If you were to ask your average well-read Spaniard to name the most famous contemporary Irish writer you’d probably be surprised by the answer. Nine times out of ten, along with the usual suspects from the Irish literary world that are translated and revered in Spain – namely John Banville and Colm Tóibín – the name cited would be that of Ian Gibson.

Gibson accepts in this Hot Press interview that he’s an obscure figure back in his beloved homeland. However, in the Spanish-speaking world, Gibson is a serious player thanks to his award-winning books – most notably about the poet and playwright Frederic García Lorca, who Leonard Cohen credited as being the “greatest influence” on his own haunting lyrics.

The 77-year-old Dubliner originally started off teaching at Queens University and then at London University, before deciding to make a new life for himself in Spain. He broke through when his debut book about the murder of Lorca was banned by Franco, forcing Spaniards to smuggle copies in from France.

Gibson has other strings to his bow apart from biographies: he’s written novels and narrated documentaries, including the BBC’s two-part The Great Famine. Another subject clearly close to his heart is sex. Gibson has written a book about the erotica collector Henry Spencer Ashbee, and is also the author of English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After. The latter is a study of flogging and flagellation, widely credited with the outright banning of corporal punishment in British schools.

These days, Gibson is considered the chief authority on Lorca, and has also written the definitive biography on Salvador Dalí, even interviewing the eccentric genius for his 700-page tome.

He has written biographies of the leading poet Antonio Machado, and another on film director Luis Buñuel. One critic in the Irish Times hailed Gibson back in 2014 as “the creator of modern biography in Spain” when reviewing his book on Buñuel. No wonder the author was swamped for autographs and selfies the moment we stepped into the café in the splendid surroundings of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. In fact, at one point, it was hard to get a word in edgeways: it appeared as if the entire café wanted a meet and greet with the man himself.

Jason O’Toole: Ernest Hemingway once stated that the best training for a writer was an unhappy childhood. Was this the case for you?

Ian Gibson: It wasn’t perfect – put it that way! I’m from a tiny minority within a minority. If you’re going to be a Southern Irish Protestant be an Anglican, because there you get a little bit of stained glass, the liturgy and a feeling for culture. But I came into the world in a tiny Methodist community – and that is not to be recommended in Dublin circa 1939, because you haven’t been born into a social group with any feeling for the arts or literature. They were very isolated.

Did you feel alienated?

I felt I didn’t belong to the mainstream. I wanted to escape from the family environment. It was very restricting. Also, it had got inside me: it was part of me and I wanted a change. But I was on the road to salvation – my version of salvation – when they sent me to a Quaker boarding school, which was coeducational. It helped a lot. The Quakers are far more broadminded than Methodists. So, I begin to run away very early. I’ve been running away all my life (laughs).

Did you feel a calling to be a Methodist preacher?

I did think maybe I was being called and that’s terrifying, because there is this business in the Bible about how if you are called and you don’t respond you’re damned forever. I was imbued with the New Testament and Bible class and Sunday school. I got out of that when I discovered French literature, and then when I went to Trinity, that really saved me. And then there was the difficulty of not being able to get hold of Ulysses, the censorship, the sinister John McQuaid and all the ghastly business with Protestants and Catholics. It was a woeful island in those days. So, I’d no sooner graduated that I wanted to move away.

You once said in an interview with a Spanish publication that Guinness liberated you during your formative years.

There’s no question about that. After our matches, when I was playing for Old Wesley First 15, everybody would hive off to the local and have a few pints. It was a ritual. So, I started to savour the joys of Guinness around the age of 17 or 18 – and it was a liberation. The moment you’ve had a few drinks you feel better and you feel free from shame. And that was a great problem for me: the feeling of being ashamed about sex and myself in general. You have a few drinks and everything is temporarily relieved. But my father was a teetotaller, and that posed another problem.

Did you feel guilty about masturbation?

