Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Joseph OConnor: Ghost Light

Tonight on behalf of Harvard bookstore I am honored to welcome Joseph O'Connor to discuss his new book Ghost Light this they're called novel opens with an aging actress crossing a city spilling over with detail such as women looking like boxers to scuzz as society flappers in a picture of the Marx Brothers never made. Mali all go to surviving in London and sifting through her to motionless past her reminisces carry her to the stages of Dublin where she started her spectacular career and a place she began a fiery affair with Irish playwright John Millington saying in a glowing review the Daily Telegraph calls Ghostlight delicately wrought with each part interlinking and making a beautiful hole. The novel comes to an acutely moving climax. A fitting end to a haunting book about the last importance of memory and the absurdity of love. Joseph O'Connor has written six previous novels and his first book cowboys and Indians was short listed for the Whitbread prize star of the sea published in 2002

won the Irish post award for literature and received international claim. Mr O'Connor was born in Dublin and his writings have been translated into 35 languages. I'll now turn the introductions over to the vice consul of Ireland and Steve nee. Thank you. Thank you Ryan. Thank you all for being here. I'm just going to say a few brief words. First of all to welcome Joe to Boston on behalf of the Irish consulate. We're very honored and proud that you're here. This event is taking place as part of a series of events which are taking place across the United States this year as part of an Irish government initiative called imagine Argent so they'll be a lot of events taking place here in Massachusetts including a classical music event this coming Friday and MIT and various other cultural events promoting contemporary Irish culture whether dramatic dance music

literary. So I would urge you all to check out the website which is w w w dash. Imagine Ireland Dutch i.e. and you can check out what events are happening in the state you reside in. So as I say we're delighted to welcome Joe. Thanks for being here and we're looking forward to the reading. Thank you. Thank you. Well thank you very much Ryan. And tears are for those lovely introductions I want to particularly thank you for being here tonight and for sponsoring the little reception so make sure you stay and have a drink afterwards. She mentioned imagine Ireland the initiative of culture Ireland a branch of the Irish government that promotes Irish culture brought as part of the. I'm told that the government is sending 1000 Irish

artists to the United States this year I didn't know we had a thousand Irish artists. I'm certain the way things are in Ireland I'm not sure we've got the funding to pay for them to come home a gander so you may be stuck with them for a while. But it's a wonderful thing you know Ireland is going through some difficult times but one of the greatest inheritances that we have and the thing that has sustained people and the thing that has brought dignity and honor to Ireland all over the world is through very difficult times before has been this magnificent inheritance of our culture which has really been part of our gift to the world. So I would encourage you to support these events because there are some really wonderful people heading towards your shores. So I'm going to read to you a little bit from this novel of mine Ghostlight which Ryan told you a little bit about just to

contextualize us slightly more for you as Ryan mentioned. This novel it's loosely based on real life events in the in the life of one of our truly great writers a man called John Millington Singh who wrote a play that some of you will have seen called the playboy of the Western world. The first really important Irish play of the 20th century and saying in real life was a rather reticent. Buttoned up slightly damaged man. He never knew his father who died when he was a baby. He was raised in wealth you know and with privilege but with a certain amount of loneliness to his mother was a very strict puritanical religious person and saying read the works of Darwin as a teenager of 15 or 16 and suffered a very extreme crisis of faith. And he knew that this would separate him from his family. He had been

hurt in love a few times as a young man as most of us were a few times when we were young. Indeed there was the same as having something in saying this childhood that never gave him the capacity to recover from those hurt so he was a lonely man. There's a beautiful phrase about him in a poem by Seamus Heaney where he says that loneliness was his passport through the world. You know it was really how he presented himself to the world. So saying and the great poet William Butler Yeats the great writer and intellectual Lady Gregory were involved in the early years of the 20th century with the founding of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin a place where some of you would have been a really remarkable institution the National Theatre of Ireland which came into existence before the nation itself legally came to be and it was through the mass that in the last years of his life Singh

