Apparitions of the Virgin Mary traditionally appear to children or other innocent souls. But in Brian Moore’s Cold Heaven, a novel set mostly in well-heeled Carmel, California, it’s Marie Davenport, an adulteress, who receives the vision. Marie has just checked into the Point Lobos Motor Inn to meet her lover, Dr. Daniel Bailey, and is out for a walk along the cliffs when the Virgin appears to her. The apparition asks Marie, a militant atheist, to reveal what she has seen to local priests so that the rock on which the apparition stood may become a place of religious pilgrimage.
Starting with the apparition, strange things happen. When Alex, the husband she was planning to leave, is killed in a boating accident, Marie believes it’s because she refused the apparition. Then Alex’s body disappears from the hospital morgue. Indeed, Alex seems not to have been dead at all. Or was he? Whenever Marie is on the verge of fulfilling the apparition’s request, Alex begins feeling better. He deteriorates, however, when she seeks to evade it.
Still, the last thing Marie wants to do is go public about the vision. Convent-educated in Canada, she fears and despises the apparition and loathes the Catholic Church. “They will make Alex into a miracle that will mock his whole career,” she says bitterly. “They will destroy my life with Daniel. I disobeyed them. They will have no mercy.” Finally, Marie talks to a priest. Despite Father Niles’s assurance that “it’s basic to Christian theology that man is free to say no to God,” she angrily insists that she can’t get away because the apparition is exercising “force. I am being punished.”
Steeped in the literature of apparitions, Cold Heaven is amusing and sophisticated, both ironic and serious—a masterpiece. Author Brian Moore, who died in 1999, was a lapsed Catholic. As a rule, there’s nothing more annoying than the lapsed Catholic writer who uses Catholic settings or themes (think Mary Gordon). But Brian (pronounced Bree-an) Moore, whose precise relationship with the Church, whatever it was, is hidden behind his art, is an exception. He’s a writer who, like Evelyn Waugh and Muriel Spark, should have a special appeal for Catholics. Born in Belfast in 1921 and educated at St. Malachy’s College, he served with the British in World War II, later emigrating to Canada to become a journalist. He then moved to Malibu and remained in the United States until his death.
Though a prolific writer who was thrice short-listed for England’s prestigious Booker Prize, Moore wasn’t as well-known as he should have been, even though such luminaries as Graham Greene were among his most fervent fans. Moore was a successful writer but never really famous. That’s probably because, as was noted in a Time magazine obituary, there was no such thing as “the new Brian Moore.” Moore, who began his publishing career with a novel about an alcoholic spinster in Ireland and was at work on a book based on the life of Rimbaud, the decadent 19th-century poet, when he died, continually surprised his public. Moore wrote just as beautifully about a brittle woman falling apart in New York (I Am Mary Dunne) as about the trials of a Catholic cardinal in a Communist country who looks to Bernard of Clairvaux for inspiration (The Color of Blood).
Moore wrote some 20 novels over the course of his career, though not all are of special interest to Catholic readers.
Some, such as The Magician’s Wife or The Luck of of Ginger Coffey, don’t have a “Catholic” component. But Moore’s preoccupation throughout his writings with the struggle with faith is telling. Reviewer John Wilson noted, “When a writer repeatedly proclaims that he has left faith behind in childhood—in fact, book after book in which a crisis of faith plays a central role—we may reasonably wonder if he is not engaged in his own evasive maneuvers, conscious of a pursuer at his heels.”
Catholics, a svelte novel at 124 pages, set sometime in the near future, after Vatican IV, has a cast of characters that will bring back memories to those who lived through the aftermath of Vatican II. The novel, which came out in 1973, was adapted as a “Playhouse 90” broadcast starring Trevor Howard—odd, because, of all Moore’s books, Catholics is the most parochially Catholic. Like the later works of Walker Percy, Catholics sometimes allows the ideas to predominate over the yarn, though it’s still a good read.
