Interview with anthony cronin

by Maurice Fitzpatrick

This interview took place in Dublin at Davey Byrne's pub, on Thursday August 11th 2005.  Anthony Cronin was patient and friendly throughout.

MF: You wrote an article recently about faith. In it, you raised the question of our very being and linked what Martin Heidegger's had to say with the pre-Socratics. Your beliefs are, in a sense, a departure from the beliefs of your youth. Is that so?

AC: Oh no. Oh no. I do not have any theological beliefs really but I think if you comb my Irish Times columns, for example, which I wrote for twelve years on a weekly basis, you won't find any denial of the possible existence of a deity. It never really was germane to most of the important things in my life. I do not believe in a reacting, caring, interfering God on a Judaeo-Christian model .Why is there not nothing? It would have been easier if there had been nothing.

MF: Do you believe that we are shapers of our own destiny?

AC: I think we have to act as if we were. Let's put it that way. There is nothing out there that we know to relieve us of that responsibility. So it's a kind of a pragmatic thing.

MF: V.S. Naipaul has described the religious impulse as “the inability to contemplate man as man”. Do you agree with that?

AC: Yes, I think that's true in most cases. Though if you look back at the great writers of the Middle Ages...Chaucer more than Dante. Dante was of course more religious than Chaucer but Chaucer is able to contemplate man as man. I think he had orthodox beliefs and so on but when it came down to brass tacks...

MF: And a writer coming later like Ben Jonson seems capable of contemplating pure being despite what general religious beliefs there were at the time...

AC: Well, I have to say that I haven't read Jonson sufficiently, or sufficiently critically, to arrive at any such account...

MF: Ok. Although your writing has taken many forms, including criticism with a markedly purist's concern for standards in poetry, you have avoided academia. Does that arise from a personal reaction against academia today?

AC: Yes. It arose from a personal reaction against Eng.Lit. That is why way, way back as an undergraduate, confronted with an option of - there wasn't much Eng.Lit around then, as far as Ireland was concerned, it was before the New Criticism - but, even so, it had a dissecting purpose that...

MF: Didn't appeal?

AC: No it didn't appeal. I didn't want to return answers along those lines. And I really think that a large part of university education is learning how to please examiners. That's what people do. That is why there is no such thing as a fact in a university. A fact is whatever you think would please your particular mentor.

MF: So facts are in flux.

AC: Yes, in flux.

MF: How would you make the university system better? Would you enlarge the tutorial system?

AC: I think there should be a very loose tutorial system, rather along the lines of the Greek academy. I think that would work ok. Really I am dubious about the whole enterprise in any shape or form. Can I get back to journalism for a second?

MF: Yes.

AC: I suppose I wrote a lot of journalism because I felt inclined to. You know, I had things to say that fitted the form. Partly also because it's a handy number that's to your elbow. If you're pushed for subsistence, you get it in a week, so to speak – instead a book takes two or three years and what are you meant to do in the meantime? Most writers I think have that attitude to journalism. But nowadays I'm not under such pressure. I still am – just in case you think otherwise – under a fair amount of editorial pressure to write journalism more frequently. But I resist it. And I have also not so much to say that fits the form. Maybe my concerns are on another level and I no longer want to write book reviews. It seems to me that, I mean when I was starting out, one felt that one ought to change things even by book reviewing. Maybe you could change the course of English literature by giving someone a good pasting! But I've long since ceased to believe that. I think the tide goes on like it did with King Canute. I do sometimes regret that I haven't been more involved in the literary scene journalistically in latter years. I mean, I do see trends and modes which I feel should be put to task, should be put on trial.

MF: John Banville once said that part of the reason why he likes reviewing books is that every week a stack of books would arrive at his doorstep and he loves reading new books.

AC: I wonder if he will feel like that in thirty years time!

MF: So your attitude to reading has totally changed.

AC: I hate giving up the time it takes to read books just because they land on your desk or your editor's desk and he has asked you to review them. I just feel that life is too short now. I mean, you're talking to someone who used to review four or five novels a week for the T.L.S. And I certainly wouldn't want to have to read four or five contemporary novels a week now. I was writing a book review every second week for the Sunday Independent until a couple of years ago. But I confined myself mostly to biographies so I wouldn't have to engage in criticism. But biographies have got so bloody long.

MF: Well, I remember reading, with a grin on my face, somewhere around the 500 page mark of your Beckett biography, you said something similar: biographies have got very long.

AC: Did I?

M.F: Yes.

AC: I am found out.

MF: Then again, you obviously had your material to write about Samuel Beckett.

AC: Yes, I couldn't have done him in less really. I would have liked to. And then it just grew.

MF: What is the book you most enjoyed writing?

AC: I would say The Life of Riley, probably. I did really enjoy writing The Life of Riley. I wrote it mostly in Spain, in the afternoons, with the aid of Spanish gin. Spanish gin is very good.

MF: I must try it.

AC: Yes, you should.

MF: Going back to academia for a moment. Do you think that the 1968 protests have altered academia for the good? In America, the catch-cry was relevancy. The relevancy of great poetry may not be immediately obvious...but then its resonance is lost if the primary concern of students is to herald in the new.

AC: Well, great poetry is not a product of academia. I know it tends to be in the United States and elsewhere. But what gets written is largely influenced by academia because people write the sort of poems that academic critics like to explicate. An awful lot, a sad amount, of poets start as academics. I know that's their bread and butter. Well, they remain academics. I don't think it's healthy – the connection between the two. I don't think 1968 changed things curriculum-wise or teaching methods-wise. I taught in America in the 1960's and one significant departure that came in was the assessment of teachers. But I don't know that that's a good idea, to tell the truth. I know it's all very fine and dandy to be democratic but not everything should be democratic.

MF: A young poet has to earn his/her bread and butter, as you say. Then you get T.S. Eliot advising young poets to write as little as possible. That would leave many poets dissipating their energies in journalism or in academia. Is poverty the great tragedy of a poet's life, as Kavanagh said?

AC: Well, it's the great tragedy of any life. It's certainly not conducive to doing as much as you could do or should do. It's not conducive to any sort of long-term project. No, no. Poverty is not good for anybody and it's not good for poets either. Eliot's advice; as far as I know, he never committed this advice to paper. I don't know. I think it comes from a story of William Empson's. They were crossing the road. Just as they were waiting for the lights to change, Empson asked him do you think poets should write as much as possible or as little as possible. And the lights changed and Eliot strolled across, leaving Empson waiting for an answer. But when he got to the other side, Eliot said: “oh as little as possible, of course”. I don't know anyone who ever wrote less than they might have done because T.S. Eliot advised it...eh, but I can see why he said it. But perhaps you could use it as a justification for your practice. I mean, I often felt that I wasn't writing – in terms of mere quantity - that much verse. Eliot provided a warranty for this. But I don't know that people are really influenced...people who have thoughts to write and something to say will write them. Besides which I don't think Eliot's advice on any matter cuts much ice nowadays, does it?

MF: He's out of fashion.

AC: He's out of fashion and some of his critical attitudes, even to a fervent admirer like myself, are beginning to seem a bit dated, a bit prissy, a bit precious.

MF: The social protest expressed both by yourself and other writers commemorated in Dead as Doornails was against a state hand in glove with an authoritarian church. Is it fair to say, in retrospect, that this stringency against free artistic expression was the whetstone for the sort of art that flourished at that time?

AC: It wasn't so much the state – I mean I know the censorship board and all that – but the pressures against free expression were not exactly about legality. They were more in the general atmosphere at the time. I think all sorts of things can - the grain of sand in the oyster shell – result in art. But I am not sure there were specifically limitations of freedom of expression. I think limitations on freedom of conduct or limitations on freedom or moral outlook but, as for limitations on freedom of expression, I don't think they would be conducive to anything. Unless they made for  samizdat art. But the samizdat art would be no different from what people would have written if they could.

MF: Some of the writers of the time, say, Kavanagh considered themselves to have been sacrificed. Do you think they were sacrificed or their environment made too uncomfortable for them?

A.C: Oh, I think in a different time, different atmosphere, they would have developed in ways that were different but, on the other hand, if you take away what your previous question touched on, you should take away all the obstacles. Perhaps you're taking away fundamental things. These are very hard questions to answer. I think they would have been happier, far happier and they would have done more work of a more architectonic kind in a different time and place.

MF: In 2005 there is an aura of permissiveness in the air. Have we reached saturation point in what is tolerable? Is this deleterious to writers now?

AC: I wouldn't blame permissiveness for some of the things that are intolerable or where the limits of tolerability have been reached, so much as other things. There is a very odd thing about this time. You say it's permissiveness and I suppose it is in a sense. But it is also dreadfully conformist - much, much more than the Ireland of my youth: the Ireland in which these people flourished or didn't flourish, whichever way you are to look at it. And this is the most conformist era that I can remember and I'm not talking about conformism directly imposed by the governments such as totalitarian governments or governments like Nazism or the Soviet Union. I am talking about another kind of conformism. This is a voluntary conformism. This is really quite extraordinary and it has corrupted writing too. Everyone has the same attitudes, not just P.C. attitudes and those generally classed as that, though that has something to do with it. It's really amazing. I think you had a question earlier about protest poetry or something. It's amazing that all the protests harp over the same strings. There is a conformity of protest! I find all that very dismaying. I think it is induced by all sorts of things. Commerce has a lot to do with it, advertising has a lot to do with it, the holding up of ideals of a rather terrible kind has a lot to do with it. This even applies to literature. You could say that there are less commercial pressures than before but in fact there are far more. Everyone in a sense is compelled to be a successful author. There is a tremendous compulsion to be successful. I mean in everything, even in literature. But it's everywhere. Because it doesn't come from fiats or decrees or officially propagated dogmas it's worse, you know. You cannot revolt against it.

MF: It's invisible.

AC: Yes, it's largely invisible. Its results are visible enough but its causes are very hard to pin down.

MF: But surely this high degree of capitalism must end.

AC: Must end? That is a very big question that I do not know if I want to get into. I hope so.

MF: As you were growing up poets like Yeats and Auden and Eliot were still alive. All of them have had an obvious influence on how you write. Is that true?

AC: Yes, I would think that all those have had influences. I don't know if you could grow up in that time without such influences. I don't think I would have wanted to. Poetry has always been receptive to influences. English poetry in the 18th century was Drydenish. Pope was Drydenish. In the late 19th century it was Wordsworthian and Keatsian. I am not sure Keats was a good influence and Wordsworth I suppose in certain ways...But then you could say that no one is but in other ways they may be deeply enabling. I mean, I think Eliot's poetry had a great, great enabling effect on those who came after him.

MF: In 'Lines for a Painter' you write of your envy of the union of the painter's mind and hand, although your envy is modified by the end of the poem. Let me ask you about your relationship with pictorial art. Your own poems seldom use painterly images, yet you seem very drawn to pictorial art.

AC: I am drawn to it. I think, looking back, I have had more painter-friends than writer-friends. Some of them have been deep influences. That poem is to Patrick Swift. He was one of my earliest, deepest artistic friends. That is a bad phrase but you know. I really do envy painters in many important ways. There is another poem, a later one, called 'Envy of Painters' which lists some of these at the beginning. I think if I hadn't been Anthony Cronin the writer, I would have preferred to be Anthony Cronin the painter. But of course one cannot speak of one's level of mere talent because you don't know what it is until you test this talent and burden this talent with real impulses and real things to say. And it isn't very voluntary. I imagine that my talents lay elsewhere.

MF: Derek Mahon has compared you, wholly admiringly, to Pablo Neruda because you share Neruda's concern for political happenings and how they shape our consciousness. Are you comfortable with that comparison?

AC: Well, I suppose that I should be slightly uncomfortable with the level of achievement implied in the comparison but nevertheless, no, I am not uncomfortable with it. And I was very pleased about it.

MF: Closer to home, we had Sean O Riordian, in his Irish Times columns in the 1970's, being quite political. And he insisted, I recall, in an interview, that everyone should be interested in the political animal that man is and how it seemed to feed (even if he wrote quite metaphysical poetry)

his own creative impulse. Do you feel the same?

AC:Yes, I do, taking politics in the widest and deepest sense. I do feel that one should be interested. But, on the other hand, when we speak of interests in poetry – that's largely something that's decided upon. You don't decide it for yourself. It really has to have that mysterious poetic interest, it has to have that mysterious obsessional quality. There is no use in saying to a poet: 'you should be interested in politics', if he is not. A lot of poets nowadays feel they ought to be and the result is a sort of weakling protest stuff...just as unthinking as if they had not professed an interest at all. But an interest in philosophy too...a poet should have an inquiring mind, should be predisposed...

MF: Like that exchange between the Yeats and Mohini Chatterjee, when Yeats asks the Brahmin whether he should pray.

AC: Yes, that's a beautiful poem.

MF: To what extent was the fragmentation of the human imagination the culmination of artists like Eliot striving for a select audience?

AC: I don't know what you mean by the fragmentation of the imagination, unless you mean the same as he meant early on in that essay on the metaphysical poets. Striving towards a larger audience?

