Maeve Binchy (21 page)

It is a wonderful letter, full of confidence and good advice. It puts Maeve in the driving seat. It is
her
work that all the fuss is about. He and she are too close to make a judgement about it, he advises, but he is sure that it will be a great success, and promises to come and get her when the Garda find her walking by the Liffey muttering, ‘Nine out of ten – see me…’

He followed it up with a first-night telegram in the form of an end-of-term school report for a pupil called Maeve at St Thespis School. Every subject listed has a famous teacher appended who makes an appropriate comment. For example, for Drama the teacher is one W. Shakespeare, for Literature it is Jane Austen, and so on.

Very aptly, the last subject is simply ‘Life’, and the teacher is Jean-Paul Sartre, who comments, ‘She knows the meaning of it.’

In the event, the reviews were mixed, but welcoming of a new talent. Notably, there was criticism of the plot. What they expected from Maeve was less plot and more relationships and feelings. Wrote Con Houlihan of the
Evening Press
, ‘Alas Maeve
Binchy has not enough faith in her own talents and decides that her play must have a plot … Credibility so triumphantly achieved is thrown to the winds.’ Dubliners, readers of the
Irish Times
, even those in the rival office of the
Irish Press
, already knew what Maeve was about and wanted her to have confidence in her particular talents. They would not have to wait long.

Things were moving forward well. Maeve had two plays under her belt and a collection of short stories, and was enjoying no small reputation on the
Irish Times
. Gordon now described himself as a writer and was working on a book about Amy Johnson,
Queen of the Air
. Both
The King of Quizzical Island
and Maeve’s
Central Line
were due to appear in 1978 – along with the sixth volume of Daniel A. Binchy’s
Corpus Iuris Hibernici
, of course.

With a year until publication and everything poised for
lift-off
, Gordon asked Maeve for her hand in marriage, a move that she later said consigned Myles McSwiney’s suggestion that she join him on the L&H committee at UCD almost twenty years earlier to second place among invitations from men that had thrilled her! The only pity was that neither Gordon’s parents nor Maeve’s had survived to see the day.

So much had been said about fate and a love that is meant to be. William and Maureen had set the benchmark with their chance meeting in Ballybunion, but it all came round again with Maeve and Gordon, who had met by chance and made a match not between two families at war, like Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers, but between two nations at war, Ireland and England. Resolution was a topical theme at the time, for there had been
a series of ‘peace rallies’ the previous summer and famously two Irish women, Mairéad Corrigan and Betty Williams, had formed the Community of Peace People, for which they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The wedding between Maeve and Gordon, set for 29 January 1977, was to be undertaken with minimum fuss in London, rather than in Ireland, where Belfast was in lockdown and Dublin the scene of the assassination of British Ambassador Christopher Ewart Biggs and his secretary Judith Cook the previous July. The reception would be held at an Irish hotel, like Olive’s in ‘Pimlico’, a story Maeve was writing for the
Victoria Line
collection (which had now been signed up too, so high were the hopes for
Central Line
) – a hotel where at Christmas you got ‘the Pope’s Blessing in the morning and the Queen’s speech in the afternoon – a combination of what was best about both cultures’, as she wrote. Adrian Henri, principal among the Liverpool beat poets, who had a poetry band called the Liverpool Scene and wrote a lot about love, composed a poem especially for the occasion.

Afterwards, the plan was to make a fast getaway to Australia, followed by a very leisurely return, a period when Maeve would work their passage with commissions both from the
Irish Times
and from other newspapers along the way.

Gordon was forty-four, Maeve thirty-seven when they tied the knot at Hammersmith Register Office, travelling from ceremony to reception in a horse-drawn carriage. Thereafter they flew to Hillydale in the Dandenong mountains, near Melbourne, Australia, where they honeymooned at the house of Joe and Roni Greenberg.

Joe, until a short time before an art director for the
London-based
advertising company Waseys, had met Maeve through the photographer Liam White, who knew her well and was a firm friend. The Greenbergs had an unusual collection of African fertility masks, which seemed an appropriate enough setting for the start of the couple’s life together as man and wife.

Almost immediately, Maeve arranged to write for the Australian newspaper
The Age
. She also wrote regular reports from Australia to the
Irish Times
and then drifted seamlessly into a memorable series called ‘On the Beaches’, enjoying some of the choice beaches of the world. Responding to one such article, a besotted reader wrote:

M
aeve was thirty-eight when she discovered she couldn’t have children. She and Gordon were bitterly
disappointed
, but as time went on they remained so occupied with writing their books that some friends of theirs believed at first that they were childless by choice, which wasn’t so.

She approached the problem as she approached everything else that beset her in life: positively and pragmatically. The facts were that fertility treatment just wasn’t good in the late 1970s and adoption wasn’t possible after forty.

