Close to the Next Moment E-Book

Jody Allen Randolph

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

In the first decade of the new millennium, Jody Allen Randolph interviewed twenty-two leading Irish poets, artists, fiction writers and playwrights to create a record of how the makers of a culture saw their country as it moved into a new era. Her exploration was shadowed by intimations of unease; as economic collapse gathered pace, recurrent concerns gained a new urgency. What are Irish values? How have they changed? How do new cultural realities affect the old arts of language and image which have been so important in Irish tradition? In journeys across political divides and between languages, from Seamus Heaney and Nuala N í Dhomhnaill, deeply rooted in Irish inheritance,to African-Irish Joyce Akpotor; from Gerry Adams for whom when our future is settled, we will agree on our history, to the artist Dorothy Cross who brings an international perspective to her redefinitions of Irish imagery, Close to the Next Moment captures the conversations that are remaking a culture.

Leseprobe

Close to the Next Moment

Interviews from a Changing Ireland

Jody Allen Randolph

for my family

The lights jig in the river

With a concertina movement

And the sun comes up in the morning

Like barley-sugar on the water

And the mist on the Wicklow hills

Is close, as close

As the peasantry were to the landlord,

As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,

As the killer is close one moment

To the man he kills,

Or as the moment itself

Is close to the next moment.

Louis MacNeice

from ‘The Closing Album’

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

Preface

Anne Enright (August 2008)

Hugo Hamilton (August 2008)

Paula Meehan (August 2008)

Bisi Adigun (September 2008)

Theo Dorgan (March 2009)

Ursula Rani Sarma (March 2009)

Dorothy Cross (June 2009)

Conor McPherson (June 2009)

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill (June 2009)

Marina Carr (July 2009)

Barry McCrea (July 2009)

Mary O’Malley (July 2009)

Gerry Adams (August 2009)

Roddy Doyle (August 2009)

Alice Maher (August 2009)

Colm Tóibín (December 2009)

Paul Muldoon (December 2009)

Women Writers in the New Ireland Network (December 2009)

Seamus Heaney (January 2010)

Cathal Ó Searcaigh (January 2010)

Michael Longley (February 2010)

Eavan Boland (February 2010)

Index

About the Author

Irish writing from Carcanet Press

Copyright

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Michael Schmidt for his encouragement on this book and Judith Willson for her expertise and her patience in guiding it to completion. I am grateful to George Thompson, librarian emeritus at New York University Bobst Library, and to librarian Sylvia Curtis at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I am very grateful to playwrights Robert Potter and Ellen Anderson who arranged library access in California. Maeve Whelan at the Arts Council in Dublin gave logistical assistance in locating writers and artists. Mary O’Malley, Máire Grogan, John Sutton, Susie Tyrell, Deirdre Ní Thuathail and Ian Joyce stepped in to facilitate interviews. I am grateful to Nessa O’Mahony and Anne Mulhall for organising access for the Women in the New Ireland Network interview. Paul Delaney shared his knowledge about Irish drama and conferred on bibliographic matters. For copy-editing, thanks are due to Andrew Kirk. For transcription, I’d like to thank Kelly Morgan at University of California at Santa Cruz and Anna Chase Jordan at the University of Vermont. For research assistance I am grateful to Sarah Groeneveld at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I also owe thanks to Elizabeth Hess at University of California at Santa Barbara and to Kristen Gaylord at New York University. At Keble College Oxford and University of California at Berkeley, Jennifer Lorden deserves my particular thanks for her support of this project. And finally, my thanks to the many writers and scholars with whom I discussed this book and whose advice helped to shape it.

Preface

In his poem ‘The Closing Album’, from which the title of this book is taken, Louis MacNeice writes of another time in Ireland. He points out powerful and volatile proximities. The tenant is close to the landlord. The Anglo-Irish are close to the Irish. The assassin is close to his victim. The moment is ‘close to the next moment’.

This book shows that Ireland remains a country of proximities. The alignments may be different now, and yet they have their roots in the realities that MacNeice and other writers recorded. Some of these have stayed fixed. My interest in doing this book, however, has been in change rather than stasis. Every country undergoes change. As a Mellon Fellow and graduate student in University College Dublin, I spent the best part of every year in Ireland for more than eight years in the late 1980s and 1990s. I saw a natural pace of growth back then. But in Ireland, over the past decade, change itself has changed. It has become so rapid and so complete that it seems to be of a different order.

The speed of that change has shaped the themes of this book. I wanted, however, to represent more than a current upheaval in a small country. I hoped to create a time-lapse sequence of images in which recent events in Ireland could be viewed with the energy and force with which they were first felt. To do that, I interviewed twenty-seven leading Irish poets, visual artists, fiction writers and playwrights.

The result, I believe, is a rare record of a nation and a culture at a moment of extraordinary revision. I started interviewing for this project in the summer of 2008, a month or two before the global financial collapse. I finished in the spring of 2010. When I started there was a gathering concern about an economic downturn. Property sales had slowed. Construction had largely stopped on the building sites. But there was no real sense of what was about to happen.

The writers I interviewed before the economy collapsed – Anne Enright, Paula Meehan, Hugo Hamilton and Bisi Adigun – are reflective about the state of the country. They speak with eloquence and a measure of unease about stresses and shifts in their sense of Ireland. But neither they nor anyone else could have predicted what happened next.

