Anne Enright: ‘Male critical culture has become quite defensive and sour’

About half an hour into my lunchtime meeting with Anne Enright, when we are well into our salads in a smart brasserie in Dún Laoghaire, she takes me gently but firmly in hand. Since we sat down, I have been relentlessly quizzing her about her new novel, The Wren, The Wren: its genesis and setting, the transgenerational trio of grandfather, daughter and granddaughter who are its central characters, the nuances of its language, whether a cornflower blue skirt in one significant scene is linked to a completely different outfit in another, and on and on. Enough is enough.

“The book is a little bit underdetermined,” she says. “So it’s not going to give you all those answers.” She laughs. “In fact, this whole conversation has been looking for those answers, which the book slightly withholds. So it should seem congruent, but not necessarily locked in, in terms of cause and effect.”

Most of the poets I know are really very nice. They’re kind of lovely as a bunch. So I don’t know why I made Phil that guy

—  Enright on the protagonist of her new novel

She is absolutely correct, of course. The best fiction represents the chaos and unpredictability of human affairs, recoiling from neat resolutions. And Enright’s novels, which include Booker-winning The Gathering, The Green Road and the book before this one, Actress, are among the best of the best – resonant, provocative, moving explorations of the closeness and distance inherent in intimate relationships, with all the dynamics of power and desire they entail. The Wren, The Wren is especially arresting when it addresses the question of violence within families, with Enright telling me that one key moment stopped her in her tracks when she recorded the novel’s audio version: “I really, really found that scene hard to read. And I had to do it a million times to get it right.” To say more would mean being guilty of a spoiler, but readers will know when they reach it.

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Hovering over the novel is the figure of Phil – father of single mother Carmel – now long dead but still making his influence felt. Phil was a poet “of some reputation,” whom we meet early on ransacking his seriously ill wife’s bed for his watch before he abandons her and their two young daughters (“He liked to walk out when the weather was good. He paused on the threshold to squint up at the sky, and he plucked a stolen buttonhole on his way to the bus stop, to drive the neighbours mad.”) When he receives a bad review from fellow poet Austin Clarke in The Irish Times, he throws a discus of dried cow manure at the front window of Clarke’s house in Templeogue, “and bragged about it afterwards in every pub”. His family become practised at hiding the review pages from him on a Saturday morning.

Enright is resigned to the inevitable game of identification that will greet her portrayal of a great Irish poet. “There’s really nothing you can do about that. Especially in Ireland.” When she worked as a producer, many years ago, on the RTÉ satirical programme Nighthawks, “every single sketch we did – it could be about St Patrick banishing the snakes, it could be about Michael Collins – somebody would say, ‘That was a great thing you did about Terry Keane’, Charlie Haughey’s mistress. You can’t stop them.” She goes on to qualify that “most of the poets I know are really very nice. They’re kind of lovely as a bunch. So I don’t know why I made Phil that guy.”

Phil’s poems appear throughout the book, written of course – since he is fictional – by Enright herself. They’re a mixture of lyrical, romantic pieces, meditations on his own past and versions of historical Irish poems; the book’s title is taken from the poem Phil writes for Carmel. How much of a creative challenge was it to introduce an entirely different genre into her prose? “It gave me serious impostor syndrome,” she replies, smiling. “I thought I couldn’t write poetry. Poems are not just lines broken up on a page; there’s some special voodoo there.”

She enlisted the help of poets Jane Clarke and Jessica Traynor to confirm that the pieces could stand: “I just needed them to say ‘This is a poem’. This is a poem, as though it was a kind of sacred, vocational kind of thing, that you couldn’t just be a poet by writing a poem. That’s against everything I’ve ever said about prose. People say, ‘Oh, I’d love to be a writer’. And I’d say, Well, you know, if you type, that’s a fair start. Being a writer is someone who writes.” The acknowledgments in The Wren, The Wren also reveal that she accosted Paul Muldoon in Dublin Airport with Phil’s version of Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna’s An Bonnán Buí, or The Yellow Bittern (“I can’t believe I did that”).

