CHARLOTTE AUSTIN - Welcome, Chris. What is the prevailing purpose behind Irish Nocturnes? Why did you decide to write this varied and unique collection of essays?


CHRIS ARTHUR - I'm not sure that you could describe Irish Nocturnes as a book with a purpose. I didn't set out to write it with some kind of grand plan. When I started writing essays I just concentrated on single pieces to begin with, without any thought of putting them together as a book. But as I wrote more of them, I realised that a lot of the essays were speaking in the same voice, that they had a thematic unity such that it would make sense to put them together in book form.

At that point, I was very fortunate to encounter an editor at the Davies Group, my publishers, who agreed with my assessment. Although in one sense each essay is independent, being able to read a collection of them is not just a case of gathering together a lot of disparate voices all babbling away about their separate concerns. Rather, it's like looking at the same scene from different angles and perspectives. Cumulatively, I like to think that they afford a richer vision.


How long did Irish Nocturnes take to write?

"Ferrule", the earliest essay included in the book, was written in 1993. But that's not to say Irish Nocturnes took seven years to write. It's something I've been working on intermittently over this period, as other commitments allow. I'm not sure how long it would have taken if I'd been able to concentrate on it full time - certainly not quite so long. But it's not the sort of writing that can be rushed.


The beauty of Irish Nocturnes lies in its effective and graceful prose, each word carefully chosen. With this collection of eighteen essays, what overall message do you want to convey?

I don't think there is one overall message. Actually, I find it quite difficult to identify the reasons why I write, the purposes behind it, the messages I want to convey. All I know is that I've been moved to express myself in writing for almost as long as I can remember. I've always been entranced by the beauty and intricacies of language, and still find it amazing what it can be used to convey.

In the foreword to Irish Nocturnes I mention the story that Herman Hesse tells in his novel Rosshalde about an artist being asked why he paints. "I paint because I have no tail to wag" is his reply. The impulse behind my own writing is similar. The essays begin as reflex reactions, unthought and automatic, to certain people, ideas, memories, animals, objects, places. I then proceed to refine my verbal tail-wagging (or sometimes howling) into a more polished form.


Each essay leaves the reader with a series of thought-provoking questions, some more profound than others. Yet the reader does not feel lectured at. How easily is this achieved?

I'm relieved to hear you say that the reader doesn't feel lectured. One of the occupational hazards of essay writing is that you end up with a sermon or a lecture. This tends to happen when the essayist tries to make things too neat, to tie up all the loose ends, to make everything seem cut and dried. I'm more interested in writing essays that are meditative, reflective, open-ended, that suggest different ways of looking at something rather than arguing for a single, supposedly "right" way.

I'm pleased you found the essays thought-provoking. I suppose getting people to think, without making them feel lectured at, relies on posing questions rather than promoting particular answers, expressing a sense of curiosity and wonder rather than conveying any dogmatic commitment to a single point of view.


What thought process do you consciously go through before starting work on an essay?

Conscious thought processes play almost no part in the genesis of an essay. It's not as if I could plan to sit down and write one. I wish I could! I'm not sure where the first germ of an idea comes from. We're back to tail wagging, and automatic responses. Our experience is so incredibly richly textured, yet we spend a lot of time at the surface level of the mundane, routine, the everyday.

Some things, though (and these are the keys to essay writing), just seem to offer a way into the richness of interconnection and relationship, the proximity of mystery, the history that under-runs every moment. Sometimes it will be an object, or a person, or a place that offers a way in. My essays start from ordinary things and try to unravel their connection with the extraordinary.


What is the significance of "Linen", your first and best known essay in this collection?

I was pleased with what the reviewer for the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies said about this essay. He really seemed to catch what I was trying to do in it, and probably gives a much better account of its significance than I could. I think I can best answer your question by quoting from what he says.

"Linen starts from a piece of linen embroidery done by my great-grandmother "but spirals out to refer to [linen's] role in the growth of Belfast, and out to catch a glimpse of linen in ancient Egypt. His mind follows different threads into a maze of information and reflection, yet it is the sacral significance that objects assume in the flow of his own life that really interests him. He plays with the idea of threads and embroidery as an intellectual method for winning a deeper understanding of those ordinary lives in an earlier time, but his primary interest is not historical. While the linen cloth triggers reflections that spiral away from it, the thing itself anchors him in the context of where he has come from and provides him with an endless well of metaphors. History and nature provide contexts for understanding, but it is the capacity to discover symbols and spin metaphors that is celebrated here."
- Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

I've been very fortunate, incidentally, in having found readers and reviewers who seem able to appreciate what I'm about in the book. It's fascinating to see the way in which other people's comments on the writing can often pinpoint features of it that I was unaware of consciously, but which I can see very clearly once they're pointed out.


One of the essays entitled "The Empty Heart" particularly struck a chord with me. Do you feel that today's society exists on an empty heart of sorts, with no faith or belief of any kind?

One of the most impoverishing of all our myths, and one that seems to have acquired considerable prominence in our society, is that there is no more to things than meets the eye. If religions or spiritualities are effective, they provide potent symbols that help us to see the world with a vision that's alert to wonder-mystery-awe.