And yet this is not a book about economic attitudes. The economy is simply a catalyst for a broader conversation. The rapidity with which financial optimism turned to a bleak concern even while this book was being prepared allowed a more questioning series of perceptions to be put in the frame. What are Irish values? How have they changed? How do new and pressing cultural realities affect the old arts of language and image which have been so important in Ireland?

These questions allowed me to turn this book in the direction I wanted it to go. My chief interest has been to see how the makers of a culture – and Irish artists have always been that – view the events happening in their own country. Do they, like MacNeice, believe that politics, economics, artistic expression and disillusion in a faith are indivisible realities? Do they believe, as MacNeice did, that there is still such a thing as Irishness?

In the spring and summer of 2009 I was able to take up these conversations again, with the poet Theo Dorgan and playwright Ursula Rani Sarma. They made valuable additions to the debate. I continued with the artist Dorothy Cross and the playwright Conor McPherson. Here too the conversations were illuminating. By now the economic collapse was all too obvious in Ireland. That summer several conversations turned, perhaps not surprisingly, to a sombre view not just of cultural change but of the peril confronting a whole planet.

The desire to look through a wider lens had a parallel in a desire to turn back to history. This is what Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill does as she looks at what has changed in the Irish language and what is vanishing in an Irish-speaking culture. Both Marina Carr and Barry McCrea echoed some of this. And occasionally now, as these conversations went forward, a note of anger entered some of the answers – anger with government, anger with the Church. This would be reinforced by events such as the publication of the Murphy report in the autumn of 2009, with its harrowing accounts of child abuse and cover up.

It seemed appropriate that these interviews took place against a background of different landscapes and constantly changing terrains. In the West of Ireland Mary O’Malley discussed the vanishing life of Irish fishermen and related it to the disappearance of maritime communities across the planet. Not surprisingly, the deepening economic crisis – which was now part of all the interviews – added its own context. In its shadow, the past seemed to be at risk as well as the present. And so towards the end of the summer my interviewing put me on the road to Tara, the old home of the kings of Ireland, now the contested site of a proposed motorway.

Accompanied by visual artist Alice Maher I went to hear Paul Muldoon and Michael Longley read their poems of protest in a small church. On the way there, Maher pointed out the ghost estates at the edges of towns and cities, left unfinished as builders went bankrupt. The unfinished housing, laid waste by the crisis, added a poignant critique. It seemed that the historic kingly site had been violated in the name of progress by some of the very same economic forces that caused the collapse.

In August I took the Enterprise train from Dublin to Belfast where Gerry Adams pointed from his window at a Falls Road irrevocably altered by urban planners and developers. Back in Dublin, I walked up Georges Street to talk with Roddy Doyle, who spoke about his own journey as a writer and his sense of a new Ireland. And when the late summer gave way to autumn floods that seemed emblems of crisis as well as actual events, I spoke to Colm Tóibín. He described, among other things, the way the old authorities once relied on in small towns – the priest, the doctor, the Fianna Fáil man – could no longer be found.

These themes of change and upheaval found a different context again in a group conversation with five African-Irish women writers who live between two countries. All were members of the Women Writers in the New Ireland Network, a group initially facilitated by UCD poet Nessa O’Mahony and scholar Anne Mulhall to support community among Ireland’s newest writers. Ozotu Rosemary Abu, Pamela Akinjobi, Joyce Akpotor, Thabi Madide and Jane Beatrice Ovbude discussed the competing loyalties of place and language. They weighed the claims made by their countries of origin (Nigeria and South Africa) against the challenges of writing in their new home, Ireland.

As one of the coldest, harshest winters on record laid down blankets of snow, and schools and airports were closed, Paul Muldoon surveyed just how much and how little had changed in Belfast. In a broad meditation on types of change, Seamus Heaney reflected, among his other concerns, on the drying up of vocations to the priesthood, and the relentless outbound travel on the electronic information highways.

In a December made impassable by snow, my questions for Cathal Ó Searcaigh, sent to his home on Mount Errigal, in north-west Donegal, went undelivered for weeks. In early February Michael Longley reflected on what future we could share, and what shape it would take. The last interview for this book was completed in mid-February as winter was turning into spring in my Californian coastal city and the first Irish crocuses and snowdrops were starting: I talked to Eavan Boland, 350 miles north of me in San Francisco, about the arc and journey of this book. She pointed out that the old, single story of Irishness and nationhood had now changed, that Ireland was now a place of many stories.

Is there any single conclusion that can be taken from these interviews? I’m reluctant to argue that there could be. My purpose from the start has been to let the writers and artists here speak for themselves, and let the reader listen for himself or herself. If there was a single challenge in the interviewing process, it lay in the attempt to slow down the molten process of change in Ireland and turn it back from reaction to reflection. It was a unique opportunity for me as interviewer (and, I hope, for the reader as witness) to see the minds and talents that shape a culture actually apprehending it in a moment of crisis. There are many voices here, many references. There is nothing that could be called a consensus. What this suggests is something that many of these writers themselves suggested: that the life of a country is composed of a rich, various and sometimes conflicting series of conversations. And that we do not need to agree. We simply need to listen.

