A cottage industry

Achill was where writer Heinrich Böll 'played truant from Europe'. His cottage is for many Germans what the Joyce tower is for Joyceans, writes poet John F. Deane

Toward the end of the second World War, the gardaí found it necessary to come into my father's office in Achill Sound and question him about the occasional small package that arrived for him from Germany. It was a kindly query, and the answer - "these are books by great German writers" - sent them on their way contented. Bored with the dust and dullness of his job in the civil service, he taught himself German and was relishing the excitement of Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin in the original.

One of the packages I watched being opened revealed a novel, Wanderer Kommst Du Nach Spa, by one Heinrich Böll. That was 1955, and that very author had by now taken up summer residence scarcely three miles away from our home.

Late in 1957, another book arrived: Irisches Tagebuch, later translated as Irish Journal, all of it written in Böll's house in Dugort. I urged my father to go and speak, in German, to the strange visitor, but my father's diffidence prevented what would have been a telling encounter.

Heinrich Böll was born in Cologne in 1917; he was drafted into the German army, fought on both the Russian and French fronts, was wounded and spent time in a prisoner-of-war camp. His experiences during those years formed the groundsheet of his writings; he was the first and most successful writer to attempt to put those times into focus, alerting the human soul to its deeply flawed nature, and in practical and political terms working to urge a self-renewing Germany to a spiritual integrity.

Speaking of the Nazis he wrote, "they revolted me, repelled me on every level of my existence: conscious and instinctive, aesthetic and political." He saw the Irish as "the only people in Europe that never set out to conquer". One important aspect, for Achill, of his experience of war, was a sense he always displayed of wishing to help artists in difficulties, either from repressive regimes or because of restricted means. His home on Achill Island was always a haven for such artists. In 1972 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Another Nobel laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote (in Visions from San Francisco Bay): "The European spirit hated itself, turned against itself, and derided the institutions it had elaborated, perhaps thus masking a painful sense of its own disgrace."

Böll came to Achill Island, to a place where those institutions had remained unscarred for centuries, an island on the west coast of Ireland that echoed the immediacies and simplicities he had already encountered in Synge's works; he knew Joyce, too, and Yeats, Swift and O'Casey. Böll elaborated the details of Germany's disgrace, producing a literature of direct and passionate assessment of the individual's sufferings in that war, and he wrote out of a place and space that graced him in his writing. He spent every summer there, from 1950 to just before his death in 1985, and wrote most of his novels in his Dugort home. When he returned to Germany it was to a more hands-on role in public life.

Milosz again: "Catholicism is the most anthropocentric of religions, and in some sense, through its own excess of divine humanity, it resists the exact sciences which annihilate the individual, and thus, paradoxically, is less susceptible than other religions to the disintegrative influence of science and technology." Böll was a committed Catholic, and had found a place where "religion is savoured to the last drop". Like Graham Greene who was in Achill before him, Böll found an ambience both physical and spiritual that was unspoiled and supportive, existing at that time far from the centres of scientific and materialist endeavours, though his own Catholicism was far from being uncritical.

When searching for a place of retreat from his distraught homeland, somewhere he could work and offer his family some respite, Böll had been urged by Pádraig Ó Rathaille of Radio Éireann, a regular visitor to the Bervie Guesthouse in Keel, to visit Achill. He stayed with the Gallagher family in the Bervie, then rented a house from them, in Keel. He enjoyed his Guinness and his whiskey in The Village Inn, and later bought a cottage in the curiously beautiful and historic village of Dugort. He set up a small room where he sat at a table under a window facing out on Blacksod Bay. To those privileged to work there, that room, and the cottage itself, retain a sense of his benevolent and committed presence.

The 1950s in Ireland were a shifting and hesitantly developing decade, strategic economic planning being emphasised and attention focusing on the influence of the Church on government. All of this interested and worried Böll, though his writing focused on Germany and there is little influence on that work of an Achill landscape, apart, that is, from the wonderful Irish Journal. That book sees him "sitting here by the fire it is possible to play truant from Europe".

Böll was very much liked around Achill Island, where he made lifelong friends. The Irish Journal outlines his experience of Ireland between about 1950 and 1954; it is written with a mixture of wonder and love, generously peppered with anecdotes and surprised affirmations.

Böll was often to be seen out walking on "the bog road" that led through a landscape of heath and bogland, from Dugort toward the main road. With his black beret, his heavy coat, his walking stick and a fag permanently in his mouth, he was a familiar and wholly accepted figure, part, almost of Achill's soulscape.

Chapters in this book have him in the pub, where he feels like a dentist extracting the tooth of ignorance about the war from some locals: "Hitler was, I said, and I said everything . . ." He is somewhat frustrated in the local Achill Head cinema at the delays and the noise, but when he goes out for a smoke "the eye falls on the quiet sea across 30, 40 miles, beyond the edge of the bay as far as the mountains of Connemara and Galway"; the whole endearing book is alive with a gentle irony and an obvious affection.

In Germany itself, Irisches Tagebuch has gone through countless reprints and has become something of a Bible for those interested in things Irish, and they are many. The Böll cottage is for many Germans what the Joyce tower is for Joyceans, though the cottage remains an active and working space. I spent one day in the month of July in the cottage, taking note of Germans arriving on pilgrimage; they averaged, over 24 hours, a car-load every 20 minutes.

That day there were three German tour buses that drew up in front of the gate for a look. Now there is a notice on the gate, pleading that the artist in residence not be disturbed and the Germans, being who they are, respect that request and move on, a little frustrated perhaps, a little astonished too that the Achill of Irisches Tagebuch is not quite the innocently backward place they anticipated from that book.

One of the great chapters in Irish Journal speaks of "the most beautiful feet in the world". This tells of Doctor King and his wife Clodagh; the doctor is called away to an almost inaccessible part of Achill where a woman is about to give birth; he leaves his young wife anxious over his safe return. The chapter describes how the woman giving birth is felt by Clodagh to have "most beautiful feet", the chapter being a homage by Böll to the beauty of women and the generosity of their sufferings.

In the first writing workshop established on Achill Island, Clodagh presented me with her own finely crafted poems. During those days we discussed the cottage and Böll's widow Annemarie's wish to have something done with it. I suggested a writers' residence and the generosity of Annemarie and René, her son, was immediately evident. What has not been trumpeted is the wholehearted support given by the local community to the cottage and its residents. The cottage, now in its refurbished state, has seen artists fromall over the world come and work there; poets, painters, photographers . . . from every continent, and they invariably report on the magic of the house, of the Achill people and landscape.

"Donkeys bray in the warm summer night, passing on their abstract song, that crazy noise as of badly oiled door hinges, rusty pumps; the light from Clare Island lighthouse has been shining across for some time, the blue silhouettes of the mountains are deep black, a few yellow lights far off in the bog; when God made time, He made plenty of it."

• The Heinrich Böll cottage on Achill Island is supported by The Arts Council, the Department of the Arts and Mayo County Council. Some funding for the purchase of the house was raised locally. It is administered by the Heinrich Böll Association on a non-profit basis. The chairman is Edward King, and the secretary is John McHugh. The cottage is available to artists in any discipline, usually for periods from two to four weeks. Decisions are made as to residencies in the month of October for the following year. A small stipend is available to help with ongoing expenses. Applications, in writing, including a full CV and examples of work, are invited and may be sent to John McHugh, Abha Teangaí, Dooagh, Achill Island, Co Mayo. E-mail: hbollachill@anu.ie