President Michael D Higgins: ‘Jennifer Johnston provided a deep examination of the nature and limitations of identity’
May I join with all those who will have been so saddened to learn of the death of Aosdána member Jennifer Johnston.
Throughout her many novels and plays, Jennifer Johnston provided a deep and meaningful examination of the nature and limitations of identity, family and personal connections throughout the tumultuous events of 20th-century Irish life.
It is noteworthy that her work has always been championed by so many of her fellow writers, who have acknowledged her as one of the finest of Irish novelists. So many of them have recorded her as a strong influence on so much of their own work.
The awarding of a lifetime achievement award to Jennifer Johnston at the Irish Book Awards in 2012 was a well-deserved public recognition of her work.
It was preceded by many other recognitions of her work, including in her winning of the Whitbread Prize in 1979 for The Old Jest and the shortlisting of Shadows of Our Skin for the Booker Prize in 1977.
Jennifer Johnston’s passing reminds us of the important heritage which served as context to her work. The daughter of actress and director Shelah Richards, who made distinctive and unique contributions to Irish performance and writing, and playwright and war correspondent Denis Johnston, Jennifer Johnston leaves a significant legacy which stands proudly among the achievements of so many members of her family. These contributions include those which have been made by her own children, who are continuing a distinctive contribution.
May I extend my deepest sympathies to Jennifer’s children Patrick, Sarah, Lucy and Malachi, to her grandchildren, and to all of her extended family, friends and many admirers and colleagues throughout the world.
[ Jennifer Johnston obituary: Writer who combined brevity with razor-sharp wisdomOpens in new window ]
Sebastian Barry: ‘Even before I met her, I revered her’
I remember when I was in my early twenties and making that secret pact with oneself to try to be a writer, staring at pages of The Captains and the Kings and trying to figure out exactly why they were so good, so seemingly natural, and in some ineluctable way producing an effect that was beyond words. I concluded that writing, for a real writer, arose from some kind of mysterious gift, an inner electric circuit that could light up syntax and produce an ultimate human music.
Even before I met her, I revered her. She came to my first play at the Abbey and astounded me by praising it freely, not a reaction I expected from another writer. She launched my novel The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty in Fred Hanna’s, and rang me up very crossly when it wasn’t shortlisted for the Booker. All that was very unusual among her generation of writers, who could be caustic at times, and didn’t suffer new writers gladly. But she did. She was so scrupulously honest she wouldn’t ever praise something she didn’t actually admire, another peril of the writing life that she just didn’t engage in.
We went up to Derry for her sixtieth birthday and might as well have been family, such was the gracious, dramatic welcome. Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Bowen, seem to me part of her tradition. She was such a warrior and a friend that you could be forgiven for taking her for granted. She was almost the exact same age as my mother but her real generation was that eternal one of permanently essential and gold-standard writers.
- Sebastian Barry is a novelist, playwright and former Laureate of Irish Fiction
[ Writer Jennifer Johnston dies aged 95Opens in new window ]
Lucy Caldwell: ‘Jennifer Johnston’s How Many Miles to Babylon? was my portal to reading’
We read How Many Miles to Babylon? in our third-form English class, when I was 13. Our teacher, Miss Dent, set us a brilliant task for homework – we were to write an extra chapter for the book, which could come at any point of our choosing. I decided to write an extra ending – a chapter to come after the book’s own final chapter.
In Johnston’s, Alec shoots Jerry, rather than letting him die by firing squad, and for this is sentenced to death himself. Mine, I decided, would stay with Alec right till the end, as his very final minutes, final moments ticked away – I would take him right up to the barrier of death.
Johnston quotes Yeats in the book, and I borrowed his Collected Poems from the school library, read them for the first time, fell in love. I wove Yeats’s poem Death into my chapter – “Nor dread nor hope attend a dying animal;/ A man awaits his end/ Dreading and hoping all” – with its resounding final line, “Man has created death.”
I spent every spare minute that week on my writing; the intoxicating feeling – this is still how it feels to me now – not of creating, but of tuning in to another world, until that world becomes more real than your own. I knew then that this was what – that this was all – I wanted to do. It was my first intimation, too, that books come from other books – that at the heart of this most solitary of pursuits is a far deeper sense of connection, of communing, of being in conversation – freewheeling conversations that can span generations, and lifetimes, and to which the grave is no barrier. I couldn’t have articulated any of that at the time, of course, but I know that I felt it.
Hilary Mantel always said that we should ask not which books inspire us, but which give us permission. To that I would add, which books are your portals? Jennifer Johnston’s was mine – to the life I needed to have. What a gift. Jennifer – thank you.