Jody Allen Randolph Dublin–Santa Barbara 2008–2010

August 2008

ANNE ENRIGHT

Novelist and short-story writer Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962. She studied English and philosophy at Trinity College Dublin before attending the Creative Writing course at the University of East Anglia. As a television producer and director for RTÉ, she worked in children’s programming and also on a noted late-night series called Nighthawks. Two years after publishing her first collection of short stories, The Portable Virgin (1991), Enright left television and became a full-time writer.

Enright’s fiction includes the short-story collections Taking Pictures (2008) and Yesterday’s Weather (2008), as well as the novels The Wig My Father Wore (1995), What are You Like? (2000) and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002). She is the author of a volume of comically trenchant essays on pregnancy and child-rearing entitled Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004). She is also a noted journalist. A frequent contributor to the London Review of Books, she has published there what amounts to a position paper on women in Ireland in an essay on J.M. Synge called ‘Bad at History’, as well as an acerbic account of the current recession in Ireland, entitled ‘Sinking By Inches’.

Her novels employ various settings and backgrounds, including England, Paris, New York and even nineteenth-century Paraguay. But her most recent novel, The Gathering (2007), returns to Ireland. It tells the story of three generations of a large Dublin family as they gather together after the suicide of one of its members. The novel probes the silences and structures that surround one character’s sexual abuse as a child. To achieve the action of the novel, Enright employs stylistic strategies she is noted for: a cinematic use of quick cuts and rewinds to enfold multiple perspectives into the narrative. Here, as elsewhere, Enright’s writing is lyrical, darkly comic and edged with surrealism. Her vision of Ireland during a time of rapid cultural change is unflinchingly honest and original.

JAR: How do you see your generation of fiction writers? I mean those who started writing in the 1980s and came to prominence then. Do you see them as having markedly different concerns, obsessions or even formal strategies from previous generations of Irish writers? And how would you place yourself in that context?

AE: It’s interesting. There was a generation of writers who started writing and being published in the 1980s. But some of these writers are ten years younger than the writers that preceded them, and I’m ten years younger again. So I don’t know how to mark out the generations. In critical terms there may be an idea here of the shift from rural to urban concerns. I think of that as a modernising shift, or a shifting to the modern. That doesn’t mean much to me personally. I don’t define myself against a rural tradition, although I remember being impatient with one. And certainly I continue to be impatient with ideas about authenticity that hearken back to a rural, patriarchal tradition, which to me is a false tradition anyway. Ireland is a very matriarchal country. So how has it suddenly become all about blokes in wellington boots? I don’t think the countryside existed in the way it was often described.

JAR: The 1980s and 90s in Ireland were a time of rapid cultural and economic change. It’s clear that the values and orthodoxies of one generation were being dismantled by a subsequent generation. When attitudes change in a society, does it follow that the writers in that society are changed too?

AE: Society changes, yes. But I don’t know when a literature changes. I don’t think writers write from or reflect the mores or the restrictions of a society. A lot of the creative impulse is about overcoming restriction. If you look at how a society changes, there was a stage in Ireland where you could say that change had effectively happened but that people didn’t yet realise it. The civil wars of the 1980s about abortion and divorce and contraception were mostly about people refusing to recognise what had already happened around them. You construct a political framework for change and you realise that these frameworks happen after the fact. And much later than the actual change. For my generation growing up there was a lot of arguing with parents and authority figures. In practical terms, the argument was already won, because we knew how we were going to conduct our lives. Of course the young, suburban middle classes were a kind of enclave. There were people who were much more injured by the mechanisms of change than we were. But for us it didn’t matter all that much. Apart from anything else, everybody was going to leave the fucking country anyway. So the heat of that time was just symptomatic. It didn’t make change. The change had already happened.

JAR: In your most recent novel, The Gathering, the narrator Veronica Hegarty investigates her brother Liam’s suicide by tracing the story of three generations. Given the cultural differences between these three points in time, I’m curious how you worked to construct those voices and sensibilities.

AE: I’m very involved with voice and with the way people speak. The whole push of rhetoric is one of the things I use to give my work energy and edge. I go back to 1925 in The Gathering. Now obviously I didn’t talk to anyone in 1925. So my nearest approximation is on paper. I use the writers’ voices in what might be termed a postmodern stitching together. Going back to ‘Eveline’ from Joyce’s Dubliners, this is a huge influence in the early scenes in The Gathering. But I didn’t sit down and channel anybody in particular. I didn’t hoover through old books as I was writing. I probably avoided reading more than anything else. Even so, these linguistic refractions are not just people’s voices and how they sounded in one decade or another. They come from the different ways that people wrote.

JAR: Beneath the voices you are using is a sense of the pre-articulate. Was that a deliberate part of your characterisation of Veronica? Did you see Veronica’s quest as representative of the ways stories of abuse were coming to the surface in the wider culture?

AE: The thing about The Gathering is that Veronica doesn’t even articulate what happened to her brother. She only sees it. She doesn’t put a word on it. I don’t think the word abuse ever comes into the book. She’s chasing these fugitive images. She’s never been in therapy. She probably wouldn’t want to be. It – the story, the thing – is not comfortable or finished for her because the language for it isn’t adequate. It isn’t even available. In the 1990s you listened to people on the radio who were saying things for the first time. And they had to say them without being sexually explicit which in some cases was quite difficult. Especially when those were actually the things that they were talking about. But then it swept through the country that all kinds of things could have happened that no one knew about. And no one could know about them, because there were no words for them. And these questions came into family conversations on Christmas Day: did it happen to you? Did it happen to me? So Veronica is approaching these linguistic possibilities. But she’s not there yet.

