First Published: The Irish Times, October 20, 2009

WHEN JOHN CORIGLIANO’S opera The Ghosts of Versailles premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera just before Christmas 1991, it was immediately hailed as one of the major musical events not only of the year but of that still-young decade. The run sold out immediately. In the courtyards and foyers of the Met, opera lovers begged for tickets. In the box office, they drew up a waiting list. Inside the house from the first night on, reported the New York Times , “there was the kind of excitement rare at opera premieres.

Listeners walked up the aisles at the intermission discussing their favourite arias and ensembles”. It had arrived, said the critics; the great new American opera they had been waiting for, and it had come courtesy of a New Yorker, a Brooklynite, who had never written an opera before.

Nor has he written one since. There have been more than 100 scores – symphonies, concerti, film scores, works for voice, orchestra and electronics – and there has been huge acclaim; as the awards lined up on the mantel of his Manhattan studio testify, Corigliano is, at 71, one of the most significant composers working in the US today. There’s an Oscar there, for the score to Francois Girard’s The Red Violin (1997). There’s a Bafta for the score to an earlier film, Revolution, in 1986. There’s the Grawemeyer Award for his Symphony No 1 (1991), a powerful elegy for friends lost to Aids, and there’s the Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No 2 (2001). And there are three Grammy Awards, among them the gong Corigliano won in 1999 for the recording of Mr Tambourine Man , his vocal work based on the lyrics of Bob Dylan.

Looming over them all is a framed poster from that 1991 premiere of The Ghosts of Versailles , an image that weaves together the strands of eeriness, enchantment and lunatic energy that make the opera such a rarity – and such a rich riot. Audiences at the Wexford Festival Opera will see this tapestry for themselves when a new performing version of Ghosts (a co-production with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis which premiered in June at the Opera Theatre of St Louis, Missouri) opens the 58th festival tomorrow night.

Ghosts is set between worlds supernatural, theatrical and historical which intermingle – and, crucially, interfere – with each other in the setting of Marie Antoinette’s private theatre in the palace of Versailles. Historical time scarcely ever comes to bear on the opera, only enough to give us the sense that these ghosts have been ghosts for the 200 years since their deaths during the French Revolution.

Among the ghosts are Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis XVI, as well as the playwright Beaumarchais, author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro , and also of a later play, The Guilty Mother, on which Corigliano’s librettist, William M Hoffman, based Ghosts : another mingling or muddling of reality and imagination. The character of Beaumarchais has fallen madly in love with the ghost of the executed queen, and for her he creates and stages a new opera, featuring the familiar characters of Figaro and the Almaviva family, who attempt to change the course of history and save the queen from her fate.

But “history as it should have been” is no less straightforward than history as it truly was, as Beaumarchais discovers when his creations begin to depart from his careful script.

That Corigliano is still intensely involved with the opera, 18 years later, that he is still proud of it, that he is still convinced of the rightness of its meditations on change and power and responsibility; all this is obvious from the fluency and frankness with which he talks about it, and about the process of first bringing it into being with Hoffman, at the suggestion of the conductor James Levine. But it will remain his only opera, Corigliano says. And in a way, it’s a wonder that a Corigliano opera came about at all.

“It’s a funny situation,” Corigliano says. “The genesis of this was so strange. I met James Levine about a project for voice and orchestra that had nothing to do with opera, because I didn’t want to write an opera. Because I knew how long it took, and I knew that if it wasn’t an absolute hit, it wouldn’t get done again, because of the economics of it being a whole evening and so expensive.”

But Levine, hearing these reservations, was not to be swayed; even in 1979 when they first had that conversation, Levine knew that something spectacular would be needed to mark the Met’s centenary in 1991. And he knew that he wanted that something spectacular to be a new opera, given that the Met had not commissioned one in decades. “So, he said to me, well, what would you do if you did an opera, and I said I would do a buffa. And that’s when he got really surprised, because in this day and age, people don’t think of that as a valid way of expressing things. Since the German Romantic period, music is deadly serious, and it’s full of angst and sorrow. And God knows I’ve written pieces like that, like my first symphony.

“But I said, no, I want joy in the opera house. I think that, physically, a buffa can affect you in a wonderful way and I wanted to do that.” Also, he knew, the buffa convention would corner him into writing the kind of opera he wanted to write – one teeming over with arias, ensembles, solo pieces, duets, rather than what Corigliano describes as the “wash of line”, the pure flow, that constitutes some modern opera, out of which the audience can fix upon nothing, say, to hum to themselves as they walk the aisles of the Met or the Wexford Opera House during intermission.

“You know, inflected words that never become arias, never become melodies, never become pieces,” he says. “I think that, especially in a form that’s as large as opera, [with] things that last two and a half hours, it’s more important than any place else to actually compartmentalise, and write things that have beginnings, middles and ends. Because otherwise, the flow is wonderful, but you don’t remember anything.”

Corigliano’s stance seems strikingly old-fashioned, even populist; later, talking about the impact that 20th century composition made upon what is generically called “classical” music, he is equally forthright about the dangers of what he describes as “writing in a certain way, writing in a very highly intellectual process that was incomprehensible”. Incomprehensible, that is, to the audience.

“If you’re just going to sit and watch the back of somebody waving his hands, and a bunch of people in black suits playing, that’s not really enough,” says Corigliano. “If nobody can hear the music unless they know the rules, you cut the audience out of the process.” Yet Ghosts is hardly buffa-by-numbers, hardly a gentle carousel of one hummable aria after another. It opens with a nerve-jangling, jumpy evocation of an unhappy afterlife, then moves into sharply ironic borrowings from Mozart and Rossini, throwing in a high-camp take-off of Turkish wind music, some utterly haunting arias and ensembles (you will hear Once There Was a Golden Bird and O God of Love in your head for days afterwards), some 50 kazoos and perhaps the heaviest leaning on an electronic synthesizer ever witnessed in a production originally commissioned by the Met.

With characters who watch an opera even as they are part of one, who construct fictions of the past even as they themselves represent – and parody – such fictions, Ghosts is an opera as much about opera, and about perceptions of what opera should and should not be, as it is about its ostensible subjects, the frazzled phantoms and fragments of a violent revolution. Corigliano himself has described Ghosts as standing for “an anti-modernist view”, as confronting modernism in every sense – musical as well as historical – and finding it wanting. “It’s an opera about different kinds of change,” he says. “And the change of the French Revolution, that violent change where you just create rubble and build something new by ignoring the past, is different to the kind of change that uses the past, remembers it, and then blends it with the present and the future as it goes forward.”

Yet there is also a strong warning within Ghosts , against the path of resisting change, resisting the modern. In the liberties it takes, and the parodies it makes, when it comes to beloved operatic characters – Figaro, Susanna, the Count and Countess and Cherubino – Ghosts warns against the imprisonment of opera, and classical music, in an airless garden of the past.

“It’s funny, because of the subject, but I think it’s a very American piece, in that way,” says Corigliano. “We’re standing back, in a way that perhaps European artists would not, from that tradition. We love it, but at the same time, we also think some of it is a little ridiculous, and, you know, it’s that combination, and I think that’s probably partly from being an American, and out of the culture, and growing up that way.” When the opera premiered, successful as it was, Corigliano encountered what he saw as some resistance to its anti-modernist stance, some disapproval, from European companies who did not travel to see it, even when it was produced in Hannover. But that has changed now. And, in the 18 years since the ghosts first walked the stage of the Met, the realities of change and responsibility have shifted, become more troubled, too.

“ Ghosts talks about what happens if you change things in a fundamentalist manner, in a dogmatic way, and how destructive that is, and that there are other ways to do it,” says Corigliano. “More than ever, we are seeing a world that is changing rapidly. You know, right now, across town, Obama is sitting down to talk to the UN about nuclear disarmament, to change things that way, rather than to change things the other way. So we are talking about two different kinds of change. And more and more we’re seeing around the world that French Revolution version of change, where if you’re not with us, you die. But the minute you have an idea that there’s only one way for anything, whether it’s musical or political, you end up in a very bad situation. You end up with intolerance. And then, only bad things can happen.”

New York, October 2009

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, October 10, 2009

EARLY ON AN October Saturday the landscape around Eagle Pond Farm, near Wilmot in the state of New Hampshire, is astonishing to drive through. This is the famous New England fall in all its glory, and it is almost too beautiful for words. But only almost: “These colours were the most outrageous, crimson and bright orange and Chinese red. The birches turned russet, and the oaks a deeper brown-red. We floated on the bliss of the natural world.”

Those are the words of Donald Hall, poet laureate of the United States in 2006-7 and the author of 16 collections of poetry, as well as of several memoirs and essay collections. When Hall wrote those words, in his 2005 memoir The Best Day the Worst Day , he was recalling the first autumn he and his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, spent together at Eagle Pond Farm. That first fall of theirs was in 1975, when the couple, recently married, took leave of absence from their life in the academic and literary whirls of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, where Hall taught poetry at the university.

The plan was to camp out in the house in which Hall’s maternal grandparents had lived, and in which he had been so happy during childhood summers: a clapboard farmhouse dating back to the first years of the 19th century and heated only – and bear in mind that New Hampshire winters plunge regularly towards 20 below zero – by a solitary wood stove not much younger than the house.

