MOLLY McCLOSKEY is, it seems, a rarity among Irish-based American writers. Despite taking a degree in English literature in the States she didn t immerse herself in the works of Joyce, Beckett and Wilde before relocating to the land and birthplace of such literary giants.
I had read some Yeats and some Brendan Behan but I wouldn t have been all that well read on Irish literature, she admits. I m much more interested in contemporary Irish writers like Mary Morrissey and Ciaran Folen, as well as American writers such as Edmund White, Rick Moody, Alice Munro and John Updike. And the Russian novelist, Nabokov, is a particular hero of mine.
Nor does she draw inspiration from the rich landscape and heritage etc. of her adopted homeland. Though she s lived in Sligo since 1989, McCloskey s debut collection of short stories, Solomon s Seal displays little, if any, Irish influence. Instead it focuses on the fragility and mundanity of family relationships, set against an American backdrop.
The predominant theme throughout the sixteen stories is loss; through death, divorce, time and distance, while the writing style is spare, physical and tautly observational, rather than descriptive. It s also occasionally unsettling with McCloskey skilfully compacting entire lives into a few pages, underlining the ephemeral nature of existence. However, despite the placelessness of her work, as she describes it, McCloskey says that coming to Ireland was the main catalyst in launching her writing career.
Since I was ten I ve wanted to be a writer but I didn t know how to start, she begins. Coming here brought language so much more into focus for me. I was speaking the same language, yet speaking it so differently. There seems to be several layers in the use of language over here. It s a complex approach to what s been said and how it s been interpreted. In America everything is more upfront.
The anonymity of being far from home was, she says, equally vital to her early attempts at writing. I thought well I can always leave next week so I m not afraid of showing my work to anyone. Also, when you re writing about a place you re coming from and going back once a year, everything comes into sharp relief of the kind you don t have when you re there day in day out. Every time I seemed to go back, I came away with sharper impressions. Things change, or you ve changed and everything coalesces.
HUMAN SCALE
Born in Philadelphia in 1964 McCloskey spent much of her childhood moving around from city to city, living in North Carolina, Washington, Oregon and New Jersey.
We were a typical middle class American family with the usual problems, she relates. We grew up in fairly wealthy suburbs, with kids driving around in BMW s. My father was a basketball coach and he kept getting hired and fired. We followed him around and he eventually reached the top of his profession with The Detroit Pistons. He was in the newspapers sometimes and we had to put up with a certain amount of abuse when his team wasn t doing too well! My parents eventually split up and my mother made a home for us in New Jersey, which is where I call home now.
The youngest of eight children she sought solitude in books and writing when still quite young. I started writing journals when I was ten, she recalls. They were not so much what happened day to day, as in a diary, but one s responses to what happened, which can be quite an interesting record. Often you find something you were grappling with yesterday and discover that you ve been grappling with it for ten years.
After graduation, McCloskey applied for a full time job in a newspaper but decided that if she wasn t successful she would go to Ireland and travel around for while. Thankfully, I didn t get it, she smiles. I d planned to stay a couple of months but one thing led to another and I stayed.
I think the first impressions have remained constant, she adds. I was drawn to the human scale of the country. I was a stranger but I didn t feel loneliness. When I go away, I miss the darkness and the subtlety, which are two elements that can be absent in America. By darkness, I mean the depth and romantic nature of the psyche here.
She wrote a short story and submitted it to Force 10, a Sligo-based arts magazine, where it was published. She went on to win the RTE/Francis MacManus Award in 1995 and has worked as a freelance journalist, mainly for the Sunday Tribune. But her first love is fiction and it is through the medium of the short story that she has found her first critical success.
It s a natural first option for a new writer, she opines. It s far less daunting to fail over ten pages then over three hundred pages. I find that if it s there, it tends to come quickly and immediately. The stories seem to let you know whether it s going well or not. I like the crystallization of something rather than the fleshing out. With a novel you re second guessing yourself all the time. Although as a reader, I prefer the novel.
Written mainly in the first person, the observation and detail contained within the stories in Solomon s Seal is at times so precisely formed that they come across as autobiographical. McCloskey however disputes that assumption on the part of the reader.
Some of it certainly is, she acknowledges. It might be a line or something that s been said over dinner, or a character or someone I knew. But the question of whether something is autobiographical or not isn t all that relevant because if I m presenting it as a piece of fiction and you re able to read and appreciate it as fiction, that s all that matters.
As a reader I like reading in the first person and I don t always connect it with being autobiographical. A writer can assume a persona for the purposes of the story it s much more immediate and intimate. Also, when writing you only have to put yourself in the mind of one person rather than several characters.
LOVE STORY
The title story in Solomon s Seal and the one that has aroused most debate concerns an ill-fated love affair between a nineteen year old girl and her widowed stepfather.
It s one of the stories that isn t at all autobiographical, she stresses. Most of the idea for it came from a film with a similar plotline. In the film they don t actually make love but it becomes an issue as to whether they will or not.
I think of it as a love story. There are a lot of psychological misgivings and emotional entanglements built up over the years. But on the other hand they are two consenting adults who aren t related by blood.
What has been the response to the story?
All but one of the reactions to it have been quite positive, mostly I think due to the fact that there doesn t seem to be any blame attached to each of the characters. There is a lot of love there. It was just how it was going to be manifested. They tried it one way and it didn t work out.
Given the bleakness of the themes and the generally dark backdrop of the stories, there doesn t appear to be much humour in her work. Is she an intense, melancholy individual?
I m quite a social person actually, but it s very difficult to do humour and maintain a level of seriousness, to blend pathos and humour with intelligence. Generally I find that if I go down a lighter path, my work tends to get weaker.
But for all the loss involved, she concludes. I don t find the stories depressing at all. There is a very strong attachment between the characters. There would be no sense of loss if there wasn t that love. I find that reassuring. n
Solomon s Seal by Molly McCloskey is published by Phoenix House