- Lucy Caldwell won the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award and the 2023 Walter Scott Prize
Dermot Bolger: ‘Her precise and understated prose always managed to carefully and shrewdly dissect the human heart’
I loved Jennifer Johnston so much because of the great generosity of her spirit, her wondrous laugh and the fact that she was the ultimate writer’s writer, perpetually – until her final years in a nursing home – midway through writing one book and already fretting about how she would write the next one. Like Samuel Beckett, her novels grew shorter and wiser as she grew older, coming to embody brevity and resigned and well-earned razor-sharp wisdom. If her books grew shorter in length, they were never slight; her precise and understated prose always managed to carefully and shrewdly dissect the human heart, often subtly honing in on sharply observed insights into childhood hurt, betrayal and discreetly hidden familial cruelties.
Johnston was one of Ireland’s greatest writers. Her uncanny ear for the subtleties and hidden meanings behind seemingly innocuous dialogue may be in her genes as her mother was the famous Abbey actress and her father a noted and now neglected playwright. Since that superb debut with The Captains and The Kings in 1972 at the relatively late age of forty-two, Johnston made up for lost time by producing a distinctive oeuvre of sparse and tightly controlled novels. In this age of hype and celebrity her books did not always receive the attention they deserve, simply because reliable novelists are not newsworthy. Johnston simply appeared in the shops every three years with another small, intensely crafted volume to be treasured by lovers of good writing.
Her novels sometimes dealt with political and cultural tensions within Ireland but more often focused on the more hidden civil war of family relationships and the difficult transition from childhood to adulthood. The hallmarks of most of her works was to be deliberately low-key and often shot through with dark humour and she was capable of summoning unforgettable characters with the sparsest sentences. Johnston was superb at dissecting ordinary life, at understanding the ties and strains that hold a family together and the contradictions at the heart of any human being. I never met her without walking away lost in admiration and a sense of awe that never went away since I first read her work back in the mid-1970s.
- Dermot Bolger is a novelist and playwright
[ ‘How has life led me to this moment?’: Creativity in Jennifer JohnstonOpens in new window ]
Colum McCann: ‘She had her ear to the trees of many different Irelands, past and present’
Vladimir Nabakov once suggested that the function of literary creation was to portray the ordinary bits and pieces of today as they might be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times – “to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in the far-off times.”
If we would like a portrait of the decades gone by, go no further than the books of Jennifer Johnston. She carved herself a place in the Irish century by telling us some of our finest and most complicated stories: way beyond the Big House, way beyond the trenches, way beyond the sill of the grey church.
She had her ear to the trees of many different Irelands, past and present. Wisely she guided us forward one step at a time. She was a careful but joyous writer who knew a sinuous word when it came her way. She cared about the art of the story and what happened within. She didn’t attempt to smash the icons, but she certainly scratched a good deal of their paint off.
She threw open the windows of new places for many a young writer. She didn’t make a big fuss, but she cared about helping other people. She wrote wonderful letters of encouragement to younger writers and she wasn’t afraid to take us to task. I still have some of those delightfully honest letters – really, you can and should do better – in my files from the 1990’s when she seemed to be on a particular evangelical fire for Irish literature. She adored having people around her. A glass of wine. A good story. A genuine inquiry into hopes and habits.
It all boils down to the fact that she liked the world and the people within.
Even towards the end, Jennifer was still creating stories. At her nursing home in Dún Laoghaire, where I had the privilege of visiting her a few times, she would occasionally not just drift from her dementia, but she would dolphin-leap out of it. After a moment you would realise that she was creating tales of star-crossed lovers travelling across continents of hope and desire. She was, in this sense, always travelling. This was a great dignity in this. The stories still came to her, with their fragrant tenderness. She received them and allowed them space once more.
May her influence enter the air.
- Colum McCann is a novelist
Joseph O’Connor: ‘Empathies of the heart incarnated in language’
I remember the very first moment I heard Jennifer Johnston’s name. I was 14 years old, a kid who loved reading, and I was in the old Carnegie library in Dún Laoghaire, the town of my childhood. I was aware that we in Ireland had a lot of wonderful writers who were dead, and I asked the librarian if she could possibly recommend one who was alive. She gave me a copy of Jennifer’s novel The Captains and the Kings. “That,” she said, “is the real thing”. I took it home and was transfixed as I read it.
The world it described was strange to me, a kid growing up in suburban Dublin in the 1970s, but it was described with such freshness and vividness that I wanted to know it. This is - and was - the genius of Jennifer Johnston. We recognise in the work an integrity of purpose, the quietly powerful beauty that only the finest artists achieve.
Her work never attempts to wow you. There are no gimmicks, no tricks. No straining for effects. No fireworks. The work of Jennifer Johnston stirs deeper recognitions. Empathies of the heart incarnated in language. As a reader, I thank her. I have never read a sentence written by Jennifer Johnston that I didn’t believe.
For so many of us, Jennifer was an inspiration and an example. She won major awards and critical plaudits, and published books that were wonderfully achieved but didn’t achieve the same recognition. Through all of it, she has kept going, doing what she did: writing sentences of such grace and poise and truthfulness that you feel you are walking the weather of the lives she describes. Fashions come and go, fads arise and die, and even how books are published has changed – but in producing a body of work that any writer would be immensely proud of, the great Jennifer Johnston was true to her calling.
