[In the following interview, conducted in 1982 during the James Joyce Centenary in Toronto, Canada, Moore discusses the treatment of political and religious issues in his novels, and explains why he prefers straightforward narrative to experimental fiction.]

[Meyer and O'Riordan]: We live in an age where often there is more attention paid to a writer's life than is paid to his work. Has this been a problem for you?

[Moore]: There are people now reading biographies of W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell, who probably have read very little of their work. And then you have the examples of Mailer, Capote and Vidal, whose lives are of more interest to people than their work. So, in the case of a writer like myself, who has simply a private life and not a very colourful legend, the only things people can fasten onto are details like my nationality. I think it is irrelevant myself because with a writer it is what he writes that is of interest and not his life. If in my book I seem to be an Irish writer, then the reader thinks he's in the presence of an Irish writer. If he thinks I'm a Canadian, then he thinks he's in the presence of a Canadian writer. I think nationality is something Canadians worry about unduly. A good example is Nabokov, who at one time was a White Russian, then had British citizenship, and then became an American citizen. Then he left America when he had made enough money and went to live in Montreuil for the rest of his life. But the Americans always accepted him as an American author. In all the years I've lived in America, there's always been this question of whether or not I'm a Canadian author. Overall, though, I'm a writer who has no personal grievances because for the past twenty-five years I've been able to write what I wanted to write, and that makes me one of the lucky few.

Graham Greene has called you his favourite living writer. Do you return the compliment?

Well, I've wondered if it is often the case that writers you like also like you. I admire Graham Greene's work and I've learned a lot from him. Greene and Waugh are the two pre-eminent English writers of their generation. They are pre-eminent in prose just as Larkin is in poetry. People that like Greene usually like Waugh. And people who like Waugh and Greene usually like Larkin. One tends to like writers in which one sees something of oneself. I'm very lucky that Graham Greene said that about me because it has helped my sales enormously. For instance, in faraway countries where they've never heard of anyone other than Graham Greene, his reference to me has been particularly useful. In one South American edition of The Doctor's Wife, Greene's quotation about me was used and it helped sell thirty-seven thousand copies. If I sold that many in the United States of a hardcover edition, I'd be very lucky.

Have you ever met Greene?

I met him once years ago in Montreal. It was only very briefly. I had only just finished my first novel and was introduced to him by the editor of The Montreal Star and we went out on the town together for the evening. I met him on one other occasion in Montreal when he passed through, but I can't really say that I know him.

Many of your novels don't deal directly with politics per se, except in the case of The Revolution Script. In this sense you are also like Greene.

Well, I started as a newspaperman and I learned from that that novelists can't possibly keep up with all the news and information today. For instance, if you set out to write a novel today about El Salvador, by the time it was published nine months later, it would probably be out-of-date. So I fear political subjects are very ephemeral. They are not a great subject for a novel today unless you have an exceptional experience like Solzhenitsyn. But to go and report on things journalistically, as novelists did in the nineteenth century, is a waste of time. Other media will cover these things much more accurately. Also, it is interesting that a political situation such as that in Northern Ireland has really not been touched directly by any major writer. Seamus Heaney doesn't write directly about it and neither does anyone else. My feeling about novels is that people are born, married, they fight and they die and various things happen to everyone—these are the subjects which interest me more rather than whether they were born on the right or wrong side of privilege.

Nevertheless, you did tackle a political subject in The Revolution Script.

That was a mistake. I wanted to do a non-fiction book and I started to do it out of a belief that Trudeau, in invoking the War Measures Act, was acting in the same way as the British had in Northern Ireland for twenty years. He was repressing liberty. And I saw too that the anglophone liberal people here were completely blind to that because they were afraid of the French. When I started to write the book I was trapped by the fact that I couldn't make direct contact with the terrorists. When the terrorists were allowed to flee to Cuba in the middle of my book, I had to make them fictional characters. I knew they weren't going to come back and sue me. (Laughter.) The book was an experiment but I don't regard it as part of my work but rather as some journalistic exercise.

