"I WAS a very precocious child. I read Freud when I was seven. It was like reading a fairy tale. There was a man who thought he was a wolf." Elizabeth Wassell is delicate and elphin in appearance, almost like a fairy tale character herself. Her first novel, The Honey Plain, is full of mythic references of the impish variety, including a pair of lovers on the run called Dermot and Grania, a society of eccentric feminists who worship Sheela na Gigs, and several larger than life summer school characters.
A New Yorker whose ethnic background is a mixture of "Eastern European Jewish, French and English, but no Irish", Elizabeth now finds herself in the ironic position of feeling most at home in Ireland. "I never felt like a real American. My family was very European. When I came to Ireland it was like a homecoming. I was ignited in Ireland. I love the landscape and the tight. Ireland inspires me in a very special way."
Her reason for coming to Ireland is that she and her companion, poet John Montague, spend long summers in an old farmhouse, three miles from Ballydehob in west Cork. There is a garden full of singing birds and colourful fuchsia bushes, and an old barn which will one day house John's library.
During the American spring semester, John is "distinguished writer in residence" at the New York State Writers' Institute in Albany, which is presided over by an Irish American novelist, William Kennedy (author of Ironweed). This is the part of the year Elizabeth least enjoys: "America is not where I belong. It is very self absorbed. I find it very hard to get The Irish Times. I know Ireland is insular in its own way but in Ireland I still have more of a sense of belonging to the real world. I never feel isolated from the news in Ireland."
Elizabeth has a genteel, old fashioned exactness about her speech which makes her sound like a heroine from a novel by Henry James, so it is hardly surprising that she feels out of place in modern day New York. Nevertheless, she received a grounding in fiction writing there which meant a lot to her. As an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence, she took classes with the acclaimed comic, short story writer Grace Paley. During her MA in creative writing at New York's City College, she was taught by Edna O'Brien: "Grace Paley was my first real mentor, and Edna O'Brien was wonderful".
Elizabeth started writing at an early age because her psychoanalyst mother was "far too interested in scrutinising my inner life and telling me what it all meant. I wanted to have my own voice."
After university she tried a succession of different jobs, always trying to "buy time to write".
These included university lecturing, copywriting, waitressing and trying her hand at being a restaurant critic. Some of her stories were published in magazines and she wrote a first novel which was "unpublishable": "The only way you can learn how to write a novel is to write one. And I did learn all about dialogue and chapters and things."
For this novel, The Honey Plain: "I wanted to write about love and I wanted to make the novel funny." She was inspired by a desire to create the male equivalent of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina: "These heroines created by Flaubert and Tolstoy have a kind of emotional disease, an excessive romanticism which appears to be ardour but is really sentimental. Dermot, the hero of my novel, is similar. He has affairs but love continues to elude him. He can't get close to a woman. If he does, his ideal of her is tarnished. He eventually realises that love has to be ordinary.
THE Honey Plain centres on the man tat breakdown experienced by Dermot, a literary man, and his awakening into a whole new world of love with Grania, a younger, like minded American. "Like all novels, it emerges to some degree from life, but it deals with the truth of the emotions rather than fact. If Dermot is based on anyone, it is me, because I have been excessively romantic in the past.
"There are so many memoirs written as though they were novels nowadays, like Angelo's Ashes, that it is difficult for people to tell the difference. And Ireland is so small, it is hard for you to be anonymous, even if you want to be."
One fixture of Irish summer life which she has encountered many times in John's company, and which is a significant ingredient in the book, is the phenomenon of the summer school: "I wanted to write about summer schools. They are so silly and funny and marvellous. There have been a lot of novels written about academics but no one has written about the summer school."
She decided that a series of summer schools (complete with zany and pompous academics fresh faced American undergraduates and plenty of opportunities for what one of her characters refers to euphemistically as "hang gliding") would be excellent settings for the travels of her modern day Dermot and Grania in their perambulations around Ireland. "The original Diarmuid and Grainne travel from stone bed to stone bed. I decided to have my Dermot and Grania travel from summer school to summer school instead."
The "schools" include the Hag of Beare Summer School, the Glee by the Lee, the Drumlin Summer School and the Honey Plain School. There is also a rundown of some of the real schools, such as the Yeats, Merriman, Synge and John Hewitt schools.
The title of her novel came to her one day as she and John were driving through Tipperary. He told her that the Irish translation of Clonmel is "honey plain": "John also mentioned casualty that the Honey Plain was the name of the old Irish paradise. I was haunted by the fact that there remained in the Irish consciousness the idea of a land of honey, a pagan paradise where the bawdy and the spiritual can coexist."
She was also struck by the very different view of relationships in Ireland which emerged during the heated debate around the divorce referendum: "I felt that for people to remain in an unhappy marriage is really not what they should be doing. I was married before I met John. I know what it's like. People have the right and the responsibility to love."
SHE notes that "harsh puritanism and sentimentality are both the enemies of real feeling, involving easy judgments and easy tears. It is more important to look at what real people are doing, in anguish and torment, trying to love."
But her novel is not intended to dwell for long on pain. It is laced with irreverent hum our. The members of the Sheela na Gig Society genuflect before their icon; a woman has "eyes listing to starboard like a couple of sailors on shore leave"; a loquacious Cork summer school organiser explains: "I'm a hoor for the rococo"; and at the end of the book there is some merrily neat couple swapping to ensure that no one is left alone and miserable.
Elizabeth's comic role model is not so much David Lodge (with whom she is compared on the cover blurb of the book) but more Evelyn Waugh: I like Waugh's comic sense. It is ironic rather than satirical."
She is not unhappy to be publishing her first novel at 40: "Poetry is the terrain of the prodigy. It takes novelists longer to find their own voice. I think you have to go through a journey into the underworld."
