Death of an Old Maid

THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE (223 pp.) -- Brian Moore -- Atlantic-Little, Brown ($3.50).

Judith Hearne is an old maid whose soul drifts like flotsam on a landlocked sea of Irish malice. It is the impressive feat of First Novelist Brian Moore, an Irish-born Montreal newspaperman, to compel the reader to follow the course of this human driftwood to its last miserable beach. Author Moore believes with G. K. Chesterton of his native city that:

The folk that live in black Belfast, Their heart is in their mouth . .

Broken Hope. It is not so much fear as despair that haunts Judith Hearne, following her like a faithful cur from one dreary Belfast bedsitting room to another. She is fortyish in a land where a good man is not only hard to find, but for an aging, long-faced music teacher with no more than a hundred pounds a year to her name, downright impossible.

Yet she hopes, and the merciless way in which her hope is broken is the theme of this moving book. The button-eyes of her shoes, a cracked lithograph of the Sacred Heart, and her aunt's photograph are the familiars of her lonely misery. These possessions symbolize the three elements which transport Judith Hearne to her doom--genteel poverty, a puritan concept of Catholicism, and the aunt who had exploited pity to keep her in domestic servitude.

Brian Moore has told an old-maid joke, if it is realized that the point of the spinster joke is human cruelty--and that none sees the point more clearly than the spinster. There are many conspirators against the old maid. The first is Belfast, "drab facades of the buildings proclaiming the virtues of trade, hard dealing and Presbyterian righteousness," with "the dour Ulster burghers walking proudly among these monuments to their mediocrity."

"A Boozer." In this dreadful city is set a dreadful boarding house, whose inmates, one by one, destroy Spinster Judith as barnyard fowls peck to death a sickly hen. Her latest and last landlady is Mrs. Henry Rice, with a "bad, blackhearted, slimy voice." The landlady's son, Bernie, is an atrocious intellectual engaged in writing a great poem. His mother washes his hair for him, while he dreams of himself as Messire Bernardus Riccio, a Machiavellian figure. The landlady's brother, James Patrick Madden, is back from New York and thought to be rich; although a vulgar sort, Madden is Judith's last hope for a husband. The parish priest is a hard, harsh, unimaginative zealot called Father Quigley. Like all such spinsters, Miss Hearne has rich and happy friends--Professor Owen O'Neill and his family, but these, too, fail her because she comes to understand that her Sunday visits are permitted by charity, not offered from love.

Novelist Moore, for the most part, lets his characters describe each other with merciless Irish precision. Judith Hearne, alas, is "a boozer," "an ould fraud," and on one "day to end all," she is jostled from her waking daydream by the discovery that the "American" Madden is not rich and does not want to marry her. The only fortune he ever made was compensation for being run down by a city bus, and he wanted the old maid's money to start a "hamburg joint" for Yankee tourists.

The last step on her path to madness and ruin is her belief that God himself has failed her. Out of the elements of what might have been merely a dismal story, Novelist Moore has composed an authentic tragedy. The struggles of Judith Hearne in her lace-curtain destiny are those of a gladiator caught in his net.

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