MF: Striving towards a select audience, a classically educated....

AC: I don't think he strove towards a classically educated, select audience. What you might say is that the mass audience is a corrupter. If I am lucky enough to have a small audience which understand me – that will do. I don't think anyone ever strove towards a select audience – I mean, what sort of a nincompoop? What they want is an aware audience. I want an audience sufficiently knowledgeable to understand my references and sufficiently civilised to know my place in the literary scheme of things. All these would be, in my book, OK objectives.

They don't rule out some sort of appreciation of popular art. After all, Eliot wrote an essay on Marie LIoyd. No other writer would have written a serious piece on Marie LIoyd at that time. And after all the writing of his plays was an attempt to reach a larger audience - not a smaller and select one– a very, very much larger. And they did reach a larger audience – Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion. I saw The Family Reunion in London in a sizable theatre which was full and appreciative.

MF: Well, he does describe one of the characters in The Waste Land as “the lean solicitor in our empty rooms”. He has a notion of man as being detached from society and yet reaching it obliquely.

AC: I suppose that is what a writer is.

M.F: Has Flann O' Brien's explosion of the novel form in his At Swim-Two-Birds left a vacuum yet to be filled?

AC: Well I think it left a vacuum for him that he never succeeded in filling. It is a larger question really, you know, in modernism generally. Most writers don't seem bothered by that anyway. I mean, everyone writes what used to be called middlebrow novels now and they aim at what used to be called a middlebrow audience. They want sales and they want the Booker prize.

MF: Is it a business now?

AC: I'm just commenting on it in relation to 'did At Swim-Two-Birds and other great modernist works leave a vacuum'. No, they didn't. People were quite happy to fill the vacuum with novels which Arnold Bennett and H.G. Wells would have written.

MF: Organisations like Aosdana are in place now to help struggling artists and other agencies to publicise their work. Has this done anything to remedy the loss to posterity of artists of the calibre of Louis Mac Neice, who have been forgotten or somehow shaken through the sieve?

AC: Well, that was what was hoped. I remember writing to Samuel Beckett, when I was inviting him to become a member. I knew that if we had Beckett on board - in an alphabetical list, we would have had Beckett somewhere near the top and it would be OK. And I wrote to him saying: you know and I know that ninety percent of the people who will be aided by this won't matter in the long-run but for the sake of the other one or two percent who will, it should be in inclusive enough to include them. I don't understand about forgotten Mac Neice. Could you phrase it another way?

MF: Well, to my mind he is not read as much as he should be, as a writer of his calibre should be.

AC: Oh my God. I cannot think of any poet that is more read, certainly by poets.

MF: By poets.

AC: By the general public too. He is very well known and by some standard a popular poet – even in his own day – and I just think that has continued. You would have to ask Faber and Faber about this. But certainly that is my impression. And I certainly think his masterpiece, Autumn Journal, is very well read.

MF: Eliot called him a “poet's poet”. And he tends to be read, as you say, by poets.

AC: Oh, I don't think – if Eliot said that, Eliot was wrong. Mac Neice himself would have liked to have been thought of, I think, as the poet of the common man. He had a great respect for that strange being, the common man. A great respect for him and speaks for him in many poems. He was a genuine democrat, Mac Neice. He mightn't be so democratic if he was alive today. No, no it amazes me that you should think that he is forgotten. That is nonsense. No good poet is as widely read as he should be. Insofar as there is an audience for poetry, Mac Neice has as big a share of it as anybody else.

MF: You arranged your Collected Poems with a concern for themes, which you felt has more attractions for the general reader. So you share Dr. Johnson's concern for the common reader.

AC: Oh yes. But when you say the common reader, unfortunately things have changed. I mean, in an era of universal literacy of sorts. When Dr. Johnson said the common reader and the sense in which I mean it – I mean someone who is genuinely receptive to literature but who is not a professional critic, is not part of the world of professional criticism. And I am glad to say that I do feel that I have been able to leapfrog over professional criticism and find readers beyond this. I've had lots of evidence of this – both in personal contact with such people and in mere sales figures. It's a source of great satisfaction to me. And some of my books have been made by readers. Oddly enough, Dead as Doornails did not get the kind of critical reception people think it got at all on first publication. It was readers that did the job.

MF: If we speak in terms of the common reader, that is the book that you will always be remembered for.

AC: Oh no. That sounds very pathetic. I mean, I've written a lot of other things. That sounds terribly depressing to me. But I am just instancing it as a case in point where it was the reader who singled out the book.

MF: Derek Mahon would suggest that you are – although it is probably anathema to you – the poet laureate. And for those reasons – contact with the common reader.

AC: I think Mahon also said that I would not want to be such. For one thing, there is too much competition I think he said. And I think we'll leave it at that. I think there are others who have a more substantive – whether or not it is a better claim – to it.

MF: Theo Dorgan once asked you in interview whether writing had been worth it. You reply, if memory serves, was “writing has been the one thing that was indubitably worth it. If it wasn't for writing, I certainly would have drank myself to death or else have resorted to sterner measures”.

AC: Did I say that? [laughs heartily] Yes, I agree with that, in all its assertions. I cannot imagine what life – no, I can imagine what life would have been like without it and it would have been pretty awful. It was pretty awful, at times, with it. But besides which I do believe that writing – real writing, honest writing – has an effect on the writer which I hate to call therapeutic but I do think it is a therapeutic effect and I think one comes to terms with one's own awful problems through writing more than in any other way that I know.

MF: Ibsen called poetry “the judgement court on the soul”.

AC: Absolutely.

MF: Is it fair to say that writing for you has been a source of solace?

AC: Yes, it has been a great source of solace. Not that I'd look at it...I mean, I look on it as a huge satisfaction and a lot of other things as well. But, yes, it has been a source of solace.

MF: In some of your early poems we meet you in pretty saturnine surroundings, coping with poverty and addiction. How do you view those days now?

AC: They're part of one's development. If you go back even earlier, you know, being born in Ireland, a Roman Catholic, being brought up in a certain ethos. These might all be a source of deep regret to one but they made one what one is. And in a profound sense that it is impossible to truly wish to be other than what you are and, such as I am, those days were part of the makings of me too.

And besides which, it was occasionally fun.

MF: You travelled extensively in the fifties and sixties and part of what attracted you to places like Spain and France was the lively debate that went on in newspapers and over the airwaves. Were you ever tempted to settle abroad?

AC: Yes, often is the answer; often and still am. Ireland is a God-awful place still, in many ways.

MF: The weather?

AC: No, no, no. Not just the weather. There are other things. There are other things than that. Every place has its God-awfulnesses.

MF: Since the collapse of the Soviet, the preponderance of a single power has prevailed. George Bush would call what he wages a 'holy war'. Do you think that the present problem in the world and in Iraq is a ramification of that existence of that pure power?

AC: That is a long and convoluted question. The Soviet Union has collapsed and we all have to live with the consequences. Putin called it the greatest geo-political disaster of the twentieth century. And there's something to be said for that. But simplify the question. I mean, what are you asking. It is certainly not a holy war.

MF: It is not a holy war. Is not this age of proliferation the worst thing...

AC: I think it is a disaster. The invasion of Iraq is a disastrous – apart from being anything else – error. Napoleon said about the Duke of Enghein: “it was worse than a crime, it was a disaster”. Whatever about it being wrong morally – as I think it was – it's a disaster. It's a disaster for Iraq. It will be a disaster for the United States. And I think it's a disaster for the world.

MF: Do you see a link at all between the collapse of the Soviet and the rise of power of the U.S.?  

 

AC: Oh there is bound to be. Nature abhors vacuum. Of course there is a link.

MF: Dr. Johnson once said that “if a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances through life, he will soon find himself left alone”. You wrote once, quoting Thomas Moore, that you “feel as one who treads alone”. How do you think that the premature loss of the seven men recorded in Dead as Doornails has shaped your life?

AC: Well, there have been many, many more deaths in my life than them. Today I wonder whether I have any contemporaries left. I open the paper and another one has died or somebody tells me and that's bound to have an effect on my life. Most of my friends are much younger than myself, and have shown no signs of their mortality as yet, though some quite young people I know have died. It is bound to have an effect on your life, your outlook.

MF: Do you feel that the death of your fellow writers – Behan, Kavanagh and Flann O' Brien – marked the end of an era?

AC: Well, I don't know. It would be hard for me to believe that because it was my era too and I haven't departed. But it was a specific era and, even defined in terms other than literary, it was coming to the end. Their deaths more or less coincided with the end of real Irish poverty. And also the Ireland in which there was a sort of ongoing antagonism ended. As I say, their deaths coincided with the gradual opening of the window. I suppose you could say that they coincided with the end of modernism too. Not that – with the possible exception of Flann O' Brien – any of them were modernist. I think Kavanagh was modernist, in a sense.

MF: Do you?

AC: Yes. He was greatly influenced by the Beats.

MF: And he also wrote a lot about underdevelopment – his journey from tragedy to comedy.

AC: You mean emotional underdevelopment?

M.F: Yes.

AC: Well, there are still many people who find difficulties with their development, although having lived one's youth in that era had something to do with it.

MF: Your style is distinctive and its beauty has been remarked on by many fellow writers and critics. How did you find your style?

AC: It found me. I mean, I suppose you find it partly from what you read, partly from who you are, partly from what your aims and objects are. But one thing I would say is that I think there has been a big decline in the art of prose and if you even talk in terms of people being receptive to prose – I honestly think that the number of people who are receptive to good prose is now less than the number who are receptive to poetry. The number of people who can distinguish good prose from bad has seriously declined. The number of people who can recognise great prose when they see it has seriously declined. You can mark the decline in some respects. It was the Hemingway/Stein revolution which wasn't bad in itself but it meant that elaborate prose styles of various kinds were no longer acceptable. But then there was the kind of workaday thing, which I think came in in the fifties when novelists ceased to care about their prose or cultivate their prose. Some of them still have an ear for dialogue but the ear for prose is very rare nowadays, very rare.

MF: Is there any novelist nowadays who you would look to as a good practitioner of the art of prose?

AC: Yes. There are a few. I don't want to get into it.

MF: The use of the disjunctive is more characteristic of the French language but you use it often in a self-effacing or ironical way. It is unique I think in Irish writing. Why do you use it? Where does the impulse come from?

AC: I think you'll have to tell me what the disjunctive is.

MF: Oh sorry. The disjunctive is, for example: “such as it is” or “insofar as it existed”. You use it looking back with a chuckle.

AC: It does give it a kind of a sunset glow.

MF: The Dublin of the late forties which you depict in Dead as Doornails is one of “ghastly unreality”, “social boozing” and lack of sex. Very similar to Joyce's character, Mr. Duffy, in 'A Painful Case'.....

AC: Oh Mr. Duffy was a very different type of person to most of the people who were chronicled in Dead as Doornails. Mr. Duffy was a very respectable person of the old world. Respectability was his middle name, wasn't it?

MF: Although characters like Brian O' Nolan would like to think of themselves as...

AC: Ah yes, well that is a different matter. That was a personal...

MF: Affectation?

AC: No, not affectation. Personal characteristic. No I don't see Mr. Duffy has any correspondence.

MF: You once wrote that “poetry has the supreme virtues of humility and honesty”. In the poetry of Blake and Kavanagh that you so admire, there is a child-like quality, an awe at the existence of simple things. In our age, this sort of poetry has given way to poetry of ideas or political poetry. Would you agree?

AC: No, I don't think we particularly have a poetry of ideas. There is a political poetry, only in a very simplistic sense...sort of protest poetry in which everyone protests about the same thing so that there is safety in numbers. No I don't think a poetry of ideas has taken over at all, at all. I think most of what we have is a poetry of rather weak personal reminiscence and recollections of personal feeling in a rather weak and predictable way. I wish there was a poetry of ideas. I wish there was a political poetry in the true sense, in the sense that The Four Quartets is political poetry.

MF: What do you think is the relevancy of biography?

AC: Well, lets not get on our high horse too much about it: it satisfies human curiosity, which is not a bad thing at all. For instance, I do notice – I was thinking about this question the other day and at the same time reading a couple of people that I haven't read before, Lermontov for one and Nekrasov for another – and I noticed that I skipped over all the prefatory matter except that of a biographical nature. I think writing that impresses you - has any sort of any effect on you - always makes you want to know more about the author and the springs of the writing, if somebody is clever enough to identify them. But besides that I personally have always sought to write biography and criticism together and I do flatter myself that the criticism in the Beckett book – and the na gCopaleen book but Beckett presents more difficulties than na gCopaleen – I do think it is true that it makes him far more accessible than he might be otherwise. I do succeed in making the work more accessible and the feeling that a real human being wrote this and he wrote it out of quite common agonies and despairs and joys that other people have as well. So it isn't just pure biography. I mean, the Beckett arose because Beckett was unfinished business as far as I was concerned. I wrote about the novels in extensio in English when he was hardly known as a prose writer. I mean he was beginning to be known as a playwright. If you write about somebody very early on in other people's awareness of him - or even your own awareness of him - you are naturally going to get it somewhat wrong. I think I did rather well considering that there were no other critics in the field and there was nobody you could check against but at the same time I felt that over the years I wanted to say more about him critically. At the same time I was annoyed by certain attitudes towards him as a human being – you know this notion that he was a recluse and all that kind of thing. So anyway, I hoped to kill those two birds with the one stone. I think, to a certain extent, I succeeded. Now I think the same is true of na gCopaleen. I called the na gCopaleen book the...

