For queens and country

Events in the USA led to the postponement of the printing of this interview, which took place before the bombings in NYC and Washington DC. It was my colleague Liam Mackey who wryly observed that critics who had remarked on the similarities of Jamie O’Neill’s writing style to that of Flann O’Brien – and the obvious homage to the latter writer in the title of O’Neill’s epic – now had another common factor to remark upon. O’Brien published At Swim Two Birds in 1939 and the advent of World War II effectively ensured that the book would enjoy little exposure or consequent success as that conflict effectively halted regular literary discourse ‘for the duration’. It is a reasonable supposition that O’Brien’s temperament ill-equipped him to deal with this hiatus. By the war’s end, his alcoholism had begun to overcome his creativity in a battle where drink would ultimately triumph over genius.

The same will not hold true for Jamie O’Neill. Despite the critical acclaim, the rumoured £1,000,000 advance from Scribner, the unprecedented publicity for a heavyweight novel and the added frisson that the author is a young, gay Irishman, O’Neill sits before me and hand rolls a cigarette with quiet confidence. His self-effacing manner and soft voice belie an inner strength and calm apparent as he carefully considers my questions.

Was he fascinated by writing, or reading, as a child?

“Anything but,” he replies. “I attended the secondary school that I describe in the book, but I wasn’t a very applied student. I was hopeless at studying and at the time of my Leaving Cert my parents were convinced that I would attend university. At this point I had never read a novel for pleasure, but I cleared out my room of every distraction, magazines, music and books in the vain hope that I might be forced to study out of boredom. I came across a copy of Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott and I left it there, I thought ‘I’m never going to read that’, of course that was the only thing I read in those two weeks.

“I was aware at this stage that I was gay, and I think that I was searching for some reference to myself and my life and feelings, as all kids growing up do, but when you’re gay, you don’t find that. There’s no connection with chosen texts or whatever. Once I remember a teacher mentioning in passing that some of Shakespeare’s sonnets were thought to have been written about a man, and I quite remember the dead, scarlet silence that greeted that remark, and the subsequent laughter, in which of course I joined my classmates. “Sexuality is such a central thing in your life, and if you’re not talking about that then confidence and means of expression are denied you. If you don’t get that from family and school or wherever than where do you get it from? I never learned to express myself in school, and it took me many years to gain that faculty.”

After a perhaps predictably disastrous Leaving Cert O’Neill left the family home, partly to avoid parental wrath, and travelled widely in Europe. Asked if he was equipped to deal with that situation at age 17 he quips: “Well, of course, I had been to Killarney once before”. He took casual work on building sites and the like and gradually gained an understanding of himself and his sexuality. Inspired, incredibly by the TV series Jason King, concerning a dandy Austin Powers-type writer who did a nifty line in murder-solving, he had now begun to write. “I just thought all writers lived in fabulous hotels and wore great clothes”, he smiles. “I suppose I was born for the big advance! (laughs).

On return trips to Ireland he discovered Dublin’s emerging gay scene:

“I remember nights in the Hirshveld centre where I would drink soft drinks and dance to loud music and meet boys who had travelled from Belfast and Derry and I experienced those tentative fumblings and that was a very happy time in my life. Funnily enough I could never imagine enjoying that experience now, but it definitely gave me a confidence and an acceptance of myself.”

By the mid 1980s O’Neill was living in London and had fallen in love with the BBC TV presenter and chat-show host Russel Harty. Upon Harty’s death in O’Neill was obliged to leave their home and suffered deep depression and lonliness for some years before coming to: “An arrangement with that loss, which required attention”. He published two books in this period that he now: “Can’t open”. He credits Harty with giving him both unconditional love and an education in both self-acceptance and the arts. He is however wary about discussing this period of his life, given the tabloid press’ spurious fascination with the relationship in the wake of the Scribner advance.

“I have no intention of selling this book by listing the people I’ve slept with,” he observes wearily. “But the idea that a younger man cannot love an older man and vice versa is a relatively modern notion.The Greek ideal was that you should learn from your elders, and again if you can’t learn from family there has to be some way of passing on a tradition. I learned to feel good about who I was. People should look for love, at the risk of sounding like a terrible sentimentalist love is really what we all search for, irrespective of sexuality.”

This love is beautifully and indeed graphically portrayed in At Swim Two Boys, a tale of two teenagers in 1915 whose burgeoning relationship is complicated, and then ultimately cemented, by both the arrival of an older Anglo-Irishman and the subsequent Easter rebellion. Although comparisons have been made to Joyce and the aforementioned Flann O’Brien in fact the prose is all O’Neill’s. The minutae of post-Victorian Dublin and its mores and morals is lovingly depicted, and both the love scenes and the battle scenes are exciting and affecting. But it might seem strange to some to juxtapose the story of a gay relationship against the background of militant republicanism.

“I always felt unsure when I was asked ‘Are you Irish?’, I would always answer ‘Well I’m gay’. The natural state of nationalism should be apathy, you shouldn’t have to care about your country. It should be just a given. This is one of the only countries where a question like ‘Are you a true Irishman?’ might be asked. If you’re gay, you can’t be a true Irishman in the minds of many, at least. Yet gradually I’ve come to an understanding of my own attitude to my Irishness, losing someone I loved encouraged me to ask questions of myself. Who am I? Why am I living in a foreign country? I wanted to write and research a book that would ask me that question, ‘Are you an Irishman?’ and I could answer, ‘Yes’.

He worked as a hospital night porter while writing this book. How has he handled the praise, and indeed the financial security, that At Swim Two Boys has given him?

(Laughs) “The only thing that’s different is that people tend to treat me like a real writer now, and creep by my study when I’m writing. It’s that ‘serious writer at work’ syndrome! In fact I’m usually playing video games. “Success is sitting at a typwriter in mid-sentence when you know where that sentence is going. Finishing the thing, that’s the success!”

At Swim Two Boys is available now published by Scribner