Meet the Author: Bernard MacLaverty

Bernard MacLaverty is an Irish fiction writer and novelist. His novels include Lamb (1980), Cal (1983) and Grace Notes (1997). His latest book of short stories Blank pages and other stories was published by Jonathan Cape in August and is also available from our catalogue.

Who were your heroes and role models as you were growing up and when did you first start writing?

My heroes were footballers, mostly Manchester United players.

In the cinema or ‘pictures’ as we called the movies then, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were favourites – the Marx brothers - anything that made us laugh. In a very short time this changed to anything which moved us. Actors such as James Dean, Marlon Brando. Then we discovered that somebody actually ‘made’ movies, that they just didn’t appear at your local picture house. People like Elia Kazan and the Russian, Sergei Eisenstein. Later the films of Ingmar Bergman.

It was around about this time – when I was about 17 or 18 that I started to properly read. And this coincided with starting to write. I don’t mean novels or short stories but lines. I tried poems, snatches of prose – describing the difference of a river in daylight and at night. Patterns of words that never existed before – like footprints in fresh snow. It was terrible stuff but it was the act of making such stuff which was important. I liked everything about words – their sound, the multiple meanings, their rhythms when strung together. I loved reading Roget's Thesaurus. Twenty different ways to say the same thing.

What is your writing routine? What does a typical writing day look like?

I don’t have a routine. It’s a bit like a beachcomber who takes a walk every day for exercise but is always looking down at his feet. He’ll see something of interest, pick it up, scrutinize it, sniff it, throw it away. Or he’ll put it in his pocket to examine later.

Routine only comes into it when I start to work on something I’ve found. It stays a good length of time in the head being arranged then I barge ahead with it to find out what it is. Then the rewriting begins. Striking out words - that's what it's all about. The very act of striking out a word means there's a better one. Or it is better to have no word.

I sit down every day in front of the computer to produce words – emails, a diary entry, a journal. I work at everything which helps to avoid doing the important writing. Sharpening pencils, looking at the internet, a bit of drawing. But sometimes you think of a sentence and you like it and write it down. Maybe you add to it the next time you see it. And the next. It becomes a paragraph, then a page. What began as a brick has become a wall. Gradually it becomes a structure - a dwelling house of bricks - with a purpose. Stories accrue and accumulate. You are in the Building Trade. You take up residence and describe what you can see from the windows. A woman with secateurs working in the garden. You hear the creak of boards, the distant noise of the newly installed plumbing. Before you know where you are you have written something, a fiction of a certain length. Then I rewrite it, declare it finished. By such hops and skips I have written 5 novels and 6 books of stories. Along with their descendants, like screenplays, radio drama, libretti.

Can you tell us a little about Blank pages and Other Stories and how it came together? This is your first collection of short stories since Matters of Life & Death?

Yes, but there was also a novel Midwinter Break which took a long time for me to write.

Blank pages came about just as I describe above. The first story was ‘Soup Mix’ – a story about old age, of a son visiting, almost by accident, his mother in an old peoples’ home. Then over a period of about five years other stories came. A story of family life ( ‘The Dust Gatherer’), one of a fracture in family life (‘Searching’), a story of loneliness (‘Blank Pages’), a story of exile ( ‘Sounds and Sweet Airs’) two stories of resurrection which became the beginning and ending of the book ( ‘A Love Picture’ & ‘Blackthorns’). Usually I would have tried to publish the stories in magazines as they were completed but this time I let them accumulate until I had a book length manuscript of new material.

It normally takes a book about 2 years to work its way through the publisher’s intestines. Since its submission the world has become engulfed by a pandemic and it seemed wilful not to have taken account of such a catastrophe. For a long time I had been interested in the work of the painter and draughtsman, Egon Scheile, and I remembered that he had died very young during the pandemic of 1918. So this was the last story written in the collection – a counterbalance to the redemptive opening and closing stories.

You often write about the complexity of ordinary lives.

Yes, what else is there to write about?

As a well known writer is it still possible to observe and pass unnoticed?

Yes, even within my own house, even among my own family.

I'd like to ask about your novella Cal if I may? How did the character of Cal McCluskey develop and how was your experience of working on the screenplay of the film?

I have always thought of Cal as a novel and not a novella. As a writer you use the material of the life you have lived. I knew what it was like to be a boy/man of that age. The introspection, the shyness, the battened down anger. Growing up as a Catholic in Unionist Northern Ireland I was aware of the discrimination, what it was like to be treated like a second-class citizen, the gerrymandering, the jobs market where No Catholic Need Apply. As a bystander I experienced the violence that choked the state for about 30 years. Bringing all these elements together resulted in a character called Cal. For reasons of guilt he pursues a local librarian called Marcella and gradually falls in love with her. The complexities of the relationship carry the reader along, I hope. You can detect that I hate giving the story away, even in shorthand. The way the story unfolds is the book.

The writing of the novel Cal is creative and turning it into a screenplay is craft. It is telling a story by different means, a craft I came to, late. In adapting prose you must abandon everything that is word based. Images have to go. Like in Lamb – ‘The brothers crossed the quad like black crows’ can’t be done. How could you film the 1st sentence of Lamb ‘There were things at the bottom of Brother Sebastian’s bag which he didn’t know were there.’ But they can be substituted by other visual things, sound things, music even. For instance the mass production of crucifixes by the woodwork pupils early on in Lamb. In Cal the scene of self harming with a lit cigarette which was not in the book.

Like any story it’s about who gets to know what, when. The film begins with a killing but we do not see the killers. Time sequences are straightened out. Flashbacks fill the gaps. The difficulties of internalisation were helped by the wonderful cast Pat O’Connor, the director, assembled. John Lynch, plucked from half way through drama school. Helen Mirren as always brilliant, but in this case she was extra brilliant and won the Best Actress Award at Cannes Film Festival. Other Irish actors like Donal McCann and Ray McAnally were superb. And the screenplay won the Evening Standard Award for Best Screenplay 1983.

Oh, just one other story. Cal hides in a derelict outhouse at a short distance from the Morton’s farmhouse. Designer/producer Stuart Craig had hunted Ireland for the best location to suit the geography of the novel. When I went to the set the first thing I wanted to see was the outhouse. And there it was, exactly as described in the text – right down to rolls of barbed wire and junk and bags of meal and some mice. I said to Stuart ‘That was a piece of real luck finding Cal’s hideout exactly where it should be.’ Stuart smiled, ‘We built it there last week.’

Is there anything you can share with us about your latest project?

Not much. Because I have not settled on one yet. I am rewriting, tidying up two screenplays which were abandoned along the way for reasons of finance which had nothing to do with their writing. It is a difficult time of COVID worry. I have always wanted to write a novella (see above) but have never gotten around to it. For many years I put off reading Chekhov’s The Steppe because it was so long. This year I read it and was enthralled. Maybe this time I should try and work in such a form?

One book that everyone should read?

The one they like the best. The gist of what is being talked about here is short story and that guides me to James Joyce’s Dubliners. Also because it ends with one of the great stories of the world The Dead.

What is on your 'to read' pile at the moment?

If you are publishing fiction regularly (notice I did not say frequently) then publishers send you new material, seeking your opinion of it. What they call ‘a blurb’. Sometimes I do read and contribute, more frequently I don’t because it all depends on time. And I am getting old. I once heard a 95 year old man on the radio say ‘So I don’t buy green bananas.’

Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?

I’m the one who keeps the pictures straight in our house.