Maeve Binchy (25 page)

In 1985, the year of publication of
Echoes
, Maeve was thinking more about a projected film of
Light a Penny Candle
. A joint, four-part RTÉ and London Weekend TV production was mooted, but the producer, Bernard Kirchaesski, had terrible trouble finding a girl to play Aisling. ‘Outside Ireland there is an image of an archetypal Irish beauty, influenced by Maureen O’Hara and Hollywood. It may be phoney, but we are looking for what the world thinks your Irish girl looks like, and we can’t find her.’
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Phoney it is not and Kirchaesski’s failure to grasp the one essential in the production that it was his responsibility to secure – the ‘Aisling’ persona – was lamentable. It is
appropriate
, however, that he likened the character to Maureen O’Hara. Maeve may even have had Maureen O’Hara in mind as a descriptive model when she created Aisling. The actress would have made the perfect Aisling had she been of an
appropriate
age. The famously red-headed film star was born into a Catholic-Irish family in Dublin in 1920 and trained at the Abbey Theatre from when she was a child, was noted for playing fiercely passionate heroines with a highly sensible attitude and, like Aisling, was abused by her husband. After her Hollywood success O’Hara returned to Ireland, to live mainly in Glengarriff, County Cork.

Perhaps this toying with Maureen O’Hara was the reason why Maeve chose the name O’Hara for the similarly pivotal
character
in her second novel – the schoolteacher Angela O’Hara
in
Echoes
. But this time she modelled the fictional character on an actress who was of an age to play her. Imagine her surprise when, four years later, quite independently, Geraldine James was cast in the part of Angela O’Hara in Channel 4’s television series of
Echoes
. Maeve had had no involvement in the casting. She couldn’t believe it.

Actress and author subsequently became good friends. People rarely recognise themselves when fictional characters are based on them in novels, often because we don’t see ourselves as other people see us. Geraldine was no exception. But in her case there was a surprise for her fictional creator too. Maeve had had her schoolteacher cycle down the hill in Castlebay with her hair flying in a straight line behind her and this is exactly what Geraldine had liked to do when she was a child. There was great synchronicity and the film turned out to be a magical experience for Maeve.

It was shot in the little seaside town of Dunmore East in County Waterford during a beautiful summer, and Maeve and Gordon used to find any excuse they could to go and watch. They got to know the people of the town, who were thrilled to have the film happening on their doorstep, many of them performing as extras in the film, so that if you go there today it is not difficult to find someone who was in it.

Maeve remembered one day in particular when she was watching the filming from the top of a cliff; there must have been 200 people involved. It suddenly hit her that all that was going on had emanated from one little idea she’d had, born of the balmy days of summer in Ballybunion, when she and her
friends and family were so young. But what moved her was not nostalgic reminiscence, rather that the film had created work for so many. After that, whenever films were made of her books she waited in anticipation not for the denouement but for the credits, which she wanted to go on and on.

By the time of the filming of
Echoes
, Maeve had already published her third novel,
Firefly Summer
(1987). The
following
year came
Silver Wedding
. As with her journalism and short stories, so with the novels, the idea for
Silver Wedding
came while sitting on a bus. She overheard a girl saying to her friend that it was her parents’ silver wedding and she must remember to get a card. Her friend said, ‘Oh, that’s nice, is there to be a party?’ To which the first girl replied, ‘No, it’s a dreadful marriage – but the worse the marriage the bigger the card.’

The pathos of the exchange stunned Maeve; the sadness, delivered with a terrible matter-of-fact acceptance like that, on a bus, insisted on being allowed the chance to develop in her imagination and find resolution in one of her ‘parables’.

Maeve was by now in the novel-writing groove, no longer worrying whether the next tale would be a bestseller. She was a novelist who was expected to deliver new works on a regular basis. When a small publisher has a success the size of Binchy’s on their hands, turnover requires that she keeps producing. But there was no sense of being stuck on a treadmill.

Perhaps it was all this writing about her childhood, or perhaps, as she said, it was the invention of the fax machine, which had recently made communications between writer and publisher so good that it didn’t matter where you were writing any more. Or
perhaps she was now ready in herself to return. Whatever it was, she and Gordon decided that it was time to make Dalkey their principal home.

