James Kidd
“Yes it was odd to look back but I tell you one thing. It certainly makes you feel old, writing a memoir. You think, Has it been that long? Did that really happen?”
Just in case I have missed the tone of wistful disbelief, John Banville, one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, sighs deeply. Nevertheless, writing a memoir – or at least a memoir of sorts – is precisely what the 70-year-old author of 18 novels (28 if you count the crime fiction he produced as Benjamin Black) has done.
Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir, certainly looks back – on Banville as excited child, sulky teenager and aspiring man of letters. But readers hoping for the full story of his life and literary career – his victory at the 2005 Man Booker Prize with The Sea or occasional work in the theatre – might be disappointed.
“I just wasn’t interested enough in myself,” Banville, 70, explains of his refusal to produce a comprehensive autobiography. “Writers, we just sit in rooms. Day after day, week after week, month after month. Year after year. Just making up these fantasies. All of our lives is really going on inside our heads.”
These philosophical musings are shaped by Banville’s seven-decade relationship with Dublin. Although he has called the Irish capital home for almost his entire adult life, he confesses: “I realised I had never really lived in Dublin. I had always been on the outside. I now look at buildings I had never bothered looking at before.”
In Time Pieces, he undertakes a voyage of urban discovery, guided by an old friend, Cicero, who knows Dublin's every nook and cranny. The pair meander from canals to docks, from James Joyce's alma mater at Belvedere College to the Abbey Theatre and around Mount Street. The Mount Street area, close to the Georgian street scapes of Merrion Square, are where his Detective Quirke crime novels are set – dark stories among the rain soaked grimy streets of offices, flats and bedsits.
“It was an extraordinary sensation to discover Dublin at this stage in my life. Going around it now I feel I am a Dubliner. A bit late, but still. Better late than never.
‘[James] Joyce is a great flaneur. He always made the point that people never look at the upper stories of buildings. I didn’t even look at the ground floor. Now I do. I see how strange it is that these wonderful, old Georgian buildings have survived, perfectly intact in 2016. It is extraordinary. Layer upon layer of time that you pass by as you walk down the street.”
Banville was not a Dubliner by birth, being born 150 kilometres away in Wexford. As he writes in Time Pieces: "I treated the place as no more than a staging post on my way elsewhere ... In imaginative terms, this indifference to my birthplace, to its history and to the complex and subtle life of its people, was not only arrogant but foolish, and wasteful, too."
The immature Banville possessed no such perspective and sought various ways elsewhere, both real and imaginary. "Books from my earliest years were an escape from a rather dull world. I didn't realise it at the time but Wexford was very beautiful. But Wexford in the 1950s wasn't exactly Paris in the 1920s. It was a dull, impoverished time – financially and spiritually. So, books were an escape but they were also an entrance into life, into being vividly alive." This entrance opened almost inevitably onto Dublin itself (Banville moved there in the 1960s), one of world literature's great capitals, thanks largely to James Joyce, but also W B Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Time Pieces is at its funniest when wondering just how much actual writing went on in the city. Banville first worked for the former Irish state airline, Aer Lingus when he arrived in Dublin and then moved into journalism with the Irish Times.
“People would sit in pubs and just talk their work away, quite wastefully. Who knows how much talent there was? The Irish love telling our own story over and over. I always say that if you are a politician you can get away with enormities here so long as you have a good story to tell.”
“Joyce used up Dublin in the way [Constantine] Cavafy used up Alexandria, or [Charles] Dickens used up London. If I make a reference to Dublin in my ‘Banville books’, people say, that’s a reference to Joyce. When I write as ‘John Banville’, my books are set in a Dublin of the imagination. When I write as ‘Benjamin Black’, I can write about Dublin itself.”
The mysterious motions of John Banville’s mind occupy large parts of our conversation, which is somewhat ironic as Banville struggles to articulate exactly what these their mysterious motions are.
“I don’t understand the act of creation. I always say to people at question and answer sessions, The person who wrote these books is not here. He ceases to exist the moment I stand up from my desk. I know no more about him than you do. Most people think it is pretentious nonsense but it is true.”
The basics of the creative process are obvious enough. Banville works at a flat in a complex of about 500 apartments in central Dublin.
