Hot Press Meets Colum McCann

Sipping stout in the residents bar of Dublin’s Brooks Hotel, bestselling author Colum McCann is considering the downside of international literary success. “The fact of the matter is there is a small defeat in fame,” he says, “and there’s also an inevitable fall that is going to happen. There is an incredible potential for sadness there.”

Now aged 48, the youthful-looking Dubliner speaks in an unmistakeably Irish accent, tinged with a New York drawl picked up after more than a quarter-century living in the Big Apple. “You know that just because today you signed 100 books at Hodges Figgis, in twenty years you might go in and see a young writer selling 200 books, and there is not necessarily work for you… but does that matter in the end? I think you’ve got to have a forceful humility on one hand, but also a strength of reserve to say, ‘I know that is going to happen, so fair enough’. When you have your moment, you take it and enjoy it.”
A friendly, unassuming and easy-going type, McCann has been enjoying his moment for quite a few years now. Beginning his writing career as a journalist with The Irish Press, his literary star has been steadily in the ascent since the appearance of his debut collection of short stories, Fishing The Sloe-Black River, in 1994. His first novel, Songdogs, was published two years later. Although he now describes it as “very much a young man’s novel,” the book garnered many favourable reviews.
A string of increasingly well-received books followed (This Side Of Brightness, Dancer, Zoli, etc.), but it was really 2009’s Let The Great World Spin – based around Philippe Petit’s real-life tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974 - that fully confirmed his status as a literary A-lister. Published in 30 languages and selling well over a million copies worldwide, the novel won numerous awards – most notably the 2009 US National Book Award for Fiction, the Ambassador Book Award and also the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (one of the most lucrative prizes in the world).
McCann’s winning streak doesn’t seem likely to end anytime soon. He’s back on home turf for appearances at the Dublin and Listowel writers’ festivals, and also for the launch of his just-published novel, TransAtlantic.
All of the sales, prizes and plaudits positively pale in comparison to what he understandably describes as the “greatest honour” of his entire literary career. Following the gunning down of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, last December 14th, teachers and psychologists selected Let The Great World Spin as a novel that might help the survivors of the massacre overcome their trauma and grief.
“Yeah, that was wild,” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. “That was one of the most profound things that has ever happened to me in my writing life. I got a letter saying, ‘Is it possible that you could donate 60 books to the Newtown High School because we have chosen your book to talk to the students who had been through Sandy Hook – and only the High School students, 17 and 18-year-olds – in order to navigate their grief?’ Of course, I was instantly on the phone saying, ‘Yes, of course’ and arranging it... but also I said I would go up and visit.”
While there was, of course, an inevitable curiousity underlying his desire to visit the scene of such a horrendous massacre, he also had more noble reasons.
“Part of it was, to be honest, curiosity, but part of it is exactly what interests me right now. Can literature be healing? [Novelist] Aleksandar Hemon says that literature must engage itself on a profound social level, and it has to get in and at least attempt to say something – whether that be the audacity of hope or the audacity of despair. So I said I would go up, and I went up four weeks ago. Got up at five o’clock in the morning, drove up, and went into the school of 1750 students. That is as big as a college here – say Rathmines or something like that – and I did four classes.
“It was mind-blowing because there was an English teacher there, Lee Keylock, and he’s from England and the students obviously adore him. They look to him for recommendations, he brings them to poetry slams, he does all of these things. And this is a white middle-class area that suddenly got rocked by this horrific thing. Whether their brothers have been killed, or their sisters have been killed, or they knew the kids, or they knew the teachers, or they babysat, or whatever.
“I was just there to talk about my book,” he continues, “and I’m not interested in exploiting that tragedy, but part of me is fascinated by how students take the book and apply it to notions of healing, decency, grace and recovery – and they had done.”
He’s obviously still deeply moved by the whole experience. “I have had lots of good things happen. If ever there was a more profound moment that made me believe that maybe the stuff that I am doing is alright… (shakes head). Some of the students said, ‘I couldn’t read it!’, and that’s grand, too, because it was not like I wanted them to read it and have some sort of profound revelation. Some of them read it three or four times, and some of them absolutely said that, ‘This was a way for me to engage with the darkness and find some sort of light out of it’.”

