Colum McCann in Conversation with Niall: Mac Monagle

Listen to Colum McCann in conversation with Niall: Mac Monagle and reading from Let the Great World Spin, Thursday 16th June 2011 at Dublin City Library & Archive.

Niall: Mac Monagle: The format of this evening’s event is very relaxed, we are among friends – though this is water (laughter) – and we’re going to have a conversation during which Colum is going to punctuate the conversation with three or four very short extracts from the novel, then we open it up to the floor for a question and answer session because this is the most wonderful event in any book’s life, when the book and the author gets to meet the people who fuel that book and send it on its way in its reading life, because without readers the book does not really happen. It has to be sent out, it has to be received, though the loneliness of the long distance writer is something that is also part of the making of the work of art. But can I begin Colum please ...

Colum McCann: Can I begin? Because I want to thank you, that’s the most extraordinary introduction that anyone has given. (clapping) That was really ... thank you so much.

Niall: There’s no getting away from this being a 9-11 novel though curiously enough 9-11 is never mentioned and it begins on Wednesday the 7th of August 1974 at 7.47 a.m.

Colum: Right.

Niall: Updike, Don DeLillo, Claire Messud, Joseph O’Neill – they all came at it directly. When did you realise that you would write the 9-11 novel and come at it obliquely?

Colum: Well I suppose one of the ... I mean actually on the day itself I knew that eventually I was going to have to confront it because I was at home in my office on 71st Street and I lived near a hospital at the time and there was all these sirens outside the window and I thought well, you know, there’s something going on down in the hospital and I walked out and it was about 9 o’clock in the morning and the answering machine was blinking and, you know, the red light was blinking away and I hadn’t heard the phone go off, neither had my wife Alison, so I pressed the play button and it was my sister in London and she was going “Are you alright? Are you alright?” and I was like what does she mean are we alright, of course we’re alright, I mean what’s going on? And how could she know before we knew that something was going on. I looked out the window, there was nothing there and then I thought, you know, I should figure out if something was really going on because people were starting to move quickly on the street and there seemed to be some sort of buzz going and I turned on the television over my wife’s shoulder, and she was there dressing our son Johnny Michael at the time, and I saw the twin towers where her father worked and he was in the first building to be hit, the second building to come down, and I didn’t know what to say. I mean what do you say to somebody at that stage? And I just said her name and she turned and she fell to her knees and we did not know for about 5 or 6 hours what had happened to her father, Roger Hawke. Eventually, thank God, you know, he’d gotten out and he’d come out of the building when the first building had come down so he was covered in all that debris, that sort of weird glaucoma storm of dust that was coming down, and he came to our place covered in all that dust and my daughter, Isabella, who was 3 at the time, ran down the corridor, jumped into his arms and said ... she thought he was burning because she could smell the smoke off his clothes and I told her no, no he wasn’t burning but that he would be alright and then she said “No, no he’s burning from the inside out” and I thought okay well, you know, that’s out of the mouth of babes and I’ll have to remember that because she didn’t mean it in any sort of ... obviously in any hyper literary way but I sort of thought of it as like I have to mark that and then as the days went on little things happened around our apartment and I thought someday I’m going to have to try to make sense of it for myself, not for anybody else because I’m not interested in telling anybody how to think. I think we’re told enough how to think, you know, by others but being allowed to feel is more interesting and then I remembered Philippe Petit’s walk across the World Trade Centre towers and I said immediately when I remembered having read about it I thought that’s the way to go because that’s an act of beauty, an act of grace, an act of, you know, creation in certain ways and it opposes the act of destruction but you can talk about the act of destructions by talking about the act of creation. And I have no ... I think DeLillo’s book and Claire Messud’s book, all those books are fantastic and they have the ash falling early on in their books and I just thought, okay, I don’t want to do that, I don’t want to go there, I want to go sort of obliquely like I suppose like a poet would go. A poet goes to something else, you know, another place in order to talk about it.

Niall: Early in the book the charismatic, mysterious John Andrew Corrigan we’re told his theme was happiness, what’s your theme?

Colum: I think my theme would be the possibility of grace in the face of all the other evidence that we see. The possibility of some sort of redemption. Many, many years ago I wrote a book called This Side of Brightness where I stayed with the homeless people that live in the subway tunnels of New York and these were people living in like really, really tough situations, you know, in little caves off to the side of the tracks in dirt and squalor and no matter what situation they were in every single one of those homeless people said to me “When I get out of here ...,” not “if I get out of here” but “When I get out of here I will do such and such a thing” and it spoke to me about the possibility that we need to have some sort of available light beyond what is immediately dark, you know, about how we live. And I understand that like, you know, as a middle class south county Dublin, you know, man that that may seem sentimental but I don’t think it’s sentimental, I’ve learned it down through the years through various travels and everything like that that I don’t value cynicism at all. I’m sort of tired of cynicism. I was a little bit cynical in my early 20s but I just go ... I think cynicism is dishonest and it’s lazy. I think optimism is that further step through cynicism to the far side where you say, okay, you know, maybe it’s bad but so what, it’s bad, we’re not going to like end up talking about it all the time, let’s talk about the little bit of light that’s there.

