THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:With the publication of 'Ghost Light' Joseph O'Connor is at the end of a 10-year project to write three books 'set in forgotten corners of the Irish past'. He now plans to turn his attention elsewhere rather than end up like Flann O'Brien – stuck, he says, in the 'rut of finding Ireland so fascinating'
JOSEPH O’CONNOR has promised to dress like Lady Gaga for our interview, in anticipation of the photographer’s presence. Instead he appears disappointingly dapper, youthful in a black shirt and coat, though he assures me afterwards that he had the bejewelled knickers and lobster-shaped hat in his briefcase, ready to break out for the shoot.
It’s not often you get a mention of bejewelled knickers from a 46-year-old who is just as likely to drop mentions of John Millington Synge or the nuances of Irish politics into the conversation. That’s the thing about Joseph O’Connor, though: he can be both academic and accessible in conversation and in his books – which have garnered him critical acclaim while flying off the shelves.
His latest novel, Ghost Light, is based on the real-life love story of Synge and the actor Molly Allgood. "I knew the story from my childhood," he says in that soft south Dublin accent recognisable from his Drivetimecontributions on RTÉ Radio 1. "I grew up in Dún Laoghaire, and on a Saturday night my pals and myself used to go to the Presentation College disco in Glasthule, or Pres as it was known, and the general consensus was that if you hadn't persuaded somebody to slow dance with you by the time Stairway to Heavencame on, at the end of the night, you would be having a lonely walk home."
He eases comfortably into his story, making you wait for Stairway to Heavento connect somehow to Synge. "And that's usually what happened. The way home took me past this crumbling old Victorian house where Synge had lived his last few years with his mother . . . At that time, in the 1970s, it had been allowed to decline a bit, and it was very, very atmospheric."
The house was just one of the many echoes in his life that drew him to the story of the great playwright and the acclaimed actor to whom he was engaged at the time of his early death. “My mother had been a dress designer, an apprentice dress designer before she got married, which Molly was, and my father’s mother’s name was O’Neill [Allgood’s stage name was Maire O’Neill], so there were these little prickles of connections. It just kept the story going in my head.”
It took several drafts to find the right voice to tell his version, however. Ghost Lightis O'Connor's fictionalised story of Synge, "the ultimate commitment-phobe", and his long-time affair with the feisty Allgood, who inspired the role of Pegeen Mike in The Playboy of the Western World. In the end Molly's voice steals the stage in Ghost Light.
“She just seemed so complex and lovely. I think I probably fell for her a bit, to be honest. I think I had a bit of a crush on young Molly, and it may be the first time that’s ever happened to me with one of my characters. When that happens you have to be very careful and stand back.” He smiles, and his face is boyish in his mock sententiousness. “Don’t get involved and leave some room for the Holy Spirit.”
As O’Connor describes it, it’s a love story for grown-ups. “Most love stories – the tradition back into the 19th century, really – is there’s a marriage on the last page, and all the way up to Bridget Jones there’s still that, where the focus of the story is to be with someone. But most of us have someone in our life that it didn’t work out with. It may be a lover, it may be a sibling, it might be a parent, but most of us have a relationship in our life that went badly wrong. But that person stays with us always, and you take that person into your marriage, into your relationships with your children, into every friendship and every relationship you’re ever going to have, and sometimes the person that you couldn’t make it work with is a very deep influence on your life,” he says. “I couldn’t remember a book about that.”
When asked who that might be in his own case, O’Connor, characteristically generous with his answers, is reluctant to elaborate. “I had the standard-issue unhappy childhood, so there’s all of that,” he says with studied dismissiveness. His famous sister, Sinéad, has been vocal about the abuse meted out by her mother, though her characterisation of their childhood has caused some tension between the two over the years. “I’ve nothing to add to anything I’ve said about Sinéad ever,” he says, “other than that I love her and I admire her greatly, without any qualification.
“I feel that we had a very good father, a very loving and loyal man, a very emotionally literate man, which was unusual at the time. I’m proud of him, and I don’t think that I would be doing what I do now without the values that he had, about solidarity and culture and the love of learning and literature and all of those things, so I try and mention him when I can. My mother was a very charismatic, very beautiful woman with many gifts, and being a mother wasn’t one of them.”
