Dublin-born Joseph O'Connor is an award-winning writer with seven novels to his name. I recently met him in Ireland to talk about his literary influences (see this week's Triple Choice Tuesday) and newest novel Ghost Light (see yesterday's interview, part 1).
In the second and final part of the interview, we talk about new Irish writers, why Ireland has produced so many great writers, and how having a room of one's own is vital for the creative process...
Reading Matters: Are there any young up and coming Irish writers we should be aware of?
Joseph O'Connor: Yea, there are loads. I have a new book out that I edited for Faber called New Irish Short Stories. For many years those books were published by Faber, I suppose, every four or five years – Faber has had a great historic commitment to the Irish short story – and they were edited by David Marcus, who was great. He died a few years ago, and Faber asked me to take over that role.
So the criteria is that the stories have to be new, and previously unpublished, so this book contains work from William Trevor, Roddy Doyle, Colm Toibin, and other great established masters of the form, but also has new people like Kevin Barry – his contribution is a top story, absolutely wonderful.
The most remarkable thing about the process, for me, is that this is a small country, people find out you’re editing a book, they start sending you their stuff. Four people who were new sent me stories that I just couldn’t leave out.
The standard is so high among newer Irish writers. There’s a young woman in the book called Elaine Walsh. She works as a lawyer here in Dublin and this is her first ever published work of fiction and the stories are arranged in alphabetical order by author, so she’s next to William Trevor, which is kind of nice. There was just some quality about her story that I just had to put it in.
Another young woman called Órfhlaith Foyle, who has previously been published in magazines and things, has also contributed a stunning piece of work.
I think the younger Irish writers now – you know I’ve just finished teaching writing at University College Dublin – are so much better than when I was at college, they’re so well read, so hard working, and they realise, I suppose, that that whole thing that happened in London publishing in the early 1990s when Ireland was trendy has gone now. It’s not enough now for you to be Irish and have a novel that’s quite good and a book of short stories in which half are okay. Nobody’s going to take that risk on you anymore. Just to get into the starting gate, you have to be excellent.
RM: Do you have any theories about why Ireland, despite its small population, has so many brilliant writers?
It is a remarkable thing for such a small country. My only explanation for it is that certainly when I was a kid, writers were the only people from Ireland – apart from George Best the soccer player – who ever achieved anything.
To grow up in Ireland in the 1970s and the early 80s, to be a kid here, well, it was a rainy, rather frightened place, in which 100,000 people emigrated every 10 years, and we all knew that the official aims of the country were a farce. The country was not independent. It was deeply, deeply linked to England, and all the hypocrisy of that, pretending England was the old enemy and yet several million of us are there earning our living.
And people didn’t speak the Irish language the way we all thought they once would, and Catholicism was failing and there were already stirrings of scandal in the Church. And more than that, I suppose you had a sense that the place was a bit of a failure and if someone bothered their arse to put a bench in the local park it would be vandalised and then the rain would rot it and no one would ever fix it, and that’s what it was like to be from Ireland.
But somehow we’re the country of Yeats and Oscar Wilde and Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney, and that these people had opened up the territory where Irish people could succeed. And that the great generation of Irish writers 100 years ago, who still thought in the codes of Gaelic, had done remarkable things with the language. They had taken the conqueror's language, if you like, and it was the ultimate revenge: they decided to speak it and write it better than the English did. It's a bit like the West Indies and Pakistan and Australia deciding they would be better at cricket; we decided we’d be better at literature.
Anne Enright always says in other countries smart people went off and made millions, opening factories or banks, but in Ireland they wrote books – perhaps that’s a pity, but I think there’s something to it. There’s a notion in Ireland, and there still is, that to want to have a life in the arts is a good thing to do, it’s not a waste of your time. And I know having spoken to English colleagues who write and people from other countries, they often have a story the day they went home and told mum and dad "I’m dropping out of college to become a novelist" and the smelling salts had to be ordered and the vicar had to come around because it was such a shock. But in Ireland I think most families would be proud of that [wanting to be a novelist]. They would think that’s a good way to spend your time.
So I think it’s a mixture of those factors, and then success breeding success. And success breeding a kind of iconoclasm.
I remember when I started writing, one of the reasons I wrote was that there was a certain Irish writer older than me whose work I didn’t like and I wanted to bloody show them. So whenever I hear a younger Irish writer saying about me that I’m a load of old crap I’m sort of pleased because ––
RM: -– you think it will encourage them?
JO: Absolutely! Sometimes having a windmill to tilt at is a good thing. But I don’t know… it’s still an unusual thing [about why Ireland has produced so many writers].
RM: My pet theory is that the weather is so terrible…
JO: Oh yes, the weather. We all stay at home.
RM: Or go to the pub, and the pubs are so fantastic, so you’re stuck in a pub and it's raining and you’re having a pint or whatever, and the creative juices get going...
