Aubrey Malone profiles Roddy Doyle, a writer of many parts
Roddy Doyle is a man of many parts. As well as having written eleven novels, seven plays, seven screenplays and innumerable stories for children, the King of the Expletive and former Booker Prize winner has also established, with Sean Love, the creative writing centre ‘Fighting Words’ which was the subject of a recent TV documentary.
He even wrote the life story of his parents in his first non-fiction book, Rory and Ita,’with their collaboration. As if all that isn’t enough, he’s co-written the autobiographies of two iconic Irish sporting stars, Kellie Harrington and Roy Keane. The collaboration with Keane led to a series of interviews between them, which segued into their ‘In Conversation’ shows. In May of this year these will be both in Belfast and in Dublin’s 3 Arena.
One of Roddy’s most controversial books, The Woman Who Walked into Doors, (1996) was an explosive study of spousal abuse, giving us a brilliantly realised character in Paula Spencer. She explains the bruises her violent husband Charlo gives her as being the result of the eponymous ‘accident.’ How many women were reduced to such lies for fear of further beatings?
Paula first made her appearance in the searing TV drama Family in 1994. She also featured in Roddy’s 2006 novel, Paula Spencer. His most recent publication, The Women Behind the Door, (Jonathan Cape) takes her story into a new direction with the arrival of her eldest daughter Nicola on her doorstep.
Nicola has left her family. Is she going to be another Paula? How many scars does she carry from the memories of Charlo?
Their relationship is transmitted to us with Roddy’s familiar mix of humour and pathos. There are also prolific uses of the stream-of-consciousness mode of narration he enjoys so much. Like his last short story collection, Life without Children, it contains elements of what he refers to (like all good Northsiders?) as ‘the Covid.’ ‘It’s only th bleedin’ flu,’ we hear from a man in Supervalu in the frontispiece of that book.
Paula is now in her late sixties. She’s living with a nice but dull man. The book employs the same staccato style as Roddy’s other books, interspersed with equally familiar cathartic moments.
The continuing Paula story is clearly an area where he feels comfortable. The book returned him to the fanbase he partly lost with some of the edgier books he’s written in recent years, like The Guts,’ and Two Pints. The latter had Jimmy Rabbitte, who first made his appearance in The Commitments, fighting middle age and health concerns.
It’s hard to believe it’s nearly forty years since The Commitments first brought Roddy’s unique elliptical style to us. Since then he’s become so much a part of the national psyche we almost take him for granted. ‘I’m just a bald man with glasses,’ he says, ‘There’s a rash of them around. It’d be different if I had a Mohican.’
Roddy, as most people know, began life as a teacher in North Dublin’s suburb of Kilbarrack. This was where he engaged with the working classes that have been his raw material since. He spent the first few years of his writing career fending off charges that he wasn’t a ‘serious’ writer. Some po-faced readers could only see the expletives. The profusion of dialogue also led to many people regarding them as plays in disguise.
Roddy cut his literary teeth writing plays. They were done with Paul Mercier in the Passion Machine Theatre Company. He doesn’t apologise for the profusion of dialogue in his books. “People are their talk,” he said once.
He’s always been entertaining talking about his books and their circumstances. ‘I was asked to speak at a screening of ‘The Commitments’ once in Amherst,’ he recalled in an early interview, ‘and only one guy turned up at the lecture. He apologised on behalf of the entire population of America.’
‘The Commitments’ was self-published at a time when few writers were doing this. It was like the writing equivalent of going to a dating agency or a marriage bureau. Was it a sign of desperation on his part?
He didn’t see it that way. ‘I sent the book to every publisher I could think of,’ he said at the time, ‘and it came back unopened.’ So they didn’t reject the book, he reasoned. They rejected the fact of someone sending them a book in the first place. That realisation made him feel less bad.
He was aware he was a new voice on the horizon, someone who didn’t want to adopt the traditional De Valera definition of what constituted Irishness. He became noted for his depiction of different kinds of characters, ones who weren’t tropes, who didn’t have traditional histories.
Was there a market for this? He wasn’t sure. The book world of the time was characterised by sensationalism. ‘If you want to get published in London,’ he said, ‘you have a great chance if you’re a drug addict or an ex football hooligan.’