MF: Life and Times.

AC: The Life and Times and I think that's an important aspect of it. A lot of your questions, Maurice, for example, have been about the effects of the times on the writer and I want to get that right for people.

MF: One last question on influence. I see a lot of Auden in your work – the conversational style, then the 'Letter to Lord Byron' mode of your 'Letter to an Englishman'. Apart from that, in 'Not Easy'- there is something of the same tone as 'In Praise of Limestone' in the way you examine the pitfalls of art. So he has been a huge influence?

AC: Oh he has, yes. But he has been a huge influence on any poet since those early years. There was a kind of tendency when I was a chap in London, when I first went to London as, I suppose, a young poet...people were denying Auden's importance and his influence. It was all Dylan Thomas, except a little later on when some people saw Empson as a little more important. I did a programme with Alvarez I remember in which we were sort of meant to take sides between Empson and Auden – which was a very stupid idea. But there was an attempt to deny Auden's importance and influence going on then. But I would be the last to deny his influence, I would be the last to deny the pleasure his work has given me, the absolute pleasure, and I would be the last to deny the absolute illumination he cast on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

MF: Anthony Cronin, thank you very much.

[Anthony Cronin's Collected Poems is published by New Island.]

interview with pat mccabe

by Maurice Fitzpatrick

Walk past the Church of Ireland chapel at the top of the diamond in Clones town. Much of McCabe's novel, The Butcher Boy, was filmed in this square by Neil Jordan. Turn down Fermanagh Street. On the right is a lane where the dwelling place of the butcher boy's dissolute father lived. On-location shots of the film and places that inspired the writer are one and the same in this case. Walk past the bookies, the beer gardens, the Emin-em chip-shop. Stop at An Bonnan Bui pub. Think about the Irish language poem by Cathal Bui Mac Giolla Gunna, a paean to drinking by an unreformed drunk. You are getting closer to McCabe territory.

The house where he was born is nearby. After a period of exile in London, he returned to live in the town he loves. Slip inside the old-fashioned Creighton Hotel and you may just find him digging into a plate of rashers and eggs, washing them down with cups of coffee. I was lucky to catch up with him doing just that.

This interview took place in Clones on Monday morning July 23rd, 2007. I met author Patrick McCabe in his hometown, Clones, Co. Monaghan. I found him jovial and hospitable. His new novel, Winterwood, had just been published in Ireland to critical acclaim. We began, however, by discussing his early novels.

MF: You started you life as teacher. What roads did you take?

PMC: I was a primary teacher in a small town called Longford. I was there for four years. I was a teacher basically for twenty years. And in between times – I was already, you properly, in a serious way, writing – I wrote from the age of nineteen. I came from a kind of a small town literary family: small town, working-class I guess. My father was a stone-cutter by trade. Very musical. Traditional background, nothing very exciting. I left Ireland when I was thirty-two. That would have been 1987. I lived in London, stayed there for ten years. So first writings were kind of short-stories of the ordinary traditional Irish nature. You could almost whistle them, couldn't ya? Coming-of-age narratives, little bit of funky sex. Relationships with the father and mother. Then John McGahern, Frank O'Connor and all those boys. And then again there was a lot of sixties literature, say Camus and all that stuff. I got very into Ian McEwan at that time. A book called First Love, Last Rites. It was a kind of a seminal work in the seventies. It started off very small but... it's dealing with the end of the kind of hippie dream, the sort of outer reaches of – I don't know – personality disorders and things like that. So I found that very interesting and wanted to blend it with all the traditional stuff. I felt that there was a kind of undercurrent of Irish life that wasn't dealt with. I wasn't conscious of that, so much as felt it somewhere – I couldn't name it, maybe but I see now. There was a kind of a – I don't know what you'd call it – an identikit traditionalist view of Ireland which was fine, it was true: presented by Trevor and McGahern. But there was also a wild hilarity and a craziness that didn't seem to find a home in a lot of these writers... except maybe as local colour. There was a kind of a parsonage window view of the natives. Except that I was a native and I felt there was somehow almost a political point to make: you know, who are you to tell the story? Why cannot I tell the story? I suppose the first two books I wrote, Music on Hilton Street and Carn were very traditional. But Carn was moving towards something else. They were all exercises in style. I didn't really find the style until after, until The Butcher Boy you know. That's really when it broke through. That was about not caring whether people read it or not. You have got to get to that point. Because if you don't get to that point, you'll second-guess everything and you'll want to get published and you'll want to make a few bob. And that will inevitably constrain ya –  dictate what you should or shouldn't do. You need to be a certain age or you have to be through some trauma or something to get to the point when it doesn't matter if anyone reads this. This is what I want to do. You think nobody will read it and then everyone reads it. It's an interesting lesson. That is not to say it will happen again for anyone. You know, I might give that advice and then someone says “nobody has read my book. How do you explain this?” And ye cannot. I think sometimes accidents happen and a certain amount of luck is necessary. And that book came out when Ireland – after having been ignored for maybe forty or fifty years, as a place of violence and you know a wind-swept tiny island, off the west coast of Europe and of no great interest to anybody – suddenly, with a possible resolution of the conflict, with American industrial interest from the silcon valley and as the result of a sort of creative boom, represented by Sinead O'Connor and Roddy Doyle maybe was of interest to people. And there was an interest and that book happened at the same time. I would suggest that had it happened five years before or even five years later that it wouldn't have got the same level of interest. That's just a kind of conjecture on my part but I think it is probably true. Luck sometimes happens. That's means if you are a professional writer and you stick around for long enough then sooner or later you are going to be lucky. So it is about endurance as much as anything else. Then I wrote another few books after that and I have been a writer since really.

MF: You mentioned a musical family and you were quite serious about music. You were interested in showbands. Did you work also as a DJ?

PMC: No, I was never a DJ.

MF: So it was never going to be a way of life, music?

PMC: Nah, I was never good enough. That's the only reason. It wasn't that I wouldn't have liked to do it. But I never attained the level of proficiency that would have made it worthwhile financially or otherwise. Nah, I was never good enough. But I had great fun doing it. I used to know a lot of musicians, used to busk a little bit maybe. But no I was never good enough.

MF: Right. But it has featured a lot in your work.

PMC: Oh, it has.

MF: And even your first book, Music on Clinton Street. The title comes from a line in a Leonard Cohen song.

PMC: Sure. There is always like the Walter Pater thing where he says that all art aspires to that condition. But mostly it is to with that fact that I used to listen to music a lot as a kid because my father played. And he was very good. So it was always in the air.

MF: You lived in London and Dublin which you write about in Winterwood, your new book. How was that, when you left your small town, your locale where you write about? Did you find yourself in transition?

PMC: In many ways yes and in other ways no because I don't suppose creatively you ever leave a small town. It was just that now in a huge place you realise that in other cultures they have small towns too. And you start to look at your own hometown against the backdrop of their towns whether it is, you know, a small town in China or a small town in India. Maybe small communities aren't all that different. You get to know people. I am thinking of Indians I used to know and people from Sudan who I was friendly with. And they would talk about their village: and there was such and such and he was a great character. So it was very much similar in many ways. London, then after a six month or a year period –  I was not  really dislocated by that. I have to say that the scale was too big. This kind of seems strange now to someone like yourself who has traveled – but the scale of London seemed daunting. You know, ten million people, twelve million people. Nobody tells you any lies. If you survive, you survive. If you don't, you don't. Nobody's going to keep sweetening it with any promises – which was toughening and good. It removed you from the kind of comfort zone and the sympathy syndrome. It brings out the best in ya, particularly if you have got young children. I think if you are on your own it might be a little bit more difficult. You either could succumb to hedonism or you could get sentimental – which would be the worst fate of all. I would sooner succumb to hedonism of the worst order than succumb to sentimentality. It does nobody any favours. But anyway I was lucky enough to have a good partner and nice children, so that kept me very steady. And I started working every evening and writing. I was up early in the morning and very disciplined about it. I developed a very tough discipline there which is not necessary but for me it was. It was essential.

MF: Was and is?

PMC: It is yes.

MF: Probably living here in Clones where there are fewer distractions than, say, London, do you find it easier?

PMC: Well, I am probably older now and I'd be better able to handle them. I meant that at thirty, thirty-one you are still a relatively young man and there is still a lot of excitement to be had in the world, so it would have been more distracting. But now, I am like the old bull: I am not in such a hurry down the hill, you know, than younger I might have been.

MF: Here in your hometown, Clones, most of The Butcher Boy was shot, the film adaptation of your novel. You put in an animated performance as Jimmy-the-skite. How do you remember that time?

PMC: Great. Ah sure it was like the circus has come to town. Or maybe a dozen circuses. It was kind of a dream come true, I suppose. But I had been dreaming it so often that it was just like another day to me. It was probably the last time that a huge community gathering like that happened.

It is probably the last time you will see it in that way – where you would have older people out with toddlers. Maybe you could have it at sporting events – but that would be only a section of the community. It doesn't bring out the people from the mountains, the people who have stories to tell. It seemed that everyone was there, without exception. So it was a once in a lifetime thing.

MF: And they all pulled together...

PMC: Well, they would, wouldn't they? I mean, they are getting paid, they are having a great time. So it is not like this great feather in the community's cap. Of course, they are having a wonderful time. I think that perhaps it was the end of that period of a sense of wonder. I think if you brought in a movie crew now people would be quite blasé about it. It was the beginning of the end of that period before the proliferation of, you know, the plasma screens and every available commodity from the consumer world – now you can get in any small town in the world. That hadn't happened yet. But it has certainly happened now, in the intervening period. A huge amount of expensive cars and limousines pass through.

MF: I was just having a walk around Clones before I met you here. I was trying to piece together how they may have recreated Clones of the 1960's or so. They did a terrific job...

PMC: They did. They didn't have to do that much, mind you. It is surprising how many of the shop-fronts remained the same. A lot of the little alley-ways architecturally were the same. The Diamond – which was the main theatre, the stage – was just five roads spurring off. They didn't have to do much with that. They graveled it but that was all really. They changed a few shop-fronts. So as soon as they arrived in here, they saw immediately what had been in my head. That main square, The Diamond, was the stage where everything happened. You know, one person goes up Fermanagh Street, the other person goes down. There are people intersecting all day long. And they saw straight away that they could shoot it there. And everything would happen on that platform.

MF: And it marked the beginning of your collaboration with filmmaker, Neil Jordan which solidified with his filming of your novel, Breakfast on Pluto. And you wrote the screenplay. Do you find screenplaying has effected your primary activity as a novelist?

PMC: Nah, because I never really took myself seriously as a screen-writer.

I don't even know if it is writing per se, really. It is a messy group activity; and it is a collaborative venture, first and foremost. The main work on that was done by Neil Jordan, which he knows – if you put this down, can you shoot it. He knows it. I could come up with stuff that couldn't be shot in a million years. Or if it could, it would cost a million dollars a minute. And he said: well, just throw that stuff out. He knows and he eventually got the shooting script together in a very short time. So, I don't see myself as director or as anyone who would have a huge interest in screen-writing. I am much more interested in the novel.

MF: I think it was John Huston who became a film director simply because he saw what they were doing with his scripts.

PMC: That happens. That happened to Neil Jordan too. He didn't like the way they were doing his scripts. So he said, I'll do them myself.

MF: But it must have been very exciting to see your work filmed. Writing is a sort of anchorite activity...

PMC: Oh, it was. I am not suggesting for a second that it wasn't. It was immensely exciting. But I didn't expect it to happen again which it did.

But, as I said, it was Neil Jordan's vision essentially, with an imput from me.

MF: So you do not sit down and write filmable novels?

PMC: No, no, no.

MF: Have you been translated into Japanese?

PMC: Chinese but not Japanese. That is only recently too.

MF: So Japanese is next, getting further east...Are you related at all to Eugene McCabe, who wrote The King of the Castle?

PMC: No, I am not. He lives about a mile out of town but I am not related to him. It is great play that.

MF: Right, let's get on to your new novel, Winterwood. Your new novel is in many senses a departure from you previous work, which focused on myth-making: Emerald Germs of Ireland did so, in particular. Character-driven books like Breakfast on Pluto, The Butcher Boy and now Winterwood is your latest. Is it sometimes a relief to turn to realism, modern Ireland and recognisable references?