In 1993, he took his sister to task in this newspaper over her public version of their childhood, contending that while their mother was indeed an abusive parent, Sinéad always had the support of other family members, including her father. Now, however, O’Connor says he and his sister have a warm relationship. “Sinéad’s children are in school with my children, so I usually see Sinéad at half eight on a Monday morning, and we get on fine.”
There were times, however, when having such a well-known family member cast a shadow over O’Connor’s burgeoning career. “I remember once that the headline of a review of a book of mine in Australia was ‘Sinead O’Connor’s brother writes novel’. I felt that I would like to be one or two other things than that.”
WHILE HIS SISTER chose her path in music, Joseph O’Connor’s attraction was to words. “I grew up in a house where books were loved. My mother and father both loved not just literature but music and theatre and the world of the arts, and it was also a very turbulent home, so I think sometimes, for a kind of bookish, musical kid, the place of the imagination becomes a kind of safe place. That’s the place where you’re in charge and you can make some decisions and make sense of things.”
He can pinpoint when he decided to become a writer. "When I was 17 someone gave me a copy of Salinger's great book The Catcher in the Rye. Anyone who ever reads that book as a teenager is just floored by it, and I can remember the moment turning the last page of that novel and thinking: I would love to do that with my life; if I could just write something that would touch people and make them laugh and move them and provide such pleasure to read, that's what I would like to do."
It wasn't that easy to achieve, particularly when O'Connor was coming of age. "People who are younger and people from outside Ireland find it hard to believe, but there wasn't really much of a sense in the 1970s that Dublin had any literary culture at all, so I didn't think it would be possible to do what I do as a professional thing." So he decided to become a journalist, starting out on summer jobs with publications such as Magilland the Sunday Tribune,where Vincent Browne, its editor, warned him that his writing talent could be an indication that he was in the wrong job. "[He] used to say: 'You can never be a good journalist, because you're a good writer. A good reporter can't write, and a good writer can't report, and you're never going to be John Pilger, let's face it.' " And, though he says he loves journalism, he adds: "There's some truth in what Vincent said."
Yet his early years in journalism taught him skills that stood to him when he began to write creatively. "It taught the discipline of writing, which is a good thing for a novelist to learn. It taught that you don't wait for inspiration to strike, that there are things that have to be done every week. A couple of years after I left college I wrote a column for the Sunday Tribune, and it was a great thing, because, no matter what was going on in your life, you delivered 1,000 words on a Friday at four o'clock, and that was it. And when they said 1,000 words they meant 1,000 words, and if you wrote 1,200 words of the most beautiful prose since Scott Fitzgerald, somebody would take a scissors and chop off the last few. So I think being a journalist was a really useful thing."
Nowadays his journalism gets national airplay on RTÉ, while the novels keep coming. Yet back when he began, getting published was not easy, and support from bodies like the Arts Council, even “in indirect ways”, as he puts it, were an encouragement, and something he believes should continue for a new generation of writers.
“The arts are one of the things that make Ireland considerable in the eyes of the world. I found, teaching in New York, it was the first thing my students knew about the place – that this is the place of Roddy Doyle and Anne Enright and The Chieftains, and not this place of sordor and child abuse and corrupt bankers, so I think that’s a useful thing for us, and if we want to have that, it is important that we sponsor people.”
He cautions against being too idealistic about what the arts can do, but “it isn’t said often enough that the arts are for pleasure. There’s a lot of talk about brand Ireland and culture Ireland and cultural tourism, and it’s not that it’s completely unimportant, but reading is for pleasure. Dylan Thomas said: ‘There’s only one reason to read a poem, and that’s because you love it.’ And we need that. We need to have novels that we just love.”
O'Connor's first novel, Cowboys and Indians, was published in 1991. Though it was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, its author is less than enthused about this early work. "We have to love all of our children equally, but we like some of them better than others, and certainly, when I look back at my first book I read certain passages of it through the grid of my fingers," he says. "God, I so admire people like Anne Enright who've only ever written masterpieces, but I'm not one of those writers."
