DAY 11,985

Autumn sonata

At the October bank holiday weekend Bo and I drove to Gweedore, in Donegal. Usually at this time of year we went to Uppsala, in Sweden, to attend the annual meeting and banquet of the Gustavus Adolphus Academy on 6 November. This was a gala event, held in the medieval castle, Uppsala Slott: in the vast cloistered hall, by the light of hundreds of candles, the most renowned historians and ethnologists of the Nordic countries gathered to eat, drink and be merry. The women wore evening frocks, the men frack: tails and white tie. Lots of them were festooned with medals and decorations like characters in stories by Chekhov. I loved it. The banquet was glamorous and held in an exquisite setting, and it provided us with an excuse to visit Sweden and do some Christmas shopping before settling into Ireland for the winter.

But this year we were not going. Bo had been tired. Two years ago, in 2001, he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and had had a long course of radiotherapy. The cancer was cured, but the treatment had aged him and left him tired. In addition there was a regular round of check-ups, and visits to the consultant and the doctor. It seemed just too complicated to head off to Sweden. Instead I had committed to giving a workshop in creative writing in Acadamh Ghaoth Dobhair, with Micheál Ó Conghaile, a friend, writer and publisher, from Connemara. I persuaded Bo to come with me. We were going to spend a day in Gweedore, and then drive over to Fanad, to the old cottage that had belonged to my parents. I liked to visit it once a year or so.

We were both very happy, in celebratory mood. Bo had had his six-month cancer check-up three weeks earlier, and just yesterday had got the news that all was well, he was cancer-free. The checkups were always worrying, the telephone calls confirming that everything was okay a joy and a great relief. Off the hook for another six months.

It was a fine day. Crisp air, light breeze, the splendid leaves performing their giddy dance of death: seductive, endlessly entertaining. We decided to get going and be well out on the road before stopping for lunch, since our aim was to drive in daylight as much as possible. We had an appointment to meet Micheál for dinner in Na Cúirteanna, the hotel in Gweedore, at eight that evening. I drove – Bo had stopped driving four years ago after he had a crash in his little blue Micra, outside Ballyferriter, in Kerry. He had believed, he often told me, that he was going to die then. Blinded by the low strong sunlight of late September, he had swerved on to the wrong side of the road and collided with an oncoming car. Luckily the driver of that car had slowed to a standstill, and Bo was also driving slowly. The airbag activated and almost smothered him – cracking a rib – and the car began to fill with smoke. But the driver of the other car got him out and phoned the ambulance. He was brought to Tralee General Hospital, where he was examined in A&E, and discharged at 1 a.m. He was completely alone – I was in Dublin and did not know about this accident. He knew nobody in Tralee. He asked if he could stay on his trolley until the trains started running in the morning and his request was acceded to. Early in the morning he got a taxi to the station and took the first train back to Dublin.

I was teaching a creative writing class that morning, when Terry, a friend of mine from Dunquin, rang. He said a blue car that looked a bit like Bo’s had been involved in a crash outside Ballyferriter and asked if we were all right. I assured her that we were and she said, ‘Oh it was probably somebody else’s car.’ Some minutes later Bo telephoned me and told me the whole story.

Two days later a doctor from Tralee Hospital rang and said the initial diagnosis – that Bo was uninjured – wasn’t correct. Further examination of the X-rays showed he had fractured a rib. He was advised to go to a hospital in Dublin.

This was one of Bo’s encounters with real danger, and one of our first encounters with the small failures that inevitably occur in hospitals. That had been a small mistake, with no serious consequences. Sometimes you can be lucky.

The hotel in Gweedore was not one I was familiar with. It is in a hollow niche at the side of the road on a hillside overlooking the Clady river, and the mountains, and Errigal – none of which you can see in the dark. But it is on the main road, and well signposted, so even in the pitch-black night, we found it easily.

The lobby was full of wedding guests. They milled around, drinking coffee and champagne from a carnivalesque chocolate trolley perched beside the reception desk. Women and girls dressed in satin and silk dresses, pink and yellow and blue, tottered on heels six inches high, with elaborate hair styles and little fascinators – the wedding uniform down the country, which is unlike anything anyone ever wears otherwise. Like tropical insects, dragonflies, hummingbirds, butterflies from the Antipodes, they fluttered all over the lobby. We, coming in from the wilderness outside, smelling of car and rain, in our tweedy work clothes, with our shabby bags, our laptops, felt like aliens from another planet in the midst of these bright satiny creatures.

Micheál phoned the room minutes after we arrived and we met him, as planned, at eight o’clock. When we got to the lobby all the wedding guests had vanished, and all that remained was the white wrought-iron stall with its jars of old-fashioned sweets. ‘Tá said imithe isteach chun dinnéara, is dócha,’ Mícheál said.