met Ansel tempestuously in love with a much younger woman she was a teenager when they met a woman called Molly. All good. Which is. It's a beautiful name isn't it. I sometimes think that one of the reasons I wrote Ghost Light is that if you're cold Molly Oh good Somebody should write a novel about you. Molly was a catholic first saying was Protestant she was from the inner city of Dublin from the tenement district that shone OKC wrote about us. The part of town that my own grandparents were from and as well as the differences of class and background temperamentally she was very different to saying she was extremely fiery flirtatious light hearted full of the kind of spark and the fire that people from from cities tend to have and so on paper these two people could not possibly have had a relationship. But as we all know that the song of Heart's Desire is the sweetest song

of all and all sorts of wonderful things happen when people fall in love. And so it was that in the last few years of Singh's life he and Molly had this secretive affair saying died when he was 37. Of Hodgkin's disease something that had beset him pretty much for his whole life. But Molly lived to be an elderly woman she drove right into the 1950s she continued to act and does Ghostlight begins. I have to say you know these are fictional characters they're based loosely on the real thing and the real Molly. But as Ghost Light begins we find her as an elderly woman living in London in 1952 when the city has not yet been rebuilt really after the bombings of the Second World War. And she's elderly as I say she's a bit down on her luck and her great performances are behind her and she likes the odd drop to drink by way of consolation. And she wakes up one morning.

With a memory of this man he was so important to her all those years ago and the novel traces what she does on this day in 1952 and how she remembers the past and how she tries to process it. So I'm going to read three brief extracts. I think that's all you need to know. Oh yes. I'm saying. And Molly had little endearments for each other as lovers sometimes do. Singh used to call him Molly used to call him tramp as a sort of ironic mockery of his prosperous background. Old tramp she used to call him and he used to call her changeling a rather ambiguous endearment. It's from Irish folklore and if you have the ability to change your form some of the fairy folk do that then you're a changeling. But but I think it really it really relates to Molly's

changeable nature and the tempestuous arguments they used to sometimes have. So I'm going to read a bit from 1952 from the opening of the book. Then I'm going to read a flashback to a day in their courtship back in 1980 and I'm going to finish the third reading when I get to the last. It's from the epilogue of the book and that's in the form of a letter that Molly wrote as a as a young woman. So I'm not going to reveal what happens at the end but suffice it to say that many years later many years after both participants in this love affair have died someone is going through Molly's papers and they find an old letter that that she wrote and never sent. So so there we are. So this is from Ghostlight chapter one. A lodging house room in London. Twenty seventh of October 1952 6:43 a.m..

In the top floor room of the dilapidated townhouse across the terrace a light has been on all night. From your bed it was visible whenever you turned towards the window which you have to do in order to fetch your bottle from the floor. Most nights the same the bulb is lighted at dusk in the mornings. A couple of moments after the street lamps flicker out it dies on the ragged curtain is closed. You are 65 now. Perhaps the age of that house perhaps even a little older. What are thoughts you approach your only window. It is shockingly cold to the touch. Winter is coming to England. The weather has been better. Last night a hurricane struck London. You have never noticed anyone enter or exit for lorn house but the post man still delivers to it. Stuffing envelopes through the broken glass in the door

panel the letterbox has been nailed closed many years. Man you're an 8 in the porch. One of the street girls plies her trade there and the balustrade has long been splashed with obscene words. Many of the window embrasures are boarded weeds sprout from the facade. You have a sense that the occupant of the room is a man. For one midnight a fleeting shadow crossed the upper window pane. So you thought there was mail illness in how it moved. There was a time when you used to think about him. How can he live alone in a bomb blasted old house. Who sends the letters. What are they about. For it helped to pass the brutal hours immediately preceding dawn but this morning someone else has come to you again out of the same light. Somehow out of an unseen room out of the city you have lived in the last 13

years but have never found a reason to call your own. This has happened to all of us a coasting across the mind by one we had thought forgotten or purposefully banished. But to day will prove him a wonder reluctant to be exiled an emigrant still attempting to come home. He could be difficult sometimes. What use in denying it. It's irritable unforgiving for a relatively young man because the whisperers and gossips and snigger is always made such a point of the age difference between you and the Vixens triple chin and hypocrite. It's too deceitful to utter their true objection for what are yours fictions. Ink stains on a calendar. There are moments of late when yesterday feels a life ago and tomorrow an unborn century so unreachable it seems. And how do you live to beyond