To the teenage Maeve thirty years earlier, Dalkey had been the dullest place on earth, the Kalahari Desert, and she and Philippa had wanted to escape. To the spinster in the 1960s, living there had seemed a life sentence. But now that she was in her forties and ‘at one’ with herself, dispensing her philosophy of life to an insatiable family of readers, the little town promised Maeve the deepest resonance of whom she had become.

Dalkey, as it turned out, had also changed. It was no longer the place it had been in the 1950s and 1960s – and neither was Ireland.

T
he fortunes of Dalkey had changed dramatically through its history. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, thanks to poor navigation of the river Liffey in Dublin, it was the main port for the capital, and was known as the ‘Town of the Seven Castles’. Walled on three sides, to east, north and west, with a double ditch rampart to the south, its seven castles were quite small, more like fortified warehouses. Two only survive – Archbold’s Castle, next to the Church of the Assumption, and Goat’s Castle on the opposite side of the road, now the Town Hall and Heritage Centre.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the rise of Ringsend, a Dublin suburb on the south side of the Liffey, closer to the capital than Dalkey, and the successful navigation of the great river, took the life out of the town until, in 1815, hundreds of men were drafted in with their families to quarry stone high up on Dalkey Hill behind Knocknacree Road, for the
construction
of the great asylum harbour at Dún Laoghaire.

A metal track running between the quarry on the hill and
the harbour worked without power of any sort on a two-track pulley system, the weight of the stone-filled trucks coming down the steep hill pulling the empty trucks coming up it from the harbour. Today, the route of the old track is known as ‘The Metals’ and makes for a pleasant walk between the two towns.

Even with all this activity, however, Dalkey remained little more than ‘a noisome fishing port of hovels, cabins and drinking taverns’ until the mid-1800s, when the rising Dublin
professional
and business classes built themselves fine houses in the surrounding area.
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When Maeve returned to live in Dalkey in the 1980s, the sheer beauty of the place and its handy location meant that among the inhabitants of the big houses, built by the Victorian professional classes, were now some of the movers and
shakers
and beneficiaries of a newly prosperous Ireland. Dalkey was becoming trendy. Tina Turner, Chris de Burgh and members of U2 bought houses in the town, raising its profile considerably. Maeve and Gordon became neighbours of Gloria Hunniford, Bono and Neil Jordan. In Finnegan’s, the local pub where Maeve and Gordon had their own table, one would encounter all sorts of people.

Fortunately the approach to celebrity was pleasantly casual in Dalkey and when Maeve returned as an international
bestselling
author there were still townsfolk who remembered her as a girl of ten, riding her old bicycle around the neighbourhood. Best of all, her brother William and two sisters, Joan and Renie, also found their way back to live within a few minutes of Maeve and Gordon at Pollyvilla.

For Maeve there was no moody nostalgia when she walked the streets of her childhood, rather the thrill of the future as she watched ‘the girls coming up from Loreto in their uniforms, each one with hopes and dreams of what life will bring them’. And what a life now lay in store! She felt no regret for ‘a vanished era and the ghosts of yesterday’, only a sense of pride in the changes and the role she had played in some of them.
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Whether a child of the 1980s could, as an adult, afford to continue to live in Dalkey was less certain. Maeve’s parents had bought Eastmount on Knocknacree Road, high above the town, for £3,000 in 1952. It went on the market in the spring of 2007 for €3.55 million, reducing later, with Ireland in the grip of recession, to €2.95 million.

As for her home with Gordon, which was now to become their principal address, they extended the first floor to make a studio where they could both continue to work side by side. Glass covered, and sun strewn in summer, it could be reached by means of a spiral staircase from the ground floor. A roof patio was laid outside where the ten minutes ‘sulking time’ could be spent dead-heading roses, and from which the big bunch of trees can be glimpsed behind which Eastmount stands.

Later, with part of the proceeds from the sale of her novel
Firefly Summer
, they bought the derelict house behind Pollyvilla for guest accommodation and to increase their privacy, naming it Firefly Cottage. Today, the whole dwelling is a bit like the Tardis. From the outside one would think it is a single-storey Georgian folly, but inside there was all the space they needed to live, work and entertain.

