Dipping the Pen Nib Into Tragedy

“It meant not constantly trying to get readers to feel pity for my characters, which was what I’d been doing for way too long.”

A couple of weeks ago, an American writer friend emailed asking me to take part in a project she’d devised, a sort of poetry sharing circle—or “poetry pyramid scheme,” as a mutual friend later described it—in which everyone participating would send “an encouraging quote or verse” to another participant. The thing we sent out, be it a poem, a text, a prayer, or a meditation, was to be something which we ourselves found a help in challenging times. The hope, presumably, was to get a wealth of consoling and uplifting language out there, and sitting at my computer in a hotel room in Dublin, where I had traveled to take part in an event for James Joyce’s birthday, I thought this was a very nice idea indeed. I thought, “I’ll do this, definitely.” I thought how glad I was to have the chance to send something like this to my randomly assigned fellow pyramid schemer, who was a writer I really admired.

And then I remembered. I don’t know a word of heartening poetry. I don’t know a word of heartening anything. I’d just flown three thousand miles to pay homage to the writer who had made it impossible to look at snow without thinking of the descent of the last end of all the living and the dead (although, admittedly, he also did some good things with the word “yes”). I wasn’t going to have anything suitable to add to the project. All the poems I love are completely bloody miserable, maudlin as all get-out; precious to me because of the pangs of bleakness and sorrow they set going as reliably as a long-hoarded regret. In my writing notebook from when I was seventeen (I keep everything; mopey hoarders do), I copied down many such verses, the star of them—circled and underlined for emphasis—a line from Derek Mahon’s “Dream Days”:

But the weeks go by
Like birds; and the years, the years
Fly past anti-clockwise
Like clock hands in a bar mirror.

1996 was a cheerful little year for me, obviously.

It was this realization a couple of years ago—of my own maudlin-ass tendencies—that comprised the closest thing I’ve had to a turning point as a writer. I’d just finished my first novel, in which—not to put too fine a point on it—I’d killed off two of the central characters, in no small part for the sweet rush of melancholy with which it allowed me to inject the story. I was beginning my second, and I found myself reaching for the Death button again and again. The quickest way to a reader’s heart, the Irish tradition has taught its writers, is to make something terrible and poignant happen to your characters, and to fill the spaces they leave after them with a great deal of mournfulness and heartbreakingly stolid wisdom; it’s easy, you don’t have to deal with them anymore, and you even get to make readers cry.

I’m not saying I’ve shaken this tendency off entirely, or even all that much, actually. I can’t resist a good character homicide when the mood really gets hold of me; it’s just so satisfying, dipping the pen nib into tragedy, into the cruel onward march of time. But I’ve tried to resist it, having become keenly conscious of how unthinking an instinct it has been for me for so long. I’m not trying to write happier fiction; that would be madness entirely. But fiction which doesn’t reach for the lowest-hanging sadness levers, which doesn’t borrow automatically from the atmosphere of a particularly miserable Irish funeral; something like that. With Tender, I wanted to venture as fully as I could into the territory of who the characters were, of what their deepest selves were like—the selves they would want to keep hidden from one another, maybe, or even from themselves; and that meant, frankly, keeping them alive, even if I suspected that readers might like them more if they were all tragic and lost and grieved over. The myriad ways in which people grieve for one another while still alive, and in which they use that grief against one another, trying to get things from one another; that was what I was more interested in, I realized. It meant staying in life, in all its messiness, and bringing the writing right into the grain of the central character’s consciousness, so that there could be no way to depend on the power of the unspoken, of the beautifully spare. It meant not constantly trying to get readers to feel pity for my characters, which was what I’d been doing for way too long, I realized, because pity was a shortcut to what felt like connection and engagement, but was actually just a Pavlovian twitch. I wanted, instead, to get at what Elizabeth Bowen (whose The Last September was like a shadow-presence in the writing of Tender) was talking about when she said “Pity the selfishness of lovers . . . it is impossible.”

I still don’t have a happy poem. Who does?