Dermot Bolger has been pushing Irish literature for decades. Now his anthology of it has been expanded
Nicholas Wroe
Dermot Bolger wasn’t the only teenager with literary pretensions growing up in 1970s Dublin, but surely no others have had such a lasting influence on the modernisation of Irish literature. Instead of scribbling some embarrassing verse and carrying round a battered copy of Rimbaud like his bookish contemporaries, in 1977 the 18-year-old Bolger decided to adopt a more practical approach. He got a job in a welding-rod factory to finance his own publishing outlet. First with The Raven Arts Press and then with New Island Books Bolger went on to both champion a new generation of Irish writers and carve out a successfully diverse writing career of his own.
His initial ambition was to make a living as a writer by the time he was 40. He achieved it by the time he was 24. Since then he has published six novels with a seventh due later this year, eight plays and six collections of poetry. He was recently the driving force behind Finbar’s Hotel, in which seven Irish writers – including Roddy Doyle and Bolger himself – anonymously contributed chapters about one night’s events in a Dublin hotel. “Bizarrely, it has now been translated into Serbian and Japanese,” he says.
This was followed up with Ladies’ Night at Finbar’s, in which seven Irish women writers – including Maeve Binchy – had a crack at the same project. It has been adapted for a BBC radio play to be broadcast this month. Most recently this one-man publishing industry has edited The New Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, a revised and expanded paperback edition of which is just out.
“When doing the anthology it was interesting to see how Irish writing had changed in the 20 or so years since I started,” he says. “In those days it was virtually impossible to do anything. I remember when Neil Jordan set up the Irish writers’ co-operative they sold, literally, one copy of Jordan’s first book in London. I spoke to an English publisher at the time about an Irish poet and he said the poet was as good as anything he published on his lists, but if he wanted to read about urban blight he reads a poet from Hull, and when he wants to read about the countryside, he reads a poet from Ireland. We had a job to do as a tributary of English literature where the south was green and there was trouble in the north. There was no awareness of a whole new vibrant nation emerging.”
The situation is utterly changed now, although Bolger expresses some concern as to how far the pendulum has swung. “When I started editing this anthology I phoned up one English publisher to ask him if he had any Irish debuts coming up. He said he had seven. This was astonishing so I asked to see them, but he said I couldn’t because none of them were written yet. They were writers who, on the basis of a short story or two, had been given two novel deals. It was when the race was on to find the next Roddy Doyle and it frightened me. It makes you wish for an embargo on promising Irish writers for a couple of years to let us catch up. They should freeze them all and hang them on hooks in a big warehouse outside of Brussels.”
To his credit Bolger doesn’t keep up the “it was all better in my day” stuff for too long. “It used to be that the archetypal Irish writer would start off with a very sensitive book about a child growing up in a small rural community who would come into conflict with the Catholic church and into contact with their sexuality,” he explains. “It would wind up on the boat to England and generally a year or so after that the writer would follow suit. Now when a writer becomes successful they actually come home to Ireland. And there has also been an influx of foreign writers which is also good.”
The new atmosphere is in part due to the generous tax status of writers in Ireland but also because of the work of people like Bolger who managed to move the agenda of Irish writing into the age of the Celtic Tiger. He is justifiably proud of publishing the first books by the likes of Patrick McCabe and Colm Tibn and latterly a series of agenda-setting books on social issues, including a study of childhood in Irish institutions that exposed the roles of church and state in the virtual slave labour and torture of children in the first half of the last century. “The scandal of this abuse is now coming out in a string of court cases,” he says. “But when I published the first expos of this hidden world a decade ago, several Irish printers refused to print it.”
Bolger’s own fiction also trawls the new and contradictory realities of modern urban Ireland, where beauty and sleaze exist side by side. His 1990 novel, The Journey Home, was called, “the best book about Dublin since Joyce” by The Irish Independent. “I was abused for examining political corruption in that novel,” he recalls. “But much of it is now being exposed by a series of public tribunals here.” In his most recent novel, Father’s Music, he tracked the twin underworlds of Dublin organised crime and the traditional music scene.
“When I worked in the welding-rod factory my hero was Pier Paolo Pasolini,” he explains. “Pasolini managed the great feat of offending both the Catholics and the communists at the same time. I still think that if you can keep doing that you’re doing something right.”