Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist by Denis Sampson Marino Books 344pp, £20 in UK
IN 1965, ten years in the wake of publication of Judith Hearne, Brian Moore completed his script for Hitchcock's Torn Curtain, and took a vacation on the California coast. It marked, according to his biographer Denis Sampson, a pivotal point in his life and career.
Behind him the largely suppressed unhappiness of his growing pains in Belfast seemed finally exorcised by the writing of his clutch of early realistic novels about Ireland and Irish exiles, just as his war years in North Africa and Europe seemed set asideby the writing of thrillerish pulp fictions, at a pelt, and mostly pseudonymously, a phase of his writing career in the early Fifties he has for decades been loath to discuss.
In that summer of 1965, ulcers abating, his first marriage over, he drove with Jean Denny, his soon-to-be wife, into the settled terrain of a future in California. There creative and personal growth began, the risks of the former it seems offset by the deepening certainties of the latter, as new novels, new fictional voices, with ventures into the fabulist and gothic and adventure genres, took hold on his eclectic imagination. "We're in a shack on the Pacific now," he wrote. "It's a sort of dream life, sitting at the typewriter and watching the surfers under the window. I wish it could continue."
Moore's presence on the shoulder of biographer Denis Sampson, reminiscent of the figmentary angels in The Emperor of Ice-Cream, teasing Moore's Doppelganger hero, Gavin Burke, is inescapable, melting invisibly into Sampson's chronological discussion of Moore's work. In Sampson's book Moore's footsteps create a tremor of associative resonance as his novels' interior worlds and his life assume a complex interrelationship - a biological/literary plot without a denouement.
Therein lies the essence of Sampson's dilemma. For while Moore continues to live and produce novels, attempts to define his artistic achievement in the context of his peripatetic existence must be provisional. Moore the chameleon, as Sampson terms him, is a subversive. Nevertheless, a pointillist picture emerges, relating significant details - meetings, moments, remarks, encounters with other writers - which reveal, putatively, the genesis and the impetus for Moore's choices in shaping his formal artistic development. Sampson draws heavily on Moore's papers lodged at the University of Calgary, a dependence which results in a reduction in the force of Sampson's probing, as he dwells on the work after Black Robe (1985), the point when the archive seems to diminish.
Sceptics may argue that, in any case, those papers present Moore's version of himself, sold for scrutiny by scholars. Sampson acknowledges Moore's withholding of permission to quote from some sources; "as a result, the treatment of certain issues is . . . less vivid than I had originally intended". Yet by testing the archive inclusions against Moore's essays and a battery of interviews given elsewhere, Sampson minimises the likelihood of distortion and establishes a wholly plausible, multifaceted sense of the writer at large.
It is intriguing to watch as Moore responds to the influence of Borges during the Seventies, before trying on the cloaks of Tolstoy, Conrad and Dostoievsky, paring his style to polish the "tale" in his later novels. Moore's gift for reinvention of his main theme, (in Thomas Flanagan's phrase "the fragility of the self"), is shown as a facet of his ability to conceal even as he reveals - his greatest trick, the invisibility of the author.
A sense of duality touches everything, even the structure of Sampson's biography, which is neither a full-blown biography nor a scholarly disquisition (as previous studies of Moore have been). This "life" divides into the chrysallis-life before and on the far side of the San Andreas Fault - Moore at Malibu - where, Sampson contends, the chameleon life was perfected. This biography sits uneasily on that fulcrum. Does it explain why Sampson believes Moore's latest novels to be non-autobiographical?
Contradiction of this view is embedded in Sampson's own lucid scrutiny of the links between the novels' locales and underlying values, and Moore's wartime passage across North Africa, France and Poland. Sampson is scrupulously accurate (I noted only three factual errors in the book, none significant). More importantly, he has fathomed his subject's life. Moore is incarnate in his novels, but with Sampson by one's elbow, reading that current of dark, swirling dreams becomes at once a questing adventure and an enlightenment.