Hall and Kenyon continued to float on the bliss of worlds natural, and poetic, and private, for the next 20 years; Eagle Pond Farm, which had always been the “poetry house” to Hall in his boyhood, became the home of their hearts and of their poems, and their bliss was deep and unbroken until Kenyon’s diagnosis with leukaemia in 1994 and her death the following year. She was 47, had published four collections of poems and, at the time of her death, was poet laureate of New Hampshire. Hall, 19 years her senior, had, against the odds, survived an aggressive cancer just two years previously. At the close of The Best Day the Worst Day , which is a memoir of their life together and of Kenyon’s illness and death, Hall writes that still, at Eagle Pond Farm, Kenyon fills the air around him “like a rainy day”.

And that is the case, too, on a day like today, a brilliantly bright day, when the blue sky is caught and deepened in the waters of Eagle Pond, with those leaves crimson and russet and Chinese red seeming to ignite along its edges. At 10am Hall is at the door of his farmhouse with a welcoming wave, and a few minutes later he is settled into a blue chair by the sitting-room window, its sill piled with books and papers, while Louise, a slip of a cat with a dainty, interrupting mewl, curls herself around everything in sight.

Now 81, Hall moves slowly on his feet, and he looks, if not weary, then somewhat wizened – in his creased flannel shirt and with his beard and crown of wild grey hair, he sets you wondering whether you are looking at the likeness of one of the two men who lived in this house before him; his grandfather Wesley Wells, whose gift for storytelling first made Hall think of this as the “poetry house”, or his great-grandfather Benjamin Keneston, who was a blacksmith and who fought in the American Civil War – thus giving Wesley much fodder for his stories – and who bought the house and its farm in 1865.

Hall was first brought to this house at the age of six weeks, he says, and from the age of three or four he loved the place so much that he did not want to leave and go back to his home place of Hamden, Connecticut. By 10 he was coming up to New Hampshire for the whole summer, and it was when he was 12 that he began to write poems, in the little bedroom that is now his “extraordinarily messy” study. An older boy, a neighbour in Connecticut, had turned Hall on to Poe, Keats and Shelley, and so followed a couple of summers of writing Victorian and romantic verse while, outside, his grandparents saved the hay.

How did they feel about him being inside, sweating over sonnets, instead of out in the meadows, sweating over the scythe? They loved it, he says. And besides, he only ever wrote in the morning. “My grandmother would bring me black coffee in bed at about 6am. They would have been up for about an hour or so. And sometimes I’d join my grandpa at the haying, scything around the stone walls and the trees, but mostly I stayed in my room and I read – I read through Shakespeare one year – and worked on poems. And I remember I began to study metre. And so it was my poetry place.” He laughs. “I remember when I was 15 or so, I had a fantasy. There were a lot of old bachelors living in cabins in the woods at that time, and I had a fantasy that I would have a cabin, and trap for a living, and write all the time. And that’s not me. I’m physically inept and lazy. But I did , you know, want to spend my life doing it.”

Hall went to prep school at Phillips Exeter Academy, which was awful, he says, “a Republican universe” in which the death of Roosevelt prompted “a snake dance of joy” by the students. But if this was repugnant to Hall, practically brought up by a grandfather who, “in an absolute ocean of Republicans, was a fierce Roosevelt Democrat”, then Hall’s passion for poetry was little short of repugnant to his classmates. “It was something to be sneered at,” he says, imitating the scorn: “Ah, go and write a poem about fruit.” However, Hall, who had by then moved on from Keats and Shelley to Eliot and Stevens, cared nothing for what his Exeter classmates thought, and here’s the proof: at 16 he attended the prestigious Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and met for the first time Robert Frost – almost 60 years his senior.

Was Hall intimidated? “Oh, I looked up to him enormously. He was pretty easy to talk to, but I think I pretty much listened that first time. Later he said of me, ‘I brought him up as a pup,’ referring back to that first time. Later again he read a book of mine, and he said, ‘You can do anything in poetry you want to do.’ But what he also meant was, you haven’t done it yet. And I knew that. He was a man of great vanity and jealousy, and often nastiness – not to me; I was sometimes afraid he would be, but he remained generous with me. And he was a model of endurance and perseverance. I mean, he was almost 40 before anybody knew his name; he was unpublished in the US, virtually, except for school magazines.”

It was largely through working on just such a magazine – the Advocate , at Harvard – that Hall met a group of young poets who would become his extraordinary contemporaries: John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara and Adrienne Rich.

“ God , Harvard,” he says. “None of us knew we would ever publish a book, but we took it very seriously. We would stay up late arguing over whether one poem was good enough to go in our magazine. It was incredibly stimulating. We argued all the time.” (The only poem he really remembers publishing in the Advocate was Ashbery’s Some Trees .)

After Harvard came Oxford, where Hall earned a BLitt and, for his poem Exile , won the university’s Newdigate Prize. That got him a mention in Time magazine. And that, in turn, got him out of going to war. “This is a sort of sordid story, but my father, unbeknownst to me, brought the Time issue down to the local draft board, and I was deferred.”

Instead of going to Korea he spent a year at Stanford, working with Yvor Winters, and three years on fellowship at Harvard. While there he published Exiles and Marriages , his first collection, and edited an important anthology of new English and American poetry.

A teaching job at the University of Michigan followed soon afterwards, and it was while teaching a poetry workshop there that he encountered Kenyon, then 22 and already a striking poet. It seems Hall had made an impression on her even before they met; after her death, in a notebook from her undergrad years, he found this line: “When I found out Donald Hall lives three houses away I felt like I did when I found that Dublin was a Viking stronghold.”

They married in 1972 and soon moved to a stronghold all their own. Hall never returned to Ann Arbor, nor to teaching. He and Kenyon gave their lives to their poetry, and when they needed money Hall wrote magazine articles, textbooks, children’s books. He has written of his marriage to Kenyon as a “double solitude”; Kenyon in her study all day, Hall in his own, the house humming with the combined energies of their works in progress. “Once a year I’d knock on her door,” says Hall, without the trace of a joke. “Only if there was something I had to interrupt her for. Otherwise, there was that privacy, separation, during writing time. We might meet at the coffee maker, have a cup of coffee, just pat each other on the butt, and not talk. And at night, she’d be over there , reading Keats, and I’d be here, reading Gibbon, and mostly there was silence.”

Silence remains Hall’s most natural element. After Kenyon’s death he wrote out of silence for years about her illness, about the death itself and about the long journey of grief; poems that populated his collections Without (1998) and The Painted Bed (2002). Just as he and Kenyon did from their first years here, Hall resists company – he prefers to write letters to people, dictating several letters a day to a recording machine – than to meet them. In this context the demands on his time and energies of his year as poet laureate can only be imagined. If he has to talk he would prefer to do it by phone, though he prefers approaches to come via the fax machine that sputters incongruously in his book-lined study than by phone. Yet in conversation he is generous and gregarious, laughing with glee, telling long stories and sometimes chiding himself for having told it all before, in one of his memoirs, in an essay or in a poem. It is to show me photographs of Kenyon that he brings me into his study, where there is a whole wall dedicated to her frank, fine-boned face. “That’s foxy Jane,” he says, looking at one photograph. “And that’s spiritual Jane. She was both.”

Apart from the cat Louise (her sister, Thelma, met her end on the busy road outside) Hall lives alone, although he does have a companion, “my love Linda” as he refers to her in his 2006 memoir,Unpacking the Boxes . “A girlfriend,” he says now, “I mean, a lady friend, she’s not a girl, who comes over a couple of nights a week. But it’s virtually just peace and solitude here. And I miss it when I’m away. I love to come back to it.”

Eagle Pond Farm, New Hampshire, October 2008

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, September 5, 2009

WELL, MR AUSTER. Tell me all about yourself.” Quite a way to start a conversation. But then, if you’re Samuel Beckett, you can probably get away with any conversation-starter you like. And it goes without saying that you can lean across the table to pilfer a cigarette from your new acquaintance – though, being Beckett, you’ll probably be polite enough to ask first. And never mind that you have a packet of your own – albeit cigarillos rather than cigarettes – on the table in front of you. Stolen smokes are sweeter by far.

Thirty-five years after he first met Samuel Beckett in a Paris cafe, Paul Auster has picked up a few of his ways. Novels narrated by obsessive men tripping over the perils of memory and through the trapdoors of language: yes. Monologues that pit consciousness against itself; those too. And even in Auster’s dark good looks – those intense eyes which have stared from the jackets of his books for some 30 years now – there is now a touch of those hawk-like Beckett features; at 62, grey-haired and high-browed, he looks just about ready for his close-up with John Minihan. And then there are the cigarillos. The air is struck with the smell of cigar smoke as Auster opens the door of his Brooklyn home, a beautiful brownstone in the writer-riddled neighborhood of Park Slope, where he and his wife, the novelist Siri Hustvedt, have lived since the 1980s.

This week, Auster and Hustvedt will both travel to Dublin, to take part in the inaugural Mountains to the Sea DLR Book Festival in Dún Laoghaire. On Friday evening, they’ll each read from new novels in progress – Auster’s 16th, Sunset Park , which he has just finished in a longhand draft, and Hustvedt’s fifth, The Summer Without Men . But on Thursday evening, in the keynote event of the festival, Auster will deliver what has been titled the “Beckett Address”, a talk on the Beckett he knew and the Beckett whose colossal impact he still feels as a writer and a reader. It’s been pleasurable, Auster says, to dredge up memories of that first meeting, in 1974, and of the correspondence that followed, (including a letter from Beckett which read, in its entirety, “Dear Mr Auster, OK for ‘Lethal Relief’, Yours, Sam Beckett”). But Auster still cringes somewhat at the memory of his very first response in that Paris cafe – his first Beckett address, so to speak. “He said, tell me all about yourself. And I had nothing to talk about. Nothing to tell him. So I stammered a bit, and stumbled, and I felt like crawling into a hole.”

