Prison Writing #16, 2002 (Waterside Press)

The Prison Writing Interview with Julian Broadhead

Carlo Gébler is the author of acclaimed novels, such as The Cure and How to Murder a Man, non-fiction books Driving Through Cuba and The Glass Curtain, he has also made documentary films for television on subjects as diverse as `Country & Irish` music, the Irish Troubles, the English lyric poet George Barker and the Irish writer and thinker, Conor Cruise O'Brien. His most recent book, Father and I,  a memoir of his relationship with his late father, was received highly favourable reviews in the media. Brought up in London, Carlo Gebler now lives with his wife and children in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. For the past eight years he has worked in prisons, encouraging and helping inmates to write - first in The Maze and latterly in Maghaberry. Carlo Gebler was interviewed by Prison Writing co-editor, Julian Broadhead.

JB: First of all, how - and when - did you become a writer in residence?

CG:  The long version is as follows . . .  I arrived in Northern Ireland in 1989.  I went there to write a book, The Glass Curtain- and I'm still there. I was interviewed on Radio 4  and I said I'd like to make a series of films about 'ordinary' rural life in Northern Ireland. I thought a series of films that were not Troubles-centric was long overdue.  To cut a long story short, a woman called Maurna Crozier had a little government money intended for theseeding of projects like mine that would amplify perceptions of the complexity of life in Northern Ireland. She gave the money and  I went to the BBC.  They were impressed that someone in bigoted Northern Ireland hadseen fit to give the project some money.  I made the series.  It was called Plain Tales from Northern Ireland. I stayed in touch with Maurna.  She got involved in a project to bring art into prison. She asked if I was interested in going into HMP Maze  - Long Kesh to Republicans - and working with prisoners on their writing.  It would have to be even-handed, I'd have to see Loyalists and Republicans. Yes, please, I said. An incredibly complicated vetting process followed.  Two RUC inspectors twice interviewed me at home.  I also had to supply an incredible amount of background information on my family going back to my great-grandparents. The whole process culminated with a telephone vetting.  A man from the NIO rang me and I had to answer his questions.  He rang while my wife was in labour.  She was having our fourth child and she had opted for a home birth. I didn't feel I could say to the guy from the Northern Ireland Office who was cross questioning me, "Excuse me, could you call back when my wife's hadher baby."  I just didn't think he'd believe me. The conversation continued and the good news, after forty-five minutes, was that I was in, in jail. And the good news went on.  A little later, after I'd put down the phone, out came the baby and it was a girl. 

I turned up for my first day.  My first port of call was a loyalist block. The inmates had rioted the weekend before and set the block on fire so once inside I found myself in a blackened wing with charred cell doors.  There were no officers about at the time. My greeter, a Loyalist lifer, sniffed the air as he led me down towards the kitchen-come-dining room.  I would be holding my class in the band room - where Loyalist paraphernalia was stored - behind the kitchen. "Had a bit of a barbecue the other night," he said, lightly.  "But of course so and so," - and here he mentioned a famous prisoner, "he would throw too much petrol on and it got a bit out of hand."

I went through the kitchen and into the band room.  It seemed to have escaped the worst effects of the fire. That's what I remember at any rate. The band room was filled with drums and banners emblazoned with paintings of King Billy. There used to be a marching season in the jail just the same as outside and this was where the prisoners kept their stuff. When I saw all the paraphernalia I wondered if this was some sort of statement to me about Loyalist culture. If they put me in this room it must have been because it meant something. However, I decided in the end there was no statement intended. This was just the quietest room there was. There were four men at the first class. I read them Pale Anna by Heinrich Boll and then got them to read me their work in turn. It was no different really - except for the conditions - to how things would have been had I been in the public library. 

JB: To go back to the very beginning, both your parents were well-known writers.  At what sort of age did you become aware of what they did? When you look back, how did you regard what they did?