Not pathologically. At my Quaker school masturbation was known as ‘revving’ – what a fantastically apt word! The dormitories reverberated every night with creaking beds. I was initiated by a future Dublin dentist who said, ‘You must try it – it’s time’. I will withhold his name! Nobody felt too guilty about ‘revving’ – it was a sort of communal frenzy! My problem, more than guilt, was a generalised sense of shame about sex, love and tenderness. My father was terribly timid, and timidity is catching; he had a peculiar way of looking at me, of noticing my blushes when anything touching on the subject arose.

How old were you when you lost your virginity?

I was 16. I had a fantastic and very passionate relationship at that school I mentioned. They say the first love is the only love – and, in my case, there’s truth to that.

It was very unusual for someone from your generation to lose their virginity at 16.

It’s all set up for you, isn’t it? You’re in a co-educational school and almost the only thing you weren’t doing together was having a shower together or sleeping together. The girls were there all the time. The Quakers were incredibly advanced. They really do believe the thing exists – so let them be together and get to know each other. And reduce the tension a bit. But they didn’t want you to go out on weekends into the fields and ‘practise sex’, as they nowadays say.

There were no condoms either.

I was an expert at coitus interruptus!

Did you ever question your own sexuality as a kid?

I never had the slightest homosexual inclination. Sadomasochistic, yes. So, that was always something that excited me as a child, when I was seven or so: I was fascinated reading Knock-Out comics with those beatings and canings. I had no language to describe it. I didn’t even know what a turn-on was, nor what sex was. All I knew was that already at the age of seven those stories fascinated me.

You wrote a book about Victorian sex, shame and flagellation…

One of the reasons I wrote the book was because I consider that corporal punishment – as it was then practised in Britain and Ireland – was a disgusting, disgraceful procedure. The French knew way back in the 19th century that it could be a sexual turn-on and that it was dangerous to beat children. The Brits never faced up to that, miserable hypocrites. Nobody writes a book about such a subject unless he can understand what he is writing about. So, I could explore that fantasy and also make a contribution. I remember being warned, ‘You can’t do it’. But I’m glad I did it because it documented the illness. The critic Auberon Waugh said, “This book has made me be ashamed to be English.”

Your book played a major role in the banning of corporal punishment in the UK…

When I published it in 1978, the British were still beating away merrily. Soon afterwards there was a parliamentary debate and the practice was abolished, under pressure from Europe. And even when they abolished it, there was not a single person to my knowledge – even in the House of Commons – who acknowledged that my book played a role in the abolition, although I know that it did. Nobody had the courage to stand up and say, “One of the reasons we’re abolishing it is because beatings are a sexual turn-on, or can be.” And that has been recognised as such in European psychology, by Freud and others. And that’s the reason why it should be banned – not just because it’s cruel, but because it’s sexually dangerous and it can turn somebody into a life-long addict. The proof is there, oceanically, in Victorian pornography.

You also wrote a book about Henry Spencer Ashbee, the erotic collector.

The possibility that he might have been the anonymous author of My Secret Life was fascinating. I went to the British Museum’s Private Case – now ‘Private’ no more – to see the parallels between Ashbee’s prose style and that of My Secret Life, and I think I found some tics that make it likely that he was the author, but I wasn’t able to prove it. If I could’ve proved he wrote My Secret Life that would’ve been news in the 1960s and ’70s – but nobody gives a damn nowadays. So far as I am aware, nobody has clinched who wrote the book.

Is it true that you were inspired to write your biography about Lorca because your brother was gay?

Not exactly, although it may have played a part. The book is dedicated to him because his sufferings helped me to understand Lorca’s. You know, in the 1950s it was bad enough being heterosexual in Ireland but to be gay was atrocious. Can you imagine what it was like for my poor timid father to have a gay son? And not only gay but manic-depressive. When he went high he was terrifying. He died in a clinic in Bristol.

I’m very sorry to hear that…

It was terrible. He was in his fifties. Quite young. He was a fantastic person, very charismatic and very funny. He could’ve had a big career in television. In fact, he did begin to have a career in television, in RTÉ, but a manic-depressive presenter or stage-manger didn’t fill the bill, understandably, and he lost the job, after which he went from bad to worse. Knowing all this, having been in on it, helped me to understand Lorca.