Niall: But there is much darkness as well though in the book, I mean it’s its strength I think in a way, you know, the death of the Corrigan and the death of Jazzlyn and the death of Tillie, I mean these are very realistic portraits of people in crises and the bad luck of that car accident ...

Colum: Right.

Niall: ... which character came to you first? I mean there are so many unforgettable characters and I think there are 11 different voices or perspectives in the novel ...

Colum: Right.

Niall: ... some in first, some in third person, but which person came and haunted you to begin with?

Colum: Once I knew that I wanted to write about the tight rope walker, originally I was so angry about what had happened in America and what was being done in say the name of my children and so on and what was being done in Iraq and Afghanistan that I said, okay, I’m going to take the tight rope walk and I’m going to mess with history and I’m going to have him walk across that wire and I’m going to make him fall and I’m going to create a fiction out of that. That cynicism that I had became sort of uninteresting to me as I went on and I realised I’m not so interested in this tight rope walker as I am interested in the city that’s at his feet and I’d wanted for quite a while to write about an Irish character because I want to come home, right, because I’d been away for a while, I’d written about a Slovakian gypsy, I’d be away, you know, and I wanted to be able to come home. So I also wanted to write about a Catholic character and not somebody who was involved in, you know, the abuse or anything like that because I want to talk about good people and it’s really hard to talk about good people.

Niall: But it’s an alternative liberating kind of Catholicism, it’s far more interesting than ...

Colum: Exactly, it’s liberation theology and it’s his sort of joy that he throws at the world. And so he comes from down the road, he’s from Sandymount, you know, and ...

Niall: Where the palm trees grow.

Colum: ... where the palm trees ... Dublin where the ... Hugo Hamilton got the title first, beautiful title, Dublin where the Palm Trees Grow. But yeah so I wanted to come home and the funny thing is so I invented this character, John Corrigan, and he introduced me then ... he started living in this tower block and he introduced me these hookers that he worked with or they were down the street and he’s like just administering grace to them by allowing them to use his apartment as, you know, a halfway ... as a dressing room really and then they started to introduce other characters to me so really it’s an Irish novel in that sense, that it all came out of this Irish character who lives in New York.

Niall: And are you the Ciaran Corrigan?

Colum: Yeah, I wish I could be John Corrigan but I’m the more cynical brother.

Niall: Yeah. I mean you know the bandied phrase is the great Irish novel the great American novel, there are beautiful Irish riffs in this book, of Sheila in her wheelchair dreaming of Galway, you know, a world lost to her.

Colum: Right.

Niall: Or when Jazzlyn comes back and she encounters an ugly side of Ireland, she’s called a nigger ...

Colum: Right.

Niall: ... she’s spat at because of Afghanistan and Iraq or whatever ...

Colum:Right.

Niall: ... I mean obviously you are Irish and you will always be Irish but how do you play the Irish in America or the Irish American?

Colum: You know, I’m sort of uncomfortable with those words, Irish American, because they just automatically shout, you know, ancient order, you know, Paddy Day parades ...

Niall: The parades.

Colum: ... you know, gay men and women are not allowed march and that sort of thing, so I love being Irish, I also love the American. I don’t like when they get smashed together just it’s my own fault, it’s my own failing. We’re trying to change it like, you know, you look at the likes at Loretta Brennan Glucksman from the American Ireland Fund and she’s funding all these like fantastic philanthropic organisations here in Ireland. Someone like Gabriel Byrne is now Cultural Ambassador, you know, he’s around in town now, he’s changing the whole idea of what it means to be Irish American and like you know the ladies all go like – when they say Gabriel Byrne – they all go ooohhh! (laughter) They do and it’s great though because he is I mean ... because he’s fantastic and he’s radical and he’s different and he doesn’t play to any of the corny or the lepracorny (laughter) image of the Irish and I think that’s what we’ve got to push as much as anything else.

Niall: This book was years in the making I presume and obviously, you know, you move from the Upper East Side and that rarefied sensibility of Claire Soderberg and her judge husband and then you get down and dirty and we’ve got this brilliant Tillie character, the salty, earthy, vulgar, crass, deeply human character, how did you get those voices? I mean how easy was it for you to become Tillie?

