Interview with Jamie ONeill (2003)

Baywindows .com New England online newspaper At Swim Two Boys Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Male Fiction By Philip Gambone Irish author Jamie O'Neill's latest novel, "At Swim, Two Boys," received rave reviews when it appeared in the U.S. this spring. The book deftly interweaves several plots, most importantly the love story of two 16-year-old Dublin boys and the story of the Easter 1916 Irish Republican uprising. O'Neill has been praised for his exquisite use of language, his creation of character, his evocation of the period, and his ability to frame a gay story within a larger context. He has been compared to the great Irish writers Oscar Wilde and James Joyce and was recently honored with the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Male Fiction. At least one local critic has called "At Swim, Two Boys" "one of, if not the, greatest gay novel yet written." O'Neill's reading and book signing in Boston, originally scheduled at We Think the World of You, had to be moved to a larger venue because of the crowd of fans who showed up to hear him. The afternoon of the reading, I caught up with O'Neill in the lobby of the Suisse Hotel. The interview that follows was taken that afternoon. Bay Windows: I want to begin by telling you how much I loved your novel. This book is something that all of my friends are talking about at the moment. Jamie O'Neill: I never know how to react when somebody says that. I find that I can never say the right thing. I feel such great honor: It's a privilege to hear anybody say that about your writing. I don't want to come across as a phony - to be gushing or something. I find it extraordinary. BW: In another interview I read, you said that you had a love affair with these characters. What do you love about your characters, especially Doyler and Jim? JO: Well, I had a love affair with the book as much as anything. That book was like a good lover. BW: In what sense? JO: It angered me, it annoyed me, it left me despairing at times, but it never bored me - the writing of it. You know that Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." Well, it's a bit like that. It was a hard book to write, because I don't have a background... I didn't go to university. I had to do an awful lot of research. It was hard in the sense of keeping in your head everything that was happening. It wasn't something where you could write a few sentences in a free half hour. You couldn't do that. The job I had, the shifts were thirteen hours long. In thirteen hours I had time to concentrate, to get the notion of where everything is in the book, and have long periods of writing. BW: One of the things I like about the boys - and I like it about Mr. Mack and MacMurrough as well - is that the first time you meet them, whatever you make your mind up about them,

well, usually you've changed by the time you get to the end of the book. I was astounded by that aspect of the book, because at first, of course, I hated MacMurrough. But by the end of the book, he had so won me over. I was in awe of how you were able to both turn me around to who he was, but also make him grow as a character. He starts off as a prig. He's angry, he's hostile ... JO: He's predatory. BW: Yes, and he's predatory. But by the end of the book, he's so much more than all that. JO: And yet I think, at the same time, he's kept his ... he's aware of the nasty side - it's still there. You know, there are three strands to the novel. One, of course, is the heart of the novel, which is the two boys and their friendship, their swimming. Another strand is Mr. Mack coming to understand that it's his son that is most important. Becoming respectable doesn't matter. The third one is MacMurrough coming to understand, in Gide's phrase, that the goal of our humanity is to be able to love and to be worthy of being loved. I think he becomes that at the end. I have this notion of love that it's not so much to be enjoyed as to be endured. [Smiles.] Nice formulation: enjoy and endure. I wish I had thought of that when I was writing. BW: There's a Joycean element to your prose. What has been James Joyce's influence on your writing? JO: [Long pause] Would you mind if we just went back to your first question? About what I like about Jim and Doyler. When I was growing up gay - and I think most people have this feeling, that you're inventing yourself for the first time, you're creating - it is a struggle to find the words and the language. In my twenties, I came to understand that I didn't want to be defined by just something I wanted to do in bed. I wanted nobility and courage and pride to still be a part - and not just an extra part - but a part of my being gay. That's what I admire in the two boys. All these things are together. You take one away and the whole thing collapses. A way to be gay BW: All right, then I'm going to skip the James Joyce question and go right to a question that I think is directly related to that. Your novel is about the emergence of two new vocabularies, two new consciousnesses, two new, as Jim says, "patterns of the possible" that of an independent Ireland and that of homosexual love. How do you see those as related? JO: Well, there's something that Madame MacMurrough says at some stage. She says that all liberation is the same. Insofar as my brother is not free, I'm not free. Or my freedom is diminished to that extent. There were great hopes for Irish freedom around that time. They really thought that they were going to create a new thing. When independence came, it turned out that there had been no eight-hundred, or seven-hundred year yearning for Irish freedom in the Irish spirit, but only the limited liberty to keep the outside world away from Ireland, to stop the modern influences, to retain and conserve what needed to pass. Independent Ireland was a big letdown. Emigration increased. So they always had this safety valve: anybody who didn't agree with them, the boat was there to America or to England.

