SOURCE: “Jennifer Johnston,” in Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics, edited by Jacqueline Hurtley, Rosa González, Ines Praga, and Esther Aliaga, Rodopi, 1998, pp. 7–19.

[In the following interview, Johnston discusses her creative process and the various critical responses to her work.]

[González:] Your novels are fairly short, almost novellas. Do you consciously aim at brevity?

[Johnston:] No, I don't. I always say to myself, “Now, this time I'm going to write a long novel,” and it always seems a long idea in my mind, you know, but they come out almost exactly the same length. That seems to be my rhythm, and I believe very strongly that when I've made my point I don't want to embellish it in any way, and I think with very long novels a lot is embellishment, and I don't have any desire to embellish.

At the same time your novels are very carefully structured (with the use of multiple points of view, of framing devices …). Do you plan much before you start writing?

No. I'm a very disorderly person and a very disorderly writer. When I start to work I have just say one or two ideas in my mind, and I just start sort of playing around with them, like you play with tennis balls against the wall, and after about forty pages, suddenly they take on a momentum of their own, the characters suddenly start to develop. I always know where I'm going before I start, but I don't know how I'm going to get there. And so I actually allow them to grow organically, and I do that the first draft, and I have this pile of paper which I don't really look back at. And then I go back, and I edit back, usually cutting out the embellishments, the things that I had actually thought were rather good writing, or a wonderful sort of scene between two people that had given me great pleasure to write. These are the things that usually come out strangely enough. I think it's quite strange, because I take a very long time to write my novels, and I can sit for days or weeks, and not really write anything at all, and I think this is the novel assembling itself subconsciously in my head, and then it comes out very slowly, but I am very seldom absolutely conscious until I get back to look at it a second time, and it has a pattern, has worked out. And then, as I say, I'm aware of it then, and then I do the shaping, to fit in with the shape that it has taken itself.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman (1986) you said that as a teenager you would have preferred to be a man. Is there a connection between the desire you expressed then and the fact that several of your early novels have male protagonists?

No, I don't think so. When I said that, and I think that I really meant it, I was very aware from the age of about fourteen on of the opportunities that were for men that there weren't for women, and that you had all the time to be sort of retuning your thoughts and ideas to fit into this role in the world that you were going to have to play. Things are quite different now, well, things are slightly better now. I think when I started to write, when I was teaching myself to write, I didn't have the courage in a way to approach writing as woman, and so I came at it obliquely through writing through the eyes of a man, and this was, I think, lack of courage. Because you can't jump in at the deep end of a swimming pool unless you can swim and I had to teach myself to swim before I really started to write about the things that I wanted to write about.

You have just mentioned that the position of women in Irish society has changed. How do you see this change?

I think on the surface it seems to have changed a lot, but I don't think it has changed really very substantially. I think another twenty-five years and it will have changed substantially. But it's a very slow process, unless you had a civil war, and you wouldn't ever have one about that particular subject.

But there are many more women participating in public life.

There are, yes, there are, but there aren't enough. And there are very few women writing in Ireland, which I think is very sad. There are a lot of painters, but there are very few women writing, and I've never been able to work out why it is so. Now, I've told you that I was judging this prize for a literary book published in Ireland, and I got eighteen books and one of them was by a young woman. Now, that's saying something, you know.

Your last novels feature middle-aged female protagonists. For all of them maturity and fulfilment entails isolation and the independence of living alone. Would you like to comment on this?

Yes, I suppose it is this sort of great notion that we have all been brought up on, which is that you have to keep compromising all through your life. And when you start to compromise you sometimes find that you just compromise yourself out of existence, and I just have the feeling that this is one of the reasons why I say that things are not right here as yet with women, because they tend to have to either compromise themselves out of existence or they have to take this other road which is that of isolation. And somehow, when the middle-ground area is reached, then women will be in a much healthier situation, but at the moment it tends to be very much one thing or the other, and the sort of happy medium has not been discovered yet.

Even though your novels deal with emotionally charged material, you avoid creating a melodramatic and sentimental tone. Do you find it difficult to adopt this detached and unemotional approach?