CG: I could spend a hundred thousand words answering this question.  The sound of the typewriter clacking and clicking is one of the dominant sounds of infancy and childhood.  My father, Ernest Gebler, was a night bird.  I would hear him banging away on his Remington at night. He bought this typewriter in the nineteen thirties.  He was working in Dublin as a cinema projectionist and trying to make his way as a writer.  His father, my grandfather, Adolf, a secular left wing Jew from Sudetenland who had settled in Dublin and married a local girl, was not amused.  He was annoyed my father was daring to write.  Adolf was a musician and he firmly believed there should only ever be one artist per family.  He also drank.  On one occasion, when he was very drunk, he attempted to throw the typewriter out the window and into the road.  The equivalent would be throwing an iMac in to the street.  When my father got Alzheimer's, I got the Remington. What a talisman! Unfortunately, I had it with me in a taxi in Athens when my wife had a stupendous argument with the driver.  He ordered us out of his cab and in the ensuing chaos I left it behind. Yes, back to my childhood.  My mother, Edna O'Brien, was a day bird.  She had a modern typewriter  which stood on a rubber mat.  As a result it made a different muted noise.  Early on I learnt that the typing style or sound was as distinctive as an individual's footfalls.  Each of us types a different way.

When I was five I came out of my primary school gate - we lived in Morden, a London suburb in those days - and I found my mother waiting.  It was the summer and she said I could have what ever my heart's desire was from the ice-cream van parked at the kerb a few feet away.  While we waited in the queue she explained her largesse.  She had written a novel, The Country Girls, it had been accepted for publication and she was going to receive what, to my ears, sounded like a fabulous sum of money.  This was the moment when I realised that one could write - or type - words on bits of paper and get money back in the post for those bits of paper.   It wasn't a miracle, writing for one's living.  It was feasible, possible. My mother did it. My father did it.  At some point it occurred to me I could do it. 

JB:  Presumably, few - if any - of your friends had parents who were writers? Did that make you feel different as a child?

CG: Until I went to Bedales - a co-educational boarding school of progressive tendencies - when I was fourteen, and where some of the children were the offspring of writers, I attended a succession of state schools.  None of the mums and dads of the boys and girls I mixed with had anything to do with the world of the arts, apart from one youth whose aunt was Diana Dors.  There certainly were no sons or daughters of writers. When I told my contemporaries that my parents were writers the reaction I got was largely agnostic.  The information was received but rarely commented upon.  There was neither hostility nor interest. Writing wasn't a job that anyone else's parents` had anything to do with.  It was odd, unusual. Of course, my parents had friends who were writers. I understood this - but they were in a completely different milieu to the factory workers and the lorry drivers who were the parents of my friends at primary school. Understanding this was a big a discovery.  The conclusion that I came to  - understood in childlike terms rather than in the adult terms that I'm using here - was that society was comprised of discrete compartments.  These had nothing to do with each other. Or put it another way - writing, being a writer, yes, it was a big deal, for the writer, but the rest of the world didn't necessarily think so.  I've never forgotten this.  I think it's been a useful perspective.

JB: Did you have much contact as a child with your parents' literary friends or contemporaries?

CG: Yes, there were writers around during my childhood and adolescence.  A few visited the house in Morden. Later, my parents separated and I lived with my mother in Putney.  A lot of writers visited her house and attended her parties.  This was the sixties.  Parties were a big thing. I was introduced to all sorts of writers including the reclusive JD Salinger.  In fact I spent a whole afternoon with the hermit of Connecticut.  He had his daughter with him and we went to Battersea funfair.  I was thirteen or fourteen.  She was seventeen or eighteen.  I can't remember her name but I can remember she was wearing lime-green stockings. Miss Salinger made an infinitely greater impression than the venerable father did.  I knew he was famous, I knew he'd written Catcher in the Rye but at the age that I was, he was just an old guy.  I was much more interested in the daughter.  I don't think she paid me any attention whatsoever. 