That was my feeling about Irish independence. I wanted to conflate the two ideas. [The character] Scrotes gives a little speech towards the end of Part I, where he says, Ireland is a country of the heart, just like the country that these two boys want to build for themselves. And to have any sort of country, you need to have pride. You get pride from tradition, from history. That's why MacMurrough is there: to provide a tradition for the boys to grow up with. You know, it's sort of grand and dandy to have two boys kissing on a rock at the sea, but I wanted - I needed - my story to be more than that. That's why MacMurrough is there. I'd been writing it for about three years before I thought to put MacMurrough in. BW: Your portrayal of homoerotic friendship borders on the Platonic - the selflessness, the comrade love, the impetus toward "high deeds" and fighting with your comrade beside you. Do you have an idealistic view of homoerotic friendship, of this "country of the heart"? JO: Well, I hope so! I hope I have ideals. It's funny when you use the word "Platonic." In Galway, where I live, I overheard someone say, "It's a book about a Platonic relationship." And I thought, Either you haven't read Plato, or you haven't read my book. [Laughs.] BW: Maybe I meant Hellenic, or Greek. JO: You quoted that phrase, "patterns of the possible." In that paragraph - you see, I know the book by heart - it also mentions that they were "humping physical fellows." Often when you get homoerotic relationships, the physicality is left out. And often when the physicality is there, you don't get the sentiment of the friendships. I wanted it to be all. I'm quite aware that there are many mistakes in the book. It's not ... it's not ... I'd like to start writing it again, and do it properly this time. High ideals BW: I wasn't implying that there were mistakes. It's just that, at the end of the book, I wondered what your attitude was toward MacMurrough, who so inspires those boys to go out and fight at each other's side; and in the process Doyler is killed, and, if I read the last page correctly, Jim is later dying in MacMurrough's arms. I sensed, I thought, a kind of ironic stance between MacMurrough's high ideals of what can be inspired by homoerotic friendship and the grim reality of what happened to these boys. JO: Yes, the problem is that history intervenes. You know, Irish history for the first 25 years of the last century is damnably sad. There was an Anglo-Irish war after 1916, and then there was a civil war; and I know, in my heart, that Doyler and Jim would have been on opposite sides of that civil war. So I kind of done them a favor. [Laughs.] There is a lot of joy in Jim in the second-to-last chapter, about fighting and all this. But in a sense, Jim has gone crazy there. He's gone overboard, and MacMurrough is coming in to try to shine some rain on it. That's good! - "shine some rain" on him. BW: What "mistakes" do you think you made in the book? JO: Well, you see, there's a character who's only present now, who was completely absent when I was writing, and that's the reader. I was writing to please myself - "please" is the wrong word - in some ways to fulfill myself. I don't know how people get through the first chapter, if they don't have an Irish background. There are other chapters as well - the garden party towards the end of Part I - it's full of jokey references to Irish history which I'm sure

