In late 2009 I paid a visit to the Galway home of Man Booker Prize
runner-up, John Arden. Less than three years before his sad passing, he was good enough to spare some time to speak with me about what turned our to be his last collection of stories Gallows - Tales of
Suspicion and Obsession.
There’s a
man with a Palestinian flag on Shop Street. He’s 60 if he’s a day and
when the rain falls on the happy shoppers of Galway, he usually gets wet.
There are men and women who spend each weekend at Shannon Airport,
counting airplanes as they traffic in and out and engage in uneasy
staring-matches with guards through iron fences.
They are
people who are placed, or place themselves, on the edge of what most
people see as ‘normal’ society. People who sooner or later will pay some
price for that placement.
For the last four decades, John
Arden has lived in relative obscurity on Ireland’s west coast. After
exploding onto the literary scene in the late 1950s, Arden was quickly
hailed as one of the visionary playwrights of that era and was even
christened Britain’s Brecht.
But all truths must eventually
out and Arden’s unwillingness to keep quiet about his opposition to the
British military machine and their presence in Ireland soon brought
about a number of high profile falling-outs with the British theatre
establishment. And that, as they say, was that.
Now,
as he prepares to turn 80, he is about to release his most substantial
collection of work in years. Set in Galway, London and Yorkshire,
Gallows is a collection of short stories that attempt to lift the
carpet of polite society and peer at the goings-on in the underbelly of
life.
“It’s not deliberate, you know. It’s just what happens
when you write short stories over a period of years. The themes really
are subconscious. It’s only after [the story] is written that I realise
what the underlying theme might be,” he says.
“It think it
reflects in some ways how I have been feeling over the last number of
years. I call the book Tales of Suspicion and Obsession and we do live a
society that is full of that. Everybody is complaining about somebody
else - very often there is good reason. Nobody trusts the authorities
any longer. The government, such as it is, is derided on all sides and
not believed. How many people actually believe what a cabinet minister
says anymore? They used to believe them, you know. These type of themes
just seem to get into my writing, whether I want them to or not.”
After
finding much of his early success as a playwright - both for stage and
radio - Arden forced his way back into mainstream success with his 1982
novel, Silence Among the Weapons, which was shortlisted for the Man
Booker Prize.
His latest work, a collection of short stories, represents another shift in medium but perhaps not a change in style or method.
“It’s
an interesting idea because there are two very different schools of
thought about writing short stories. A lot of people think about short
stories as one single episode or event - they are not very concerned
about plot, they are much more interested in working on the character.
They are very often mood pieces,” he continues.
“My approach
is much different. A few years ago, I had a job with the BBC, adapting a
series of short stories by Wilkie Collins for the radio. He called his
short stories ‘little novels’ and that is what they were - they had a
beginning, a middle and an end. That, in a way, is what I have tried to
do. They are short but they are structurally not unlike a novel. There
are many characters and a lot of action but the thing is not to fuss and
bother too much about the trappings of description and things like
that.”
Gallows is a black comedy, especially black considering
Arden’s constant exploration of the strife for social justice and his
admission that he just doesn’t do happy endings.
“It’s not so
much that I don’t do happy endings; it’s more that I’m just not bothered
by them. If a happy ending crops up, then I would write it but most of
the stories in the book don’t have a defined ending. When I say I have
given the story a beginning, a middle and an end, I mean I have given it
an end to that plot. But I don’t end the stories by giving an assurance
to the reader that everything is going to be okay, that everyone who
has been in trouble in the story isn’t going to be in trouble anymore.
That just doesn’t happen in life, does it?,” he says.
“In
life, people have difficulties and, after a while, if they are lucky,
they surmount them. Then they carry on for a while and they have more
difficulties which crop up from a different ending. This doesn’t mean
that they can’t be positive stories - I don’t make a point of going for
the miserable ending either. Quite a lot of the stories end on a
question mark - what will they do next?
“Interestingly, for
this book I have been drawing pictures. Having finished the stories, I
started painting all these little pictures to illustrate them. The
painting is a very different creative exercise. I hadn’t done it in
ages; it was just something I found myself doing over the last 18 months
and I very much enjoyed it.
“But my writing process hasn’t
changed much over the years. When I’m writing, I’m writing and it’s the
same process that I’ve always done. I try to do a little bit every day
and I still enjoy it.”
This interview was first published in The Clare People Newspaper in October of 2009.
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