JO: Well it’s a long time now since I’ve been in a pub, I can tell ya. It’s a very long time. [Laughs]. I think that’s a strange thing, actually. You know visitors often have an image of Irish writers like Brendan Behan, making for home with a bottle of whiskey at 2 in the morning, getting out the typewriter, stick the cigarette in your mouth and away you go… But, in fact, younger Irish writers are so serious they live on tofu and mineral water, they do pilates, rather distressingly. Ha!
RM: They’re a bit more professional?
JO: Yea, they’re quite professional. And, to be fair, our governments, which have made a complete mess of almost everything over the years, have, accidentally, done a number of intelligent things to foster the arts and they try to help you here. There are tax breaks and all of that which exist to help younger Irish writers. They’ve been reformed now and the amount of money they allow you to earn has been decreased.
RM: Is that because of U2 earning so much money?
JO: I certainly think the tax situation that was introduced in the 1970s, where you paid income tax on known creative earnings, it wasn’t envisaged that Irish people would ever make millions out of the arts. Nobody did really, it was a kind of gesture, more than anything else. I suspect the dole did more to support Irish artists than the tax exemption laws ever did. But yes, in recent years, probably rightly it’s been modified. But it still makes a difference.
And we have an Arts Council here, which is small and hardworking, and we’ve had a succession of government ministers of all parties who have had an affection for the arts, which really helps. And I think they realise that at some level it’s part of people’s interest in the country.
It’s hard to quantify but I find, having travelled a lot this year, for example, to promote Ghost Light in different countries, that the Ireland people talk to me about in other countries is not this sordid dungeon of dodgy priests and bankers and politicians. Usually the first five minutes of meeting someone, they will say something about Seamus Heaney or the Chieftains or Riverdance or Colm Toibin or Colin Farell – usually they will mention an artist to me. And I think our governments realise that and try to foster it.
RM: Well, Dublin as UNESCO City of Literature must help build on that. I couldn’t think of a better, more appropriate, city to promote literature.
JO: Were you here for that event?
RM: Yes, I went to DublinSwell.
JO: I thought that was an extraordinary night. It was a huge venue, there wasn’t a spare seat. I know the people who organised that event and they were surrounded by a lot of people saying it's too big, it's 2,000 people, it’s St Patrick's weekend when people are away and you’re going to sell 200 tickets, it’ll never be full! And on the night it was so full the event was almost half an hour late starting, there were still people trying to get in. There was a standing ovation at the end. Personally, that was about as much live literature as I would be capable of enduring, but it’s a remarkable thing. I don’t think there’s another capital city in Europe where an event like that could have happened.
It was the first night I ever met Seamus Heaney and how fantastic is that, you get to spend Friday night on the same stage as the winner of the Nobel Prize? I can’t believe my life!
It was a lovely night… I think it’s to do with the kind of crap we’re going through in Ireland at the moment, that sense of unease and trauma, and the false fantasies that existed during the Celtic Tiger years that some of us fell for, and now we’re at this cross roads wondering what we can take from the past. Is any of this stuff from the past any use to us? And I think that night, and my little night at the Abbey Theatre on Sunday [The Music of Ghost Light: Joseph O'Connor and Friends], we tried to say, well, "look there’s this thing that we do that we’re excellent at, we’re not just quite good, sometimes we win". And I think that people are just really responding to that.
RM: Are you working on anything at the moment?
JO: I’m working on a collection of short stories, which was originally for this autumn, but I’ve moved it to early next year, because Ghost Light is coming out in a lot of countries in translation, so I’m doing a lot of travelling for that. I write a column each week, do radio, so I’m always writing in a way.
RM: Can I talk about the writing process. When you write, do you have a special room? Do you work certain hours?
JO. I have an office at the end of the garden and you can’t see if from the house. I think my children have been in it maybe twice, my wife has never been inside. It’s very good for family reasons, for everybody to have their room.
Before I was a father I wrote when I felt like it. I’d stay up all night, and I often did, but you realise after you become a parent that you better not do that. So, at the start of every novel, at the start of Ghost Light, I was very good. I kept office hours, I went to the gym, never smoked, and took a few hours off for lunch. But by the end it obsesses you, you’re not even really sleeping any more, you lie there with your eyes closed flickering through what you wrote that day. It's very intense. I wish it weren’t. I wish there were an easier way to do it, but there doesn’t seem to be.
People have there little rituals too. Anne Enright told me once that she always washes her hands before writing.
RM: So, do you have little rituals?
JO: No, I just sit down at my desk and cut open my veins, you know, and then I wait for the words to flow out. [Laughs] It’s much more messy with me.
I'd like to thank Joseph O'Connor for graciously giving his time to talk with me, and to Lisa Gooding at Random House for helping to arrange the interview.
To be in with a chance of winning a signed copy of Joseph's latest novel, Ghost Light, do return to the blog tomorrow and enter my competition.
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