JAR: The title of your book denotes the gathering of the Hegarty family for Liam’s funeral. Are these questions and silences figured by the corpse the family gathers around?

AE: There’s a depth of silence underneath the book. As well as these scraps of words floating about. I’m developing a whole new theory as I talk to you here, about the corpses in my work as flotsam, as ghosts. Things that are not processed or finished or dealt with. They are still trapped in it, remnants that stayed the same, that are swept along. But what was it about not talking about the elephant in the room, the corpse in the room? What was that all referring to? There are many unspoken things in Irish life. Even though we talk about death all the time, we’re quite fluent about the business of dying. So when people say the corpse in the room they mean a different kind of dead thing. The corpse in the room, the elephant in the room, the purloined letter. All of these are interesting to me. I had a dream once that was very important to me. In the dream I was swimming up through these strata where everything was happening at the same time. It wasn’t even specific events but I really liked that sense. And there was a guy in the dream, who said, You’ve come at the wrong time. That’s exactly what he said.

JAR: Was your dream connected to writing or to your sense of yourself as a writer?

AE: There was always a worry in my early books that I was sticking things together. That I never started at the beginning and went through to the end. That I never did it properly. I was always layering things. Things happened in layers. And I do have this wonderful sense that a book could be experienced simultaneously somehow. That you need not be tied to this temporal line. So that might be part of it. The way I write a book is that I’m writing all of it at the same time. It’s horizontal. It never becomes a static object. One of the great things that happened to me was having a computer that could take a novel in a single file so I could make a change and follow the ripples all the way through it. So I don’t write from A to Z.

JAR: You’ve said that as a young writer both the new Ireland and the old existed in your mind. In The Gathering, Liam exists in the 1970s, ‘an old fashioned ghost’, a ‘throwback’. In your most recent volume of short stories, Taking Pictures, ghosts abound too. By representing a past that refuses to lie down or go away, are these ghosts and corpses resisting the invitation to rewrite the past that came with prosperity? And do you feel an obligation to continue the recovery projects of an older Irish literature?

AE: But I am rewriting the past. And we must always rewrite the past. That’s what you’re there for, really. Because the past changes as new information becomes available. And I don’t know if that’s the great human project, that we know more and therefore things become more clear to us. But they certainly become clear in a different way. Continuity with an older Irish literary initiative to recover and remember? Well, I don’t know. What were they recovering and remembering? What were they supposed to recover and write? There is an idea of an ideal past in Ireland. I don’t hold with it. I’m very uninterested in it. So the power to recover and remember, certainly, but not in that way. Not something lost and lovely.

JAR: In an essay called ‘My Milk’ you wrote about a moment in Eavan Boland’s poem ‘Night Feed’, when the speaker chooses a bottle not a breast, as an indicator of the bland modernity of the suburbs: ‘I grew up in those suburbs. I know what we were running away from.’ But wasn’t the suburb one of the locations where the new Ireland was born and a new future was begun? That new Ireland of prosperity, of reverse immigration, of coming home?

AE: I like Dermot Bolger’s idea of the suburbs as half the potatoes that his father grew out in the back garden. My father also grew potatoes in the back garden, and still does. So the suburb is a transitional space between those born in the city and rural migrants – my mother was born in Dublin and my father was born in Clare. And Dublin, not universally but extremely commonly, was made up of half and half. So it was an interesting amalgam, an interesting place. But there wasn’t a huge rejection of rural values as being more basic, or crude, either in my family or in Irish life. There was still a nostalgia for the rural and for the West. I know we partook in an American idea of the suburbs too. And perhaps it was a better new future. Who’s to say?

JAR: In 2006 you wrote a piece on consumerism for the Irish Times, about a trip to the Dundrum shopping centre. You described yourself as a failed consumer for forgetting how to want things in a culture that wanted things. A month earlier you’d written a piece about money. You described how consumption had gone from a political problem to a spiritual one. I wonder if you felt consumerism was reconstructing the Irish character in some way, and if so, how this might affect choices given to your characters.

AE: I was reared not to judge people by what they had. I think that was somehow part of the national project. I think that has shifted now. Certainly as children we were discouraged from talking about how much people had. Maybe I was naïve. So when a student in the University of East Anglia said, ‘I don’t know anything about your characters, I don’t know what kind of wallpaper they have’, it took me years to realise he wasn’t talking about pattern, madness and repetition. He was talking about how much money they had. And I thought, oh right, that’s all about class then. He wants to know what class my characters are so he knows how to read my book. But I don’t judge my characters that way. It’s a moral issue with me. I don’t think we were primed for materialism. In my family, we were primed for education. Exams were hugely important. I think what we absolutely wanted was to reverse emigration. I remember in 1990 I went out to the airport to film on Nighthawks. One of the first pieces we did was to film the returning emigrants. It’s an astonishing place, that arrivals hall in Dublin airport in the days before Christmas. And that was in 1990. Staying home was an ambition in my family. And we were very lucky. My brother became a civil engineer in 1984. Out of 120 in his class, only two stayed at home. He was one of them. In retrospect, that was a minor miracle. But, you know, nobody in my family is very interested in what kind of car he has.