It must’ve been horrible to witness your brother sink into despair?

It was absolutely shattering. He was in-and-out of Saint Patrick’s Hospital. I’ll never forget the time I had to take him back on the plane to Dublin because he had a breakdown in London. He was on lithium and then he stopped taking it. He was completely manic, mad, crazy. And in St Patrick’s he began to cry when we got inside and he realised he was back there again. I’ve never seen anything like it: the tears literally spurted from his eyes in two jets. Can you imagine? In two jets!

Leonard Cohen said Lorca was the biggest influence on his lyrics…

I was invited to go with him to Lorca’s village in Granada, Fuente Vaqueros. Because Sony did a CD that included one of his songs and I wrote the text on the back. They invited me to go with him, but they weren’t prepared to pay me a fee. I thought it was unfair. I mean, why should I give up two days work on what I was writing at the time to go, even if it was with the great Leonard Cohen?

Did anybody think you were mad to turn down the offer?

My son Dominic said to me, “You have to be a fucking eejit! I would’ve paid for myself!” (Laughs) My son was probably right. If I had gone I would obviously have had a long conversation with Leonard Cohen about Lorca and I’d be able to answer your question more adequately. It is a fact, of course, that Cohen was deeply affected by Lorca’s poetry.

You wrote that Lorca was like a rockstar when he went to Argentina for the performance of his play Blood Wedding –that he couldn’t go anywhere without being mobbed.

I don’t think any Spanish writer had ever equalled Lorca’s success in Buenos Aires in 1933-34. He really was the talk of the town. He filled the theatre day and night for a month with Blood Wedding. It’s a vast theatre: it holds 2,000 people. That is when he sent his father a big cheque for 30,000 quid or so and said, “I’m not just this poor poet. Please take Mum out for dinner on me!” So, he was a fantastic one-man show. He was an incredible performer. It’s not normal for anybody to have so many amazing gifts, because they weren’t just talents: they were gifts, you might say, given by the gods. The gift of poetry. The gift of theatre. The gift of music. The gift of conversation. The gift of drawing. And the gift that Spaniards praise very highly: el don de la simpatía – the gift of the personal touch, the gift of empathy.

Was his murder politically motivated?

It was basically political in that he had aligned himself with the Republic. By 1936, he was the most famous young writer in the country. In Granada there was great jealousy as well. There was a mixture of political motives and personal motives of rancour and jealousy, including somebody in his own family, a distant cousin who was a fascist. The House of Bernarda Alba is based on a real family in the second of Lorca’s villages. It hadn’t been staged yet, but news had seeped out about the theme of the play. The family found out a few weeks before the Civil War that it was based on one of their members, Francisca Alba, the village and its sexual mores. They were outraged, particularly that distant cousin, with his ultra-right-wing tendencies.

It’s also been suggested that his death was down to the fact that he was a homosexual.

No, although the fact that he was gay didn’t help. The main thing is that he was a left-wing republican, plus somebody who was earning a lot of money, somebody with incredible personal charisma, all of these things coming together in your own town – as if this had happened, let’s say, in Greystones, or in Bray or a little bit bigger. That’s it. A few months later it mightn’t have happened. Somebody could’ve said, “For Christ sake – don’t touch him because he’s famous. It’s going to do us a lot of damage.” As it did when the news broke that September.

You met Salvador Dali when researching your biography about him.

I got to meet him because I had published my biography of Lorca. And Dalí’s closest friend had read parts of it to him because he himself was in very bad shape physically, the eyes and so on. He read him some passages from the book about his friendship with Lorca and he wanted to add some more details. So, I was summoned to his throne in Figueres, which was a remarkable thing for me. I was in Madrid and the phone call came, saying, “If you don’t come today the master may not receive you, because he kicked somebody out yesterday. He’s like that. He wants to see you today and if you don’t come today he may never want to meet you.” So, I was on a plane in a jiffy. I hired the fastest car I could find in Barcelona and roared up the motorway to Figueres. So, I was there within a few hours.

