Fiction more wondrous than truth for disillusioned literary groupies

WHEN the organisers contacted me and asked if I’d be interested in doing workshops at this year’s Listowel Writers’ Week, I thought about telling them I would consider it, but I was afraid they’d go off me and get someone else, so I said yes with such speed, it came close to tearing their arm off at the shoulder for the chance.

It was like being assumed into heaven. I’ve spent half my life hoping to be on their programme.

I’m a literary groupie. Always have been. Literary groupies dream of travelling business class on planes, not for the luxury or the chance of sitting beside Russell Crowe, but for the possibility of finding themselves close to an important writer. They just want to share the same air as writers they worship, to meet and touch and maybe even question one of the most important people in the world.

Literary groupies understand that you have to have computer technicians and politicians and police officers but the only group they really believe matter in society are writers; those magicians who can reach across time and space to move the heart of a reader, to change how a reader sees their world, to remind a reader that they have a soul.

You cannot become a literary groupie later in life. It starts as early as the pre-teens, when the groupie-to-be gets smacked in the kisser by three eternal verities: 1) What happens in books is more interesting than what happens in even the most exciting real life; 2) Characters in books are more fascinating than 90% of real people, plus you can close them down when you’re tired of them, and 3) “Once Upon a Time” is up there with “I love you” as a phrase with magical appeal and carries less implicit responsibility.

My early induction into the literary groupie club probably kept me out of jail. There can be no doubt that the only thing that stopped me hitting my father over the head with a two-by-four when I was a teenager and, like all teenagers, had discovered the florid inadequacies of my parents, was that he owned a book of short stories by James Plunkett, affectionately inscribed. To him. Personally. No matter how impossible my father was, it was obvious he must have some deeply disguised virtues if he knew and was liked by James Plunkett.

I couldn’t wait to outdo him with my own autographed books and got started at 11 with one by Enid Blyton, as a result of entering and winning a competition.

When I was 16 I got to interview Patricia Lynch on an RTÉ programme and was shocked to find her loosened from life by old age. Up to then, my working assumption was that a writer’s brain was immune to dementia. It was oddly upsetting to find that I knew more about the characters she had created than she did. To realise that she not only didn’t own them any more, but didn’t know what was going to happen to them in the future was as heartbreaking as the matching realisation that they had no future.

I ran into the same wall when introduced to Josephine Tey’s detective stories (Tey also wrote plays as Gordon Daviot). The pleasure was finite, the number of books already defined, because she was dead at the point where I first learned of her.

On the other hand, the writer, dead, is still better than the writer alive but turned toxic by time, success or both.

Richard Llewellyn’s How Green was my Valley made generations of readers fall in love with Welsh miners. When I encountered him, he was an old right-winger who admired Margaret Thatcher and had no time at all for the men still going down the pit, albeit in rapidly diminishing numbers.

It retrospectively tainted the novel as if the sympathy with which it was written was fraudulent. It was like finding out that Harry Crosbie secretly went to Eton and was only letting on to love Dublin.

THE thing about being a literary groupie is that it’s an immutable condition. Nothing cures it. Nothing reduces the thrill of encountering a writer whose work you love.

While many of those attending this week’s event in Listowel will be hungry for the information which will allow them to get their own work into print, the rest will be groupies like me, so in thrall – to give just one example – to the sweeping confidence of Declan Hughes’ crime fiction (his latest novel is City of Lost Girls) that even if, in person, he turns out to have the dynamism of rotted seaweed, we’ll still be glad we saw and heard him. For many of those attending, the chance to encounter, say, Roddy Doyle and simply tell him how much pleasure his work has given them is enough. It does help, that being your objective, if you can stay coherent.

I can’t rise to coherence in the presence of a writer whose work I love. When I was introduced to Joseph O’Connor in an RTÉ Radio Centre corridor, all I could produce was a grinning silence so absolute, he must have thought I was having a neurological accident.

In the last couple of decades there has been an emerging requirement for writers to become the marketing arm for their own work, talking it up on radio and TV and spewing selected secrets about themselves to profile writers in order to appear in newspapers and magazines around publication day.

Some writers engage in the bookselling media circus with more enthusiasm than others. One of those appearing at this year’s Writers’ Week is Jennifer Johnston, whose Truth or Fiction has just been brought out in paperback by Headline Review.

Johnston was not built for the personal hard sell. Years ago, she appeared on UTV’s I Don’t Think we’ve Met, so named because the presenter, Bunny Carr, to avoid having to do research in advance of broadcasts, invented a format whereby the show opened with him facing an empty chair. As the titles rolled, a total stranger would walk out and sit down in front of him, offer their name and profession, and it was then up to Bunny to find out more. When Jennifer Johnston took the empty seat, she told him she wrote books.

“What kind of books?” he asked.

“Small books,” came the crisp reply.

To describe a masterpiece like How Many Miles to Babylon? as a small book is wilful understatement characteristic of Johnston. Fortunately, writers of such unflatterable common sense are balanced by those who fool Oprah by extending their talent for fiction into the embellishment of their own lives.

Listowel, this coming week, will be spilling over with people who want to write, people who read, and with writers.

Writers: Those infinitely valuable artists who tell the bright shining lies by which we understand the truth.