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‘Inexplicably, the most under-valued Irish novelist of the past 50 years’

Maurice Leitch, who died this year, left us vivid portraits of Antrim mill villages in decline, tense Border communities and Troubles-torn Belfast

Maurice Leitch evokes fascist Spain’s soiled, aspirant glamour and its menace. Photograph: Bobbie Hanvey

Philip Taylor
Thu Dec 21 2023 - 05:00

The Co Antrim-born author Maurice Leitch, who died in September at the age of 90, enjoyed a literary career spanning more than six decades. From his first journalistic pieces of the mid-1950s to his final book, Gone to Earth, in 2019, Leitch produced 15 novels, two collections of short stories and more than a dozen radio and television plays.

Despite regular critical acclaim and awards, his renown always lagged behind that of comparable contemporaries and even in his native Northern Ireland he remained far from a household name. Indeed, the writer and academic George O’Brien – whose encyclopaedic studies of Irish fiction make him well-placed to judge – has described Leitch as “inexplicably the most under-valued Irish novelist of the past 50 years.”

Leitch’s style and setting varied somewhat from book to book – to keep himself interested, he explained – but his favoured themes of repressed trauma, obsessive sexuality, and the plight of the alienated individual in a dysfunctional environment, were explored time and again.

While he occasionally took his fiction to more exotic locations – London, Bristol, even Spain – it is above all his Ulster-based work for which he deserves to be remembered, leaving us vivid portraits of Antrim mill villages in decline, tense Border communities and Troubles-torn Belfast at rock bottom. Moreover, Leitch offers an all-too-rare literary perspective on the northern Protestant experience, an invaluable, near-unique contribution to any understanding of this complex cultural and historical inheritance, still so little explored in fiction compared to the more familiar – and, for many readers and commentators, more easily relatable – Catholic or nationalist take on existence in the northern state.

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I first met Leitch in 2019 while carrying out research on his close friend and fellow Co Antrim novelist, the late Ian Cochrane. Always generous with his time, Leitch then agreed to reflect on his own life and work over the course of numerous discussions in London, by phone during lockdown, and most recently at his final home in Faversham, Kent.

Often described in the past as something of a contrarian, it was clear from our interviews that various grudges, particularly against occasionally ungenerous reviewers, had indeed been harboured – nurtured even – over the years. But by now, in his mid-eighties, Leitch appeared, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be a mellower version of his former, occasionally combative self. In all of our conversations and correspondence, the necessary egotism of the writer seemed tempered by a down-home Co Antrim self-deprecation. His talk was energetic, often mischievous, his fluent reminiscences punctuated by gentle bursts of laughter at the absurdities of life and human vanity – including his own.

Maurice Henry Leitch was born in 1933 in the small village of Muckamore, where his father worked for a time in the local linen mill. Maurice recalled his father’s uncomplaining life of tough physical labour, from splashing around in his underwear in the bleaching department to “just about the worst job you could imagine – painting the underside of buses!”. Andrew Leitch was determined that his clearly intelligent son should avoid similar hardship by pursuing his education, an opportunity he himself had been denied by his own less forward-thinking father.

Maurice was an avid reader from an early age. With few books at home, he turned first to his mother’s women’s magazines – he particularly enjoyed Red Star Weekly, delivered by the breadman and favoured for its mix of sensationalist journalism and romantic stories – before gravitating to the tiny Boots lending library in Antrim, then finally being brought, wide-eyed, to Belfast’s Smithfield Market to raid its overflowing second-hand book stalls.

By his early teens, reading was an obsession and an immersive experience: “I remember one horrifically wet Sunday. We had a sort of little parlour room, the “good room,” but it was damp, as was the whole house. And I was sitting there in the damp reading Dracula. I read it from cover to cover, sitting transfixed in the armchair, absolutely terrified and I couldn’t stop reading it.”

Maurice earned a secondary-level scholarship to the prestigious Methody College in Belfast. Never particularly happy there – he felt treated as a yokel by the mainly urban pupils and staff – he nonetheless did well enough to progress to Stranmillis College, where he trained as a primary school teacher and further developed his interest in literature: “I remember doing an essay on Sons and Lovers, and the lecturer wrote at the bottom ‘You can write’ – that stayed with me and planted a seed.”

Leitch subsequently taught in an Antrim primary school for six years, while devoting spare moments to writing. First came little sketches for the Belfast Telegraph on rural subjects, followed by a series of children’s stories, then his first radio play, The Old House, in 1960. “Yes, that was the first play I did,” Maurice recalled. “It was produced by the late, great Ronald Mason. He was head of drama in Belfast, and later in London, and he was a great friend to me. And Jimmy Ellis played the lead. It was a bit sentimental in a way, but poignant I think. The idea came from me seeing all these derelict houses scattered about the countryside, and then suddenly somebody would take over the house, knock it down and build a bungalow right over the top of it.”