The novel is about monks who, living on remote Muck Island, off the coast of Ireland, nevertheless incur the wrath of Rome. Their sin: saying the Mass in Latin while facing the altar. Their transgression becomes known because the monks of Muck Abbey, who belong to the Albanesian order, also celebrate a hugely popular Latin Mass every Sunday for ordinary Catholics on the mainland. Alas, a TV crew shows up to film the proceedings, and Rome is tipped off to the problem. The father general of the Albanesian order dispatches James Kinsella, an American priest, to put a stop to it. The embarrassing activity at Muck comes at a time when Catholic ecumenists detect “an apertura [an opening]” to Buddhism. Church officials fear that the practices such as the Latin Mass at Muck might put off the ecumenically minded, thereby slowing the process of the “interpenetration between the Christian and Buddhist faiths.” (There is also private confession at Muck, but, fortunately for the monks, the Vatican hasn’t gotten wind of this misbehavior.) Not only is Moore brilliant at parodying the language of modern Church documents, he does a splendid job of creating an Albanesian father general who’ll be familiar to connoisseurs of trendy, postconciliar clerics. Father General “lolled in his Eames chair” as he perused a “Fact Form” on the retrograde monks at Muck. His favorite expression is “oh, la, la.”
The Abbey of Muck last attracted the notice of Rome in 1463, and the devout old men who now live there are strange to Kinsella. Kinsella is himself a disciple of Father Gustav Hartmann, a famous member of the Albanesian order and clearly modeled on the liberation theologians who were once so in vogue. He “had taken Holy Orders as an Albanesian monk, much as Malraux had become a Minister of State in the Fifth Republic, not for the obvious condition, but as a means towards social action. The Church, Hartmann taught, despite its history and its dependence on myth and miracle, exists today as the quintessential structure through which social revolution can be brought to certain areas of the globe.” Hartmann endured torture in South America before becoming a professor at Harvard, where Kinsella studied under him.
When one of the monks, elderly Father Manus, delivers an impassioned speech on the meaning of the Mass that reflects the Church’s ancient teachings, Kinsella says he appreciates Manus’s “point of view.” Later, when the abbot of Muck asks Kinsella what the Mass means to him, he replies, “I suppose, to me, as to most Catholics in the world today, it is a symbolic act. I do not, in the old sense, think of God as actually being present, there in the tabernacle.” The rest of the scene deserves to be quoted:
The Abbot turned from the window, head cocked on one side, his hawk’s features quizzical. “Isn’t that remarkable,” the Abbot said. “And yet you seem to be what I would call a very dedicated young man.”
“In what way is it remarkable, Father Abbot? It’s the standard belief, in this day and age.”
“Or lack of belief,” the Abbot said. “I think I was born before my time. A man doesn’t have to have a big dose of faith anymore, does he?”
Kinsella smiled. “Perhaps not.”
Although Kinsella does not realize it, the abbot has just alluded to his awful secret: He has lost his faith. The abbot is no longer able to pray and regards it as his job to keep the abbey running smoothly. He is dismayed by the notion of disobedience to Rome (which Kinsella sees as his ace in the hole). Alone in the chapel, the faithless abbot meditates on his predicament: “Aggiornamento, was that when the uncertainty had begun? Changes of Doctrine. Setting oneself up as the ultimate authority. Insubordination. He looked at the tabernacle. Insubordination. The beginning of the breakdown. And, long ago, that righteous prig at Wittenberg nailing his defiance to the church door.” (In the novel, the Church does seem to have changed its teachings on the Mass.) Since we have spent quite a bit of ink on a very slim novel, perhaps it’s time to move along, without spoiling the ending.
