BishopAccountability.org
	Of Pain and Gain By Assaf Uni Haaretz June 5, 2009 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090678.html DUBLIN - This is not Ireland's finest hour. After more than a decade of economic growth that bestowed much money and optimism upon the inhabitants of the Emerald Isle, the tide seems to be turning. The construction sector has collapsed completely. Skeletons of abandoned buildings line Dublin's canals, plastic sheeting flaps in the gusty Atlantic wind, scaffolding rusts in the salty air. The big banks are teetering on the brink of nationalization; the swelling national debt is liable to drive the country into bankruptcy soon. Prices are rising, wages are being cut, tens of thousands have been laid off, and the media is filled with reports about new taxes to be levied on homeowners and ordinary working folk. Within this general atmosphere of gloom, old pains are again surfacing: Last month a government report was published, following a nine-year investigation, stating that tens of thousands of Irish boys and girls had been subjected to physical and sexual abuse in boarding schools run by the Catholic Church in Ireland over the last 70 years. What had been trickling out since the 1980s in personal stories in this vein has welled into a flood that threatens to drown Ireland in a torrent of rage and shame. The press is calling on the Church to ask for forgiveness, and the victims are exploding in a violent way in the media.? So who has labeled Anne Enright's books "too dark?" "After I won the Booker," says the Irish writer, whose fourth novel, "The Gathering" won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2007, "there was a feeling of, 'Oh no, not another Irish book about suffering.' [The book deals, among other themes, with the impact of sexual abuse on a large Irish family.] I was asked, "Can't we already get beyond all this misery?" The feeling was that if anyone shows an interest in coping with the deep problems of the Irish society he is performing an act of betrayal. The question seemed to be: 'Isn't all this behind us, now that we have so much money?'" Well, perhaps the money is gone now, but the problems remain in Ireland. Enright: "There were always stories, but we were exposed to them in bits and pieces, over time." "It started at the end of the 1970s, when the victims started to talk on the radio, and continued into the 1980s and 1990s, when they appeared on television and in the media, but it was never portrayed like this: 70 years of systematic abuse. Last week I came home and found my husband [actor and director Martin Murphy] preparing to read the whole report on the Internet. In the taxi on the way home, however, when I wanted to hear what the commentators on the radio were saying, the driver turned off the radio. What they were saying was too horrible." Tough language On Sundays, the shoreline of Bray, the affluent Dublin suburb where Enright lives with Murphy and their two children, fills up with Eastern European and Baltic nationals who in recent years have flocked to Ireland in search of work. Lithuanian, Polish and Estonian can be heard among those sitting at the wooden tables laden with beer outside the pubs. It's already after 8 P.M., but the sun is just starting to set and the air is only now beginning to cool off. Enright arrives for the interview in a whirlwind. It had completely slipped her mind and her husband had to drive her straight there from a family outing at the beach, with the two children in the back seat. "We took the children to the sea," she says. "We went into the water, but they didn't. It was too cold for them. Would you believe that my seven-year-old daughter told me, "I can't wait to dip my toes in the Mediterranean?!" The family in general, and hers included, is an institution whose intense feelings and secrets Enright likes to probe. In 2005 she published a kind of diary about her experiences as a new mother, entitled "Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood," written when her children were sleeping; she also writes regularly about family-related issues in the Irish media. "People must be saying that maybe it's enough already - all this dealing with your children," she says with a burst of laughter, one of many such eruptions that punctuate the conversation. Enright blazes with energy and has a sharp tongue. In "The Gathering," which has just come out in Hebrew, the prime preoccupation of the protagonists and the narrator is a case of sexual abuse in a family. The book was a surprise winner of the Booker two years ago, beating out highly regarded rivals, including Ian McEwan's "On Chesil Beach." To read "The Gathering" is to plunge into the bewildered, pain-filled, misunderstood - but rife with black humor - world of Veronica Hegarty, one of 12 children, who is struggling to understand how an episode of sexual abuse in the past affected Liam, the sibling she had been closest to, who at the beginning of the novel enters the sea with his pockets filled with stones and drowns himself. It is an attempt to understand "the reason we were all so fucked up and so very much here," in the words of Veronica, who is somewhat unhappily married and the mother of two daughters on whose love she depends. During the days leading up to her brother's funeral, she recalls an unclear image of Liam being sexually abused by a longtime suitor of their grandmother. "Veronica does not actually know anything," Enright says, diving straight into the serious depths of her novel, in contrast to the jovial, inebriated atmosphere around us. "From the start, she is a witness to something; she does not take part, does not experience it. She is not exactly undergoing abuse. She doesn't know, because she does not have the words to describe what she saw. She saw a strange scene, but has no way to say what it is, really. Only after there is a discussion of sexual abuse on the radio does she understand what that scene was. She is in a stage of denial. I think that rejection is an automatic stage that precedes deep knowledge. That is the stage Veronica undergoes." "Over the next 20 years the world around us changed," Veronica relates in the book, recalling the scene she saw, "but I never would have made that shift alone if I hadn't been listening to the radio, and reading the paper, and hearing about what went on in schools and churches and in people's homes. It went on slap-bang in front of me and still I did not realize it. And for this, I am very sorry, too." Enright: "When I wrote 'The Gathering,' I very deliberately did not deal with the Catholic Church, because that was so easy, so ideologically developed. Naturally I thought about it, but abuse by priests was too familiar, too available, too engraved in the Irish way of life. I wanted Veronica not to be certain, and when you talk about sexual abuse in the Church, you really cannot