Yes, I do find that. I find it is absolutely essential to me. Sometimes I just go too far and I have to do a lot of rethinking and re-editing and things like that, because I find this sort of writing doesn't appeal to me in any way. I like that sort of cool eye and I would like to be able to retain that myself.

Although Aidan Higgins and J. G. Farrell had both published a novel with a Big House setting in the late 1960s, the publication within three years of your first three novels greatly contributed to the revival of the Big House novel. Were you conscious of re-instating a tradition?

Absolutely not, absolutely not, this makes me laugh. I mean, the fact that the novels were published in three years was a total accident of fate. It was the very fact that my first novel, which was The Gates, just was turned down by fourteen publishers and then, after The Captains and the Kings came out, my publisher, who hadn't been one of the people who had seen it in the first place, said, “Oh, we'll publish that too.” By which time I was writing Babylon, so this extraordinary thing happened and it looked like I was going to be the most prolific writer. In actual fact, as I said, it was a total accident, it was quite fortuitous. And really, as far as I'm concerned the Big House is just a means to an end in a way. I'm not really saying very much about that life, I'm trying to talk about the people and this just happens to be the setting in which those people have been placed. I mean, Aidan Higgins quite specifically is writing a Big House novel in its own curious way. I've always found this was a burden to me, that is, I've been given this role, which I'm desperately trying to get away from, you know. But I never can, because all these academics have written their critical works, and they are talking about me in universities, and this is the category they put me into, and I don't like this, I find it very limiting, and it annoys me.

But you have used the Big House as a setting in many novels.

Oh yes, but I wasn't actually trying to make statements of any sort about “the Big House.” As I have explained to you, well, tried to explain, how the thing creeps out of my head, the idea that I would have in the beginning would never be about that sort of thing, it would have to do very much more with something like violence, or a person will appear and I have to discover why this person wants to be written about. I never wanted to write about Big Houses as such, I just happen to write about the sort of people that I know best, without any conscious notions in my head.

I feel terribly strongly about the fact that we are all being put into little boxes. The people don't talk to each other, you see them living in a society like there is in a small town here, the people who live on this side of the river don't talk to people who live on the other side of the river, the people in big houses don't talk to people in little houses, and this goes on throughout everybody's lives, and children are taught in a way not to have anything to do with people who live over there, for some reason or other, which is totally spurious, and I've always felt that age doesn't matter, that sex doesn't matter, that religion doesn't matter, that you can have relationships with people from anywhere, and there is an honesty and a truth about those relationships. This is something that I prefer to explore rather than explore the reasons that keep those people apart.

An early reviewer of your first novels (Brian Donnelly, 1975) said that in The Captains and the Kings you were careful to weigh the scales of merits and faults between the representatives of the two nations. Were you aware of this?

I was aware to a certain degree that I had to do that, that otherwise there was very little point in writing that novel, and I was just aware as I was going along that I had to put both sides of the picture to a certain extent. It's quite an uneven novel, some bits are quite good, but for example the father of the boy is not a very good character, I mean, I wouldn't write him like that now, but yes, I was quite careful because you don't want to make a lot of people baddies and the other lot goodies, especially when you are writing about an old man like that who was really neither a baddie nor a goodie, you have to give everybody a reasonably good balance.

Critical analysis of your work has been fairly contradictory, that is, it has been said that your novels convey more about your country “than whole volumes of analysis and documentation” and at the same time your novelistic universe has been compared to Jane Austen's “little bit of ivory, two inches wide.” How do you react to these divergent views?