What was he like?

It was a fantastic experience. He was all dressed in white silk with a red Catalan cap on his head. He was full of tubes. It was terrible. He began to tell me all about his friendship with Lorca. And I hardly understood a word because he was talking in a mixture of Catalan, French and Spanish, but terribly badly articulated because his mouth was full of tubes and the hand was going bang bang on the chair, from Parkinson’s.

Did he talk about the rumours of a sexual relationship with Lorca?

He told me that it wasn’t possible, much as he would have wished. Because he wasn’t homosexual. And because it would’ve been painful. You couldn’t believe a word Dali said, really. But he insisted that had it been possible, he would have been only too happy “to make his arsehole available to such a great poet” – those were his words – who, moreover, he loved dearly.

Did he say anything else really about it?

He told me about a fantastic girl, Margarita Manso, who was a companion of his at the School of Fine Arts in Madrid. He recounted a scene that took place at the Students’ Hall where he and Lorca lived. The three of them were together, I think, in Lorca’s bedroom. Lorca was sexually excited and about to grab Dali and bugger him. And Dali was screaming, “I can’t! I can’t!” And the girl was watching this. And Lorca switched his erection to the girl, who was fascinated with both of them. And it was the first – and only time – in his life that he had made love to a woman because Dali had got him going, you know?

Do you think Dali was in denial about his sexuality?

I knew a very close gay friend of his and he said to me, “Dali wasn’t really anything sexually, but he was certainly more gay in potential than hetero!” He really just wanted to see people doing it. Dali organised parties in his house in Cadaqués and used to sit masturbating in a corner, watching people screwing. He never took part. I don’t think he had much sex with anybody. He was terrified of physical contact.

He would’ve loved online porn!

He would’ve been sitting at the screen a lot of the time, yes! It’s an amazing thing – isn’t it? – to have such explicitly erotic material generally available online, any variation you want. I suppose in the monasteries and holy places around the world, beginning in the Vatican, everybody has access to a screen and sees these images – it must be a tremendous temptation.

Do you think Dali was fucked-up sexually?

Well, yes. But what does that mean? Sex is a complicated matter. The drive is there and – depending on the circumstances of your childhood and inherited traits – it can go one way or another. The variations and pitfalls are endless! It’s a miracle that anybody can actually get it up, it seems to me!

Enda Kenny said that he wants to have a national conversation in Ireland about porn?

Do they still call it porn in Holy Ireland? “Porn”, basically, is only just like coming in when your parents are at it! It was forbidden to see – and now you can see it. To see? In my day it wasn’t even discussed. So, I don’t know whether I would call it porn or not. I mean, it’s certainly very invasive: you just can’t get away from it. The obsession with sex is everywhere. It makes it more and more difficult to grow old!

Shouldn’t the Taoiseach have better things to be talking about?

Yes, of course. The outrages committed by the Catholic Church in Ireland, for example. You’re not going to be able to repress sexuality, it always returns. It’s better to face up to the fact that people do this and that it’s there – and it’s not going to go away.

In her biography of Franco, Pilar Eyre wrote: “He wasn’t interested in sex, he silenced his desires with his hunger for power and was therefore able to remain celibate almost all his life. Ambition replaced orgasms...”

Paul Preston is the authority on Franco. I don’t know that much about him and his orgasms, or lack of them! What I do know is that he was the greatest assassin ever produced by Spain, and there must have been some very deep reason for that. Resentment, perhaps.

I’m sure you are familiar with the story that Franco’s father was in a whorehouse the day he was born.

Yes. I think his father was a very liberated man sexually and very promiscuous. And not only that – unlike my father, who never touched a drop in his life – he enjoyed his drink. He was a handsome man, swaggering, and a great success with women. And he didn’t like his son Francisco very much! Clearly he constituted a major problem for Franco, as did Franco’s brother Ramón, a famous airman and also a great man for the ladies. Franco had to be Number One and one way was to become the all-powerful dictator of Spain.

Do you think the same could be said about Dev – that he replaced sex with power?

