INTERVIEW: Julia O'Faolain, who is back in print after a long absence, tells Fiona McCannabout her father Sean's hand in her writing and about the unwelcoming state of modern publishing
WHEN JULIA O’Faolain finally arrives into Dublin after five hours of confusion and delay at Gatwick Airport, she somehow manages to look like she’s just stepped out of a Parisian cafe: impeccably dressed, coiffed and with a wide, lipsticked smile, while all around her frazzled passengers stream past with sour faces and sweat stains.
O’Faolain, who reads this afternoon as part of the Dublin Writers Festival, is no stranger to travel, and manages to take it all in her stride. Except, perhaps, the loss of her umbrella, removed from this tiny, birdlike septuagenarian by security in Gatwick for fear, she tells me indignantly, that she might brandish it as a weapon on the aircraft.
It's been a long time since Irish readers have been treated to a new work of fiction by this novelist and short-story writer, who has just published Adam Gould, described in the press release as "her first novel in 17 years".
“This is actually not true,” she corrects me as she settles on a sofa in a tiny room in Dublin airport, kindly donated by the Dublin Airport Authority when they hear that O’Faolain, who has flown in especially for this face-to-face, is due to leave again in just over an hour. “I had a novel that came out in Italian . . . about 10 years ago, and nobody here was at all interested.” The novel in question had as its protagonist the former Italian Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti. “I think he’s a fascinating case, but by the time I got my novel finished and everything I was told that the young English-speaking world hadn’t heard about him and didn’t care about him, and communism was a dead duck,” she says. “Which I suppose was true.”
THEN THERE WEREthe short stories that she continued to pen in the intervening years, appearing in the New Yorker, and one in the Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories 2004. There are plenty more where they came from. "I have a collection of short stories that my agent would like to sell, but we'll see." Her opinion of the unpredictable world of publishing is thinly disguised as she speaks of the difficulties getting published, even as a Booker-prize shortlisted novelist, for the critically acclaimed No Country For Young Men.
"I'm having the same difficulty my father," she says of the problem of making it into print these days. "He's practically out of print." Time was when things were different. "My father, in the 1970s, was doing tremendously well because there was Playboy." An elegant eyebrow arches, gauging my reaction. Sean O'Faolain in Playboy? She nods, adding that Hugh Hefner was "a great patron of the arts for a while". She even attended a Playboyparty with her father, whom she consistently refers to by his first name, an appellation that underscores a friendship obvious from her anecdotes. "Sean and I sat at the table with VS Pritchett, who was an old friend, and Sean and VSP were looking at the other table, where the [ Playboy] Bunnies were." Looking, she assures me, is all that was allowed, however. "There was a Bunny Mother to chaperone them, and none of the men were allowed to go near."
Those days of Playboyparties and Hugh Hefner's patronage of the O'Faolains may be over, and the publishing world a less welcoming place – "it is part of the Americanisation of life," she says with obvious disapproval – yet O'Faolain is not giving up. Her latest novel, Adam Gould, described by Eve Patten in this newspaper as "a vivid and absorbing story, fast-paced and confident of its strong historical flavourings".
So how did it come about? “I was walking around one day in Passy, and I saw a plaque which said that [Guy de] Maupassant had died in this lunatic asylum,” she recalls. “It was a very prestigious, expensive, grand, private lunatic asylum to which anyone who had money would like to send their disturbed relatives, and Maupassant died there because he had GPI – general paralysis of the insane – due to syphilis.” It’s no coincidence that Maupassant, one of the fathers of the modern short story, should interest this writer, whose own father made such a mark on the genre. “I was fascinated because my father was very keen on Maupassant and so was Frank O’Connor and all the short story writers,” she says.
Adam Gouldwas the result, a book that is as much about the young, Irish ex-seminarian of the title, confused by the world of political intrigue and bodice-ripping passion in which he finds himself in France, as it is about Maupassant. As a young woman who grew up in Wicklow and went on to live all over the world – in France, Italy, the US and, finally, England – was there much of her own experiences of cultural dislocation in this character, who carries her own mother's maiden name? "I don't think it's so much me personally, because you know this is my 11th book of fiction – I've used up anything that there is of me." Yet setting a story in France was no coincidence, given that O'Faolain, whose love affair with the country began as a young teenager, when she was sent to live with a French family to learn the language, still spends much of her time there in an apartment she recently purchased.
IT WAS LOVE AFFAIRSand France that, in an indirect way, set her on the path to writing, when her father's discovery that his daughter had fallen in love with a Frenchman at a young age prompted drastic measures. "He was very displeased by the fact that I had a French lover who was a communist," she recalls. "It was my father who broke it up really. He said 'Come home and stay home for a year and don't let him come for a year, and test him'." She smiles at the parental wisdom. "Well, that broke it up. And I was rather fed up, and so my father said 'Well, why don't you do a bit of writing?' So in a sense he encouraged me, but it was just to get my mind off other things."
Writing, she assures me, did not come easily at first. "I don't think I had any particular ability," she says. "I remember writing poems and getting Patrick Kavanagh to look at them, and they were the most embarrassing rubbish." Yet she kept going, writing "longer things and longer things", until she published her first collection of short stories in 1968. More than 40 years on she has returned, with Adam Gould, to a theme that would have resonated with her father, who she once described as having "gradually, reluctantly" given up on God: namely the dangerous power plays between church and state.
In the case of Adam Gould, these take place in an increasingly secularised France, but its relevance to the Irish context is clear. It's not a new theme for O'Faolain: she has been open in the past about the price paid for what she called the Irish State's "readiness to toady to the Catholic Church". Nor do the Ryan report revelations come as any surprise to her: her father used to receive letters from people anxious to make the physical abuse of children in schools and institutions public.
O'FAOLAIN HAS LIVEDso long away from Ireland that she looks to me for information on the country she will never call home again. She also looks to literature for representations of modern Ireland, but tells me she has still to find it. "I think Claire Keegan writes very well," she says after some thought, "but she is writing about a rural Ireland. It could be my grandmother that she's writing about. It's not very modern."
She rises to leave, with her old-school diction and umbrella allegiances sitting gracefully alongside a keen curiosity in the current. And current writers such as Keegan clearly interest her as much as those, like Maupassant, who went before. “I don’t think [Keegan] has given an image of the new Ireland yet,” she says with some regret. “I’d like to see that.”
Julia O’Faolain reads today at 2pm at Project Arts Centre, Dublin, alongside Christine Dwyer Hickey and Claire Kilroy, as part of the Dublin Writers Festival.
Adam Gould
is published by Telegram