Carmel was very difficult to write for me, and I stayed with her for a long time with this sense of difficulty. The reason she was so difficult is that she has no imagination

She drew on all sorts of influences to write the poems: there are echoes of the metaphysical poets George Herbert and John Donne, a touch of Patrick Kavanagh, the satirical, cosmopolitan edge of Louis MacNeice and something, too, of Michael Hartnett (“a lovely man: I met him the day I was married, in my wedding dress on Stephen’s Green,” she recalls). Did she have fun? “I loved doing the Irish stuff – the breakthrough for me was realising that he could translate from the medieval Irish. It was such a blast.” One such poem was the ninth-century, 24-syllable The Bird of Lagan Lough, which has been translated by Seamus Heaney, Ciaran Carson and Derek Mahon. “You’ve no idea how cheeky it is! But I didn’t do a bad job.”

I wonder aloud whether Enright will follow novelist Colm Tóibín, who published his debut collection last year, into writing poetry. “I loved writing as Phil; not only that, I loved writing as Phil writing as the monk, as St Columba. I don’t think I would write poetry as myself.”

[ Anne Enright: ‘I looked at how men manage their confidence and took a few leads’ ]

Why not? “It asks questions about sincerity, I think. I’m not a great believer in sincerity because I think people can be quite sincere, or seem quite sincere, and be entirely unpleasant. So sincere, or even heartfelt, they don’t have a moral or even aesthetic value for me. I prefer to play.”

And play she certainly does, throughout her wrong-footing fiction, at one minute deadly serious, at another lightly comical, even flippant.

Phil aside, The Wren, The Wren contains another of Enright’s tense depictions of a mother-daughter relationship, here conjuring up Nell, a woman in her 20s, writing blandly positive copy for internet influencers while living in a shared, rented house and attempting to gain a degree of independence from her much-loved mother, Carmel.

Enright began the novel in “the absolute pits” of lockdown – she has recently written an immensely evocative description of her daily walks on Killiney Hill for the London Review of Books – and found that grim time paradoxically productive.

Working was, she says, “oddly wonderful, because it reminded me of when I wrote in my 20s, before anyone was going to read it, just writing and you don’t know what it is. And you have no sense of who’s going to read it or how it’s going to be sold; there was no internet or whatever. That removal of the outside world, on that level, was really helpful to me.”

[ Anne Enright: ‘Hilary Mantel’s Irish heritage was key to her relationship with the past’ ]

You can see the influence of the times in the way the novel’s characters appear to exist in pockets of isolation, even though the setting is (just) pre-pandemic. Carmel, for instance, is rarely pictured outside her house or garden – which is also emblematic of the way that she has, as a determined single mother and businesswoman, created her own sanctuary. “Carmel was very difficult to write for me, and I stayed with her for a long time with this sense of difficulty. The reason she was so difficult is that she has no imagination.”

She bursts out laughing. “So every time I wanted to go off on one of my usual sort of lyrical shifts, or metaphors, or out, out in some way, I had to tie her back down to reality, tie the language back down to be more literal, less imaginative. She doesn’t have a lot of insight, Carmel. She doesn’t psychologise. She’s very practical. All of these things that she considers luxuries are mostly people’s mental wellbeing; she considers them to be unnecessary luxury. She’s not interested in anxiety, sensitivity, in tolerance. She’s quite Irish in one way. But she was a survivor.”

As ever, Enright is fascinating about the dynamics between the genders, and the echoes over generations. As Phil has proved himself incapable of coping with his sick wife, so Carmel bails out when a man she is dating – casually from her point of view, less so from his – falls ill. She invokes her daughter to elude a nurse’s attempt to pin her down to take responsibility for him, a similarity between father and daughter that Enright’s husband pointed out to her. “And I was, oh my God. Absolutely ... for her, that raging sense of something precious and threatened that is completely her responsibility – she must look after this – is similar to how Phil feels about his poetry. It’s his excuse.” Although, she adds, “it’s possibly more moral to have a child as an excuse than a short chapbook of translations from the Irish”.