Another influential literary figure from my youth was Kenneth Tynan.  He was an habitue of my mother's parties.  I met him frequently.  Anyhow, towards the end of his life, when I was in one of my periodic fits of depression about what I was going to do with my life, blah, blah, my mother arranged for me to see him.  This was for a 'pep' talk. I showed up at the Tynan house in Onslow Square in South Kensington, I think. I was led into the sitting room.  I sat down. Tynan wheezed in a few moments later.  Was he fresh from spanking the au pair?  Now there would be a story!  He collapsed in a chair and took a hit of his Salbutamol inhaler. And then he began to speak. I wish I'd taken notes.  He was brilliant.  His 'talk' went something along these lines: So I wanted to be an artist.  I wanted to write.  I wanted to make films. Well, then, all I had to do was to do it.  If I wanted to write, and he thought writing was more important than making films, all that was necessary was that I sit down and put one right word down after another.  What was I waiting for?  I owed it to myself.  And if I didn't make a start and apply myself, he predicted a melancholy future.  I'd end working for other people as an employee.  That would be appalling. He was also very firm on the subject of originality.  Whatever I did in the world of letters and he was emphatic about this, I must not, under any circumstances work as a hack.  I must not spend my life writing about the writing of other people.  Oh no, that was, in his opinion, the way to get cancer.  The only thing that mattered was originality. It didn't matter, he continued, if my work turned out not to be first rate. The point was, it would be mine, I would have made it, and I would own it. He also extolled the virtues of labour.  Work was ennobling; work was good for the soul.  That was the future and I must seize it with both hands - a life of literary toil. The talk lasted about an hour.  Then I said goodbye and left.  I don't think I ever saw him again. But his words never left me.  They remained in the unconscious and, over the years, gradually came to exert a greater and greater influence.

What Tynan did, which was why he made such an impression on me, was to size me up in a moment, mentally decide I was going to be a writer, and then tell me to go away and do it.  When you're young and callow, as I was, an authority figure that reads you right and then tells you what to do will necessarily have a profound, transforming effect.  And they don't have to spend long with you.  All they need for the trick to work is an hour.

I'm not saying I wouldn't have become a writer if I hadn't had this peptalk.  I would have found my way.  After all, I was driven by the psychological need to appease and propitiate my father with words.  What Tynan did was to cut the journey time by years.

JB: Did you read your parents' books?

CG: I didn't feel I needed to read them - they talked about their books, or around their books, all the time  I gleaned enough from eavesdropping on their conversation.  I was also more interested in reading my preferred authors, most notably Enid Blyton, whom I worshipped. Reading my parents' books came later.  

JB: Looking back overall, has your parents' occupations been a help or hindrance? 

CG: By their example I saw it was economically possible to survive as a writer.  Of course it could have been a hindrance.  My mother's stock has always been high.  If I had attempted to piggyback my own career on her fame, I would have made enemies.  Grub Street is a place of terrible enmities.  What ever you do, don't court envy in the world of letters.  This is why I have always refused to do Sunday Colour supplement things which feature famous parents and their children.  Why seek to give a false but envy-provoking impression that one is part of a literary dynasty?  I also believe - on the basis of experience - that progress through the world is entirely accidental.  Things rarely happen because of pulling strokes or using connections.

JB: You studied Russian Film and English at university, then went into making films. When did you begin to think about writing for publication and how did that happen?

CG: At the Film School I met a writer called Kerry Crabbe.  Although I was training as a director I was also scribbling and reading a great deal.  What Kerry did for which I am eternally grateful was to make a random process regular.  One week he would say, "I want you to write me a sonnet and I want it next Thursday at two."  Or, "I want two hundred lines of dialogue.  Three young travellers on a cross-channel ferry," and then he would specify what they were talking about and what their characters were, etc.  I would go away and do the work and at the appointed time I would present the work, good, bad or indifferent. That was a salutary lesson, if you write you must produce your work on schedule, not when you feel like it, not when inspiration comes.

The other great influence from those days was the great Scottish film-maker,Bill Douglas.  He it was who made the trilogy, My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home.  I wrote a script based on Chekhov's harrowing story 'In the Ravine' - a story about infanticide.  My idea was to re-make this story as my film school graduation film, in the west of Ireland using non-professionals.  Bill was my tutor.  I gave him the script.  Bill sat down and went through it with me, changing, subbing, re-ordering and so on. Then he told me to go away and re-write it.  I did.  We continued the process for about three months.  I re-wrote the script dozens of times. What it taught me was that the writer must write and re-write, comb and re-comb, polish and re-polish in order to get it right.  A few, a very few writers have the ability to produce perfect copy at one sitting.  But for the rest of us, you have to work at it if you want to get it right.  

