A recent TV documentary and a controversial review for his new novel have thrust Dermot Healy into the media spotlight. It is the endpoint of an 11-year effort to finish the book, writes KEITH DUGGAN
IT IS a squally, sleepy afternoon and Dermot Healy is the only person to be found walking in the village of Carney. He has offered to meet there and guide me back to his house which, he forewarns, is almost impossible to find unless you know where you are going. Healy bought the place pretty speedily more than 20 years ago after his friend, the artist Seán McSweeney, pointed him in the direction of the owner. A deal was struck at dusk.
“When I took Helen there to show it to her the next day, I couldn’t find it myself,” he laughs. “Not the best start.”
The Healy household featured prominently in The Writing In The Sky, a recent documentary about his enduring fascination with the barnacle geese from Greenland that relocate to this part of Sligo each autumn and whose presence stoked into life his long poem , A Fool's Errand.
The geese, in fact, might be inadvertently blamed for the slow fermentation of his new novel, Long Time, No See. Healy had more or less finished the manuscript back in 2002. "But a final ending escaped me and I went off and did something else."
He worked on plays and tried to write the significance of the geese out of himself until eventually he conceded that the material was gradually shaping into the epic narrative it became. He does not classify himself as a bird watcher but the annual visits by the geese became “part of the everyday”, part of the landscape.
Healy’s house is flush against the coast; a narrow gap between trees opens onto the most spectacular view of the sea, with Classie Bawn, the old Mountbatten pile, a shadow on a promontory on this overcast day. Healy dealt with the problem of coastal erosion in his own slow-burning, fastidious way. It took him several years to buttress the exposed coastline bordering his house with gabions – wire mesh bales containing tens of thousands of stones. “They have to be a particular size. Too big and they will break. Too small and they will be sucked out of the mesh.”
The workmanship is incredibly neat and must have been painstaking to carry out. Healy did everything himself. Once, a visitor got down on his knees in front of the gabions, as if in prayer. Healy was taken aback and joked about it, but the man told him: “No, you don’t understand. These things saved my life in Lebanon.”
When Healy was working on the stone bundles, the geese would fly by every evening, about five minutes before the light failed. “That’s when you knew it was time to stop.”
The novel, meanwhile, languished in a drawer as Healy consoled his ever-patient agent and publishers whenever they phoned enquiring about his progress. “It must have been frustrating for them,” he says.
Eventually, about three years ago, he set about completing the thing. So hot on the heels of A Fool's Errandcomes the first Dermot Healy novel in 11 years.
“The return (after an 11-year absence) of one of the most celebrated contemporary Irish novelists,” reads the introduction on the inside flap: the publishers all but added a “phew” at the end.
With it come the attendant duties of book readings and launches and festivals and signings. After a decade of being left to his own devices, it has been a rather dramatic period of exposure for the laconic Westmeath man, from the screening of the television documentary to a recent row in the letters page of this newspaper over Eileen Battersby’s review of his book. This drew responses from writers Eugene McCabe and John Banville.
“You enjoy it when it is over,” he grumbles happily about the attention in general, but he will not be drawn on the specific question of the review. “Ah, I am like a schoolboy. When I sign the books, I have to ask someone to tell me their name – people I know even – because I get a blank. I don’t know whether it is nerves of whatever.”
Long Time, No See is clearly set within the last 10 years and anyone who has visited Mullaghmore or Drumcliffe or the hinterland where Healy resides won’t be long placing their imagination there when reading it.
For all the perceived hardness of the economic boom, small kindnesses abound in the story and rituals such as the stations of the cross prevail alongside the internet; surfers alongside spirited old-timers with a fondness for Malibu. The narrator, Philip (known to all as Mister Psyche), is a kid just finished his Leaving Cert and you lose count of the number of good turns he does for people.
“That still goes on. I know it does,” Healy says. “Calling on people to see if they are alright; doing shopping; lighting a fire. It goes on the whole time. I have seen so many young fellas around here doing things for people – and getting a few pound for it too. And the other thing is that he [Philip] is the link between the father and the mother and the grand-uncle, who won’t go up to the house.
