What is it about the Irish?
A
few weeks ago, on a balmy midsummer’s evening, I was a guest speaker at a talk
for the inaugural London Short Story Festival, held at Waterstone’s Piccadilly.
This three-day literary event was an expertly-run boutique festival packed with
workshops, readings and talks, all dedicated to various aspects of the art (and
craft) of the short story. The talk had the somewhat provocative moniker What
is it about the Irish? and aimed to explore, and explain, the copiousness of the Irish short
story. Sharing the panel with me were writers Claire Keegan, Colin Barrett and
Mary Costello, none of whom I had met before, with proceedings chaired by the
event’s director, Paul McVeigh, who is himself a writer of short stories and
novels.
Prior
to the talk, I had given this assertion-framed-as-a-question a lot of thought.
I re-read Anne Enright’s feature on the same subject, which, as editor of the
Granta Book of the Irish Short Story, she had penned for the Guardian in
November 2010. Enright makes some astute observations in this feature (I
particularly liked her point that in their self-containment short stories ‘are
the cats of literary forms’) though the exact reasons as to why Irish writers,
in particular, would seem to be so adept at the short story form ultimately
elude her. (In fairness, the feature is more an account of Enright’s selection
process for the Granta anthology) But then, are we really that good? Of the two
most high-profile prizes offered annually to short story collections, the Frank
O’Connor International Short Story Prize and the Edge Hill Short Story Prize,
since 2007 two Irish writers have won the Frank O’Connor award, Edna O’Brien
with Saints and Sinners in 2011, and Colin Barratt with Young Skins this year, while Irish writers
have scooped three Edge Hill Short Story Prizes in the past seven years: Colm
Toibin, Claire Keegan, Kevin Barry. While ‘world domination’ might be
overstating the matter somewhat, clearly, when it comes to the short story, the
claim that Irish writers rank as (being among) the best in the world is a claim
with solid foundation.
During
the discussion, I suggested that perhaps the roots of this national
precociousness lie in the fact that Ireland has a much-celebrated oral
tradition. But of course, many cultures have this. And while we have a
‘founding’ legend in The Tain, composed as it is of tragedies, histories and
heroic tales, so too do other cultures (The Mabinogion, Beowulf, The Bhagavad
Gita etc), and who of us in Ireland have actually been raised on stories from The Tain?
(Enough for the tales to have entered our bloodstream and become a source for
short story writing?) I would say not many. The bedtime stories read to me as a
child were by Hans Christian Anderson or the Brothers Grimm. I knew the name
Rumpelstiltskin long before I’d heard of Cú Chulainn.[1]
In
retrospect, I might also have suggested the Catholic upbringing of those of us
who grew up in the Republic. Lorca often cited the Catholic mass as the root of
his dramas, with its delineated acts (climaxing in transubstantiation), in
which everyone shakes hands and goes home at the end. That’s pretty much the
shape of a lot of short stories, too. Joyce saw his own writing as mass-like,
and once asked his brother Stanilaus
Don’t you think there is a certain resemblance
between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean that I am
trying in my [poems] to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or
spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of daily life into something that
has a permanent artistic life of its own…for their mental, moral, and spiritual
uplift.
Nonetheless,
there are lots of largely Catholic populations/countries, and they don’t all
produce great short story writers. So perhaps the drama of the mass is not the
culprit either.
Claire
Keegan had many fascinating things to say about the short story and Irish
writers. She said that she considered the Irish to be ‘a covert people’, that
the ‘talker’ in Irish society is often called ‘the fool’ – and that the hidden
stories, those to be kept quiet from the rest of the fold, find their outings
in short fiction. I’ve thought a lot about this in the days since the festival,
and I’m not entirely convinced. The stereotype of the ‘cute whoor’ is known to
all of us who live in Ireland – but such a character exists in many cultures
(the cute whoor appears frequently in Dickens’ novels but as his/her English
counterpart: the sly and wily cockney). I honestly don’t think you can
generalise about an entire populace (though we do this all the time in Ireland;
summing up our countrymen/women is a national pastime - but God help anyone
else who does it). And speaking personally, I am closer to having Tourette's
syndrome than being particularly covert (‘whatever you say say nothing’ etc).