When I left the film school I directed documentaries occasionally and wrote some short stories.  My then girl friend got these published in the Literary Review.  To see the work in print was an extremely important spur.  I also began doing reviews, interviews, and bits of travel writing.  But everything I did was short.  There was nothing long-form.

JB: Which writers have influenced you the most?

CG: Once you internalize words by the act of reading you add to the sum of your consciousness and you are therefore in consequence of that addition, different, altered.  Every book adds to you.  Every book I've ever read therefore has been an influence because every book I've ever read is lodged in the psyche.  Some of course have more influence than others do because I return to them.  In my case the most persistent influences are Chekhov and Camus, and from the point of view of being a professional writer, Greene. The awkward Graham is also an example to writers, or he has been to me, on how to live your life if you are a writer.  What Greene reminds one is the importance, if you're a novelist, of thinking long term.  The novelist is running a sixty or seventy year marathon and must pace himself accordingly. Greene is also right that all novelists' lives end in failure. Within the world of Irish letters obviously Joyce and Beckett are the suns at the centre of the universe. It's a sci-fi two sun universe, you see, this world of Irish letters and the rest of us are satellites or planets revolving around this pair.  I know Joyce is great and so is Beckett but the Irish writers I like are O'Flaherty . . .  The Informer is an Irish Ur-text . . . Francis Stuart  -he who blotted his copy book by aiding the Nazis in the last war - Black List, Section H  is fantastic . . .the Blasket Island writers . . .Maurice O'Sullivan - Twenty Years A Growing is the greatest Irish autobiography ever . . . John Mc Gahern - I find his pessimism reassuring . . .

JB:  How about crime/ prison literature - especially prisoners' accounts of incarceration?

CG: I am not nearly well read enough in this or any other area.  But I have read all of Bunker and was greatly impressed.

JB: What do you think the benefits are of publishing prisoners' writing - i.e. benefits to the writers and to wider society?

CG: If we write we want what we write to be published.  Apart from Emily Dickinson most people who write, write to be read.  Publication completes the act of writing.  When a prisoner gets his work into print it does him, his ego, his sense of self-esteem, no end of good.  However, writing, it should never be forgotten, is an economic activity.   When you pay the prisoner - as Prison Writing does - you give the prisoner the complete experience - publication and money.  The effect of the two together is colossal. Is this of benefit to other writers?  The answer is yes, it can be.  I read Prison Writing and I learn from what I read.  Whether this is good for society, I don't know.  If people -civil servants, MPs, social workers, policemen - read it and are changed by what they read, then it would be good for society. The writing of prisoners is not going to substantially alter government penal policy.  I wish it was otherwise but it isn't.  The person that publication helps, primarily, is the prisoner.  And for me, that's fine, that's enough.  Getting work into print doesn't have to achieve anything else.  As far as the amelioration of human misery is concerned I'm a firm believer in modest achievable goals.

JB: Can you give a brief outline of the inspiration for your novel, How To Murder A Man ? Just to give an idea of how a spark ignites into something much bigger.

