Interview: French writer Michel Déon, who has lived in Ireland for three decades, has finally written a book about his adopted homeland. He talks to Lara Marlowe
Michel Déon has lived quietly in the west of Ireland for 30 years. Though he writes every day in the Old Rectory in Co Galway that his wife Chantal transformed into a stud farm, the French writer has always taken time to watch and listen to the Irish people around him.
As Déon writes in Cavalier . . . passe ton chemin! (Horseman pass by!), published in French by Gallimard this month, Greece, the family's previous home, obsessed him, but Ireland kept him. His two best-known novels, Les Poneys Sauvages and Un Taxi Mauve, were partially and wholly set in Ireland. But they were published in the early 1970s, before the Déon family settled permanently in Co Galway.
In the intervening decades, Déon has written prodigiously, producing more than 50 novels, essays and plays. But he has largely ignored his adopted homeland. Now Cavalier has righted that oversight. Déon has produced a poignant, often funny 200-page description of Ireland and its inhabitants, as seen by one of France's greatest living writers.
Chantal's fox-hunting introduced Déon to the "horsey set", some of whose Anglo-Irish members had seen better days . In wanderings through the countryside, he met a white-haired postman who warned him that retirement was a death sentence, and a woman of the roads known as Tall Sarah, haunted by the loss of her six children.
Patrick Joseph Smith, a labourer, arrived at the Old Rectory driving a tractor, followed by his collie. "A man who is loved by his dog cannot be completely bad," Déon thought.
In a suspense-filled chapter, Déon is stunned to see the village priest conducting his own funeral service. Unknown to Deon , he had a twin brother, also a priest.
A strangely attired would-be poet asks the French académicien for literary advice. As part of his Irish education, Déon follows in the footsteps of William Butler Yeats, and establishes friendships with John McGahern and Ulick O'Connor.
Under the pen of a less skilled wordsmith a ruined aristocrat whom Déon met on a fox hunt might have become a cliché. But we watch horrified with the writer as the man pours himself glass after glass of wine, port and spirits, falls asleep in the dog kennel and eventually commits suicide. Every time he recalls the wasted life, "The same sad diagnosis comes to me: fin de race". The end of a bloodline, the dead man "symbolised perfectly the middle English aristocracy that came centuries before, following in Cromwell's wake, to establish themselves as conquerors. Ireland had slowly engulfed him, sapping his virtues and instilling the slow poison of its sluggishness in a curious movement of the pendulum".
Déon captures perfectly the eccentricity of Ulick O'Connor, "elegant navy-blue blazer sprinkled with a layer of dandruff on the shoulders, grey trousers sagging above his runners". At their first encounter, at a publisher's cocktail party in the Shelbourne Hotel, O'Connor objects to an English writer, recounts his eviction from Gay Byrne's Late Late Show, and tells Déon that he has been a lawyer, ventriloquist, magician, Irish pole-vaulting champion and boxer as well as a writer.
"There's a risk Ulick will be angry, but I also said kind things about him," Déon shrugs when I speak to him. "He doesn't mind being sniped at."
The book alludes to O'Connor's visits to the Déon home, but leaves out my favourite anecdote: Chantal Déon's dismay at finding O'Connor's fountain pen has leaked on the sheets.
"If Chantal read about it, it would make her furious all over again: I didn't want to remind her," Déon explains.
Déon's friendship with John McGahern grew out of a meeting at the Étonnants Voyageurs literary festival in Saint-Malo. Déon noticed the Irish novelist when an audience member reproached McGahern for not taking a stand on Northern Ireland. Anger transformed McGahern's tranquil face, Déon writes: "He reminded the audience that a writer is free to think what he wants to, and that what he thought of . . . this interminable civil war was nobody's business, especially not a fool who knew nothing about the problem."
DÉON ADMIRES "THIS mixture of pity and cruelty with which delves into the heart and soul of his characters". At the end of Déon's visit to McGahern's farmhouse in Co Leitrim, McGahern tells the Frenchman he has just completed an autobiographical book about his father and mother.
Déon will turn 86 in August, and is 15 years older than McGahern. But they share their recent revisiting of their childhoods. At the end of the chapter on McGahern, Déon writes: "Is there a time in the life of a writer when, having masked or distorted what was most dear to him . . . the need to speak openly about it imposes itself irresistibly?"