JAR: You’ve mentioned in book reviews that the ‘the lunatic landscape of material choice’ is a new subject for the Irish novel. The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch has a running focus on Eliza as the ultimate consumer of beautiful things. Partly in response to types of deprivation. Partly in response to the sadness of there being nothing material she cannot buy.

AE: You’re right about Eliza. I wanted Eliza to be about greed. But then, to contradict myself yet again, there’s a terrible aesthetic snobbery in me, which isn’t to do with the price of stuff. So that’s Eliza as well. A lot of my work is somehow involved with how you organise yourself within the world of materialism. But it’s not really engaged in it. It’s more alienated by it. Thinking back to what I said about not judging people on their stuff, it’s possible a younger generation again has come through all of that. Now it’s all just stuff again, and they have a different set of values. They’re always texting. They’re always in contact. There’s a whole different idea of how to exist. There’s a whole strain of them that isn’t materialistic at all. I mean who wants a globalised consumer identity? There’s been so much stuff around for so long they’re not all that bothered. I do think in material terms Irish people learn very fast. The learning curve, when money hit, was very steep. And I think that people aren’t as vulgar now as they were four years ago. We just can’t laugh at them any more in that way. But it’s most important to me not to laugh at them in any way. You laugh at people for having the wrong objects because they have too much money. And you laugh at them for having the wrong objects because they are poor. What’s the difference?

JAR: In an older Ireland there was a sense that, in being Irish, people had access to a unifying identity. Is that sense of Irishness still intact? Where does Irish identity come from now?

AE: I come from a very particular background in Ireland. My family has always been pro-Europe. One of my brothers works in Brussels now. The 2005 survey that said that Ireland was one of the happiest places on the planet, which made us all laugh, was to do with the fact that families remained integrated. So the shift in material wealth didn’t mean the breakup of the family structure. In fact, prosperity brought families together. It brought the emigrants home. I have my own ideas about the family, that it’s not the most glorious institution. I was thinking the other day that of all the institutions I thought I might end up in, marriage wasn’t exactly top of the list. I have my doubts about the cult of the Irish family. But there’s no doubt that it has social benefits.

JAR: In a recent Irish Times article you observed ‘a renewed keening, that ancient Irish lament, for all we have lost, though it’s hard to say what it is this time around, which Ireland is gone’. There has been a sense at times in your journalism of a culture perhaps having gone too far, of something valuable being lost. And at the same time a sense of doing battle with or mistrusting the past in order to get fully to the present.

AE: What I mistrust is not the past itself but stories about the past. Ireland was built on the fiction of an idealised past that was stained by the English occupation. If you look at what Yeats and Lady Gregory were doing, they were deliberately building a romantic Irish fiction. And that romantic Irish fiction was perpetrated in order to support Irish nationalism. And it continued to form ideas of Irish national identity right through my childhood and beyond. Once a relative in London turned to me about one of the bombings there and said, doesn’t it make you feel ashamed to be Irish? And I said no. And she was very shocked. But I felt, well it’s absolutely nothing to do with me. I don’t support these people. Why should I be blamed for what they’re doing? Why should that be more Irish than I am? You do feel a strong sense that the word ‘Irish’ has been stolen by many different groups over the years. And that the last thing an Irish person is, is middle class, urban and female.

JAR: And yet you’ve written urban middle-class women into the centre of Irishness or definitions of Irishness. Having done that, is it any clearer to you, from where you stand now, what has been lost or gained culturally over the past twenty years?

AE: I don’t think something valuable was lost when Ireland got money. I actually welcomed the increase in prosperity. My nieces and nephews have work. Nobody’s leaving – which is, as I say, a core value, in the extended family – unless they’re going away for holidays. These days nobody’s in Ireland, because they’re always on a plane. But they come back because they live here. So we’re pleased about all of that. And also about the fact that people’s food is better and there are tall young people with good skin. Yes, the traffic was terrible and the property thing was terrifying, and it was an awful blow to the arts community that people couldn’t live in clusters any more. They had to go out and live in estates in Trim, so an arts community was very much fragmented by it. And that was difficult. But in general I didn’t object to it. I had worked in RTÉ when I was young and single, and so I had buckets of money when nobody else did. I was young and successful until it stopped working for me in those or any other terms. I had my little boom very early on. I didn’t think money made me a bad person. So I wasn’t too frightened by it coming for other people.

JAR: In a review of Edna O’Brien, you commented that she was ‘the first Irish woman ever to have sex. For some decades, indeed, she was the only Irish woman to have had sex – the rest just had children. This was a heroic and sometimes difficult position to maintain in the national imagination.’ You’ve also contributed to that unsettling of the national imagination by taking women’s interior lives and sexual experience as your subject matter. Has that unsettling extended to masculinity as well, to the re-imagining of male characters and experience?

AE: I said that about Edna O’Brien because it was true. I took the line from something said about Mary Holland – that she was the only Irish woman ever to have an abortion until Sinéad O’Connor came along. I’m shy about writing specifically about gender. And not because I don’t think about it all the time, not because I’m not politicised, but because every time I write something down it seems wrong. I don’t know exactly why that is. I feel it’s too brittle. I’m not in charge of it enough. Obviously when I’m writing I like to be in charge. I like to be able to bounce. I like a sprung floor. I don’t want to get stuck. And none of my characters like getting stuck. They are to one degree or another stuck, but their voices are very much free. I like the freedom of their voices. So that is a problem when I write about gender. I feel more and more trapped. So the sentences just die for me and I can’t do it. I have to go and write about something else. I actually regret to a degree how noisy my work is about sex. I suppose it’s partly if you’re breaking a silence, then the initial clatter is that little bit louder.