PMC: No, I wouldn't say it is a relief. Every book has its own texture and its own feel and it takes a while before you get into the world or the milieu of it. And it is a relief to get into it and to know what it is but what it actually is – whether it is modern or past – doesn't matter. As long as you are in the right place, that is what matters. You know, with The Butcher Boy, it was the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961. To know that that was the period in which it is to be set. It usually turns out that it is in an era or a year where there has been some trauma or other. I don't mean global trauma, I mean personal trauma. Something has happened that year that has dislocated you in some way. It could be a move – in my case – to England or it could be some childhood hurt. I don't know. It depends on so many things but it tends then to find its locus in that period, if there is a particular novel to be written.

MF: Popular culture in Winterwood, just as it did for Francie in The Butcher Boy, provides many of the archetypes for images in the character of the daughter. Interestingly, the father reverts to this world in his much less lucid moments. Is realism too much of a burden for him to bear?

PMC: Yeah, I think it is and the realism only gives you a tenth of the story anyway. Look at the number of people who come into a shop, buying lotto tickets. You know, people are dreaming all the time without realising it but spend an awful lot of time day-dreaming about this and possibilities of that. Where will I go on my holidays? And when I get back from my holidays, Aine will be getting married and that'll be a great day. So people are walking around but they are not actually tuned in... I have always felt that naturalism or social realism only really provides maybe a third of the story. I just don't like the style of the writing. There are certain novelists who I warm to because of that – they give you the marble but not the inscape of the statue, you know.

MF: Is the hold that Slievenageeha [home place of main protagonist, Redmond] has on Redmond overall deleterious?

PMC: Well in this book it is. But I could equally write another book where it wouldn't be. As I see writing books is part of one long book. So it just happens to be chopped up into different books at different times. The story is constantly evolving. The next book could be about Slievenageeha where it is the most enticing, exciting, wild and close-knit community. So it depends at what angle you hold the strobe light at, what you want to highlight. So in this case, whatever sense of belonging he has is probably from the mountains. It has to some extent an anchoring. But I suppose it would have to err on the side of deleterious. (Laughs)

MF: Did you intend to put down markers of the development of modern Ireland in the episodes of the novel? Or was it just the frame that presented itself in the course of telling Redmond's story?

PMC: Well, I wasn't overly conscious but I was a little bit conscious that there were a few signposts along the way. The forces of modernism – perceived modernism – began to assert themselves. And I felt that there had been a lot of sort of lazy writing about that period. You know, people thought it was amazing that Irish people could drink coffee as if that told you anything about anything. A lot of people making outlandish statements about how wonderful Ireland was when you'd be in these pubs in Stuggart in 1982... all it was doing was catching up, as far as I was concerned. In Europe for the past twenty years they have had all these things like Cafe-en-Seine [a Dublin pub a la Paris]. You know, people wetting themselves over this. It is just an identikit fuckin' pseudo-Parisian pub. What are you getting excited about? It is just more consumerism. You know, it is not any great achievement on the part of Irish people because some businessman goes to Paris and says: 'there is an idea. Let's franchise that'. So it was just another indication of Ireland being you know a little small-town-country. People getting all excited over nothing. I think that has changed dramatically now because people have traveled. But at that time it was just a little bit stupid I thought.

MF: But Redmond remains remarkably impervious to the various charms or pseudo-charms of modern Ireland.

PMC: Oh yeah. He does indeed because he has that black, almost diabolic sense of the inevitability of things and of this rotation of the cycle and kind of black magic and eschewal of mortality.

MF: Apart from Ireland, there are people in the world chronicled in this book who are juxtaposed with the personal trauma of Redmond. It must be said that in his obsessions with the real world, the underworld pales in significance. Is he a solipsist?

PMC: Yes he is. I mean he tries to deny it but he spends most of his time looking in there and turning things around. But I think he had to be. I don't think I could have really curbed that without... Because I wanted it to be almost pulverising in its analysis. You know, almost exhausting, constantly undercutting the reader. There is a bit of narrative trickery going on my part which I didn't experiment with so much before. A little bit of manipulation, giving you a bit of information – rescinding it, then adding to it and constantly undercutting the reader's expectations. It is a kind of a thriller in that respect.

MF: Clones has been sort of by-passed by the full thrust of the “meretricious fanfare”, obvious in Dublin. Do you think that places like this retain their identity more?

PMC: Because of that?

MF: Yes.

PMC: No, I don't think it is true. I wish it were. Because what happens is that people leave anyway. The knowing everyone identity was a kind of by-product of interlinking transactions in little shops and small businesses. 

And the sort of pocket universe nature of small towns which has been blown away anyway regardless of whether the community is awash with money or not. Just people go and they lead different lives and they shop in...

MF: Lidl?

PMC: Lidl or Aldi or where ever it is. As inevitably people do. You know the shopping-mall culture began a long time ago. It is only now it is hitting here. And it has done all these things in other communities. Small towns in England have disappeared for that reason. Small town American – you go there and you find ghost towns all over the place. People move towards the cities. It's the consumer beat-em-off really.

MF: Is the trend irreversible?

PMC: Well, implicit in that question is that I think this is a bad thing. I think there are many good things about it. While we laud the close-knit nature of the community in the past, there were an awful lot of people who had no money, who were miserable, who got no help, who were never encouraged, who were glad to get the hell out of the place. And you know the fact that these things bring with them a lack of opportunity and it almost kind of imposed democracy – a lot of those people will not be conscious of these things anymore. I think some of it should be reversed or maybe looked at but, you know, I think it is the way. Capitalism has worked, relatively speaking; communism hasn't. Socialism has been seen to fail. All my generation were banging on about how the seventies would be socialist. Well all I can remember about socialism is strikes and people complaining and factionalism. So, for all its faults, capitalism does seem to be the one that works. It provides people with a reasonable standard of living. So the great triumph of the zeitgeist is that there are very few people starving in this country anymore.

MF: That's right. And you remember...

PMC: Very much so because I used to be a teacher, you see. And I saw at very close-range: kids coming in with pale skin, bad teeth, smelling of urine, big families, plastic sandals. Lovely little kids with auld nits in their hair. You know, all that stuff is not only within living memory – it was the seventies. I wasn't one of these people who it made my blood boil. I wanted coldly to do something about it. And it has been done now. So that's far more important than anything. Perhaps more important than art in a way – that people do not suffer. It was kind of unbearable.

MF: You character Francie Brady [The Butcher Boy] is a classical victim of that scenario. His father is a drunk and his mother is taken away.

PMC: Yeah, and probably the most corrosive element in all of that is the malignant shame. You know, that you will never be any good. Look at you. Nobody belonging to you was any good. Why don't you go away? Does that mean go away to England or go away from the earth? It means go away, in a big way. You don't hear that so much now.

MF: And in many ways, it has become more democratic. Miss Nugent types have sunk under the water. People with talent and some confidence...

PMC: They get a break, yeah. And it pretty much bears out what Sean Lemass [Irish Taoiseach/Prime Minister, 1959 – 66] said at that time: the rising tide will lift all boats. You will always get people who whinge and moan. But the rising tide did lift the boats. The fact that people are coming back from abroad now and seeing opportunities in business and everything else and going with those opportunities. That has created a culture whereby things can happen. The first impulse is no longer to say: you are making a fool of yourself or you'll be the talk of the town. There is an impatience with that kind of nonsense now which always seemed like the by-product of some kind of self-hatred or colonial depression maybe. Maybe it was. You know, because a lot of people used to say: “Buy British, it is better”. That was current in the sixties. With their little Union Jack on the product brand and Buy British, it is better.

MF: It seems incredible now. They fly the Tricolour on the top of Trinity College Dublin of all places these days.

PMC: Maybe it takes time after a conflict. Remember it was a pretty horrendous conflict – 1920/21.

MF: It takes fifty years.

PMC: It does. It takes fifty years.

MF: What is happening in India now really is recovery.

PMC: So I would say when you look at these post-colonial countries and see how long it takes, it does seem to be a generation at least or two generations.

MF: And Ireland feels far more linked with Europe now.

PMC: Well I think that was the great thing. That was the greatest thing of all. The minute that that link with Europe was established, then there were countries with whom we had no political quarrel – in fact, quite the opposite – we were more than prepared... But it was quite linked with the amount of money we seemed to get (Laughs). It bears out the old cliché about the gambling, feckless Irish, marvelous with your eye...

MF: But we started to gamble at a game that we couldn't lose.

PMC: Well that is true.

MF: It has left England in a sort of a quandary, of their own volition they are forgotten.

PMC: Well, I would always be a bit cautious about predicting the demise of England. Because London, I see recently, was established as the centre of International Finance. You know, the amount of foreign reserves that the British have is quite spectacular. For all the talk about poor old Britain, they have an incredible and unshakable sense of their own worth. And by and large they are a fine people. I get on very well with them. I think, you know, they will always be ok. I mean, London is a great city. There are many great things about England. I think what's wonderful is that there is a proper relationship between Ireland and England. I don't think the Irish and the English ever hated each other enough (laughs).

MF: You don't think they hated each other enough!

PMC: I don't think they hated each other the way they ought to have had. They had too much in common, you know. I think that once the old imperial class died away... they looked down their noses at their own people just as much as they did the slope-shouldered Fenian. The working class to them were just hewers of wood and drawers of water. But now that they have gone and the Blair kind of thing. I think it is totally different times.

MF: A couple of Ingmar Bergman films came to mind when I was reading your novel, Winterwood. The Passion of Anna shows a woman who insists on honesty all the way through the film, only to be exposed as a liar herself

at the end of the film.

PMC: Yeah, that is good. I haven't seen that. But that is excellent, I love that.

MF: You haven't seen the film?

PMC: No, believe it or not. I have seen a lot of Bergman but I haven't seen that. So she insists on honesty?

MF: She insists on always speaking the truth.

PMC: Oh, that is great. And then she is the liar?

MF: She is the liar. And the funny thing is that her partner – who lived with her for a year, though they never really loved each other – knew from the start when he discovered a letter that she was living a lie. And he revealed it in the last...

PMC: Ah, very good.

MF: You want to see the closing scene. It is just tremendous.

PMC: I must look at that now.

MF: The other film was Persona. It is a film when two peoples identities sort of merge.

PMC: I haven't seen that either.

MF: It is worth watching too because what you do in Winterwood... there is a line: “can he translate his name?”

PMC: Yeah, it is from a book called Confessions of a Justified Sinner which is by...

MF: James Hogg

PMC: Yeah. That is an astounding book. And it deals again with split identities. It is a Scottish thing – you know, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They were fascinated by these kind of schisms. And this Presbytrian thing of breaking up, setting up your own sects and all that stuff. There was a lot of stuff in that I was attracted to.

MF: I must admit that, though I was fascinated all the way through, it was sometimes hard to see what the connection between Ned and Redmond was.

PMC: It was himself. It is the older version of himself. They are both the Devil. They fuse at the end.

MF: Ned has interfered with this Micheal Cunningham character. And Redmond also has this enormous love for his daughter, Imogen but there is a suggestion...

PMC: Well there is an implication there that is so chilling it is unspeakable.

MF: And you deliberately left it like that.

PMC: I deliberately left it like that, yeah.

MF: Redmond is the architect of his own downfall. He kills the thing he loves, so to speak. He kills it twice. And the resulting implication is that romantic love is a trick that is played on us. Does this echo the author's views?

PMC: The tender trap isn't it? (Laughs). That Frank Sinatra song. Well, Tom Murphy, the playwright, said an interesting thing to me one time. It seems on the surface banal but it is very interesting. When you think about the bigger quesions: if a stone was cast and that stone had a mind, it would still think itself moving of its own volition. Do you know what I mean? So sometimes you can only think: is everything being choreographed by a very expert puppeteer? If they are, who is the puppeteer? We like to think it is God, but supposing it is not? Supposing – let's say the tsunami – God must be a very busy man if he has nothing better to do than to arrange that.

You see, Old Ned is the Biblical name for the Devil. Old Nick is the common one but Old Ned is the other. So I was suggesting that perhaps that is the case, that in fact, that even the tender trap, the moment you see a woman across a crowded room or she sees you is the moment that you are really snared. So I mean it is... my kids have long since given up reading these things. My own view, is that if you are going to do something, really go in there and don't hang back. If it is set up as a Devil's story, make it a Devil's story. Equally if it was about a celebration of the human spirit, I would go all the way with that which I have yet to do sadly. But maybe yet. When I get old and sagacious, I will have a go.

MF: Well, Leo Tolstoy was a resolute determinist. He was always looking at history for proof of this. So maybe you're the Leo Tolstoy of Ireland.

PMC: How did Tolstoy end up? Did he switch around at all?

MF: I don't believe he switched on that point. He did embrace religion to an enormous extent.

PMC: I do think, as you get older, you do get more determinist. It is amazing. Even around town – there is a small gene pool. I often see guys who I think I know but it turns out it's their son or their nephew. But the way they stand is the same. You think that the whole fuckin thing is organised. You know, sometimes you can see that far more clearly in a small place.

MF: And it hasn't led you into the art of prediction or prophesy?

PMC: That would be a sad day if you're from Japan and the prophet is sitting in session, telling you what is going to happen. No, I wouldn't have that kind of arrogance.

MF: Maybe I will just pop one more question.

PMC: Sure

MF: What are you working on now?

