Dermot Bolger reverses plan to retire and sticks to his words

After 14 novels and 18 plays, at the age of 65 Dermot Bolger had written his last — until a short story took hold, and a collection, ‘Imperfect Beings’, followed, writes Sue Leonard

Dermot Bolger made his name as a writer in his 20s, but says his later novels are his best.

Last year, playwright and novelist Dermot Bolger decided it was time to retire. At 65, he’d been writing for half a century — his first story was published when he was 14 — and he wanted to enjoy what he calls the writer’s best accolade: The free travel pass.

“I was going to become an old codger, wandering around the golf course,” Bolger says when we meet in the Gresham Hotel.

Bolger’s prolific career has covered every genre. There have been 14 novels, 18 plays, 11 volumes of poetry, two collaborative novels, and an earlier volume of short stories.

Add to that his role as a publisher, an editor, a critic, and columnist, a commentator, and a friend and huge support to both established and fledgling writers, and it doesn’t seem feasible that he could suddenly put down the pen.

Bolger says: “If I got run over by a bus, there wasn’t a story that I was desperate to tell and hadn’t already got around to telling.

“So often, you are working on a project, and you’re thinking of the next one already, or one that one day you will write, but there was a blank space.”

He stuck to his plan for three weeks. Then an idea for a short story started to grow.

And so, by accident, I wrote nine stories last year.

It came, he says, because he started to look back on his life.

“And to realise that even though I still feel like a young punk from Finglas, the world I grew up in, the world I was a teenager in, has gone.”

Imperfect Beings is a glorious collection: Thought-provoking, illuminating, and compulsive.

The stories are not autobiographical — none are set in Dublin — but elements of his life do seep in. The first story he wrote, Half Sister, was sparked when he was dealing with probate for an elderly aunt of his late wife’s.

Another, the closest to his life, tells of a playwright revisiting a guest house in Wexford, where, one summer, she realised she was going to become a writer.

“I went back to my own summer holidays in Courtown as a child, and it was the last summer holiday I remember. I was nine, and my mother died of a brain tumour some months later, and my father was a sailor.”

Brain tumours, dementia, and memory loss feature in more than one story in this collection. The author says he’s not sure what the stories are about, but feels that they are infused with the retrospective grief of the sudden, and shockingly managed, death of his first wife, Bernie, 16 years ago. 

He poured the emotions of his initial grief into the story Nine Iron, about a bereaved golfer whose anguish drives him to an act of violence.

“Bernie died suddenly, in accident and emergency,” he reminds me. “That whole sense of trying …That whole sense of trying to conceal your grief from your children — there were days I did scream, and waking up and wondering was I actually dead — and was just dealing with something that your brain isn’t able to comprehend.”

The impact Bolger had on other writers

All the stories are set in the present day.

“But there are people looking back at the world of 30 or 40 years ago and trying to find an answer. What would it be like to bump into your first girlfriend in a motorway café or to be on the edge of dementia as a public figure?

"Would you go the Nuala O’Faolain way of going on the radio and telling everybody, or would you go quietly with just one interview, not explaining the context?”

As a young man, Bolger made a huge impact on Ireland’s literary scene. At just 18, he founded the Raven Arts Press, giving many writers, including Colm Tóibín, Patrick McCabe, Eoin McNamee, Fintan O’Toole, and Ferdia MacAnna, a start.

His 20s were productive. He wrote four highly acclaimed novels between the ages of 26 and 31; and four plays. He befriended many older writers, including Paul Durcan and Anthony Cronin.

“They treated me with great respect,” he says.

Becoming reflective, he adds, “You’re a man of 19, and they are 31. It’s a massive gap. A lot of the people I used to hang out with are dead now. Suddenly, you realise that the things you think about are in a whole other world from young people. It is that strange place called the past.”

His friendship with the late, great novelist Jennifer Johnston dates from this time.

“She phoned me and said, ‘I loved your first novel, I’m going to Canada and want 10 copies to give everyone there.’ I was stunned! We met then and just laughed. I used to tease her. Her middle name was Prudence, and I’d say, ‘How are you, Prue!’”

In those early days Bolger was published by Penguin, Harper Collins, and Picador. And although that brought sales, prestige, and fame, it also came with a great deal of pressure.

“I look back at that time, and particularly at the success of my third novel, The Journey Home, when I was writing a novel a year and a play a year. And I was on the Arts Council much too young. You were dealing with 101 things, and very often the support you got from publishers wasn’t that great.”

In contrast, his more recent books, published with smaller presses, are, he says, his best.

Some of those early books were quite flawed, because they needed one more draft that they didn’t get, and now I’m quietly getting on with producing good books and hoping that they find an audience one day.

Bolger’s novels are highly regarded in the literary world, yet they tend to fall below the radar. Why is that?

“If you focus on one thing, you can probably build a reputation, whereas when you’re focused on so many things, you fall between a whole lot of cracks. But I’ve made a living from my imagination for over 40 years, and that’s not bad!”

Of all the literary formats, he finds the novel most rewarding.

“Novels endure. You can pick up an Evelyn Waugh novel published 70 years ago. A play is very interesting and immediate — you’re working with a group of actors, and there’s a great buzz around them — but after the last night, they’ve gone. I remember after my first play at the Abbey we had fantastic box-office sales, and on the last night there were two, then a third ovation.

“Then, I saw people coming out again and thought it was a fourth ovation, but it was the carpenters coming to dismantle the set.”

He would most like to be remembered for The Family on Paradise Pier and An Arc of Light, but his biggest achievements are his two sons and his four-year-old grandson, Oscar.

Bolger is happy with life. He married his second wife, Helen, just a year ago.

At 66, he doesn’t worry about death, but very much fears the confusion and indignity that can precede it.

People are always asking him to write an autobiography, but he’s cautious.

“I think John MacGahern’s memoir, although brilliantly written, wasn’t the wisest in that there was mystery around his books, but he was like a magician, showing how the tricks were done. If I worked on one, it would be cloaked in the third person; I’d come to it from a different angle.”