CG: How to Murder a Man owes its existence entirely to HMP Maze.  That jail was what got me going on that novel.  Or, to be more precise, the men I met in that jail were what got me going.  Or, to be even more precise, it was their work. The prisoners wrote all kinds of things, love stories, dirty stories, buddy stories, every kind of story.  There was plenty of propaganda as well.  But what surprised me the most, was that quite a lot of what the men wrote about was what they knew about, their lives as paramilitaries before they came to jail.  Quite often, their fiction, their drama, was in fact, a thinly veiled account of what it was that had got them into prison, or would have got them into prison, or had got their mates into prison.  "Write what you know," is advice often given by tutors of 'creative writing' to wannabe scribblers and I presumed my pupils must have had this advice from the teacher before me and what I saw was the result. And what was so striking in these accounts was that although there was politics before and after the deed, at the moment of the doing of the deed, there was never any politics.  Political violence was a politics free zone. If this work I was reading and working on with the prisoners said anything, it said that when the lads were doing it for Ireland or Ulster, Ireland or Ulster never crossed their minds at the moment they were doing it.  Oh no, what they were thinking was rather more prosaic.  I hope this gun won't jam. Is that a policeman?  How the hell am I to get out of here?  I had always apprehended this simple truth - I'm not that stupid - but now I completely comprehended it.  And that is a completely different type of understanding. One day I received a play from a prisoner. This didn't just have a de-politicized centre: this had almost no politics at all  - bar a little reference to the Reverend Ian Kyle Paisley.  But then who can write about Ulster without mentioning our home-grown Colossus?  This play was entirely about the deed and the penumbra of practicalities surrounding it.  Where to get your boiler suit.  The best kind of boiler suit to buy.  What to do to the boiler suit before putting it on.  How to use two cars to get around a checkpoint.  How to move a weapon.  What to do after you've made your whack, and so on. One evening, around the same time I received this play and I was reading it, I found myself talking to an old school friend about it.  I heard myself saying this play is a manual on how to murder a man. "Well, there's a title for your next book," he said. My friend was a commissioning editor for Channel Four.  He earns twenty times as much as I do precisely because he can think in snappy title terms and I can't).

So now I had something I hadn't got before - a title - and around this I could feel all sorts of feelings about Ireland and our - or her - Troubles beginning to cluster. The catalyzing, galvanizing intervention came in the form of a totally unexpected and unsolicited request.  Out of the blue, I was asked to write a play.  I had never done anything like this before. What would I write, I wondered, and as I asked myself this question, the most extraordinary and unexpected notion came into my head.  I must get hold of Realities of Irish Life by William Steuart Trench.  I didn't know why but get it I must.  When my unconscious says, Go do, I always follow instructions.  This would be no exception.  I went to the Linen Hall library in Belfast.  I got a copy.  It was a first edition as it happened.  I read it. Steuart was a landlord's agent and, as well as being a Victorian polymath, model farmer and polemicist for agricultural improvement, he was also a beautiful non-fiction writer.  His book Realities of Irish Life is the story of his life as an agent for a succession of landlords, some of whom were absentees.  His is the kind of voice from whom one doesn't hear very much in the late twentieth and early twentieth first century.  He's one of the bad men of Irish history, one of the dastardly agent wallahs who screwed the peasantry.  That's a pity because what ever your politics, Trench is man worth reading.  His is a good robust style and he tells some cracking if mildly partial stories.  One of these caught my attention. It was about an attempt of a local agrarian secret society to assassinate Trench himself. 

I thought this was great.  Here, from the past, was a story, which directly chimed with what I'd gathered in the prison, that at the moment a 'political' murder is committed in Ireland, all a man has in his mind are the practicalities.   Here was a story about the practicalities of trying to kill.  Here was a story from the past -- and a brilliant story at that -- that would allow me to talk about the present in an indirect way. Here, I sensed, was a narrative vessel that was strong and sturdy enough to carry the multitude of feelings and experiences that were in my head safely out into the world. So I plundered Trench, changed the story around quite a bit, and turned out this magnificent play.  Brecht, Shakespeare and the Jacobeans conflated into a brilliant single bundle.  The manager of the theatre who commissioned the piece summoned me to a meeting, gave me a camomile tea and said, "We can't put this on, it's too depressing.  Everyone will leave at the intermission, go outside and slit their wrists," which I took, in its own way, to be very high praise indeed.

Anyway, nothing is lost in the ecology of the writer.  So it won't be a play, I thought.  Right then, I'll write it as a novel.  I started writing. And as I wrote, I re-cast the piece completely, i.e. I did not get the dialogue and put bits of description in between.  Oh no.  I took my story principle -- man, agent, is sentenced to death: he resists: he survives -- and I started re-telling it, in a literary way, from scratch and, the process started, it was hardly any time at all before literary things that don't happen in the play began to happen.  In other words, in the writing, I re-imagined what was already a re-imagining.  Fast forward two years and Hey Presto! I had a novel.

JB: What has been the most artistically rewarding book or film you have done?

CG: I love all my children equally - including the ones that squint or limp or have some other incapacity.