nobody gets. Like the name MacMurrough. It was MacMurrough King of Leinster who first invited the English to Ireland. There are loads of little things like that. The wave of words BW: I think the way that American readers get through the first chapter - and maybe this gets back to my Joycean question - is that the language is so gorgeous that individual vocabulary almost doesn't matter; you get swept up in the waves of the prose. There was one paragraph where I didn't understand 75 percent of the words, and I thought, The guy's having a good joke with his American readers. It was full of Irish vocabulary! But it didn't annoy me. There was something so exuberant about the writing that you just dive in and swim with it. JO: I have this thing with words. I choose a word as much for the sound as for the meaning. I really think you can reveal character and advance action, plot, through the sound of words. I couldn't say it beats meaning - of course it doesn't. For instance, there's a passage in there where Jim is being fired at by a machine gun, and if you look at it, you'll find five or six words ending with "-atter": chatter, snatter, splatter. To me, that is that same noise, and it does go back to Joyce. Ulysses opened at the Forty Foot, where the boys swim. And you're asking for trouble having your own book set at the Forty Foot. You really are! But that's where I grew up, that's where I hung out when I used to go play truant from school. It's a place I know very well. I wanted to have this personal dimension in the book, that place where I grew up.. BW: Do you think it was cheeky of you to open the book that way? JO: No! It's not cheeky. The two boys come most definitely from the Irish cultural traditions. They're Catholic, they try to play hurling, they play Irish music on the flutes, Doyler speaks Gaelic, Jim tries to learn it. That was obviously necessary to the book, because I could then show you that as naturally as they are Irish, they are naturally in love with each other. The book had to follow roughly that same notion, so that stylistically it grows out of the Irish literary tradition as they grow out of the Irish cultural tradition. I think, as you go through it, that it takes on a life of its own. It isn't the same as Joyce at all. You see, all this Joyce thing started with my agent. He's paid to say nice things about it. Being compared to Joyce is not pleasant. It's like arguing with God. You're not going to win that argument. There was a very famous English comedienne called Joyce Grenfell, and my mother thought, Why are they comparing you to Joyce? You see, I don't come from a bookish family at all. We had the Reader's Digest, that's it. It was never read, except for "Laughter is the Best Medicine." A Dickens analogue BW: How about Dickens? I noticed, for instance, that Nancy names her baby Estella. You must have had "Great Expectations" in mind. There are other subtle references to Dickens. What's that all about? JO: I only discovered Dickens as I was writing this novel. I'd never read Dickens before. I tell you, the first book I read was "Ivanhoe." And I can tell you why I read that. BW: Why?

JO: I didn't read any of the books in my school course. I did actually play truant a lot. I don't like being supervised very much. I'm not very good at it. That's why I got that job as a night porter [in a London psychiatric institution]. I was the only person awake. No supervision. When I was coming up to my Leaving Certificate, which is your final exam at school, I had to do this two-week review. I had to do something. So in my bedroom, I cleared out everything that could possibly distract me -- music, games ... I didn't have very much, whatever it was. At the end of the shelf was this novel that somebody had given me years ago called "Ivanhoe." I thought, Well, it's pointless; I'm not going to read that. Might as well just leave it there. But that's all I did for those two weeks was read "Ivanhoe." [Laughs.] I failed my final exams. It broke my father's heart. I'm the last of the family, and I was supposed to be the first to go to university: Climbing up the ladder for the family. He never forgave me that. A model for Mr. Mack BW: Is there a little bit of your father in Mr. Mack? JO: Oh, loads! I tell you, just up the road there was a woman -- Madam MacMurrough is based on this woman -- her name was Betty Gore-Booth. She was wealthy, she had a bigger house, all that sort of thing. And my father's accent would change -- we used to cringe, because his accent would change when he was talking to her. And nothing was too much for her: Oh, I'll mow the lawn, he'd say. Would you like the lights turned on this evening? Ah, it was terrible! He was always up there trying to ... BW: All of the voices in Anthony MacMurrough's head - Scrotes, Dick, the chaplain, Nanny Tremble - what is it the saves MacMurrough from going crazy? JO: Well, this is interesting. You know, he has suffered Oscar Wilde's prison term, which is two years hard labor. People nowadays don't realize that two years' hard labor was reckoned to be the utmost a man could suffer and still hope to live. For instance, if he was given three years, he would have gotten "penal servitude," which is a much lighter sentence. It was the next thing down from a life sentence. It was a terrible thing. I often used to wonder, Why did Oscar Wilde disintegrate in prison? Well, it wasn't just two years in prison, reading Dante. So MacMurrough is a fractured mind when he comes out; he's a wounded soul. And, you see, in a sense he's guilty of the guilt that society has put on him: he hasn't in any way been able to acculturate himself. BW: In the same way that the Irish themselves were victims of the culture that the British imposed? JO: Mmm, I have a lot of problems saying that. The Irish had a lot more to lose in their cultural traditions. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, children would be hated if they spoke in Irish. It was quite illegal. The games were being lost, the music was being lost. But what saves MacMurrough? I think in a way that seeing the boys together seems for him to be a new start. BW: At one point toward the end of the novel, as Doyler is selling Republican newspapers, he muses: "But Doyler couldn't see much use selling to people who wanted to read the paper. It was the people who didn't, or didn't know they wanted, you had to catch. Else you was talking to yourself." I couldn't help thinking that this captures the dilemma of the gay writer as well. Who is your ideal audience for this novel?