“He is the narrator but he is also a listener. And the Malibu thing did happen way back here one time. When I started going to up to Ellen’s first, there was four old men and they asked for Malibu. They might go on to a whiskey or a brandy but they would always open with a Malibu. It was because a German lad ordered it here years ago and they must have got a bottle in and the German bought for the bar and the old men became addicted to it.”
Because I ask if Ellen’s was the bar shown in the documentary, Healy decides, after lunch, to show me where it is. It involves another drive which, again, would bamboozle a stranger, to a thatched house with a wooden door that is reputedly 400 years old and which, unfortunately, does not open to customers until six each evening. He drives us a different route back – “This is a nice glide,” he says of a hill which shows off the splendour of the coastline once again – slowing and pointing excitedly when he notices some of the geese at the bottom of a field.
“Someone told me the other day they were gone. That’s just a small flock. They land in a field in Lissadell House too. And that goes back to Constance Gore Booth and them making reference to them.”
Moseying about the countryside is part of Healy’s writing life. He will drive about and then pull in to write something down in the notebook he keeps in the driver’s pocket.
'I don't have a good answer for that," he confesses when asked why he writes, reflecting on boyhood days when a schoolteacher introduced an extra hour where the class would read A Tale of Two Cities, of reading books his grand-aunts brought from France – old English histories and cookbooks – of going to London. All he knows is that it started early. He isn't writing much at the moment.
“Not really. The head is empty. Each night the poems visit me but I don’t write them down. Memory is not as kind as it was either. A lot of it is visual and it comes from a phrase – I remember writing ‘Half day Thursday’ and it unlocked a whole load of things for me.”
A Goat's Song, his celebrated 1994 novel took seven years to write. The Bend For Home, his revered memoir, was written in about three years. Sudden Times took about the same.
He is unconcerned about the gaps between his publications and can't avoid it anyway. "I don't have the gift for it," he says of producing book after book. In fact, the biggest struggle he had with A Fool's Errandwas acknowledging that the work was complete. "It was a case of letting it go."
And for Long Time, No Seehe removed the very dream sequences that had originally provoked the book, reluctantly discarding all but one or two startlingly psychedelic depictions and framing the story instead around the everyday conversations through which his characters joust their way through the days.
The Midlands low is still in Healy's voice but he has the Sligo-Donegal lilt bang on in this book, just as he paid careful attention to the Belfast accent in A Goat's Song.
“I regretted taking those bits out because I had gone into depth with them and it was going to become a sort of fantasy. But then the reality took over and it took me a long time to get rid of the dreams. With the dialogue, I wanted to have that sound – the confusion you often hear when people speak. I wanted that experience for the reader. And the accent is a thing that fascinates me. How can the Northern accent change almost from one house to the next?”
Back in the house, he produces a gorgeous handbound edition of the book, the final proof that it is, at last, off his hands. “The book was so long in preparation that it is great to have it out of the way. The last three years were tight work.”
Last week alone involved the intense bustle of three trips to Dublin and a reading in London, a bout of travel he describes in a way that suggests he is no hurry to repeat it. He says he had great fun at The Irish Times/Poetry Now Prize award function, which he was up for along with the eventual recipient, Séamus Heaney, and Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Muldoon and which was spoiled only slightly by his turning on his ankle on the way home.
“It was dark,” he explains.
But most of the time, Healy is content with more localised travel, ambling down to Grange for breakfast if Helen is out or sometimes to the coffee shop at Drumcliffe church.
And, of course, he watches the geese.
Among the pictures and cuttings on the wall near the fireplace is an article from a London newspaper about the Japanese soldiers who stayed in the jungle continuing to fight the second World War decades after it had ended. Healy studies it anew when asked about its relevance. “I don’t know. Sometimes I cut out these things. And sometimes it filters back into the books then. Sixty years after the end of the war? I couldn’t believe that. Sometimes I put a piece of paper on the wall until it haunts me a little.”
When we leave, Healy again drives lead car back to Carney, planning to stop in for a pint. He will be back in the bright lights tomorrow night, opening the Cúirt festival in Galway and doing his best with the signings. “The hand wobbles and the signature begins to fade,” he says. But as he pulls into the village and points the way with a steady thumbs-up, that seems unlikely. Carney is quiet and all is right as rain.