We had a very good dinner, starting with a seafood plate, in a small, deserted dining room. ‘All the other guests are at the wedding,’ Micheál said, observing the empty tables surrounding us. What did we talk about? General things, and the workshop we would do tomorrow. As usual Micheál was low-key and reassuring. Although he is a prolific writer and editor and runs one of the longest-surviving and most successful Irish language publishing houses in Ireland, he never seems harassed or worried, and takes life calmly.

One topic we discussed was an Irish language writing workshop I had done with Micheál, and another writer – maybe Alan Titley; neither of us could remember – four or five years before. This workshop took place over a weekend in Connemara. A stunningly picturesque place, an island, and the weather was lovely. I had evolved a particular way of handling these one-day or weekend workshops – I liked to ask students to do some ‘out of the box’ writing exercises, to discuss aspects of writing (point of view, power of memory, character) and so on, and then move on to review their own work. I had organised a schedule for the workshopping part of the programme – we would review four students per session, let us say. In my workshops, I like everyone to have read and considered all the submitted scripts in advance. I ask students being workshopped to read the first page of their story, or whatever it is, and summarise the rest to remind us of it. Then we review it. I have abandoned the practice whereby each writer reads their entire script aloud in the workshop. While this convention has advantages – the major one being that everyone definitely hears the story even if they haven’t bothered to read it in advance – it takes up a huge amount of precious class time, which I believed then to outweigh the advantages. Anyway, we proceeded. My first very easy exercise is one that works very well almost always – describe a room that meant a lot to you as a child. People did the exercise and then, as usual, I asked if anyone would like to share their piece with us. One of the participants, a pleasant, round-faced man wearing spectacles, put up his hand. He read his piece, and then spoke at great length about his father.

What he had to say was extremely interesting. At first. But soon I, and the other facilitator, realised what was happening – a not uncommon occurrence at workshops: one lively person, who is entertaining and extrovert, takes over. Initially he or she is a delight. But soon that participant is talking far too much. Sometimes this person uses the workshop setting as a sort of forum in which to tell the story of his life, as a place for talk therapy. I know these people do not set out consciously to do this; I see it as a sign of their loneliness, and no doubt they do it because they don’t have the opportunity to express themselves and tell their story to an understanding, sympathetic audience often enough.

Sympathising with these people, who can provoke perfectly understandable resentment among some or all of their classmates, the less charitable among them who will quickly classify them as loudmouths, makes it difficult to find a way of stopping them. I find it hard to step in and staunch the flow. I believe I tried, and succeeded up to a point, by moving on to the next item on my plan. The dominance of this speaker was one factor that precipitated the events that followed.

Who participated in the workshop? A mixture of people, some from the locality, some from further afield. Several were published writers. That did not mean that they had nothing to learn. Everyone has plenty to learn, always. Writers in Irish often write with the complete spontaneity that writers in English – schooled, now at creative writing classes and in competition with millions of other writers – can lack. They can write with a disregard for artistic discipline that would be unusual among English language writers. The results can be refreshing, original and good. As Theo Dorgan said, launching a translation of Irish short stories edited by Brian Ó Conchubhair and published by Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Micheál’s company, about a year before, ‘All these writers are nuts. Even the famously sane Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is nuts.’ (I paraphrase. I took it as a compliment, which is how it was intended – although my story was very sane, in that anthology.) There is some truth in what Theo said. The stories were more varied, more wild, took more chances – also, more contrived, in some cases, taking the form of unconvincing realism – than any contemporary collection of stories in English could be. Some Irish male writers write what reads to me as soft porn – very old-fashioned fantasies about sexual encounters with beautiful women in unlikely situations, which are probably a reaction to the puritanism of Irish language literature in the early twentieth century. To criticise writing in Irish is not popular, but it seems to me that quite a few Irish language writers would benefit from creative writing classes.

The majority of fiction writers in Irish are men – this has always been the case. For instance, during the twentieth century about 250 novels in the Irish language were published, and only 10 of those were written by women. Sometimes very sweetly, sometimes in ways that are less pleasant, male writers can be defensive, competitive and arrogant. Arrogant women writers are not unheard of, but they’re a rare breed.

While one man in that particular workshop talked far too much, another man in that group was silent. For hours he said absolutely nothing. Then, at about three o’clock on Saturday afternoon he stood up and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. He did not come back.

I reminded Micheál of this incident.

‘Did I ever tell you what happened later?’ Micheál asked.

He’d received a solicitor’s letter from the workshop participant. The man complained that the workshop had not delivered on what was promised in the description he had received. He was threatening to sue the organiser – Micheál – for damages.

Bo, Micheál and I laughed heartily. This was the first time I had heard of anyone suing because a creative writing workshop was not to their liking. I should add that this workshop was free to participants – their travel, accommodation and tuition, all free. It was funded by some state organisation.

Micheál smiled and said at the time it wasn’t funny. It is never nice to receive a solicitor’s letter.

‘So we have a new yardstick with which to measure the success of a writing workshop. Nobody walked out.’

‘Nobody sent a solicitor’s letter.’