- Joseph O’Connor’s novel The Ghosts of Rome is published by Harvill Secker
Eoin McNamee: ‘I found Jennifer open to young writers in a way not necessarily followed by others of her generation’
I was starting out when I met Jennifer and found her open to young writers in a way not necessarily followed by others of her generation, particularly when it came to the North. She accepted your good faith even if you were coming from a different angle and was curious as to what you were about, and why you were about it. I remember her as not suffering fools gladly, but generous and warm-hearted with it. We’ll miss her.
- Eoin McNamee is an author and Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin
Anne Griffin: ‘Johnston is a true loss to Irish literature’
Johnston’s writing taught me many things, not least that this troubled island’s history can be expressed exquisitely through the everyday lives of the lonely, isolated and in-love. Her work shone a light for me on how to mine who we Irish are by way of the ordinary life. A wise guide, who was immensely humble about her work, Johnston is a true loss to Irish literature.
Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.
- Anne Griffin is a novelist
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne: ‘a trailblazer for writers of the next generation: mine’
Another writer from that gifted generation born in around the1930s has left us – McGahern, William Trevor, Val Mulkerns, Edna O’Brien. Now Jennifer Johnston. But what glorious legacies they bequeath! Johnston was a trailblazer for writers of the next generation: mine. Novels like The Captains and the Kings, The Gates, How Many Miles to Babylon, were crucially important to the revitalisation of Irish fiction in the 1970s. What was most striking about Jennifer Johnston’s writing was her inimitable voice, unique, making any page from her hand instantly recognisable (as in the anthology of anonymous stories, Finbar’s Hotel, assembled by Dermot Bolger in 1977). In person she was great fun, a kind woman who didn’t put up with any nonsense. I remember her pointing out to the overly enthusiastic neophyte organiser of a literary festival we were attending that it was after 11pm when we finally got to sit down for a bite to eat, after a day crammed with far too many readings and workshops and lengthy interviews on local radio. Jennifer was like a strong protective mother, what we all need.
- Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a novelist and short story writer
Glenn Patterson: ‘The moment I first read her I fell under her spell’
Jennifer Johnston was not only one of the best novelists of her generation (and several generations either side), she was one of the kindest and most generous - I would need a third handful of fingers to count off the younger writers I know who benefited directly from her support. She was also by some distance the most fun to spend time with, knowledgeable and insightful about literature, hilarious about just about everything else... Actually, about literature too. The moment I first read her I fell under her spell. Fifty years on, I am under it still.
- Glenn Patterson is an author, screenwriter and lecturer in creative writing at Queen’s University Belfast
Patricia Craig: a ‘quiet, sometimes unsettling and always compelling voice’
In the 10 years since her last novel, Naming the Stars, was published, we’ve missed Jennifer Johnston’s quiet, sometimes unsettling and always compelling voice. Throughout a career spanning more than 50 years, she set about casting a disabused, but humane and tolerant eye on foolish mortals (the title of her 2007 novel) and their intriguing if misguided activities.
She began in 1972 (at the late age of 42) with The Captains and the Kings, which revisits the Irish “Big House” theme – inescapable, indeed, for someone who’d grown up as a middle-class Protestant in mid-20th-century Dublin, though Johnston’s productive ambivalence towards the subject carried an inspiriting charge. She always took an interest in unexpected friendships, between people of different generations, different social classes and different political affiliations (a recurring motif), and the ways in which these could bring enlightenment to their participants, but also engender tragedies.
Describing herself as anything but an “innovative” writer, being instead one who worked on a “very, very small canvas”, she nevertheless went on to tackle, with insight and aplomb, many facets of modern life. A growing concern with a kind of subdued feminist assertiveness came to dominate her work. She didn’t balk at a head-on confrontation with “difficult” subjects such as incest (in two novels, The Invisible Worm, 1991, and Grace and Truth, 2005), and she kept a continuing interest in the effect of violence on individual lives, whether first-World-War violence, Irish republican violence or the emotional violence inherent in askew family relationships. And all handled with subtlety and obliqueness.
A major figure in contemporary Irish fiction, despite her own reservations about some of her work – The Gates was a very bad novel, she said forthrightly – Jennifer Johnston is especially to be revered for identifying the creative impulse as a central force for good in a turbulent, chaotic world.
- Patricia Craig is a critic
Maura McGrath: ‘Her contribution to Irish literature will endure’
Jennifer Johnston was an esteemed literary voice whose work captured the complexities of Irish life with extraordinary depth and sensitivity. Her novels and plays resonated across generations, and her contribution to Irish literature will endure.
- Maura McGrath is chair of the Arts Council
Maureen Kennelly: ‘She brought nuance, compassion and truth to every page she wrote’
Jennifer Johnston’s passing is a great loss to the literary world. A gifted storyteller, she brought nuance, compassion and truth to every page she wrote. Her influence on Irish writing is immeasurable, and her legacy will continue to inspire.
- Maureen Kennelly is director of the Arts Council
