Many years ago I spent a week at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annaghmakerrig, near the wonderfully named town of Newbliss, County Monaghan. The centre, which describes itself as “a residential facility for creative artists”, is housed in a large old mansion bequeathed to the state by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, a mid-20th century theater impresario. It stands on an eminence above a wooded lake, in a situation of great beauty and serenity.
I was assigned the attic roomwhich offers what must surely be the best view in the whole house: a vast sky, still water, still trees, a flock of Yeatsian swans. My desk faced the window. The first morning, I laid out my writing materials, my dictionary, my old pocket watch which accompanies me everywhere. Everything is ready, ready to go. I waited. No words came. Of course, I knew what it was: the view, its unbearable beauty. With great effort, I turned the desk to face a white wall. Now I could work.
Some people can write anywhere – a novelist I know can write on a transatlantic plane. Not me, unfortunately. I need silence, my empty wall, the happy nothingness that even the ticking of a venerable watch cannot penetrate or disturb.
Over the years, I have had to deal with many inconveniences. I remember with a pang of a vestige of discomfort from what I thought was a ship’s captain’s scarred and rickety desk, complete with an incredibly creaky swivel chair, in which I liked to imagine that the Old salt sat while tracing his way back and forth across the big bridge. . We had a baby and a Labrador puppy at the time. Often I had to take care of both of them, the dog who gnawed at my right ankle and the child who reached through the bars of his playpen to grab me by the soft part of my left calf and laughed.
Somehow I managed to write a book.
Then there was the little attic room, a maid’s roomI imagine, above the garage of a rented house on La Vista Avenue, not a part of the tawny California coast, as the name suggests, but in an Irish seaside suburb. Mind you, there were palm trees whose survival, amid the mists and winds of an Irish winter, filled me with respectful admiration.
And then there were the four months I attended the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, a long time ago. I arrived at the end of August to temperatures above 40°C all day and into the middle of the night, where my brain felt like it was frying. However, autumn – what a beautiful word for autumn – was cool and bright, and I could finally work.
If I can call it work. I wrote a short story, in a beautiful cloth-bound notebook, that the day after I got home, I slipped into the wood stove in our kitchen and looked through the little smoke-filled window , with vindictive satisfaction, the covers become distorted. and the pages writhed in agony and slowly collapsed into ashes. Why did I destroy the product of four months of hard work? Because it wasn’t real; because it was written elsewhere, out of time, out of place.
But finally, in recent years, I have landed, like my imaginary old sea dog, in Howth, a fishing village located 10 miles north of Dublin city. This room in this house above the port will be my last writing place.
Not long ago, someone I love found a beautiful second-hand table for me somewhere, which has definitely become My Desk. Compared to the cramped surfaces I was working on, it is wonderfully wide and deep – I consider it an expanse. Which does not mean that I I have expanded—no, I remain as cramped and tough as ever, scratching out the involuntary words: “my only loves, not many,” as one of Beckett’s chattering paupers says.
Over the years, a menagerie of inanimate creatures has accumulated around me; they remind me of the seven dwarves who, in the Disney film, gather to listen to Snow White sing her lilting song about a long-awaited prince. Among them are a pair of fierce Chinese dragons, a wooden mouse in a polka dot dress, a stone bird of indeterminate species, always alert, and another smaller, mustachioed mouse wielding a typewriter.
It’s hard to say what they think of me, although when I finish work for the day and they gather in droves, I feel like they’re pitying me. the poor slave to whom no prince will come. I suspect that people would say of me what Flaubert’s mother said of him, that I wasted my life in a mania for phrases. But ah, Gustave, such sentences.
“” by John BanvilleThe Drowned” is published by Faber (£18.99)
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