You seem to write a great deal about the loss of faith in the face of personal adversity. You suggest that it is very important for one to develop some system of personal moral values, in order to stay sane, to have some constants and anchors in one's life. For instance, Judith Hearne has pictures of her aunt and the Sacred Heart and Ginger Coffey has his family. In traditional literature it is the artist, the intellectual, the aristocrat who has come to terms with the problems of faith in himself and in others. You seem to be more interested in the ordinary person's loss of faith. Do you see that as the common theme in your work?

There are certain continuing preoccupations in my novels, but, yes, I decided very early on that Joyce had written about an intellectual's loss of faith in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and I decided I couldn't complete with that. I also recognized, however, that Joyce himself, my great hero, had said that his work was a celebration of the commonplace, and I feel that my writing is also a celebration of the commonplace. I believe that the most interesting lives are the lives of ordinary people. Most of us can't relate to someone who is extraordinarily intelligent or extraordinarily dumb because most of us fall somewhere in between. I am interested in the point in ordinary people's lives when, like all of us, there's a carrot held out in front of them—like ambition. My novels often revolve around the moment in that person's life when to remove that carrot of ambition or desire, the person is forced, within a certain period of time, to re-evaluate their lives and make a decision about what they are going to do. I'm interested in the moment in which one's illusions are shattered and one has to live without the faith, whatever that faith was which originally sustained them. I also like in novels to start the clock ticking. I like the novel to take place within a certain time. I have to explain to the reader what made this particular time different. That to me is the natural moment of fiction, the natural moment of crisis. I do this in order to inject an element of suspense. I've come to have a greater interest in the element of suspense as I grow older. For instance, I will now look at Conrad's The Secret Agent in a way I would not when I was young. I look at the suspense in Graham Greene or Borges in a way which didn't interest me when I was younger. My new book, Cold Heaven, is a curious book in that for the first one hundred and fifty pages you believe you are reading a thriller because you don't know what's happening to the character. It moves very quickly, but on a rather mundane level, the way thrillers do, and then you discover, halfway through the book, that this isn't an ordinary thriller—it is a metaphysical thriller, about something more mysterious than that contained in an ordinary thriller. I don't think I would have written a book that way ten years ago. This is a culmination of my experiments along the same lines in The Temptation of Eileen Hughes and The Mangan Inheritance. Cold Heaven goes one step further. So, willy-nilly, I'm going through a cycle of books in the suspense genre. It is important to realize that what I'm trying to do is not write books that are detective stories, but rather are novels of suspense in the detective mode. The power of withholding information from the reader, but not dishonestly, the power of narrative, of unfolding a story by turning pages, builds narrative suspense, which is interesting for your writing because it forces you to write more leanly—in a direct, clear, clean way. My style has been evolving towards a more plain style. Reviewers have said that when I use a simile or metaphor it stands out. It is not simply piling on description. When I do finally say something about a character, it hits, it has a very big power. I think that is something which is the result of this very visual age we live in. People can't read in the way they used to because their mind's eye is making cinematic cuts. We see prose passages now as films because children are brought up looking at film all the time. I've always thought that the modern reader made jump-cuts just like directors in films. I think we could move fiction into the realm of short-takes, a way which has not really been attempted. Someday, someone will come up with a type of fiction which approximates the cinematic, and that will have a very interesting effect.

What about Kosinski and Robbe-Grillet?

There's no movement in Robbe-Grillet. He just pans around and looks at furniture, and as for Kosinski, he's just a bad writer, so I'm not the person to really discuss him. Whereas, if you take an older writer like Evelyn Waugh, he can take two men in a room and you can see exactly what they are doing, but in very understated prose. Similarly, Greene is one of the great scene-setters of all time. Their techniques are very cinematic. We tend to take cinematic as a pejorative word in writing, but I'm not using it that way at all.

You seem to be saying that the novel has a future.