On the strength of this existing work, Leitch secured a full-time job at BBC Radio, as a writer and producer of documentaries and in-the-field features, operating out of Broadcasting House on Ormeau Avenue. Leitch recalled the pre-Troubles Belfast of the 1960s as a cultured and in many ways idyllic place: “There was a sort of kernel of people in Belfast who were all interested in the arts – painters, writers, musicians. It was a wonderful time, almost like living in Paris in a way. We were watching foreign movies, and reading French and American writers and having great conversations in all the pubs.”

The Liberty Lad was clearly at least semi-autobiographical in nature, detailing the frustrations of a young teacher stuck in a depressed mill village

It was a time of many literary friendships, too, often formed through his radio work, with emerging talents such as Derek Mahon, Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney. “I did this sort of avant-garde jazz and poetry programme. We had this jazz trio and we brought poets in to read their work and that’s how I got to know Seamus. And I remember one Christmas, both our families must have been away, and he and I spent Christmas Day getting very, very drunk and we had a great time. And he sent me a poem afterwards, which I could never really get to the bottom of. Because he dedicated it, ‘To Maurice, most elaborate of men’ – and I was never too sure if that was supposed to be a compliment or not!”

Working closely alongside Leitch at the BBC was Sam Hanna-Bell, a ground-breaking producer, intent on bringing the real life of the north to the radio, documenting local customs and characters in a direct, unpatronising manner few had done before. He also happened to be an acclaimed novelist, whose December Bride (1951) still stands as an emblematic work of Ulster fiction. And it was he who now urged his younger colleague to write a novel. “He was a sort of mentor to me, quite a firm mentor,” smiled Leitch. “He told me I was exhausting all my creativity on the BBC, writing all these documentaries and feature programmes, and all this work was going into the air and vanishing. Writing a novel was what he saw as really important – that was the pinnacle.”

When Leitch’s first novel, The Liberty Lad, duly appeared in 1965, it caused quite a stir with its frank sexual content, allusions to political corruption, and – unusually for the time, although a secondary element in the story – its candid portrayal of life at a gay person in Belfast.

The Liberty Lad was clearly at least semi-autobiographical in nature, detailing the frustrations of a young teacher stuck in a depressed mill village, keen to grasp more from life than rural Antrim appears to offer. The inter-generational strife and aspiration for social mobility unmistakably echoed the preoccupations of much post-war working-class British fiction. “Yes,” agreed Leitch, “I loved Alan Sillitoe and all those northern English writers. And I suppose I was an angry young man too. It’s a sort of an arrogant thing at that age. You see all the things that are wrong with the society around you, but haven’t got to the stage where you see all the faults in yourself, and you feel you must put it all down on the page. Looking back I feel a bit ashamed though, that The Liberty Lad was such a strong book – it was probably a bit selfish. But writers tend to have that sort of rush of blood to the head with their first book.”

He adapted easily to life in his adopted city, becoming fast friends with another Northern Irish writer, Ian Cochrane from Cullybackey

Leitch’s next novel Poor Lazarus published in 1969, was more innovative in style and even less compromising in its subject matter, dealing with sectarianism and mental illness in an Ulster Border village teeming with pent-up prejudice and suspicion. What was particularly daring – and indeed troubling – about the novel was the open bigotry of the central character Yarr, a Protestant in a largely Catholic community, even if his suspicion of his neighbours seems informed as much by his own psychological difficulties as by any cultural preconditioning. This apparent exposure of Protestant prejudice was too much for some, including the poet John Hewitt, who reportedly described Leitch as having “letting the side down.”

“Well, I’ve been doing that ever since,” Maurice laughed when I reminded him of Hewitt’s assertion. “It’s part of the fun of writing and I couldn’t see it any other way, really. I wasn’t going to put a gloss on things. As I always used to say, I’m not working for the Northern Ireland Tourist Board. In any case, your own tribe’s never really satisfied. They’re waiting for the book that makes them look wonderful and I could never see it like that.”

Leitch moved to London in 1970, leaving behind a failed first marriage, and taking up a new radio production role there with the BBC, before eventually securing his dream job in charge of “A Book At Bedtime” on Radio Four. He adapted easily to life in his adopted city, becoming fast friends with another Northern Irish writer, Ian Cochrane from Cullybackey. Cochrane had been living in London for a decade, but his writing career was only now taking off, with short stories published by Faber and Penguin, and a debut novel, A Streak of Madness, about to be released. With his easy charisma and distinctive appearance – all but blind, standing five foot nothing in his cowboy boots and velvet cape – Cochrane was already at the centre of numerous social and literary circles. “Everybody seemed drawn to him,” marvelled Leitch. “I came from the same background, but I was sort of in awe, watching him in action, and how people were bowled over by him. Whereas I still had a sort of old Presbyterian residue of restraint.”