PMC: I have just finished a novel called Dreamboat which is from Horace. Omnaeum ao dum condimor or something.  Talk about determinist. The world is shaking and out of it falls a ticket and we all sail to exile on our own boat of dreams. It is also a quote from Alma Cogan who was a ballad and blues singer of the fifties: Dreamboat, you lovable dreamboat. So it is a happy-go-lucky romp.

MF: I look forward to reading it. It's due in the shops soon?

PMC: Well, it will not be out for at least a year.

MF: Pat McCabe thank you very much.

PMC: Thank you Maurice. Mind yourself.

interview with seamus deane

by Maurice Fitzpatrick

This interview was conducted in Newman House in Dublin on February 7th, 2007.

MF: In his book, The Irish Famine, Colm Tóibín wrote of his dismay with historians in UCD in the early 1970's, when he was a student there, who seemed proud of the secondary research they had done in English universities. Few wanted to parse through documents and letters written by Irish people during the Famine. He wrote that Irish history writing, as exemplified by Roy Foster, was still not addressing that lacunae in the Irish psyche. In your own history writing you have treated the form as literary genre. How do you feel about the state of Irish history writing?

SD: I am not sure I would be entirely confident that I could say that I  know what the state of Irish history writing is. But what I know about it is that I think it has become even more, generally, even more coarsened than it had been by the so-called revisionist tendency which has now become obsessive in its varied attempts to dismiss what it calls the nationalist reading of history. And after thirty years, although it has taken a few blows, it still regards itself as iconoclastic whereas in fact you can now – you can almost trace the curve of Irish historical revisionist historical writing by looking at events in the North, in the way in which the North has gone. The degree to which, you know, Republicanism and nationalism were constantly – or caricature versions of them – presented as the enemy and, of course, the idea of colonialism or imperialism or any violence visited by the British upon Ireland as a fundamental feature – this was dismissed as, you know, another nationalist myth. That said, I think also most distressing thing about the writing of history – but I think I would include in this commentaries by writers, especially artists in general, upon art or the role of art or the function of art or on those topics which most people should avoid – it seems to me that there still is a degree of philosophical poverty in the writing of history and the thinking about aesthetics and the thinking about art which has strangely intensified as the reasons or excuses for it have diminished. I'm not quite sure why this is, except that I think it is part of the – what would one say – I don't simply say not the intellectual habit of mind; but a habit of mind that is formed by two or three things. One is for a long time the lack of formal education for many people and therefore their suspicion – and their well-founded suspicion of well-educated people. So that there would be a class element involved in that, as well as a political element. That would be one thing. A second thing would be the mystification by the Irish state of the idea of the literary, which they have used as a sort of tourist card of admission to the world club. And with that, a sort of fitting into the stereotype of the notion of the Irish as an imaginative people who dare not let themselves be violated ever by an idea because this would, in some way, break the integrity of our reputation. And this leads to a kind of infantilism that you will find in almost any comment on the nature of poetry, the function of the novel, realism still regarded as a kind of radical genre in fiction writing, the commentary on Joyce, the commentary on Yeats, the level of reviewing in the newspapers. There is something seriously deficient – I am not saying this from some position of de haut en bas – but it is something which I think if you use more than, if you refer to more than two non-English language writers in half an hour you are regarded as an intellectual, and of the worst kind of intellectual, someone who parades the fact that he has read – I don't know – he has read Sartre or he has looked at Adorno or whatever it might be. But this notion that the intellectual life is a foolish, delusive, academic venture is deeply embedded here, though I think the Irish academy is entirely free of any charge of being intellectual. I think it is astonishing that, for instance, the humanities in Irish universities are on what one would call intellectual traditions in philosophy and literature and history and in all the cross over areas between those, just to mention the most obvious ones and the ones that look to me the most... It is astonishing how little that they are addressed. So that is a poverty that affects the writing of history, especially in its revisionist mode has created its own poverty, and its own kind of polemic and bigotry. So a short answer [laughs] is that I am not too impressed with the state of history writing.

MF: You are one of the few writers of history who will classify “Trinity College history writing” or judge the ascendancy Protestant to be “a parasitic class”. Do you feel that history should take its protagonists to task?

SD: Well, the very short answer is yes. But it would take much longer to say on what basis, you can take A or B to task for what might be considered a crime, an atrocity or corruption whatever it may be. It is not a matter of saying, you know, “who shall 'scape whipping?” It is not only that, it is again I think the formation of – to dare to say that there is an ethical position which is not finally going to be undermined by relativism, you know, saying that because it was 1830's, you know people thought differently therefore... You know, which is something that you often find in Irish history where there are so many atrocities. The first way of relativising an atrocity is to say: “put it in its context”. That idea of putting something in its context seems to me philosophically a very odd idea in itself. It also seems to me very risky to say “oh well, there is an ethical position above and beyond those historical conditions in which we live and in which others lived”. So, having said yes, I would then say it is more a hope than a possibility. I do not know from where one could with confidence make a critique of others or take someone to task but you certainly can do it indirectly by taking people to task for not really attending to the – let's say – atrocious dimension of something, especially people who take care not to attend to the atrocious dimension here but  take care to attend to it there, you know. So that you know like nowadays let's say as opposed to the Russians talking to the Americans, the scandal of the Americans in Iraq, which is perfectly true. But the scandal of the Russians in Chechnya is something that never gets the same attention.  And they are both acts of massacre, they are both acts of intervention, they are both acts of subordination. But you know where it would be, I think, possible to say you could take something like the American foreign policy, the Soviet experiment, the Chinese experiment, fascism, imperialism, colonialism, whatever, you could take large chunks of the earth's surface and periods in the modern era, say from the Famine era here: for a hundred and fifty or two hundred years. There has been a series of atrocities but every one of them – every one of those that I've mentioned – has had its own system of concealment and propaganda to say that this was for the betterment of humankind that we are killing all these people. So I think it is easier to say: look at the hypocrisy and the corruption of the mind involved in that excusing of atrocity, rather than to say, well, here is the ethical position from which they can all be condemned equally, but you'd like to think that there is one. And I know that many people have tried to construct one – not in Ireland but particularly, I think, in France.

MF: In a poem entitled 'On Reading Milton's Paradise Lost' you hone in on one phrase from the poem: “sovran planter”. It takes on extraordinary resonance, given how the past four centuries have panned out. Have you learned to accept that that mentality was of its time and place?

SD: I don't know. To accept that that mentality was of its time and place? I don't think that mentality has by any means disappeared. Its success rate has diminished. But its one of a series of mentalities that actually seek their, still seek, both in the present and in the past, seek a kind of argument for the necessity for subordination for a higher purpose, whatever it may be; usually its something having to do with an ideal civilisation. I think the durability of that kind of excusing, that kind of recognition that there are some circumstances in which subordination is wrong and there are some in which its justified, which is the position most people have actually, if they inspect it. The untenability of that position is something I think is deeply corrupting in this island and has been particularly corrupting in historical records. But it is corrupting generally. I think it's far more corrupting than brown envelopes being passed to County Councillors, not that I'm in love with that idea either (laughs).

MF: Do you see new and frightening systems of control taking over in Ireland? The February 2006 Dublin riots were an overspill of the kind of thing that has been happening in the north for decades. Rather than the South leading the pacification of the North, is the North corrupting the peace of the South?

SD: Well I think the North has been corrupting the south for forty years. I think the Gardaí were corrupted by the RUC and the British intelligence services. But they decided to cooperate with them. I think the coalition government, you know of the distant past that presided over the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, knew that the British secret service was operating here and did nothing. And of course now the British government refuses to provide the documents which show that it was a terrorist agent in a foreign country, as Ian Paisley would call it. So, the system of control – by the way I think the February riots were sort of insignificant really. I mean those who marched made a great deal of it; but a lot of the people there, who did the rioting, were semi-drunk, coming out of pubs, going to a football game, half of them were Celtic supporters as far as I could see. It wasn't organised in any way against that particular Unionist march. But of course the Unionists made hay over the fact that this had happened. But when you look at – whether it was that riot or recent revelations about collusion and the determination to smooth it over, which astonishingly comes from Sinn Féin almost as readily as from as the Irish Government, not to mention the British government which of course is determined to conceal it. You could see that, yes, there is a policy for the pacification of the North and for the very slow absorption of the North into the system of the Republic, just as the Republic itself has been absorbed into the larger system of Europe and, you know, the global economy. But I don't find this really more frightening than what went before. In fact, there are sometimes I think I almost prefer it because there seems to be a certain, shall we say, it's not exactly malice aforethought but there is an element of forethought in it which I think in the end is actually not so much brilliant planning as a recognition that the economic development of Ireland, the fact that Ireland has finally won its independence, not from the global market – but then, who has? Who is independent of it? – but that it has won its economic independence of Britain; that the North is an experiment which failed politically and is also failing economically; and that Britain itself is also undergoing a number of changes in the UK federated state. There is a recognition that some preparation must be made for the long-term effects of this and Sinn Féin's absorption into the political system is part of that preparation. So, no, I do not think of it as sinister. I think of it as the kind of preparation that I associate with a very highly trained civil service in Dublin and in London; civil service, bureaucrats, who have been watching the way the political weight is being re-distributed. So, then – but you could say this of any place – the surveillance, policing, all of that has intensified and always one would be worried about the advances of technology, always being way in advance of any ethical development. But again that is not something peculiar to us and it is not even something peculiar to the political realm.

So, I suppose, my general answer (laughs) is no, not that worried or afraid about it.

MF: In 1972 the Sunningdale agreement failed, partly due to Unionist objections and partly due to the IRA taking on a new facade. Surely, as one deeply involved with Northern Irish politics of the time, the failure of this agreement and the subsequent escalation of paramilitary activity must have boded ill for the possibility of any agreement in the future?

SD:  Well, yes. But Sunningdale – this is stale stuff in one sense – I mean, Sunningdale failed because of the failure of the British government to stand behind it and to stand up to the Loyalists. And that has been a constant feature of the situation. You know, Unionism/ Loyalism has always beaten a drum when any prospect of a change threatened, especially a change that might actually bring some justice to the North because they were in the position of resisting any introduction of justice precisely because everything was so skewed to their advantage before. So it was a zero sum for them anyway. Any change meant less for them because they had always 100% anyway. Sunningdale seemed – not it didn't seem, it was, at the time, the failure of Sunningdale was sinister – because it showed that a certain kind of refusal, a certain kind of recalcitrance was very much politically war. And it also showed that the British government – I'm not really sure if the British government formed a policy in relation to Northern Ireland until about ten years after that. You know, a policy that it felt it could actually pursue without being pulled to the side by their own army or their own officer corps. You know the loyalists in that, which always has been something of a problem in Ireland anyway, in the modern era. So I think, yes, it was partly the lack of backbone that Harald Wilson displayed but it was also a sinister indication that you could be rewarded for bigotry but it was also an indication that, whether the Sunningdale agreement was a very clever agreement in some ways, very cleverly designed, it was designed by two or three people and it hadn't been, if you like, internalised into British policy and I think in a sense what we have been seeing is a version of Sunningdale and an extension, a series of extensions from Sunningdale, actually becoming part of an agreed policy between Dublin and London, which is the crucial thing: the Dublin and London axis. You know, that that has been formed and that that's well greased and that London knows that the only way it can get out of the North is by buying its way out. You know, fill the trough so that everybody will put their snouts in there and get a salary for, you know, people in the North who wouldn't otherwise have got a job were getting senior jobs politically because this is one of the ways the system can be, if you like, greased towards, slide towards that moment when it actually changes from what it has been to something quite other. You know that the Unionists are hoping that it is one of those cases where everything changes so that everything can stay the same. Whereas the Republicans are hoping that the Unionists won't notice that so much has changed that actually almost nothing will be the same. And still, you know, if you had a large sum of money to bet, you would think twice before betting on either right now. It's at a critical point now, though how often could one have said that since 1972? But that really seemed like a ghostly year you know, when the place could have gone up in flames, with the British army watching and even in some cases aiding and abetting it.

MF: You couldn't have been aware in St. Columb's in the 1950's, that you were part of a generation – yourself, Seamus Heaney and John Hume (although Hume was a few years older) and others that would make a huge impact in Ireland and further afield. Nonetheless, you personally must have been aware that you were one of the first from the Bogside to get as far as university. Is that so?

SD: Yes, I guess I must have been, yeah. But what was worse in a sense was going to Cambridge afterwards. I went to Queens and then came to Derry and taught for two years in a really tough secondary school. Then I went to Cambridge as a PhD student. And that's when people really started to look on me as if I had two heads – saying what are you doing going to Cambridge, Cambridge isn't for people like us.

MF: In Derry people were saying that?

SD: People were saying that yes.

MF: Not in Cambridge?

SD: No, not so much in Cambridge. They did find me a little odd but Cambridge was obviously somewhat more diverse in its types than Derry was. I mean, I found Cambridge odd; in some ways wonderful and in some ways very dull. I had one great teacher in Cambridge and I had the library.