But presuming this master of the short story form is dead right about us Irish,
and we are a covert people, and the roots of the story are, as Keegan states,
in ‘a reluctance to reveal’ – are the Irish really any shadier in character
than anyone else? I doubt it. David Foster Wallace said ‘fiction’s about what
it is to be a fucking human being’ - while Frank O’Connor said that ‘there is
in the short story at its most characteristic something we don't often find in
the novel, an intense awareness of human loneliness.’ I consider that the Irish
write about exactly the same things as non-Irish short story writers – human
isolation, the deep, dark moments between people - but, the question remains,
why do we do it so well?
Perhaps
there is a flaw in the question, in the premise itself. I think so. A little.
Yes. For the question contains in it an element of astonishment. As if the
Irish should be surprised at their own success. The UK and US have produced
their fair share of great short story writers (when I list my own favourites it
is Americans who top the list) but I bet neither US or UK writers wonder at all
about their evident skill. Still, Ireland has an indisputably strong record for
a small (divided) island (in which the people in the South of the island do not
always have a great awareness of the literary doings of the people in the North
of the island and vice-a-versa) on the edge of Europe. Could the answer be less
to do with supposed national characteristics and more to do with geography and
history? For various reasons (mainly consistent economic disaster), over the
past few hundred years there has been much traffic out of the country to the
countries that flank our own – the UK, the US, Europe (France mostly) – hence
the canvas for a writer in Ireland is much broader than it should be for a
small island. Most Irish writers I know love American writing, they reference
US writers as ‘influences’ all the time. Irish writers just have some kind of
weird spiritual connection to the US. I am no different. I read far more
American short stories than Irish ones (Flannery O’Connor, Carver, Ernest
Hemingway, William Gay, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Poe, Lorrie
Moore). In fact, the Ulster Gothic ‘category’ that my own stories have occasionally
been placed in by readers or critics probably owes much more to the Southern
American Gothic stories that I have read over the years than to Irish fiction –
yet I am still intrinsically an Irish writer. So, perhaps it is a case
that the Irish short story is, especially now, when the populace is on the
march again, engaging at a very deep level not just with itself but (as
emigration has returned with a vengeance) with the American short story, the
British short story and perhaps, more recently, with Canadian and Australian
short stories, too.
While
Ireland produces fantastic short story writers it also produces world-class
novelists, playwrights, poets. We (as in the editorial we) are simply very good
at writing. And I think we’ve become good at writing because writing is the last free
art.[2]
Whereas England is choc-full of drama schools, music (opera, classical, musical
theatre) schools, art schools, dance (contemporary, classical, Jazz) schools,
Ireland is not. And while the number of degree programmes in music, dance, film
and drama are, thankfully, increasing (though Trinity College suspended its
Acting degree a few years ago), I still think artistic creativity in Ireland
more often than not enters one of two channels: visual arts (currently thriving
in Ireland,
check out the work of Richard Mosse at the recent Venice Biennale) - or
writing. To study other art forms (music, dance, film) you often have to study
abroad; the training is not in Ireland, at least not at the same level and
multiplicity of choice as in the UK, for instance. So, it would appear that
‘writing’ mops up much of the creative energy in Ireland because it is, well,
free. Anyone can pick up a pen and write. You don’t need to be trained to do it. You
can teach yourself. (And writers in the UK also have the lure of writing for
TV, film and television, which is not as great a draw in Ireland due to the
comparatively small size of the Irish TV & Film industry.) In England, a
creative kid might go to any number of schools or classes; in Ireland a
creative kid (very generally speaking) goes to a drawing class or starts
writing at home - or forms a band. And add into the mix the fact that there is
an awful lot to write about in Ireland. Especially since the collapse of the
economy in 2008. In her Guardian feature, Anne Enright discusses why
contemporary Irish short story writers do not have the concerns of the likes of
O’Faolain and O’Connor, stating that
Of course, things are different in the 21st
century, now that poverty has been banished (or was, for a whole decade) and
the success of our writers is officially a matter of national pride.