(Laughs) I don’t know that much about De Valera. He never struck me as very sexy!

A lot of Spanish men regularly visit brothels.

They did until recently, certainly. The traditional system wouldn’t have worked without prostitution. That has been the case for centuries. It was considered normal that fathers would introduce their sons to sex in a brothel and take them along to be initiated. Because obviously you couldn’t do it with a decent girl from next door! So prostitution formed a very useful function in Catholic Spain.

You’ve no objection to sex between consenting adults, even if it’s paid for?

No, not at all. I just hate the idea of paying for sex. I’ve never been with a prostitute in my life. I don’t like the idea. There’d be some women who enjoy being prostitutes, in which case there isn’t any great problem. But I wouldn’t like to think men are using women who are brought here under duress from other countries. Sexual slaves, in a word.

Spaniards appear to be more sexually liberated than we Irish?

Surely Ireland has changed in this respect! I mean, do men still drink too much in order not to be forced to perform and perhaps fail?

Well, it’s still illegal to have an abortion in Ireland.

I’m appalled by that. I couldn’t live in a country that didn’t have abortion.

Did you realise that it still takes five years in Ireland before you can get a divorce?

(Laughs) Five years? Really? Who are the Irish boyos who pushed through this legislation?! Well, what can I say? Old attitudes die hard.

On the positive side, Ireland was the first country in the world to pass a referendum on same sex marriage.

Thank God the people voted in favour. That’s a huge step forward – after centuries of oppression. But from what you’re telling me, it appears that the place isn’t progressing as quickly as I imagined.

Have you ever tried Viagra?

I tried it once, then I got prostate cancer, had an operation and it no longer works. You can inject yourself, if you feel the need to do that. And there are probably new techniques. But Viagra doesn’t work. A great pity.

Prostate cancer is topical in Ireland, because Gay Byrne recently revealed he’d been diagnosed with it.

You are assuming that I know who Gay Bryne is. Actually I do; he has been around for a long time now. I sympathise. All these issues should be out in the open. One isn’t to blame for having this. One isn’t to blame for this thing called sexuality. Why can’t we get it out in the open?

Did you suffer from depression after your operation?

Of course. I had a normal sex life. It would be nice still to be potent so maybe I’ll do something about it some day should the need arise – pun intended!

What are your thoughts about euthanasia?

I want euthanasia! I think people should be able to have it. I’ve just done my will: I don’t want any machines. When it happens, I want to be left alone and to go as quickly as possible.

If you were diagnosed with a terminal illness, would you go to Dignitas in Switzerland to end your life?

No, I’d rather do it myself. I’m beginning to ask my medical friends, what is their view (laughs)?

Do you still consider yourself Irish?

Well, I come from there and I think about Dublin the whole time – it’s inside me. I never felt fully Irish, though, because of my family being from an English background and Protestant and so on. I never felt Irish in the way a Catholic would. But I feel fantastically Irish here in Spain. Spain has been a great liberation. I don’t have to explain all the tiny nuances of where I come from: I’m Irish and that’s it. I suppose I use the Celtic thing excessively. Because people expect that from you – so why not let them have it? I play it up a bit.

Are you religious now?

Christianity has terrified people for 2,000 years. I can no longer go for the personal God and the pie in the sky. That’s completely gone. You know, the thought of a great giant figure up there somewhere – that has gone completely. That was the God we were taught.

Do you feel Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are heroes or terrorists?

I suppose there’s a bit of everything. Coming from where I come from – part of a minority, and my fear of being swamped by the other religion – I understand how the Catholics in Northern Ireland would feel about the Protestant majority. I was almost a fanatic myself. I felt that there were evil elements in Catholicism: the Virgin Mary and the Saints, Papal infallibility, indulgences, confession and all the rest of it. I was taught to believe that Catholicism was an evil version of Christianity. It filled me with terror. When I was teaching at Queens I could see that in the North as well. You’ve got two communities who theoretically believe in the same religion, at least in the basics, yet there are major differences. I was, myself, on the brink of anti-Catholic fanaticism, so I can understand the anti-British hatred felt by some Irish Catholics. It doesn’t mean I would condone it. But I can understand that mindset.