But then Beckett stole a cigarette, and sparked it up it with a wisecrack about vices, and the younger writer relaxed a little. And they talked, for a while, “about many things” – the poet John Berryman, who had recently taken his own life; the painter Joan Mitchell, who had coaxed Auster into writing to Beckett and asking for a meeting in the first place; the trials of translation.

Though he was in awe of Beckett’s writing, which he had discovered, and devoured, as a teenager, Auster didn’t ask Beckett much about it – though he did offer some “young and enthusiastic” counsel on the translation of Beckett’s 1946 novel Mercier et Camier – and would have been content, he says, to have talked about cricket the entire time, if that was what Beckett wanted. “Though my cricket knowledge is not very good,” he laughs. “Really I just wanted to chat.” They chatted about Dublin, which Auster had visited as a Joyce-mad 18-year-old. They talked also of New York, which Beckett had visited just once, in 1964, shooting Film with Buster Keaton and getting lost on a trip to the World’s Fair in Queens with his publisher, Barney Rosset. “And apparently,” says Auster, “and I love this, Rosset took Beckett to a Mets double-header, and Beckett sat through both games completely transfixed. And Beckett said, this is a wonderful sport and if I lived here I’d be completely involved with it.”

AUSTER NEED NOT have worried, then, about the prospect of an awkward conversation about cricket or anything else; he and Beckett hit it off, and they had plenty in common to keep discussing through their letters as the years went by. But, unlike many who wax lyrical about their bond with “Sam”, Auster is refreshingly realistic about the connection he and Beckett had.

“We weren’t friends at all,” he says. “I mean, you can’t call it friendship, it was hardly even an acquaintanceship, but there was some feeling of solidarity, I felt, from him towards me, and I appreciated it very much. And I think now that I’m an old fellow and I see young writers, you know, there is always this feeling of tenderness and fear that you have for them.

“Because it’s so difficult. You almost have the same anxieties for these young writers as you have for your own children.” He laughs; he’s exaggerating, he knows, but he means it too, in a way. That intense young writer who sat across a cafe table from that intense older writer in 1974 had already, by then, been years in the making. Born in 1947 in Newark, Auster was already conscious at a young age that he had been conceived, as he puts it in his first prose book, The Invention of Solitude , in a “loveless embrace, a blind, dutiful groping between chilly hotel sheets”. His parents, who divorced when he was a teenager, were not readers, but his mother’s sister is married to the translator Allen Mandelbaum, and when the Mandelbaums went to Italy on a Fulbright grant in the late 1950s, they left boxes of books with the Austers for safe keeping. When it became clear that they were going to take some time to return, the young Auster and his mother unpacked and shelved the books. Auster began to explore, and by the time Mandelbaum came back, Auster had begun to write poems – all of which his uncle-in-law subjected to a “very, very tough” critique.

Auster’s father owned buildings in Newark, and it was while working for his father – at first helping to collect rents, then working on the building maintenance – that Auster got some glimpse of the racial divisions which existed in that city in the years leading up to the 1967 riots. When the riots erupted, Auster was with his mother and her husband, who happened to hold a prominent position in the Newark city government, and who drove them straight through the Central Ward on his way to City Hall. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Auster says of the scenes in the streets and in the jail, which they later visited. “It was like driving through a war.” In his most recent novel, Man in the Dark (2008), he recreates that night, describing how he and his stepfather found the mayor sitting at his desk in City Hall, “crying ‘what am I going to do, what am I going to do’, his head in his hands.” And how a colonel from the New Jersey Police walked into the office and said, “I’m going to kill every black bastard in this city.”

Newark, Auster says, has never recovered from those riots. “This is a country in which we allow this to happen, we allow major cities to founder.” At that stage in his life, Dublin was one of the few other cities he had experienced aside from Newark and New York. He saved his wages from a part-time job to travel there, to follow in the footsteps of Leopold Bloom. “I didn’t talk to anybody,” Auster says. “I was too shy even to go into a pub. All I did was walk and walk and walk. Dublin got imprinted on my brain. “Every night after that for years, as I was falling asleep, in my mind I would be walking in Dublin.”

He remembers staying in a B&B in Donnybrook, taking the bus into town, “passing the hospital for incurables”. Speaking of incurables, he remembers, too, Beckett’s response to Auster’s memories of Dublin: “He said he couldn’t live in Dublin, it would be impossible, because all anyone did was sit around and drink and talk and waste time.”

AUSTER, LIKE HIS hero, was never a fan of wasting time. By his mid-20s, he had written reams of poetry, translations and essays, as well as some plays and the beginnings of two novels. To finance these endeavours, and his years in Paris, he had worked after university for the US Census Bureau – a job which gave him the chance, quite literally, to make people up – and on an Esso oil tanker, scrubbing and cleaning his way around the Gulf of Mexico. He had also, while at university at the anti-Vietnam, anti-draft hotbed that was Columbia in 1968, been arrested while protesting the war: “kicked by the cops, dragged by the hair and thrown in jail”. In 1974, he married his first wife, Lydia Davis, and in 1977 he became a father, to Daniel, the boy whose “sweet and ferocious little body”, at rest in his crib, became the powerful closing image of the first half of Auster’s 1982 memoir, The Invention of Solitude .

That book was Auster’s first foray into prose, a haunting and visceral meditation on fatherhood, written from the point of view both of a father and a son. It was, in a sense, the beginning of his life as a writer, for all the words and scenes and stanzas he might have written in the decade and a half beforehand. “When I was in my 20s, I didn’t know how to write well enough to realise the very ambitious goals I had set for myself,” he says. “I just wasn’t capable. So I felt very frustrated, and I stuck to writing poetry and translations, and essays about poetry and fiction. But towards the end of 1978, I had gone through a rough period. My marriage was breaking up, there was a little baby, I had no money, and I was scrambling, scrambling to make money.”

It was a difficult time, and Auster was perhaps in no mood to sit in on a rehearsal of a piece of modern dance in a Manhattan high school gym, but that was exactly what he ended up doing in January 1979, when his friend, the painter David Reed, invited him to come and see a rehearsal by a choreographer friend of his. The dance was, Auster says, “exquisitely beautiful”, but it was when the choreographer began to speak, to try to articulate what it was she had just done, that he really sat up and took notice. “The inadequacy of her words in relation to the motion that I was watching opened something up in me,” he says. “I don’t know what, a kind of joy. A chasm, between words and world, it was right there before my eyes.

“And I went home and I started writing something, a text of no genre that I can identify, about the dance and the movement. I felt liberated. I felt that I was going in a new direction altogether.” And at 7 o’clock the next morning, the telephone rang. And, as Auster says, “no-one calls at 7am unless there’s bad news”. His father had died of a heart attack during the night. Auster sat at his desk and wrote and wrote. It was a “compulsion”, he says, to write about his father, to try to understand that man’s complexity, his distance, his life that had been, in a sense, invisible.

As he went through the months of sorting out his father’s personal effects, the treasures and the junk that had piled up in his home, Auster kept writing, kept tracing, kept plunging into the morass of feelings and sorrows and realisations; as he discovered a murder that had been kept secret in his family for over six decades, his writing took on a new urgency, his need to understand his father, to understand memory and language itself, took on a further depth.

And then there was the small boy who called Auster “Father”, who rendered the stuff of memory and of language more complicated still. The narrative surged forth from a fresh sense of a world more staggering and more convoluted than had previously been imagined; a world of secrets, of serendipities, of strangenesses that were at once beyond language and yet perfectly matched to its mysteries. For Auster, a wellspring had been tapped. As a prose writer there was now, as he puts it, “no turning back”.

The novels now grouped together as the New York Trilogy followed soon afterwards – City of Glass (1985),Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room ( 1986).

Then came a book almost every year, as well as several screenplays, most recently The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007), which started out life as a fictional film in his novel The Book of Illusions (2002). Invisible, which will appear from Faber in November, is Auster’s 15th, and revisits strikingly the terrain of his years as a young writer in New York and Paris. Visited by his amateur detective protagonist, Auster himself appeared in the very first novel, as did his new wife Siri Hustvedt and his son Daniel (Auster and Hustvedt’s daughter, Sophie, now a successful singer and actor, was born in 1987). It became a central trope in Auster’s writing, this mirroring, this weaving together of levels of fiction and layers of reality until the distinction between the two became not just uncertain but irrelevant. There was also, from the start – from the very first line of The Invention of Solitude , in fact – the literal presence in the writing of the act of writing itself, of the blank page or the notebook, of the author, of the reader: the novel caught in the act of becoming a novel, or, perhaps, of trying to become such a thing. Meanwhile, his protagonists barely know what kind of a world they are caught in; menacing, surreal, constantly shifting in meaning, and ruled by forces of chance and coincidence. Which are forces, says Auster, in which he truly believes.

