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Delaney’s odyssey

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

“They were in a terrible condition,” he recalled of those men he saw leaning against walls in small-town Tipperary and Limerick. “A lot of them never worked again.”
As a small boy, he’d ask his parents what was wrong with them.
“We never knew about it growing up,” he said of his own generation. But the author learnt something of the Great War from his mother, a schoolteacher like his father. She was born in 1903, so, he said, she was at a very perceptive age when the war was raging in Europe.
The American intervention in that conflict was decisive and nowhere more so than at Belleau Wood. There, the Marines had an incalculable impact on European history by blocking the Germans’ pathway to Paris in 1918.
Delaney’s latest novel has Robert Shannon, a traumatized Irish-American chaplain from that battle, land in Tarbert, Co. Kerry, in 1922 just as the Civil War forces were massing troops in Limerick.
Shannon — who gives his name to the third in the series of historical novels following “Ireland” and “Tipperary” — is a protagonist “in jeopardy with a history of jeopardy,” Delaney said.
Travel, if the sufferer was capable of it, was a treatment for shellshock. It was thought that “he had to get himself together.”
The priest knows nothing about Ireland and its problems, though is soon to learn that the combatants on both sides were former comrades like his Marines.
Twenty years on, the Civil War was still a factor in Munster. Delaney, who was born in October 1942, pointed out that many of its veterans were still in early middle age when he was an infant.
That war, in which brother fought against brother, father against son, uncle against nephew, had produced, the author said, an “unusual level of bitterness and brutality.”
Meanwhile the World War veterans had “gone through hell and were kind of reviled when they came back,” he said.
“There was a shame attached to it. We were duped,” Delaney said. “We enlisted in great numbers in return of the promise of our own government, Home Rule.”
That promise was made to John Redmond leader of the nationalists at Westminster, because the Irish were known to be the best soldiers.
Delaney quoted Field Marshal Montgomery who said during World War II: “You always keep the Irish for the killing.”
The author added: “I’ve been to villages in Northern Ireland, I’ve been villages in the Northwest, where after the Great War, the oldest male was a boy of under 12.”
Asked to explain the continuing fascination for the 1914-18 conflict, Delaney said that its horror has never been fully digested. The World War was quickly followed by the 1939-45 conflict, an even greater calamity for humanity, which obscured the earlier war.
Delaney — who also written novels about the Holocaust and is now working his way through the Irish 20th century a decade or so at a time — argued that in historical fiction the balance between fact and invention has to be right.
“It’s almost an exact science,” he said. “You select carefully facts that support your fictional position.
“You really do use the facts to drive the narrative of the fiction – it’s quite tricky,” he added.
He spent long days in the National Library in Dublin getting the details right on the kind of meals, for instance, people ate in the 1920s.
“There’s a lot of sandwiches; there’s a lot of porridge; there’s a lot of bacon and cabbage,” he reported. “I made as many notes from the advertisements as I did from the articles.
“If you’re to be authentic as a historical novelist, your reader has to hear the nation breathing at the time in which the book is set,” Delaney said.
Some of the material he has found over the years shocked him. He recalled that, when researching an earlier novel set in the 1920s, “The Sins of the Mothers,” he was struck by the high incidence of suicide in the Irish countryside.
The word was never used. “Man found in fatal accident with gun” was one typical euphemism.
“Every single week, in the Clonmel Nationalist or the Tipperary Star out of Thurles, there was one or two of these,” he said.
The victims were often men who couldn’t support their families during hard times.
This delving into the past was, more generally, part of the culture he grew up in. There was only the present and the past. “My mother’s father told great stories. He was an enchanting man,” he said.
The novelist’s father had successful sideline as an essayist and humorist, and his work was compiled in best-selling books. So the process of writing was part of his childhood.
Now when he’s back home in Ireland, it is to do research and fact-checking in the National Library for his own books, and to visit family. “I have one son in London. I’ve another son in the Midlands of Ireland, and I’ve a third son, and daughter-in-law and granddaughter in the West of Ireland in County Galway,” he said. He also does readings when at home. Last November, he did a speaking tour of County Tipperary libraries to discuss his novel “Tipperary.”
However, Delaney and his wife Diane Meier divide most of their time between homes in Manhattan, where she has a marketing business, and Litchfield County, Connecticut.
“I was living alone in England for a long time,” Delaney said. After the events of Sept. 11, 2001, he and Meier, who had been a platonic friend since the early 1990s, both began to look at their lives. “She was the person in the world I got on best with, and I was the person, she says, she got on best with. And it seemed perfectly sensible.”
The main reason the couple decided on the U.S. rather than London was her dog, which they didn’t want to put in quarantine.
This phase of his life has seen him take on more fully the role of full-time author.
From about age of 8 or 9, after reading Robert Louis Stephenson and books like “Swiss Family Robinson” being a fulltime writer was the only real ambition he had.
“There was never any chance I was going to be anything else,” he said.
Delaney’s first venture into the adult world of work, however, was as a bank clerk in Dublin. “I was in the bank 11 years, four days, nine hours, 31 minutes,” he said.
“I did a lot of amateur and semiprofessional theatricals around the country and in Dublin for quite a long time,” he remembered. “I also did quite a lot of freelance broadcasting.”
“I was always very, very energetic – my evenings were filled, my weekends were filled with that kind of work,” he said.
Delaney left his day job to become a RTE newsreader, and after that, while remaining in the Irish capital, a BBC reporter at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Then he moved to England, where made his name making and presenting programs on the arts. His first book “James Joyce’s Odyssey” was published in 1979. He is also well-known for the companion book to the TV series “The Celts.” He has now more than 20 non-fiction and fiction titles to his name.
His other two main jobs have provided the ideal preparation for his writing career, he believes.
Because of his years in the bank, he looks at writing as a business, and he utilizes work practices and disciplines he learned there.
“My broadcasting career taught me, especially in the BBC, where I was being produced by some of the best brains in the country, about how to communicate with people — what you have to do whether it’s broadcasting, whether it’s writing.”
He also learnt in broadcasting that one had to respect one’s audience.
“That’s been hugely helpful,” he said. “So that when I sit down to write, that is uppermost in my mind. It’s a means of respecting my audience, giving them value for money, but above all giving them emotional value for money. If they have invested emotions in this book, then it’s up to me to see that their investment pays off.”
Delaney continued: “A friend of mine has said that ‘from day one you were completely focused on where you going.’ He said: ‘You told me when you were 25 years old’ — he’s a year younger than me — ‘that when I was retiring you would be making your living as a full-time writer and really, probably only at the beginning of your career.'”
Added Delaney laughing: “It’s a kind of madness.”

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