Colum: Well it was easy enough to be Ciaran Corrigan because you’re entirely right, the Ciaran Corrigan character was really me but obviously it was much harder to become a 38 year old grandmother who is a hooker on the streets of the Bronx. I mean one of the funny things that I do talk about like, I don’t want to repeat myself, but when I was working on Tillie, that character, I’d be writing away, you know, in the middle of the afternoon or whatever – and my children are not allowed knock on my door because they’re supposed to be leave me alone when I’m writing – but anyway my daughter came along and slipped in a little note, a little white note, underneath the door (laughter) which said come on dad let’s go play – because she loves football, she’s a great little football player, soccer player – come on dad let’s go play football in Central Park and I’m like right now I’m turning a trick underneath the Major Deegan Expressway, give me half an hour (laughter), you know, and I’ll be right with you. Because you get into the head of the character or you try to get into the character and then in a curious way you’re in the body of the character. But the nice thing about literature is being able to be in the body of the character and not having to suffer, you know, you suffer with them but then you can walk away without the overwhelming impact. It’s like read Sebastian Barry and you read about the First World War and you experience the war and you cry with the war and you experience the terror and difficulty and you experience it, you really, truly experience it but then you walk away and you don’t necessarily have the baggage of all that ringing of the bombs in your ears or, you know, the digging of the tunnels or the rats in the tunnels or anything like that, that’s what I love about, you know, great books. And let’s face it, I have to say about Dublin, Dublin literature or Irish literature in general, we’re so blessed, aren’t we, when you think about all the great writers that we have?

Niall: Yeah, yeah. How hard was it for you not to become overtly political? I mean it’s a political novel, it’s a religious novel, it’s a novel about the aesthetic, it’s about so many complex things but you didn’t bung in, you know, okay, Nixon appears on a newspaper on the floor of a diner so you give us the back story but were you ever tempted to just ... or I mean in the making of the book I spoke to your Editor last night and she said that when Colum McCann presents a novel it is a work of art, there is no faffing around, he has worked and honed the text, that it’s a joy for an editor to receive on his or her desk, and in this instance her desk. Now when you were making and shaping the book how different was it as you went along to the book that is now between covers? I mean the shape, the structure, the voices, did you edit out worlds? Did you find things as you went along that had to go in?

Colum: It’s virtually the same as when I gave it to my Editor apart from line work ...

Niall: But in the making I mean?

Colum: ... but in the making of it it’s crazily different, you know, I had a huge chess match in there, because there’s a character who plays chess, and I invented ... I spent 2 months every day with a chess grandmaster, a Russian grandmaster, inventing a game that reflected the structure of the novel. Black against white, all this sort of stuff, and it was annotated and everything – I got rid of it because I just felt a reader, ah maybe that’s too much.

Niall: That takes a lot of courage though doesn’t it?

Colum: Yeah.

Niall: Having worked and worked and then I mean to make that decision that you just say ... I mean Catherine Boyd in last Saturday’s Irish Times she announced that she’d spent a whole year working on canvasses and she got rid of the lot of them. She just felt they had no integrity, they were not working.

Colum: I just threw away 18 months of a novel about Frederick Douglas being in Ireland and I had this idea long before this whole Frederick Douglas stuff started to happen (laughter), you know, with Obama’s visit and everything like that. Yeah, you’ve got to throw stuff away, you know, you write the novel that you want to read and if you feel it’s not good enough or it’s not honest enough – honesty being the real thing.

Niall: But you never repeat yourself. I mean, you know, as a novelist you’ve gone to such ... I mean Rudolph Nureyev, the Romanian Gypsy world, the underworld or the under belly of New York, now this one. You tend to challenge yourself or is it a challenge to go different routes every time?

Colum: I love to go on journeys ... I like to travel so some of the travel I’ve done ... like I’ve taken a bicycle across the United States, I’ve walked the length and breadth of Ireland more than a couple of times and now that I’m a dad – I have 3 kids and everything – I don’t travel so much. I mean I travel for work but I don’t travel in the same way and so I travel in these characters so the adventures I take on sort of become a sort of journey, if you will. So I have a good time. People say you should write about what you know about, right? They do, that’s the old, you know, wisdom, write what you know. But honestly I’ve a friend here, John Gorman, who knows me very, very well, he knows me since the age of 12, and if I wrote about what I knew about I’d be writing about growing up, Clonkeen Road, middle class, fairly, you know, ordinary and nobody wants to read about that. I don’t want to read about that. I want to read towards what I want to know. I want to make a leap into some sort of weird place or weird life that instructs me then about myself because eventually everything ... they’re right, you can only write what you know, but if you write outside of what you supposedly know it becomes much more interesting.

Niall: And in the places in the novel I mean, you know, even a sentence like ‘stepping into a mahogany lift’ and it prompts the narrator to think of this as a coffin or you think of, you know, the ‘Miro, Miro on the wall’ world and you think of the diner and you think of the project housing, are these drawn from places or just imagined places?

Colum: That’s interesting, yeah.

Niall: I mean you’ve done research before. You’ve spoken to police you’ve, you know, gone down into the subways, are these places ... I mean the building where Claire Soderberg lives is that a real building in your mind because of something you know well yourself?

Colum: Yes, it is a real place. I think by the very fact that it is imagined it then becomes real and that’s why I was like, you know, I carry this in this book today, you know, stepping into this book Ulysses is, you know, you step into a very, very real world even though it’s invented. Isn’t it Clifford Geertz who says that the real is as imagined as the imaginary, right, and I think the corollary works as well, the imagined is as real as the supposedly realistic, yeah.