Since Cowboys and Indians, however, there have been many more books, though it was Star of the Sea, his historical novel published in 2002, that launched him into an international league. Hailed as "his most substantial and impressive novel to date" by The Irish Times, it seemed to mark O'Connor's coming of age as a literary writer. "I don't remember making a decision to be a literary writer," he smiles. "I just wrote Star of the Sea as well as I could do it. I suppose it's the first book that I really gave 105 per cent to, and it seemed to work. So that was good."
Star of the Seawas followed by Redemption Falls, both "great big bloody doorstoppers", as he describes them, and now Ghost Light, a more portable read, at just over 250 pages. " Ghost Lightis the end of a 10-year project for me, which is to write three books set in forgotten corners of the Irish past. I made a decision when I set out to do that that I would only write those three books, and that whatever happened to them would happen. If they were successful, fine; if they weren't, fine; but at the end of that I would go on to writing something contemporary."
HE IS ALSO SURE his next book will be set outside Ireland. “I love Flann O’Brien,” he says by way of explanation. “I think he was a great genius, and the tragedy of his life is that he never raised his eyes from Ireland and what a wonderful, internationally important novelist he would have been if ever he could have got out of the rut of finding Ireland so fascinating!”
O’Connor gets out of Ireland often, having lived in London and New York several times, and even in Nicaragua, as a supporter of the Sandinista government in his early 20s. To O’Connor, “to be Irish is to be a bit peripatetic”, and though exile has surfaced thematically in much of his work, he never feels the Mountains of Mourne nostalgia for home when he’s living away from Ireland. “Just on a very prosaic level, when you’re living in the East Village and the party starts at 10 o’clock every night outside your window, and it goes on till five in the morning, you do sometimes pine for Glendalough, but not for the mystical, Celtic, spiritual reasons; it’s just for a bit of f***ing peace.”
Does he still see himself as an Irish writer? “The definition of that has expanded so much in recent years,” he says, pointing to writers such as Colum McCann, Joseph O’Neill and Philip Ó Ceallaigh, who are redefining the words “Irish writer”. “But, boy, do we love the meaning of those words. I sometimes wonder do people sit around in Belgium having conferences, wondering what does being Belgian mean and what is a Belgian writer. I think we probably think about it too much.”
Irish or otherwise, he says writing takes serious commitment. “Writing isn’t like falling in love, it’s like being married, and there are days when it’s absolutely brilliant and there are moments when you’re not so f***ing sure, actually, and it takes a bit of effort to get through it, and you’re hoping that in the long run it will be worthwhile.”
For all that, it remains O’Connor’s first love despite its myriad frustrations. “I love the challenge of it, and the infuriating frustration of it, and sitting down at a desk on a Monday morning and trying to make two people fall in love or think of a plot of how they’re going to murder someone, or make people feel the excitement of being young or the bittersweet nature of being old.”
He is animated as he speaks of writing, and, though humour comes easy to O’Connor, he is serious now. “When the day comes when nobody buys my books any more, which I’m sure will come, I’m sure it will be a great consolation to me to go into my room and write.”
It’s only when he talks about writing like this that you realise that underneath Joseph O’Connor’s calm and affable demeanour is a restlessness, an agitation that can only be calmed by his craft. “It just settles something in me.”
Ghost Lightis published next month by Harvill Secker. Joseph O'Connor will be speaking at Dublin Writers' Festival on June 3rd
EARLY YEARS
Born September 20th, 1963.
Grew up in Dún Laoghaire/ Glasthule, Co Dublin.
CAREER
Worked as a part-time journalist while studying at UCD, for publications such as Magill and the Sunday Tribune. After college he went to Nicaragua, where he reported on the aftermath of the Sandinista revolution, before returning to live in England. He published his first short story in 1989. His first novel, Cowboys and Indians, was published in 1991. He has since published six more novels, a collection of short stories, several film scripts, and stage plays. He has a weekly diary on RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetimeprogramme.
FAMILY
He is married to the television and film writer Anne-Marie Casey, with whom he has two sons.
