Niall Williams - History of the Rain

There is a scene I love where a brother and sister meet after many years and little communication. They meet in an arranged café in mid-afternoon. The light is dying and the city outside rumbles softly in the complacent time before rush hour. The café is unexceptional and quiet. She comes first, sits at the far end, a table facing the door, nervous in her buttoned raincoat. The waiter is an older man. He leaves her be. The brother enters late with the look but not the words of apology. He kisses her cheek. They sit and the old man brings them teas they do not want, two pots, strong for him weak for her. It is long ago since they said each other’s names aloud, and saying them now has the extraordinary shyness of encounter I imagine on the Last Day. At first there is the full array of human awkwardness. But here is the thing: almost in an instant their old selves are immediately present. The years and the changes are nothing. They need few words. They recognise each other in each other, and even in silence the familiarity is powerfully consoling, because despite time and difference there remains that deep-river current, that kind of maybe communion that only exists within people joined in the word family . So now what washes up between them, foam-white and fortifying and quite unexpectedly, is love.

I cannot remember what book it is in. But it’s in this one now.

Writing of course is a kind of sickness. Well people don’t do it. Art is basically impossible. Edna O’Brien said she was surprised Van Gogh only cut off one ear. Robert Lowell said what he felt was a blazing out , flashes, nerve jabs in the moments the poem was coming. I myself have had no blazing out, and don’t suppose it’s all that good for your constitution. To stop himself from taking off into the air Ted Hughes had to keep repeating over and over Beneath my feet is the earth, some part of the surface of the earth . The thing is, writing is a sickness only cured by writing. That’s the impossible part.

Once he had started proper, my father never stopped. He was always writing. That’s what I understand now. There was no rest, no pause. It was not that he only wrote when the dishes were cleaned and cleared away in the evening, when he went off alone to the table in the pool of lamplight. It was not that he only wrote when he had the pencil in his hand. It was that whatever part of his brain brought the rhythms and the sounds, whatever part of his mind saw things in the everyday not-really-beauty that was here around our land and the river, that part had clicked On and gotten stuck. There are two things, Tommy Devlin says, that are the mark of genius: one is non-stop buzzing in the brain, the other seeing the next move when there is no next move. He was speaking about Jamesie O’Connor hurling for Clare back in the day but the non-stoppedness is right. There’s seeing in it, and there’s transformation. Things are seen differently to what they are. Not that they are always better or brighter necessarily. It’s not like Bridie Clohessy whose vision was blurry coming from WeightWatchers and mistook Declan Donahue for the Archangel Michael, or Sheila Shanley who took a notion after her husband died, woke one morning and decided to paint everything Buttermilk, walls, windows, stairs, threw out everything she owned that was not a creamy off-white, and became a one-woman effulgence show. Sometimes things are darker, worse, and with inexplicable torment you hear the gulls, whose complaints are complex and constant when they come in over Cappa with cries crazy it seems from banishment.

I didn’t understand that my father’s brain could not rest, or that when he was out in the fields, driving us to town, or sitting to tea, all the time there were words, rhythms, running like one of those programs that don’t shut off somewhere in the back of the computer. All the time there was gathering this sense of mission.

Once people got to hear about it in the mystical way that people of Faha can hear a person taking off their underpants and are the ne plus ultra in the Intelligence & Surveillance league, once word was out that Virgil Swain was writing poetry, there were two immediate first reactions; the men’s: that it was his own fault for marrying Mary MacCarroll; the women’s: her own fault for marrying The Stranger. But after that initial wave had passed a third reaction came and endured, a quiet awe and respect reserved for someone who had chosen such a serene and perfectly impractical career as that of Poet. We’re like that as a people. We can’t help but admire a bit of madness. Even Tommy McGinley was quietly admired despite the kind of hit-on-the-head mouth-open expression he got from eating cork, after hearing on RTE it was the main ingredient in Viagra, and not what they actually said, that the main ingredient was made in Cork. No, in Faha a bit of madness is all right. So, people started giving us books, books they had read and ones they knew they would never read, books that were left to them, books that were bought because they were the cheapest things at church sales, books that came free with newspapers, books that were found in trunks and attics whose titles and binding and print combined to say this is a serious book and to which the finders in our parish invariably responded by thinking: Virgil Swain.

‘This is a book for an intelligent man,’ JJ said, handing over Yeats’s Essays and Introductions (Book 2,222, Macmillan, London) before sitting a while in our kitchen, big hands on his knees, genial eyes smiling and that kind of lovely old-fashioned gentle courtesy you can find in the older people in Faha. After a time he nodded to the fire and added, ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had a poet.’

Of course my father hadn’t exactly chosen poetry. But it was always rising in him; that’s what you get if you read your Abraham Swain and know your The Salmon in Ireland .

At first I didn’t even know that it was poetry. Dad was working, that’s all. I knew it was writing, and I knew it was humming. When you’re young you’re protected by a cloud of vagueness. How our whole household actually worked, how the farming progressed, how many bread loaves were baked and sold, eggs trayed and delivered, how in fact we survived at all — I had no idea. I never wondered, never asked. I may have heard a cow had died, a pine marten had raided our hens, that the car was resting this week, but because Mam was basically Genius Level Ten at guarding her children I never computed these facts, never added them up with Nan mending our mended clothes, Aeney’s trouser legs being let down and let down until they couldn’t be let down any more, fish for dinner again, or the large earthenware jar of coins my mother kept in the window.

Then one day the cloud lifted. In Miss Brady’s class I answered that my father was a writer.

‘Really? That’s wonderful, Ruth.’

I had said it out loud for the first time, a writer , and felt a little ascension myself.

‘Where are his books so?’ God-forgive-me, the Bitch of the Brouders asked, because her father, Saddam, was our leading celebrity and she wasn’t going to be dethroned from Best Father.

I had no answer, Ascension Ends with Crash Landing running in a Breaking News banner across my forehead. Then Miss Brady said, ‘You can be working on a book and be a writer.’

But later when I was standing alone in the yard and trying hard To Look Normal Jane Brouder crossed over with that hideous Anne Jane Monaghan who had only added her middle Jane out of some Cool Girls thing, who believed herself the model for Miss Perfect in the Mr Men series but who I voted Girl Most Likely to Be Lady Macbeth, who later, after her mother had paid a dozen tutors to more or less crow-bar off the top of her head and stuff everything they knew in there, got six As in her Leaving and is now in teacher-training polishing her dictator skills.