“Don’t you feel that reality is this enormous pinball wheel and everything is bouncing off and into everything else at one time?” he says. “Nothing is isolated.” Which must, surely, be difficult to render in fiction – don’t all those co-existing and contradictory worlds run away from him on the page? He nods. “But if it’s not hard, it wouldn’t be fun,” he says. “The adventure is the difficulty, in a way. I don’t feel that I’m fully in control of what I’m doing, and less and less as time goes on. I don’t know where the stories come from. I have no idea.” He’s emphatic as he says this, he has the air, almost, of someone protesting their innocence. “They just surge up from some hidden spot inside me, and if it feels interesting, I go.”

THE ONE QUESTION he won’t answer about his writing, he says, is the “why” question – why does he write about writing? Why does he shut his characters into empty rooms, release them into bewildering worlds? Why, in the new novel, does he write (at least for a time) for the first time in years from the point of view of a young man, rather than an old one, a man who has not yet been short-changed by life and chance and circumstance, as Auster’s narrators so often are? “You can’t talk about why,” he says, lighting one of those miniature cigars. “You can only talk about what. Maybe you can talk about how, if you’re lucky. But why, that’s the great mystery. And I just have no answer for it.

“I don’t know where thoughts are born. You’re walking along the street, thinking about what groceries you’re going to buy, and suddenly, there’s a synapse, and you’re thinking about a story that you want to tell. Where the hell does it come from? I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

But is he content not to know? “I think that’s been the great journey of my life writing prose,” he says with a smile. “When I was young, I thought I had to know everything in advance. I thought every word had to be figured out, to have 17 different meanings, and you choke yourself like that. So it’s been a gradual process of liberation. And getting back to Beckett, he said a very interesting thing about the difference between him and Joyce. He said the more Joyce knew, the more he could. And Beckett said, the more I know, the less I can. But I feel I have a third. The less I know, the more I can.”

Park Slope, Brooklyn, September 2009

A new play I’ve been commissioned to write by Origin Theatre Company will open at 59E59 Theatres in New York next month as part of Origin’s 1st Irish festival. Fugue will play with four other monologues by Irish playwrights. Details here.

First Published: The Irish Times, Saturday, July 25, 2009

IN THE ELEVATOR, I’m sceptical. He can’t always talk in that voice, can he? At 11am, in the middle of a busy two-day trip to New York, at the end of another long season of the radio show which requires him to riff and revel and recite in front of a live audience for two hours every Saturday night, and reportedly right up to the wire with the deadline for his latest novel, surely Garrison Keillor won’t really sound like . . . well, like Garrison Keillor? With that richest of radio voices, that voice that slides slow into the deepest of timbres, cushioning the consonants and drawling the vowels? I ring the doorbell. The steps that approach the apartment door are leisurely, almost ambling.

“Hello,” says Garrison Keillor, in Garrison Keillor’s voice, evoking the bullfrogs and cicadas and bumblebees of yet another quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It’s all I can do not to tell my ears how rude it is to stare.

Keillor, who will appear next month at the Kilkenny Arts Festival, spends part of his year in this Central Park West apartment, but mostly lives in St Paul, Minnesota, with his wife, Jenny Lind Nilsson, who is a violinist in the Minnesota Opera orchestra, and their young daughter (Keillor has been married three times, and also has a 40-year-old son from his first marriage).

He is most famous firstly for that voice, and secondly for that line. The words “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon” signal, each Saturday night, the beginning of the 20-minute monologue that is the adored centrepiece of A Prairie Home Companion , the live radio variety show written and hosted by Keillor since 1974. With this line, Keillor launches into the storytelling style that has become his signature over the past 35 years, a wandering through the anecdotes and the enigmas of everyday life in a small community that seems, on the surface, largely whimsical but which is sharpened with a wryness that allows little to escape its grip. The daily doings of the people of Lake Wobegon, a Minnesota town “out on the edge of the prairie”, become in themselves the edge from which Keillor casts smoothly off to reflections and recollections that reach from the quotidian towards the universal.

The fictional town of Lake Wobegon – based in part on Keillor’s actual Minnesota home town of Anoka – has been the setting, too, for several of Keillor’s novels. The most recent, Liberty , was published in 2008 and told the story of a sixtysomething Wobegoner falling unwisely in love with the pageant queen whose commando take on Lady Liberty in the previous year’s Fourth of July parade set the whole lake talking. Like all the Lake Wobegon novels, it bubbles over with gossipy subplots along the way to an antic denouement.

The next novel in that series is the one on which Keillor is currently working, and on which, yes, he is right up against his deadline. “Closer to the cliff you cannot come,” he says of the September publication date for a novel on which he’s still very much at work (when I arrive, he immediately brings me for a brief glimpse of the desk at which he’s been writing all morning, as though we must visit the work before settling down to conversation), but he doesn’t look too worried. Keillor is hair-raisingly prolific, producing a novel almost yearly as well as penning most of the items on A Prairie Home Companion and writing a weekly column which is syndicated to newspapers around the world, including The Irish Times , and which analyses everything from Sarah Palin to potato salad and the debatable distance in between.

It’s not an output of which everyone is a fan; in a vicious take-down in a 2004 issue of Poetry magazine, poet August Kleinzahler described Keillor as an “indefatigable and determined purveyor of homespun wisdom . . . all appetite, irrepressible, the hardest-working ‘thoughtful person’ in show business”. And Kleinzahler wished, it was clear, for the hard work to stop. A round-the-clock tape of Keillor reading poems on a second radio show to which he lends his “burnished caul” of a baritone, The Writer’s Almanac , would make for a good torture weapon, Kleinzahler suggested.

But Keillor’s not for turning. “I live in a state of mania, maybe too strong a word, but a state of hyperactivity,” he says, “and it’s brought on, in part, by a sense of time passing.” He will turn 67 next week. “It’s a very comfortable age,” he says, “and that just has to do with having all of these projects that one wants to accomplish. I have a screenplay that I’m promising myself I’m going to get done in August, and my great dream and ambition is to write a play, and I’m contracted to write a few more books, and the radio show is tumbling along.”

It’s a hectic life, and it’s a life, he admits, which bears little resemblance to those lives he dreams up and draws out every Saturday evening. “I live a life which is so distant from Lake Wobegon,” he says. “I lead the life of a writer, and I travel a lot, and I’m in a lot of airports and hotels, none of which can figure much in the life of Lake Wobegon. I’m a nomadic, a migrant worker, telling stories about a very settled people.”

KEILLOR HAS KNOWN distance from the community of his birth for a long time now. At 20, he broke completely with the Plymouth Brethren, the fundamentalist sect in which he and his five siblings were raised in the then-rural community of Anoka (and which, according to some sources, had its origins in Dublin in the 1820s). He has, he says, no bitterness about his upbringing, or about the strict confines which the sect placed on daily life – dancing and other entertainments, such as movie-going, were strictly forbidden. Rather, he has fond memories of the one form of entertainment which was permissible in the eyes of the Brethren: storytelling.

“I remember sweet occasions when we would be sitting in a room, or perhaps outdoors under the trees at my grandma’s farm,” he says. “And there was very much a hierarchy of precedence, social precedence, so that the eldest person was deferred to. Which would have been my Great-Uncle Lou, and he would have the floor, and he loved to tell stories. And they would sit and reminisce.”

As Keillor talks, his voice slips deeper into those familiar, lulling rhythms of his own storytelling, sometimes pausing deeply between words, never rushing a line, never having to grasp for a transition. “Children were much lower down the scale, so you just sat and you listened, you listened to your elders talk in this stately sort of twangy Midwestern style. Finishing each other’s sentences, and laughing, it was all very pleasant, and very sweet. And as a child, you might be allowed to ask a question, but you were not asked, in this circle, what you had done last week. You were not on display.”

The storytelling, the reminiscing, the laughter with a touch of sweetness – it sounds familiar. Yet if Keillor developed the format of A Prairie Home Companion as a tribute of sorts to that realm he had known in childhood, then he must have done so unconsciously, because, for him, the two worlds could not be more firmly separated. In fact, it was by becoming the writer and broadcaster who would devise Prairie and Lake Wobegon’s quiet weeks that the young Keillor made his break with the world of the Plymouth Brethren. In the eyes of the elders to whom he still refers as “my people”, his striking out for the world of the page and the stage was nothing less than an irredeemable sin.

“I make my living in a field in which there is a kind of self-display,” he says. “But to my people, this is absolutely alien.” The Brethren had, Keillor says, “no social skills among strangers”, and only within their own circle did they wish or feel confident enough to speak.

“I was astonished, when I was a kid, to see how awkward they were, trying to make small talk with neighbours, with a delivery man . . . we really were set apart,” he says. “And when my people dealt with strangers, they were very curt and uncomfortable. They distrusted social skills, that sort of blather, that sort of easy confidence in strangers.” He pauses, and gives a sort of shrug. “What I’m doing right now, with you, for example, they would think was the strangest behaviour. To talk about yourself in any intimate way with someone you’ve never met before.”

Maybe they’d be right, I say. Keillor nods readily. The principle of separateness by which the Brethren lived, he said, was extremely strong – “true Christians were to separate themselves from those who did not adhere to the truth” – and the children of the sect also had “a kind of hostility bred into us, a sense that we were to tune ourselves to the next world and not to this one”. It was a “skewed vision”, he says, but part of it has remained with him. Which part? “The idea of separation. And I think part of what the Brethren bake into you makes you a satirist. It’s an interesting subject, and one that other people have written about. I haven’t. Maybe I don’t want to know.”