Well, I think that the first one is a bit grandiose. I would be very happy to be compared to Jane Austen, and I'm aware of the small patch of earth that I'm looking at and cultivating and turning over the stones of. I'm very aware of that, and I think that we all have to be aware of our own limitations, and I'm never going to write The Brothers Karamazov. I would rather try to do what I know I can do, and do it better and better than to launch myself into some vast world that I really couldn't cope with. I'm too old, to begin with. But I think that even if I had started writing when I was twenty-two or twenty-three I still would have been looking with a microscope at my own patch. I think I can call it my own patch, there are not many other people doing what I'm doing. I'm afraid I have a strange eye disease and I really see very little, so I can stare at things for a very long time, and as I stare at them they become very much clearer to me, and in a strange way that is what I feel I'm doing when I'm writing. And I'm really only doing it for myself. To have my books sold in the shops, and have people read them, is an enormous bonus. This sounds awful, but I really write to make my life worth living, and the other thing is something else, and it's wonderful. So, I would be on the side of Jane Austen, but basically, what you do when you write a book, you are having a dialogue with one other person who is the reader—whoever that may be—and they have their own input into that, which is why I think it is terriby important to write in an almost minimalist way, because then their imagination, or their sensibility, is working, and so every single person who reads your book comes away with a different point of view about it. I have never tried consciously—ha!, which is just as lucky—I have never tried to make important statements, I don't really want to do that.

And how do you react to criticism in general?

I really don't mind. I mean, the one time when I really did mind was when The Christmas Tree came out in the United States, and the man in The New York Times tore it into shreds in the most unkind, and extraordinarily personal fashion. He was a critic called Anatole Boyer. I remember reading this review—the post came when I was having my breakfast, the publishers had sent me the cutting—and I was absolutely devasted by it. It was as if this man was punching me about the face, and it had a catastrophic effect in the USA on my career there, which just stopped like that. It doesn't matter how good any other reviews have been since, my publisher refused to publish my next book, and just everything went “shhhh.” I hated that, I don't mind what anybody says at all, but I mean this was very personal, I had never met the man, I didn't know anything about the man—think somebody told me he's dead now. Maybe he had cancer, maybe his mother had just died of cancer, I don't know, but it was vituperative to a degree, it was very long and it was just so horrible. …, I didn't like that. But apart from that, you know, it's one of the things you just get used to, you just go on writing books, you just say, “you win some, you lose some.”

One of the things I like is the fact that young writers in Ireland seem to like my work, and this gives me a great feeling of satisfaction, and a great pleasure, because they are the future, and if young writers that I admire think I'm OK, that's fine. I mean, critics are like sort of being bitten by a mosquito, you scratch for a little while and then you forget about it, and there is really very little point in being annoyed.

Most of your work explores the damaging ways in which the past influences the present. Do you think that the burden of the past is a distinctly Irish feature?

No, I don't. I think we handle it in our own very particular way. But I think we are all burdened by the past, by our history, by our culture—and I never really know what culture means, you know, it can be the way people eat their bacon and eggs, as well as the novels they write or the paintings they paint. But yes, I think that for all sorts of historical reasons we handle the past very badly, and maybe in the next millenium, you know, we will have learned. …

Sorry, when you say “we,” do you mean the Irish?

Yes, I mean the Irish. I think other races can handle their own past in a more creative way than we do. I don't know, because this is the only race I really know. Well, I certainly know the English are not bothered by their past in the sense we are. In this country you can't spend a day without something or other happening that reminds you of the past.

The emphasis on the past and on the way in which the forces of the outer world impinge upon the private sphere and destroy it lends your work a very pessimistic tone. However, in The Christmas Tree (1981) and especially in The Invisible Worm (1991) there is an intimation of regeneration that was absent in your earlier work. Would you say that you are becoming more optimistic?

Actually I'm quite an optimistic person. It's just that I wrote pessimistic books. You see, it's the whole thing of living constantly with violence, living with terrible circumstances around you. It's the total helplessness of the human beings who are trying to relate to each other, or love each other, or just have some sort of warm and normal life, when history is happening all around you, either in the form of the First World War, or the concentration camps, or just the violence that we have had here. Because everything you do is sort of crushed, all your sensibilities are crushed in a way by continuous violence. My goodness, you have wonderful writers in Spain who have said all that.

But would you agree that in your more recent fiction there is a vision of the future that was absent before?

Oh yes, I think that is absolutely right.

In your novels there are a lot of intertextual references: literary allusions, nursery rhymes, songs, and so on. Do you plan them beforehand?