JB:  'Father and I' ?  What made you decide to venture into memoir?

CG: Everything that you write is of course, in some way, out of your experience. Even if you don't write directly about what has happened to - even if, let us say, you make it all up, your experiences are what have made or fashioned your unconscious, or psyche, and no matter how made up or invented is the work, it will nonetheless bear your imprimatur.  It will have something of you impressed on it that is unique, like your thumbprints are unique. I'll put it more simply; your task is to learn how to sing in your own voice. Writing - fiction or non-fiction - is the organisation of experience, real or imagined, with words into a structure.  When it is read it gives the reader pleasure.  That's why I'm doing it, anyway.  I want the reader to enjoy that same sense I get from reading.  That's all I'm about.  It's a very simple proposition; pay money, buy book, get pleasure in return. There's no logic to the process, at least not when you're inside it, trying to do it.  I certainly have never had the experience of sitting down and thinking the next thing I am going to write will be this.  Only Arnold Bennett and few other lucky souls could manage that.

JB: Could you describe the process?

CG: I get a feeling first.  Then the sensation grows stronger.  It's like when a fish nibbles at a line.  Then lines of prose, and the odd image, and the sound of a voice, the smell of a room, and other bits and bobs drift into the conscious part of the mind. I know that when that begins to happen something is bubbling.  But I also know it's not like fishing.  I can't strike and wheel in a tuna.  I have to wait until I feel I have been filled up with what ever it is that is imminent (and about which I have some dim idea, incidentally). After a while, the moment then arrives.  Ah ha.  It's there, it's come.  And it's time to start to write.  I usually have a vague idea of structure and I will make a note of that structure - usually in the form of chapter headings.  It's important I never put too much down before I write; it's important I don't over-plan because then there'll be nothing for me to discover in the course of writing.

Then I start to write in earnest.  Usually, the first sixty or seventy pages are awful.  I'll have to go back over them, and back over them, and back over them.  I'll be like a blind man at a cocktail party groping around, colliding with people, trying to find someone friendly (and probably female) to talk to, knocking trays over and generally making a mess of things. But this period of disaster does not last forever.  Then I do find my feet. Or a sofa to sit on.   And someone to talk to.  Content begins to slot into place.  I know my characters, I find, and my head is filled with their lovely voices.  I am juiced.  Now the fun really begins. Off I go.

Out of all the different things one does as a writer, this is my favourite period.  I'm writing.  The words to say it are coming without my thinking. Though I know, roughly what sort of a direction my story is going in, I am also discovering, each day, while I'm writing at my desk, something I didn't know, or lots of things I didn't know.  I'm being surprised all the time. It's almost as if - and this sounds really weird - I'm reading something I have never read before.  It actually feels like that. And then the thing is done.  I get to the end.  The writing is over.  I'm always impatient to get something finished -- because I'm impatient to find out what's going to happen -- but at the same time I'm also always bitterly disappointed.  A book is like a child and you grow it and when it's finished, well, that's the moment the child becomes a young adult, says goodbye to the parents, and strides off into the world, leaving mum and dad behind, mourning in their empty nest.  Luckily, unlike most mums and dads, the writer can soon re-fill, or re-populate the nest, by choosing to have another book.

JB: In fact as well as fiction? This would apply to your memoir Father & I ? The pain of your childhood comes clearly out of the book. Had you any reservations about writing something so personal ?

CG: You would be forgiven for thinking I am talking here about fiction.  You may even be thinking, he's talking about How to Murder a Man.  And it's true, all that I have been saying, is applicable to writing fiction. But - and isn't there always a but? - I am not only talking about fiction; I am also talking about Father & I.  It was only possible to write it because I went through the same psychological process as with fiction. I want to talk about the prompting business first.  One of the things about writing is that the work you have been doing, produces the work you do next. After I finished How to Murder a Man, and in reaction to writing two historical novels  - that in turn were a reaction to a whole slew of other novels that had come earlier - I had the hunch feeling I spoke about above. And the hunch was that what I was going to write next would not be about other people: it would be about my own past.  It would essentially be the story of my father and myself, and our forty-four years of miserable co-existence.