Maeve and Gordon continued their work on word processors – ‘like twin pianos,’ as she liked to put it – occupying
opposite
ends of a desk set along one wall of their glasshouse eyrie. Framed book covers and shelves of her books lined the walls, along with pictures of Maeve mixing it with powerful figures in the White House. Open lay a copy of
The Book of Kells
, the famous eighth-century illuminated manuscript of the Four Gospels, created by Celtic monks in the eighth century. This was not a contradiction for a Catholic who had lost her faith, it was something of a statement, because
The Book of Kells
is a relic of a time before the Irish Church was politicised, when Irish monasteries were the acknowledged centres of learning in Europe. It is often forgotten that St Patrick, besides bringing Christianity to Ireland, brought the written word. Maeve and Gordon would turn a page of this beautiful remnant of Tradition each day, just as is done with the original
Book of Kells
at Trinity College Dublin.

In preparation for writing a book Maeve would first detail her characters on large cardboard sheets. She regarded them as real creations, not to be discarded just because they had served her purpose in one story. Like Joyce, when required she had no hesitation in letting them wander into a second novel. For
Quentins
, for example, she welcomed Brenda Brennan and Ria and Danny Lynch from
Tara Road
, Cathy and Tom Feather, Maud and Simon Mitchell from
Scarlet Feather
, and Nora the Signora and Aidan Dunne from
Evening Class
in the new novel. Readers would comment on just how pleased they were to see them again.

Maeve was a consummate planner. Each novel, each project, had its own file, notebooks, timelines, headings, lists. First she would sit down and write out the story in maybe six or seven pages to confirm in her mind exactly where it was going. These would be sent to the publisher and, assuming they liked them, the project would go live.

In order to give the novel a clear sense of place she would often draw a map of the village where the action occurred. As soon as a character was introduced it would be given a house on the map, marked with the character’s name. Hotels, pubs, shops would go on it too, as the whole village took shape.

Then there were time charts, which logged the duration of the writing and how many words Maeve needed to write each day; two to four pages (about 800 to 1,600 words) a day was the norm.

The working partnership with Gordon was extremely helpful. ‘The discipline of another writer sitting beside you makes you work,’ Maeve said. They’d work for four hours in the morning. Gordon would often put on a pair of silent headphones to cut out all sound. Maeve could answer the phone and think nothing of the interruption, but when she was writing she was gone to the world, total focus, total concentration.

At the end of each day they continued to read each other what they had written. But they were not at all competitive, even now that Maeve’s career had taken off globally. Both being writers, they knew that some days go better than others. On a bad
writing
day, when things just didn’t go well, they were a tremendous support to one another.

They claimed that they’d only ever had two arguments, one about the law of copyright and the Berne Convention, the other about Mexican cleaners working in Los Angeles airport. Not matters on which marriages have been known to founder, but the Mexican cleaners did provoke quite a stand-off, so much so that Maeve claimed that the divorce settlement – who was going to have what – was written out in a café at the airport itself. The next day they couldn’t remember what they’d been fighting about.

Gordon developed a foolproof system to avoid a repetition. They’d separate ‘Tone’ from ‘Content’ of any argument and submit the content to ‘A Working Party’, made up of the two of them. They could have a working party on anything, and list the arguments for and against whatever was at issue. It never took long to reach an agreeable conclusion.

They had little systems for all sorts of things. For example, one left over from earlier days when money was tight was that they discussed financial matters only on Saturdays. Bills, cheques, whatever, all went into a drawer until then.

The only other occupants of the studio were two cats, Fred (a ginger) and Audrey (white with a black tail which it refused to acknowledge was its own). They would walk over everything and provide Maeve and Gordon with a good excuse not to work. Before Fred and Audrey were Tex and Sheelagh, immortalised in a painting by Norah Golden and in
The Tex and Sheelagh Omnibus
by Gordon, illustrated by Mary Murphy, which Poolbeg published in 1996.

Gordon’s work powered ahead. Following his collaborations
with the illustrator Alan Burton, he teamed up with Maeve’s sister, Joan Ryan, on two story collections,
The Haunted Hills
and
Sea Tales of Ireland
, before adding well over a dozen children’s titles of his own over the next decade. Titles included adventure stories and mysteries, such as
The Cool MacCool, Tom’s Amazing Machine
(which became a series),
Cruncher Sparrow High Flier
(also a series),
The Red Spectacles Gang, The Curse of Werewolf Castle
, and quirky projects such as
The Rhyming Irish Cookbook
, illustrated by Cathy Henderson, which no doubt raised a few laughs in the making.