No, no, they just occur when the moment happens and suddenly something will come into my head. You see, I come from a literary family, my mother was an actress and we always read enormously. My childhood was filled with people singing songs, nursery rhymes, romantic ballads, or whatever they might be, not necessarily well but they were there, and every time we went on a car journey there were all the statutory songs that you sang as you drove. And so, it is very much part of my life, and I listen to a lot of music, and that is very much part of me, and I don't think I could write a novel, or a play, that didn't have those sorts of sounds coming into it. Because they change the pace of things, as far as I'm concerned, because when you suddenly come across a bit of a song or something, presumably the person who is reading it too, hears that being sung in their head, or that being played. Or maybe they don't, because maybe they don't know what I'm talking about. But whatever it does it's a sort of bonus, just a change of pace to keep things sort of going, you can write elegant prose for so long, but suddenly you want to do something, to shake it up a bit, I think that's one of the reasons, and also, as I said, I think it's very much part of myself.

And what about the titles? How do you decide them?

The titles, I find it quite difficult getting titles. Now, The Invisible Worm I knew immediately, and my current book The Illusionist I knew immediately, well like within about twenty pages of the start, I said, “this is going to be called The Illusionist.” And that is absolutely right. The Invisible Worm I thought was a great title too; my publisher tried to make me change it and I wouldn't. But up till then I always had a certain amount of difficulty trying to think of titles, because it's got to have some relevance to what is happening, and you can't make them too boring. Nobody likes to babble on, it always causes problems with people, they say, “Why?.”

Your titles are getting shorter, aren't they?

I think that's just an accident. It's totally accidental.

Are you satisfied with the adaptation of several of your novels for the screen?

No. I quite liked How Many Miles to Babylon? I thought that the woman who directed that, and Derrick Mann, between them, who adapted it, did a really good job on trying to get the sort of essence of the book there onto the screen. There were things I didn't like, but this had nothing to do with the adaptation. And Shadows on Our Skin was actually quite good, but some bits lay themselves open to being adapted and it worked quite well, you know, and the producer knew what he was doing, that was O.K. But I have been pretty unhappy about everything else; and I positively loathed some of the later ones. I've just written the screenplay of Fool's Sanctuary, which I hope is going to be made, and then I have no one to blame but myself, and if it's awful, it is my fault, but I much prefer it to be this way, than going round sort of griping about somebody else.

Have you considered the possibility of setting some of your work outside Ireland?

Well, The Illusionist is partly set in England, you know. It is about three generations of women: a grandmother, a mother and a daughter who is about thirty. The story is told with the voice of the mother—the one in the middle. The woman herself, as she tells the story, is living in Dublin, but she spent fifteen, twenty years in England, and the story is about that. But you have to be awfully careful, for example writing about the trenches, you have to use an awful lot of tricks so that you cover up your own ignorance about what you are writing about.

But you lived in England for a long time, didn't you?

I did, I did, I lived in London, but this woman lives out in the country, and I really have to keep the story inside, in tight close-ups you know, so that you are not really abandoned in some spurious English countryside that I am just inventing.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman you said that when you lived in England you felt an alien there. Why was this?

When we went to England, it was really like just going down the road on the train. Now, we were very lucky because we had a little bit of money, my husband had a good job, we lived in a very nice house, we had lots of friends. When I left Trinity, I suppose most of, practically all our friends and contemporaries left Ireland and went to live abroad, and many of them went to London. As I say, London was almost a suburb of Dublin and we were able to come back, we came back with kids on all their holidays. I only started to feel like an alien when the Troubles started here, and then I was suddenly aware of a huge difference in perception between the English and the Irish. And it became very obvious to me that I was an alien, but it really didn't happen to me very much before then, not all that much. I'm always contradicting myself. …

You've mentioned Trinity. Do you have good memories of the time you spent there?