JAR: In an essay about Synge and prostitution, you wrote that you were outraged about Arthur Griffith’s response to the woman picking up the stranger in In the Shadow of the Glen: ‘Everyone knows that Irish women are the most virtuous in the world.’

AE: That was in my history book when I was in sixth year in school. It’s possibly the only thing I remember from that history book – F.S.L. Lyons’s Ireland Since the Famine – which is a very thick book indeed. I was outraged by it. You could say I spend considerable amounts of time proving that this isn’t so. But actually, that’s not what I’ve been doing. When I write about sex and sexuality in my books it’s very ordinary stuff. It is, as the modern people say, very vanilla. So I’m not transgressive in that way. I’m not saying that Irish women are not virtuous. I’m not saying, isn’t it wonderful, here’s my character, the prostitute who really likes it. I don’t do any of those things. It’s a very puritan idea anyway. I’m not interested in it. I do very ordinary situations in which women could not be described as virtuous or not. Virtue doesn’t come into it. They’re neither virtuous nor not virtuous. They’re having sex. So it’s getting rid of a whole structure, it’s working outside of the structure, to find a new virtue – or not, thank you. Both at the same time.

JAR: You say your writing about sexuality is very vanilla, very ordinary. But have there been times when it has caused outrage?

AE: There was some guy writing about Eliza Lynch, that she was disgusting, foul. I said well, yes, she has sex, that’s true certainly. She spends a whole chapter having sex. I suppose that’s true too. But you know sex is different for different people. For some people it was a foul thing to do. And for some people it’s just something they do of a Tuesday. Actually it’s kind of fun, to shock people with something that isn’t actually in the least bit shocking. It’s a very political act. Everything, even the physical, is seen though a social filter. Whether it is experienced that way is another question. When it comes down to it, I don’t think that Ireland was sexually repressed. I think it was sexually oppressed. There are whole societies that are much more repressed than Irish people. I think of two English women I passed once in a park whose dogs were fucking and they were talking sweetly about the weather and saying, ‘Come on Rover!’ That’s repressed. In Ireland, that wouldn’t happen. In Ireland we would laugh about the dogs. Sex was a constant in Irish life and it was constantly criticised and made negative and demonised, but it was always in the air because the Catholic Church was so obsessed by it. The Catholic Church were oppressing this as well as sort of fomenting it at the same time. It was central. It was the central silence. In a way, I think there’s something noble about having characters who can have sex without the weight of all of this nonsense. I think that’s a reasonable thing to want to do in your fiction. And reasonably liberating.

JAR: Are there dangers as well as liberations in writing about sexuality?

AE: There are all kinds of dangers. If you write about sex and sexuality in a book, we’re so hard-wired for it. It sort of magnetises the reader’s attention. You find that readers haven’t read three sentences after the rude bit because they’re still stuck at the rude bit. Their minds won’t move on. So I should probably manage it a bit more carefully. I think the next book which is a lot to do with relationships and sexual relationships will be much more tender about it all. Writing men is the really big problem. I can’t write men. I tried to in the last book and the voice … He started off like a nice guy. He’s having a hard day. It wasn’t going his way. And by the end he was just sort of tainted by misogyny. He’d become a narrower person by the end of the story than he’d started out. That’s so against my whole aim as a writer. I have to be able to write a bloke who we know more about, or who knows more about himself. Or who’s more free at the end. It really suits to have women in your books because, if they are more constricted starting off, it’s easy to have female characters who are more free by the end of the narrative. Certainly it’s one of the things I want to do very soon – address male characters and experience. But I’d ask you as well whether that unsettling you mention has done anything for the characterisation of men in American fiction. This disturbance of the imaginary you talk about that happens when we introduce women’s desire – men either empathise with that or hate it. Joyce loved it. He relished it. Female desire was fundamental to him. But it seems to me that some blokes get really butch and unpleasant in this kind of atmosphere. They get more entrenched. They get more puritan, more involved in ideas of disgust, and their characters get smaller. They get sort of reactionary, though their material might seem the opposite. Meanwhile, women are going off and having great fun writing whatever they like. But there are quite a lot of nervy guys around. For years, getting a decent introduction from an Irish male to an Irish audience was out of the question for me. Now that I’ve won the Booker Prize, they know what to say. But it used to be my game, actually, just to sit back and see them not be able to do it. Just to get an Irish man to introduce me who would say something nice. They just can’t.

JAR: Why is that?

AE: Ask them.

Anne Enright: Selected Bibliography

NOVELS

The Wig My Father Wore. London: Cape, 2002; New York: Atlantic, 2003.

What Are You Like? London: Cape; New York: Atlantic, 2000.

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. London: Cape, 2002; New York: Atlantic, 2003.

The Gathering. London: Cape; New York: Grove, 2007.

SHORT STORIES

The Portable Virgin. London: Secker & Warburg, 1991.

Taking Pictures. London: Cape, 2008.

Yesterday’s Weather. New York: Grove, 2008; London: Vintage, 2009.

NON-FICTION

Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood. London: Cape, 2004.

