Ireland holds a literary fascination for writers from abroad who will give readings during the upcoming Kilkenny Arts Festival, writes Colm Tobin
IN THE SPRING of 2006 the novelist Andrew Sean Greer came to Stanford University, which is outside San Francisco, to give a reading. He began by reading a section of his novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which had come out two years earlier. The section dealt with the San Francisco earthquake, an event which was about to face its centenary.
It was a master-class in how to combine serious research with strong characterisation, and a lightness of tension between the two. He took us through the 1906 earthquake from its earliest rumble, the first collapsing buildings, the fires spreading, where his characters were, how they heard the news, and what they did. He read with passion and an instinct for the dramatic moment. It was clear that the students of creative writing present and most of the staff were impressed by the graphic way in which he managed to evoke the period and make the characters come alive as well.
And then he stopped and smiled, and said that he had an apology to make. He hoped he had not fooled anybody, he said. What he had just read, he explained, was from his dustbin, or the place where words now go when you press the delete button. The section he had just read, he said, had almost brought his novel to its knees. He had spent so long doing meticulous research, charting the earthquake minute by minute. And he had spent so long integrating his characters into those minutes. But, when he read it over, he discovered that it was no use. He was sorry, he said, if any of us had liked what he read. It was rubbish.
He then proceeded to read from the published novel, where the characters are miles away from the earthquake, an event which provides them merely with an excuse not to go back to the city. Thus they can fulfil their destiny. The earthquake is something in the distance, a piece of news. It is the characters and their unlikely love which matter.
This was a master-class in how little public life can affect a novel, and how much, on the other hand, it can intrude on a delicate narrative. It was a lesson to novelists busy doing research for novels, and it said, stop, look at your sentences, think of your characters. Let them breathe. Do not grip the tender hearts of your imagined characters and your lovely words in the hard hand of history.
It was clear to me that evening that Greer, who lives in San Francisco, is an unusual creature - an American writer who does not teach in a university. Most American writers have to teach; it is the only way they can get health insurance, the only way they can live.
But in the city of San Francisco there is still a remnant of the energy and anarchism that the Beat poets and hippies brought to the city 40 years ago. Many people live in cheap accommodation because there is rent control; there is a health service in the city for people below a certain income. It is possible to be a writer there and to wander the streets freely, and not see a student from one end of the year to the next.
Thus writers such as Amy Tan, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers, August Kleinzahler and Andrew Sean Greer live in or near the city. They are the ones whose names we know. In every cafe on almost every street corner, tables are taken up by lone, severe-looking, mysterious and anonymous figures who are writing the great novels and poems of the future. They are there all day, thousands of them. No one seems to tell them they should go and get a job.
Some writers who teach really hate it. One night in a bar in San Francisco I listened to one such figure moaning about his classes, and the students he had to put up with. He implored me to do a class for him. I was new to the business and must have been in a good book, but I agreed. When I arrived at his campus, he asked whether I would mind if one of his colleagues sat in on the class, and disappeared.
The colleague was a young Chinese woman. She watched me with an exacting sort of sympathy as I wrestled with the students. She had an extraordinary aura, a presence which was alert, alive. She looked like someone on whom nothing was ever lost. Afterwards, when I asked my friend who she was, he told me she was Yiyun Li. On the way back to the city we stopped and I bought her book A Thousand Years of Good Prayers - a collection of stories set in contemporary China. I am not alone in thinking the stories are masterpieces; the book has won many prizes, including the Frank O'Connor Prize in Ireland, but Yiyun Li, because of immigration problems, could not travel to collect it. Earlier this year, I was back in Stanford and discovered that Yiyun Li could now travel. I was delighted to be able to invite her to read at the Kilkenny Arts Festival.
One day in January I was crossing the street in San Francisco when I saw some guys coming towards me. One of them was John Freeman. Freeman, though he doesn't look the part (he is young and very good-looking), is one of the most powerful book critics in the United States; his reviews are syndicated and appear all over the country. When he suggested I come and have coffee with him and his friends, I agreed. You don't mess with John Freeman.
They were going to someone's apartment between Noe and Market, a block from mine. It was one of those dream spaces that every writer longs for. A place untidy with hardback books and pictures; an apartment full of light with many rooms. Slowly, I realised I was in the apartment of the writer Rabih Alameddine. I had just read his novel The Hakawati, an enormously inventive and brilliant book, filled with sprawling stories that resemble folk tales and also with moments of pure, careful truth.
He looked at me with his vast, ironic gaze. For the rest of my stay in San Francisco, he took immense pleasure in telling anyone who would listen that he had found me wandering alone in the streets. Just two blocks away, he said, Andrew Sean Greer was living; he lent me a proof copy of Greer's new novel The Story of a Marriage. I remember that I took the book home and began it the next day. The novel, set in the 1950s, tells the story of a woman who is offered money by a man, an ex-lover of her husband's, if she will let her husband go, and it sits in that beautiful space full of moral ambiguity where Henry James was once comfortable.
I was so desperate to find out what happened in the end that I decided not to go out that Saturday night to a gay bar called Drunk and Horny, to which I am devoted. In other words, I found the book totally engrossing.
For these three writers - Greer from the east coast of America, Li from China, Alameddine from Lebanon - who had found freedom in San Francisco, Ireland, as a literary place, has considerable power and fascination. Li, for example, used the stories of William Trevor as an essential tool in her move to writing in English. For them, the tradition of literary fiction in Ireland, from James Joyce to Anne Enright, is of vital importance. Thus inviting each of them to come to Ireland for the first time, to read at Kilkenny Arts Festival, will provide me not only with a way of sharing my discovery of three significant contemporary writers and powerful literary presences, but a way for them to take a look at the landscape which has made its way into so many influential dreams.
Yiyun Li is reading with Deirdre Madden at St Canice's Cathedral at the Kilkenny Arts Festival on Saturday August 9th at 1pm; Rabih Alameddine and Andrew Sean Greer are at the Parade Tower on Sunday 17th at 6pm. Booking is at 056-7752175