Maeve Binchy (26 page)
Authors: Piers Dudgeon
Marian Keyes, a great friend of Maeve who besides being a writer of renown knows plenty about the ancient Irish tongue, has argued that while the words Maeve used are English, ‘they’ve been attached to the template of the older language we spoke’. And that is as it should be, for the
seanchaí
is associated with the Gaeltacht, the Irish-speaking areas of Ireland.
The distinction between an analytical writer and a
spontaneous
one is a valid point in the context of the
seanchaí
. ‘You analyse things as a writer,’ Maeve once said to fellow writer Felicity Hayes-McCoy, ‘but I don’t. I’m just delighted by them and write them down.’ Hayes-McCoy wasn’t sure that Maeve really thought that. But perhaps she did. There was little room for analytical thinking when she was writing. Then, she dared to lose herself in what she was doing. Lost to the conscious control tower of her thinking, the words just poured out. Writing this way, instinctively, was the ultimate in authenticity – a position she craved above all, the writer’s self is lost to the task, along with all prejudice and affectation.
Traditionally, a
seanchaí
would point to this essential absence of self by ending their story with the phrase ‘Sin é mo sgéal-sa! Má tá bréag ann bíodh! Ní mise a chum ná a cheap é.’ ‘That is my story! If there be a lie in it, be it so! It is not I who made or invented it.’
Maeve’s editors were another vital part of the process. She had been brought up a journalist on the old adage, ‘Don’t get it right, get it finished.’ Deadlines are sacrosanct on a newspaper and must be met at all costs. If the words don’t come in, the paper doesn’t go out – and you’re in the firing line. The good
news was that Maeve never had writer’s block. A blank page never frightened a journalist as good as she. But it was up to the editor to get it right, which is no mean feat when faced with a manuscript of 250,000 words as opposed to a feature of a few hundred.
She was aware that people might think she was not a
perfectionist
, but ‘I do not write poetry’, she said, ‘nor have I explored a new form of literature. I tell a story and I want to share it with my readers. I want my books to draw the readers into the tale that is being unfolded.’
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For her the priority was that here was a story that had to be told and she was for anything that would facilitate that process. She’d rarely dig in and have an argument about it. The initial problem her editors had to grapple with was that she was a rotten typist. Her agent, Chris Green, who edited and retyped the whole of
Light a Penny Candle
before sending it to Century, so convinced was she of its potential, recalls that whole sections of words would arrive in the form of anagrams, and there were occasions when even Maeve was unable to decipher what she had written. Green maintained her hands-on editorial
involvement
. In the Binchy archive there is a note from Maeve wishing Rosie, her editor, and Green ‘courage and patience’ as they set about editing
The Glass Lake
(1994).
Carole Baron, who subsequently looked after the editing on the American side, agrees: ‘When Maeve sent in her manuscript her typing was abominable. You could barely read it. You said to yourself, “Oh my God, what am I going to do with this?” And then you started to punctuate it and paragraph it, and the magic
of her words would emerge.’ She recalls that when word
processors
came in, her husband taught Maeve how to ‘cut and paste’, which greatly speeded up her working life.
Speed was an attractive commodity, because it meant that she could feed the publishing monster she was creating more efficiently, but it was also potentially a destructive one. The year 1990 saw publication of
Circle of Friends
(230,000 words), a collection of short stories (
The Storyteller
) and the television film of
The Lilac Bus
. In 1992 came her novel
The Copper Beech
(113,000 words), and in 1993 the
Dublin People
collection of stories. These were followed in 1994 by
The Glass Lake
(289,000 words) and in 1995 the film of
Circle of Friends
. There was also her journalism in the
Irish Times
and elsewhere.
To write a 250,000-word novel involves an enormous amount of energy and stamina. Maeve had to slow down, but was showing no signs of doing so. She seemed to be operating in a different time continuum to everyone else. Her conversation was an enthusiastic, non-stop, generous flow of anecdotes, information and observations, punctuated by quips, queries and conspiratorial asides. It was a wonderful, delightful, endless flow, like her books. But surely the sheer tempo of her working life was bound to take its toll, particularly as in 1997 she was
diagnosed
with ischaemic heart disease (left ventricle dysfunction), which would dog her until her death fifteen years later.
Maeve had been busy, busy, busy all her life since the moment of truth at UCD in the late 1950s, and she couldn’t see that life should be any different. When, one Christmas, five friends quite independently gave her copies of Paul Wilson’s bestselling
self-help book
The Little Book of Calm
, she was for the first time alarmed. She said she couldn’t understand it, she always thought she was
too
calm. ‘How odd to be seen as some kind of tense, clenched fist.’ It made amusing fodder for her hugely popular
Irish Times
column, ‘Maeve’s Week’. But it was a sign that she needed to change.