Though his mother, at 94, still lives in the family home at Anoka, and though he speaks of her with warmth, his relationship with his father, who died in 2001, grew more and more distant with the years.

“I did not do anything, past the age of 11 or 12, that impressed my father,” says Keillor, “and I think you had to achieve that, to be close to him.”

What was the young Keillor expected, by his parents and his community, to be when he grew up? His answer gives some insight into how far his people lived from a world in which identities are defined in terms of careers.

“You were expected,” he says simply, “to be good. You were expected to accept Jesus as your saviour. You were expected to grow into a life within the Brethren and to become one of them. They also wanted you to do well in school, but they were very fearful of one of their own going too far in that direction.”

COLLEGE WAS NOT looked on with favour. It was just about tolerable for Keillor’s older brother to go to university to become an engineer (tragically, that brother, Phil, died earlier this year following a skating fall). But Keillor’s path was looked upon by his elders with something like horror. That path began with boyhood bicycle rides to the library in downtown Minneapolis, continued to high-school attempts at poetry and a name-change from Gary to the more literary Garrison, and carried on through an English major at the University of Minnesota, where he worked at a radio station for the first time.

Soon after graduating from university, Keillor began to broadcast a morning radio programme on Minnesota public radio, much admired for its eclectic mix of music, medieval chant frequently sharing airtime with contemporary rock. The Atlantic published one of his poems, and in 1970, the New Yorker accepted one of his stories, Local Family Keeps Son Happy . The title seems almost a painful tilt at the reality of his family situation, but Keillor, by that time already married with a young son, had left Anoka well behind.

Or so it seemed. In 1973, the New Yorker assigned Keillor to write about the Grand Ole Opry , the weekly radio programme which had been broadcasting out of Nashville since 1925 (and continues to do so today). Keillor went along, and in the wings of the old Ryman Auditorium, he found the germ of a radio show he would make his own.

“It was people doing radio,” he says, “which I’d been doing for a while. But they were doing it with a real sense of camaraderie, and I missed that, working alone in a studio.” In contrast to public radio, which seemed, he says, “always on the verge of being pretentious”, the Opry was friendly – though not necessarily onstage. Nashville was a doggedly commercial operation, and the stage was for making hits. “But there was this wonderful, warm, friendly atmosphere backstage,” Keillor says. “These people loved talking to each other, telling stories backstage. Onstage, they were just pushing their latest record. It was radio twisted by commercial, irrelevant factors.”

FROM THE BEGINNING, Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion took a swipe at those commercial pressures by including spoof commercials in its line-up of music and comedy sketches. “Powdermilk Biscuits,” he recites for me now, “give shy persons the strength to get up and do what needs to be done.”

The first show played to an audience of just 15 people, but the numbers steadily grew, and when Minnesota Public Radio joined with other national stations to form American Public Radio, an enormous audience began to tune in to the show. Keillor’s monologue was already a highlight; Lake Wobegon, with its traces of old Anoka, was finding its way into homes across the country.

Though he never uses a script as he delivers the monologues, Keillor plans them carefully in advance. And for the stories necessary to build an imaginary community, he has his sources, among them a number of relations in Minnesota who e-mail him weekly to provide him with nuggets of local news.

Then, on Saturday mornings, he makes notes for a couple of hours, and that evening, he leaves those notes behind. “It gives you an odd freedom, having all this preparation, to improvise and to invent new things that you hadn’t thought of. Sometimes the notes that you write out for a monologue are a way of discovering all the things you don’t need to say, or don’t want to say, and then it leaves you free to go to the thing you want to do.”

Does he ever go blank? Standing up there, without notes, in front of an audience of hundreds, sometimes thousands (the July 4th show, which also marked the 35th anniversary, was attended by some 10,000 people), not to mention the multitudes listening in around the world? “No,” Keillor says. “There are moments, yeah, when your mind feels like it’s blank. And you learn how to do a kind of circular talking. You could always slip laterally into something. You’d always remember something. Something would happen.”

Especially during the years of the Bush presidency, and most intensely in the months running up to last year’s presidential election, that “something” was often less a sideways slip than a slam-dunk into a political and cultural commentary which railed against Republicanism – which he describes as “a psychological gated community” – and, in particular, against Sarah Palin.

Keillor travelled to Wasilla to try and make sense of the Palin phenomenon, and what he saw there gives him some understanding of why she decided, earlier this month, to announce her resignation as governor of Alaska.

“Alaska can do Palin no good whatsoever,” he says. “It’s very small, and so scrutiny is very sharp. She’s an act that does really well on the road, not at home. The audience that loves her is in the lower 48, and any prospects she has of running for president are there.”

Propped up against the living-room wall is a framed front page of the New York Times from November 5th, that edition emblazoned “OBAMA”, which sold out in the city before 6am. Keillor’s admiration, even adoration, of the Democratic nominee was evident in his columns in the run-up to the election, and it’s an admiration which remains firmly in place now that Senator Obama has become President Obama. “Though,” adds Keillor, intriguingly, “I don’t entirely understand him.”

What does he not understand? “Well, a politician is a created persona,” he says. “And I think that his is carefully created. I don’t really know what’s behind it, or underneath it. It’s a great mask, and it’s a mask that I believe reflects some of him. But this is a guy who didn’t enjoy campaigning.” And who made it seem as though he did? “Yes. I think he’s a serious person, and he made a very important choice, that the racial symbolism would be other people’s symbolism, not his. That was a big choice. That separated him from everything that had come before.”

Keillor may no longer be of the Brethren, but he is still a church-goer, a practising Episcopalian. “Though I’ve been very irregular of late, and my priest has written me a note about this,” he says. He may be a passionate Democrat, but he also describes himself as culturally conservative. What does that mean?

“It means, I guess, that I believe in hard work, and in achievement, and I believe in rewarding it,” he says slowly, after a considerable pause. “I prefer honest non-fiction, diligent non-fiction, to edgy memoir, and I believe in the classics, and I believe in the classic virtues. And I think that not all that much has changed.”

He nods. “I think that the drama of change is much overplayed.”

New York, July 2009

IT’S SPRINGTIME in Brooklyn, in the old Italian neighbourhood of Cobble Hill. But suddenly it doesn’t feel like Brooklyn anymore; suddenly the air seems that of a small Irish town, of a small Irish sittingroom, where a small Irish boy sits at a card table with his sisters, aunts and neighbours and learns to play his hand.

Colm Tóibín, sitting at a cafe table on Smith Street, is talking about bridge. Not the bridge, the glinting marvel of stone and steel that soars out over the Hudson just blocks from here, but the card game, the game of chance and plotting and trick-taking, the game which, Tóibín has just announced, taught him more about writing novels than anything else. A moment ago, he was talking about the benefits of having to write long essays on literature and politics for publications such as the New York Review of Books; how the eye sharpens, how the mind gets a workout. And now, he says, it’s all really down to bridge. “It was the big training I got, intellectually,” he says. “It requires an enormous amount of planning and remembering.” Of long silences, working out what to do, working out when to yield. “It’s a way of thinking,” he says. “Of watching how the cards are distributed, of how to guess them. And for writing novels, that’s the skill you use.”

Tóibín, who will turn 54 this year, and whose gimlet eye has long been in evidence in his writing and in his observations as one of this country’s foremost cultural commentators, played cards all through his childhood in Enniscorthy, Co Wexford. His was a family in which, he says, you could fight, they could swear, “but if you played badly, if you forgot that someone had played a king and you then played the queen, that would be considered absolutely foolish.” Anything, he says, “would be excused, except bad bridge playing”.

Anything – even, it turned out, the writing of fiction often rooted very deeply in Enniscorthy and in the intimacy and intensity of local and family life. As he began to return to Enniscorthy as a novelist, after a time in Spain in the late 1970s and a successful period as a journalist and editor in 1980s Dublin, Tóibín saw with relief that his mother, aunts, uncles and siblings (his father, a local schoolteacher, died when Tóibín was 12) weren’t interested in dissecting his use of those stories, snapshots and shadows that had woven their way into the consciousness from which he wrote. “They knew what to do,” he says, “which is to say absolutely nothing. Sometimes my mother might write me a letter about the style, the sentences. But sometimes they wouldn’t say anything at all, and you would arrive down to see them, and it would be lovely. Because they would have loads of things to tell you and to ask you, and it would be as though you hadn’t written any book.”

Tóibín has now written a dozen books; six novels, a short story collection, and five works of non-fiction. Of the fiction, only two books – The Story of the Night (1996) and The Master (2004) – are set at a complete remove from the landscape and seascapes of Co Wexford; the former novel is set in Argentina in the time of the Falklands war, while the latter takes as its subject the last years of the novelist Henry James. The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and several of the stories in his collection Mothers and Sons (2006) pass through Enniscorthy with an army of characters seeking ways to belong, to come home, to make sense of the worlds in which they have been landed by their creator. In Tóibín’s new novel, Brooklyn , published by Penguin Viking, the central character – a young woman called Eilis Lacey – leaves a quiet existence in 1950s Enniscorthy for the teeming streets of downtown Brooklyn, but learns that the job of truly leaving home is more difficult, and more life-changing, than she could ever have imagined. What starts out seeming like a gentle, almost delicate study of an era in Irish and Irish-American life becomes, in Tóibín’s hands, a window flung open on a complex psychology, both of an individual woman and of a web of cultures and communities jangling against one another, struggling to forge norms in a society in which everything, public and private, is moving almost too rapidly to be seen and known.