She rehearsed the whole panoply of problems attached to childless marriage in her novels. In
The Copper Beech
, the Kellys discover that it isn’t easy to be a childless woman in a small town; Nora Kelly ‘had been aware of the sideways glances for some time’. That God gave more and more children to the Brennans and the Dunnes when they couldn’t feed or care for them while he passed Nora by was further evidence, she thought, that God wasn’t operating in the world. But at the same time, Nora hears that childless couples do often grow very close to one another
– there being no distractions of family. The disappointment unites them into a shared lifestyle, something which Maeve and Gordon had already.

But in
Tara Road
when Hilary and Martin can’t have
children
their marriage becomes sexless, while in
Quentins
, Brenda Brennan (co-owner of the restaurant Quentins, around which much of the action revolves) is childless and directs her maternal impulse into her work. Brenda mothers her clientele, who look to her for advice. Like Maeve in all her stories, Brenda brings her ‘children’ from disillusionment to self-belief and fulfilment in the end.

Traditionally the Irish mother, like Ria Lynch in
Tara Road
, ‘passed on her standards and values to the next generation’. Maeve never had the chance to be a mother, but instead sat with her husband in the room where they worked and passed on her standards and values in her fictional parables to her family of readers.

There would soon be a publishing family too, one to which she was just as loyal. The sons and daughters of friends and family became Maeve’s surrogate children. Maeve used to love them especially around the age of fourteen and fifteen, when she could play the role of ageing
enfant terrible
and do
outrageous
things with them, like taking them to movies for which they were underage.

But she could be schoolmarmish, too, insisting on a curfew and no smoking and spending half an hour every evening doing cocktails and scrapbooks – every evening they had to come up with a new idea for a non-alcoholic cocktail and make
it in an electric cocktail maker which Maeve had, and then fill in a scrapbook of what they had done during the day. It was torture that she knew would give form to the whole experience – making them visit places and do things that they knew they would have to put into the scrapbook in the evening.

When these surrogate children grew up and married and had their own children, she asked them for photographs of her honorary grandchildren and made a picture collage. Mary Kenny remembered Maeve saying to her that she only ever wanted two things in life: ‘to succeed in her work and be happily married. She achieved both of those aims abundantly.’ But it seemed to her that Maeve might have missed having grandchildren more even than children. When she asked for a picture of Mary Kenny’s, Maeve quoted Gore Vidal’s famous saying, ‘Never have children, only grandchildren.’

It is a fact, a coincidence perhaps, possibly more than that, that three female novelists who have been very successful in recent times (Maeve Binchy, Catherine Cookson and Barbara Taylor Bradford, their combined sales more than 250 million) were all childless. Cookson had a terrible time with it, fighting the temptation to snatch babies from prams and ending up in an asylum for a while, as she revealed in her autobiography. Taylor Bradford was deeply disappointed, but saw that she could never have written as many books or spent so much time writing had she had children hanging on her apron strings, the argument behind Cyril Connolly’s point that ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’.

For Cookson, her books
were
her children – she saw them
like that and she couldn’t stop having them – she birthed more than 100 of them! It was a bit like that for Maeve and Gordon, not in terms of quantity, but they always worked at them together, in the same room, producing their fictional ‘babies’, conceiving them, nurturing them, even allowing each other to criticise the way they were nursing them, all the way through gestation to birth. And it must have been especially rewarding that one of them was all the time turning out books for other people’s children.

Among the obituaries for Maeve, few omitted to mention that she was childless. An article in the
Daily Telegraph
seemed to suggest that female writers who didn’t have children were missing a fundamental female experience of love which was bound ultimately to limit them as writers – a provocative point that was directed at Maeve but not backed up with reference to her work. There is only one instance where possibly the
argument
could be engaged, in
The Glass Lake
when Helen learns that her young daughter Kit burned the note that she left to explain why she has left the family home. Helen blames her in a way that seems to question her maternal qualities. But perhaps life is more complicated than many of us like to imagine.

Insightful of Maeve’s surrogate maternal qualities is the reason she gave for showering blessings on her friends who shared their children with her: they didn’t just revel in their children’s successes with her, they shared their failures and
problems
too – the bad as well as the good. In that, she found an intimacy with the families that surpassed the expectations of everyone involved.

You can’t truly love someone without the bad bits. What Maeve was describing was the unconditional love of
motherhood
, and is that not more powerfully conceived when it is so, as in her case, without hormonal assistance?

After their return from the extended honeymoon,
Central Line
, dedicated (like every one of Maeve’s books) ‘To Gordon with all my love’, was published by Quartet, and
Deeply Regretted By
, the classic Irish émigré tale written by Maeve in 1976, was broadcast by RTÉ Television as part of its ‘Thursday Playdate’ series on 28 December. The play won a prize at the Prague Television Festival and two Jacob’s Awards. In September 1979, rehearsals began for Maeve’s third play,
Half-Promised Land
, which opened at the Abbey in October. The story was based on her experiences at Kibbutz Zikim in 1963.

Yet Maeve wasn’t happy that drama was really her medium. Readers of her novels know that the very value of her fiction is that she explores her characters’ emotional lives without any of the time constraints that drama placed on her – some of her books extend beyond 600 pages.

