Heinrich Boll wrote Nobel Prize-winning masterpieces here, Paul Durcan learned to drive here, I've lived here for a month. The Heinrich Boll House, in the shadow of the impossibly stark Slievemore mountain on Achill Island, is as close as I've got to a writer's paradise. Keen to move out of Dublin and in dire need of getting work done, I was tipped off by Dermot Healy and one phone-call later, to the kind people who run the house, had wrapped up a month's residency in the land of low-flying clouds, sprinting sheepdogs and the sort of scenery which makes Connemara look manicured and rounded. Boll's house was bequeathed for the use of those who wish to live there to write.
Achill has attracted writers over the years. Louis McNiece holidayed here with his first wife, swimming in the green depths of Keem Bay and discovering megaliths on Slievemore. Graham Greene spent time there and, according to the Boll House visitors' book, so have Paul Durcan and James Kelman. One local told me that Durcan learned to drive here, a great disappointment to me as for years I've been deflecting criticisms of the fact that I can't drive by mentioning the fact that Durcan can't either and quoting lines from, Self Portrait Naked With A Steering Wheel. But the most important writer to live in Achill was undoubtedly Heinrich Boll himself. He spent many years in this house and published his Irish Journal, an immensely popular book in Germany, in 1956. The book is out of print at the moment in English and it would surely do no harm for one of the more intrepid Irish publishers to come out with a new edition.
I don't know exactly why Boll came to Achill in the 1950s. Maybe the place's unusual tranquility appealed to a man who had been wounded no less than four times in the second World War. He is remembered by the locals as fitting in well with the community and photos of him in front of the cottage show a man with a weatherbeaten, west of Ireland look about him. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972 thanks to some great novels. Billiards At Half Past Nine, The End Of A Mission and The Train Was On Time anticipate the gnomic, human and sceptical works produced by Eastern European writers such as Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima. I am usually cynical about the idea of a writer's house telling us anything about his or her work but there is something exciting about the idea of Boll producing these novels in his study looking down at a stunning view of Dugort Bay.
If nothing else, the thought of the work previously done in the house encourages an early start the morning after nights before in the Slievemore Hotel where the late-night presence of slumbering, friendly sheepdogs on the front steps adds an extra obstacle to the unsure of foot. Boll's immense standing in Germany provides an unexpected bonus in the shape of the dozen or so of his compatriots who visit the house daily. This also discourages lie-ins as the thought of an unshaven novelist in his boxer shorts being accidentally camcordered by literary tourists from Frankfurt is not a pleasant one.
It's a cracking spot, Achill. The drive out to Keem Bay is as beautiful and breath-taking as the Connor Pass; the Golden Strand encourages the sending of postcards just to make city-dwelling friends jealous - and for some reason it's the best place I've ever seen for pool-tables. The Valley, where the table is in front of an open turf-fire whose smoke provides an additional challenge for budding Ken Dohertys, is a pub like no other. I've been reading a lot of Boll's work while staying in the house. It began as a gesture of gratitude for his posthumous provision of such a shelter. But I have become enthralled by the work and the man. Like his friend Gunter Grass, he was keen that the German people would never forget the evils of Nazism or let national self-confidence lead to a renewal of intolerance.
It's ironic then to live in this house and read almost every day of the latest hysterical racist reaction to the presence of a couple of thousand Romanian Gypsies in the country. In one of the most famous passages in his Irish Journal, Boll tells of meeting a man named Padraig who assures him that tales of the concentration camps are just British propaganda. I like to think the old warrior would be just as unimpressed at the current evidence of the fact that bigotry and xenophobia are far from alien to the Irish character. Eamonn Sweeney's memoir, There's Only One Red Army (about his family's involvement with Sligo Rovers) will be published by New Island Books in September. His novel Waiting For The Healer was published this year by Picador.