Now everybody has it in them, and certainly every writer has it in them, to write the story of their life with their family.  Indeed, every writer does write about his or her own family in one way or another.  I was and remain no exception.

But you can't do it when you most feel like it - which is usually when you are young and not long out of the fold.  You can only do it when it feels right - this business of writing about one's own should never be rushed, that is what I'm trying to say.  I couldn't start until these events that I had a strong yearning to describe until they were coherent, until they had a shape.  When you write fiction, you, the writer, you make that shape.  When you're writing fiction you have to wait for life to offer you that shape. That's the one big difference between writing fiction and non-fiction. In the case of my miserable forty-four years co-existence with my father, though I'd always wanted to write about him and though I had some nice anecdotes, some interesting situations, I had no end.  And I couldn't make one up.  I couldn't have written the book and stopped it say, in Dalkey, where he lived out his last years with my stepmother. When you're writing non-fiction you have wait for life to offer you that shape. There is also something to be said here about ethics.  I had a duty of care towards him as a writer.  I would not have written this book had he (or my stepmother) been alive.  That would have been quite wrong.  But after they were gone, that changed. This sounds harsh but Graham Greene was right - there is a shard of ice in every writer's heart.  I'm no different.  After he died I thought, it's over, now I can begin. Lines of dialogue and interiors of rooms where I hadn't been for forty years had been floating on the edge of my peripheral vision for ages, sure sign that this material was growing or developing in my unconscious.  But I hadn't an end and without an end I couldn't start; and when he died, I got my end.  There wasn't any more story to go. I would be the first to agree this is an appalling statement.  But is also a statement I'm prepared to stand over.  Every writer is a schizophrenic.  I'm kind and I'm tenderhearted and I love my children and my wife.  My relationship with my dad was appalling but in my own boyish way I probably loved him (I think).  But there is also, because I am a writer, another side to my nature; this side is watchful and cool and detached.  It doesn't cause harm to others or myself but it is extremely discriminating.  It looks for narrative coherence and when it arrives, it hungrily seizes the coherent story and uses it.  We're not monsters, us writers, any more than we are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.  We just tell stories and when we get sight of one, we seize it with both hands and we won't let it go.  There is something very calculating inside the writer but it is important never to confuse that with ruthlessness or a capacity to manipulate.  It's a wary, infinitely patient watchfulness.  Graham Greene described authorial selfishness marvellously in The End of the Affair.  Martin Amis in The Information also does a very good job.

 A psychiatrist would probably say that I chose to write this book because unconsciously I wished to make conscious this discovery.  I had to write the book in order to embrace those sides of my nature I didn't like because I associated them with him. It is also true that I wanted to write something simple, i.e., anti-novelistic and, moreover, I'd been very affected by all the memoir material written by prisoners that I had read in HMP Maghaberry. The answer, doubtless, is that I wrote 'Father & I' for all sorts of reasons - for all of these reasons.  But there's one thing I can tell you emphatically.  I didn't write it as therapy.  I didn't write it to make myself better, although that may have been a result of the process.  I wrote it because I had a story, I had the impulse, and I wanted to make some money. Never leave the economic motive out - it is money that makes the world go round!  As I wrote, when I wrote, I wasn't thinking about my own psychic health.  All I was thinking about was one thousand good words a day, or thereabouts and a story of a hundred and twenty thousand words that fulfilled the contract.

JB:  There is little mention in Father and I of your life with your mother. I can see that the book is focused on one specific relationship but the reader might wonder - as I di - what was happening with her at times. Maybe I'm overstating the impression I got, but it's almost as though your life with your mother was secondary, because of your father's dominating manner . . . What did your mother think of the book?

CG: You're absolutely correct. My mother loved me.  That was a given.  I wasn't therefore involved in a complicated drama with her in which I was trying to get her to love me.  I didn't need to.  I took her for granted and the people you take for granted  -at least when you're a child - do not lodge in the memory or generate narrative.  My father, on the other hand, did not love me - or at least that was my impression - and so I was involved in an incredibly complicated drama with him.  I spent all of my childhood trying to get him to love me.  It was an intense experience and all these years later it helped to produce a book.

