What goes in to writing a biography? Five years of your life for a start

My initial plan was to write a foot-stepping book, travelling around Ireland to see if any tangible signs of Richard Hayward existed but I was advised by my literary agent to instead write a biography; firstly, Hayward needed to achieve cultural retrieval to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his death in October 2014.

But writing his life story also required stepping into his shoes. Any biographer will want to visit their subject’s birthplace, so I set off to Southport, Lancashire to seek out Forest Road, a residential area where Hayward was born in 1892. I found his red-brick house – now with a cafe on the ground floor – and walked up and down the road several times. In a shoe shop an old cobbler, whose grandparents lived in the area more than 100 years ago, illuminated what it was like. He explained about the distinctive Accrington brick of the houses that gave a glazed shining effect – a small titbit of information stashed in my notebook, helping to build up what Vladimir Nabokov referred to as “straw and fluff”.

The family moved to Larne, Co Antrim in the mid-1890s where Hayward was educated. On a sunny spring morning I headed to Larne and cycled around town – the main mode of transport in those days – to find his house at Sandy Bay. I called at his old grammar school and was shown class attendance records and some of his travel books that he later presented to the library. I continued to chase Hayward’s spirit, visiting places throughout Ireland he knew well: Carrick-on-Shannon, Knockmany chambered cairn in Tyrone, the Burren, the Corrib and Kerry, where in 2012 I attended Puck Fair in Killorglin as he had done on two occasions in the 1940s.

Then I knuckled down to the exploration of archives, spending time in what Henry James called “the visitable past”, reading the tangible printed documents with ink inscriptions. Using a magnifying glass to scrutinise Hayward’s letters, I deciphered his handwriting in his private papers held at the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. Letters are revealing because authors unburden themselves with a directness that adds authenticity. Hayward’s true voice – his humour, anger, irascibility and impatience – comes across.

The highlight of the archive was finding his travel notebooks. Leafing through his original research notes created a frisson of excitement. Studying his methodology allowed me to see how he transformed his jottings into fluid prose and where ideas came from. A writer’s notebook, it is often said, is a “junkyard of the mind”, and his notebooks drew me into his orbit. Seeing the initial nibble notes – the repositories of his on-the-spot experience – made in scrawling writing, his corrections, scribbles, pencil doodles, bracketed asides and whimsical comments brought him touchably close. They provided not only a portal into his thought processes but also the full sensory experience. Handling them, smelling the paper and ink, and wondering why he chose certain phrases felt like slipping out of linear time into a parallel world in the company of the man who wrote them seventy years ago.

Cross-pollination plays a large part in archival research and led me to government files in the Public Record Office in Belfast; BBC written archive files at Caversham near Reading; census, and film censor forms in the National Archive of Ireland, and correspondence with his associates reflecting the overlap in his life of literature, theatre, film, music and broadcasting. This involved exploring buff coloured files in the archive of Maurice Walsh at the University of Limerick (Walsh was a champion of Hayward and reviewed some of his books for The Irish Times), the Liam S Gogan papers at UCD, Hubert Butler’s archive at TCD, and the Thomas Carnduff papers at Queen’s University. All of these produced engaging stories that helped bring him alive. Finding out about his associates in different cultural circles meant compiling brief biographical walk-on parts of a cast of artists, writers, singers, actors and musicians, making it a “crowd” biography.

For several years I had one foot in the 20th century and the other in the 21st. I wrote to Irish daily newspapers seeking information and received 27 replies which sent me off in new directions. In between all this, my research involved a detailed reading of his travel writing and the opinions of newspaper critics on his books, as well as watching his films that had been digitised, and listening to his baritone singing voice belting out The Bright Silvery Light of the Moon with Delia Murphy.

Armed with the archival triangulation of letters, notebooks and press cuttings, I turned to the task of finding people to interview about him. A biographer cannot revisit the past on his own; he requires help from his subject’s family, friends and detractors to unravel the past. I spoke to more than 50 people who remembered him and others who recalled their parents talking about him, which brought extra colour. Hayward, I discovered, was extremely popular, but not universally so. He provoked feelings of envy but also of what one informant called “friendly disdain” amongst some academics.

In October last year, David Lodge wrote an obituary for the Guardian on Park Honan, a writer noted for his biographies of authors. Honan had written one on Matthew Arnold, and Lodge wrote that it showed his great strengths as a biographer: “inexhaustible patience and a willingness to spend many years – to do anything, read everything and go anywhere – in order to build up a huge database of facts, often from previously undiscovered sources, that would then be distilled into a readable narrative by intense compositional effort”.

At several stages the weight of information that I had gathered, much of it from undiscovered sources, threatened to overwhelm me. Every biography is an act of interpretation and the same facts can be presented in many different ways. I adopted an investigative approach, trying to present a balanced evaluation of Hayward’s life and work, and an analysis of his achievements.

Since its publication by Lilliput Press in the summer of 2014, the book has been a catalyst for Hayward spin-offs, including a BBC NI television documentary and a BBC travelling exhibition which has toured libraries in the North. The Linen Hall Library held a weekend symposium on him, and in early May the library was presented with a specially commissioned bronze cast portrait bust of Hayward by the sculptor Charles Ludlow. For the first time in 65 years, his 1950 book Ulster and the City of Belfast has been reprinted by Clachan Publishing with the original watercolour cover and sketches by the Belfast artist Raymond Piper who accompanied Hayward on his travels.

Immersing yourself in a life can turn into an obsession where you bore family and friends by talking about the work. It was unquestionably an all-consuming project. As a writer of Irish travel books and guidebooks, I felt a strong empathy of identification with Hayward. Metaphorically speaking, I lived closely with him, for five years, sentencing myself to a life of “solitary refinement” to complete the book, breathing a huge sigh when the final proofs were dispatched to the printers.

Romancing Ireland, Richard Hayward 1892-1964 has been reprinted in paperback by the Lilliput Press at €20 (£14.99) lilliputpress.ie. Clachan Publishing have reprinted Ulster and the City of Belfast by Richard Hayward, with a new introduction by Paul Clements at €18.90 (£14.90) clachan-publishing.com

Paul Clements is a contributing writer to Fodor's Ireland 2015 and the new edition of the Rough Guide to Ireland to be published in June. His lecture, Exploring Ireland with Richard Hayward, will be given to the Royal Geographical Society in Belfast on Tuesday, May 19th, at 7.30pm, rgs.org/northernireland

Over the weekend of June 13th and 14th he is tutoring a creative writing "footsteps" workshop as part of the Immrama Festival of Travel Writing in Lismore which will include visits to two historic houses in west Waterford. lismoreimmrama.com