The gathering of literary heavyweights at this year's Dublin Writers' Festival left the audience hanging on every word, writes Fiona McCann
'IF YOU GET THAT first line down, everything begins to tag onto it and develop," a bespectacled JP Donleavy told RTE's Vincent Woods at the Project Arts Centre on the first day of the Dublin Writers' Festival. In his three-piece brown suit and polka-dot cravat, he looked every inch the writer as he reminisced about unannounced visits from Brendan Behan, read from his book The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners, and served up advice on writing to a salivating audience.
"Authors are repressed prizefighters," Donleavy, himself a boxer, remarked during the public interview which was broadcast live on RTE. In which case, the festival's programme director, Liam Browne, was its very own Don King, bringing so many literary heavyweights to the five-day event that readers were literally running between venues to catch every word.
For many, the star attraction was playwright Tom Stoppard, who expounded on censorship, writer's block and the functions of theatre in his open interview with Fintan O'Toole at the MacNeill theatre in Trinity College's Hamilton building. His unruly, iron grey hair contrasting with the controlled precision of his language, Stoppard was astoundingly articulate as he accessed and moulded language to his subject matter, which included a suggestion that theatre's primary purpose should be to bring about social change. "The theatre I want to be part of is the theatre of a good night out," he insisted.
Taking on Beckett's untouchable stage directions, which he called "control-freakery", the author of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Coast of Utopia and the screenplay for Shakespeare in Love, also elaborated on his own writer's block, but insisted that after 40 years of writing, he was still not ready to give up. "I have in me an ugly streak of competitiveness and I take a furtive pleasure in not burning out," he confessed "confidentially" to a packed lecture hall.
Yet even Stoppard had to vie for top billing with the inspired pairing of Man Booker Prize-winner Anne Enright and the American master of the short story, Tobias Wolff, an event that left the squeezed audience oblivious to their physical discomfort as storytelling cast its spell. As she stepped up to read, Enright immediately thanked Wolff for the part he had played as one of three judges responsible for her receipt of the €20,000 Davy Byrne's Irish Writing Award in 2004. It was clear the appreciation was mutual when Enright finished her prize-winning story, Honey, with Wolff so moved he offered her another €20,000 on the spot. "To be reading short stories in this story-haunted city is such a wonderful thing," the author of This Boy's Life, and In the Garden of the North American Martyrs told a room full of readers that felt equally blessed by his presence.
With his quiet containment counterpointing Enright's forthright engagement, the sense of balance within a short story between what is explicitly articulated and what is implied was finely illustrated as the two writers discussed the form and their reasons for engaging with it. "There are a lot of things in women's lives that amazingly still haven't been said," explained Enright.
ONE WRITER TACKLING this silence with humour and delicious irreverence is Marian Keyes, whose personable manner and generous engagement left each member of her audience feeling directly connected with the best-selling writer. "I like to write about people co-existing with their damage," explained the author of Rachel's Holiday and Watermelon, in conversation with Eason's Maria Dickinson. "It's tough being human."
As if to illustrate her point, she described, with characteristic levity, her own personal difficulties later mined for fictional material. "For the first 30 years, my life was disastrous. I had terrible boyfriends, I was drinking alcoholically, I attempted suicide and had very bad hair," she said. "I was delighted to have had the disastrous life. It came in so handy, but I'd be delighted not to go back to it either."
Keyes may have drawn indirectly from her own biographical experiences for her best-selling books, but for Catherine McCartney, there was nothing indirect about her subject matter. Her book, Walls of Silence, is a personal account of her family's search for justice following the murder of her brother Robert in Belfast. Yet as McCartney explained, there was a healing aspect to the writing of it, despite its difficult subject. "If I hadn't written the book it would have stayed in my head and driven me mad," she said. "It helped in that it emptied my head."
She was joined on stage by Susan McKay, Carlo Gebler and Patrick Maguire, the latter falsely imprisoned in connection with the 1974 IRA bombings of two pubs in Guildford when he was only 14-years-old. For Maguire, writing was a chance to tell his own story, and to explain to those close to him what he had gone through. "Many people have suffered along the way with my struggle, and I'm hoping that if some of these people read my book, they might understand," he said.
In an event that examined how writing can play a part in coming to terms with the legacy of the Troubles, there was a poignancy in moments where the limitations of the art became apparent, as when Maguire spoke of leaving his childhood behind him in an English prison cell. "I would love to go back to one of those cells and find that kid and bring him home," he said.
Conflict was also a theme in an event pairing lawyer Philippe Sands and Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch, both of whom have used their skill as writers to expose the truths behind the methods of interrogation in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. "The true story here is not that there was a crime, but that there was a cover-up," said Sands as he pointed the finger at the Bush administration for explicitly authorising interrogation techniques forbidden under the Geneva convention. This is writing that is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Stoppard's "good night out", yet Gourevitch's engagement with language revealed its essential power, illustrated in his description of a US administration that "defined torture out of existence".
One man whose writing has explored both the political and the poetic is Israel's David Grossman, interviewed for the festival by Hugo Hamilton, a writer whose German heritage left him subject to taunts of "Nazi" as a child. While he spoke of his feelings about the need for Israeli borders and gave his perspective on the current impasse in the region, there were also moments of pure poetry, where the sweet joy of writing was communicated with conviction, as Grossman told his audience that he wished to write "a book that will shiver on the shelf."
TO BALANCE THE sweet sentiment and social engagement, this year's Dublin Writers' Festival offered plenty of humour, provided by Kathy Lette in her brunch at the Morrison Hotel, by Keyes with her easy charm, and by the highly entertaining interview of Ian Rankin by fellow crime writer Colin Bateman, or "Batman without the e" as he himself proclaimed.
Yet while tribute goes to the 40-odd writers who entertained and inspired over the five-day festival, the 2,500 members of the public who turned up to take it in had much to do with its success. Among them was Umer Rashid, a student at UCD from Pakistan, who was making it his business to pose a question at every event he attended. "You can never understand any topic unless you ask a good question about it," he explained after having asked for elucidation from Esther Freud, Philippe Sands, David Grossman and Ian Rankin.
According to Shula Bitran, who also attended a number of readings and interviews, the festival's success lay in the diversity of the writers involved. "I think they brought very good writers who raised very interesting questions also, from different angles," said Bitran of what festival director, Dublin City Council Arts Officer Jack Gilligan, described as "without doubt the best festival we've had."
For Browne, bringing these readers into contact with writers was just one of the joys of the festival, now in its 10th year. "I loved that the writers didn't just get to meet the public but they got to meet each other," he said. "It's a great joy to bring writers together."
It's a joy that was clear in the smiles of Wolff and Enright, their excitement palpable as they approached that which unites them with characteristic differences. "I don't have a theory of endings," Wolff explained in answer to a question from one member of the audience, as a smile spread under his thick white moustache. "I don't really have any theories much any more." Not so for Enright. "My own slender theory of endings is that you're not looking for the last line," she told literature fans who leaned forward in their seats as they waited for the conclusion. "You're looking for the silence after the last line."