Would you like to see a united Ireland?

Yes, I really would. It could be fantastic. Because the Protestants have a strong work ethic and many other positive values. Why wouldn’t they be able to work alongside Catholics? Where is the magnanimity? Why isn’t it possible to bring the two together? I’d like to see it, but I wouldn’t want to force it upon anybody.

If Spain left the EU, the country would probably implode…

I feel that very strongly. This country has been so insecure for so long – bouncing in one direction, changing in another direction, civil wars, God knows how many. There’s been no sense of the country moving forward with some sort of agreement on the basics: there’s always been a tendency to undo what the previous government has done. Rather like Red Hugh O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell in Kinsale: they’re so busy fighting among themselves that they fail to coordinate their efforts in order to defeat the British. Spain’s a bit like that. “You are more responsible than I am. You’re to blame – I’m not to blame.” They’re constantly squabbling among themselves. So, to be in Europe is a sort of framework within which all this dispersed energy can be channelled. Nobody here talks about getting out. It would be absolutely crazy: people have lost their inferiority complex, they’ve overcome their shyness about learning other languages. I think it’s meant a very positive change in Spain.

You once said that the right wing in Spain is the most extremist in the EU.

There is no ultra-right wing party here as such: it is within the conservative party, the Partido Popular. I meant that those attitudes persist within the party. And there are tics – Franco tics – which survive. Until recently they had an overall majority. In the current situation they’re more docile because they have to reach compromise solutions. But, if you ask me, they are wolves in sheeps’ clothing – not true democrats.

Your body of work has been mainly written in Spanish. But do you feel underrated in your homeland?

I don’t blame the homeland for not knowing what I’ve written. How could it? But at least it made me a member of the Royal Irish Academy and gave me an honorary D. Litt., which is nice (laughs). Some people are aware of my biography on Lorca. Most of the other books haven’t been translated into English. The main thing is that I’ve done what I’ve wanted to do. Someone once said to me, “If you’re going to write a book about somebody don’t write a book about somebody nobody has ever heard of – find somebody famous to write about.” I didn’t choose Lorca only because he was famous but because he fascinated me.

Was it a shock when Franco banned your first book?

Not at all. The book was published in Paris in 1971 and the subject was Lorca’s assassination by the Fascists at the beginning of the Civil War. It had no chance whatsoever of being sold openly in Spain. But it crossed the frontier massively. The moment Franco died, in 1975, it was issued here. It was very timely. No book of mine has done as well as that book. It was hugely successful.

Did you receive any threats or feel intimidated?

If you mean when I was researching, I did have nightmares about them coming for me. But they never did. It was a police state. But it wasn’t dangerous for me, in that I don’t think they could’ve done anything to me – at least not officially. But the people I was talking to were in some danger. They could’ve been beaten up because it was a pretty ruthless place then. There was a lot of fear. I had to be very careful not to implicate people and not to give their names in the book. It was dangerous.

The last time we met, you mentioned that you were planning to write your last ever book in Spanish.

Did I really say that? Anyway, I’ve just finished a book in Spanish called Aventuras ibéricas, which should be out by the time this interview appears: a hotchpotch about my decades here, with the stress on my rambles around the peninsula. I have a chapter on the Roman roads, one on the Iberians, another on the Goths. Then there are chapters on Lorca, the Catalans, Don Quixote Land, La Mancha… And a final chapter about why I love and despair of Spain at the same time.

You told the Irish Times in 2003, “You can’t spend years on a biography without in the process discovering something about yourself as well.”
What have you discovered about yourself?

That the circumstances of my childhood turned me into a sort of literary detective, obsessed with getting at the truth. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t want to be in the university, teaching. I didn’t have any gift as a poet or as a novelist. And I found my vocation as a researcher. I found that I had an ability for language. A certain flair for talking to people and getting out there and burrowing away and tracking things down. I have an obsessive personality – maybe that’s also to do with coming from Ireland.