And I had this weird situation where you able to live and study at the same time. You didn't have to teach. You didn't have to get up at nine and come back at six and that sort of thing. Cambridge was an important thing. Going to Cambridge was much odder than going to University because I went there more or less on my own. When I went to University there were four or five of us in that year who went to University or to training college – but up to Belfast, as we put it then. So it was the first generation coming through. The concept of getting free secondary education because then what we paid in St. Columb's was three pounds, ten shillings a year for books. That was the only school expense. But apart from the fact that you weren't out working at fourteen, you know, which was for a start you weren't bringing money into the house. Anyway in Derry you wouldn't have got a job, there weren't any jobs to be had so you were as well to go to school. And my parents were very anxious that we should do this so... And they actually recognised that a cohort of Catholic kids going to school was what was going to break the Northern Irish state. And it wasn't that obvious to me when I was ten or eleven but I was sort of educated into this by Eamonn McCann who was, what, two years behind me? One or two. He went to the same school. And he was the worse footballer I have ever seen. He was even worse than Heaney. And I was a good footballer but we'd play a bit of football after school and sometimes Eamon and I would sit on the railings, talking politics. And every so I'd get down and thump the ball into the centre of the field and then get back up on the railings again. It was that kind of really professional football. So I got a kind of – his father and my father were best friends. He and I weren't best friends but we had conversations and we were acquaintances at school. But I found him too embarrassing on the football field to be associated with (laughs).

MF: You had an inspiring English teacher, didn't you?

SD: We had, Sean B. O' Kelly whose photograph I saw recently again in some old photographic file. Yeah, he was pretty marvellous. But what made it all the better was the system, the system of state scholarship was such that a number of us had already won the scholarships to University and we were fifteen, turning sixteen. And so was Heaney and a couple of other guys. So we were given a sort of what they would now call a transition year. Told to stay behind and concentrate... but they said to me     “you only got a B in history” or whatever it was – a credit rather than a distinction. The history teachers always said – it was Irish history – that nobody from a Catholic school would ever get an A in history because once it was seen... you know the only Irish history we really read was Grattan's parliament period. Everything else was off limits. But even then, you would do a British history module, always with Irish history running second to it. And they said the examiners will always recognise a Tague [derog. Catholic] when they see one and he/she will never get more than a B or a C. So I got a credit or a B and they said: why don't you do history again and get an A this time and also just you know. There were ten subjects the year before. And that year, transition year, there were four subjects – English, Latin, history and French. And the English class was four. There was a man called Micheal Cassoni, a man called Paddy Mullarky, who later became the head of the Civil service here, Seamus Heaney and myself and this teacher, Sean B., who was simply – he just, I mean he introduced us to the romantic poets and he was hopeless in fiction. But essays and poems and especially Wordsworth and Keats and Hazilitt and even the boring Charles Lamb somehow was interesting then.

Yeah, he enthused and he inspired and he took pleasure in his subject. We had this sort of – you know we weren't the least interested in the exam result – but we all got A's in English. I actually dropped to a C in history and thereby confirming all our suspicions, you know. But yeah, that was a great year. It was the most relaxed year one could ever have and still be at school and still have the exams shimmering on the horizon but you know, having got your scholarship, you didn't need to worry about the exams. So it was nice but yeah I still remember him fondly. 

MF: The Irish language was also off limits?

SD: No, no we were taught Irish, though very badly by the usual cohort of extremely violent teachers who seemed to be – in Irish – Irish seemed to have an especial gift for producing teachers who should have been in prison for violence, you know. But no, Irish was taught. There was a state exam in it. Obviously the government didn't like it very much, it had to be permitted under the British system. But the opportunity to get close to Irish, to get fluent in it, was completely ruined by the quality of the teaching. It was certainly the worst taught subject, by far. I mean, no language... well Latin was taught brilliantly. French was taught badly, Irish was taught worse. German wasn't taught at all. Italian wasn't taught. Irish, French, Latin and Greek – those were the basic foreign language subjects that were taught. Of course you weren't really allowed to think of Greek and Latin as foreign languages. They were the classical languages, they were handed down. And they were taught by priests who – we were very lucky, again – the priests who taught classical languages were very gentle and very eccentric but nicely so for young kids. I mean the sort of ones who would weep if you didn't – one actually wept if you didn't understand a line of Virgil. “Cannot you see this...oh” and then he would go to the window and take in big breaths to control his emotion or to he'd go into fits of laughter and puns. We would be looking at each other, sort of saying: this nutter. But, at the same time, we were glad to be his class rather than with the Irish teacher, having your fingers chopped off.

MF: And did this notion of Irish as a foreign language feed into thoughts about Donegal being an exotic place?

SD: Well, Donegal was exotic partly because the scenery there is startling. But it was where I associated holidays with – not that we had very many – but also I did go to the Gaeltacht once when I was at Queens, not when I was at school. I had a memorable few weeks there. Essentially I thought of it as a place where you went on your holidays and where, during the war years and after, you could get butter, you could get what we called 'country butter', butter wrapped in paper that had come straight from a farm. You could get eggs, you could get all sorts of things that were rationed in the North. It was nice to be able to walk over the border and back. It was a strange feeling, going over a little humpback bridge. You know over here: the North. Over here: the Free State. And that name, the Free State, stuck with it. I liked the name, you know, itself, and the memory of Sunday walks crossing the border and the memory of going the beach at Buncranna, the one memory of going to the Gaeltacht and then major memories, you know, teenage visits, which in some ways don't really count in the formation...(laughs). Yes, Donegal and the Irish language and then idea of the Irish language which was dearer to my parents than it was to me, partly because the teachers made me react so much against it. Not against it, but against wanting to be involved with it. That and some Gaelgoir fanatics in Derry, who were overly fanatic too, again with their same belabouring of the language and their destruction of it really, as something that's beautiful, that's other than a political weapon. I think of that, in all my education, as the biggest defect because that was an opportunity for growth and a central and important opportunity for growth, that was stifled. And that's not something that can be got over, I don't think. It leaves a consciousness of it, a consciousness of a deformity of the inner self and knowing that, in a way, you know – the history of the language is a complex thing – but obviously the loss of the language is associated with various forms of political and economic subordination and with the Famine. It's also associated – not in this century but in the century going back – with various forms of self-mutilation. And that's something that's remained, only half-comprehended.

MF: Declan Kiberd once argued that Irish is recoverable. And a lot that is said about the role of the British in the passing of the language is “Brit-bashing mythology”. It sounds like you wouldn't agree with that.

SD: Well, yeah, partly but I mean of course it is. The language was starved in almost every sense but I think the attempt at recovery was in fact another form of starvation. And it was maybe an unconscious form of starvation. It's very strange how violently anti-Irish language many Irish people are. It's almost a pathological area and remains so.

MF: Well, if you are getting lumps kicked off you at school...

SD: Yes, but that is not the source of it. That is a symptom of it: that they were hitting you like that and that it was more in Irish than in any other subject. It's like saying, you know, in the North the problem is this separated schooling. That is not the problem. That is the symptom of the problem. It's not the cause of it. And to say that with the Irish – I still see it with Gaelgoirí here or Irish scholars – who are a bit like the historians I was talking about earlier, in a different light though. Philologically, they are full of this kind of confidence that they are really scholars whereas somebody in a subject like English – you don't have to know anything to teach English. But to teach Old Irish, you need to know at least three languages, apart from modern Irish and German and of course Latin. That's the very basic equipment you need. Whereas you can be a monoglot ignoramus for English. You know, in some ways I would say, yes this is true. But these people don't know what literature is. They have no idea – you know, they are looking at the development of the enclitic in the 4th century and at how an 'n' became a 'd'. They are looking at poems and the poems may as well have been made of concrete. These people have no idea and they're as infantile in their literary formation as historians are in their philosophical formation. And it's another one of those examples, which has repeated in various levels of Irish life, of an over-sophistication: over-development in one area and under-development in another, to the point where it has become absurd, where you're looking at a very seriously deformed situation, which always has brilliant aspects to it but also aspects of its own desolation. It takes some patience to recognise that the degree of desolation is in fact intimately related to the degree of brilliance. They're not opposites. They're dialectically in tension, one with the other. And the Irish language is a very good example and the writing of history is another good example and the doctrinal, provincial, backwardness and the so-called economic advancedness that we have now. They still haven't separated, they haven't become polar opposites at all. But to think of them as polar opposites is the standard mode of infantile thinking that operates here and I keep wondering why. It cannot be permanent. Why does it seem  permanent? It is an historical phenomenon. But what historical circumstances need to change before that can alter?

MF: Allow me to ask you about academia today. You wrote once of Joyce scholars not seeing the wood for the trees – getting lost in minutiae and being unable to place Joyce's oeuvre in the tradition it belongs. Isn't that lack of lateral vision a metaphor for all academia?

SD: Possibly it is. I would sort of like to think the opposite – but, yes, the evidence is the other way. But, I mean, it's partly a function of industrial production, methods of industrial production which have of course absorbed the academy long since. The idea – the sort of German/American idea – of research, an idea of research born in 19th century Germany, exported to a powerful and wealthy country like the United States and then re-exported to less wealthy and less powerful countries like England and Ireland and France and Italy, which is, you know, University-wise, a shambles. I see what you mean. People are screaming and complaining now about the destruction of the humanities at the hands of all these CEOs and you know the business ethic. I think it will do the humanities a world of good to be destroyed, to be destroyed in the form that they have become. They'll get worse before they get better – if they get better. They certainly will get worse. For instance, there is a Professor of Joyce Studies over at UCD now. And there is going to be a Joyce summer school. And there is going to be a concentration by the University of stuff on Joyce because it's a money spinner. It's tourism. It's economically sensible. It's an industry and, to a lesser extent, Yeats and all the Irish writers. Any Irish writer, practically, is a candidate for industrialisation in the academy. And the consequences of that are, I think, yes, somewhat melancholy. On the other hand, if the humanities would finally sink under the water and stop waving for help, there might be humanism or that kind of cultural... energy will not disappear obviously but I think almost any other form other than the academy of the last thirty years, the time I've been in it (laughs), would be preferable.

MF: You wrote of your first visit to Russia: “the stricken aroma of the Czars...the smoking gold of icons”. Was your trip to Russia loaded with expectation?

SD: It's hard for me to say honestly now. But I think it was. In fact, the man you mentioned, Tony Cronin, I remember when I came back and I was saying some unkind things about Russia, more or less accused me of betraying the cause and I felt a bit guilty myself. But you know I didn't know an awful lot about Russia before I went there. I knew some things. But I wanted not to see what I saw. Going through Moscow in a limousine with your KGB man with you and you stare out the window and you say: “what is that queue for?” And there would be silence. Then when the car had passed, he'd say: “what queue?” This happened four or five times and I would say: “that one back there”. When you were walking, you couldn't avoid the queue. He'd say: “they're queuing there – it is not a shortage. They're queuing for the new asparagus plant or something”. It was just forced in upon me that this place is actually disintegrating. This place is repressive, militarily powerful but I thought Russia was the poorest place I had ever been. But the next year I went to China – well, I didn't go to China, I went to Beijing – and that was a far more oppressive regime, partly because everyone was then allowed to speak about the cultural revolution. But about nothing else. You would get these elderly people brought in front of you. And they would more or less be poked – you know, go on, talk about the cultural revolution. They'd say: “my wife was raped, my son was killed, my books were burned and I was sent to the provinces for ten years but now I am back and I have recovered and I have found the true path once more”. And you'd say: “well, what about ...I remember asking one man: “do you ever see the people who did all those things to you?” And he was absolutely silent. He looked at me and said nothing and the subject changed. I don't know, we went somewhere else and he said: “I could not answer. The people who did this to me are escorting you”. And then he walked away. That made me look differently at the young men, relatively young men, who were smilingly escorting me from one thing to another. So Russia and China were both shocks, just as is the way the United States has gone. I have been teaching there – I'm finished now – for the last ten, twelve years. The place has become toxic. Mostly since the Bush Administration but it was going that way anyway. American foreign policy, like the Soviet internal policy. It's going to cost as many lives. And it's for an idea world domination. In some ways, it is going to disfigure everyone and everything there. And it is now possible to say that you have to watch what you say or you'll be reported – and if you're a foreigner you'll be deported as well. And that used never to be sayable in America and it is now. So, this is all sounding very gloomy but I did say that I wasn't frightened by what is happening in Ireland (laughs). I'm frightened by America far more than by what is happening in Ireland. 

MF: You used to write left-leaning, Marxian stuff. Did that change after your visit to China and Russia? 

