Book Interview: Timothy O'Grady recalls compiling the emigrant classic I Could Read the Sky
A street race in County Cork, pictured in Timothy O'Grady and Steve Pyke's I Could Read the Sky.
- I Could Read the Sky
- Timothy O’Grady and Steve Pyke
- Unbound, €25
In 1989, Timothy O’Grady’s publishers were asking for a book — and he didn’t have one in his head. Meanwhile, Iris Murdoch had taken a box of photographs to her publisher, Carmen Callil. Taken over a period of 10 years by the photographer Steve Pyke, they were powerful images of Irish scenes and people, and they asked O’Grady to supply a text.
“I thought about it for two years,” he says, on Zoom from the home he shares with his wife in Poland. “How do you do a real book where both the verbal side and the image would do what only they can do?” Working on the conundrum, he began to write some pieces, and then he interviewed some Irish emigres living in London.
“I knew a lot of them, anyway,” he says, “because I was living in West London and had been around them In Irish pubs for more than 20 years. I then went to the Irish Centre in Camden, and the Roger Casement centre in Archway where there were pensioners. And I went to lunches and tea dances talking to these people and collecting their stories.” And then a strange thing happened.
“I came home, it was quite late, and this voice came into my head. It said, ‘this room is dark, as dark as it ever gets — the hour before dawn in winter. I have sounds and pictures but they flit and crash before I can get them. The bedclothes are damp. The ache in my neck is bad. I hold on to myself for anchorage.’
“I couldn’t sleep,” he says. “So after 45 minutes I got up and wrote the words down. That’s the beginning of the book and that’s the feeling.”
What follows is an almost indescribably brilliant account of what it was to be an Irish emigre — often lost to their families and references of home. It’s so lyrical, so full of feeling, and although many of the stories are heart breaking, they’re told without an iota of self-pity. As for the scenes describing music, they are quite simply the best I have read anywhere, ever.
Many of the emigres abused alcohol, but O’Grady has empathy for his subjects and never portrays them as down and outs.
“A lot of them suffered,” he says. “They disappeared from their families. Maybe they didn’t get the land, and they vanished into the ether. You’d see these advertisements in , ‘last seen in a ballroom in 1957’. There was a lot of pain in those stories.”
From Chicago, O’Grady first arrived in Ireland in 1973. He was living in a house in Gola, an island off the coast of Donegal. He was 21. He met a woman in Donegal. He followed her to Dublin, and then to London. It was through her, that he met the Irish community there.
“For years and years, I knew all these musicians in the Irish pub world. The pubs were very democratic. You’d see surgeons, nurses, and labourers there, and people of 88 and 18.
“The pubs would come alive with music, whether country and western or Ceili it had an effect on people, invoking excitement, a sense of identity or a memory. It was clear from people’s eyes how much was happening for them, and for the musicians, it was an expression of feeling.”
When, on a visit back to Chicago to visit his parents, he met the musician Martin Hayes, the two conversed, and he gained even more of an understanding of Irish music.
“A lot of the music in the book comes from conversations I had with him,” he says. “Through him, I saw what the music was.” He tells the story through one man, and everyman.
“I took stories from everywhere, so the book covers a lot of experiences, but I used the face of Michael Sullivan. The story I tell of the man whose wife died — who was walking the dog and saw her collapse in the street — that’s Michael’s story.”
O’Grady wrote the book in Chicago when his father was dying, about three years after he’d lost his mother.
“My mother’s death muted me for a year. And with him, he was so frail, and he was moving to another world, that it felt like a liberation for him. So when he died, I felt a terrible loss, but also this strange exhilaration. This feeling of being hyper alive.”
It’s also the time that he fell in love with his Polish wife.
“We were together when my father was dying. And we had 10 years when we were apart, and then we got back together.” Did these events inform the book?
“Oh yeah,” he says. “My father’s funeral, and looking at the coffin, and trying to think of never being able to speak to him again. It was … .” He breaks off, a catch in his throat.
The book was originally published in 1997, to quite astounding reviews. Musicians, in particular related strongly to it, including Martin Hayes, who wrote a song based on it. There was also a film.
After that first publication, O’Grady and Hayes were to give readings with musical interludes in a bar in New-York, and they needed a singer. They contacted Sinead O’Connor.
“She was just wonderful,” he says. “I asked her to sing a song in Irish, and she learned it. Her total commitment to a feeling in a song is unique in my experience.
“I remember being in a pub with her, talking, and it was like there was nothing else in the world. She had such presence. A kind of light, and everything else fades away. But whatever that capacity was, she obviously paid for it. She suffered so much, and it was awful to hear that.”
At the beginning of this year, when O’Grady produced an audio version of the republished book, Martin Hayes joined him, producing and playing the music. And that seems absolutely appropriate, because, as I was reading it, I was seeking out and listening to the songs referred to in this wondrous novel.
O’Grady’s planning a book based in Belfast next; a city he got to know when he was establishing himself as a writer. Intrigued by the city, he is heartened to see how it has evolved.
“I find Belfast a really compelling place,” he says. “There has been such a transformation from the year of the Hunger Strike when I first saw it until now. The improvements in transport in housing, in public arts, and in the confidence of people is compelling to me.”
On its first release the reviewers, ecstatic, spoke about the poetry, empathy, and absolute understanding of the emigrant experience. And it spoke to those who had themselves emigrated, or who were brought up close to the emigrant’s experience.
“I got letters from people who were born in England with Irish parents who were labourers, and they felt I was giving their father back to them who had died. One said, ‘I only have to pick up this wonderful book and we can hear Dad tell a dry joke, see his little smile’. That doesn’t happen with any of the other books I have written.”
O’Grady has previously written four novels and four pieces of non-fiction, but once he had the idea for it immediately felt very different.
“I became very excited by it,” he says. “Novels normally have such architecture and rooms and cities, and complicated interactions and plots, and this wasn’t like that. I just went straight in because of the immediacy of the photos. I was freed.”
