GUEST PROFILE: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY - Part 4

Being the fourth of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. Read Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

Benjamin Black’s most recent novel, The Lemur, is different from the first two in several respects. It features neither Quirke nor Phoebe nor any of the Dublin gang and is set in contemporary New York. The project was commissioned by the New York Times and it appeared in 1,500-word installments. The prospect of working in a new form – the serial novel – filled Black with giddy revulsion.

“I thought I was going to be writing a piece a week. I was thrilled by that. The challenge of it. I saw myself terrified on a Friday night: I’ve got to have 1,500 words by Monday morning. Of course, being the New York Times, everything had to be finished before they’d publish it.”

For all his disappointment, Black discovered that the rigors of writing on the installment plan, so to speak, had its own rewards. “I would add words and take words away just to get it to exactly 1,500 words. It was a nice challenge to try to do the arc, to know that in 15 sections I would have to finish. That was amusing. I like the technique of writing. Yes, I suppose that would be Black’s strength that he works out of technique.”

The result is the story of a journalist named John Glass who puts his career on hold to write an autobiography about his father-in-law. When the researcher Glass hires (and subsequently nicknames “the Lemur”), to dig into his subject’s past turns up dead (Black has an affinity for naming his novels after the character who spends the bulk of the book as a corpse), Glass is thrust into the role of the reluctant detective.

In terms of atmosphere and mood, The Lemur, a strikingly different novel from its predecessors, but The Lemur is similar to the Quirke books in one very important respect: once his protagonist gets involved in the case all signs point to his own extended family to which he is bound by honor but not blood. The tension between these conflicting forces propels the narrative forward. The stories are whodunits to be sure, but the families to which Glass and Quirke belong are much murkier and more mysterious than any criminal organization that Black could credibly conjure up.

In the Richard Stark novels, Parker is the ultimate outsider, but once he starts planning a caper, his gang functions as a kind of surrogate family. This is something that Quentin Tarantino uses to great effect in his films. In Black’s novels, the opposite holds true: his family is the gang. Unlike Simenon’s novels, in which the author professes not to know where the story is going or how it will end, Stark’s Parker novels are formulaic, technique-driven affairs. It is, perhaps, a limitation of the sub-genre of heist stories and caper flicks. What makes Parker so striking is his seriousness, his complete lack of humor, which is a departure from Donald Westlake’s other books, where he is always going for the joke.

“Stark doesn’t do jokes,” Black says.

Precisely. But what is Mr. Black consciously not doing that Mr. Banville does?

“Banville is obsessed by sentences. Flaubert’s mother said about her son that he threw away his life for a mania for sentences. That’s what we do, you know. If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings I would say the sentence. I spent three, three-and-a-half hours the other day writing a paragraph. Black couldn’t do that. What you get with Banville is the result of concentration; what you get with Black is the result of spontaneity.”

He pauses, looks at the ceiling. The skylight reveals neither sky nor light, a portal into gloom. It’s still raining, still dark. It is nearly noon. My time is nearly over and neither one of us is sure who is being interviewed: Banville or Black.

“What John Banville writes is disguised poetry. You know, I think of my novels as a long sequence of… sonnets. Really. I can’t write poetry that has ragged ends on the page. My friend John McGahern always said, There’s verse, there’s prose, and then there’s poetry. Poetry can happen in either. Since we’re both novelists we agreed that it happens much more often in prose than it does in verse. But again, one has to be aware that there’s nothing more off-putting than “poetic prose.” You have to achieve a kind of harsh music to make poetic prose real. And the poet I look to constantly for that is Yeats. The older I get the more I read Yeats. His poetry is extraordinary. I keep reading him over and over. That harsh music that he gets is wonderful.”

For the moment, Benjamin Black is on vacation from his writing desk while John Banville finishes a book that he started in 2004—The Sinking City—with many interruptions.

“I’ve got to finish it now because it climbs slowly up, you know the feeling, and it’s got me by the throat, and it’s saying, Finish me, finish me. So that’s an obsession. I think becoming Benjamin Black was a way of doing that because the John Banville book that I’m doing at the moment is very personal. It’s quite different from its predecessors. Well, personal in that I’m the only material that I have. Everyone in the book is me, but it’s not autobiographical except that all fiction is autobiographical, except the autobiographical.”