In Irish Nocturnes I suggest that "symbols are born when the coal of everyday experience implodes into diamonds under the pressure of a weight of meaning that is more than merely ordinary. Through their glittering facets we can look at ourselves and the world in a new light, have things brought sharply into different focus, cut through to other levels of valuation." The book is concerned to tease out symbols from unsuspected places - bits of bone and walking sticks, owls, corncrakes and kingfishers, pieces of linen, temple bells, sheepdogs.

I raise the question of whether we may be living at a time when the great solitaires thrust upon us by nation, faith, ethnicity, may be over. We seem to be living at a time of quite extraordinary potential richness in terms of the range and diversity of knowledge we now have easy access to.

Where previous generations were mono-lingual in terms of the symbols they had access to, we have the potential to be multi-lingual. Unfortunately that potential is too rarely realised and we tend, instead, to end up punch-drunk with a glut of numbing information. Perhaps the time has come to discover the symbolic/metaphorical significance implicit in ordinary things, in our own lives, rather than looking for the kind of over-arching symbols traditionally associated with religions.


What do you hope readers will take away from Irish Nocturnes?

Most importantly, I hope they'll just enjoy reading it. I enjoyed writing the book and I'd like to think that the sheer pleasure I derive from language, the delight I get from using it in a certain tone, register and tempo, will be something that readers will be able to share. Beyond linguistic pleasure, but very much tied up with it, it would of course be nice if the book sparked ideas and made people think. And quite apart from words, I hope that Gigi Bayliss's illustrations will appeal to other people as much as they appeal to me.


Where should readers begin? Which is the best essay?

Different essays appeal to different people, deciding which one's best is a very subjective thing. I'd recommend starting with the very brief foreword, Of Eels, Ulstermen and Dogs' Tails. This explains something about the nature of the book. Then it really doesn't matter what order the essays are read in.

It's probably best to browse through and just start with what most catches your attention. "Ferrule" is the shortest essay and perhaps one of the most accessible. It attracted a lot of favourable reader response when it was first published. My own favourite is probably "Kingfishers" - but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best essay or that other people will rate it.


What genre of writing does Irish Nocturnes fit into?

I borrow the term nocturnes from the Irish composer John Field to describe a particular type of essay - one written in a pensive, meditative, introspective key. You might also describe the book as creative non-fiction, or literary non-fiction. I very much like the point made by Paddy O'Sullivan (Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit at the University of Bradford, England) that John Field's nocturnes "represented the quintessential Irish Diaspora art form - memorable, emotional, portable and short".

The drawback, though, is that "you do need to have a piano". Perhaps with this in mind I should have called the book "Pianoless Nocturnes"! But I'd like to think that the description "memorable, emotional, portable and short" could be applied to my verbal nocturnes.

The book may pose problems in terms of categorization for bookshops and libraries.

Where would it best be shelved? Essays as such often aren't given a section to themselves. Outside of Ireland it might be fitted under "travel". Nature plays an important dimension in the book (there are essays about owls, kingfishers and corncrakes) so it might be put under "nature writing". Others might see it as "biography". There's also a strong philosophical and spiritual dimension as you'd expect with meditations.

In a recent radio review, Robert Greer (who edits the High Plains Literary Review) says that the essays "offer an infectious view of the personal and cultural history of Ireland", so "Irish Culture" or "Irish History" might be used as headings. And, going back to Denis Sampson's review for the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (which offers the best assessment of the book I've read), he says that the nocturnes "are a genre unto themselves" - so maybe there should be a special section for the book! I guess if I was a librarian I'd just put them under the very broad heading of modern Irish literature.


You have a second collection of essays due out early next year. What is the focus of this new work and how will it differ from Irish Nocturnes?

In fact, the original proposal for a book of essays that I submitted to my publishers, the Davies Group, was for a single book of Irish essays. I had the great good fortune to find an editor who instead of rejecting a rather unwieldy proposal, realised that what I had in mind was two books rather than one.

Irish Willow - the title of the second collection - is again rooted in the north of Ireland, mostly County Antrim, where I was born and raised. We're all grounded somewhere, and the resonance of our experience will be coloured by the hues of wherever we think of as home. I hope that Irish Willow will be of interest to anyone who has glimpsed what the natural philosopher John Stewart Collis has termed "the extraordinary nature of the ordinary", or has felt what Georgia O'Keefe refers to as "the faraway nearby". The twelve essays that constitute the book all start from the ordinary, nearby world that I know, but try to follow threads in it that lead into a sense of wonder at the strangeness, complexity and beauty of things.


What project do you have planned next?

I have no plans to stop writing essays. I just wish I had more time to do so. For the moment, completing Irish Willow is my major writing project, but I would hope to publish further volumes in due course.


Any closing thoughts or comments?

Naturally, I hope readers will enjoy Irish Nocturnes - and, when it comes out, Irish Willow. But if anyone looking at the books doesn't find them to their taste, I'd hate to think of them concluding on that basis alone that they don't like essays. The essay is a fascinating and very diverse form, and there are some wonderful essayists writing today.

To get some sense of the range of creative possibilities allowed by the essay, and of the current vigorous good health of the genre, it's well worth taking a look at the annual compendium, The Best American Essays, which has appeared under the general editorship of Robert Atwan since 1986. This provides an annual trawl through a range of literary journals that publish essays and selects what the editor thinks are the best ones.
---

Irish Nocturnes is available online at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books Ulster, Borders, and all fine bookstores. Also available directly from the publisher, The Davies Group. Email: daviesgroup@msn.com