JO: Well, you see, in Ireland, it's not considered a gay novel at all. It's an Irish novel. But this is not some great virtue of the Irish. It's just that we don't have a sufficient population to have... I mean, if it was a gay novel, it would be all of its own on the shelf. Really. When I read in Montreal -- I read at the Irish Studies Department at the University -- I looked out from the podium at the people, and I saw these generations of Irish women with a particular kink in their hair, the Irish men with rosy cheeks, you know, that gene that just hasn't gone at all, and in the front row a priest in a gray suit and collar, and beside him a lesbian couple, and on his other side a gay couple growing old together; and I thought, "This is a privilege, this is a privilege to bring such unlikely people together." "This book, if it can bring people like that together, then you can be very proud." A role for literature BW: Did you start out with that intention? JO: The phrase that I would have used, if it weren't a novel, is not that you're just talking to yourself; I would have said, You're just wanking. I don't see the point in writing unless in some way, in some small way, you're adding to the sum of [humanity]. When you're walking down the street and you see two young men, or two young women, holding hands together, it's beyond me how anybody could be annoyed by that. In the streets where you walk and you shop, to see such courage and love and pride displayed, you should be proud of your country to see that this is there. Just talking to people who are already proud of being gay isn't enough. I think books have a special place for young people. I said this in Canada. When you're growing up, your morality, your sense of behavior - all these things - you know who you are. You learn these from your peers, from your family, or from school. But for me those avenues weren't available. That's where books come into their own. You don't find yourself, but you find the pattern of the possible. Books tell you that this has happened before, that you will survive, and you may prosper. And what I wanted my book to do is to say, you can be part of the good world, the noble world, the very best? BW: What were your first two books about? Oh, I don't consider them ... I was really, really surprised when I came over here and saw that they were mentioned on the back of the book. I'll tell you what happened. Up until 1988, I was living with my partner - I had a partner but he died in 1988 - and we lived together for six years. He was very famous in England; he was a chat show host. He was hounded by the newspapers. It was a really bad time. I had written those books while I was with him, but they weren't published until after he died. When he died, I was homeless. I was actually living on the streets of London. My clothes had been burned by his sister. I was still being hounded by the press. Like, my parents found out I was gay because there was a photograph of me naked on the front page of the Sunday Mirror. BW: Jesus! What was the press hounding him about? JO: Well, you know the English press. He wasn't openly gay. Oh, it sold thousands of newspapers. Anyway, I completely collapsed. I lost everything, and I kind of lost my mind at the same time. It took me two or three years to get everything back together. And I found Julian - Julian is my boyfriend. The book is dedicated to Julian. Julian is French. In the meantime, those books had come out. When I think of them, they don't seem like my early

novels. They seem like novels of a previous incarnation. They're no good. I hate for anybody to try looking for them. BW: Are you working on something new? JO: No. BW: Too early? JO: Well, I loved writing that book, and I don't want to just write another book, because now I'm "a writer." I think you're just killing trees unless you're doing something... The world isn't going to run out of anything to read. I want to fall in love again with a story. But you know, having said that, the happiest place is the middle of a paragraph. It's not Galway or Dublin or Ireland or France; it's the middle of a paragraph. Or on your way home from work on the bus, and your last sentence is still ringing in your ear. And nothing else matters but the positioning of an adverb. There is happiness; that's writing.