Notes from a library bar

Sipping neat Jameson in the upstairs Library Bar of Dublin’s Central Hotel, writer Philip Ó Ceallaigh seems to be in pretty good form for a guy who’s just lost out on 35 grand.

The 38-year-old Irishman had travelled from his home in Bucharest to attend this year’s International Short Story Festival in Cork, where his recently published collection of short stories Notes From A Turkish Whorehouse had been shortlisted for the prestigious Frank O’Connor Award.
Four days before this interview, the award – the literary world’s richest short story prize – went to Japanese writer Haruki Murakami instead. But Ó Ceallaigh claims not to be bothered. He’s had a nice catch-up trip to family and friends in his native Waterford, given his first-ever public readings in Cork, and has a Hot Press interview to do before returning to Romania in the morning. So no complaints, all told.
“Nah, I wasn’t really disappointed,” he smiles. “I would’ve liked to have won it, sure. But I’m not hungry for that kind of acclaim. I was years ago. When I was shortlisted for the Hennessy, I really felt, ‘Oh, I have to get it!’ I needed that kind of pat on the back, and it was great to win it. But this time round, I was just delighted to be there.
“You know, a few years ago if you’d told me that I’d be on a shortlist with Haruki Murakami, I wouldn’t have believed you. I didn’t even expect to be in the position where I’d be making a living out of being a writer at this point. Long may it last!”
As it happens, Notes From A Turkish Whorehouse has already been validated elsewhere. His book won this year’s Rooney Prize and has just been nominated for the 2006 Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award.
However, it takes a while for Ó Ceallaigh to tell me this. Likeable and relaxed, he’s no self-publicist. Speaking so softly that I have to keep moving my tape recorder closer, he seems new to the interview process. He’s not hostile, but seems genuinely bemused by certain innocuous questions. “Why do you want to know that?” he asks with a furrowed brow, more than once.
The biographical information is slow in coming. Eventually he reveals that his father’s from Dublin and his mother’s from Newry, but he grew up in the Waterford countryside. His father worked for a US multinational, and provided a comfortably middle class lifestyle for Philip and his three siblings.
He attended Newtown Secondary School. “I was kind of solitary,” he recalls. “I’d spend a lot of time on my own, reading books. I didn’t integrate very well.”
What kind of books were you reading?
“Mostly science fiction writers – like Harry Harrison and Robert Silverberg. I read an awful lot of SF growing up. I was just a magpie, I’d read anything. When I started writing myself I became a lot more attentive to how things were written.”
A heavier and more literary phase followed SF. “Chekhov and the Russian writers I really loved. Just for their intensity. A real attempt through writing to uncover the truth about life. A pretty tall order sometimes, but there’s that pure intention there. There’s an attempt to discover the meaning of life. Look at Dostoevsky. Chekhov very, very quietly does the same thing. They’re not interested in cheap drama. There’s a basic realism to the writing.”
In his late teens, he discovered the booze-soaked work of Charles Bukowski. “That was a real revelation, to produce such an effect through such simple language. And it’s the kind of writing almost anyone can read. He’s obviously a tremendously funny writer.”
Other early influences included Knut Hamsun, John Fante, William Burroughs and the Beats. “When I was 21, in the States, I went and sat on Jack Kerouac’s grave,” he laughs. “I didn’t know where he was buried, but then I saw a picture of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg at his grave and the caption said Lowell, Massachusetts. I was already in Boston, so I took a train and next day I was sitting at Kerouac’s grave reading poetry. Ha, ha!”
More than a little inspired by On The Road, no sooner had Ó Ceallaigh completed his philosophy degree in UCD than he’d set off on his own travels.
While he now speaks six languages fairly fluently, he puts it down to necessity rather than linguistic talent. His passport is extremely well stamped. A couple of years teaching English in Spain became a springboard for various reconnaissance missions around Europe. He travelled to Russia, spending almost a year in St. Petersburg before heading to the US. He worked at a variety of casual jobs on both coasts (“I did a lot of construction work and was a truck driver for a while”), before returning to live in Ireland in the mid-90’s.
“I had a vague plan to write, but not in any careerist way,” he shrugs.
He wrote his earliest stories during sojourns in Waterford, Dublin and Galway. While he junked much of what he produced, some reworked versions of his earlier stories appear in Turkish Whorehouse.
“I used to write in the Rathmines public library,” he recalls. “I was on the dole and living in a bedsit down the road. It was too cold to write at home. I had one of those meters that you had to put 50p into. So I’d go down the library every morning and after lunch to scribble stuff in longhand in the study room there.
“Basically, I went from crap job to crap job. I did a string of them in the States and then when I got back, while I was writing in the library, I got a job as a waiter in Rathmines. I was fired from that.”
Were you a lousy waiter?
“No, I was a great waiter!” he cries, indignantly. “I called the boss a ‘fucker’ one day – not to his face, but it got back to him – so that was the end.”
When times got particularly hard, he volunteered for clinical trials. “It wasn’t that bad,” he smiles. “Morphine sulphate is pretty dependable.”
In 2000, he relocated to Romania, where he taught English again. He also worked in a variety of lowly media jobs – editing an expat newspaper and doing some freelance journalism. He got enough money together to purchase a one-room apartment in Bucharest. With accommodation in a cheap city, Ó Ceallaigh was able to devote himself more or less full-time to creative writing.