What occurs within Banville himself is harder to define. Not that this stops him giving it a florid go, for example when he compares inspiration to falling in love. “Two people look at each other with transports of joy. We know it’s an ordinary human being but we deify them. That’s the imagination working overtime, in white heat. It doesn’t last very long. It is very beautiful when it does. That’s what writing the ‘Banville’ books is like. This is why so many people complain about my overheated prose.” He chuckles. “I write constantly in the state of a lover.”
One could add that Banville writes constantly in the state of an alien visiting Earth. Literature has, he says, been his way of contemplating the sheer strangeness of being alive.
“I consider our presence here to be a cosmic blunder. The world is much too beautiful for us. We don’t deserve it. I think we hate it for that reason. We have set out to conquer nature and having conquered it, we are now busily destroying it. It is a very perilous position our children will be in.”
Such pessimism tends to overwhelm what optimism Banville can summon up. He recalls falling in the street one beautiful summer’s morning. “Almost immediately there were six people around me. They could not have been more helpful. One chap said, ‘Go across to that pub and have a double brandy.’ That was wonderful.”
But the misanthrope finishes the anecdote: “In different circumstances these same people would be herding me into a cattle truck going east. We are a strange species. We will try to do good, if it suits us. If the circumstances are different, we are capable of any atrocity.”
Banville once expounded this theory to a roomful of psychiatrists in London, who apparently sat shaking their heads in disagreement. Banville cited the conflict in the Balkans which was still to escalate into full-blown war. “We said after the Holocaust, never again. I remember that Saturday afternoon when I heard that 7,000 young Muslim men and boys had been herded away. Never say, never again. We are capable of anything. We are also capable of absolute glories. For every Hitler, there is a Beethoven.”
The mood doesn’t lighten much when we return to Banville himself. A few years ago, he contributed a six-word story to a volume inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s famous snippet: “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”
Banville’s version is a mini-masterpiece of self-conscious concision: “Should have lived more, written less.” Today, he sounds similarly regretful about the costs of his profession, even as he admits his powerlessness to resist them. Those years of artistic effort have made him a great writer but not necessarily a great husband or father. “My life goes on inside my head. That is where the real life is lived. That is why it is so hard on the people around one. Hard on one’s family. One’s children. One is never absolutely there.” The life of writing affected Banville’s personal life in other ways. He tells a funny story about a row with his wife, not long after their marriage. “She was in full rhetorical flight. I said, ‘My god that’s wonderful. Can I use that?’ She replied, ‘You are a monster, you know that?’ I said, ‘I know, but can I use it.’”
Banville’s wife agreed, knowing he would probably use it whether she gave permission or not. “[Writers] are kind of monsters. We consume everything around us. We would sell our children for a phrase.”
He is not much cheerier when I ask whether age has its consolations. “I used to think, when I was young, that when I got old I would be wise. But age doesn’t make you wiser, it just makes you confused. Confusion is not a bad state for a writer, I think.”
Despite the brooding conversation Banville is one of Ireland's most decorated writers. Aside from the Booker Prize winning The Sea, in 2011 he won the Franz Kafka Prize, while he is also the recipient of the Prince of Asturias Award, one of the most distinguished prizes in the Spanish-speaking world.
He does seem to find bleak comedy when we turn to subject of death, citing his Catholic upbringing. “When I was a child what terrified me was not the prospect of hell, it was the prospect of heaven. Eternal boredom. And everyone would be waiting for you there: the school bully; that awful aunt you hated. Whereas with hell, you would be suffering but at least there would be interesting people.”
I asked him about future plans. He is teaching a seminar in Chicago for two months, which means he will be in America for the election. I ask him the inevitable Donald Trump question.
“The last time I was in America for any length of time was in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected. We thought the world was going to end. It didn’t.” He describes Trump as “a dangerous human being. You should never let people with a grudge have their way. They have to be kept down.”
His guide through ageing, illness and even approaching death, as through Dublin itself, is Cicero, to whom he gives the final word. “As my friend Cicero says, You had better get all of your living done before bits of you fall off in the street.”
At least now, Banville knows the best Dublin street in which to fall apart.
James Kidd is a freelance reviewer based in London.