She once said, ‘Plays don’t come easy to me because I don’t have a visual imagination.’
73
The different skills required were shown even more obviously when her work was scripted for film. When she saw the film script for
Circle of Friends
(1995) she said she had to lie down in a darkened room. It was only ninety-one pages, while the book was 551! She was sure that they must have emasculated the characters, who spoke mainly one-liners in the script. When she saw the film, however, she was thrilled to see that the actors expressed visually much of what she had written
in the novel, and saw clearly just how different the media of book and film are.

The aptly entitled
Half-Promised Land
premiered at the Abbey Theatre on 11 October 1979. It tells of two Irish
schoolteachers
who leave the convent school where they work to holiday in a kibbutz in the Negev Desert. The two women handle their newfound freedom in different ways. Sheila is a dedicated worker who finds herself forced to compromise her Catholic moral principles after a woman seeks her support to get an abortion. Meanwhile man-hungry Una forms a romantic attachment with an aggressive young Islamic soldier stationed at the kibbutz. Typically, Maeve uses humour to avoid head-on involvement with the reality of her relationship with her man back in 1963. Neither Una nor the soldier understands a word of the other’s language – but there’s little time for talk anyway…

Had Maeve traded the telling political and emotional burden of the relationship for laughs from the audience? Perhaps there had been compromise. Script editor Sean McCarthy discussed in detail what he thought was wrong with the first draft and locked her in a dressing room in the theatre until she got it right. Two hours later, theatre administrator Douglas Kennedy released her and discovered that she had long ago finished the task, was writing her column for the
Irish Times
and could use a double gin and tonic, which he went straight away to fetch. Maeve was never one to fight her ground with editors. She was already on to the next project.

Five weeks later the play ‘opened to terrible reviews and
sell-out
business’, according to Kennedy. ‘Though Maeve was stoic
about the largely negative critical response, she did admit to me some time later that it hurt.’
74

Kennedy, today a novelist of renown, became friends with Maeve and benefited from her advice about failure, the taste of which every artist knows. He had left his job at the Abbey, had a less than successful experience with his first book and lost his column on the
Irish Times
. She took him to lunch and asked him, ‘What next?’ The only thing is to keep working, she said. Move on and whatever you do, don’t let a hostile reviewer know that they’ve got to you.

Kennedy went on to give Maeve one of her great journalistic coups. The year after
Half-Promised Land
he managed to get the San Quentin Drama Workshop to perform Samuel Beckett’s
Krapp’s Last Tape
and
Endgame
at the Abbey with Beckett himself directing. But Beckett would rehearse only in London and on the condition he didn’t have to do any press interviews.

Naturally when Kennedy went to London for rehearsals he sought out Maeve, who invited him to dinner and asked whether he could engineer a seat for her in rehearsal. He said it was unlikely, but to his amazement Beckett agreed, so long as she accepted that there would be no interview.

Samuel Beckett (1906–89) had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1969 and was the most influential playwright alive. His
interest
in French existentialist literature, especially Camus, coincided with Maeve’s. ‘To anyone who can face the facts of human
existence
and not worry about some received dogma being thrown into question, Beckett is hugely enjoyable,’ wrote John Calder.
75
As the author of
Waiting for Godot, Endgame
and
Krapp’s Last
Tape
, he was singly one of the most interesting men in world theatre, had influenced Pinter, Fugard and Stoppard and would work with Ted Hughes. There was, also, as with James Joyce, a local frisson, because of Beckett being brought up in Foxrock, by Dalkey. Maeve may not have agreed with his bleak outlook on human existence, but to say that she was exhilarated at the prospect of meeting him was an understatement.

Come the day, Maeve sat in the auditorium watching the rehearsal, her ‘pen darting across her reporter’s pad’. Then, during a coffee break, Beckett, to her surprise, approached her, asked if she was the journalist from the
Irish Times
, and started chatting with her about Dublin. Kennedy calculates that they spoke for about seven minutes, ‘a huge conversation’ for Beckett to have with a journalist. During those precious minutes Maeve more or less destroyed the pencil in her hands in her efforts to stop herself writing anything down, which she knew would mark the end of the conversation. But when Beckett returned to the actors she sat down and scribbled manically for ten solid minutes, and when Kennedy saw the article in the
Irish Times
, the first
interview
with Beckett in an Irish newspaper for decades, Maeve, he said, had managed to regurgitate everything, verbatim, that he had heard Beckett say to her.

In the same year, when on a visit to Dalkey, Maeve spotted a little Georgian cottage for sale which fronted onto the road, and she and Gordon fell in love with it. An estate agency might call
it ‘unpretentious’ or possibly ‘bijou’, but that says nothing about its singular architectural beauty, with its decorative ridge-work, swirling stone masonry over Georgian brickwork, and bold bay windows onto the street.

The cottage was already on Maeve’s radar. When she and her father used to walk that way into town in the 1960s he would always say, ‘Who in their sane senses would call their house Pollyvilla?’ And Maeve would just as surely reply that the man who built it (and Annavilla next door) had two daughters, one called Polly, the other Anna, and that when the two cottages were built the builders’ filling agent Polyfilla had yet to be invented.