Niall: And I mean there’s people who dismiss fiction as kind of, you know, inconsequential. I always ...

Colum: They’re so full of shite probably (laughter) sorry excuse my French, yeah. (laughter)

Niall: ... I always remind them of Brian Friel’s very telling phrase, “imagined truth”.

Colum: Right.

Niall: It’s as valid as actual truth or, you know, what the imagination conceived to be true, it’s as valid as any other truth that there is.

Colum: Absolutely. I mean fiction comes from the word fictus, to shape, I mean it doesn’t mean to invent, it means to shape something, so you’re shaping a peculiar truth and sometimes it’s more true, as Friel says, like than, you know, what we call ... we accept as, you know, pure truth.

Niall: This is a little aside, but was there something mischievous in your making your novel and shaping it in beginning it early in the morning and ending with a woman in bed, just like James Joyce’s Ulysses?

Colum: Yeah. You know I can’t touch Ulysses, I mean I don’t think anybody can touch Ulysses, I think it’s the greatest novel of our time and if my novel is a nod to it, it is a nod to it, yes, I was aware with all the different voices, you know, I had my own Molly in Tillie, the hooker, I ended it with a woman in bed with a woman crawling in beside, a young woman crawling in beside a woman, generally, most of the novel takes place over 24 hours and all that sort of stuff, yes, I was aware of that but I know that I’m a sort of like a pale figure in comparison to that novel but it is a nod to the sort of generosity of what Joyce gives to us.

Niall: Did you always know that you would begin in 1974 and then bring us to 2006?

Colum: I knew but I didn’t know how the hell I was going to do it. I really ... you know originally I thought I was going to finish with a tight rope walk and I thought that’s clichéd, I opened with a tight rope walk so therefore I should close with tight rope walk and I was like no I can’t do it, I can’t do it and then suddenly when Obama was getting, was gathering speed and I was writing this and I was thinking Obama might get elected it started to open the novel for me, it started to open it with a sort of a light, you know, an optimism because they were dark times, let us not forget that they were dark times when George Bush was in power and it was embarrassing to like be even in New York where hundreds of thousands of people were out protesting against these wars but it was embarrassing to be there.

Niall: I mean the closing sequence I think is just lyrical and so beautiful and so hopeful, the Jazzlyn/Pino relationship or what it might become and the like, but you said somewhere I think that the two towers in your novel were Corrigan and Jazzlyn and were they were kind of morals, I mean they die, you know, early on in the book ...

Colum: Right.

Niall: ... what about their deaths in relation to everything that they contained in terms of possibility and potential?

Colum: Yeah, it was startling to me because when I killed the Irish character, Corrigan, off I was like, okay, no, no he can’t die just yet, I thought, you know what I’ll do, I’ll try and resurrect him (laughter) and I tried to roll the stone away from the, you know, and the stone wouldn’t go, it was like Sisyphus like it kept rolling back. He wouldn’t resurrect himself for me. I was like, ah you bastard, you know, you’re supposed to not do this to me because I really want you for the rest of the novel, and then no he said no and he’d introduced me to all these other characters – I know I’m talking about it in a strange way but this is how it felt when I was writing it, he’d introduced me ... and he said no you can’t resurrect me, I’m meant to die, and then two thirds of the way through the writing of the novel I realised that like two towers the two main characters of the book – or two of the main characters in the book – had fallen and you spend the rest of the time trying to build them back up again and that’s sort of what happened.

Niall: And of course for Ciaran he never forgot them, you know, he brought them – those characters – with him into the rest of his life ...

Colum: With him.

Niall: ... and back to Dublin and Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Colum: Yes.

Niall: Why we’ll talking about the JC, hidden saint character, perhaps you’d read a little bit about John Corrigan?

Colum: Thank you.

Niall: The day job, when you’re not writing novels, is teaching – Hunter College.

Colum: Oh yeah.

Niall: Tell me about teaching.

Colum: I’ve had loads of day jobs down through the years. I was a waiter, a bartender, a ditch digger – I did all sorts of things – but I love teaching. In fact, winning the IMPAC Dublin last night I had the chance to invite two of my teachers along and I have great admiration for them because I can remember my teachers, I can remember like being in 3rd class and the scratch of the chalk against the board and like all sorts of things. I have tremendous respect for teachers. I also have tremendous respect for ... I think teachers and librarians go in the same category for me. I think librarians are teachers and teachers are librarians in certain ways and I think they do tremendous things for us that don’t necessary get acknowledged. And any country that doesn’t look after its teachers, in particular, and its libraries and its books I think is doomed in a certain way. One of the great causes, I think, for optimism even now in Ireland after all the stuff has hit the fan is that we still do, I think, have a certain amount of respect for the book, for the word and I hope we continue like to have respect for, you know, those teachers. Well my wife’s a teacher and all that sort of stuff so, you know, I’m invested in this but I think it’s important.