Banville, Black, whoever it is that sits before me is clearly enjoying these Jekyll & Hyde shenanigans, but I take the bait, and ask him to tell me more about the book.

“It’s set in the countryside in a house, as usual, on a midsummer day. It’s about a family. The father of the family is in a coma and is dying but his mind is working. There is a first person, which is the god Hermes, and when I told my publisher this he said, 'Oh, yes, John, another crowd pleaser.' ”

The hour is over. The author asks if I have any more questions. I close my notebook and ask if he recommends the Joyce Museum at the Martello Tower in Sandycove. Banville frowns.

“It’s worth going to, but don’t expect very much. It’s his walking stick and his waistcoat, his this and his that. But you look at them and they’re just lying there because there’s nobody inside them. Nobody uses them. They’ve become completely inert. There’s no presence. Curiously, when you go to museums and you look at gold amulets from 2,000 years ago, they’re alive, precisely because they’re anonymous. When you see something that somebody actually owned it’s always completely dead because the person who owned it leaves an absence in the object.”

And with that, the author takes his leave. As I gather my belongings, I notice that Mr. Banville has left his hat and umbrella on the cold hearth. Or perhaps they belong to Mr. Black. In any case, they seem anything but inert.

A few days later, I go to the Tower that every reader of Ulysses visits on its opening pages. The Museum is even shabbier than expected, the items on display feel picked over, scavenged. Banville, or maybe it was Black, was right. The place feels dead, funereal, and not even the view from the top of the Tower is enough to lift my spirits.

But before leaving Dublin I dutifully *ahem* stop by McDaid’s for a bit of the water of life. McDaid’s is a whiskey bar and I sampled some twelve-year-old Power’s, a brand that was once more popular than either Jameson’s or Bushmills.

The atmosphere is warm and cheerful and the pub is filled with locals who don’t pay any attention to me. In the back of the bar, on the way to the gents, is a snug where a blokey-looking fellow holds court with an attractive young lady. They are dressed for a night on the town but there is carnality about their affection that suggests they’re still in the grip of last night’s fun.

The man next to me tells an impolite joke I don’t catch but his companions laugh. Someone adds their own bit of wit to the punch line and the laughter expands, convulsive and contagious until the harsh music overtakes the pub, fills it with life. I imagine we are all characters in the next Benjamin Black novel and there’s no other place in the world I want to be.

(Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

Comments

[Rory O'Connor]

Can I just say, as a Dubliner, that this makes me very very bored? You didn't extract one new piece of information from Banville, and I feel very sorry for him having to put up with such uninspired questioners ALL THE TIME. OK, maybe he doesn't want to part with any new insights, and the metabolised feeling is all in the novels, but couldn't you at least TRY?

Good photo of the gloom of Dublin, though, and it really is like that. I only found that alleyway from pt 2 or 3 the other day, so it was well spotted.

[JW]

Well, as an avid reader of Banville who lives in Orange County, I enjoyed your glimpses of a city I've yet to visit and the way you managed to interview both writers (Banville and Black). I was not expecting a deconstruction of the work or the writer, such as the commenter above may have been. My experience lends me to believe writers can often be the hardest to interview if the interviewer is trying to understand how the bezels, springs and dials work, as opposed to discussing how and why the writer tells time.

I, for one, enjoyed the segments and look forward to more of this kind of reportage here at TEV. Happy Holidays!

[Rory O'Connor]

If you're a true Banville reader you SHOULD be expecting a deconstruction of the work! Maybe I'm wrong to get annoyed at the usual puff pieces, but I've read this piece fifty times in fifty newspapers!

Also I was a bit twee-Irishy in saying Dublin is "like that". It's like that becauase the world is like that.

[JW]

I don't think you're wrong - I'd love to delve deeper into his work. But I'm sure an hour of tea would not even begin to yield his genius, which is why I don't think it's necessary to critique what wasn't probed.

[Rory O'Connor]

Yeah, you're on the ball, peace out