I don't have any theories about "the novel". I find that experimental writing, unless it is truly experimental, is one of the most easily fakeable things in the world. One of the most truly experimental writers in the world is Flann O'Brien. The writing goes beyond Joyce into something that is absolutely brilliant. Borges is a truly experimental writer, also Gabriel Garcia Marquez. John Barth isn't. With these academic writers, it's all just Twenties' hokum revamped and regurgitated. It is unreadable and it is junk. I think most writers in their heart of hearts suspect that it is junk.

So when someone sits down to read a book of yours….

I want them to read for pleasure, I want to move people. I find that unless I'm going to do better than Ulysses, I don't want to write an experimental novel. Although, I am among Joyce's greatest admirers, I think Finnegans Wake is a great mistake. No one reads Finnegans Wake for pleasure, nor have they ever. The suspicious thing about most of this so-called experimental writing is that it is instantly teachable. The old, bad schlock writers like Irving Wallace and Robert Ludlum—all these people like the old storytellers, write in a very bad way, a very cliched way, but they write within a very strong framework of narrative, a strong framework of dream. Their books are wet dreams for college-educated people. They have that power. They are the obverse to me of the Barthian academic novelist, who is equally cliched and equally bored. I suffer from two things that prevent me from having a big audience. One is that I'm a nomad, and, two, I don't write the same book over and over again. There isn't a continuity to my books where people can say: "That's a Brian Moore". I have a continuing set of preoccupations, but I experiment with form. It is like what Greene said about me, I'm like a lion-tamer with the novel. It hasn't been a conscious strategy of mine to avoid being labelled English-Canadian or Irish-American because I would like to be claimed by everybody, and to have a readership in each of these places. I didn't have an Irish readership for a very long time because the clergy had my books banned in Ireland. Irish people thought for a long time that I was an American or a Canadian. The only good piece of luck I've had in this matter is that since my first book was published in England, the English always treated each book as a book by itself. So right from the very beginning in England, I've always had respectful, good reviews of my work. They are the only people who have never mentioned my nationality.

You mentioned that there were certain continuing preoccupations in your novels. Could you talk about some of them?

I suppose unlike most male novelists today, Catholicism continues to be something that I write about. I'm interested in the church as an organism. I'm interested in loneliness. I've always considered myself one of life's rejects. I came from a family of successful people—my father was a great achiever in examinations and things like that. I failed my examinations at school. I was very bad at math which in those days was the end—if you couldn't get math you couldn't get anything. I could never become a doctor because I was not good at chemistry. I was thirty before I wrote my first novel so I had quite a bit of experience at being a failure before I became a quasi-success.

Your novels tend to contain a rather bleak vision….

I think that's true. I tend to try to examine the dichotomy between what people think they are and what they do. A wonderful book could be written about Hitler's image of Hitler. Hitler didn't see himself as he was and neither did Attila the Hun. It is interesting that monsters don't know they are monsters and to my mind everyone has a totally false notion of their own worth. Some people are modest to the point of not realizing their true worth, but they are a small minority.

Did you ever have a mentor or a particular teacher who influenced you or encouraged you when you were young?

Yes. When I was seven or eight, I remember the headmaster calling me in, and asking me to fill a notebook with essays on topics like what I did on my summer vacation. I was very flattered and happy to take the week off from studies to write for him. I wrote seven or eight essays and he used those essays for three or four years after. So, I was given this inflated notion of myself when I was very small. I wasn't as successful in any of my other subjects, so I got this notion of myself as a writer, but I was intimidated by other writers that I read and thought I could never equal them. So, I thought the next best thing I could do was to become a newspaper reporter. It was only after I had read a couple of bad books written by people that I knew that I decided I could do better than that. I thought that poor books were more important to read than Tolstoy.

Like Brendan Tierney in An Answer from Limbo?

Yes. I use that example. I seem to be at variance with most modern writers. When you read interviews with them they seem to say that writing is torture, that it is hell and how when they go through it they sweat blood and this sort of thing. I find that writing is torture. It is hell to get it right, but I'm only happy when I am writing. Why I write so much is that I'm happy when I am writing, not when I'm teaching or being interviewed. (Laughter.) I can live quite a solitary, monkish life because I'm not intimidated by the act of getting up in the morning and continuing to write a novel. I suppose that there are more writers like me, but they feel that it is impolitic to admit it.