talk about being uncertain." From the outset, the author explains, she was drawn to write about a character who "disappears" in a large family - a not-uncommon phenomenon in Catholic Ireland. "We came out of her on each other's tails; one after the other, as fast as a gang-bang, as fast as an infidelity," the heroine Veronica says about her birth, adding that her parents "were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit." And she adds: "All big families are the same. I meet them sometimes at parties or in pubs, we announce ourselves and then we grieve ... the dead first, then the lost, and then the mad. There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child. There is always a colossal success, with several houses in various countries to which no one is ever invited. There is a mysterious sister." Veronica's family, too, is rife with such characters - all of whom meet at the brother's funeral. Anne Enright is not Veronica Hegarty, but to hear the character speak is to witness the ability of the Irish writer "to suspend fragments of situations and see close-up and in high resolution things that few writers are capable of seeing," as Prof. Menahem Peri, the chief editor of the New Library publishing house, under whose imprint "The Gathering" appears in Hebrew, writes in his blurb. The chairman of the judges of the Man Booker Prize described the book as "an unflinching look at a grieving family in tough and striking language." Ready for success Anne Enright was born in 1962, the youngest of five children. She still lives quite close to her parents, who are now in their eighties. She graduated from Trinity College in London with a degree in English and philosophy, and received a prestigious scholarship for a creative writing program at the University of East Anglia. In her twenties she worked for several years as a television producer on a comic program broadcast by the Irish state channel. That was a period, she recalls, when she "worked 70-80 hours a week and partied every night, which didn't leave me all that much time for writing." Finally she had a nervous breakdown. "Whatever it was, I was uptight and not functioning," Enright explains. Afterward, she decided to concentrate on writing books. "I always knew I loved to write. I was actually looking for a more authentic way 'to be' and I found writing. But I am not sure that writing is a more authentic way of being. Don't tell anyone, okay? Especially not everyone who says 'I want to leave my job, I want to write something true.' Writers lie all the time. I don't know how 'true' it is." Aren't you looking for truth in what you write? "Well, I suppose I am. You're right. In any case, it's really a life of great privilege, a writer's life. As long as you can make a living from it." Winning the Booker freed Enright from economic concerns - in addition to the honor, it carries a cash award of 50,000 pounds - and made her a public figure, sometimes to her chagrin. Sales of the book leaped from fewer than 4,000 before the prize announcement to more than a quarter of a million in Britain thereafter (with a similar number sold in the United States). The book has since been translated into dozens of languages. But the spotlight that went along with receiving the prize was also trained on an article she published in the London Review of Books (LRB)12 days before her win was announced - her response to the disappearance of four-year-old Madeleine McCann while on vacation with her parents in Portugal. Even though that article is rife with complex, contradictory emotions ("I disliked the McCanns earlier than most people," was a comment that drew headlines), the media's coverage created a fairly hostile picture of Enright. A few columnists even called for her book to be boycotted. The tabloids did not have to dig deep to dredge up the story of her depression in the wake of her breakdown, and even mentioned her stay in a psychiatric hospital. Asked if she thinks people should know about her depression to better understand her novels, Enright shifts uncomfortably in her chair. "Well, from one point of view, the fact that I wrote in 'Making Babies' about the collapse and the depression I went through led a few journalists to turn my life into just a cardboard cutout. But even in retrospect, I am happy I talked about my depression. My desire was to help. To give people who have experienced depression an opportunity to understand, especially the usefulness of letting the time go by. The truth is, I didn't know whether to publish it or not. I asked myself: If you died, would you want it to be published? And the answer was clearly yes. It was hard, but the situation itself revolved around an inward turn and an inability to turn outward, so I think it benefited me to write about it." Were you prepared to deal with success? "Yes. All writers are ready for success. They will be lying if they tell you otherwise. Success is particularly pleasurable if you expect it for a long time. Every book you finish writing, you think it will be amazing and will have a dizzying success; by the same degree, you also think it is not really perfect. For me it would have made no difference - I felt I could go on writing for my whole life. It is a good life. It is a good thing to do." What has success changed for you? "People now listen to what I say," she smiles. "It's not so convenient and interferes considerably with life. Suddenly at parties people want to talk to me and hear what I have to say about the world. It's quite strange. It's more or less what happened with the column about the McCann couple, though in that case people did not even listen properly to what I said. In any event, it has nothing to do with me. If the world is crazy, that is not my fault. I have learned enough to know how to express myself and how not to express myself in the public arena. To tell the truth, winning the prize might have changed my days, but it has not really changed my life." Enright spent much of the past year on a worldwide promotional tour for "The Gathering": "In the past year I spent 63 nights without my family" ("In 2008 I spent, on a rough count, 64 nights away from my family," she wrote in the LRB), "and I didn't write very much. The truth is that I was happy to take a year off, and my husband also told me, 'Just do it.' I discovered at the beginning that resistance takes a great deal of energy, and also that I do not really have a snobbish instinct that would prevent me from doing it. Now I know that I will not grab myself in another 10 years and regret not having done it. On top of which, after 15 years in which I tried to remain viable in the eyes of the publishers, it would have been a pity to pass it up." Do you enjoy writing? "I just have to do it. I have many feelings about writing, of which enjoyment is undoubtedly part.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.