From her shyness, to her resourcefulness, cunning and desire, Tóibín inhabits the mind of Eilis with ease and utter conviction. He didn’t “go around asking questions or staring at women in the street” to achieve this, he says. A university course which he taught shortly before beginning the novel, and which focused on the emergence of female protagonists in 19th-century fiction, did the work of rousing this character out of his subconscious, and the writing of her did the rest. Neither did he spend time trawling the streets of Brooklyn, looking for anecdotes or historical sediment; he has only been here a handful of times, he says, looking out on the very streets on which his character wanders.

A close friend of Tóibín’s, the writer Robert Sullivan, lives in a brownstone on nearby Clinton Street, and that house metamorphosed, in Tóibín’s imagination, into the boarding-house in which Eilis lives when she arrives off the boat (by sheer coincidence, it transpires, a house just a few doors up from the Sullivan residence was, in fact, an Irish boarding-house until relatively recently). Meanwhile, a neighbourhood church, the Oratory Church of St Boniface, where Tóibín has attended an elaborate Easter vigil for the past few years with Sullivan and his family, became the model for the church run by the priest who brings Eilis to Brooklyn, and for the parish life into which she quickly becomes assimilated.

“I’m interested in it,” he says, of his very occasional (and always stateside) trips to church. “When I first came to New York, I joined a choir, and I obviously had to go to mass because we were singing at the mass. But it’s almost a question of – sometimes almost deliberately, but not very deliberately – trying to find metaphors, trying to find things that I can work with. And going to church on a Sunday in America, and hearing the sounds and looking around, has something. But it’s not religious. And it’s not even nostalgic. I mean, I’m talking about, in the last few years, maybe five times, but they do stay in my mind.

Tóibín now spends a large part of each year in the US; the success of The Master here has brought visiting professorships his way, at Berkeley, at Austin, Texas and, this year, at Princeton. And something else that has stayed in his mind is one of his less-pleasant brushes with the force that is old-fashioned Irish-America, when the organiser of a Boston folk and literature festival, in 1997, marched up to him after his reading and informed him where to board the festival bus to mass the following morning. By itself, the offer – or rather, the instruction – would have seemed merely over-eager, a little presumptive, but it was coloured by the fact of a very prominent Irish-American politician publicly refusing to shake Tóibín’s hand at the reading.

The problem was with the novel with which Tóibín was touring at the time, The Story of the Night , a gay love story set in 1970s Argentina; at one point, the protagonist and a man he meets in the street make love to the sound of the revving of car engines powering the cattle prods used as torture weapons by the police. And this politician, by refusing even to look at Tóibín, was not protesting about the torture, but about the sex.

Tóibín has been out as gay for many years. Did anything like that ever happen to him in Ireland? “Never in my life,” he says, quickly moving from the weary bemusement with which he has told the story of the snub to a clipped, almost dark vehemence. “Never in my life. Never once.” And such behaviour on the part of a public figure would never happen in Ireland, he says. This insistence forms the core of a speech which Tóibín says he has had cause to give more than once during the past decade. It’s a speech which, last St Patrick’s Day in New York, brought an audience at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum to thoughtful – and, it seemed, grateful – silence. Tóibín, who had just read an excerpt from the manuscript of Brooklyn , spoke out against the banning of gay and lesbian groups from the official St Patrick’s Day parade in that city, arguing that the ban only highlighted the chasm between Ireland and Irish-America. “Because the way those groups were treated in America would not happen in Ireland,” he says. “People might not have known what the Stonewall riots were in Ireland, but at the same time, they knew how to treat their children. Or their neighbour’s children. Which was with respect and decency, which didn’t happen here.”

To Tóibín’s story about the Boston politician and The Story of the Night , Ireland soon presented an extraordinary foil. Shortly after the novel’s publication, he received a letter from, he says, “someone who had been in government in Ireland, in a terribly important position”. The letter-writer had read the book, and had learned something which was utterly new to them. “It said, ‘I simply didn’t know that two men could love each other’,” Tóibín remembers. “It said, ‘I thought that was about perversion, about sex. I didn’t know that a man could wait by the phone for a phone call from another man, in exactly the same way as we do. I just didn’t know that, until I read your novel’”.

It’s a story which illustrates, to Tóibín, that the acceptance of gay love has long since happened in Ireland at a fundamental level. “That sort of lesson has been learned in the domestic sphere, in so many families,” he says. “And perhaps it’s made its way into the public domain, very slowly and carefully. But watching the debates here in the US, even when they are lost, as in California, and watching what has happened in Iowa and Vermont, and watching the astonishing lift of the human spirit in Spain when same-sex marriage was allowed and El Pais, the main paper, would print a photograph every day of couples getting married.”

Tóibín is utterly eloquent on the subject of marriage rights for gay couples. He is disappointed, he says, in the people in government – people younger than him, people of whom he speaks with respect, such as John Gormley and Ciarán Cuffe. “Because there isn’t, as far as I know, a political party in Ireland which has guaranteed even to put this on the agenda. And if anyone is saying, in Ireland, and nobody seems ready to come out and say it, that our love is lesser than your love, well, no one said that to the Catholics of Northern Ireland or the blacks of South Africa. Or no one said that in the southern states of America. And I would be very surprised if people are saying that now about gay people.”

WHEN WE MEET, it is two days since Brian Lenihan’s announcement of his emergency budget. If the refusal of the Boston politician to shake Tóibín’s hand spoke volumes about the angry bandwagons underlying official Irish America, then Tóibín believes that Ireland, right now, is in danger of yielding to a bandwagon of its own.

“I was in the Conrad Hotel [in Dublin] earlier this year and Michael Fingleton came in, alone,” Tóibín says. “I was proud to stand up and shake his hand. He gave me my first mortgage. When he mightn’t have. When I wasn’t the most solvent person in Ireland. And I think if you’re going to do witch-hunts, you should do your own personal ones. Pick your own people. But joining an Irish witch-hunt, whether against priests or against bankers . . . I’m afraid not.” It’s his Fenian background coming out, he says; his grandfather, Patrick, took part in the 1916 rebellion in Enniscorthy.

Nothing changed during the boom, as Tóibín sees it; nothing except for credit-card limits. Urban planning was still as poor as it was in the 1970s; reports on building and prisons were still being ignored; primary schools were still neglected; two people with the same disease could still see “one dying prematurely from it while the other one was eating grapes in a private room”. What he’s most interested in, almost, is what came out in the work of young writers during that time: “But a sort of darkness entered in. If you went to any new play, it had a level of darkness that didn’t come from nowhere. All the young writers producing foul images. Images of a new sort of foulness was entering into the theatre. And it wasn’t being done out of badness. It was being done out of need. So there was something very, very interesting going on.”

What’s needed now, he says, is something for which he doesn’t hold out much hope. “A period of very deep introspection,” he says. “The entire society has to become as introspective and dull, almost, as Studies magazine,” he laughs, referring to the quarterly review published by the Jesuits.

Tóibín is always prone to mischief in conversation – his thoughts and his intonations dart so that it’s hard to tell, often, whether he is being serious. But he almost always is. He’s serious when he says that Ireland’s celebrity economists must be banned from the radio, since they were unable to warn of the crisis in language skilful enough and vital enough to make people sit up and listen. “They weren’t talking about ideas of justice. They weren’t using their skills properly, weren’t moving their skills out into the world. So nobody paid attention to them, and rightly so. And they’re nattering on, the same four of them on the four programmes, four months later, being not listened to by the same two million people.” He laughs. “If we want figures, we can google them, thank you very much.”

He’s serious when he says that he wants, instead, to hear people who are “not nuns, but like nuns, on the radio instead. People with a certain sort of wisdom, people who have some sort of set of spiritual or material values that are serious. Who are asking fundamental questions.”

He’s serious, too, when he says that the prominence of RTÉ Radio 1 in the national debate is a real problem, because “it hasn’t moved from a set of formats that belong in the late 1970s”. He’s serious when he says that the media more widely is “frozen”, that it is no longer stirring up the kind of argument and debate that can change the course of history. And he’s serious when he says that, when the New York Times asked him to write about the construction of the M3 on the Hill of Tara, he wondered for a moment, and he is wondering again now, “whether what’s happening in Ireland, and the degree to which it’s happening, is not as a direct result of disturbing that landscape?

“I’m talking about a general lack of thought, of planning, about how people are going to live,” says Tóibín. “About how the disturbing of that landscape – who planned it, and how, and why – has made its way into what is happening now. Of how it is a metaphor for other things that have occurred. So I’m not just talking about the disruption of magic.” Although, he adds, there’s no reason at all why the disruption of magic should be discounted in this whole affair. So, from witch-hunt to witchcraft? No, just that same search for the right hand of cards that has driven Tóibín from Enniscorthy to Austin to St Boniface’s in Brooklyn and back again.

Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, April 2009

First Published: The Irish Times, April 21, 2009

‘I ALWAYS ASSUMED that I was going to die around the same age as him,” says Philip Schultz of the father he lost almost 50 years ago. “I always thought of that age as some kind of milestone. And then, suddenly, I had lived beyond him.”

