A MISCHIEVOUS LEPRECHAUN WITH WORDS

In the literary wilds of Southern California, where screenwriters constitute the predominant fauna, Brian Moore is a rara avis --the serious novelist.

Holed up in a Malibu beach house, perched high above the Pacific, the native Irishman has crafted book after book in “monastic solitude.”

He has achieved the distinction, unusual among American writers, of recognition derived from a body of works--13 novels published over 30 years--rather than a monumental best seller, and his coterie of admirers includes Kingsley Amis, Joan Didion, a longtime friend, and Graham Greene, who calls Moore “my favorite living novelist.”

Now, “Black Robe,” Moore’s book published this spring by E.P. Dutton, has been lauded in the New York Times’ Sunday Book Review, and Moore is at work on a film script of it.

But none of these weighty attributes has managed to encumber the writer.

A spry slip of a man, with pale, playful eyes and mirth at the tip of his wit, Moore, at 64, reminds one, stereotypically, of a mischievous leprechaun.

Sitting in his breezy living room, sipping an afternoon’s glass of wine, he skewers dullards--lampooning “an iron butterfly” of an editor, and moaning over a literary lunch during which his hosts didn’t so much as wet their whistles. “They drank fruit juice. Can you imagine?”

Yet Moore is hardly a social gadabout. “I’ve always felt you need a core of dullness in your life to write novels,” he says.

He expresses distaste for literary celebrities who wreck their talents on party circuits, and tells how, after a stint as a New York writer, he escaped 18 years ago to the “non-literary territory” of Southern California. He came to do the film script for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Torn Curtain,” but the movie was not a success and Moore continued happily in the status of “writer’s writer.”

Today he is still better known in Britain and Canada than in the United States. About the flashiest thing in his daily life are the surfers who dance the big dazzling waves that bash the rocks below his house. The promontory is a favorite surfing spot, and Moore gets a kick out of living virtually upstairs.

House & Garden magazine is coming out the following week to photograph his hideaway--a bower of flowers, nurtured by Jean, Moore’s Nova Scotian-born wife. The attention is somewhat of an embarrassment to the writer, who thinks of the redwood cottage as “a tree house where I can dump my books and stick things up on the wall like a child.”

(In his bone-white office, he has pinned up a post card of the Pope mugging with newspaper photographers--which is about as much religious iconography as Moore can muster.)

Otherwise, out past raggle-taggle Malibu proper, the land is wild and quiet. The phone rarely rings and Moore jogs on the beach and swims a mile a day in a nearby pool. “I’m very Californian that way,” he quips.

On weekends, small gatherings of writers and academics find their way to the Moore’s country table and once a week Moore drives into town to teach a creative writing course at UCLA, an activity he has followed for the last 12 years. For three months a year he travels with Jean to Canada, Britain and France, osmotically gathering inspiration for his books.

Over the years, Moore’s inspirations have continually varied. He has written about an alcoholic Irish spinster in his first novel, “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,” which brought him immediate literary acclaim. He has portrayed the artist chained to his creations in “The Great Victorian Collection” and now, in “Black Robe,” he recounts a “Heart of Darkness” tale of a 17th-Century French Jesuit who travels into the Canadian wilderness to save Indian souls. Criticized at times for tackling subjects that don’t quite work, Moore has nevertheless eschewed the creative nemesis of repeating the same old stories.

As Graham Greene has noted, “Each new book of his is unpredictable, dangerous, and amusing. He treats the novel as a tamer treats a wild beast.”

Moore writes about ordinary people, and, he says epigrammatically, “I’m more interested in failure than success.” While success is dehumanizing and leads people to adopt new personas, failure forces them to examine themselves. For Moore, failure generally means a lapse of religious faith. Belief and the lack of it is a recurrent theme, which is no more in vogue than his personal tone and leitmotif of fantasy are popular in the cool realism of contemporary American fiction.

“In America I’ve always been a bit of an outsider,” he says, in a voice not unknown to other Irish expatriates. Following a long tradition among Irish writers, from James Joyce to Oscar Wilde and Edna O’Brien, Moore abandoned Ireland before he was 20 years old, judging it “a totally repressive country.”

Raised in the fractious Northern Ireland capital of Belfast, Moore endured a stringently Catholic childhood, as one of nine children of a prominent doctor. Unable to bow to religion, he left home at the first chance, joining the British army in World War II, and took with him his literary bible, James Joyce’s radically anti-clerical “Ulysses.”

Moore set out to write about the world. During the war he landed with the Allies in the South of France and afterward, while working for the United Nations, he visited the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Yet when he sat down to write, it was his Irish past that came bubbling up, and in one guise or another, he has been whacking away at his Catholic beginnings ever since.

But his fascination with belief and commitment has become an intellectual pursuit, says Moore.

“In nearly all my novels I’m interested in the point in a person’s life where whatever it is that they wanted or believed in--ambition, political or religious belief--is suddenly taken away from them, and they are forced to re-examine their lives up till then. I like to set my books in that short period of time in which they’re like a donkey with a carrot and the carrot is suddenly taken away from the donkey and he doesn’t know what to do.”

In “Black Robe,” Moore’s Jesuit priest, Father Laforge, comes to suspect that the faith he is preaching is as much superstition as the Indians’ belief in magic and dreams. At the end of the book, says Moore, “though he doesn’t know it, he has achieved a sort of secular sainthood. He has forgotten his own ambitions of becoming a saint and his own salvation, and he has realized that no matter what happens he has to love these people and live among them.”

Moore is speaking with a Celtic darkness that is out of step with the day and his person. Wearing white slacks, Topsiders and a crew neck sweater the color of raspberry sherbet, he looks dapper and writerly.

He is not, he points out, a jock, a poker player or a football fan. Indeed, his forte is his ability to mine the female psyche.

Before the feminist revolution, when Moore was honing his craft, he says, “Women were more interesting to talk to than men because they were ignored and they revealed much more of their private lives.

“Men always have an act. A man is an image he’s projecting to other men. Therefore, most male conversation is lies.”

Moore is also uninterested in machismo competition, which he finds endemic to the American literary scene. “Americans always want a champ. Hemingway was the champ. Norman Mailer was pretending to be the champ for a while. “In England there’s a company of the good in writing. If you’re a good writer, you don’t have to be the best.”

Moore is not averse to hitting the jackpot, however. “Financially, everybody would like to have best sellers,” he says.

He is pleased that Canada’s International Film Corp., which co-produced “Quest for Fire” and Louis Malle’s “Atlantic City,” is producing “Black Robe,” likely in collaboration with a French film company.

But it’s longevity that has always been Moore’s great interest. He points out that “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” has not been out of print since it was first published in 1955. “And that cheers me up,” he says.

Would he ever consider writing a potboiler, just for the sake of a little lucre? Moore laughs. “I once made a bet with a friend that I could write a popular story for the Saturday Evening Post,” he says. “It was turned down by the Post and a dozen other slick magazines. You have to have your heart in these things.”

He adds with reflective irony, “I often feel that it’s a ridiculous occupation for a grown man to be sitting in a room trying to make up stories which he then will sell to other people.”

But, for better or worse, the author is stuck with his metier. “I’m only happy when I’m writing,” he says. “It’s life for me. It’s real life.”