Long before all of this happened, Colum McCann already knew that following up a masterpiece like Let the Great World Spin was going to be difficult. And it was...
“This book was the hardest one for me to do,” he says of TransAtlantic. “First of all, because everything had done so well before – blah, blah, blah – and you want to have your back up against the wall. Also I know where I came from, and who I am, and you also
figure that one of these days you are going to get exposed.”
Many writers and artists have that same fraudulent feeling…
“Well, I think so, if you are being really honest with yourself,” he nods. “You get your lucky streak, and there you go. I do think that I have been loyal to what I wanted to do, and I do think that I have done the best that I could possibly do. Even with this book – maybe even especially with this book -– because I did put my own back up against the wall. I sort of had to. I would tell friends of mine, and I would tell my wife, ‘It’s not going, I can’t do it, I’m not quite able for this one’. Just so I could get my own back up, and come out fighting.”
Having come out fighting, his sixth novel is, thankfully, a knockout blockbuster. A book about Ireland, the symphonic TransAtlantic finds him once again using real-life historical figures to create a brilliantly braided and multi-layered work of fiction.
It opens with a breath-taking account of pioneer aviators Alcock and Brown’s historic transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to Clifden in a decommissioned Vickers Vimy bomber. From there it skips back to 1845 and the arrival of black American slave Frederick Douglass in famine-stricken Ireland, where he’s on a lecture tour championing ideas of democracy and freedom. Then the narrative jumps to Easter 1998, with McCann artfully imagining himself into the shoes of Senator George Mitchell as he travels between New
York and Belfast, overseeing the Northern
peace process.
Criss-crossing the Atlantic, from the old world to the new and back again, McCann masterfully weaves all of these stories together, demonstrating how the past shapes the future and examining the tangled skein of connections that make up our lives. A poetic, compelling and ultimately melancholic work, it’s all neatly tied up with a fully fictional
end-tale about an economic victim of the
Celtic Tiger.
It was perhaps inevitable that he would write a book structured around to-ing and fro-ing the Atlantic pond, given that he’s made that journey so many times himself since emigrating to the US in the mid-‘80s. Returning here at the height of the boom, he barely recognised the place.
“I come back to Ireland at least four or five times a year, every year,” he says. “But there was that period from about 2000 to 2005 or 2006 when I just felt like a complete foreigner. I couldn’t say anything to anyone. You couldn’t say, ‘Well, you know this party’s going to end?’ because people would be going, ‘How dare you come back and say that?’ or ‘Who are you from the States saying this sort of stuff?’
“And quite honestly, I feel it’s more textured now that we got a good dose of reality and we got burnt. It’s not necessarily a good thing to get burnt, but there is a different sort of humility that’s available now. I actually think it’s a little gentler and a little more interesting than what it used to be, certainly five or six years ago.”
He hadn’t originally planned a book about Ireland. In fact, he wrote TransAtlantic having abandoned another New York novel after months of fruitless labour.
“First of all, I was writing a book called 13 Ways Of Looking which was a completely different book. It basically came out of writing about New York in Let The Great World Spin, and I thought, ‘I’ll do something again’. So I was writing a book about surveillance cameras and one incident that gets captured on a surveillance camera in New York in 2012.”
Unfortunately, a lot of effort notwithstanding, the book ultimately came to nought. “I just didn’t like it,” he shrugs. “It was shite. Well, it wasn’t shite, it just didn’t make me want to get up in the morning and go to my desk and do it. So at the back of my mind, I’d always had this idea about [Frederick] Douglass. And then I also had an idea that I wanted to write about the Celtic Tiger. I wanted to look at the two big stories that we have nowadays. We’ll look back in 100 years, what are the two stories that they’ll talk about [from] now? They’ll talk about the Celtic Tiger and they’ll talk about the peace process.”
Although TransAtlantic tackles both of those subjects, it was the Famine-era section that really kick-started the novel. “I wasn’t sure how these things were going to work out, but I abandoned that book, and got onto Douglass, and that was the one that sort of broke me out. I spent about a year working on that section. Believe it or not, those 40 short pages were a full year of work. Going back and trying to understand what actually went on, because there’s two different strands of thought, you know? People didn’t talk about Douglass’s visit for a long, long time. It’s not part of the Irish cultural memory at all.”