Schultz, now 64, still sounds surprised by this realisation. He recounts it slowly, even cautiously, as though its borders might have shifted since its last telling; as though he might find himself, suddenly, a week away from his 60th birthday again – but this time, like his father at that age, bankrupt, bewildered and in his death throes. As though he might feel, in the words of his poem, The One Truth, “his soul/ withering in his arms” as he lay in front of his son and his wife “without enough breath/ to say goodbye/ or even ask forgiveness”.

The One Truth is the poem that took Schultz half a lifetime to write, yet that came to him rapidly, almost fully formed, the words tumbling, the images of suffering and striving and savage disappointment surging into place as though they had been waiting to go there all along. Which, of course, they had. Schultz simply hadn’t been ready to face them, or to admit them; not until after a lunch one day – a day close, by the way, to his 60th birthday – during which his friend, editor André Bernard, had spoken frankly and openly about Bernard’s own father, about the things at which his father had failed, about the ways in which his father’s life had not gone to plan. Schultz, in turn, had told his own father’s story, and on the walk home from the restaurant, he found himself suddenly in possession of The One Truth .

ANOTHER POEM ABOUT his father, Failure , followed with similar ease, “with a great sense of relief”, says Schultz, and before long it was apparent to him that he had the makings of a whole collection called Failure. His father had been a presence in Schultz’s previous five collections too, but not like this, not with this starkness and deep sadness, not with this truth.

This time last year, Failure won Schultz a Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Robert Hass won a Pulitzer last year too, for his book, Time and Materials. When Schultz’s eight-year-old son, Augie (he has an older son, Eli, also), came racing across the Long Island dog park where Schultz was walking the family dog, and when Augie shouted, “Guess who won the Pulitzer Prize, Dad!”, Schultz, who had no idea that he himself had even been nominated, expected to hear Hass’s name. But Augie didn’t mention Hass’s name. Why would he? Augie looked at his father and said, simply: “You.”

The irony is almost overkill: the collection about failure succeeds beyond its author’s wildest dreams; the poet who finally, in his sixth collection, squares up to his father’s inability to succeed finds himself, as a consequence, being celebrated by his own young son, the very son described, in the volume’s dedication, as “a success story”. But, of course, the contrasts are not quite so simple, the emotional scale not quite so polarised. Between this happy present and the darkness of his childhood, there may be vast chasms but there are also deep continuities. Schultz has come, he says now, to have so much more sympathy for the father who caused so much misery for himself and his mother, whose death left them crippled with debt and blinking with pain.

“Having sons changed the way I thought about my father,” he says. “And I also find myself understanding more about him, his struggles, how difficult it was for this immigrant man, how focused he had to be on survival.”

WHO WAS THIS man, this father who has cast such a long shadow over his only son’s life, and who lives so vividly and so poignantly in his poetry? Schultz senior was the son of Lithuanian immigrants who tried his hand at many tricks to get rich, to lift himself, his wife and their only child out of the cramped grey streets of an immigrant neighbourhood in Rochester, New York, but failed right from the start. Having convinced his bride-to-be that he was a high-flier, with his three-piece suits and his job running a parking lot, he was a victim of embezzlement three weeks before their wedding and moved, penniless, into her mother’s house, the very house from which she was dreaming of escape through marriage. As a husband and father, he was mostly absent, flinging himself into one hare-brained business idea after another while his wife despaired and his son struggled with the undiagnosed dyslexia which rendered his schooldays a time of sheer misery.

“‘What do you want to be when you grow up, if you don’t read?’ asked my tutor, an enormous man who couldn’t fit under the desk,” recalls Schultz, before laughing aloud at the memory of the tutor’s name: Mr Joyce. “I want to be a writer,” the young Schultz answered.

“I don’t know where it came from,” he says now. “I suppose I lived in my imagination. I loved stories. Maybe I thought, magically, that a writer would not have to write.

“And he laughed and laughed and laughed . . . Waves of his belly, I remember, went from his chin down to the desk, and he couldn’t stop laughing. Shock, and the irony of it, that someone who couldn’t read or write would want to be a writer. I think he loved it. I think he loved the idea.”

Meanwhile, Schultz’s father was deep in his own fantasies, as the poem Failure reveals: “a motel that raffled honeymoons/ a bowling alley with roving mariachis”. There were stints, too, as a chicken rancher, a taxi driver, a janitor at Kodak and – most vivid of all in Schultz’s memory – a vending-machine merchant. Nothing worked out, and he worked too much, “selling himself/ one lie at a time”, as Schultz puts it in another poem, the long, post-9/11 meditation, The Wandering Wingless.

Schultz senior died of heart failure, as his doctors warned him he would if he did not slow down. But he did not slow down, does not slow down still. He charges, clatters, through Schultz’s poems. He is frenetic, and he is clearly frightened. And he was a failure; it has taken Schultz this long to give space to that word. But, as he makes clear in the collection’s title poem, to be a failure is not the same as to be a nobody. To be a failure is human, honest, “unforgettable”.

Schultz’s father does sound unforgettable, not just in his spectacular downfalls but in the highs he was capable of reaching before those downfalls claimed him. Listening to Schultz talk about those highs, those “transformations”, as he calls them, it’s not difficult to understand why a writer son would find it impossible to erase the forcefield of such a father.

In his 20s and 30s, after his father’s death, Schultz lived in several parts of the country, going from college in Kentucky to a few years in San Francisco, from the prestigious writing school in Iowa to Boston, before eventually settling in New York. His first collection, Like Wings , was published in 1979.

In each place, he says, he found that he seemed to draw what he calls “fathers who were looking for sons in any way”. What he means is that some older writers, including George Oppen, Wright Morris and, later, John Cheever, took him under their wings (“Mary Cheever said I was a waif”).

Oppen was particularly influential in turning the young Schultz towards poetry, entrancing him with stories of William Carlos Williams, of Pound and Joyce, of the copy of Ulysses which Oppen and his wife had smuggled into the US in a suitcase with a hidden compartment.

But even for all that, it is the memory of his first storyteller which comes to life most strikingly in Schultz’s words, as he recalls his trips to factories with his father the vending-machine salesman, another Willy Loman hoping to impress his boy. “He would be dressed like a schlump – baggy pants, clothes filled with powder and coffee and sugar. He was cranky, he talked to himself all the time, he looked like a slob, he was five foot one.

“And suddenly he would give himself a pep talk and he would go into the boss’s office, and within minutes he’d be having the guy laugh, having them all laugh, doing his little soft shoe, his little song and dance. It was magical. From this frightened, immigrant, uneducated man who was afraid to get out of his car, he’d find this wherewithal.”

What Schultz’s father was finding within himself was something which would become crucial to Schultz as he developed his voice as a writer but also his thinking on writing itself: a persona. The Writers Studio, the intensive private writing school which Schultz founded in his New York living room in 1987, is built around the very idea of persona as central to what a writer does. Students are encouraged to try out as many voices as possible, to transform themselves over and over.

Even through the sheer neck he displayed in setting up such a school as a direct counter-presence to the prevalent – and powerful – university MFA system in New York, Schultz was proving himself to be his father’s son, he knows, though he claims that the “last thing” he wanted was to become a businessman like him. But a businessman poet is precisely what Schultz has become, whether he likes it or not, by virtue of the considerable success of the Writers Studio, which has some 300 students and outposts in Tucson and San Francisco as well as online.

WINNING THE PULITZER has brought about real changes in Schultz’s career. For a start, he says, he now has a career. And he has success, or renown, or what he calls his “new best friend, always looking for attention”, with its river of e-mails, letters, interview requests, invitations to read. It’s overwhelming, you sense, but not, either, unwelcome. The experience of reading in front of an audience may be one he speaks of in the same sentence in which he utters the words “firing squad”, but he gains a great deal from connecting with an audience, he says, from sounding his poems out in that way.

“You’re singing,” he says, “and you can come close, but you can’t really recreate that effect in your study.” He laughs.” And I did think it would get less scary as I got older. But I was lying to myself.”

Grand Central Station, New York, April 2009

My interview with John Banville, conducted on four occasions in Dublin between 2007 and 2008, has just been published in the Spring 2009 issue of The Paris Review. You can read an excerpt here.

I loved every minute of this year’s DLR Poetry Now festival; the poets were terrific, the audiences were large and enthusiastic and frank, and our celebration of Seamus Heaney’s 70th Birthday was a joy to witness (I would say that, but lots of people who were there, including all our participating poets, have told me likewise). Here are some moments from, and coverage of, the festival:

The Irish Times created an online slideshow on our event for Seamus, in which you can see both the signed limited-edition broadsheet of “In the Attic” (one for everyone in the audience, as Gaybo would say) and the beautiful, specially commissioned painting by Hughie O’Donoghue, entitled The Inheritance, with which we surprised Seamus on the day. Thanks to photographers Bryan O’Brien and Matt Kavanagh for this. And thanks to Hughie for his painting.

Seamus Heaney following the celebration of his 70th Birthday at DLR Poetry Now International Poetry Festival, Dun Laoghaire, Dublin, 2009

RTE came along and covered the same event for their evening news, as did Fiona McCann from the Irish Times. 