SD: Maybe, yes. But it's still with me that I found certain aspects of Marxism, certain Marxist writers like Adorno, Benjamin, Luckas – those three in particular seemed to be more powerful than any other commentators, any other people who could form a critique of modernity. And yet, at the same time, I think Luckas in particular was kind of squeezed and traduced by the Soviet system and became a yes-man. Benjamin is of course a victim of fascism. And Adorno is a victim of, what would you call it, social democracy in Germany. It's as if I have been educated into and persuaded by a system of thinking that has never found itself satisfactory; that has always been trying to develop another dimension. And I suppose after China and Russia, I turned to people like Althusser and, in Italy, Sebastiano Timpanaro and Lucia Collete, though most of their writing actually belong to the 1970's. But I was time-lagged in relation to that. For a while I sort of hovered between that Italian-Mediterranean attitude that you know, what has happened to Marxism is that all these morose Germans and fancy Parisians have tried to give it an esoteric dimension that robs it of its stark, brilliant, radical, materialist thrust. And you know state-worship in the Soviet Union and being critical of China. But this has been a disaster for Marxism but that Marxism itself is ok fundamentally and you didn't need all this esoteric, fancy experimentation of Benjamin and such. And I went with that for, I'd say, as long as ten years before I began to backpedal from it. And for six weeks now I have been trying to write an essay on Benjamin which, one minute is long enough to take up one side of St. Stephen's Green the next minute it could fit on one page of that [he points] journal. So, I'm obviously not exactly at a state of decision (laughs).

MF: Justine McCarthy wrote an article this year in the Saturday Irish Independent, asking why the Irish commemorate the Easter Rising and not the 1921 Treaty. Why do you think we do not?

SD: Don't commemorate the Treaty? 

MF: Well, commemorate the Rising far more than the Treaty.

SD: With reason because the Easter Rising – as the name implies – was a transforming event. The Treaty was an attempt to, if you like, suppress some of the consequences flowing from that event. I think it is typical of the Independent to portray the Rising as something disastrous. Whereas it was the one revolutionary event that we have had since '98 [Irish Rebellion of 1798]. And it passes my understanding how this is regarded as a glorification of violence. When you ask “who bombed the centre of Dublin?”... it's like the American saying the Iraqis are extremists or the Israelis saying that the Palestinians, because they use suicide bombers, are extremists. Whereas they are killing them in batches, like game, every day of the week. That whole ethic of extremism, linked with violence, linked with a junior revolutionary group – I mean the sort of thing that Lenin used to promote as a theory. Now this was raised to the idea of fact by people who kill by the tens of thousands. And what I think 1916 actually was – it was like seeing a brilliant blow landed in a boxing match. You know, a short left hook that staggered the monster for long enough and even though a beating followed, nevertheless the monster never recovered its status or its full strength after that. So, I think 1916 needs to be celebrated more and understood more. As for the Treaty, I think the Treaty is in the process of being re-written anyway and the interesting thing is to see how that is very slowly modified into another political arrangement. I mean, we are sufficiently altered now never to think of anything as a decision, but to think of everything as a process. You don't have an peace agreement, you have a peace process which can go on forever. But in fact there has been a process going on – you mentioned Sunningdale – since Sunningdale which has been actually directed towards the Government of Ireland Act [1920] on the Treaty. And toward some way of altering it, so that one of the other consequences of 1916, which was the formation of the Northern state. You know, one of the antidotes to 1916 or one of the attempted antidotes to 1916 now has itself to be undone. And how that can be managed is what's under review now every day. But when that's undone, we can celebrate the Treaty then (laughs).

MF: You might have grown tired of answering questions about the writing of Reading in the Dark. However much was autobiographical or not autobiographical, the experiences chronicled must have been nonetheless painful to write. One scene depicts British army officers beating children in front of their father. Now that it's written, do you feel a weight has been lifted off your shoulders?

SD: (Sighs) I did then for a while. But...I've never wanted to return to that arena in fiction or in any other way. I mean, something was... the fault with it – and I can go no further than this – the fault with it was that something was dismissed rather than realized for me in that novel. So I have the sense really that I should do something, I should re-interpret it. I often feel like writing an essay, under a pseudonym about it. While the reception for it was quite warm and, in some cases, quite a revelation for me. I remember Terry Eagleton had an interesting review of it in the New Statesman was it? But most of the coverage just made me feel uncomfortable. It was an exploration that went further than I had gone before but it still didn't find anything. So, whatever north pole I set off for, I never reached. And it's reduced my enthusiasm for reaching such a north pole. But I would like to re-awaken that enthusiasm for such a search – but I'm not going to, I'm pretty sure, unless something big changes.

MF: Did you look to models when you were writing it? MacNeice?

SD: I tried not to think of Joyce but of course he was there anyway. Other models would have been just books would have lived in my head at that time: Gothic novels like LeFanu's, Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir Bernanos' Diary of a Country Priest. But I couldn't say to you it's there in this form. Just like a moving landscape sometimes.

MF: It is interesting you mentioned Diary of a Country Priest. I was going to ask you about film. Was Bergman's Fanny and Alexander a model? Was film in your mind at the time?

SD: Film was, yes. It wouldn't have been Bergman. I suppose the movie that would have been closest would have been The Innocents, that version of The Turn of the Screw – the movie version of that Henry James story. And that Henry James story is in the novel in again another form, though it is a form I'd known from childhood, before I'd ever read Henry James. But you know, which is bound up with the notion that the past will keep revisiting you in a demonic form if you don't find a way of dealing with it, which is not a way of dismissing it, but a way of internalising it. But if you don't internalise it within yourself, then it will externalise itself around you in some way, which is not to say that I have any sympathy at all with the contemporary notion of putting it behind you, moving on from. That drives me nuts. So, you know, 'I murdered my mother yesterday but you can live with that, that's in the past now'. Anyway, that novel is – in my view – connected with my other writings. In some ways, it's close to what I have written about Edmund Burke. In some ways, it is close to what I tried to write in Strange Country. In fact Strange Country, those Clarendon lectures, are very close to Reading in the Dark for me. There was an overlap in their composition as well. But this is the ointment you always put in your own wind, saying that 'everything I have written is in some way coherent – one bit with the other'. Whereas in fact they could just be splintered, a series of splintered reactions. And, you know, there is no especial charm or virtue about coherence anyway as such. Nor is there in splintering it is just that one thing can be seen as the one and the other can be seen as the other. But it was certainly helpful for when writing it to me to think of it as incorporated in with and part of what else I had been doing in poetry and especially in the book Rumours and that novel and Strange Country – those were three that seemed to me to answer each other, so to say, correspond with each other.

Anyway, I'm going to have to shift because I have to be somewhere else in fifteen or twenty minutes. I'm sorry it couldn't have been longer. What is it, quarter to four?

MF: Yeah, it's quarter to four.

SD: Had you many...

MF: Yeah, I have far too many but I was wondering if I might be so bold as to ask you just one more question?

SD: Yeah, shoot one more.

MF: OK. Let's change tack. In Strange Country you write: “the Irish failed to survive in the Malthusian, Darwinian universe of economic law...– like – Scythians or Carthaginians, a people of oriental origin in an occidental empire”. This crops up in many writers. Yeats writes of Irish country people having lived in India before the famine. Do these ideas have any grounding in reality? What is your view?

SD: Well, it's the Orient as a metaphor. Then it is the west for the easterner and the east for the westerner as an index of strangeness for which you have been punished but by with you want to identify yourself. And to say that the problem with living beside an empire is – or even a continent that is full of imperial achievements and ambitions – is to say that it is impossible to be European without having drummed into you a kind of normative kind of behaviour, in which you have not participated at one level but at the same time in which you have been acculturated into admiring. So, I think that notion of saying that we want to insist upon a difference from what was called the norm and we want to tell you was abnormal, at least it is not the norm, admirable though it may be. But we are admirably distinct from what is admirably normal. But if you thread that path for long enough, something has got to give. I think either 'admirable' is going to give or 'normal' is going to give (laughs). It's like an erosion, you know. Finding yourself connected to a number of civilisations. Let's say: one large, British, European civilsation. Finding yourself connected to it and when you inspect the connection, you find that it's only available to you through erosion. Not that it will ever erode to the point where you are disconnected but it will often erode to the point where the connection is phantasmal. I think that's a very interesting condition to be in. It's a view that a French or an English person can hardly adopt or an Italian. It wouldn't be available to them, not that they would wish it on themselves. It's simply not there because the idea of being part of a civilisation – even if you say the civilisation was criminal in many ways, nevertheless it has been that kind of civilisation which has great achievements to its credit also. And there is no question but that you're part of it. But it's a bit like those Germans, like Benjamin, who know that they can never forget that they are Germans but they know that trying to forget that they are Germans is part of their being German. That sort of condition where connection is bound up with disconnection. And there is no avoiding this – you cannot think your way out of it, you cannot feel your way out of it. But you live in that condition. It's like exploring something. You're blind-folded and you're exploring wherever you are to get the dimensions of it, the shape of it, to guess its configuration. So, it's interesting but it can be exhausting too. And it often feels like a waste of strength and a waste of force because, you know, why should I have to invent the world in my hand. Why cannot I just take off the blindfold, to see it the way everyone else does? Why do I have to spend all the time guessing? Because the blindfold is – there is blindness and insight together. That's the whole connection between them. So you cannot take it off. But the wish to see differently is part of a way of seeing. It's very hard to estimate the valence between those two positions. Anyway, I have to cut it there. I hope it has been of use to you.

MF: Thank you so much.

SD: It was a pleasure.

Interview with Frank McGuinness

by Maurice Fitzpatrick

This interview took place on March 18th 2009 in University College Dublin where Frank McGuinness is Professor Of Creative Writing.

MF: You were born in Buncrana, not far from Derry, not far from the border – which is to say close to a majority Catholic city dominated by Unionists. Can you speak a little about the effect that growing up there had on you as man and as a writer?

FMG: It was a very self-enclosed world in a way. I wasn't too aware of the proximity of Derry, other than Derry was a big town and there was a Woolworths branch there. You could get spangles and Mars bars. When you were a kid, that was the big thing about it. Then when I was about thirteen or fourteen, the city started to erupt. The Troubles really began in 1966/67 (I know that 1969 was the gigantic explosion). So I became very much aware of our nearness to another world, another political system. You had this proximity but you also had a distance because the border separated you. I'm not saying I had the best of both worlds because that would be a very wrong way to put it, but I had a sense two systems operating. It gave me a very strong sense of identification but also a sense of detachment from the world there. That was something I used to theatrical effect in a play, Cathaginians. While I would not claim to be a Derryman – they would not let me claim that I'm a Derryman and I would not want to claim to be a Derryman – but I still felt it was the nearest city. Not my city, but the nearest city. And it had a very powerful presence in my life and my imagination. And I think I had to write the play, Cathaginians, as a testament to Derry's nearness to me. I have written a lot more about Buncrana though. That's inevitable because that's where I spent my childhood.

MF: The big trouble happened in 1969, as you say, when you were sixteen. Did you ever wonder what it would have been like had you been from the Bogside?

FMG: I have no doubt about it: I would have been up to my arse involved in it. It was a standing joke when I came to Dublin – I met Provisional Sinn Fein supporters – and, to me, they were less Republican than Fine Gael in Donegal. You just absorbed it in the air in Donegal. You absorbed nationalism. It was a creed by which you lived. There was a safety valve of the border and the safety valve of growing up fourteen miles from it. I have no doubt that I would have been immensely involved. I have no doubt about that because that would be my tradition.

MF: Another man who made Inishowen his home (Inishowen is your homeplace, I am not implying that it isn't) is Brian Friel. You have had a longstanding collaborative relationship with Brian Friel, probably the most prominent example of which is your screenplaying of Dancing at Lughnasa. Would you like to talk a little about that?

FMG: Well, inevitably, if you write plays you know about Brian Friel. If you come from Donegal, you know about Brian. I directed The Gentle Island which is a very neglected play. I directed that in the late 1980s in The Peacock in Dublin. And that was my first practical involvement with his work. (I had read all of his plays). I first got to know him at that time, meeting him occasionally to talk about the play. Then, when Noel Pearson, who is a mutual friend, wanted to do the film, Dancing at Lughnasa, he wanted an Irish writer to do the screenplay. He asked me because I was cheap. I was happy to do it, out of respect for Noel and out respect for Brian. A tough job it was actually because it is such a good play and it is very hard to take a good play apart. I enjoyed the exercise. I enjoyed the experience of it. Brian wasn't too appalled by it, I believe. But it was very much his play that was being filmed. It was an advantage having an Irish writer, in awe of Brian as we all are, doing the screenplay. But in a way it might have been better to have given it to someone else who had more experience as a screenwriter; and also someone who had an outsider's perspective. Maybe it would have been a very, very different film. But that didn't happen and wasn't going to happen when I was writing it. So you get another insider's view of the play.

MF: And his masterpiece, Translations, has been touted by many as a potential film. Do you ever see that happening?

FMG: You better ask him that.

MF: Ok. Let me ask you more about your growing up in Inishowen. Your first play, The Factory Girls, is the sort of play that Derry people could immediately identify with. But it was also obviously a Buncrana story. How did you come to the story?