A campaigning African-American slave Frederick Douglass was a real person, but you’d be hard pressed to find the man’s name in most Irish history books. This is possibly due to his reluctance to criticise the British Empire in any of his speeches, despite spending four months in Ireland witnessing the ravages of
the Famine.
“No, most Irish people haven’t heard of Frederick Douglass,” he affirms. “And why is that? It’s very unusual that a statesperson like that, especially an African-American slave visits Ireland in 1845. You would think that would surely be part of our memory.”
McCann has a couple of theories as to why Douglass has been airbrushed from Irish history. “There was two schools of thought. One is that Douglas is this 27-year-old slave who comes to Ireland, and goes on a lecture tour, and isn’t that wonderful? And people went out and embraced him and he never got called the N-word and it seems like a fantastic story. He even met Daniel O’ Connell. All true, but
also untrue.
“Because the other part of the story is, yes, this 27-year-old slave comes to Ireland, but he is an Anglophile, and he stays with the Anglo-Irish, and he’s a dandy, and he is Protestant, maybe vaguely anti-Catholic, you know? But you have two opposing ideas and really they are both true and both untrue: that was the point where I realised, ‘Ah yes, that’s where it’s interesting to me!’ These contradictions come together, smash together.”
Research is something he really enjoys. “For [2003 novel] This Side Of Brightness, I hung out with the homeless people in the subway tunnels of New York, but also found that I had a penchant for research. I love doing this sort of stuff: it was edgy and dangerous. I was just married then, and my life was sort of like taking on a traditional sort of arc, but I could live out some of my madness and some of my journeys in the fiction, you know, and sort of have an edgy life and not have an edgy life at the same time.”

Hanging with the homeless in the abandoned subway tunnels of NYC is a far cry from the literary existence he lives above ground. When he’s not writing his own stuff, he doubles as a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts program at Hunter College, New York, and is a regular visitor to the European Graduate School. His friends and contemporaries include such luminaries as Aleksandar Hemon, Peter Carey and Gabriel Byrne. He’s married now, with children.
“My wife’s a teacher,” he explains. “We have three kids, live in the Upper East side of New York, 86, right beside Central Park. It’s a very sort of mannered, provincial idea of a life, but, for me, I love to wake up in the morning and look after that sort of life. I do enjoy that. But I also love to wake up in the morning and go into a completely different space.”
Are you a disciplined writer?
“Very much so,” he affirms. “My best working day would be wake up at five, before the kids, and have two/three hours without any coffee or anything. So it’s not diseased by the internet, not diseased by the fact that the kids are going to get up shortly, it’s just pure dream time. And you don’t have the noise of the rest of the day and you’re not thinking about, ‘Oh, at 12 o’clock I have to go have lunch with so and so’. That would be the best possible start, and then, at 7 or 8 o’clock, the kids wake up, get them off to school, this is the real life.
“Generally then, I go for a run early in the morning and do a six mile run, loop around the park, come back in, do another two hours creative stuff between ten and twelve, and then sort of break for a little while. Then in the afternoon, I try to edit and or do the sort of domestic stuff that takes up a lot of a professional writer’s life – which means writing letters, paying taxes, you know doing my WGA (Writer’s Guild Association) membership stuff, blurbing other people, reading other people, like whatever, answering questions. Saying yes or no to festivals. It’s a full time gig now.
“There are people that complain about this stuff and it seems so fucking disingenuous to do so because it’s everything that you desire,” he continues. “You don’t want to sound twee or anything like that, but the fact of the matter is that I am very lucky to be in the position that I am in. I know how tenuous it is and I know that in ten years or even five years it mightn’t be the same way at all, so I enjoy it.”
He’s not always so grounded. As part of his research for the Alcock and Brown section of TransAtlantic, he actually took a flying lesson.