Niall: And when you began your writing career there were fewer courses for creative writing etc.

Colum: Right.

Niall: Now writing can it be taught, can it be shaped and directed? I mean where do you ... when you meet your ... I mean is it a creative writing course?

Colum: Yeah it’s a creative course so it’s fiction yeah.

Niall: Okay so these are wannabe novelists ...

Colum: Yeah.

Niall: ... they want to write. Some people never make it.

Colum: No.

Niall: Some people do. What do you need to make it?

Colum: Yes, it’s funny that you ask because I think I can take a student with less talent and more desire and they will make it more than ones with more talent and less desire.

Niall: So you need a hunger?

Colum You need stamina. A huge amount of stamina because like for years ... I mean I made no money for the best part of 15 years and like, you know, I’m not moaning about it, I mean I had a great time and everything like that but it is difficult, you know, when you start out, and perseverance and a fire. I mean I don’t teach anything, I couldn’t tell you what the word plot means, I don’t know what a metaphor is or what, you know, prescriptive grammar is as opposed to descriptive grammar. I do know that I could like grab someone by the lapels and say, ‘okay, you know, how much do you want this?’ and it’s kind of like being, I don’t know, maybe like being Trapattoni or someone like that, you know, ‘you’ve got to go out there lads and you’ll beat Italy’ (laughter), you know, like ‘you can do it’.

Niall: I was lucky enough to interview Paul Harding 3 weeks at the Dublin Writers Festival. A marvellous guy.

Colum: Oh he’s brilliant. Isn’t that a gorgeous book, it’s like ...

Niall: But he was very dismissive of those rarefied precious authors who have their own voice so they won’t read anything when they’re writing.

Colum: Ah yes.

Niall: He thought it was a nonsense.

Colum: Yeah.

Niall: I mean I agree with him and I think that, you know, I think reading must be an essential part of a writer’s life.

Colum: Sure.

Niall: Who have you been reading?

Colum: Well we get our voice from all the others that are around us. Right now I’ve been reading all this 19th century stuff, trying to get a voice around that Irish story about Douglas and stuff, so I’ve been reading Sheridan and I’ve been reading books that were published by Richard Webb here in Ireland, reading Frederick Douglas himself and all that sort of stuff. But then I’ve been reading, you know, the ones I love. Dermot Bolger, for instance, and Sebastian Barry, Roddy Doyle, you know, like all these ...

Niall: And I suspect you read poetry. I mean Wallace Stevens has a walk in part with Let the Great World Spin ...

Colum: Yeah well my new novel is actually ... the one I’ve decided I’m going to do is called 13 Ways of Looking at a ...

Niall: Oh there is Wallace Stevens again.

Colum: ... yeah, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

Niall: Okay.

Colum: Yeah, well Jesus, I mean down the road we have the greatest poet in the world, right, and I mean we have Seamus Heaney down the road and we have, you know, Paul Muldoon who is Princeton and we have, you know, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Michael Longley and like I mean we’re raised on poets, we’ve got an embarrassment of poets. I mean if I could I’d be a poet.

Niall: Really?

Colum: Oh I’d love to be a poet, Jesus yeah. (laughter)

Niall: Now well if prose is your medium what about the movie?

Colum: Ah yeah.

Niall: I mean this is so visual I mean I see the movie playing in my mind when I read that novel, are you interested in it becoming a movie? I mean you’ll reach a much wider audience and the good thing about movies is that they come back to the book very often. Almost always if you see a movie you’ll read the book.

Colum: Yeah. Well the thing is I literally just finished last ... well maybe 2 weeks ago, I finished the first version of the screen play for this book with them.

Niall: And how was that?

Colum: Ah it’s dreadful. (laughter)

Niall: No, no, no ...

Colum: No it’s dreadful. (laughs)

Niall: ... not how, I mean how difficult was it for you to say I am now writing a film script?

Colum: You know what you have to do, you’ve to take this book and you’ve to like take it up in the air and then you let it drop, bumpf, and it smashes to the ground and all the characters are down in a new array, a new heap around you and then you’ve got to pick them up and start building them back up again and I found things like that I’d wish I’d given to Claire, for instance. Like I have a section in the book where Claire talks about grief and her son going off and that sort of thing and, you know, I discovered in the writing of the screen play that there is no word for a parent who loses a son. There is no word in the English language for that. I wish I had known that when I was writing this book because I would have done an extended riff on the lack of language because, you know, if you lose your husband you’re a widow, if you lose your wife you’re a widower, if you lose your father and mother you’re an orphan, you know, but we don’t have a word, as long as you know.

Niall: Heartbroken.

Colum: Yeah. Well heartbroken is the word ...

Niall: Yeah.

Colum: ... it’s a descriptive word and heartbroken for the lack of language or heartbroken for how it feels. So in writing the film script I discovered things about the characters and then I had to destroy all sorts of other things about the characters too and I’ll probably go through 10 different drafts with them.