On the plus side her writing success had given her great
self-belief
and true confidence for the first time in her life. Gordon had helped bring her to it and now served and boosted her psychological equilibrium daily, as did her close friends and her publishers, as her acclaim spread throughout the world. With success came money. She cared nothing for it, but it too was a damn good tick in the box for her psyche.
This was self-esteem quite different to that induced by her mother’s wonderful poetic phrases about her beauty taking the sight out of her eyes. With confidence, success and money came a reduced vulnerability, a toughness which was essential if she was to remain in control of her life.
Now, in her forties, she had achieved the fiscal turnover of a light engineering company and with the encouragement of her publishers and agent had begun to develop a strong sense of responsibility about her place in the enterprise, which was redefining her self and her place in the world.
She had an intuitive approach to decision making now and was unshakeable once she had chosen what to do. Within ‘the enterprise’, nobody was too close a friend to avoid censure, or worse. ‘Once, during the writing of
Firefly Summer
, she got very cross with her agent Chris and me,’ Rosie recalls. Maeve returned
a section of the revised manuscript with a letter attached. ‘I seem to remember that in it she told us she was beginning to think she no longer trusted us to give her the right editorial guidance.’ Fortunately, there was a note from Gordon on top.
It said something like: ‘Under this note you will find a letter from Maeve which you may find upsetting. Pay no attention, girls. You are doing great, keep going.’ After that we named him Director of Morale. He was absolutely marvellous. Without Gordon’s soothing addendum, we would have slit our throats. But it was typical of Maeve that subsequently it became one of the episodes about which we laughed most.
The development was something to celebrate, the final
maturation
point in the existential process to which Maeve had submitted. People now knew that she had ‘an invisible line, which, if you crossed, you became one of the unforgiven,
sometimes
forever,’ as Rosie noted.
Maeve was becoming a very impressive lady indeed. Eventually she found herself capable of tackling head on the brightest and most talented of those she had never suffered gladly. She’d only bother with the brightest. And the wisest of them couldn’t help but admire her style.
Colm Tóibín recalled sitting next to her at the make-up bench prior to a TV chat show. She had leaned across to him and said that she had been meaning to telephone him. During a recent interview in America, she’d been asked who she knew in Dublin and among others she had listed Colm, before realising
that of course she didn’t actually know him. Would he be sure never to let her down in America and say that he didn’t know her, because ‘I mean, that would be awful, wouldn’t it? For me, it would anyway. And I know you wouldn’t do it.’
She had then smiled knowingly and returned to discussing the impossible business of making her face up with the artist who was working on her. Tóibín hadn’t known what to say. In fact, he had looked at himself in the mirror and said nothing, before realising that that had been precisely Maeve’s purpose. An esteemed literary figure in Ireland, Tóibín is a member of Aosdána, a high-blown literary club, membership to which is by invitation only from current members and is limited to 250. Maeve had a loathing for any kind of exclusivity, anything that reeked of snobbery or pretention. Tóibín knew that he had been put down by a real professional, because she had made it seem that she was doing the exact opposite. Maeve had, he wrote, ‘a sort of steely way of not ever being dull’.
‘Steely’ is the word that defined her now, as well as generous, fun and supportive, as she’d always been. ‘Mischievous’ describes how she sometimes went about her steely business. Her friends would not often refer to it, nor was it uppermost in her books or intimated in her public talks or her chats with readers in the signings. But without this steely and mischievous side she wouldn’t have been able to achieve what she did.
A story that she told many times concerned a woman who once stopped her in a London street and asked whether she was Maeve Binchy, because she’d just read her latest book. Maeve replied that yes, she was indeed Maeve Binchy and hoped that
she had enjoyed the book. To her great surprise the woman said that no, she hadn’t in fact enjoyed it at all. When she put it down she felt that she could have written it just as well. To which Maeve replied, ‘But you didn’t, did you?’
It is easy to underestimate what it takes to write fiction with an authentic voice, because the very authenticity conceals all that it has taken to be authentic. The book remainder shops are littered with those who have tried but failed to write like Maeve, because they failed to see that it was the steely or ruthless honesty with which she set about herself from the late 1950s that gave her the vision, made her the authentic article and cleared the way for fate to become an effective element in her life.
On first impressions it was easy to miss Maeve’s tougher side, so warm and generous a person was she. The American publisher Tom Dunne met her by chance in New York, around 1984. Tom was working at the time for St Martin’s Press and the firm had been the under-bidder in the US auction for publishing rights in
Light a Penny Candle
. But it was his then boss, Tom McCormack, who had read the manuscript and been handling the negotiations, and Tom Dunne knew nothing at all about Maeve.