“Yeah, it wasn’t necessary but people seem to like it,” he smiles. “People seem to think that it makes it more authentic. You and I both know that it is not necessarily more authentic, but part of it is that you want to be able to say, ‘I flew a plane for my research’, and part of it is just, ‘Fuck it, I want to fly a plane!’”
Did you enjoy it?
“No, I hated it!” he guffaws. “I hated it. I was terrible at it. I never want to try to fly a plane ever again. But it was a good experience to do it. It
terrified me.”
The last of the triptych of real-life stories that form the backbone of TransAtlantic reads like a particularly assured piece of New Journalism, as he imagines himself into the well-worn shoes of Senator George Mitchell, traversing the ocean to oversee the Good Friday Agreement. Although the offer was on the table, McCann chose not to meet Mitchell before writing about him.
“Yeah, well, I thought what would someone like [Tom] Wolfe have done with Mitchell if he had the chance?” he says. “Well, he’d have him changing a nappy in the first page and then going on his way to the peace process. I wrote to him, I said I wanted to write about him, asked would he give me his blessing to write about him. He said yes, and then his wife got in touch and said, ‘When would you like to meet him?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to meet him’.
“So I went away, imagined it, and that’s where it becomes different to Wolfe and the new journalists. I went away, imagined it, wrote it in six months, and then sent it to him and said, ‘Will you have a look at this?’ And she said wonderful things like where he got his sweaters from, that his shoes would not be brown, they’d be black, and, you know, she gave me that level of detail. So it’s all forensically correct, but then I insert the fictional pieces into the non-fictional narrative. So it was a conjunction of both.”
Although he chose not to meet Mitchell, he did manage to get some time with another architect of the peace process, former British PM Tony Blair.
“Yeah. A friend of mine set up a meeting, a full half-hour with Blair face-to-face in New York. It’s kind of extraordinary that he did that, but I wanted to see what he figured about Mitchell. But, there’s dozens of people that I talked to about the peace process.”
McCann is familiar with the North. His mother hails from Derry and a short Gary McKendry-directed film based on his novella about the Troubles, Everything In This Country Must, was nominated for an Oscar in 2005.
“I went up every summer, from a young age,” he says. “Get on the bus at Busaras. We’d go up to the border, actually change buses in Armagh always, because the bus would go to Coleraine. I’ll never forget the soldier inevitably walking along the aisle checking everybody out as we went along. My mother’s farm was a dairy farm, and I felt entirely free up there. I’d get out at six o’clock in the morning and go milking and drive a tractor, run around, and come in exhausted at the end of the day – it was idyllic, actually. I was very happy when I was up there, much more so than I was in even suburban Dublin, where I had to be a little bit
more mannered.”
His late father, Sean McCann, was an author and journalist, too. “Dad was features editor of The Evening Press, and that meant that he was also literary editor, so he’d bring home all the books. He’d bring home Kerouac and Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, the lot of them. There were books everywhere, newspapers everywhere. Dad was writing books, too. He wrote 27 books. Mostly non-fiction, like The Irish In Love, The Fighting Irish, books about theatre, books about Brendan Behan, Sean O’Casey, and then soccer books as well because he was a soccer player.”
For all the honours and high praise McCann has received, he has inevitably endured his share of criticism as well. Has he ever been knocked back by a negative review?
“You know what it’s like,” he shrugs. “It’s like: good review, bad review. If you believe the good ones, you have to believe the bad ones – and if you believe the bad ones then you might damage yourself. Unless they are really super-smart. Occasionally, someone comes along and they
are right.
“I have had bad reviews in The Irish Times, bad reviews in The New York Times, I mean, places that matter to me, and I felt a little bit wounded getting up on a fucking Sunday morning and thinking, you know, my neighbours have read this or whatever. But the fact is you get more phone calls for a bad review than you do for a good review. You get more support for something like that.
“You have to be sanguine about it,” he continues. “You get kicked in the teeth a little bit. Kicking back and whining about it, it’s no good. I’ve seen people whine. I’ve seen people get in a corner and say, ‘That [critic] Michiko Kakutani, she did this to me in The New York Times. She did this to me and… blah, blah, blah’. So what? You know? If you believe in the book then you believe in the book – and that’s good enough.”

TransAtlantic is out now through Bloomsbury.