Just as Cavalier is Déon's summing up of his decades in Ireland, La Chambre de Ton Père (Your Father's Bedroom), published last year by Gallimard, was the story of his childhood in Paris and Monaco, where his father was a high-ranking official. The autobiographical novel subtly recounts the boy's discovery of his mother's infidelity and the heartrending moment when she tells him: "I never loved anyone but your father."
"McGahern's childhood was less happy than mine," Déon says. "He lost his mother, who was marvellous, and his father was very strict. I lost my father, and though my mother was wonderful, she had great faults. These things mark you terribly. At first you want to hide them, even to yourself. And then one day you want to talk about them."
At his age, Déon says he thinks often about death, but insists it is without sadness. He quotes an autobiographical title used by his friend and fellow académicien, Jean d'Ormesson: "C'était bien" - it was fine. Nor are the deaths of the characters in his book tragic. George S, a terminally cancer-stricken Englishman, invites the Déons to dinner in his mobile home and savours his Château-Beychevelle wine. In an attempt to console the mother of Richie K, killed by a kick from a horse in Co Wicklow, Déon tells her that "Richie has certainly found horses to brush down and ride, up there". Mrs K's face lights up and she replies: "Oh yes . . . Otherwise he'd already be back among us."
One of the people who most marked Déon was Patrick Joseph Smith, "Old Pat-Jo", the labourer who virtually became part of the family. "Born elsewhere, he would have become an architect, engineer or entrepreneur, probably without being more happy," Déon writes. He fondly recalls Pat-Jo's "natural nobility, his reserve, the mischievous sparkle in his eyes".
When Déon's son, Alexandre, restores a home in Paris, he brings Pat-Jo over to help. Alexandre takes Pat-Jo to the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées "without managing to impress him".
Later, Déon visits Pat-Jo when he is dying in hospital. The Irishman tells the French writer that he is about to be reunited with his mother ("healed, without her wheelchair"), his brothers and sisters. "They'll be very happy to see me, to touch me to be sure it's true, that I really am the survivor of the family, thanks to the Virgin and little Bernadette," he says. "When you're certain of that, all that is left is impatience."
Déon called the workman "Old Pat-Jo", though he was 10 years younger than Déon. "Everyone is younger than me now, even the popes!" Déon laughs. There is a touch of longing for lost faith, even envy, in his description of Pat-Jo's death.
"What good fortune to believe in that!" Déon says. Though he and Chantal were raised as Catholics, they no longer practise. "Something remains though. The imprint of a childhood around priests . . . When churches are very beautiful, when there is beautiful music and paintings, I wonder if I don't have faith."
Déon rages against tourism ("almost worse than war") and the destruction of the Irish countryside by developers. Bits of his beloved Portumna Forest disappear every year, and the bungalows move ever closer to the Old Rectory.
"Livestock nolonger cross national roads to change pasture, and it seems to me the weather is less damp and windy," he writes. "New roads pass through countryside from which the carcasses of cars and old tubs used as drinking troughs have been removed, but which are more and more fenced in by barbed wire hung on cement posts. What became of our hawthorn barriers, of thorn hedges and wild fuschia? . . . Oh my children, what are you doing to one of the most poetic countries of Europe? Prosperity has fallen upon Ireland like paedophilia upon the low-ranking clergy."
Farmers' sons in Co Galway drive Jaguars to the pubs, Déon tells me. "People drink more than ever. The girls sleep with everybody. It wasn't like this 30 years ago. I am happy for the Irish, if they are happy like this."
Whatever about Ireland's shortcomings, the overwhelming tone of Déon's book is one of affection. The Irish may often blight their rural landscape, he says, but they are talented musicians and superlative writers. Ultimately it is their power of speech that most impresses him. "Even deprived of their essential rights," he writes, "a people still have speech to defy their oppressor. And if they are gagged, they retain the remedy for all misery: the interior language that enables you to be yourself and to be all others."
This book is Déon's tribute, his way of thanking Ireland. His joy in writing becomes the reader's delight. Surprisingly little of his oeuvre has been translated into English. Let's hope an English language publisher snaps up Cavalier, passe ton chemin!