The
feature is written before the disclosure of many of the Church abuse scandals, the high-profile symphysiotomy law suits,
the Savita
Halappanavar tragedy, the Tuam babies revelations – and before it became
blatantly clear that Ireland’s guaranteeing of bondholders after the collapse
of the Lehmans’ Bank (and the ensuing deal with the IMF/ECB) would officially
plunge the country into an economic abyss. So really, things are not that
different in the 21st Century for contemporary Irish short story
writers. Except that now the canvas is very wide – and is black as coal.
Another
reason that might explain the success of the Irish short story is this: we are
a small tribal country and we all pretty much know each other’s business and
so, as writers (in Ireland), we can offer our stories detail and a sense of truth that,
perhaps, those living in much larger communities are less in a position to
offer. Sam Shepard came from a village in the US of less than five hundred
people and much of his writing is about the people he knew there. Place plays
an important role. Just as in Irish poetry – where Kavanagh has Inniskeen,
Heaney has Annahorish, Michael Longley has Carrigsweewaun – John McGahern
endlessly references the flora and fauna of Leitrim, Eugene McCabe features the
Monaghan lakes and boglands, Joyce charts the topography of Dublin. Authentic
detail is very necessary for story writing; you can’t be general in a story,
you have to be
specific.
*
An
audience member during the LSSF talk wondered why the Irish stories he’d heard
on the radio of late were all so dark. I think he was Irish himself and had
lived in London a long time and felt that the stories he had listened to had
‘no light’ and failed to reflect the Ireland of his memory. Perhaps he was also
trying to say, in his own way, that these stories were selected by radio
producers with an agenda: to make Ireland look bad etc (for whatever reason).
Needless to say, his question – and assertion - caused a bit of a stir. But the
truth is that contemporary Irish stories (especially those written in the
post-Lehmans post-Linehan era) are dark because right now Ireland is a pretty
dark place (pick up a newspaper). The darkness is inevitably going to permeate
(in some way) the art produced here – and contemporary Irish short story
writers are, it would seem, channelling this pain. It might be argued that we are doing
exactly what Peadar O’Donnell, Frank O’Connor, Sean O’Faolain told their
contributors to do when they edited The Bell in the 1940s, which was (like
the ethos of Faber’s Geoffrey Grigson) to encourage work that reflected the
true socio-economic picture of a (then) resurgent Ireland. They told writers to
give them – if not exactly full-on romans à clef – then stories about
…the throbbing engines of the Shannon scheme -
or the Beet factories. This may be unpleasant; depressing; suggestive of a
phase that other countries are sick of. There it is. We have to accept it…(the
images) are significant because they are true to life.
As
an Irish writer I feel that I cannot ignore the recession and its effects for
the simple reason that the recession is not ignoring me.
Finally,
the question-as-title of the talk at Waterstone’s (What is it about the
Irish?)
suggests a lot more than it asks. For there is, I consider, a veritable
explosion in new Irish writing. Emerging and newly-established authors are
producing stories, collections, debut novels at a phenomenal rate. Something is going on. And Paul McVeigh at
the LSSF has picked up on this. When I began to write plays in 2002 I saw the
same explosion in new playwriting then as I am witnessing in short-fiction
writing in Ireland now. The likes of Kevin Barry, Colum McCann, Desmond Hogan,
Claire Keegan are now established masters of the short story form. Before them
were writers such as Eugene McCabe, Colm Toibin, Edna O’Brien – all of whom are
still producing stunning work. But there are new kids on the block: Colin
Barrett, Mary Costello, Alan McMonagle, Danielle McLaughlin, Nuala Ni Choncuir,
Bernie McGill, Paul McVeigh, Billy O’Callaghan - the list is long and I am only
naming people here whose work I have read or have heard good things about.
There are many others. Perhaps ‘world domination’ of the Irish in the short
story form might not be an overstatement after all.
Jaki
McCarrick’s
debut collection of stories, The Scattering (Seren) was shortlisted for this
year’s Edge Hill Prize.
Links:
What
is it about the Irish? At The 2014 London Short Story Festival:
[1] In a
recent interview at the Dalkey book festival, Salman Rushdie talked about being
raised on Indian stories (only one small portion of these being The Arabian
Nights). He
said these tales played an important part in his genesis as a writer.
[2] Samuel Beckett’s theory on Irish writing
success was down to ‘the British
and the priests. They have buggered us into glory. When you are in the ditch,
all you can do is sing.’
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