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, which launched Moore’s career when it came out in the mid-1950s and went on to become a movie starring Maggie Smith, is about a homely, middle-aged woman’s loss of faith. Not many writers could make the story of Judith Hearne—a Belfast woman who yearns for a man and ekes out a meager living giving piano lessons—into a riveting story. As the novel begins, Miss Hearne, who moves from one shabby boarding house to another, is hanging up a photograph of her “dear aunt” (in reality a snobbish old termagant who wreaked havoc on Judith’s life) and a colored oleograph of the Sacred Heart. “His place was at the head of the bed, His fingers raised in benediction, His eyes kindly yet accusing. He had looked down on Miss Hearne for a long time, half her lifetime.”
Despite her reduced circumstances, Miss Hearne gamely up holds a certain standard of gentility. When she enters her land lady’s living room, she notices that it is “not in the best of taste.” When offered a cup of tea by her landlady, Mrs. Henry Rice, she asks for “just a soupçon of cream.” She sniffs, upon meeting Mrs. Rice’s brother, James Madden, recently returned from America: “Who but an American would wear that big bluestone ring on his finger?”
Still, Miss Hearne is man-hungry, and she decides to overlook Madden’s general uncouthness and to swallow her disappointment that he was a doorman in America rather than a hotel owner, as she had fancied. They begin going to Mass and on walks, and Mr. Madden pours out his plans to open a restaurant in Ireland.
It’s clear to all at Mrs. Rice’s—except for Miss Hearne—that Mr. Madden is only interested in her because of the money she doesn’t really have; he’s been fooled by her genteel airs. He wants her to invest in his restaurant, and she expects that he will soon make a proposal of marriage.
When Mrs. Rice intercepts the couple at the door on the night when Judy feels Madden is about to ask her to marry him, she provokes a fight that sends her brother straight to bed without popping the question. Miss Hearne is disconsolate and—alone in her room—succumbs to temptation. She finds her bottle wrapped in brown paper, and we suddenly understand why Miss Hearne has moved so often and lost so many piano pupils:
Alcoholic, she did not drink to put aside the dangers and disappointments of the moment. She drank to be able to see these trials more philosophically, to examine them more fully, fortified by the stimulant of unreason. Thus, she did not shirk the consideration of the fact that she had sat up all night in a chair, that she might have made a lot of noise, that everyone might know her secret. She was drunk, so she found these possibilities amusing but unlikely.
Of course, she humiliates herself before the entire house, including Mr. Madden. “Next morning, as she appeared for breakfast, her earthly penance began,” Moore writes. “A fine carrying voice,” Mr. Lenehan, another lodger, says cruelly. Mr. Madden tries to ignore her, and his sister evicts poor Miss Hearne from her dismal room. Faced with rejection, Miss Hearne goes on a major bender, cashing in her savings to put up in a fancy hotel. In the course of her drunken travels around Belfast, Miss Hearne makes several visits to St. Finbar’s Church. On one, watching an old sacristan make a perfunctory obeisance before the tabernacle, she loses her faith. “And if it is only bread? O my God, protect me,” an inebriated Judy Hearne prays. “The priest had no reverence in his genuflection. And the Pope? Supposing the Pope did not know for sure, supposing the Pope did not know if there was a God.”
After making a scene in the church, Miss Hearne ends up in an expensive sanitarium, paid for by Professor O’Neill’s family, whom she fondly regards as a dear friend and whose family she has tormented for years with her boring Sunday visits. During her spree, Miss Hearne had confided to Professor O’Neill’s wife, Moira, that she’d never liked her, but now Moira is forgiving, and Miss Hearne realizes that her faith in God isn’t her only loss: “Friends,” she muses bitterly. “O, how did I deceive myself all these years? A friend is hurt when you are hateful.”
When the nurse, Nora Nelligan, tells Miss Hearne that she is strong enough to go to the chapel for Sunday Mass, she realizes she can’t reveal that she no longer believes. “Her pulse is up, I suppose it’s the excitement,” the nurse says, mistaking the cause of Miss Hearne’s agitation. Like the abbot of Muck, Miss Hearne just goes on, eventually even hanging her picture of Aunt D’Arcy and oleograph of the Sacred Heart. “And You? Were You ever?” she asks the Sacred Heart. “She closed her eyes. Funny about those two. When they’re with me, watching over me, a new place becomes home.”