his youth. The years would have contracted because a married couple become the same age. Grow to resemble one another over time like bookends their recollections in grade bindings between them and neither bothering to read what once divided them. What's this he'd be now 80 something a slippered old duffer a shuffler an hour old bags. Hard to work the calculations with the fog of a hangover. Your reckoning of the decades keep stalling tripping up and after a few ruined attempts you abandon it. You take a small sour sip medicinal just a settler there reek of gin dampens your eyes somehow intensifies his presence but you grimace it away with a swallow. The daily spite of this unmannerly town wasn't Yeats wrote that or my other lunk

Shaw double and he was whining about it. But all towns are unmannerly to the old the poor. The collaborator. What is it in poets that must dress a thing up. Christ they'd nearly call their dandruff the Seri snow. Not long after dawn the shadow kissing time. Gray light at the window and the whistle of the kettle as you move about. Failing to keep warm mittens fluttered to ribbons. You wear a dead man's boots. Well no point in wastefulness a sin. Down below in Brickfields terrace a milk wagon is delivering and you wonder what the man advance you another month's credit. But the fear of being declined dissuades you. Frost Silver's the pavement the telephone kiosk the street the wrecked colonnades of the house where

the lights burns all night. It's an awning over the grocer's on the corner of Porchester road. Rooks are circling the chimney breasts. You shuffle away from the window to the cubby hole by the cooking ring. The room smells of cabbage and dust. Somewhere below you a wireless is playing too loudly but you do not object to the interruption. Find it oddly cheering. Sometimes there are hours late at night when you miss its consolation. Silence can be frightening to the lonely. He always said you were over imaginative to give into fantasy a Catholic trait. He would joke. These nights you read Mills and Boon from the top in a library in Earl's Court Road Show you'd be lost for a bit of an escape. Only it wasn't for true romances. How he would have hated them. Your dog eared an tear stained bad

fellow's opium for spinsters he'd mock the sun would dry the oceans wide heaven would cease to be. The world would cease its motion. My love. Ere I had proved false to the song on the radio that would draw the heart out of you Molly that anyone ever felt such devotion. Chapter 3 kings town a prosperous suburb of Dublin 19 0 8. There is a part of the garden by the cluster of sycamores near the bend in the drive where the gravel is wearing thin. And if he stands there quietly on a still Sunday morning when none of the servants is around to annoy him and when Mother is up in her room at her Scriptures he can hear the distant approach of the train from

Dublin. The wind borne shows chug. That means she might be coming to him again. He is thirty six now already very ill. Painful years have passed since he stopped believing he could be loved. The power of what is happening terrifies him. He leaves his mother's garden makes hurriedly for Glen to Gary's station up the willow lined avenue toward St. Paul's Church of Ireland past the entrance to the quarry lanes known locally as the metal to which the Granites were hefted long ago for the stanchions of Kings town pier. There were days when he feels hammered his breathing sometimes knifes him but punctuality is important. A sign of respect he says. The walk from his mother's house takes about seven minutes. Often he arrives as the locomotive does chuntering to its screechy

standstill and belching grimy spoons of cinders and missiles. He skulks in the station portico not daring to hope lowering his eyes quickly if a neighbor happens past it would not do to be seen. Not yet not here. There is the age difference between them. But that is not all. There are the differences that cannot be noticed in an instance. And then where can she be. She materializes through the smoke. There she is beckoning circumspectly from a second class window. It is like a small moment out of Tolstoy. Perhaps one of those seemingly simple but reverberating images he values in the novels of Russia. He pictures her stepping down to the vapor the sun and then hurrying along the platform to him. Parasol in hand. She comes to him through the filth her face hopeful and kind. The

steam moistening a strand of hair to her far away. But this cannot happen for people might say. There would be talk around blending theory. Instead he boards the train takes the bench opposite her in the carriage. There are like a couple of collaborators plotting an act of treason outside the conductor and slamming the doors. A whistle is blown. A green flag is flourished as the engine gives a shriek and they just are away from Glenn and Gary. He begins to feel something like relief. From the pocket of her raincoat his pre-treating a play script she uses the journey from the city to learn her line. It's a nobody could say she is beautiful exactly but she is an actress. She was able to decide whether to be beautiful or plain like a changeling. He calls her his preferred endearment just like many sweet nothings