EDITED

The UEA Creative Writing Anthology 2008. Norwich, Norfolk: Egg Box, 2008.

The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story. London: Granta, 2010.

PLAY PRODUCED

Thank God, Fasting. Dublin Youth Theatre, 1994.

August 2008

HUGO HAMILTON

Novelist Hugo Hamilton was born in 1953 in Dublin to parents of different nationalities, his mother German and his father Irish. His father’s ardent connection to the Irish language resulted in the demand that his children should speak Irish or German exclusively, and never English.

Hugo Hamilton has observed that this embargo alienated him from all three languages. His writing reflects both his early cultural influences, and his novels have been set in both Central Europe and Dublin. But it was only with the publication of his memoir The Speckled People in 2003 that he explicitly detailed the language conflicts of his childhood. His fictional themes have continued to reflect these struggles. Throughout his work, questions of language and belonging play into issues raised by the reshaping of Europe in the wake of social and political change.

Hugo Hamilton’s novels of Central Europe include Surrogate City (1990), The Last Shot (1991), The Love Test (1995) and Disguise (2008). His novels Headbanger (1996) and Sad Bastard (1998) are both set in Dublin, as is his most recent novel, Hand in the Fire (2010). Hamilton has written a collection of short stories, Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow (1996), and two personal memoirs: The Speckled People (2003) and The Sailor in the Wardrobe (2006). In his memoirs as well as his fiction, Hamilton explores the subject of different national loyalties, as well as the complex patterns of belonging and displacement these create.

JAR: As a young writer with a dual heritage, did you feel implicated in the history of modern Irish literature? Or did you feel separated from it by your German context, or both? And which writers were presences for you as a young writer?

HH: I grew up with Joyce and Beckett. It is very hard to avoid Joyce. He’s in the atmosphere all around here even where I grew up. And Beckett was a big figure, as was Flann O’Brien. Then on the other hand, I also had these writers from Germany that my mother introduced me to: Heinrich Böll and Thomas Mann and Günter Grass, and later Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard. So there was a twin track interest in literature for me. I definitely had the historical point of view of Germany very much fixed in my head, which did contribute to my feeling very separate in this country.

JAR: Some writers seem to have almost constructed a tradition for themselves. I’m thinking here of Michael Hartnett with his relation to English and Irish both. Were there ways in which you felt you were constructing a tradition for yourself?

HH: The platform for me came from trying to understand my hybrid situation which was not easy to explain to people in personal exchanges. It was hard to tell people in pubs about my German-ness, my Irish-ness. That wasn’t something that interested anyone. My writing came from an attempt to explore that difficult issue of belonging. Was I Irish or was I German? Those were very troubled issues for me. This eventually led to The Speckled People, which focused directly on the question of my origins and mixed heritage.

JAR: Your younger characters are shaped in the interface between paradigms of identity on the island. In The Speckled People and in The Sailor in the Wardrobe those paradigms are seen in the wider context of European culture and an emerging global youth culture. Have paradigms of identity, real or fictional, shifted with peace, prosperity and the increasing Europeanisation of Ireland over the past fifteen years?

HH: Yes, I do believe that. I think for a long time, particularly during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, we were incredibly focused on what it meant to be Irish. We had waves of emigration, people losing their identity and leaving their home country behind. So we had this big need in Ireland to place ourselves: where were we? Were we this postcolonial society? Even academically we were trying to work all of that out. But in the 1990s, when prosperity coincided with a huge new release in artistic expression, the Irish people suddenly put themselves on the map in a different way. It was Bono, it was Sinéad O’Connor, it was writers and artists. It was an explosion of expressionthat was ultimately a nation’s way of putting itself on the map. You can do it through economic means, which we have also done in some way, but it really is through artistic production that we’ve placed ourselves most effectively up to now. In the middle of all of this, I discovered there was a moment here for me, also, to speak my very intimate and awkward story of being an outsider in Ireland. I thought, ‘Well here’s my chance, too. I’m not the representative Irish person, but one of these newcomers, one of the new Irish, as I call myself.’ So that gave me an opportunity that would not have been possible in the 1980s. I don’t think anybody would have been interested in this small Irish child with a German mother, because we hadn’t figured ourselves out yet. And of course the Northern Troubles were still so explosive.

JAR: Is that because becoming part of Europe wasn’t as heavily on the agenda in the 1980s as it grew to be in the 1990s?

HH: We now want to belong to Europe in a much more significant way, though we still have an obsession with our own national character, our Irishness. In the novel I am working on now [Hand in the Fire, 2010], I explore the experience of an immigrant coming to Ireland and his attempt to assimilate and come to terms with Irish life and friendship. Increasingly, there is a feeling that the Irish are in possession of something unique, something special from which immigrants are excluded. Our new self-confidence has now placed us Irish people in the role of a dominant culture. But we still have to adjust to that and understand the responsibilities that come with it. We revel in that new-found Irish confidence, but we also like to hang on to our traditional status as victims of fate.

JAR: In your work there’s a complex relation between memory and prosperity. The more prosperous a character seems to be in Ireland, the more likely he is to want to forget the past. I’m thinking of the pub owners in The Sailor in the Wardrobe denying the destitute couple living in the cottage out the back. Has there been a cultural or historical amnesia associated with these prosperous years that have ended so recently here?

