BUILDING ON REALITY

ALL BOOKS are fiction. Memory is unreliable. Imagination begins with our first lie. It is from this trinity of roughly hewn planks that Dermot Healy constructs the framework for his memoir, The Bend For Home, acclaimed by many as one of the most impressive Irish literary works of last year.
Language is always an illusion, Healy argues, whether it s journalism or whether it s fiction. The way you construct sentences, the way you choose one word rather than another, all that changes what you thought you were looking at when you started to write about it.
When I was young and started to be interested in writing, I remember sitting down and trying to describe on paper the sound of rain. I preferred my writing about to the rain itself. Almost. It s an exaggeration in itself to say that I did. But once you got something right on the page, you were happy with it, even though you had stolen it.
The opening section of The Bend For Home is an account of Healy s childhood in the Westmeath village of Finea. Exaggeration, lies, myths and unreliable recollections form a grout that edged the flat, square contours of his story as excavated from the diary he kept during his early adolescence. Throughout The Bend For Home, he tells us that he can t really tell the difference between fact and figment, and makes it clear that he prefers things that way.
For language to be memorable, Healy observes, it dispenses with accuracy. As an illustration, he quotes the lyrics of Come Back Paddy Reilly To Ballyjamesduff , penned by Percy French, a road engineer by profession. The song, a perennial favourite in the locality, includes the line Just turn to the left at the bridge of Finea/And stop when halfway to Cootehill .
However, as Healy gleefully points out, you cannot turn to the left at the bridge of Finea there s nothing there but a dead end. Even road engineers, he concludes, are capable of giving wrong directions in order to get a couplet true.
Healy s father was a founder member of the Garda Siochana. After Finea, he was stationed in Cavan town, where Dermot s mother and his redoubtable Auntie Maisie set up what was to become a thriving cafi and bakery. Meanwhile, Dermot s own mind turned to matters of the groin. While seeing little or no real live action, he could nevertheless sense and smell sex everywhere, even in Cavan cathedral during morning Lenten mass.
Especially there, he laughs. When you re 14 or 15, you re going to be smelling it even when it s not there, but I m sure it was there and has been there down through all of the centuries. Now, looking back, I remember how provoking many things were. The Lenten mass always stuck in my mind. Everyone was stiff with the cold and they were all going to lead good lives. But you could sense something else in the church, too, and I always defined it as sex in some shape or form.
One of the most intriguing aspects of The Bend For Home is the equanimity with which Healy recalls the casual sex abuse of altar boys and students by priests and Christian Brothers during this era (the early 1960s). For the most part, Healy s experience was of clerical groping and fumbled molestations rather than outright rape, but such incidents were so ineptly executed and so commonplace that they were simply shrugged off by Dermot and his friends.
The way it s written about in the book I m not looking on it, then or now, as abuse, he insists. Being true to the way I felt at the time, I m showing the guiltlessness of it; no-one felt guilty or particularly harmed by it. You just went with it, went with the flow. Everyone knew about it and you d make jokes about it.
Somebody has to have gotten hurt by it, and I m sure some lads did get hurt, even if it was only that they felt their privacy was interfered with. But most of us were guilt-free about the abuse. There was another area which affected us more deeply at the time and that was the violence that used to happen. That was the thing then that was more awful, getting beaten up, by everyone from priests to guards.
Now, in the absence of that violence, the sexual business has probably gotten worse, more vicious. Because the violence has stopped, the sexual interference has become more violent. And not just among priests. In that sense, we were very lucky. We could run for cover. There was no shame in being felt up by a priest because it was happening to all the lads.
It would be nice to think that you don t have to enter trauma just because someone stroked your bottom when you were 13. There should be an easier way of getting over it. Stroke his bottom back!
Later this year, Dermot Healy will turn 50. He has never been regarded as a prolific author; there was, for instance, a nine-year pause between the publication of his first novel, Fighting With Shadows, in 1984, and his second, A Goat s Song, in 1993. In recent years, however, he has become extremely productive, generating a book of poems, three plays and The Bend For Home all within a very short period.
Writing the memoir led me in all sorts of directions that helped me write other work, he explains. My mother died three years ago and it was with her in mind that I started the memoir. I d been stealing from the mother s stories for so long, her stories of the father. I was using them in fiction and I thought that, now that she was dead and gone, maybe I should draw attention to who she was, rather than always continually stealing her autobiography. I wrote fiction that could have been written by her but when I started to write about her it helped me write fiction as well. At first, I worried that it might be too parochial, but I quickly became more comfortable. I realised that what I was doing had as much, if not more, relevance than me hiding behind a fictional, international voice.
On a practical level, Healy says that his recent induction into Aosdana has been a major help to his creative life, and has freed him from having to hold down a day job in order to keep body and soul together. A migrant labourer for much of the past 30 years, Healy has toiled on building sites in London, Belfast and beyond, and sailed several of the seven seas on trawlers and fishing skiffs. Today, he lives on the Sligo coast and concentrates on his writing.
Working on building sites is good meditation, he asserts. It s good to be physically active. I ve been trying to build an extension onto the house in Sligo for the last few weeks, and I found that more rewarding than writing. It s tough on the old body but you have plenty of time to think when you re moving around rocks and stones. When you re sitting in front of the computer, you don do any physical work and you can find yourself drying up.
I forgot all about Cavan when I went away. It wasn t until I started writing the memoir that it came back to me. I live in a small cottage over in Sligo, beside the sea. For about a year there, I was back in Cavan every day in my mind. I d be going back into specific shops or the bakery. I d step out for a minute and look at the sea, but I wouldn t see the sea; I d see Main Street, Cavan. It was a strange experience to relive all that, accurately and inaccurately.
I d walk along the street mentally at night. Go by each door and try and remember who lived there, and they d be in the book the next day. You d be amazed to find what you have retained when you go looking for it. Starting out, it s a blank, but it comes back eventually. It s the same process with fiction.
Having spent more than his fair share of years painstakingly researching the inspirational potential of drink and drugs, Dermot Healy finally believes that he has discovered the secret of good writing: hard graft.
I m sure that drinking and all the rest of it has been both a help and a hindrance, he avers. But, as a writer now, I don t drink at all when I m working. I like to use drink as a dessert, something for when you ve finished work at 6 o clock and you ve made the dinner. I can have a couple of pints and then back to the house and have a glass of wine with dinner. It s a kind of a present to yourself. But I don t like when it goes on longer now. I tend to go to bed very early, about 9 o clock. I want to be fresh for the next day s work.
If you don t work every day, you lose the threads. The only thing that taps into anything is stringing sentences together. You need so much sleep to be able to work during the day. I enjoy writing more now. I keep it simple rather than for going for the denseness I liked when I was younger.
People train to be able to run. You have to keep working at the typewriter all the time to keep the story going, even when the story s not going. You need to be there and to know how to self-edit. If you do a little bit of work now and a little bit of work then, you won t be able to get rid of the bad stuff. If you re at it every day, you ll edit the stuff that you did the day before and you re leaving something there for yourself to link up with the next bit that s going to work. If you have a lot of gaps, you won t be able to do the self-criticism that s necessary.
Will Dermot Healy write another memoir, taking the story up to the present day?
Yeah, I might, he chuckles. I ll have to call it Around The Bend. n
The Bend For Home is published by Harvill Press at #16.99p