PARIS LETTER: Some day, I expect, there'll be a plaque on an unassuming building in Châtillon, just the other side of the périphérique ring road. "The Irish writers Harry Clifton and Deirdre Madden lived here, 1994 - ??" it will doubtless say, in French and English, writes Lara Marlowe.
Every morning, they segregate themselves in the small apartment. He works above the street; she in the back room on the courtyard.
It is only fitting, for Clifton's seventh volume of poetry, God in France, just published by Metre editions, is permeated with the sensations of Paris. It is merely one segment of a sequence of poetry notebooks, to be entitled The Lost Decade, covering Clifton's 10 years here. Madden has started her seventh novel.
Clifton is stimulated by metros and cafés and the sociology of the French capital. In White Russians, he sees "the goddess of history" in the foreign names on the mail boxes. His paternal great grandfather, Charles Doran, fled here after the failed Fenian uprising of 1867, an event Clifton interwove with present-day Paris in his third prose book, The End of Exile.
His poem "Bare Arm" describes that momentary intersection of lives when, late at night, strangers stare at each other from two lit windows. In another poem, Clifton evokes the 14th arrondissement, adjacent to their apartment: " the rue d'Alésia, outside in the rain/The millions of strange people/Whirled like atoms through the hub of Montparnasse".
Clifton and Madden lead individual lives in apparent harmony. "We live in completely different imaginative worlds," she says. They don't show each other works in progress or seek the other's advice. He is the talkative one; she produces more words on paper. "If you're writing a novel, you have to put in the hours; you must have a routine," she says. "In poetry, you work towards the intense instant," he replies. "You certainly cannot subordinate poetry to a routine."
Madden has difficulty remembering the dates of the literary awards she's won: the Somerset Maugham Prize for The Birds of the Innocent Wood in 1989, The Kerry Book of the Year Award for One By One in the Darkness in 1997. "I don't think about my own life a lot," she admits. Her personality and energy, one senses, are channelled into her characters.
Though she loves the contrast of living between Dublin and Paris, location is all but immaterial to Madden. "It's not so much the place as in 'the greater place', but the domestic place that matters," she says. "I'm here now and I'm writing. If I weren't happy or settled I couldn't write; you just get on with it."
Clifton and Madden left Ireland almost by chance at the end of the 1980s, when they were newly married. With her Somerset Maugham prize money and his Arts Council Bursary, they decided to live in Italy for one year, which stretched into three. Then they moved to Paris, keeping a base in Ireland. In recent years, Clifton has been a writer in residence at Trinity and UCD; Madden taught in the MA programme at the Oscar Wilde Centre at Trinity and was a judge for the IMPAC award.
Abandon the image of writers retreating to Ireland for peace and quiet.
"Paris for both of us represents work and privacy," Clifton says. "We're not here to be social and Irish. In Ireland, we constantly meet people, but it can become claustrophobic. Here, you're a face in a sea of faces. It's liberating. You have an anonymity that you don't have in your own country." Clifton quotes Patrick Kavanagh, who said that a city should also show you its cold side. "Kavanagh said Dublin pretends to be warm, but is actually cold. Paris doesn't give a damn whether you live or die. That indifference is an enabling quality."
Madden goes to museums or galleries at least twice a week. It's a way of breaking the isolation of writing, but it also inspires her. Had she not been so interested in art, she might not have made her last novel, Authenticity, an exploration of the place of artists in contemporary Irish society. During one of her frequent visits to the Louvre, Madden chose Nicolas Poussin's Portrait of the Artist for the book's cover.
The creative life appears seductive to people with salaried jobs, but Clifton rejects "the belief that you can have it both ways; that you can be a poet but lead a life that is materially indistinguishable from a solicitor's".
One has to choose, he says. "We have chosen austerity and a measure of freedom I do believe that art is a destiny and it's imposed on you. If you try to evade it, you'll suffer for it."