JB: Do you find many prisoners have read your books, or do so as a result of your work among them?

CG: Some prisoners read my work.  It's not mandatory as far as I'm concerned.

JB: How many prisoners at any given time do you work with in Maghaberry? Do you have a group or is it all one to one? What would you say the main themes are of the prison writers you have guided? How may have been published in any form?

CG: I'm in the prison one day a week.  I do not teach a class. I work unescorted on the wings, in the Punishment and Segregation Unit or in the hospital or the kitchens or the workshops, or in fact anywhere. I see prisoners alone, usually in their cells (which is the best to talk; it feels safe for them.) Sometimes I'm locked in with them. I would see in a day between eight and twelve people.  They will read me what they've written or I'll have read what they've given me to read.  Either way, I'll then go through the work with them rather as my publishers go through my work with me.  Quite a bit of what's written concerns crime and/or the paramilitaries who are still a dominant feature of Northern Irish life despite the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Typically, we can't even agree on what to call the Agreement. However, there isn't one over riding theme that prisoners in Northern Ireland home in on.  The work is diverse, it's as diverse as people are. One or two have been published in Prison Writing or in Northern Irish publications like The Captive Voice.  A lot have submitted work to Koestler - and done well.  A good number have gone on from writing for me to doing an OU degree.  Some have just written for the sheer hell of writing. Some have left and gone out into the world and worked for community arts groups because of writing. Personally, I am not obsessed with publication and, though it's important, I don't see it as the be all and end all.  Just write well, that's my motto. And in my experience, everyone, or almost everyone knows when they've written something that works and something that hasn't.  Everyone I work with in the jail, whether they go for publication or not, is doing it to make themselves a better communicator. And writing - the practice of writing - whatever it is you write - unquestionably does that.

JB: You have worked for many years, through a sense of vocation rather than financial motivation, in two of the most dangerous prisons in the western world. Are you able to offer any advice to writers in residence about how to make an impression in prison? Be it with inmates or staff?

CG: I do get paid - which is nice.  I've never been threatened, or felt frightened.  My advice to putative writers in residence is this: Never say behind a man's back what you're not prepared to say to his face.  Total and absolute glasnost with everyone is absolutely mandatory. Also be particularly careful about the way you speak to prisoners.  What you say blithely, they have to live with behind the cell door when it's closed.  You can forget what you've said once you're at home with the wife.  The prisoner can't. I never refer to an officer as a screw.  You do not have the right to pretend you're a prisoner and use a word like screw, not if you're walking out the gate at the end of the day.  Know your place.  You're just a temporary visitor. Make certain you smoke - roll-ups for preference.  Make certain you bring plenty of tobacco and that you share it.

JB:  At the end of Father & I you write "You can't change the past but, with understanding, you can sometimes draw the poison out of it." Don't you think that must very pertinent to the situation that many prisoners are in?

CG: Yes, prison forces a man or woman to have an intimate relationship with the self and writing effects the same transaction.  But there is one critical difference.   When I wrote that book I was free to turn to it or to turn away from it.  Prison, on the other hand, involves compulsion, coercion.

JB:  A fascinating interview, which I'm sure will be of great interest to anyone who wants to write, prisoners or non-prisoners. One last question - what are you working on in 2002?

CG: I'm writing a straight narrative history of the siege of Derry.  This will be an Irish equivalent of Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad. The trouble is, Beevor knew he could assume his readers know there was a Second World War and the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, and so on.  I can't assume anyone knows anything because it's Ireland.  Therefore, before I get to the siege proper, I have to explain about the Normans, the Elizabethan Wars, Cromwell, James II.  I've been writing for six months and the siege has only just come in sight over the last few weeks.  I can see it steaming over the horizon like a distant Dreadnought. I'm also writing a book for children based on the Golem stories that originated in the Prague ghetto in the sixteenth century.  I like taking ancient myth and, if possible, re-animating it.

Julian Broadhead is author of  'UNLOCKING THE PRISON MUSE - the inspirations

and effects of prisoners' writing in Britain' Cambridge Academic Press, 2006

ISBN 1-903-499-267.

www.cambridgeacademic.com