I wrote this book because a writer changed my life.
David Thomson was eighteen years of age when he came as a tutor to Co Roscommon in the summer of 1932. His life took a fateful turn. He went boating on the Shannon with a woman who became central to his romantic and literary life, Phoebe Kirkwood. She was several years his junior, but he was in love. He describes the sensation of her body warmth coming through his hands as he helped her from the water that day. And that's only the beginning.
In his celebrated memoir, Woodbrook, published in 1974, he recounts this and other sensual incidents. The book's combination of history, evocation of place, love story and poetic writing made a huge impression on readers. To devotees, it's a special book.
Thomson was a Scotsman, though born in India. He came from a well-connected family, but rejected his privileged background and became a lifelong egalitarian. This spirit is all over his writing. In later life, he famously preferred the company of Camden’s homeless to the district’s literati. He was once refused admission to his own family’s mansion, and then converted it to a hotel.
Thomson studied history in Oxford in the early 1930s, and then took a job as tutor – and later farm hand – in Roscommon, before becoming a BBC radio producer in 1943. He went on to write 13 books.
I was drawn into the Thomson world, his lyrical powers, the story of a foreigner who arrives to teach, falls in love, absorbs the countryside and landscape, the history and the beliefs of a part of Ireland, sensitively chronicles the fortunes of a family, and the decline of the Anglo-Irish class. The book inspired me to make a radio programme for RTÉ Radio in 1986, The Story of Woodbrook.
At the John McGahern International Seminar in Carrick-on-Shannon in May 2013, tribute was paid to Thomson on the 25th anniversary of his death. Someone said to me: “You really like this man, so why don’t you write a book about him?” Then I met a local woman, Mary O’Rourke, who once nursed Thomson. She recalled him vividly to me. So the book was born.
The writing of A Delicate Wildness began in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, where Thomson's papers are kept. In its reading room I became more and more absorbed in the man, his life and the literary and broadcasting milieu he inhabited between the 1920s and 1980s. There were surprises along the way of course – dramatic letters in among the routine correspondence; interesting asides that weren't in the published works; and family secrets, of course. Special gloves were needed to handle some material, and pencils only are allowed in the special reading room.
And there were some darker moments. One day I suddenly felt fed up with the whole project. I thought, “who’d be interested in all this?” Fortunately the feeling was banished by another insight and train of thought inspired by Thomson’s great mind. An early discovery was Seamus Heaney’s letters and his writing about Thomson. These were inspirational. They also produced the title for the book when, among many marvellous thoughts, he said that David had a “delicate wildness”.
Two draft chapters completed, I knocked on the door of Lilliput Press. Antony Farrell invited me in, instructed me to make myself tea as he examined the work. After some silence, he looked up, asked a question or two, and then said “yes, I’m interested”.
Then the really hard work began. There were visits to Nairn, his northern Scottish home place, to Camden Town and different parts of England to meet his friends and his three sons. They were all so generous and enthusiastic about the project. David’s widow, Martina, encouraged me from the start and talked to me in detail right up to her death in September 2013, in her 89th year.
David Thomson turned out to be even more interesting than I had thought. He had openness about his feelings, vulnerability, and suffered serious mental health issues throughout his life. But he was always able to bounce back – and produce great human, perceptive and scholarly work.
I was struck by the admiration and love others had for him – Martina’s devotion till the day she died; the passion he engendered in other women in his life. Then there’s his power as a writer: McGahern said a year after David’s death that he wrote with a “rare sweetness and gentleness”, that Woodbrook was “an Indian summer of our literature – one that will never fade”. Heaney quoted Yeats in saying Thomson had “something to perfection brought”.
The bulk of the book is an examination of the works themselves. It required digging deep into the texts – a most rewarding task. I marvelled how, in Nairn in Darkness and Light, he could make the recollection of childhood so profound, so thought-provoking – and amusing; how in his autobiographical fiction he could lay his own soul bare; how in Woodbrook he could celebrate a bygone era, a life, a place and its traditions so unforgettably; how in The People of the Sea, he could write so engagingly about travels through Ireland and Scotland exploring beliefs about the animal kingdom.
It’s a big job getting the word count up to 65,000. You dig deep in your brain; summon all the analytical powers you have. A year, a “eureka moment” or two along the way – at all hours of the day or night – and the manuscript was done.
And what do I think now that thanks to Lilliput Press, the finished product is in the shops – and I spy to see what shelf it’s on? I feel relief. Satisfaction. And doubt too – because I wonder could I have written a better book.
But getting this chance to chronicle a fascinating life has been a privilege. Thomson could change your life too.
