As part of a translation project run by Efacis (the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies), which focused on texts by the Irish author John Banville, a number of international writers were asked to respond to the author’s essay, Fiction and the Dream, in which he describes the nature of literature and his own writing process.
For Banville, fiction is akin to dreaming, and attempts to induce a dream from one mind into another. It is also a form of priesthood or religious meditation: “The writer goes into a room, the inviolable domestic holy of holies – the study – and remains hour after hour in eerie silence. With what deities does he commune, in there, what rituals does he enact?”
Despite this slip into aggrandisement, such delusions of privilege are done away with by Banville, though he does retain a sense of the writer as mystic. The act of writing is a way of encoding and preserving, a way of dragging work up “out of that darksome well where the essential self cowers”.
Hedwig Schwall’s book focuses on writers of fiction (both short stories and novels), and it might have been nice to see the responses of poets, dramatists and screenwriters too. That said, The Danger and the Glory has an admirable scope in terms of new and established writers, young and old, with many genres of fiction accounted for. English and Irish speakers are included, as well as those resident in all areas of the island of Ireland. Each writer was given a loose brief: somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 words ideally, with no set format or restriction on content. All they had to do was respond to the broad question: what is the nature of your art to you?
This will be a valuable book for students of literature
This is a book of small rituals and oddities, and these give it a lightness that it might otherwise lose under its rather grand-seeming subject. The inventiveness of many of the writers also helps it to avoid monotony. There are 62 contributions here, but thankfully there is a wide variety in the approaches. Roddy Doyle writes about the importance of music: “I used to like filling the room with music as I worked. It was company and a way to measure time. But now, today, I need music if what I do is going to be worth reading.” In one of the book’s longest pieces, Martina Devlin recalls a conversation with a British army officer. Danny Denton writes a “mass for writerly voices”, and Jan Carson writes an allegorical short story, in which a woman is constantly distracted by the sense of something moving at her window.
Distraction
A common thread that runs throughout is the need to avoid, or lean into, distraction. Kevin Barry only connects to the internet at 1pm, once his morning of writing is done. Another is worship – the world of the spirit, and the subconscious. A recurring constraint is money – the necessities of childcare, paid work, domestic tasks, all the admin of life. Most of the writers seem to agree that, as Eoin McNamee puts it, “the steps you take towards beauty are unlovely”.
For many readers (myself included), there will be moments when the book feels a little self-indulgent, an echo-chamber where writers talk to writers about how important writers and writing are. But then there are moments of lightness, and writers who shrug off the heaviness of the task they have been assigned.
In one of the best descriptions I have read of the process of writing and not-writing, Wendy Erskine compares it to the arcade game, Penny Falls, “where coins are inserted through a slot perhaps to the sound of beeps and electronic rings of the kind not yet heard on Mount Parnassus. Mostly the new penny causes no movement but sometimes it sets up an unexpected chain which causes a cascade down the metal chute”.
This will be a valuable book for students of literature, and is an interesting book to dip in and out of, though it’s not one that’s easy to read from cover to cover, variable as it is. Enright writes of a “fugitive sweetness” in the act of writing, and that wonderful phrase seems applicable here. There is sweetness, but there is a little work to be done to sift it out.