The Barrytown trilogy (‘The Commitments,’ ‘The Snapper’ and ‘The Van’) made him famous not only on the page but also in the world of cinema. Alan Parker’s direction of ‘The Commitments’ when it became a film ensured that.
Parker knew he had a great script to work with. Before he called ‘Action’ for the first time he said to the cast, ‘You better be prepared for the fact that this film is going to change all of your lives.’
It did, and Roddy’s as well.
The ‘establishment’ was still sniffy about him at this stage. I remember John Banville saying, ‘I don’t regard Roddy Doyle as a writer. He’s more like a social phenomenon.’ He didn’t help matters by making pronouncements like, ‘We’ve sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place but it’s a dreary dump most of the time.’ This was before the Celtic Tiger started to roar.
He refused to be brought down by denunciations like Banville’s one. In fact he joined in them himself, making comments like, ‘I see ‘The Snapper’ as ‘Thelma and Louise’ with chips.’
It was only with the Booker Prize win for ‘Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha’ in 1993 that the intellectuals began to take notice of him. They didn’t think he was capable of such lyricism in his evocation of a 1960s childhood from the inside out. Afterwards came the more serious books, culminating in the ‘Last Round-Up,’ the Henry Smart trilogy of ‘A Star Called Henry,’ ‘Oh Play That Thing’ and ‘The Dead Republic.’
Roddy is now such an established figure he doesn’t have to make a case for himself anymore, or worry about who likes him and who doesn’t. He also refuses to wear the mantle of Dour Faced Scribe, even if he spends up to nine hours a day writing.
His modus operandi is as unique as everything else about him. ‘I put everything in for my first draft,’ he says, ‘Then I start taking stuff out.’ It means nothing important goes AWOL, and he can still nuance his material.
Ernest Hemingway used to say that he always left his desk when his inspiration was flowing. It meant he’d be able to hit the ground running the next morning. Roddy said something similar: ‘Sometimes when things are going well I back away from the desk and wander down to the shops for a bottle of milk I don’t need.’
What a long and winding road it’s been for the former English and Geography teacher with the cheeky grin. How could he ever have forseen where it would take him? The early years of his fame, he always said, were a bit weird for him. He was once asked to endorse a green Wonderbra for the World Cup. Another time he did interviews in four different countries in a week. They were all in pubs called The Dubliner.
Then there was the day a woman who was compiling an anthology of letters from writers asked him could he help. When he wrote back to her to say he didn’t have a suitable one she said, ‘Can I use this one then?’
Roddy said recently that being as easily recognised as he is on the street makes it a big deal if he decides to go down to the shops for that bottle of milk he doesn’t need. Or even the one that he does need. Does he risk breaking a rhythm by leaving his desk? Is visibility a poisoned chalice in such circumstances? The last thing he wants to do is appear stand-offish. It would kill his streetwise appeal.
There’s an irony in becoming famous for writing about ordinary people. You became extraordinary as a result. J.D. Salinger knew all about that after ‘A Catcher in the Rye.’ What can one do with such a problem? ‘Just roll with it,’ Roddy says.
He retains a sense of boyishness about himself no matter how many years he has on the clock. (He’s now 68). No matter how thin he is on top, he feels young inside. As young, even, as when he was ‘one of the lads’ during his teaching years in Kilbarrack.
That’s not to say he misses teaching. The first day out of the classroom he felt almost guilty about being ‘allowed’ to spend the day writing. Since then it’s been like a permanent paid holiday. As the old saying goes, when you like what you’re doing you’ll never have to work again.
He continues to divide the critics about his talent and that’s the way he likes it. Most of them go into ecstacies about the way he’s diversified himself over the years, speaking of him as the champion of spare, sculpted prose. Others still find it difficult to reconcile the Hard Man characters of his books with the espousal of feminist ideals we see in the Paula Spencer books, including the most recent one.
Roddy is confused about people’s confusion on this score. ‘I don’t have a problem about changing a nappy,’ he said once, ‘and then going down to the pub to talk about football. I’m not a new man or an old man. I just happen to be a man.’
