Irish eyes on the world
Author Colum McCann
The Irish writer Colum McCann has such a strong sense of people and places that he is able to depict historical events in a manner that is both sharp and luminous. For instance, his 2009 National Book Awardwinning novel Let the Great World Spin opens with an account of Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk on a cable suspended between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. McCann describes a moment during the 45-minute feat when observers worry the aerialist has fallen, but what they actually see is a shirt descending. Despite this momentary allusion to people jumping from the towers in September 2001, the contrast of Petit’s carefree agility to the troubled lives of McCann’s characters in 1974 remains in focus.
Born in Dublin in 1965, McCann moved to the U.S. in 1986 and now lives in Manhattan, where he teaches creative writing at Hunter College. He will appear with Gabriel Byrne, the actor from a workingclass Dublin suburb who now also lives in New York City, at a Lannan Readings & Conversations event on Wednesday, Jan. 31, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center.
The novel’s title comes from “Locksley Hall,” an 1835 poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, which includes the line, “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” McCann said, “I wish I could say it was a full-formed idea and that I was acutely conscious all along, but really it was a process of going forward, exploring, and then finding the right structure . ... Some of Tennyson’s structure was derived from a series of sixth-century Arabic poems called the Muallaquat, one line of which is particularly poignant to me: ‘Is there any chance that this desolation can bring us solace?’ ” This thought is central to the book’s plot and the development of its characters.
Most of the novel concerns the summer of 1974, a year before the appearance of the infamous Daily
News headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” The author portrays the sense of decay that dominated the town in the ’70s while also lending a glimpse of the patience and hope needed to survive in what often seemed an untenable situation. There was graffiti everywhere, yet it didn’t obscure a certain modest integrity to city life. That integrity becomes more clear in the book’s final chapter, set in 2006. While the characters’ stories all play out in 1974 with Petit’s successful feat as background, the 2006 chapter is a post-9/11 tale of the city’s descent and hard-won recovery.
Although McCann lives and works in New York, he still calls Dublin home; his daughter will soon attend University College there. “I am reminded of Joyce’s line,” McCann said. “‘I have been so long out of Ireland that I all at once hear her voice in everything.’ ” He hears that voice in his 2013 novel TransAtlantic, which begins with the first nonstop aerial crossing of the Atlantic by two British pilots in 1919 and includes scenes of Ireland in a complex timeline, from Frederick Douglass’ time in Dublin during the great famine in 1845 to Sen. George Mitchell’s peace missions to Belfast in the 1990s. Belfast is the location of the shipyards where the Titanic was built, and in the book, McCann never strays far from what he calls “the deep underwater of Irish history.”
According to the author, “I tend to work from what we call in Ireland ‘the seat of my pants.’ It’s an old aviation expression, I think, about flying without instruments. In other words, I never really have a full map of where I’m going. I tend to make it up along the way. You never really know when a story is entirely complete. It’s more a gut feeling that you have said everything you needed to say.”
Even though history plays a strong role in his work, McCann wrote his 2015 novella and shortstory collection Thirteen Ways of Looking from a personal viewpoint: that is, after being assaulted in Connecticut in 2014 — while attending a conference on empathy — when he helped a woman he believed was in a domestic dispute. Lack of safety is a theme throughout the tales. Once again, the work’s title refers to a poem, this one by Wallace Stevens, whose “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” appears in its entirety throughout the first story. As for how the incident affected his writing, McCann said, “The attack knocked me sideways for a while. I lost about three or four months when I simply could not write. I went into a deep dark place, to be honest.”
McCann also turned to poetry for the title of his book on the creative writing process, Letters to a Young Writer, telling Pasatiempo he wanted it to echo Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. When asked what author he thinks has best grasped his writing, say, in a book jacket blurb, McCann answered, “Frank McCourt gave me a wonderful shout-out for my novel This Side
of Brightness. He said — and we laughed about this afterwards — that the language of the novel made him want to ‘claw myself with pleasure.’ Frank was such a great character. There was life in everything that he did. He became a great friend. The world misses him.”
McCann’s emphasis on history and his explorations of whether desolation can bring solace may also prove central to his upcoming work, a novel set in Israel and Palestine. “You know,” he said, “one of those easy, measured stories to tell.”
“I tend to work from what we call in Ireland ‘the seat of my pants.’ In other words, I never really have a full map of where I’m going. I tend to make it up along the way.”