Verbal Magazine

Tightrope

While the muse of the Irish writer has often been in exile, most of them still wrote about home.

Of those who did turn their attention further afield, there are few that have written about life outside Ireland with the same success that Colum McCann has enjoyed. McCann, who teaches at Hunter College, New York alongside fellow novelists Peter Carey and Nathan Englander, has written five international bestsellers and been published in more than 30 languages to date. In 2009 he was awarded the National Book Award for his last novel, Let the Great World Spin. In 2003 he was named as one of Esquire magazine’s “Best and Brightest.” He has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award – among others. His story “Everything in this Country Must” was made into a short film directed by Gary McKendry and nominated for an Oscar in 2005.

In this context it seems almost churlish to ask him if he sees himself as an international writer, but he doesn’t seem to have too many qualms about that label.

“I’m becoming more and more wary of terms when we talk about nation and nationhood.  It’s the age-old question: “What is my nation?” I don’t want to sound like a prat and say, Look at me, I’m so international.  There’s too much of the potential poseur in there, and I’m too old to be a poseur anymore.  But my writing is possibly trans-national. I write about what I want to know about.  And sometimes that means just inhabiting a whole new space.  I love when John Berger talks about being a “patriot of elsewhere”.  That’s what I am, either a citizen of elsewhere or a patriot of elsewhere.  I am also very fond of the Michael Ondaatje/Salman Rushdie notion of being an international mongrel.  Belonging in a sort of vague but powerful everywhere.”

What strikes one as immediately interesting about his writing are the little hooks and devices McCann uses to craft Let The Great World Spin. One could be forgiven for misrepresenting the work as a collection of short stories, rather than a novel, such is the zig-zagging of events, characters and plot lines. He says that like many writers, he started with one image that wouldn’t go away: that of Philippe Petit, the tight rope walker who crossed the twin towers of The World Trade Centre in 1974.

“The image of the tightrope walker was stuck in my head for literally three or four years.  Then I got working on it and I began using the other little cogs behind the big idea, the devices and little ideas that become the engine of a story.”

While critics have referred to Let The Great World Spin, as with Joseph O Neill’s Neverland, as the great 9/11 novel, the book is actually set in the 1970s.
So why did McCann decide to address a turning point in history with a novel set in an earlier decade?

“Well, on one level it’s just because the tightrope walk happened in 1974.  And I’m interested in twinning, or using the double-helix of the real and the invented.  Where we were then, is where we are now.  All that we are is all that we have been.  The past sets up the present.  Then on another level, the 70s were just plain fun.  I mean, the hairstyles alone are worth a page.  And the music.  And the sideburns.  And, then, the very real grief and violence of the times makes it attractive from a novelist’s point of view.”

Although it seems obvious that this novel is an attempt to address 9/11, McCann seems shy of getting into any talk on politics; a little surprising perhaps, particularly given his background is in journalism, and also the fact that there are numerous references to the Vietnam War and Nixon throughout the book.

“There are two flows to the river - that above and that beneath.  The best writers get both flows, but they don’t necessarily know where the river is flowing.  While politics is everywhere, you can’t afford to be too conscious of it, or too acutely aware of what you want to say.  A writer cannot become a politician.  God forbid!  Good writers shouldn’t tell people how to think.  Rather, they should hope to “allow” people to think”, he explains.

Through the character of Corrigan, an Irish priest in Let The Great World Spin, McCann allows us into the seedy world of 1970’s New York that is simultaneously: depraved, demonstrative, violent and humorous. And while there may not be a great deal focusing on the life of the Irish emigrant in this novel - there certainly are glimpses - particularly one scene where Corrigan’s brother goes into an Irish bar to take a drink and notices the immigrants clinging dearly to their traditions and customs.
“So I listened to my countrymen and wrote notes. Theirs was a loneliness pasted upon loneliness. It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so that you can know where you come from. We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having never left.”

So is this passage a glimpse of his own early immigrant experience of America?

“I think my experience has been somewhat different to the experience of the character.  You have to remember, he left in the early 70s when leaving was really leaving.  You would go with the expectation that you might not return.  So often the Irish in particular would recreate their past country.  It was a form of nostalgia and loneliness and guilt all pasted together.  There were Irishmen who emigrated whose accents became thicker when they left.  To twist an old phrase, they became more Irish than the Irish themselves.  That generation is older now, and the experience of emigration doesn’t exist in the same way.  As for me, I think I was lucky enough to be allowed a middle ground - I struck out and took on different challenges, while hanging on to some of my Irishness.”

Even if he does deem himself an international writer, McCann may be forgiven by the begrudgers, especially given the passionate plea he gave to an Oireachtas committee in Dublin, back in November - where he argued with the Irish government on the proposed McCarthy cuts.

McCann hasn’t forgotten his initial bursary grant that made him believe in himself as a writer, even when he only had a few stories under his belt and adds that in times of economic decline, that the government should be encouraging the arts.

“I think the Arts Council, Culture Ireland and Film Ireland and all the other organisations that are in place are doing a heroic job.  Many of our politicians have recognised this.  But it has to keep going.  The arts is one of the places in which we seem to continually out-do ourselves, in the best possible way.”

Like many Irish writers you get a sense that he is hopeful that there will be some sort of cultural revolution with the death of the banking and boom culture of the last 15 years.

“We’ll come out of the failure that was the Celtic Tiger, with stories to tell.  The best stories will have some sort of failure at their core, some sort of anger, some sort of loss. I’m looking forward to reading a great novel about the past ten, 15 years.  Music, painting, theatre, film, too.  I think we’re on the cusp of a long and very fertile wave.”

McCann says that it’s through the power of literature, he believes, some sort of personal truth can be achieved within the human heart and mind.
“Faulkner said all writing was about the human heart in conflict with itself.  And he firmly believed in the power of literature and stories.  I don’t know if there is such a thing as universal truth, but there is certainly a personal truth that plays into the larger universal story, and I’m interested in pursuing whatever degree of it I can find.”

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