In the deep past, you had to be sort of wonderfully collaborative with the male ego. And that there were women who were very good at that and survived by putting up with them more

Literary history is filled with male genius propped up by female capability. I remark that when Phil later has a relationship with a young woman, he praises her talent as a poet, but goes on to treat her very badly. He is, Enright says, “actively jealous, or envious, a more narcissistic word. It’s the same as in Actress, which is about the envy that a certain kind of man has for female talent. Mix in the kind of ‘what about me?’, the self-pity, and that style of personality cannot stand female talent, is profoundly threatened by it.”

How does she think that has affected the way female writers have been treated, in Ireland and beyond? “I think the moment for showing it most clearly hasn’t really happened yet. I don’t think women are aware of it. They go through a kind of fog for a lot of their careers, not knowing why or what’s wrong.” Does she think women are beginning to realise it more? “I think in the deep past, you had to be sort of wonderfully collaborative with the male ego. And that there were women who were very good at that and survived by putting up with them more. And that we’re at a kind of transition; the last few decades have been times of transition. You can’t just roll your eyes and keep going.

“Women are sticking their elbows out, or women are catching on to stuff really, I suppose. Male critical culture has become quite defensive and sour in some places.”

[ Anne Enright on Nuala O’Faolain: She knew there was something very wrong with her feelings ]

She clarifies that she’s referring to the Anglosphere, and cites as an example some of the “male nastiness” that Sally Rooney encountered. “I think some of the critical response to the second book [Normal People], which is the most successful book, in terms of readership, was also quite sour. Sour, that’s the word, isn’t it? Or hurtful.” Is it purely Rooney’s success that her detractors found it hard to stomach? “Being young and female is perhaps considered enough,” ponders Enright, “without going and writing a book.”

We start talking about how this fits in with the much-written-about “phenomenon” of the current boom in Irish writing, which is often met with the response from Irish writers that they’ve been here all along.

“It keeps on. There’s always another golden egg and another generation. And there have been generations being called generations, the kind of idea of ‘our generation’ has been rolling, since the mid-80s I think, which is when UK publishing really woke up to the Irish voice. You could say then there was a financial boom in the City, there was an openness to post-imperial, postcolonial cultures, and real intellectual and creative interest in making these international voices. And now, you might stop talking about Ireland for a minute and start talking about England and whether underneath the cultural expansion of those years, a political and cultural contraction was going on, hidden, not seen. That’s a really interesting question to me. Where did England go? It went to Brexit, of course.”

Nobody is celebrating the English tradition of fiction. That’s seen as an international space. It’s not an international space; it’s actually an English space. Irish fiction is also international, but we name it as Irish

She points to the moment that the Booker Prize, which has so recently longlisted four Irish novelists, started including American writers as an example of an expansionism that suggested “we’re big enough for everyone ... Meanwhile, the idea of England was in pain, was contracting, was getting smaller and was not getting culturally ratified somehow.” She mentions writers such as Jonathan Coe, Alan Hollinghurst, Max Porter and Sarah Moss – her teaching colleague at UCD – as examples of writers who engage with an English tradition, “and yet, nobody is celebrating the English tradition of fiction. That’s seen as an international space. It’s not an international space; it’s actually an English space. Irish fiction is also international, but we name it as Irish. And that gives us a kind of strength, it gives us a sense of circumference. It gives us a conversation, a space. So you can have a tradition and you can argue with the tradition and say, Oh, the tradition doesn’t do this for women, so I’m going to, and you can argue over that territory. Whereas that argument over what is the English novel doesn’t exist, is not made. And I think this could be quite useful.”

[ Anne Enright: ‘As a writer, your problems are your solutions’ ]

As professor of creative writing at UCD, Enright is enthusiastic about working with new writers and their material, and is delighted that four of her 2019 alumni – Sarah Gilmartin, Aingeala Flannery, Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe and Aoife Fitzpatrick – are now internationally published.

Our conversation has ranged widely, and Enright is at pains to issue a couple of caveats. “It’s more and more typical that I’m asked to and deliver large opinions about culture. And I spend most of my time in my head, in my room, working on a book. I mean, I read the new work coming up, I’m au fait. But I find myself doing something similar to the last time. And I say, Oh damn, I’m still there. I must do something different this time.”

So what’s next? She grins. “I’m going to sit down and write the same thing, only different.”

The Wren, The Wren is published by Jonathan Cape on August 31st