I had a great time in Trinity. I seriously failed most of my exams, you know. A couple of years ago they gave me an Honorary Doctorate, and at some stage somebody was looking up my record and said to my son, “we can't find anything about your mother here,” and he burst out laughing and said, “my mother failed to get a degree, you've expunged all memories of her.” But I enjoyed my time, it was lovely, it was growing up. I went into Trinity when I was seventeen, straight out of school, and it was a very interesting time, because it was just after the war. It was 1947. And half the people there—the university was very small then, there were two thousand five hundred people. And there were all these rules, like you couldn't go into men's rooms, and things like that. Half the undergraduates were straight out of school, aged seventeen or eighteen, and the other half were young men who had fought in the war, and they were very glamorous, very very glamorous—don't think Trinity has ever been as glamorous since. You know, they were such heroes in a way, to someone who is seventeen. God love them, they were only in their early twenties, but they seemed like real men, not like the little boys whom you'd known from down the road, who were almost only into their long trousers. Oh, yes, that was fun, it was great fun, and I met a lot of very good friends.

Were there many women?

There were, but not that many. I mean, there were enough not to be peculiar. There were a lot of English girls, because again the English universities were flooded with ex-service people, and if you couldn't get into Oxford or Cambridge, you wanted Trinity College in Dublin, it was the next one on the list, if you didn't want to go into any of those awful redbrick places. So, it was quite interesting, because they were slightly different, and they were there and they were glamorous, you know, they had probably more money than we had, and wonderful clothes, and they made us all think, “Ooh!.”

How do you see the present political situation in Ireland? Are you hopeful about the future?

Well, I feel very optimistic about it. I think one of the things that has to be done, and I think is in the process of happening here in the north, is that there is a new growth of youngish Unionists who are hardheaded, pragmatic, have been terrorists and who are now saying, “We want to hear what they have to offer us, we want to go down this road.” Now, the old breed of Unionists are all still sitting down and saying “no.” These tough guys are very bright, they speak real good common sense when you hear them on the radio. And I just feel that these are the men who are going to move us into the future. Now I am Irish. I am not Northern Irish, I am not Southern Irish, I am Irish. I also am Protestant. That does not mean anything, that is only a label. Actually I'm nothing at all if the truth be known. I was put in that box, simply because I'm not a Catholic they put me into the Protestant box.

I have never believed in the existence of the Border except as a tiresome, visitor thing that you have to cross when you want to move from Dublin to Belfast, or Dublin to Derry. I think that even if, in 1922, Ireland had been united then, there would still be problems going on here, because it's only now that they are starting to understand, and this is because of the fact that everyone is much better educated than they were, the fact that people are more liberal than they were, there's an awful lot of ridiculous myths that all churches tell. People are not listened to any longer, and there is not so much of the authoritarian people who have more money than other people. People don't listen to them any longer. Yes, we are just starting to treat each other with a bit of dignity, and circumspection. And I think we will go on and I'm absolutely certain that whatever happens, it won't be a unitary state, like in twenty-five years, I don't know how long it will be, but I think that Ireland will be united in a different sort of a way, a way that is not going to create more violence. I'm absolutely certain, because I think that people have learned so much from the horrors of the last twenty-five years. And a lot of the people who are important, don't appear to be important at this moment. Those people have learned to understand that hating people for no reason, except they have a label round their neck that's not what you have round yours, is a waste of time. And it's quite strange. I also think that the people in the South are fairly complacent about the whole thing, because they have been sitting there saying, “We are not behaving like that, ha ha ha.” I think there is a great moment when there will be huge movement here, it's bound to be. The problem in the North is solved, or more or less solved, and the North as a sort of unit can look at the South and say, “O.K. come on, now we can talk to you, and you can talk to us, and we are not going to despise each other, because there is huge strength.” And the people in the North are so like each other, it is quite extraordinary: they all say exactly the same thing; they are just looking through two different telescopes. And their attitudes to each other, they are like mirror images of each other, and they are not really terribly like the people in the South. I don't know whether northern Spaniards are much like southern Spaniards; the northern French people are not remotely like southern French people, and it's the same thing here.

It'll be such a wonderful moment when they recognize each other as brothers rather than as enemies. But I think it's going to happen. I may not see it, that's irrelevant, but the great thing is that I'm absolutely certain it's going to happen because we are a great race and we are starting to learn things about ourselves that we should have been learning for the last twenty-five years.