Interview
Celebrated Irish author,Jennifer Johnston, lets Catherine McGrotty into her own 'big house' to discuss memory and language in her latest book Foolish Mortals.
The Quiet Woman
Jennifer Johnston answers the door to me in her bare feet. Arguably the grande dame of Irish literature - Roddy Doyle’s favourite Irish author, winner of the Irish PEN Life Achievement Award, Whitbread Prize winner and Booker nominated author - she is also nothing like one imagines a ‘grande dame’.
Unfailingly charming, despite her obvious rush, (she is packing for a trip tomorrow) she settles me in her study and offers tea.
There is nothing of the ‘big house’ about Johnston today, despite her long association with those relics of the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.
Although she is a product of that history -
her mother was the actor/director Shelagh Richards and her father the playwright Denis Johnston - the association is perhaps an unfair one. The idea that Johnston only writes ‘big house’ novels doesn’t really bear scrutiny. Certainly Foolish Mortals, her latest offering, could have been written about any time in the last ten years in Dublin. ‘I seem to be writing a sort of history of Ireland, starting at the beginning of the century and coming up to date. It’s not deliberate, I didn’t set out to do that,’ she says.
There are other elements for which Johnston’s writing has become, rightly, celebrated; such as her unflinching honesty in the portrayal of her characters and the lyricism of her prose. Both are abundantly evident in the new book. The title is taken from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the story itself is full of Shakespearean allusions, with a plot that includes cross-dressing twins and mistaken identities.
‘That wasn’t conscious or deliberate either,’ she says ‘I find myself using Shakespeare and the Book of Common Prayer a lot in my work, without realising. My mother was an actress and I went to a very literate school so I was exposed to a lot of Shakespeare. He gets into your head and once he’s in your head he’s in your system forever. It’s language that resonates with people. I don’t understand why they keep wanting to change the Book of Common Prayer - they need their heads examined. When you read it you think; this is language - vital and absolutely meaning what it was saying. It’s so clear and exquisite. The King James Bible is the same.’
Foolish Mortals deals with the aftermath of a car crash which sees Henry O’Connor wake, with his memory as fragmented as his broken body. His long-suffering ex-wife, Stephanie, is left playing the role of next of kin because Charlotte, the woman he left her (and their two children) for, died in the crash. Charlotte appears to have crashed deliberately, in an attempt to kill them both.
The theme of memory is a major one within many of Johnston’s novels. Henry’s memory loss is at the core of the story in Foolish Mortals and the catalyst for much of the drama that follows, but his mother, the mercurial Tash, is also dealing with memory loss of her own, in the form of Alzheimer’s. Johnston says that Tash, perhaps the most compelling character within the book, was not based on anyone in particular.
‘I suppose there is a little bit of my mother in that she was a volatile lady, but she wasn’t a drinker in the way that Tash is, nor did she go mad in the end of her life. Writers are stealing things from people all the time; you couldn’t possibly say a character is based on one person. It’s the burglar in every writer - there are other people I know or knew that have gone into that character too.’
Her own experience of the effects of Alzheimer’s is due mainly to her cousin, the actress Geraldine Fitzgerald, whom she visited regularly in New York before her death in 2005. Fitzgerald - Oscar nominated for her role as Isabella Linton in Wuthering Heights in 1939 - was only a few years younger than Johnston’s mother and the two were ‘great friends’.
‘She spent the last ten years of her life in a state of dementia, it was terribly sad. I used to go and visit her every year. I don’t believe that these people have really forgotten everything. Nobody pays any attention to these people, it is only when you sit down with them and you look at them and try to put something into their minds in perspective that suddenly the little flash will come. I had a ring that was my mother’s ring. It was originally my grandfather’s watch fob and had the family crest on it. My mother turned it into a ring and wore it constantly after my grandfather died - she passed it onto me and I have passed it onto my daughter. At some stage about three years after Geraldine’s mind had started going, slithering away, we were at dinner one night and I took off my ring and put it down in front of her and said ‘Do you remember that Geraldine?’ and she picked it up and she looked at it for a long time and she said ‘Shelagh’s ring’. Her carer looked at me in amazement. Even her daughter used to say she didn’t know why I came, as she didn’t remember anything, but that was not true. Each time I went to visit her, after about five minutes her eyes would become alert again. Even the momentary flashes are something.’
Johnston has been quoted as saying that she finds it extremely difficult to write, but that she cannot help herself. It’s a strange statement for someone who has written 15 books in her life. ‘Ah, but they were all very short novels,’ she laughs, ‘it’s still true. You always think ‘this is going to be the last one’, but then another one comes nudging into your head.’ The 77 year old author is currently working on her 16th work of fiction but is close-mouthed on what it is about. ‘You can ask, but I’m not going to tell you.’ she smiles.