After the planning, writing, for Maeve, was not so much a craft as a cutting off from conscious thought, a process almost of unthinking. Once everything was in place she would put all her notes and files away, let go and let the writing flow. Patsey Murphy wrote of ‘a veil of mighty concentration’ coming down and a clarity of purpose which meant that ‘her fingers did not so much hit the keyboard as slap it like Jelly Roll Morton playing the piano’.

With enormous self-belief she put her subconscious to work – no analysis, just plug into tradition and go with the flow. When she was writing, her stories streamed through her
uninhibited
by conscious editing, as if delivered orally. In fact, Maeve saw herself as ‘part of the great
seanchaí
oral tradition’, proudly displaying her membership in a banner above the float she rode at the St Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago in 2001. The banner read: ‘Seanachai Storyteller Maeve Binchy’.
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Historically
seanchaithe
were servants to the chiefs of the four ancient clans and guardians of tradition, the O’Neills of Ulster,
the O’Briens of Munster, the O’Conors of Connacht and the MacMurrough-Kavanaghs of Leinster. They appeared at wakes, christenings and quiltings (
cuilteireacht
), the last of which were attended only by women, but many were wanderers and might appear suddenly in the night and extemporise their stories around a winter fire. Where there were Irish speakers there were
seanchaithe
and singers and a folk-life which even hardship and grinding poverty could not eradicate.

A large corpus of
seanchaithe
tales was passed from one practitioner to another without being written down. There are associations with oral stories of Welsh mythology, such as the
Mabinogion
, a collection of eleven stories sustained orally for 2,000 or more years before Christ, and
The Book of Taliesin
, both passed down orally and not written down until the thirteenth century.

The difference is that while these Welsh stories were written down in the Middle Ages and preserved as almost sacred texts of Welsh tradition, all that is left of the
seanchaithe
tales – the original oral literature of ‘that ancient and aristocratic world of Ireland,’ as J. H. Delargy writes in his rarely found but fascinating extended essay,
The Gaelic Storyteller
(1945),
87
– ‘are but pathetic fragments’. They were lost in the cleansing of Irish tradition by Cromwell and others, which Delargy refers to as those ‘disastrous wars of the seventeenth century’.

Because of their role as oral custodians of tradition,
seanchaithe
are acknowledged to have inherited the function of the
filí
of pre-Christian Ireland, an elite class of poets or seers, the word ‘filí’ deriving from the proto-Celtic word meaning ‘seer, one
who sees’, and so are linked, like the Aisling poetic convention, to the spirit of traditional Ireland, to the collective unconscious of the Irish people.

In
The Irish Writer and the World
, Declan Kiberd distinguishes between two levels of ancient storyteller. While a
seanchaí
would narrate local tales or lore, ‘the
sgéalaí
enjoys higher status as the narrator of the
sean-sgéal
or international tale’. The
sgéalaí
was always a man whose tales were long and difficult to
remember
– amazing adventures, remote wonders, related in the third person – whereas the
seanchaí
could be a man or a woman and the tales recounted as if they themselves had experienced them. The tradition of the
seanchaí
is the one that Maeve more nearly follows, because her narratives are rooted in her personal quest.

As part of this oral tradition, Maeve ‘speaks’ to us in a
characteristically
lyrical, very Irish way. We love her Irish ‘voice’, and the rhythms and the music of it fit her task. Her books are popular worldwide because her stories are inspired by feelings which are experienced the world over, but most copies are sold wherever English is understood, because her voice seems to reflect the vibrant patterns of emotion that resonate between the characters. Irish-English is the perfect medium because emotional resonances are built into the musical syntax of the Irish tongue, individual ‘notes’ combining to sing of emotional qualities, while rhythmic structures and time values operate to reflect the emotional cadences of relationships. Altogether, the timbre of Maeve’s authorial voice helps to inform and transform the reader at a level vastly more creative than simple
information
dissemination.