THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE

by Brian Moore

  A lady, a Catholic, and a drunk: Moore is expert at evoking the three sides of Judith Hearne’s nature. How perfectly he strikes each tone:

  She rummaged in the jewel box, deciding that the pink and white cameo would be a little too much. But she wore her watch, the little gold wristlet watch that Aunt D’Arcy had given her on her twenty-first birthday. It didn’t really work well any more. The movement was wearing out. But it was a good watch, and very becoming.

  [She] offered up a special prayer to the Sacred Heart, asking Him . . . if this man . . . might not be the one the Sacred Heart had chosen Himself to help her in her moments of pain and suffering, to uphold her and help her uphold the right . . . she touched her breast three times and asked the Sacred Heart for a sign . . . that would reveal to her whether He in His infinite patience and mercy had answered her prayers.

  . . . nothing seemed bad,. . . It didn’t matter, everything could be solved. She sipped her whiskey, feeling the oily yellow liquid burn her throat, warming her all the way. . . James Madden would ask her and she would say yes. And then she would show him how to behave. New York, the picture-postcard city, they would go off to it together, sailing away.

  “Sailing, sailing, over the ocean waves,“ she sang, smiling.

  A ghostly music pervades this novel, the music of James Joyce, dead only fifteen years before its publication. We hear echoes of the suffering women of Dubliners (Mrs. Sinico of “A Painful Case“ and Maria, stoic spinster of “Clay“), of the liturgical evocations of A Portrait of an Artist, and the blend of the elevated and the demotic that Joyce brought to the world in Ulysses. Following Judith and her escort James (Jimmy) Madden to the movies, we hear the inner voice of Leopold Bloom.

  Mammoth Mister Victor Mature, sweat streaming down his FACE, met and held the lion, bigger now as the close-up showed its MAMMOTH JAWS, its MAMMOTH FANGS. Fading to the small (double?) vanquishing the lion, and then, Victor Mature, life-size again, a handsome Samson, ready to meet his Delilah.

  And in some of Judith’s pathetic fantasies, we hear both Gerty MacDowell and Molly:

  He noticed me. He was attracted. The first in ages. Well that’s only because I’ve been keeping myself to myself too much. . .. Mr and Mrs James Madden, of New York, sailed from Southampton yesterday on the Queen Mary. Mr Madden is a prominent New York hotelier and his bride is the former Judith Hearne, only daughter of the late Mr and Mrs Charles B. Hearne, of Ballymena. The honeymoon? Niagara Falls, isn’t that the place Americans go? Or perhaps Paris, before we sail.

  We follow Judith Hearne, accompanied by her two pictures (her aunt and Jesus), from a good enough place in new lodgings to a ruined end in a charity home. Her fall is occasioned by the twin failures of the promises of sacred and profane love.

  For Judith Hearne feeds her famished heart on the over-rich delights of pious devotionalism and the popcorn of popular romance. She sees herself as the specially chosen of the bleeding Christ. But she also sees herself as a princess, a Gypsy girl. And when she meets James Madden, the brother of her landlady, a dipso doorman from Donegal (via Brooklyn), he becomes her diamond-in-the-rough Prince Charming. He is “the last one,“ her last chance for love. But while he may be courting her, it isn’t her body he’s interested in. Misconstruing her nice ways for financial solvency he dreams of enticing her to invest in a hamburger joint to serve American tourists on the streets of Dublin. And far from the love-starved widower she takes him to be, he is a sexual predator, who first beats and later rapes a maid who works in the house.

  Judith Hearne breaks the circle of six months’ sobriety when Jimmy’s sister and nephew out him: he wasn’t a hotelier, as he’d claimed, only a hotel doorman who came into some money after being hit by a bus. In this novel chock-full of dark characters, the blackest hearts by far belong to Jimmy’s sister, Mrs. Henry Rice, and her hateful son, Bernard. Bernard is purely evil: fat, blond, a dropout poet who believes that his own greatness entitles him to live off his mother. Not that his mother minds. The scene of Mrs. Rice washing her son’s hair in the sitting room would have a good chance of taking top honors in the category “horror in a domestic setting.“

  “I’ve just finished washing Bernie’s hair and I’m going to make a cup of tea.“. . .

  Night gave a special flavour to Mrs Henry Rice’s nest. The coloured lampshades glowed orange, blue and green and flames yawned noisily up the chimney. . .In the centre of the room, kneeling on a rug, was Bernard, stripped to his bulging middle, his head immersed in a towel. A big enamel basin of soapy water stood beside him on the floor. . .

  Mrs Henry Rice. . .sat down on an armchair beside Bernard and towelled his hidden features and hair.

  Disappointed that Jimmy may not be all that he claims, Judith Hearne takes a drink. From there everything falls apart with a sickening rapidity. Encouraged by Bernard, Judith presses her suit with Jimmy, who rejects her in horror. But more damaging are Judith’s public humiliations in settings controlled by the church. Seeking fellowship with an old drinking buddy, she smuggles gin into a nursing home run by nuns. Her discovery and banishment are accompanied by the swish of veils and the crackling of starched wimples. And her most dramatic public transgression occurs on the altar of her parish church. Yearning desperately for the presence of God, she is devastated that there is no “real presence“ in the form of the host. With a terrifying plainness, she becomes convinced that “she had prayed to bread.“ In a moment of alcoholic hallucination she tries to break into the locked tabernacle, the golden box in which the host is housed. She is taken away to her final abode, the very nursing home that had been the site of her earlier humiliation. The novel ends as it began, with her consideration of the importance of her two pictures: her aunt and the Sacred Heart. “When they’re with me, watching over me, a new place becomes home.“

  But of course there is no possibility of home for Judith Hearne, and Moore will not allow the slightest hint of consolation. Our instinct is to forget the likes of Judith Hearne; their fate is hopeless, and hopelessness makes us want to turn our eyes away. But Moore will not; his gaze, unflinching, honors Judith Hearne in her stark desolation, the poison fruit of false or empty dreams.

  —MARY GORDON

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1955 by Brian Moore; copyright renewed © 1983 by Brian Moore

  Afterword copyright © 2010 by Mary Gordon

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Cecilia Paredes, Dreaming Rose, 2009; courtesy of the artist

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

  Moore, Brian, 1921–1999.

  [Judith Hearne]

  The lonely passion of Judith Hearne / by Brian Moore; afterword by Mary

  Gordon.

  p. cm.—(New York Review Books classics)

  First published in London in 1955 under title: Judith Hearne.

  ISBN 978-1-59017-349-7 (alk. paper)

  1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Belfast (Northern Ireland)—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.M617J83 2010

  813’.5’4—dc22

  2009051331

  eISBN 978-1-59017-420-3

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

 

 

 
0%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share