FMG: Well if you come from that part of the world the big industry was shirt manufacturing, all through Derry and parts of Donegal. My mother, my aunts, my grandmothers, all worked in the factories. It was very much the culture of work that I inherited. When I was looking for a theme for my first play – I suppose I was adhering to the writerly advice, 'write about what you know' – that was what I knew. I think, looking back, it was inevitable that that would be the big subject of it. Again there was a difference between the Buncrana experience of shirt factories and the Derry one. We were a small town and the entire workforce depended on the woman working. When I came to Dublin in the early 1970s, it was a shock to me that eyebrows were being raised about a woman who went out to work. For me, that was the norm. I just decided to explore that whole area and what it did to the women involved – what it did to their heads and their whole imaginations. And their way of taking and living and relating to each other. That is where it came from. I was so hyped and worried about people thinking it was autobiographical. I was making big declarations, 'not based on anywhere and not based on anybody'. Of course that was a complete lie. It was based on my mother and aunts and it was set in Buncrana. It's not documentary. It is not verisimilitude. It is a work of fiction. The plot is entirely fictitious. But the characters of the women bear a lot of close resemblance to the women in my immediate family.

MF: You say that the writer should write about what he/she knows, give it a bash anyway...

FMG: At the beginning.

MF: Well, in one of Arthur Miller's early plays, A Memory of Two Mondays, he wrote about his taking a year off to work and save enough money to go to university. He was working in a back store. Whereas your The Factory Girls – I am guessing you never worked in a factory – was a braver step. It was a bit more of a leap to take on something not quite empirical as your subject.

FMG: Well I didn't work in a factory, but my mother worked in a factory when I was a child because she had to work when we were kids. So I had a very close knowledge of factory procedures and how they operated; and what was done to the women and what they had to do. So while I never served my time there, I knew what the cost of it was very closely.

MF: It didn't intimidate you to jump into an all-women...

FMG: Not in the least. [laughs]

MF:You have translated many of Ibsen's plays. Would you agree with Ingmar Bergman that Ibsen is the master of dramatic construction?

FMG: I think he is an extraordinary mind and an extraordinary mentor, armed with a terrifying capacity to reach into a terrible darkness. He does so and he helps you to do so by reason of the sheer skill of his construction. It is no accident that one of his last great plays is called The Master Builder. He is the supreme architect of theatrical achievement. You can only really go into those very strange recesses of the human imagination when you have the kind of discipline and the dramatic, theatric logic that he does. He is a supreme man of the theatre. He is a supreme storyteller. The sheer range and diversity of a plot like A Doll's House compared to, say, something like The Wild Duck: that is a mark of his diversity as a storyteller and his range as a dramatist. The parallelism I think is Titian, the great Venetian painter. You think you know what they are going to do within the framework of a canvass or the framework of a story, but the take you to extraordinary places once you start to examine them.

So I do these versions for instruction and I do them for pleasure. And that's what the theatre is ultimately about for me. I do these versions. They are not translations. I don't speak the language. I get a good literal translation. I do them for pleasure and they keep me off the street.

MF: Do you find his influence seeping in? I am thinking about The Bird Sanctuary. Do you find yourself writing Ibsenesque plays?

FMG: Not particularly. I wouldn't consciously set out to do that. I believe in the play of influences. It comes when it comes. I never set down and wonder, well I have just done Hedda Gabler and I wonder how that is going to effect my next play. That's not the way it works. Sometimes it happens. You can see it in retrospect. But in the immediacy of writing, I do not brood on influences. I just let it come.

MF: Do they give you a stimulus?

FMG: Very much so. They are fabulous challenges and they are extraordinary invitations to get inside the minds of great writers. And to make highly pleasurable love to them in intimacy of your own study. You are the first one to fuck them before anyone else gets their hands on them. It is marvellous losing your virginity to Henrik Ibsen.

MF: I can imagine. At a time when you hit writer's block, is this a moment when you reach for Strindberg or Ibsen?

FMG: I never have writer's block. I think if you are going to work in the theatre you should know the craft. You should know your skill. The directors and the actors who I really respect most are those who have proven their mettle in these great plays of the European tradition. And to have experience to match theirs, I have to get in there with that ammunition. I think a healthy theatre immerses itself in both new writing and the classics because if you really are a living theatre, they are new plays every time they are reinvented. I have done nine Ibsens and they are nine new plays. That sounds extraordinarily arrogant. But it is not. It is actually modest. It is homage to the sheer unknowableness of that work.  

MF: And you have also translated Strindberg's Miss Julie. I remember (possibly this is misremembered) you intimated once in interview that you would like to be as gloomy and deep as Bergman. So Scandinavia has a particular attraction?

FMG: Oh, yeah. I am a kind of a misbegotten Norseman. I studied Old Norse for four years. And I am very interested in Viking culture. I think I am madder than they are, actually. I think I'm funnier. I hope I am funnier. But then I do find Swedes very funny. I love their sense of irony. I love their sense of gloom. The fact that they send themselves up – I find that very endearing. By the way, I do find Bergman extremely funny. If you look at The Seventh Seal, it is hysterical at times, deliberately so. He has a great sense of humour. The answer to your question is that I do like the Nordic temperment, the Nordic vision. I like the astringency of it. It is a great contrast to ours. I hope I bring a bit of Celtic bonkers to it.

MF: It is a tall order to be madder than them.

FMG: Ah, no. You don't know my family do you? [laughs]

MF: Taking Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, Cathaginians (which we spoke about) and Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme as pointers, it is fair to say that the conflict in the North of Ireland has preoccupied you a lot?

FMG: Yes, it has actually. But I have always refused to let it be the definition of what the work is about. I always try to see it in a wider context. When I wrote the Catholic play, if you want to call it that, I deliberately chose to write about Caravaggio and to see him as a Roman Catholic, a European Catholic; and to see the Catholic experience in terms of a big picture, the evolution of the faith through Reformation and Counter-Reformation. As for The Sons of Ulster, I didn't see that ever as a Catholic/Protestant divide play. I deliberately wrote about it in terms of a European conflict, WWI. I deliberately wrote about Protestantism as a theology, as a faith darkly divided by its own inhibitions and its own divisions; and that these come from a European context as well. I never really believed in wrapping the green flag or the Orange flag around me. I think it is very limited. I always, always try to open the plays to bigger voices than the predictable; and bigger influences than the obvious. There is an Act of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, the third Act, set in four different locations intercut. My model there was cubist painting and cubist sculpture because Pyper (Pyper is the main character) had gone to Paris as a figurative painter and had gone through an enormous artistic crisis when he was exposed to the revolution that was happening in art in the period prior to WWI. That very deliberately is a nod – more than a nod – it is an absolute recognition of how the sensibility was completely shattered by the experience of war. This sculptor brought back in his memory the new way of being, the new way of telling truths. That is why the form is the way it is in the play. Yes, it does confront the horror in the North. It does confront the tragedy of Irish history. But I do want to argue in a play that we belong to more than a parish. The parish is important of course. And I was very specific in identifying where the various characters of Sons of Ulster came from in terms of their locales in Ulster. But at the same time I did always want them to be aware of, and to have their fate shaped by, bigger forces than the local.

MF: Nonetheless, you get a lot out of the local. I'm guessing that you would call yourself an Ulsterman.

FMG: No, I would call myself an Irishman. I come from Donegal. But I am an Irishman. I am an Irish writer with all that that means. I don't recognise borders when it comes to art. I do in politics, but not in art.

MF: When you came to UCD to study Arts, there were several other creative spirits here at the time – Colm Tóibín, Neil Jordan, Dermot Morgan.

FMG: Colm is younger than I am. Dermot was here as was Ronan Sheehan and Harry Clifton. Colm was a very flamboyant auditor of the English Literary Society. Dermot was a very funny, bonkers guy. Harry Clifton was a pal. I was in digs near his house and we used to talk intensely about American poetry. Éilís Ní Duibhne, who is a very good friend of mine, was here. We were in the same class. I was very close to Éilís because we both came from working class backgrounds. There were very few from the working class in UCD at that time, very few. We knew the scale of ambition we had to have to get to where we were. We knew the kind of work we had to put in to make it work. She's still a very close friend, Éilís. I was aware of them all, yeah. I still get on well with them, as far as I know. We haven't killed each other yet. We are not stabbing each other. It was a nice time. They were nice people and they still are.

MF: And of course you remained on in UCD. When did you start to teach creative writing here?

FMG: Well, I am actually in the English Department. I came back here to lecture in 1997. I have been teaching since 1977. I was in Coleraine. I was in Maynooth and then I came here. And I do regard myself as a teacher/lecturer. I insist on that in terms of my students – you really acquire critical skills when you work on anything. I do a course on creative writing but I also work on Anglo-Irish Literature and American Theatre. I do a course on Shakespeare and Ibsen. I do a course on Directing Shakespeare. So it is a broad range of subjects that I do. It is pretty demanding.

MF: By the sounds of things your approach to teaching is pretty rigorous and hands-on.

FMG: Well it is intensive reading lists of literature. I expect people to make use of their time to read because this is the only time they are going to have to read. This is feeding time. This is nurturing time. This is sustaining time to read as deeply and as widely as possible. Hands-on is not probably the right thing. I believe that this is a time when you are learning to stand on your own and when you are learning stamina so that you can function on your own. And that is a very valuable lesson for any walk of life because you are on your own. And the more you practice independence the better you are going to be.

MF: You regard yourself as a teacher, but you are also primarily a writer and you also direct plays?

FMG: I haven't directed plays for a long time. I did it in the 1990s and I just got tired. I really did get tired because I was teaching and I was writing. I can do two things. But three things is one too many. I was too late. Maybe if I'd started directing when I was younger, in my twenties and thirties, maybe if I'd opportunities to do it, I would have persisted. Also, I think if you are going to write film, you absolutely have to direct. No question of that. You must direct. That is the advice I would give to anybody starting off, working in theatre and film. You must direct your own films. Maybe directing your own plays isn't a good idea. But directing your films is a must. I never really had the hunger to direct that really great directors have. And I didn't really have the patience. I have a different kind of patience.

MF: You have patience for teaching.

FMG: I have patience for teaching, patience for writing. I do not have patience for directing.

MF: Just to back to your undergraduate years. They seem to have been great and formative for you. It was also a great time to be taught here in UCD – you were taught by a Derryman, Seamus Deane?

FMG: Seamus was here, yes. Gus Martin was here. There were very good teachers – Terry Dolan. My main area was Old and Middle English and I specialised in that almost from second year on. And then I did my post-graduate work in it. So I wouldn't have had as much contact with Seamus Deane as I would have had with people like Terry Dolan. It was a very strong department then with world-class people here. That is one of the reasons I went up to it – it was the best. It was a very new world. It was good time and I met very good friends. But it was an extraordinarily lonely time as well. I missed Donegal enormously. I had very little money but then nobody had. It was a really tight, savage time. People talk about a recession now. Dear Jesus, the 1970s was a time of hardship. As I was saying, myself and Éilís coming from working class backgrounds, we really had to make the most of very little. It shapes you. It also make you determined to get more.

MF: And did you leave Ireland for a while?

FMG: No, I have never lived outside Ireland. I couldn't actually. It is impossible. Maybe it would have been very good for me after I had done my post-graduate degree. I really should have. But I didn't do it. The consequence now is I cannot. I really don't know how I would do that now. I suppose if necessity forced it you would. You get used to anything. But I get physically sick when I am away for a longtime. Don't ask me why. That is the hard fact of it.

MF: Do you regret not going away?

FMG: I regret not going away. I really tell students who are finishing, especially post-graduate students: get away, get away for a while. Get away for six months at least and see another world. Even learn another language if you have to. I really regret not doing it.

MF: I think students now have that forced down their throats far more. There is far more emphasis on it.

FMG: Well also with mobile phones and email – it is not that far away. When we went, we went. And an awful lot of people did go away. Some part of me was determined that I was going to earn a living here. It took a long time to do it. But eventually it did pay off.

MF: Do you see yourself as a gay writer? Or as a writer who just happens to be gay?

FMG: Or as a greying red-haired writer? Those divisions don't mean anything to me. They just don't. I write.

MF: So if you saw your books in a bookshop, classed as gay writing...

FMG: I would just be glad to see my books in a bookshop. They can put them under geography. It doesn't matter to me. It genuinely doesn't matter. If you want to put Seamus Heaney under straight writing, go ahead and do it. Don't see much of that about.

MF: You don't think your sexuality in any way brought you to writing, stimulating the writing...

FMG: It must have. It is not the be-all and end-all. I am certainly aware of how much gay writing was censored and gay people were censored. I am aware of that, especially in Ireland. But then again that is a worldwide phenomenon. I am absolutely determined for that not to be the case for me. But I am equally determined that it is not going to become a mission in life. I am 'out'. I have been 'out' for a long time. If you've got a problem with it, fuck off. That's my attitude. I don't want to know you. I am not interested. I'm equally not going to let definitions such as my sexuality be the be-all and end-all of my art.

MF: I'm thinking of another Irish writer, Colm Tóibín, who has written on James Baldwin. He has also written a sort of history of gay writing. You never felt the urge to get politicised?

FMG: Well I think I am politicised. I have done it in the plays and that is as much as I am going to do it. As I say, I don't believe in censorship and that is my politics – to fight censorship. But it is not a desire to become part of a merry band. I am on my own. That is where I like to be.