and ambiguity. The train clatters into the tunnel at Kali any he is alone with her in darkness. He feels her hand steal into his. This thrills him charges him. No one can say. The moment passes quickly. There is a docile of light on the panorama of the bay his magnificent Italian along the cliff top suchan Ghana a calm run times in the air. It will not be too long before they come coasting into Bray where nobody knows him. Bray is safe. Passers by might think them a father and daughter as they exit Bray station and she links him at the elbow and they go walking down the promenade in the direction of bread he had through a swirl of dirty girls and old newspapers. He looks older than his years. She looks younger than her years. He has achieved some recognition in the field of play writing translations of two of his

works have been performed in Prague and Berlin. He is co-director of the Irish National Theatre society but few in this frumpy little town would know he was a writer and fewer if they knew it would care. His companion has appeared in three of his plays bit parts at first but she was soon elevated to Leeds past code grey wavelets breaking on the stones past to suck in the runnels of Strand. This is from the epilogue old a letter found among her papers on mailed to Wayne's inn and grocery near Cairo Kushal Bay Connemara Galway twenty fourth of july 19 0 7. Dearest Trump. I'm after writing out your

name and looking at the page a hundred years. I am unsure I should go on a tall. Or if you'd like a line or two from your old penny. So how do you keep in this weather and you without me up and Dublin are you fading away like the morning dew. I hope you won't be thick with me now for writing and you're buried in your I will play like a minor. Tis midnight in Connemara downstairs there at the drinking on the singing of sad songs. They live only for pleasure. The stony grey islanders on the dark deeps up of the blackness. It said there's a storm coming. No one seems to care. An hour ago a girl was singing the last of rock Royale and everything went still oh still as the air and you came drifting in and sat down by my window. I was thinking about the knights in Cork City when that old drunkard was singing

at near the markets to remember his hands. They were like gnarled bits of bog oak. We were going somewhere our common home was that after the theatre maybe. And there was a fella too old to be begging and he collecting money and a cap on a dog on a rope with a scarf around his neck and yourself a big ol soft heart were crying the sun would dry it the oceans wide heaven should cease to be. The world will cease its motion. My love ere I had proved false to the. I was thinking about when we quarreled you silly jealous long. I hate it when we quarrel. It makes me afraid you want to leave me. I'd no more go with another fella. You are too silly goose for words. I might play a little game of winks on my eyes but that is all and I'll

quit it if you really do wish me to toss I'd make you one happy. You're blathering old boon when it's myself there's a your mercy and always will be. And I hate it when you say I'd be better off with some easy go and chop God it makes me want to scream the Face-Off Yes so it does some harmless nice fella and his colors in a drawer and his mammy sewing him up for the winter. What would I do with him when it's my crappy Scrivener I only want you just say it for the development of maddening me don't you. Didn't I know at the moment I saw you before you'd ever given me the time of day long before you ever touched me or even I heard your name spoken girl's nonsense. I hear you saying never happens in life only in story books and songs. And the queerest thing of all is I

agree with my tramper. I haven't hide nor hair of reasons for what's between us now and if ever you wanted to quit your impatient girl truly and our little story had to be put away in a room that's only sometimes remembered. Well that's still a room I'd want and I'd go there now and again like some room in an old hotel on a sea front someplace where two centers did something they shouldn't. Do you mind what I'm telling you. It is the God's honest truth. Even if I never saw you or heard from you again you'd already have been the miracle of my life. Oh I can see you rolling your seven hundred year old eyes and say and I make it all sound like a novel for a dressmaker's. You better most grab me. But to find you in my mind at some moment of the morning to

see some sentence in a script and wonder what my Trumper would say to us or to feel you glowing on like a lamp in my head and to know I'd sleep in your arms that night. There's nothing in the world would ever give me the joy of the house. NOTHING IN THE GREAT ROUND WORLD. You're forever at me to talk only I'm sometimes afraid there's things I should have told you when we were walking the line a strand like that knowing you is the greatest blessing of anything in my life. I can't think up the phrases and the fiery words you tell of yourself. For those not languages enough in all the living world to tell you of your preciousness to me and everything about you gives me courage. I never ever had it and without you I'm like a ghost drifting through some old house of a life and there's nothing

