Denis Sampson on finding his own voice, that of William Trevor and other writers

Young John McGahern: Becoming a Novelist focuses on the apprenticeship and the breakthrough of the Irish novelist in the years before ‘The Barracks’ was published in 1963. My approach had less to do with the boy from Leitrim-Roscommon and the family difficulties he faced growing up than in “the artist as a young man”, in Dublin, in the fifties.

In the decade of his twenties, he embarked on a self-education through an intensive reading of literary classics and a study of the artistic life. It was then as a “solitary reader” that he discovered Proust and Flaubert, Beckett, Chekhov and Tolstoy, and discovered the significance for him of figures like Yeats and Shakespeare, known from schooldays. But in trying to define the stylistic breakthrough that would take him into his own artistic space, he also read letters, essays, and biographies of classic figures.

I wondered how he situated himself in relation to them and tried to trace his apprenticeship in a novel he wrote before The Barracks; the novel was accepted by a London publisher, but then he withdrew it. The typescript can be seen in the archive of his papers in Galway. In rejecting it, he took a major step forward towards discovering his artistic ambition and its appropriate style.

Literary biographers try to trace the many energies and ambitions that shape a writer’s identity, often painting big pictures, telling stories, and missing the intimate transformation in which the creative spark caught fire.

My new book, The Found Voice: Writers’ Beginnings, is a set of five short essays, and my concern is, once again, this period when the breakthrough book is written. My subjects are Alice Munro, VS Naipaul, William Trevor, Mavis Gallant and JM Coetzee, and in each case, I have chosen a work that became a foundation stone for the career that followed.

Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant are primarily writers of short fiction, both of them Canadian, although Gallant settled in Europe and in a long career had more than a hundred stories published in the New Yorker. Like Trevor, and unlike JM Coetzee and VS Naipaul, she lived in comparative obscurity, and yet much of her work is a meditation on very public matters, the origins and impact of the Nazi period in Europe, and the roles of women.

The reticent ones, Trevor, Munro and Gallant, are actually not so different from Coetzee and Naipaul in that all of them speak of the search for an authentic voice as the challenge they had to face, and the challenge for me was to discover what that might mean in each case: “a true voice”, “the writing voice”, “the voice in the mind”. Some of these major writers avoid any analytical commentary on their origins or provide a narrative of their development, and others share freely their sense of their artistic identity.

More than a decade before Young John McGahern, I had written a biography of the Irish-Canadian novelist Brian Moore, a chronological account of a life, in which I tried to isolate some of the energies and ambitions that drove him. I felt I had come close to Moore at work, but soon after completing The Chameleon Novelist, I discovered that this kind of biography would shed little light on the accomplishment of a writer like William Trevor. I wrote an essay on Trevor, Notes for an Unwritten Biography, in an effort to understand my failure to detect the vital connection between life and work in his case. And, of course, I realised the obvious, that each writer is unique, and that there is no template of the literary life. Finding evidence in personal statements, letters, archives of papers may accumulate enough detail to document the life, but I was interested in discovering how best to use such evidence.

The vital connection still intrigued me, and I persisted in believing that the breakthrough to discovering one’s signature style and to the foundation of the later career was something that might be illuminated. Young John McGahern taught me how to do this. And then I felt equipped to return to Trevor and to a variety of other prose writers whose careers I had followed with interest over many decades.

I let them speak for themselves as much as possible, but after the work was done, some similarities did emerge: migration and displacement, memory and the reimagining of the first home, self-consciousness about dialect or accent or the styles of other writers, the central place of writer-mentors and of key books as sources of inspiration.

“People like me write,” William Trevor remarked, “because otherwise we are pretty inarticulate.” Naipaul refers to his “first true book”, and he identifies it as the collection of stories, Miguel Street, much as Dubliners was in the case of Joyce. Alice Munro identifies the story, The Peace of Utrecht, as the pivotal story; she tells that it came out of her mother’s death and brought her closer than before to the “real life” she recognised as her material and to the “personal” style. Gallant speaks of finding a “true voice”, and Coetzee describes his apprenticeship as a search for the way to “speak one day in my own voice”. And so I called this book The Found Voice.

In the case of Trevor, who rarely offers commentary on his work, the pivotal novel, Mrs Eckdorf at O’Neill’s Hotel, represented a radical shift in his writing from social comedies of English life to experimental Irish writing. This novel is his first work of fiction with an Irish setting, the Dublin of his student years, almost two decades earlier, and the literary presence is Ulysses. Simultaneously with the writing of this novel, he wrote his first “Irish” story, The Ballroom of Romance.

Central new preoccupations of this “outsider” returning “home” are Irish Catholicism, Irish storytelling, and the fraught history of the Anglo-Irish, seen, especially, in the light of the Troubles. While he has said that his “English” fiction arose from a curiosity, a compelling desire to understand the foreign country he ended up living in, his return to Irish landscapes and literature (so that he insists he is an Irish writer) is greatly energised by his curiosity about the Ireland he did not know when he was growing up.

These short essays have an intensity that arises from years of immersion in the work of writers who captivated me, as well as in the work of John McGahern. I have wanted to discover a form and a style that absorbs the energies of scholarly discipline and yet allows the writer to grow through a vital process. They are not essays in literary criticism, although I trained myself in close reading, and I believe it is a crucial tool in this exploration, more crucial than the documentation of chronology or historical contexts.

As important, certainly, as the scholarly work I have been engaged in over the decade in which these essays grew, is another kind of writing. I was slowly, over a dozen years, searching for the voice in which to write a memoir. That memoir came to bear the title, A Migrant Heart.

It was something I had wanted to do for an even longer period, ever since I had become a migrant by settling in Canada, and yet that turned out to be simply the part that followed my childhood and youth in Ireland, for there was another part, the ways I returned, and I continue to be intimately connected to both places.

When I completed The Found Voice, just after A Migrant Heart, the surprise was how much, in my interpretations of them, these writers mirrored my own state. A Migrant Heart is also a memoir of how literature has shaped my life, how writers from my childhood on have played such a vital role in creating the person I have become, in helping me to find a voice.

The Found Voice: Writers’ Beginnings is published by OUP Oxford, at £25. A Migrant Heart is published by Linda Leith Publishing