Portrait of the authour as a Canadian

>> The influence of Brian Moore

by JULIET WATERS

Brian Moore discovered James Joyce pretty much the same way that I discovered Brian Moore.

"In 1939, when I was 18 years old," Moore said in an interview he did in the early '80s, "I discovered, hidden behind some innocent titles, the two-volume Odyssey Press edition of Ulysses. My friend told me it was a dirty book which his older brother had brought back from Paris earlier that year... I settled in to read it openly in search of the 'hot bits.'

"It was of course, a dirty book, more explicit about sexual matters than any other I had read until then. But it was, for me, stimulating in an altogether different way... it was stunningly unlike any other Irish (or English) fiction I had read. Ulysses changed, if not my life, then my ideas of becoming a writer."

I discovered The Doctor's Wife in 1977 when I was 13. Because of its sexy pulp-style cover, it stuck out of my parents' collection of contemporary Canadian literature. When I took it out, it seemed to magically open at the most explicit sex scene I'd ever read.

I'd love to be able to say that Moore changed my ideas about Canadian writing forever, but his writing was bleak and there wasn't much to interest a teenager in the sad life of an Irish housewife. Its apparent plotlessness convinced me that this was pornography my parents had hidden in the Can-lit section figuring I would never look there. To punish them, I hid it under my bed for about two years.

It was quite a few years later, when Anthony Burgess included The Doctor's Wife as one of his picks for the 99 best novels in English since 1939, that I discovered that the rest of the world had not been as dismissive of it as I had. With books like Judith Hearne and I Am Mary Dunne, Moore had built a literary career on his sensitivity to the existential problems of contemporary women. But by the time I learned that, I would have been more likely to turn to Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence or Margaret Atwood to influence my idea of womanhood. Partly because they were women, but also out of loyalty to them because they were Canadian women.

Somehow Brian Moore never really seemed Canadian. He had lived in Montreal for close to a decade, after moving here from Belfast. He had written for the Gazette, set a few pulp thrillers and the more critically respected The Luck of Ginger Coffey here. And he'd a won a couple of G-G awards. But in the '60s he'd moved to New York, and then in the '70s, after being approached by Hitchcock for help with a screenplay, he moved to Malibu and lived there until his death last week.

Eventually, however, Brian Moore did change the way I saw things, quite profoundly. After I read Black Robe, his novel about the early Jesuits and their confrontation with the Iroquois along the St. Lawrence, I was never able to look at Canada, and particularly Quebec, in the same way. And being Canadian suddenly felt very different.

Black Robe was like the Heart of Darkness of Canadian literature. Moore made Quebec history hardcore, terrifying and sexy. Early Montrealers were suddenly the kind of people who were savage, brutal and fanatical enough to live through winters without electricity, kept alive by little more than sex and alcohol. Not as savage, but not much less, than the proto-punk sadistic Iroquois they had to deal with.

Black Robe was not politically correct, it was smelly, dirty, perverse, fascinating and beautifully written. It was the kind of book I wish I'd come across as a teenager.

I thought of Black Robe a lot this week when Montrealers were accusing Torontonians of being wimps and pussies. True they are, but lest we forget, we and just about everyone in the history of the human race are pussies compared to the native and non-native Canadians who built this city. Black Robe was a wonderful gift that, for whatever reasons, doesn't have the status in Canadian literature that it deserves. Hopefully, it won't be forgotten.