IN the early 1980s, I was in Budapest as a somewhat unlikely delegate at a meeting of the Conference on Security and Co operation in Europe. The CSCE conferences, set up as part of the Helsinki Agreement, were, despite their name, usually highly insecure, and displayed scant signs of co operation, and this one, coming as it did after the collapse of the Reagan Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik, was no exception. It was supposed to be on the theme of literature, but the proceedings consisted almost entirely of grizzled hacks from the Soviet Writers Union and equally dodgy delegates from the US lobbing political insults at each other over the bowed heads of the Europeans.
I was lucky to have a friend in Budapest, a publisher, who showed me the city, invited me for dinner to his home, and filled me in on local and international (i.e., Russian) gossip. One night we had a long conversation on Europe as it was then - a very different place, at least in terms of national frontiers, to what it is today. I kept referring to "Eastern Europe", until my friend finally interrupted me to ask politely where exactly did I think Western Europe ended and the East began? "At Budapest? Prague? Vienna? at Paris?"
I took his point, and was careful never again to speak in his presence of "Western" or "Eastern" Europes, as if the Yalta conference had indeed succeeded in separating the continent permanently into two opposing blocs; for my friend, and many other Czech, Polish, Romanian, Bulgarian and, indeed, Russian intellectuals whom I talked to in subsequent years, there was and is only one Europe, no matter what this or that treaty, and the resulting lines on the maps, might suggest.
A Europe of the mind, then? The answer is a qualified yes; yes, despite the ambiguity of the question. The Europe that I inhabit, and have inhabited since I began to read at all seriously, is a construct of the imagination. The poetry of Rilke or Paul Celan speaks as directly to me as does that of Yeats and Derek Mahon; the fictions of Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka are as immediately intimate to my inner ear as those of Joyce and Beckett. Rilke and Kafka were German speaking Czechs; Mann was the son of Lubeck burghers; Celan was born in the Bukovina, wrote in German, lived, worked and died in Paris. I have spent all my life in Ireland except for a few stints abroad I read these writers in translation. I am aware of the peculiar predicament of the Irish artist, clinging to his rock on this offshore island of an offshore island. All the same, I would insist that I was a member of the European union when the European Union was still only a gleam in Jean Monnet's eye.
I am aware, too, of the perils of labelling oneself a "European writer" - in the minds of readers, this is almost as bad as being branded a "writers' writer". The "European novel" suggests to most of us the image of a nameless narrator in a nameless town pacing the floor of an anonymous hotel room ("from the window he could see the canal, and farther off, the barbed wire fence marking the Frontier . . .") desperately searching for his Identity. And it is true that postwar fiction in Europe has suffered from progressive enervation (see my colleague Eileen Battersby, wnting elsewhere on this page). The reasons for this are various: the devastations of war, the debilitating influence of coffee bar "Existentialism" which spawned the nouveaux romanciers; the intellectual repression in Russia and the Soviet satellite states; above all, perhaps, the seeming impossibility of matching the imaginative and linguistic energy of the Americans, who were continuing (and still continue) the great tradition of the English and Russian 19th century novel.
With a few, not very convincing, exceptions (Dos Passos's USA, the later poetry of 0.0. cummings), Modernism left American writers untouched. Even Hemingway, who spent his formative years in Europe - and none of whose novels is set in the United States - remained largely impervious to the siren song of "experimentalism", despite his fascination with Gertrude Stein (a fellow American, after all). American novelists were, and are, simply too busy chronicling the continuing process of nation building their country is undergoing, to have time for Modernist interiority. The novel in America - think of Bellow, Updike, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford - looks always outward, even when its hero is as introspective as a Herzog, a Rabbit Angstrom, a John Grady Cole, a Frank Bascombe, or, indeed, an Ishmael; or an Aliab.
For European writers, especially those working in the English language, the linguistic ferment in America is a cause of deep envy English in America now is undergoing the same kind of a chemical transformations that it did in Shakespeare's England. In Europe, however, English - and, I suspect, French, and German, and Italian ... - seems to be capable of little more than a sort of mopping up exercise at the end of empire.
And yet, there is in our European predicament a peculiar pathos which should be - and, to many of us, is - a source of artistic strength. I am thinking of Claudio Magris's Danube, that great lament for intellectual Mitteleuropa of Andrei Bitov's extraordinary masterpiece, Pushkin House of Roberto Calasso's retelling of the Greek myths in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony of the poetry of Geoffrey Hill and this is not even to mention Irish Writing.
In a speech delivered recently at Aachen (and printed in the current issue of the New York Review of Books), the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, who is in Ireland this weekend on a state visit, spoke movingly of his hopes for what he called "twilight Europe", pointing out that twilight is not necessarily a time of exhaustion and incipient sleep, but of thoughtful consideration of the long day's doings.
"It seems to me," he said, "the time has come for us to pause and reflect upon ourselves. I believe we are facing a great historical challenge, a challenge to grasp and put into practice at last what is implied in the word twilight. We should stop thinking of the present state of Europe as the sunset of its energy and recognise it instead as a time of contemplation when the work of the day ceases for a while as the sun goes down, the rule of thought sets in."
Good advice for all citizens but, I think, especially for writers. Perhaps the "rule of thought" may yet bring us out of the shadows of literary insecurity and narrow minded nationalism, and back to that Europe of the mind which over the centuries has produced so many superb works of literary art.