Niall: And will it be very different from the book or ...?

Colum: Yeah. I think it will be really different. I want it to be different. I don’t want to be loyal to the book because I think a book should be a book and a film then should be a film. It’s a guy called JJ Abrams who did the series on TV ‘Lost’ and, you know, he’s done ... he’s got a new film out called ‘Super Eight’ with Steven Spielberg and stuff and he’s very smart and he’ll do what he wants to do with it. We’ll see.

Niall: Very good. You mentioned Claire Soderberg, would you visit her in the Upper East Side and give us a taste please?

Colum: Oh right, right, right. I’ll give you a quick couple of paragraphs about that actual section that I was just talking about, how about that. And she says ... oh yeah, this is when her son is about to leave.

Niall: Okay.

Niall: I love that part.

Colum: Thank you.

Niall: In Claire Soderberg we get a back story, just glimpses of growing up and the argument with her father etc. and that racist joke how do you deepen a character once you create them? How do you go back and ... I mean it’s a very convincing portrait of a woman and even the Solomon and the Yale years and so on, that you don’t labour it but you really give a credible character and bring that character to life. How, I mean do you have a plan and a plot above your desk?

Colum: No plan, no plot, no journey – no nothing. I mean I show it to my wife first. She’s my first reader and then she says ... I mean she’s very brave because like sometimes she tells me this is God awful and I go around the house like bashing my head off the walls saying “You don’t love me anymore” (laughter). Though seriously she ... but then if she likes it then I know it’s working. She’s a fantastic reader and she’s generous enough to be critical, if you know what I mean, and that doesn’t always happen.

Niall: And which part of that novel wrote itself? Or were there parts that just you were working and you forgot the clock – something was happening?

Colum: When I found Tillie.

Niall: Okay.

Colum: When I found Tillie. Actually I’ll read one tiny little section ...

Niall: Okay.

Colum: Thank you.

Niall: At this point in time the Lord Mayor and the Lady Mayoress must leave us, I believe, thank you for coming.

Thank you.

Niall: You’re welcome.

Colum: Yeah thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.

Goodbye.

Colum: Bye bye. (clapping)

Niall: I now invite the floor to take up the conversation, questions from you people. Let’s not have embarrassed silences.

Colum: You see the thing is I always ... like as a teacher I should know you should always plant a question early on (laughter).

Niall: Well I’ll ask the vulgar question, because they all want to ask it, what are you going to do with the money?

Colum: Ah yeah. (laughter)

Niall: A.S. Byatt when she won the Booker built a swimming pool. Last year Gerbrand Bakker) went off and he said he was going to buy a field for his horse.

Colum: Nice.

Niall: Yeah.

Colum: Nice.

Niall: So what will you do?

Colum: I’d buy a field except I don’t have a horse. (laughter) Can I tell you something that’s like really embarrassing?

Niall: No – go on. (laughs)

Colum: I was trying to get to the bank today, I still have it right here. (laughter) I haven’t had a chance ... you know what, if I could get this every year I’d like to somehow change the world but that’s not going to happen. I’m going to use it to write and, you know, then hopefully do some good things with it, whatever it be, charity and things like that, and then do stuff for my family. I’ve three kids. Jim Harrison, the American poet, he says ‘Children pry up our rotting bodies with cries of earn, earn, earn.’ (laughter) So, you know, it’s there and I’ll use it to do some renovations. There’s lots of things I can do with it.

Niall: Okay.

Colum: It’s embarrassing, isn’t it, talking about money.

Niall: What do you think of our politicians, globally, I mean Yann Martel, you know, he sent a book hopefully, every month to the Prime Minister of Canada ...

Colum: Right.

Niall: ... he sent book after book after book because he wanted his Prime Minister to be a man of sensibility, understanding and this is what art gives us I think as human beings. He got two formal letters, you know, on book 53 and book 112, but just from a secretary saying ‘Dear Mr. Martel, thank you ...’.

Colum: Right.

Niall: Later he got a letter from Barrack Obama, in Barrack Obama’s hand, to say he and his daughter had read The Life of Pie it lead to really interesting discussions and thank you for writing it Mr. Martel. I mean isn’t that just such a good news story when you think how politicians ought to be reading, they ought to be going to the theatre ...

Colum: Yeah.

Niall: ... they ought to be looking at paintings because it just deepens them as human beings.

Colum: If only our Presidents could be our Taoiseachs, if you think of, you know, Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, what an incredible job they’ve done over the past I don’t know how many years, and I think the people who are there they’re good hearted people, you don’t go into that to be cynical I don’t think. I mean there are other ways to go into the world and be cynical about the world. I think power corrupts in so many small ways. I think we have ... it looks like we have a fairly good crew who are trying to like look after us right now but really if you think about the women who’ve done things as symbols for this country and as people who’ve operated and used power in a most extraordinarily generous way and looked after their readers, know their art, they know their theatre, they know what’s going on. If we could clone President McAleese and President Robinson I think we’d be in a fantastic place.