One might be tempted to say that Miss Hearne’s faith was simplistic and even that the abbot of Muck, with his certainties shaken, wasn’t up to the intellectual challenges of modern Catholicism. But that, of course, is what most believers are like. The loss of faith, like the acquisition of faith, is a curious phenomenon. In these two books, Moore has limned how faith is sometimes lost.
Father Paul Laforgue, the Jesuit who undertakes a treacherous journey to bring the Faith to the “Savages” of New France in Black Robe (for my money, Moore’s best book and his only historical novel) has not only an intense faith but dreams of being a martyr. It is based partly on Francis Parkman’s The Jesuits in North America and partly on the Relations, accounts the Jesuits of New France wrote for their superiors in France. (“Les Sauvages,” incidentally, was the collective name the French used for the Iroquois, Hurons, and Algonquins of New France, who called the Jesuits “Blackrobes.”) This particular mission of the Jesuits offered ample opportunity for both misery and martyrdom. Moore quotes a marvelous passage from Parkman that, he says, represents “the voice of a conscience that, I fear, we no longer possess”:
[Father] Noel Chabanel came later to the mission for he did not reach the Huron country until 1643. He detested Indian life—the smoke, the vermin, the filthy food, the impossibility of privacy. He could not study by the smoky lodge fires, among the noisy crowd of men and squaws, with their dogs and their restless, screeching children. He had a natural inaptitude to learning the language, and labored at it for five years with scarcely a sign of progress. The Devil whispered a suggestion in his ear: Let him procure his release from these barren and revolting toils and return to France where congenial and useful employments awaited him. Chabanel refused to listen: and when the temptation still beset him he bound himself by a solemn vow to remain in Canada to the day of his death.
Black Robe is about Laforgue’s terrible journey of more than a thousand miles to reach a remote Huron mission. The Jesuit is accompanied by Daniel Davost, a young man who, unbeknownst to Laforgue, has fallen in love with an Algonquin girl named Annuka and no longer has ambitions to evangelize the Hurons. They are led by Algonquins, who have agreed to take them in return for muskets. A consummate artist, Moore disappointingly tips his hand in the author’s note to the book. From reading the works of anthropologists and historians, in addition to Jesuit histories, Moore writes, he became “doubly aware of the strange and gripping tragedy that occurred when the Indian belief in a world of night and in the power of dreams clashed with the Jesuits’ preachments of Christianity and a paradise after death. This novel is an attempt to show that each of these beliefs inspired in the other fear, hostility, and despair, which would later result in the destruction and abandonment of the Jesuit missions, and the conquest of the Huron people by the Iroquois, their deadly enemy.”
This is the only time in all of Moore’s writing that I have found anything like this. Did he believe that the Jesuits ultimately harmed the Savages? Should they have minded their own business? Moore is referring to the historical fact that the acceptance of Christianity by a portion of the Hurons created internal strife that led, later, to their defeat at the hands of the brutal Iroquois. But Moore himself doesn’t exactly portray a multicultural paradise marred only by misunderstanding between two morally equivalent cultures. Indeed, Moore’s portrayal of the Savages’ way makes the reader (at least, this one) root for the Jesuit. The Huron, Algonquin, and Iroquois, who spoke a scatological language and were sexually promiscuous, Moore writes, “were warlike; they practiced ritual cannibalism and, for religious reasons, subjected their enemies to prolonged and unbearable tortures.”