Fiona McCann had also covered Robert Pinsky’s keynote address, The Fate of the Modern, and she wrote another piece later that week putting the premise of my own opening lecture very rigorously to the test.

Some great interviews with some of our participating poets, including keynote speaker Robert Pinsky, the young Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, and Ellen Hinsey, who read from her own work as well as along with Tomas Venclova as his translator from the Lithuanian.

 And Ian Duhig, interviewing himself, sort of…

Lastly, thanks to the bloggers: PJ Nolan and Miglior Acque, among others. 

(The photograph of Seamus was taken at his birthday dinner in Hartley’s by his fellow Derry poet, Colette Bryce.)

First Published: “Heaney at 70″, an Irish Times Special Report to celebrate the 70th Birthday of Seamus Heaney

April 13, 2009

WHEN FIRST he spoke to America, Seamus Heaney did not soften the edge of his words. In fact, in his first major interview with an American newspaper, Heaney suggested that it was a certain softness in language that was most troubling him about America. There was, Heaney told the New York Times in 1983, such a “hunger to be comforted” in America, and such a surfeit of the kind of “bogus” language which rushed to offer that comfort, which aimed to say, first and foremost, that everything was all right. Everything was far from all right, Heaney’s remarks suggested. And being in America, he said, made him acutely conscious of his “constant battle” as a poet: to choose between giving and wrecking comfort; between making beautiful, soothing things and tearing them down with the stark truths of the poet.

Heaney, at this time, was making huge strides in America. He enjoyed a strong and a rapidly growing readership there, having seriously impressed with his fourth collection, North (1975). He was gaining, too, a firm foothold in the academy; at Harvard, he had been appointed the successor to Elizabeth Bishop as poet-in-residence, and had an arrangement which saw him teach there for a semester each year.

Still, looked at today, the frankness of his diagnosis in the New York Times interview is striking; his wariness and uneasiness with America leap off the page. Soon, in another interview, he would extend that wariness to American poetry, deeming it (and the poetry of John Ashbery in particular) to be disconnected from the hard truths of lived reality, to be insulated within the “centrally heated” American dream. Though he enjoyed much about America, yet he was keeping his distance. Once his public and his academic commitments were through, it was back to Ireland, where the real work of writing was done.

No love lost, or little love lost – at least that’s how it looked. Yet America adored Heaney; among critics and general readers alike, his popularity boomed ever larger with each passing year, and his reputation as a literary heavyweight was solidifying with each new collection, each essay, each lecture. Certainly, the impact of the critic Helen Vendler, whom Heaney had met at the Yeats Summer School in the 1970s, and with whom he reconnected while first at Harvard in 1979, was a factor in this success; Vendler became a champion of Heaney’s work, and, herself a serious heavyweight, made a real difference with her endorsement. But not all of Heaney’s American readers were finding their way to him through Vendler, or through Harvard, or even through the books pages of the New York Times; already in the 1980s, his appeal was far wider than that, and already he was blazing far ahead, there, of his fellow Irish poets. Even some questioning reviews of The Haw Lantern (1987) could not knock him off course. Heaney’s rocketing reputation may well have had positive knock-on effects for the reception of Irish poetry, and Northern Irish poetry, more generally in the US, but Heaney was in a league of his own, long before his Nobel Prize win in 1995 sent him into another dimension entirely. His Northern Irish contemporaries, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon, were highly esteemed by the poets and critics who knew their work, but those numbers were simply much lower than in the case of Heaney. From early on, his name was that thing so important in the US: a brand. Heaney books would sell in good numbers (and later, of course, in massive numbers). Heaney appearances at festivals or bookstores or on university campuses would draw large crowds (and eventually would cause queues several blocks long).

WHAT WAS IT about Heaney that drew, and held, American readers so? That he spoke often on college and university campuses; that he appeared often at public literary events; that he was, in his own words, “on the go” in this way from the success of Field Work (1979) onwards might have given some fuel to the fire of his popularity, but audiences flock to such appearances only if they already admire or know of the poet; this public profile was not the making of his renown. Neither was it sercured for him by the “ethnic vote”, as Heaney described the Irish-American diaspora in that New York Times interview; his appeal went far beyond that section of his readership, Irish-American or otherwise, which might have been hungry either for the comfort of nostalgia or for the starkness of a poetic reckoning with the Northern Irish Troubles.

Nor did Heaney’s critical eye on America glaze over with the passing of the decades since he sounded that warning against a language of bogus comfort. US politicians and political commentators up to, and including, the Obama team may have seized on the “hope and history” chorus from The Cure at Troy and quoted it at every opportunity, pivoting on its soaring emotion, treating it like an unofficial inaugural poem, but Heaney maintained the psychological distance which had been so important to him at Harvard, as well as the steel he had shown in that early interview. A poem like From the Land of the Unspoken (The Haw Lantern) castigated the shallow rhetoric of politics and of the mass media in capitalist societies, the reference to writers slumbering “at the very hub of systems” sharply recalling Ashbery’s “centrally heated” daydream. And was there such an edge, too, in his Nobel lecture, with its reference to the dangers of “elevating the cultural forms and conservatisms of any one nation into normative and exclusivist systems”, or does that only seem the case now, reading those words again at the end of the Bush administration?

Heaney was outspoken on that side of the US, too, talking to Adam Kirsch in 2006 about the “arrogance and stupidity” of the regime – about how those things had made him feel “implicated in American affairs in a new way”.

And here, perhaps, is the key to understanding Heaney’s abiding appeal and importance for American readers: not what he says about Iraq, or about 9/11 – or, indeed, what he said or did not say about Northern Ireland, when that debate over Heaney’s responsibilities as a poet was raging – but the fact and the complexity of his grappling with the notion of such responsibilities, with the meaning of responsibility itself. Heaney writes, always, in ethical terms; he engages, in his poems and essays, with the ethics of art, with its relationship to the world. He questions the artist’s own relationship to the social, cultural and political realities in which he finds himself. There is in Heaney’s work a constant consideration of poetry and its uses, even as it is written. Heaney’s poems work hard for their right to be read, even as that reading is taking place; it is an almost puritan diligence that, with his American readers, has served him well. His writings display and dramatise, also, those dilemmas which, by now, are painfully familiar to many Americans: how much to engage; how closely to intervene; how far distant to remain.

Seen in these terms, the connection forged by Heaney with his American public reveals itself as rooted, ultimately, in the early connection he forged with that American poet who was most important to him: Robert Lowell, whom Heaney first met by inviting him to read at Kilkenny Arts Week in 1975. And perhaps, ultimately, it was Lowell who truly made the difference for Heaney in the US, and not simply because he declared him the most important Irish poet since Yeats. Rather, it was through his reading of Lowell that Heaney could begin to identify and interrogate his own ethical command, could begin to worry the conflict between private and civic identities and responsibilities, between the freedom of the poet and the claim of that which seems to be outside him.

LOWELL’S COMMAND, and its hold upon Heaney, points to a larger command: that of America itself on Heaney’s identity as a poet. Because, in truth, Heaney’s relationship to America is no one-way street; wary as he may be of the country, he is as hooked on it as it has long been on him. And it is arguable that every one of the deep concerns which has made Heaney’s poetry what it is comes, to a very great extent, out of his encounter with that country. America, that is, has mattered far, far more than as a market, a lecture circuit, even than as a source of inspirations or frustrations for Heaney as a poet. The real secret to Heaney’s colossal success in America may be this: America made Heaney the poet he is. And it welcomes him partly because it recognises in him so much of what it itself has fostered.

How can this be so, when Heaney kept such a resolute distance, as he told the Times in 1983, from “the American scene” and all its insulated poems? When, as he described to Dennis O’Driscoll some 25 years later, he saw himself, during his time at Harvard each year, as being like a “lighthouse keeper”, passing the months until he could go back to his precious shore, back to write and to “relish versing”? Perhaps because the distance that Heaney experienced, and maintained, in the US was what enabled him to write poetry that was the opposite of insulated: poetry, quite literally, of a bared and uncomfortable world. Until he stepped outside the hothouse of Northern Ireland, he could not see that place – his interviews with O’Driscoll in Stepping Stones make this much strikingly apparent. And if the metaphor of America, in the 1969 poem Bogland, had given Heaney a lever with which to free himself from the grip of his homeplace, and a site from which to see it more clearly, then his first extended stay in America, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1970, gave him a “looseness”, both personally and in terms of poetic form, which would release him to an even more crucial freedom. At Berkeley, Heaney became aware of “a sense of choice”, of the expanse of territories open to him as a poet, and he returned to Ireland with “a different relation to the place”, a “devil-may-careness”, as he described it to O’Driscoll.

It was this new Heaney who made the crucial (and controversial) decision to move from the North to the Republic in 1972, a decision and a move which marked a turning point for Heaney, which acted for him as proof of his commitment to poetry, and the work of a poet, outside the desires and the demands of politics and place.

Ironically, for all the excesses of its own demands on the poet, it was America which, in large part, freed Heaney to become the poet he is today. From that very straining of which he became conscious there – between comfort and cruelty, between easiness and experiment, between the hubbub of acclaim and the silence and solitude of the art – emerged a poet free to step away from political demands, to step into unfamiliar territories, to step into looser, larger, languages and forms.

It has been a cracked mirror, but a constant one. And released by its glinting expanse, Heaney can be “lost/ Unhappy and at home” anywhere, and anyhow, he should please.