James Hogan, also known as Augustus Young, is coming in for some stick for his portrayal of the Irish literary festival as farce, he tells Belinda McKeon
'I wrote it in pain," says James Hogan of his latest book, Storytime, a bizarre marriage of memoir and fantasy which takes the culture of the Irish literary festival to task.
Over the last three years, laid up by a serious cycling injury, the Cork-born writer tapped out the book's strange chronicles of acerbity and introspection in short, sharp bursts, sitting at the computer each day for as long as he could bear. The book has been published, but some things don't change.
"It's still giving me a lot of pain," he laughs over the phone from his adopted home, Port Vendres, in the south of France. "They don't like it in Cork. I'm afraid the people at the Munster Literature Centre didn't like it at all."
Not surprising, given how unflattering a portrait Storytime paints of the literary scene down south. The book pokes fun at the culture of literary festivals, those parades of authors and their offerings which can offer unintentional comedy no matter where they take place.
In Storytime, a festival director is conspicuously absent; an audience is all padding and no patronage; the writers themselves are "athletes lining up for a race, edging one another out".
Hogan, writing under his habitual pseudonym, Augustus Young (as Young, he has published eight books of poetry as well as numerous short stories and an earlier memoir, Light Years), based the narrative on his own experiences on the Cork festival circuit in 2002, and wastes no time in getting down to the business of irreverence.
Frank O'Connor's The Lonely Voice strikes him as "self-serving", his translations of the Dánta Grádhas as "an insult"; living writers, meanwhile, draped in decidedly thin pseudonyms (Claire Keegan and Desmond Hogan show clearly through their disguises) come in for a cocktail of ire and irony that, while wryly funny, does not go down easy. What was Hogan, with this pen picture of the festival as farce, setting out to prove?
"Well," he says, with the tone of someone who has explained this too many times before, "it's not me speaking, you see. It's Augustus."
The figure of Augustus Young, he explains, functions for him as much more than a pseudonym; he is a persona, a new perspective, an otherwise impossible way of seeing. Augustus says things that Hogan would never say.
HOGAN HIMSELF EXPRESSES admiration for the very writers who come in for the scorn of Augustus; he deploys them as part of his satire only to make a larger point, not about these individuals themselves, but about the scene in which they are obliged to participate as authors.
"I knew that the literary scene in Ireland was very hierarchical due to Aosdána," says Hogan of the thinking behind Storytime.
"The cosiness, the sense of an Ireland which had gone into a decadence, yet was nostalgic for its literary tradition - that propelled me into feeling, what's happened to Irish literature. It's become terribly insular. And they don't seem to know what's going on outside. Nobody experiments, except a few poets and musicians, and they're not particularly recognised. So I felt a satire was needed."
Enter Augustus, wincing and whining his way through a tour of the festivals.
The distaste with which Hogan views the Irish literary establishment looks akin to the snobbery of the exile son, and that much remains open to debate.
He is conscious of sounding "snooty" as he extols the unknown works of the Irish writer, Brinsley MacNamara, above the "lack of ambition" of contemporary prose and poetry.
But his argument, though laced with the arch wit of Augustus, is a serious one; it is an argument against literature as a marketplace, against the commercial pressures on writers today, against what he sees as a fading into imaginative stasis.
Hogan claims German thinker Walter Benjamin as the strongest influence on Storytime, but another writer, closer to home, casts an even stronger shadow on the book; so strong, in fact, that Hogan will this weekend make the trip back to Ireland to take part in a conference of poets, writers and academics, despite his reservations about such gatherings.
Marking the centenary of the birth in Dublin of the avant-garde poet, Brian Coffey, hailed by Beckett in 1934 as forming part of the "nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland", continuings is a celebration of Coffey's work at Trinity College.
Beckett, says Hogan, picked Coffey's brain for ideas for his novel Murphy, and in return gave Coffey a title for his second book of poems, Third Person (1938). Though Coffey died 10 years ago, his legacy for poetry, insists Hogan, lives on.
"He brought a new sound into poetry," says Hogan. "It's a unique sound. I have heard poets saying, from time to time, that yes, they've heard it,that they can hear Coffey. It's Brian's sound, it's the mind working with words. The mind ticking over, and then suddenly it takes off, and its ideas don't necessarily have words. And it is strange."
Hogan, like Beckett, was close to Coffey, whom he met in London, despite being his junior by some 40 years. In the words Hogan himself uses to talk about literature today, there are clear echoes of his mentor.
"I mean, he says things that really Irish writers wouldn't begin to understand. He said to me once, my first intention is not to communicate. What a thing to say. Would any Irish writer say that today?"
continuings, a gathering of poets and critics in celebration of the life and work of Brian Coffey, concludes in the Máirtín Ó Cadhain theatre in Trinity College, Dublin. Admission is free