Convinced that Laforgue is a demon, the Algonquin assign a dwarf sorcerer, Mesagoit, to keep an eye on the Blackrobe. (In the movie, directed by Bruce Beresford, Mesagoit was an incredibly sinister figure, a tiny man painted orange, who shook his drum in Laforgue’s face as they traveled in a canoe.) Laforgue faces temptation in the wilderness—he scourges himself after becoming carnally aroused by Daniel’s Annuka—and wonders if Mesagoit has been sent by the Evil One “to tempt me to despair and doubt and so prevent me from completing my mission.” Needless to say, Laforgue, no relativist he, doesn’t go native. “Perhaps it is heresy to say it,” he tells Daniel, “but in the last few days, as we go on, I know more and more that the devil rules this land. Belial rules here; he rules the hearts and minds of these poor people. Through them, he seeks to wound Our Savior. Through them, and through our weakness.”
At one point, Laforgue is hiding when the dreaded Iroquois take Daniel, Annuka, and her family captives. Like Graham Greene’s whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, Laforgue forsakes (relative) safety so that he can give somebody in mortal danger—in this case Daniel—the opportunity to confess his sins to a priest. Laforgue, Daniel, and the girl and her family are all subjected to torture by the Iroquois. As is their custom, the Iroquois kill and eat Annuka’s brother, right in front of the captives’ eyes. Laforgue has a joint of a finger cut off, another favored Iroquois practice. Miraculously, though, they escape and are found and rescued by French traders. At long last, Laforgue walks alone into the mission and finds one priest already dead and the other dying. It’s unclear to what extent his ordeal has created in Laforgue doubts about his faith. “Here in this humble foolish chapel, rude as a child’s drawing, a wooden box and a painted statuette could not restore his faith. Yet somehow he must try.”
Black Robe has a thrilling, ambiguous ending. Like the best in Moore, it’s possible to see it in a Catholic light—but it’s also possible not to. You be the judge: The Hurons, believing that the “water sorcery”—baptism—can deliver them from a fever that is raging in the village of Ihonatiria, beg to be baptized. The dying priest, Father Jerome, “greedy for a harvest of souls,” is delighted. Laforgue is not. To baptize those who have no idea of the meaning is a mockery of the sacrament, he insists. Then a Huron asks, “Do you love us?” When Laforgue, perhaps surprisingly, replies, “Yes,” the Huron says, “Then baptize us.” Laforgue agrees, and as he moves among the Hurons, baptizing them, he wonders if he is doing the right thing. “Will these children of darkness ever enter heaven?” he asks himself. The marvelous ending deserves to be quoted:
He looked up at the sky. Soon, winter snows would cover this vast, empty land. Here, among these Savages, he would spend his life. He poured the water on a sick brow, saying again the words of salvation. And a prayer came to him, a true prayer at last. Spare them. Spare them O Lord.
“Do you love us?”
“Yes.”
I felt a thrill when I first read this. What’s going on? Naturally, I prefer to believe that Laforgue has regained his faith and that the baptism matters. But, of course, there are other ways to read the passage. Moore deals as ambiguously with the sacrament of penance in another novel, The Statement. Almost a thriller, The Statement is about thoroughly despicable people. The main character, Pierre Brossard, is based on Paul Tournier, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews in World War II. Since the war ended, he has survived by hiding in monasteries, protected by ultra-traditionalists. But now Brossard is being hunted down, and monster that he is, he confesses his sins to a priest. He knows that he has led an evil life, and he wonders: “Ego te absolvo. Am I really absolved, and am I really cleansed, am I free to enter heaven?” As critic John Wilson notes, this is almost an explication of interior repentance outlined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. (It also raises the haunting possibility that God forgives people we really don’t like if they are contrite.)
As Wilson indicates, parts of Moore’s work can almost be used to explicate dogma. A good catechist might even use his novels to launch discussions about the Eucharist and confession. Unlike many lapsed Catholics, Moore grappled with the transcendent aspects of the Faith. But he did more than use Catholicism as decoration. Was Wilson right in suggesting that Moore was—denials aside—pursued by his Faith? Only God knows. Moore was too much an artist to let on.