A new Republic
Writer to Writer, an anthology of interviews with some of the 20th Century’s most eminent writers, offers food for thought on today’s world. Donal O’Donoghue has a look
With nationalism on the rise, borders being redrawn and walls offered as solutions, we cannot have enough voices arguing for the contrary. Writer to Writer, a new anthology by journalist and broadcaster Ciaran Carty, offers a Babel of such contrarians. Quoting Benedict Anderson’s description of nations as “imagined communities”, Carty tells how the inspiration for his book was a stamp album he had as kid, a reliquary of long-gone countries. Writers, he argues, are not bound by man-made structures, only limited by their imagination, thus the book’s subtitle, ‘The Republic of Elsewhere’. Populating this landscape are some of the big literary hitters of the 20th Century, offering rhyme, reason and reflection for an age that is becoming increasingly reactionary.
The list of 45 writers runs alphabetically from Amis (Martin) to Wolfe (Tom), with the interviews spaced over some four decades from 1981 (Benedict Kiely) to 2015
(Paula Meehan). The uncluttered prose allows his subjects to fill the frame. So we have Lawrence Durrell, mellow and meditative (he’s standing on his head in the hallway when they meet in a ‘borrowed’ house in London) in an essay that segues between the subject and his alter ego Blandford from The Avignon Quintet. Norman Mailer’s interview is, like the man, short, pugnacious and on the nose; while Carty’s encounter with another American heavyweight, Saul Bellow, gives us a man with his hat on the table and his intellect on his sleeve.
We are at home in Donnybrook with Benedict Kiely (1981), next door to where English agents were gunned down by Michael Collins’ hit squad on Bloody Sunday. The meeting with Carlos Fuentes (2000), the great Mexican novelist, is a fully fledged thing and we have Michael Longley, the Belfast poet, in London in 1981, speaking frankly and fearlessly about what makes him and his work, giving us one of the best lines in the book (“I’m quite sure there will be no poetry in heaven”).
Allen Ginsberg (1993) ends with a punchline about
Bill Clinton and his jointsmoking days, while fellow poet David Gascoyne (1985) leaves us with the rumination that “poetry, like music, is an international feeling of solidarity.”
Each writer gets a short introduction, written from the high ground of the recent past but punctuated with the personal. In one instance, Carty’s granddaughter, on her way home from school, tells of how a famous poet called Seamus Heaney had died and they recited his poem, Mid-Term Break, in class. In another, ahead of Kay Boyle (a life more interesting than many writers’ fictions), Carty recalls his late mother and her memories of Paris. Backdrops are revealing too, whether getting lost on the streets of West Belfast and fearing that his companion, the great Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman might come to harm, having survived the Pinochet coup in 1973 or JP Donleavy, wanting to do the interview at Carty’s office in The Sunday Tribune because he was curious to see the inside of a newspaper.
But for the most part the interviewer stays out if it (a rare exception is his account of meeting VS Naipaul, where he writes of a man who doesn’t suffer fools easily but who said he was “immensely moved” by their encounter).
I have met Ciaran through work down the years and he is, as that phrase has it, a gentleman and a
scholar, erudite and empathetic in equal measure. People like talking to him and you always hoped he would come after rather than before you on the conveyor belt of interviews, because often his interviewee would be unwilling, or perhaps unable, to let him go. That writer-to-writer connection is here in an engaging and enlightening work, the subjects revealing themselves to someone they recognise as a fellow citizen of the Republic of Elsewhere.