Leaving Northern Ireland as the Troubles took hold, Leitch had hoped to find the necessary distance to write about his homeland with greater inhibition, and his novel Silver’s City (1981) did exactly that, tackling the Troubles head-on. Perhaps his best-known work, it won him the Whitbread Prize and certainly appeared to vindicate his move. “Being able to stand back and see the bigger picture,” he believed, “is probably where Silver’s City came from, because I don’t think I could have written that book if I’d stayed in Belfast. You have to be outside the actual scene of conflict to look at it properly.”

Leitch’s work tends to contain a comic dimension never too far from the surface, but Silver’s City is a much tougher affair, in illustration of the hopelessness of the times and the brutality of the Loyalist paramilitary underworld it unflinchingly portrays. What accounts in part for the bleakness of the book – and makes it so convincing as a document of the Troubles – is that it seeks to provide no explanation for the roots of the violence, or any hint of an eventual solution. As Leitch said of his approach, “It’s present tense. It’s just unfolding in front of your eyes. There’s no looking back at a reason for it; it’s just putting it down in black and white.”

Subsequent novels all met with respectable levels of commercial success and critical praise, but lacked the lasting impact of his earlier books. Among his later works, Leitch particularly enjoyed writing Gilchrist (1994), which took as its hero an unhinged Northern Irish preacher on the run in Spain with the church funds, giving Leitch the chance to explore some of his favourite themes – evangelical Protestantism, moral depravity, mental instability – and Spain itself. “My wife and I had been spending a lot of time there, and it made a big impression on me, so I was using that as a background,” he explained. As a setting, Spain – colourful, bright, sunny and warm – clearly functioned as a kind of polar opposite to Northern Ireland. “That’s right,” chuckled Leitch, “and in the middle of that there’s a chilly northerner, looking around with eyes wide open.”

On the question of religion, I asked Leitch what precisely Northern Irish Protestantism meant to him, as a self-described “Protestant atheist”. He told me that he had always felt an attachment to his “tribe,” and more so with age and distance. “I think in the early days I probably was a harsh critic of the background, and especially the hard-bitten, non-conformist Presbyterian naysayers.” He later came to feel increasing empathy with the Unionist community, if not always with their political representatives. “I keep on saying, why will you not learn? Every time you just make the same mistakes over and over. But that’s part of the Protestant temperament, a sort of fiery, almost suicidal thing. We’re always acting without thinking, jumping the gun... We give the impression of the bluff Ulsterman, but underneath there’s this seething mass of insecurity.”

His last novel Gone to Earth is also set in Spain, in the aftermath of civil war

And of course it was precisely this “seething mass of insecurity” that fascinated Leitch and drove his writing, providing him with rich source material for the psychological character studies at the heart of all his narratives. He revelled in the challenging complexity of the northern Protestant experience, and in what he described as the “frenzied and creative” Protestant psyche, in opposition to all-too-common preconceptions of a dour, monolithic culture. For his work, Leitch drew gratefully on the curious combinations of self-sufficiency and self-doubt, modesty and righteousness, emotional containment and boundless yearning he recognised in the people he continued to think of as his own.

His last novel Gone to Earth (2019) is also set in Spain, in the aftermath of civil war, where enmity still cuts deep, with clear parallels to post-Troubles Northern Ireland – although Leitch characteristically dismissed this extrapolation as “too much of a jump.” The book garnered a few positive notices, but little sustained attention. Other infrequent mentions in the press still meant a lot, such as Glenn Patterson’s inclusion of Silver’s City in an Irish Times piece on forgotten Irish classics in 2021: “I was thrilled, especially coming from Glenn. I didn’t know he liked my work, so that was special.”

My final meeting with Leitch was in November last year, at the launch of a new collection of Ian Cochrane’s short stories

Generally though, at this stage in his life, Leitch philosophically concluded that any relative lack of recognition over the years had in fact been beneficial, shielding him from what he perceived as the often vicious in-fighting of the writing community. “I never really felt like a literary person in any case,” he assured me. “So I liked being outside the surrounding walls, not belonging to the clique, not being in the piranha-infested waters.”

My final meeting with Leitch was in November last year, at the launch of a new collection of Ian Cochrane’s short stories. Leitch had written an introduction to the book – his last published piece – warmly and vividly recalling their friendship. At the event, he spoke of Cochrane as a rare talent, emerging from nowhere and bringing his Ulster background to life on the page with a natural flair that deserved to be remembered – words, of course, which could just as easily be applied to Leitch himself.

Thankfully, Ian Cochrane’s work, largely forgotten for decades, has undergone something of a mini-revival in recent times, with a number of long-overdue reissues sparking renewed interest and reassessment. It can only be hoped that Leitch’s writing, too, will remain visible in years to come, for the many precious insights it has to offer, both local and universal.