When you were writing The Mangan Inheritance you had a very severe illness, and you've said that the act of writing helped you to pull out of it. Has writing become something a little more special for you since then?

I discovered during that period that I was too tired and too ill to read but I was able to write. So it had an influence. I was very close to death for quite a long time. That focussed my attention very closely on the years that I have left. Until I had the illness, I felt life was a perpetual party. After the illness I became aware that it might not be.

Also during the composition of The Mangan Inheritance you switched genres from a novel of manners to a gothic horror. This was quite a gamble. Do you see yourself as a literary risk-taker?

I do, indeed. For many reviewers and readers The Mangan Inheritance was too big a gamble. If I had a commercial mind, I would have written The Mangan Inheritance as a gothic horror and the book would have opened in Ireland. I would have had an enormously successful book because the whole Irish section is written in a more elevated, charismatic way, and the characters seem more interesting. The Canadian-American part of that book is written on a realistic level. One editor in fact suggested to me that I put the Canadian-American past in simply as a flashback. But I felt, as I always feel, that that would be a deception for the reader. The interest in The Mangan Inheritance should be that this is a person like you or me who is projected into this milieu. He should act as you or I would in a similar predicament. I knew I was taking risks, but I also knew that I would be cheating if I did it any other way.

How does a novel start for you?

I start with a character and keep changing my opinion of him. By starting that way I feel I get to know him or her. It is like when you first meet a stranger. You have some fixed ideas about what they are like and gradually you get to know them and trust them. In my writing you trust to the instinct of the character which makes you know not to make them do something outré because they just wouldn't do that. That defines your plot. I hate killing people in a novel because you don't go around indiscriminately killing people in real life. Death in a novel should be as momentous as it is in real life.

You've never written a novel that was entirely a flashback, but you have indicated that you once thought of writing a screen-play for Judith Hearne, which would have been almost entirely in flashback. Do you think in retrospect that the novel would have worked better as a flashback or did you simply think that, in cinematic terms, it would have worked better as a flashback?

I must have been desperately trying to find some way to answer an interviewer's question. (Laughter.) I've talked to students about flashbacks in that way. Quite often when young writers start a story they start with a scene and the scene may last for two and a half pages, and then they decide I've got to tell the reader all about this person and they go into a flashback which lasts five and a half pages. I say to them, flashbacks should be small digressions. I have very strong feelings that you should never have a whole chapter in flashback because it can become another book. Either the narrative must keep moving forward and can't be interrupted or else the digression must neatly fit into the narrative. You can't be back-peddling. If you keep flashing back, then why should you go on?

Flashbacks take away from the element of building up suspense.

Yes, they do. You're damaging the narrative in that sense. The flashback is also a convention that was much more prevalent twenty years ago.

In both journalism and the cinema, one to a large extent is forced to shape the narrative in the present tense. Has your background as a journalist and as a screenwriter for John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock influenced you to write primarily in the present tense?

Yes, insofar as in the newspaper business you are concerned with the same questions that concern the novelist—who, what, when, why, where. Also, as a journalist, you get a microcosm of what is going on in society. You have to deal with present-day events—which bank was robbed today, that sort of thing.

How did you come to work with Alfred Hitchcock?

Alfred Hitchcock read my book, The Feast of Lupercal, and liked it. He had also gone to a Jesuit school and so identified with the setting of the novel. As a result of reading that book, he hired me to do the screenplay for Torn Curtain with Paul Newman and Julie Andrews.

How did you and Hitchcock get along?

The problem I had with Hitchcock was that he was a living legend. He'd done fifty films and I'd done zero, so I tended to take his word for everything. When we finished doing the script I thought it was very bad. I felt the characters were cardboard, and I made the mistake of telling him that. He was never a person who would have a confrontation with you to your face. He just simply hired two other screen-writers, and they were not able to change it. So I wound up getting sole credit for the script, which I'm not very proud of. I don't think I'm a Hitchcockian writer. I think by the time I met him he believed his own legend. It was hard to explain to him that these characters didn't seem real to me, that I didn't think it was going to work. One of the problems was that it was one of the most expensive films that Hitchcock ever made.

