly blonded hair, which looked chopped rather than cut and was stiff from sea-bathing so that it stuck out like straw. When you couldn’t see her vivid face and the brightness of her hazel eyes, you noticed that she was looking a mess. I don’t recall making the comparison, but the always remarkable and apparently effortless physical elegance of Jean, who was walking beside me, may well have triggered the thought.

  It was, however, a passing one: something which I would not have remembered if I had not received a letter from Jackie about a month later, telling me that Brian and Jean had run away together.

  My first reaction was a shock of shame at my own obtuseness. Did I not pride myself on being a shrewd observer of people’s behaviour? How could I possibly have registered no more than that one tiny flicker of foreboding, and then dismissed it? So much for perceptiveness! And so much for Brian’s detestation of romantic passion!

  My next, and enduring, reaction was one of acute consternation on Jackie’s behalf. She, too, had failed to pick up any hint of what was going on. She had made her discovery through some cliche of marital disaster such as finding a note in a pocket when sending a jacket to the cleaner. Trying not to be entirely sure of its implications, she had asked Brian for an explanation: out it all came, and off they went. She was still in shock when she wrote, and all my feelings of sympathy were for her and Michael.

  It was only for a few days, however, that I felt Brian to have transmogrified into a villain. It did seem extraordinary that he and Jean had been prepared to continue with the property-sharing plan once they had fallen in love, abandoning it only on being discovered. That was what it looked like then, to both Jackie and me. Later it occurred to me that they might well have been less cold-blooded towards Frank and Jackie than they seemed: that they might not have realized how irresistible their passion had become until that day they spent together ‘sorting things out with the builders’, or even after that. But even while I was still being shocked by their ruthlessness, I knew that falling in love happens, and once it has happened it can’t be undone. And I also acknowledged that I and their other friends must have been wrong in seeing the partnership between Brian and Jackie as cloudless. Little though he had shown it, he must have been finding it oppressive for some time. It is absurd for anyone to believe himself aware of the ins and outs of other people’s relationships, so it was absurd to blame Brian for finding in Jean something which he needed, and which Jackie could not give. (That he had done so was true, and remained true for the rest of his life.)

  So I expected soon to emerge from total dismay at the Moores’ break-up, and to see Brian again as himself. But for the moment the person I couldn’t stop thinking about was Jackie. She had not wanted anything from the marriage that it didn’t give her: she had been as proud of Brian as a writer as she had been happy with him as a companion, and now all that was gone. Ahead of her stretched emptiness; above and below and within and without was the horrible miasma of the humiliation which comes from rejection. Then there was the anxiety of how to bring Michael through this debacle – and, for that matter, of how he and she were going to manage on their own . . . if ever anyo
ne deserved sympathy, she did. Whereas Brian had seen what he wanted and had taken it, while remaining perfectly secure in the part of his own territory that was most important to him: his writing. No one need feel sorry for Brian. So it was Jackie I wanted to support, which meant writing to her often; whereas if I wrote to Brian, I wouldn’t know what to say.

  I ought, therefore, to have kept silent, but I did not. On getting a brief note giving me an address for him (whether this came from him or his agent I can’t remember), I answered it almost as briefly, saying that although I was sure that we would soon be back on our old footing, for the present I was feeling for Jackie so strongly that I would prefer it if he and I confined ourselves to business matters.

  How I regret not keeping his reply; because its strangeness is far from being communicable by description. I did not keep it because, having shown it to André, I wanted never to see it again.