They met at a launch for Egon Ronay’s famous restaurant guide at a hotel in New York, as Tom explains:
I published Egon Ronay in those days and he did a very grand launch of this particular edition of the book at the Pierre. He pulled in four great chefs and foodies from all over the world. It was amazing. As I recall you had sixteen dishes, quite small
– the four chefs presented four dishes each – wine flowed and it went on for hours. So, all these people are gathering at their tables and I look over mine and my eyes fall on the name ‘Maeve Binchy’, which means nothing to me, and I look up and this large lady in a very green dress comes
walking
over, says hello, plonks herself down and we get talking. When I say I work for St Martin’s Press, she says, ‘Oh, say hello to Tom McCormack for me. He was so generous even though he didn’t get the book.’ Now Tom, when reading an author’s manuscript, couldn’t help but edit it as he went along, and later over a drink Maeve handed me all these little notes he’d made on her manuscript. When he didn’t win the auction he’d handed them to her and said, ‘Here, you might find these of use.’ Maeve said, ‘No, I really shouldn’t, they’re yours.’ But Tom, the great fiction editor, insisted, ‘What am I going to do with them?’ Maeve said to me, ‘He was so kind, but I was really quite relieved that he didn’t get the book, because I’d still be revising it!’
We then chatted some more and she said, ‘Now, I do have one problem with a book St Martin’s Press publishes.’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ She said, ‘It’s a disgraceful book.’
‘What on earth is it?’
‘Well, it’s this supposedly humorous book called
Irish Erotic Art
.’
She didn’t think it was funny. She said she thought it was insulting to the Irish people.
There is no such thing in Ireland as Irish erotic art and
Irish Erotic Art
is a blank book – there’s not a word in it. That is the
joke. It became a national bestseller in America. It wasn’t that Maeve didn’t find Irish jokes funny, she actually found them offensive. Tom didn’t know the background but sensed the intensity of her feelings and that their enjoyable conversation could tip at any moment into disaster.
‘I thought, right, here’s a moment when you either do the right thing or the wrong thing and you’re not quite sure until afterwards how what you say will be taken. I looked her straight in the eye and said, “I’ll have you know I wrote that book!”’
There was little laughter, but it edged Maeve back into the comfort zone more effectively than if he’d said, ‘Oh, get over yourself.’
In fact, they went on to become lifelong friends, his last name even to be attached to characters in her novels. With the tension gone, he revelled in Maeve’s speculative analysis of their
neighbours
around their table, each cameo worthy of a place on the starting grid of one of her stories.
So we stayed right till the end, ate the four desserts and drank more wine and champagne. I suppose it was around four in the afternoon by then. And I look at her, and we really are now great pals, and all is forgotten about Irish erotic art, and I turn to her and say, ‘Do you fancy splitting a bottle of
champagne
before we part?’ She says, ‘I’d love to!’ Now she herself has told this story to any number of people, so I don’t mind sharing it with you. Gordon wasn’t with her on the trip. She had been meaning to go to the theatre but didn’t make it. She went upstairs and called him. ‘The first thing I said to
him was,’ she told me, ‘Gordon, we have a new best friend.’ And from that moment we
were
like best friends. I would visit her when I came to London. I used to hole up at a hotel – maybe three of us from St Martin’s Press, meeting English publishers, reading manuscripts, sometimes there’d be long weekends when we didn’t even leave the hotel. It was hard work but highly enjoyable. But I got into the habit of seeing Maeve and Gordon. If they were in London we’d go out to the Mirabelle or some grand place, or I’d hop over to Dublin and stay in Firefly Cottage.
In Dublin they would have these memorable dinners at the round table at Pollyvilla. They were such fun. I remember one occasion, I think it was the first time my friends Hope and Charlie came with me. Maeve invited them over to Dublin too, though they had to stay at the Shelbourne. Others at dinner included the
Irish Times
columnist Mary Maher, the district court judge Mary Kotsonouris, Maeve’s cousin Dan Binchy, himself a writer, and his wife Joy, who are the loveliest and smartest people in the world in many ways, and we had a grand time. The wine, the food – dinner lasted at least five hours – Dan talking faster than Maeve. But the funny thing is I don’t really remember people interrupting the one who was talking. Everybody at some time or other would chime in with something. Dan said, ‘The Irish have learnt to be polite and wait. At a certain point someone has to stop and take a breath. It’s like a slipstream, you get in.’ They quite happily wait for you to take a breath and then the next one jumps in.
The next day we were trudging through the airport back to
London to work, and Hope, who’s a very smart girl, Yale
graduate
, honours and so on, happens to be American, happens to be Jewish – we were all a little hungover, I suppose – says: ‘I want to be Irish!’ I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Last night, the conversation, the people, the stories, the laughter – they were even singing!’ She said, ‘This place is amazing!’
That was Maeve. They showed a picture of the room in Pollyvilla and the round table in the paper after Maeve died and – because we had SUCH good times around that table – I cried.