How about John Huston? He was also a legend by the time you met him.

Well, Huston was totally different. He is one of the few really brilliant people I've ever dealt with. He came to see me about my novel, Catholics, and suggested that I turn it into a film. He said, "It should only take you two or three weeks". Well, it almost killed me. These things take longer than that. He then called me and said that it would make a good television film, rather than a feature film. I thought, then, that he was kind of brushing me off, but actually he wasn't. He said he would direct it, but unfortunately the television network didn't see it that way because they felt he would be too expensive. He would have been a very interesting director to work with. You know he bought Judith Hearne at one point.

Katharine Hepburn was supposed to star in it wasn't she?

The studios didn't want her for the part. I had no say, of course, in that decision. This is one of the objections I have to working in film. The writer just has to do what he is told to do. I mean, the problem is that there is so much money involved. It is as if when you are writing a book you are told from the outset that this must sell 250,000 copies in paperback and be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and be translated into eighteen foreign languages, or else it is a failure. There are too many masters to please in film. There's a confusion in people's minds today between art and commerce, which I think has made for a situation where even serious books are a risky business as compared to twenty-five years ago. When I first started being published it didn't cost very much for a novel to be published. You could live comfortably on five-thousand dollars a year. If you sold enough to cover the costs of a small paperback edition then everybody was happy, and you could go on to the next book. I think it is very sad for the young writer today who has a first novel. He has to be an instant success so he doesn't really have time to develop as a writer.

Do you think the novel will go the way of poetry, in terms of substantially decreased sales and influence?

I would hate to think that. Part of the confusion is in our own minds. We do tend to equate, certainly the Americans do, literary with commercial success, even at the highest level. Can you think of a Canadian writer who is more highly regarded even though he has smaller sales than any of those who have the large sales? We tend to think of the successful writer as the one who sells a lot.

Did you ever write poetry?

No, not really. I would love to have had it in me.

Which Canadian writers do you read yourself?

I've read quite a lot of them. I think my favourite Canadian writer at the moment is Alice Munro. Once again, I like those people whose writing has some affinity with my own. Alice Munro, for me, captures a sense of Canada. I like Richard Wright. None of the writers I like are what I would call academics.

Can you tell us what you're working on now?

I've had to write five hours worth of a television script based on a book by Simone de Beauvoir and I had to invent new characters. I know the period and I know France well, so I had an advantage in that. The people who hired me were very enlightened, compared to the average movie people, in that they left me alone to work on it. I didn't have to attend a lot of meetings about it and I was able to get it done in time—in four months.

Are you ruthless with your time?

Yes, I have to be. I did meet with them yesterday and they agreed with my judgement that we had to cut it down by an hour. So that's what I'm doing now.

How did you feel about working with someone else's novel?

It is easier than working with your own, because you have already seen your novel as a novel. Someone else's work you can approach just as a story—this one is a love story, a period story about Vichy and the Jews.

One other thing we've noticed about your work, there are very few overt, literary references.

Yes, well I don't think of my work in Ph. D. thesis terms. I've always felt that if you can illuminate a particular situation, absolutely and truly, and if the situation is intrinsically of interest, that will become the archetypal situation. The mistake made in so much bad fiction is to try to take an archetypal situation and then try to get a character to fit the thesis of the novel—the novel written around a thesis. For instance, a writer decides, "I am going to write a novel about infidelity or about the loss of God". Well, my own approach would be: "What if so-and-so lost their faith? What would they think? How would they behave? What would they do?" I didn't realize it, but in Judith Hearne I was writing about the loss of faith, about the loss of faith in one ordinary person. But what I did without knowing it was write an archetypal model of a novel about lonely women. Of all my books it is the one that has stayed in print most constantly. It touched some very raw, sensitive nerve among women and especially among lonely women, or women who feared they would be lonely. It has outlived feminism and every faddish shade of opinion about women. If I had planned that the book should have this effect, it would be dead and forgotten—as would all my books.