about you I don't love. You are so kindly and good and wires and I love you and so patient and so loyal and so manly. So now you know all. Can I send you this letter. Are you reading it still. I'm my God man. When we marry Can we go to America and stay there a time. That's if you still want me my plowboy. Oh wouldn't we be the nice pair of ornaments in New York or Brooklyn or someplace to flit away from this rainy sod land and the gossips on the dollar and the pokers of noses and our old maids. There's times I think it'll choke us. If only we could go in America. We would live to a hundred and fifty. Do you think I could ever play a lead in Boston or Chicago. All my trumpery wouldn't be a thing entirely. We'd be

two fools with the laughter and we traipsing down the Broadway back to some little slot in the midnight. It makes me weep with hearts joy when I think I have found you and all the lovers adventures we will share. Do you know the way I've sometimes wept when we've been together alone for all the pleasures you have given me have left me nothing else to do. That is how I feel this night. How I wish I had you here. I would measure your neck with my kisses. God I can't sleep tonight. What is ailing your girl. Do you mind. You asked me one time to sing you a song and I was nervous for I hadn't had lessons. It was the first day we ever spoke to one another in socks all straight by the post office. But if you were here I'd sing it now. Would you like that old Trumper. Because the words on a page are

only words on a page that a song needs someone to love it by hearing it was yourself told me that once there was that night we were in Cork. An old drunkard was singin it and not a soul of the world listening but you and me were and it's in my head now. And as long as I live and no matter what happens US I'll hear it every time I hear the rain. The sun would dry it the oceans wide heaven should cease to be. The world will cease its motion. My love there I would prove false to the day. Well it's coming on for Dawn. I better go to sleep. Do you think I should send this when you don't want interrupting. You're right I shouldn't. But tomorrow I'm going to as soon as the storm is over. Wish. I think it's lulling. Wait now till I

listen. Everything is quiet. Only the waves on the stone. Yes it's little enough Irish to be learning today I'm thinking. I can hear the turns calling beautiful sound. Come with me up to the cliffs and we'll watch them an hour. We won't say a word. Let the sea be all our talk. Just the gulls and the fisherman's boats heading out on the troll nets on rolling behind them. I kissed this paper dear man touch it to your lips I'm half afraid to send it I don't know why the sun is coming up. Your changeling. There we are. Thank you. Thank you very much. Or they know how to write a letter in those days and there is none of this texting nonsense.

So. So I'm happy to take questions. If anyone has one or comments yes down the very front. Ghost Light is the title. It's from a wonderful old theatrical Superstation you know how Tater folk love their superstitions and it said that every theatre is haunted and there are the names of certain plays that can never be altered. Inside the theater you know Shakespeare's play Macbeth actor is referred to as the Scottish play because it's believed that if you say the word Macbeth in a theatre something terrible will happen in fact I probably shouldn't have said it in here because the roof will fall in but I go Ghost Light is a lovely old superstition that when the theater is dark when there isn't a play on or when the theater is closed for the night. That you must always leave one light burning on stage so that the theatres ghosts can perform their own plays. So you know you'd be nice to the theatres ghost and they'll be nice to

you and that light is called a ghost light. And when I came across that. Since it is a book about memory and how we carry the past how we carry our ghosts and how all of us have a kind of backstage in our mind we're shuffling around the characters almost all the time and sometimes we bring them out onto the front stage of our memory and sometimes we're happy that they're in the back stage. I just thought that it was not just a lovely phrase but one that would actually help me to write the book. It was a great help in deciding what the mixture of tones and textures in the book should be. So that's what a Ghost Light is and it's still for people who work in the theater. I looked it up recently and in the Oxford English Dictionary. They even in our age now the very low wattage light bulb that's used backstage they hardly cause any light at all and so people can move around scenery. That's called a ghost light. It's in the OED as one

word but it comes from the adult theatrical superstition. It's nice one is not. Well it's funny.