Niall: The women in your book ... there are more interesting female characters than male characters.

Colum: Yeah. Women are more ... I mean I realised half way through writing this book this is a women’s book and not to say that men can’t or won’t read it but the women in the book take charge of what’s going on, the men are a little bit more passive.

Niall: But we still hear the macho man, ‘Oh I wouldn’t read a novel, I read biographies, I only read history’ and this is just rubbish.

Colum: Yeah. It’s complete rubbish.

Niall: But this is what happens out there, you know.

Colum: I know but I don’t understand that, I mean I’d love for ... you see, you know, when say the Iraq stuff was going on these guys came and Colin Powell whom I now have a bit more respect for but he would go and he held up – and I remember because I was writing this book at the time and it goes back to the book – he would hold up this photograph and he’d say look we have satellites and we have a taken a photograph of a tanker, this is in Iraq, you know, there you go – and he would hold it up – and the fact that he was holding it up because it was a photograph was almost evidence that it contained chemical weapons. Nobody knew what it had, it could have had baby shampoo inside it, you know, it could have anything inside it, but they said no, no it has weapons of mass destruction inside it. And out of this truth, this photograph that we accepted as a truth because he held it in his hands and said this is a tanker and we knew it was a tanker, he created a lie. So what’s more interesting to me is the way that the truth gets manipulated by these people and then ... but the textural thing was that people were dying and what the poets will eventually write about was the terrible things that were done in the name of that supposed truth and let’s not forget, say, that there was up to five Hiroshima’s perpetrated on another country. 500,000 people died for these supposed truths so that ... I’m getting very political here, I’m sorry, with the sort of Cheney and Bush and Halliburton and Blackwater and all those other people could go along and make money out of it while the average person, the really good person, I really love talking about the ... because I love America in many ways ... they got slagged and they got kicked around and they got cheapened by the people who were in power. Sorry, I’m ranting.

Niall: I see you as a romantic in the best sense of the word, you know, T Hume says that here is a definition of romanticism that man the individual is an infinite reservoir of possibility but yet you’re honest enough to portray America even now as ugly, aggressive, thuggish – even in Pino’s lovely joke, I’m carrying 8 pints of liquid, the blood within his ...

Colum: Right.

Niall: ... and the nastiness in that response to him and similarly with Ireland you don’t ... I mean you portray Ireland and America warts and all but your life is America is it, I mean ...?

Colum: No, I mean I honestly ... I’m still in Clonkeen Road but I’m in New York as well but I don’t think that I emigrated as such. I don’t think the word emigration exists so much for us as it did many, many years ago.

Niall: Because it’s only 5 hours away?

Colum: Because it’s 5 hours away. Other people were forced to emigrate and my generation ... I was lucky, you know, I had enough, I good get by and everything.

Niall: Yeah.

Colum: I know other people did have to emigrate, I didn’t have to emigrate, I went because I was curious and I always acknowledge the fact that I was very, very lucky. But I don’t think emigration is such a big thing. I think returning is more of a problem now. It’s not the problem of leaving but the problem of return and Brodsky talks about that, the quote, ‘You can’t go back to the country that doesn’t exist anymore’ so, you know, I come back 3 or 4 times a year but I know there are people who come back from, say, the Bronx and they end up going to Castlebar where they grew up or Kiltimagh or where it happens to be and they don’t recognise it anymore. They feel like they’ve landed in a foreign land and that is deeply disturbing to them because they’ve held the dream of Ireland with them. I do happen to think that Ireland is returning. I did find it, including myself – and I tar myself with the same brush – arrogant, you know, a couple of years ago. We’re so cool, we’re so hip, we’re so rich, you know, we’ve got such ... new cars, etc. I find it coming back now and I find a little ... that humour that was here, you know, ...

Niall: Yeah.

Colum: ... in the 70s and 80s, you know, it’s coming back.

Niall: The recession might be good for us.

Colum: Yeah, well nobody wants to be kicked around but there is a certain amount of humility that comes about with having a bit of difficulty. The excellence of difficulty, that Yeatsian thing, you’ve got to go through the storm and then maybe come out on the other side. So is it such a bad thing what we’re going through? Yeah of course it’s a bad thing, nobody wants to not be able to pay for the paper in the morning or whatever it happens to be.

Niall: Now I want no-one falling asleep tonight saying ‘Oh I wished I’d asked’. Yes, we’ve a question?

Questions

Participant: Yes I am just thinking of the author Maeve Binchy was always one to stand at bus stops and listen to conversations ...

Colum: Right.

Participant: ... and I was wondering in your books do you have any sort of pre-conceived ideas of how conversation should go? Or do you, you know, listen to certain people and say well that’s how they should be speaking? I was just interested.