HH: That’s something that concerns me quite a bit. We’re all delighted that Ireland is doing well, and it seems like a bad omen to criticise prosperity because we’re making up for a lot of hard times. But a lot of damage has been done that we’ve not discovered yet. We’ve always as Irish people behaved as though things were done to us. We’re victims of oppression, the environment, poverty, the weather. I don’t think we’ve quite understood we also do things to ourselves, including those things we’ve done to ourselves with our wild prosperity. One of the things that illustrates that to me is the way Irish people have dealt with the physical environment. They have very little respect for it. For instance, recently I went to an exhibition of photographs taken in Ros a’ Mhíl in Connemara, between the late 1970s and the early 80s, of thatched cottages and stone ruins from the Famine and post-Famine times. There were 180 of those cottages in this small district of Ros a’ Mhíl at that time. The artist told me that there were only forty of them left now. Ireland is in the process of erasing its past. The landscape is losing its memory in a kind of vicious way. People don’t even want stone houses any more because they still represent poverty and misery. We ditch the past whenever it is convenient to do so. We want to belong to a prosperous place. The Irish have been very aggressively getting rid of their past, which is also part of my story, the part about denying the Irish language. The Irish have very successfully pursued their cultural voice in the English language, but there may still be a lingering regret at the loss of our heritage.

JAR: You mentioned the Irish language. Have you noticed a change in attitude towards the Irish language since the years of fast-forward change started?

HH: There’s a big difference now. The problem with the Irish language is it was also used as a weapon, as a sort of instrument of power. Very often that’s what put people off in my generation. Anybody who wants to go back and learn the language is now doing so voluntarily, because the language provides some connection to an older Ireland. The cottages are all gone, the history is gone, you can’t even see it on the landscape any more. The only real way of connecting to that old Ireland is through the language.

JAR: In The Sailor in the Wardrobe you go to the Aran Islands. There you discover that one way to access that older Ireland is through the language. But your characters experience dilemmas caused by language – Irish, German, English – dilemmas that no language can resolve. Was that native language versus mother tongue debate complicated or illuminated by your experience of two languages in the household of your childhood, and then another in the world outside your door?

HH: My formative experience of this country was of being in this very uncomfortable mix of languages and identities. In that sense it reflects the experience of Irish people too. Because it was so uncomfortable with the language we all escaped into this English culture. Pop music, that new language, is where we felt we belonged to the rest of the world. We saw our parents’ generation, like my father, as belonging to a completely different, antiquated Ireland which had already disappeared. So I do understand why the Irish would have tried to escape from their culture, because it felt so restrictive. I had a similar situation on the German side, which was also a culture with a great burden, and a culture that made me feel very uneasy, because I was called a Nazi all the time. So the English language, the access that gave to world culture, was so seductive.

JAR: I’d like to return to your comment about the physical landscape. The main character in Headbanger, Pat Coyne, is given an ecological consciousness that is both critical and comical, both illuminating and eccentric. Do you see a connection in Ireland between the protectors of natural history and the custodians of human history?

HH: Well, that’s interesting, because in those books, Headbanger and Sad Bastard, I did invent a character who sees himself as a custodian of the country’s heritage and the environment in general. It’s not just an ecosystem but the cultural landscape as well. It was important for me to write that character as a precursor for my own version of my father as this cultural custodian he’s set himself up to be. I had a regret in the abandonment of certain aspects of our culture. And it’s almost something I can’t get rid of now. It’s a formative thing. My father wanted me to love the Irish language. But I’ve discovered that in Ireland there’s a kind of unresolved guilt about those aspects. I look around the streets here, and there is such a demonstration of wealth, suddenly, and such an eagerness to show that wealth, with people buying massive cars. It almost seems like they are trying to pretend that the Famine, the history of poverty, didn’t exist. It’s a kind of denial every time we buy these sun beds and whirlpools for our homes. We’re still in some kind of dispute with the past. We still don’t feel comfortable enough with ourselves to settle down and just be the way we are. I still have that feeling, that we’re on the run from this poverty. I see this in contrast with Berlin, where I find a much more relaxed way of accepting the world. There isn’t this huge drive to express identity in consumerist terms. For a country that had so little of it for so long, I think we don’t understand ourselves. I think we lost our footing.

JAR: I heard someone say recently that identity has been less continuous here in Ireland than in Eastern Europe. In Eastern Europe there is more interest in making the past relate to the present and extending something continuous into the future. But in Ireland there has been a severance between past and present. The sources from which Ireland has taken its identity over the last fifteen years are discontinuous with its previous forms of identity.

HH: That’s exactly the right way of saying it. It seems like we fell off a cliff in the 1990s. Having gone through the Troubles, prosperity was suddenly a way in which we could imagine ourselves out of that horrible conflict. And I almost agree with that outlook, ‘let’s get away from that and not focus so much on our national identity’. So maybe we needed to spend a few years just living like we had a lot of money. It takes a certain level of prosperity in a country before we can reflect on ourselves, a kind of comfort zone in which to examine things. The country that has examined its past most thoroughly is Germany. The economic miracle provided the ability to look at the past in a way that may not have been possible if Germany had remained poor after the war. So perhaps this is our moment for being truthful to ourselves.

JAR: Is that moment created by the fact that there has been great prosperity and now an economic downturn is starting? Or is that moment created by the level of comfort prosperity brings? On what does it allow us to reflect?