“I went there because I knew I could live very cheaply,” he says. “I bought a one-room apartment for $5,500. You wouldn’t get it now. It meant that all I had to think about was getting enough money for food. I wrote almost all of the stories there. The ones that I’d already written, I seriously rewrote. Even if I wasn’t going to succeed, or even if I wasn’t gonna produce anything remarkable, I decided writing was more important to me than anything else. So I wanted time to concentrate on that.”
He also caught up on his reading in Bucharest. Although there’s a very obvious Hemingway influence in his stories, he says he didn’t discover Papa’s writing until he was well into his 30s.
“It was only a few years ago that I read Hemingway’s first book of short stories, In Our Time. That changed my approach. Bukowski was my first big influence. But Hemingway, as a stylist, really knew how to pare back the writing. There was a certain simplicity in the language. I don’t think he was a simple writer. He could write very strange and very long sentences, but he constructed them out of very simple bricks. He avoided abstraction and adjectives. So he was a big influence.”
None of the 19 stories collected in Turkish Whorehouse are set in Ireland. Two are set in America, but most are based in Eastern Europe amid the crumbling concrete apartment complexes, seedy bars and brothels, and miserably corrupt social frameworks of the post-communist bloc.
There are no heroes in Ó Ceallaigh’s fictional world, only not-so-beautiful losers. The book is worth buying for the title story alone – a seedy tale of dirty rooms, broken ATMs and thieving prostitutes. The five-page opening story ‘Taxi’ sets the tone. A mouthy cab driver regales his passenger with lurid tales of his sexual adventures and infidelities, only to realise that they’re en-route to (maybe) pick up his charge’s unfaithful girlfriend.
Echoing Dahl, ‘The Beast’ is a twist-in-the-tale story about two old men falling out over the ownership of a trapped rodent. ‘My Life As An Artist’ is set in the world of the US construction industry and, given that its narrator is addressed as ‘Felipe’ by his Mexican co-workers, is presumably autobiographical.
“That one’s pretty much autobiographical,” he admits. “I wasn’t even trying to write a story with that one. I was just putting down bits and pieces of things I remembered from that time. And for some reason, it worked as a story. I didn’t have to invent anything.”
You don’t look like you’ve lived – or worked – too hard, though.
“No, the last couple of years have been nice,” he concedes. “I don’t have to get up early in the morning, I sleep when I want, take holidays when I want. No complaints about my lifestyle these days at all.”
Women get a pretty rough ride in almost all of your stories. . .
“That’s one way to put it. Ha, ha!”
Have you been in a lot of relationships?
“When you get to my age, you’ve been in a lot of relationships!” he laughs. “I do have a girlfriend, though. We’re only together a few months, but I’ve known her a few years.”
Are you part of an artistic community in Bucharest?
“I don’t hang out with writers or poets, if that’s what you mean. And I’ve always avoided that kind of thing. When I was in Ireland, I never sought the company of aspiring writers. But I just signed a contract for the Romanian edition of the book last weekend, so that should be out around Christmas”
There’s a lot of hard drinking in his stories (mainly bad vodka).
“Sometimes I drink and sometimes I don’t, but I’m not an alcoholic. I like drinking. I’m in the kind of job where I can sleep on if I need to. When I was working in a regular job, I didn’t drink very much. Now, I drink every day, but I don’t get shit-faced every day.
“As for other stuff, I don’t like marijuana. I used to smoke hash at the weekends and stuff. I don’t really like it, though. It makes me twitchy and jumpy. If I was drunk already, I might smoke it and like it. I don’t enjoy the kinds of conversations people have when they’re stoned. It’s great for listening to music, though. That’s one thing I enjoy when I’m stoned.”
It took him five years to put the book together. Published by Penguin Ireland, the first edition has now almost completely sold out. However, not everyone is a fan of Ó Ceallaigh’s dirty realism.
“Some people have been offended,” he shrugs. “I had one bad review in the Irish Times, and one of the panelists on The View had a very visceral reaction. I can’t remember her name. I just remember her saying that she felt ‘physically nauseated’ by it and she found it repellent.
“But you can’t write for everybody. I didn’t expect a uniformly good reaction. It doesn’t upset me. It’s something you should accept in advance. My hope was that the book would appeal to a few people who’d enjoy it – and it has. Firstly you’re doing it for yourself and if you connect with some people that’s great.”
He has no plans to write a novel. He’s a short story writer, first and foremost, and comfortable with that.
“I think if you’ve got something to say,” he reflects, “and you can say it with less, that’s the way to go. Fortunately, this has done well enough that I could hand in another book of short stories and get it published.
“I actually wrote a novel before this book came out. I got my advance at the beginning of last year, and I felt that before I spent it I should have a decent stab at writing a novel so I could keep the momentum going. And I wrote something, but it didn’t work. I reduced it from 50,000 words to 15,000. It’s gone from a bad short novel to a good long story. So why fight it?”
Having lived there for five years, Ó Ceallaigh is still in the midst of a love/hate relationship with Romania.
“Bucharest is very annoying to live in,” he laughs. “It’s not a pleasant city, as you probably picked up from the book. But it’s changing fast. I don’t think I’m a city person anyway. It annoys the hell out of me. I don’t even like going out on the street. I try not to go out in the day. I go out in the evening when it dies down a little. It’s pretty hectic. But for me, at this point, it’s home in a way. I kind of have a perverted affection for the place.”
And when can readers expect the next book?
“I wouldn’t like to predict. This one came together over a very long time and I had the luxury of throwing a lot of stuff out from the first years and being able to come back to some stuff and make it work. So I’m not rushing the next one. I don’t want to become the kind of writer who’s putting out a book every two years. Money is not my primary concern. I’ve been broke before and I’ll do it again.”