Colum: No, that’s a good question because, you know, well first of all I have to say I love Maeve and I think she’s done a tremendous amount for Irish literature and she ... Maeve Binchy’s books paid for a whole load of books from younger Irish writers for the past 20/30 years and she’s been generous to everybody like and she has the right way as far as I’m concerned and she does good stuff. I wouldn’t be hanging out at bus stops listening to people purely because I don’t ... the only time I write is when I sit down at the desk and write, I don’t consider myself to be a writer as I walk down the street, I don’t think oh she’s wearing purple shoes, I’ve got to put purple shoes in my book. I like to be engaged with the world, I like to be alive and not be a writer. I feel sort of cynical to be like listening in on people’s conversations, say in a pub or something, for me, and say, okay, I’m going to use that now in a novel but that’s purely my own point of view. I suppose the answer to the question is that for me the process happens as I sit down and then you try and make these conversations as real as you want them to be and then you’ve got to speak them aloud. With all my books I have somebody read them to me. Like when I wrote Dancer I had ballet dancers read them to me. When I wrote This Side of Brightness I’d an African American guy read the whole book, word by word, and I listened to it and then changed it and try and get the rhythms right and stuff.

Niall: And who read this to you?

Colum: This was read by different people. A judge read the section about the judge and he said ‘Oh that’s not right.’, you know, because they can hear it.

Niall: Okay.

Colum: And I had cops read the hooker. I couldn’t find a hooker to do it. (laughter) And with the Irish section I just read that myself because I knew I had that, that that was right.

Niall: Okay. I love the way Tillie loved Corrigan saying ‘I’ll call the guards.’

Colum: Oh yeah. (laughter)

Niall: You know, those lovely Hiberno-English phrases that are ... or “there you go”, the coffee, those fleeting moments.

Colum: Yeah, that’s right.

Niall: Any other questions? Sorry?

Participant: How influential was your dad on your writing because ...

Colum: Thank you for ...

Participant: ... obviously having a lot of books and ...?

Colum: ... I’m so glad that you know that my dad had books. My dad, Sean McCann, who had a fantastic influence on me, has written close to 30 books. He wrote 7 kid soccer books. Then he wrote a load of books about roses and then he wrote about Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey, the fighting Irish, the Irish in love, the wit of the Irish, the history of the Abbey Theatre – all this stuff. My dad would come home with books when I was 14/15 and he’d say ‘here, have a look at Kerouac. Here, have a look at Ginsberg. Here, have a look at Ferlinghetti.’ which I mean wasn’t happening. Then he’d tell me stories – because he was Features Editor in The Evening Press – about the likes of Ben Kiely coming down and sitting in his office and Ben Kiely is an Irish writer who I think is one of the greatest voices of the 20th century and we will re-discover and keep re-discovering him as time goes on. And my dad introduced me to Ben Kiely so I would go to Ben Kiely’s house and hang out with him and then go to Madigan’s and have a pint at 12 o’clock in the afternoon when I shouldn’t. (laughter) But my dad was ... is, because he’s still going strong, incredibly, incredibly important to me and also then my mum was important too in the sense that my mum came from Derry and she would bring me up to her farm in Garvagh in County Derry, when I was kid, and it was really instructive for me to get out of Dublin and see another landscape and I loved it up there actually, I really loved it up there.

Niall: There’s a glass of wine to be had outside so will we take one last question from the floor please.

Participant: About your photograph from the future of the airplane, where did you get that, is it a real photograph?

Colum: Thank you for that question. I don’t know, I think it’s page 237 or so.

Niall: It’s the photograph Jazzlyn carries with her.

Colum: It’s a photograph that Jazzlyn carries with her at the end of the novel and of course it’s taken by Fernando ... the subway tagger who is at the beginning of the novel who seems to disappear but he doesn’t he actually becomes more forceful in the novel. This is a real photograph.

Niall: I know. How prescient, you know.

Colum: This ... he’s incredible.

Participant: It’s a photograph of the future.

Niall: Yeah.

Colum: Yeah it is a photograph of the future but it’s actually taken in August 1974. When I found this photograph the hairs on my arms like rose and I knew I had my novel because what it is – I don’t know if you can see it – is a photograph of the two ... the World Trade Centre towers with Philippe Petit the tightrope walker there and an airplane in the background looking like it’s about to smash into the towers, but it doesn’t, and in fact I could read that little section.

Niall: Yeah.

Colum: Thank you.

Niall: One final question, the wonderful title, did you always have it?

Colum: : No. I discovered it like towards the end ... and completely by accident.

Niall: Had you a working title?

Colum No. No, I didn’t know what it was going be and the most amazing thing about that title is it comes from Tennyson but it was inspired by a series of pre-Islamic 6th century Arabic poems called the Mu'allaqāt which are like the suspended poems or the hanging poems that the poets would put in the marketplaces around. In the Mu'allaqāt they ask – which goes to the theme of the novel – is there any hope that this desolation can bring me solace? And I was like, ah Jesus, you know. (laughter) I was lucky, yeah.

Niall: Ladies and gentleman, Colum McCann.

Colum: Thank you. (clapping)

Niall: Thank you, you were fantastic, thank you.