clearclassics blog post 55
I love books where writers or artists describe how they write/create, not so much the inspiration and ideas, as the practicalities of time and space, desks, canvases, paper,pencils, pens, brushes and computers, crafting, abridging and editing. I am especially interested in how everyday life is fitted in and around creativity, insofar as a distinction can be made between the hours spent not directly creating and the hours spent actually getting down to it. I have written my various theses, books, articles, chapters and reviews over the past 45 years in a variety of settings and times – at a desk in a shared office, at a table crammed up against a bed in a tiny apartment; in the corner of a bedroom between 8 and 10 pm (I work better in the mornings but I worked when I could); in a chilly attic with a well-wrapped-up newborn asleep on a couch behind me; in a series of wooden Barna sheds out the back while kids were at school, or sports; in an office at my place of work; at a kitchen table with piles of notes around me in freezing February weather, and latterly, in a former child’s bedroom now repurposed as a study/guest bedroom. Some of my best writing has happened in cramped and temporary spaces in twenty-minute bursts. Recently I’ve read two brilliant books by writers which underline the importance of everydayness (that’s the only way I can describe it) in the creative process.
Sara Baume’s Opening Night is an act of artistic generosity, because it is mainly about her friend, the painter Mollie Douthit, whose unusual and striking paintings are reproduced in this gorgeous book. The first book of Baume’s I read was Seven Steeples, a lyrical evocation of a couple living an isolated life in rural Co. Cork. Opening Night, also set in west Cork, is more directly autobiographical, and it’s mainly about Mollie.
Originally from North Dakota, Mollie has spent years in Ireland, in the Burren College of Art among other places, and at the ‘time of writing’ she’s living and painting in a tiny cabin on a farm not too far from Sara (I’m calling her Sara), without any car. So Sara drives her hither and yon (quite a lot, it seems) and they swim once a month and visit regularly and they also connect on Instagram (something foreign to me but it works for them). They feed each other sourdough bread and oatcake flapjacks and hard cheese and spicy tomato soup, beetroot-and-horseradish relish, borscht, dates stuffed with peanut butter and dipped in chocolate, stir-fried broccoli, red cabbage, red rice. For Christmas dinner they have roast potatoes, fried brussel sprouts, hake with a ‘herby,cheesy crumb’ and Mollie’s ginger-and-cranberry cake for dessert, which has not risen properly but tastes delicious. I love these details and I love the descriptions of their respective domestic spaces too.
But all aspects of life are described with the same attention to detail – cold, stony beaches, supermarket car parks, the wildflowers Sara picks for her house, a train journey, a visit to Sara’s mother in east Cork (she gives them butter bean stew, bulghur wheat and greens from her garden), a stint in Skibereen arts centre, a stay in an inexpensive Dublin hotel, a visit to Kilkenny. Sara also describes and explains Mollie’s paintings. Mollie paints from memory – her grandmother’s house, her family’s lakeside cabin, a motel she and her husband stayed in, a café where she and Arvid had coffee, herself and Sara on the Dublin train, Sara’s writing desk and lots, lots more – and she leaves out a lot, because she’s painting what she remembers, not what was there. Of course. That’s what art/writing is, isn’t it? Didn’t I always know that? ‘Emotion recollected in tranquillity’ as Wordsworth said. How long, though has it taken for that to really sink in?
Sara’s partner, Mark, a prize-winning angler, features from time to time but does not emerge as a character. Neither does Arvid, the Swedish man with whom Mollie falls in love, and marries, but I suppose neither has given his consent to have anything other than a walk-on part in the book. When Mollie comes back to Cork her Swedish visa takes a while to sort out, and she has an important exhibition coming up and meanwhile she has terrible pain with her teeth. Sara worries that she is not as sympathetic as she could be, but I think she is very good to Mollie, in every way. It is just very hard to help (meaningfully) somebody with chronic pain.The book ends with Mollie’s very successful show in the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, and her eventual departure to Sweden.
A recurring, jarring theme in the book is Sara’s dislike of people generally. Holiday-makers on beaches (or even just other people on beaches), crowds in Bantry and Skibereen, restless children on a train, First Communion congregations spilling out of churches, women in pyjamas on the balconies of blocks of flats, are described with something between bare tolerance and outright disdain. This didn’t spoil the book for me, because I interpreted it as fear of the unknown, but it was a little disappointing all the same.
Caitríona Lally’s artistic life is quite different. She has worked for over a decade as a cleaner in Trinity College’s housekeeping department, so as to facilitate her writing life, and this is the main focus of Home Economics: a memoir. She studied in TCD in the early ’00s and did a bit of housekeeping then, but came back in the early ‘Teens as a part-time, permanent employee. I’ve written in this blog about her strange and beguiling debut novel, Eggshells, which was a prize-winning and commercial success, and the writing of her second book Wunderland (which I also read and enjoyed) happens within the timespan of this book. At the end, she tells us she has been approved for a few years’ leave from her cleaning job to write another book.
Her cleaning job in Trinity gives her three things – money to live on which supplements her partner’s income; flow (so-called ‘mindless’ tasks done with skill and dedication are actually very ‘mindful’) and a community which gives her moral support and advice through working life, pregnancies and children’s illnesses. The other workers are either Dublin women nearing retirement age or young men from all over the world – eastern Europe, Africa, South America. She clocks on at 0550 and leaves at 0920. On her way in (walking or on a bus/tram) to work she passes Mountjoy prison and the Mater hospital, fervently thankful not to be in either place, and while she’s passing along O’Connell St., clean laundry bags are being delivered to hotels and fresh bread to restaurants. (Joni Mitchell’s ‘Morning Morgantown’ comes to mind.) Sometimes she even sees the remains of drunken quarrels spilling over into the morning. Her cleaning-working day finishes when most people’s working days are beginning, with coffee in a city-centre café, and her writing-working day begins.
Her first birth is traumatic and her little girl is left with a (temporary) facial palsy which makes breast-feeding impossible; she is so reassured when she reads Eavan Boland’s ‘Night Feed’ poem which celebrates bottle-feeding, that she emails the poet right away – and gets a warm reply. Her second birth is a bit easier. Eerily, because the exact same thing happened to me, she finds an account of one of the births that she wrote a week or so after, but her memory of the birth a year or two later had become quite different. Which is the more reliable account, she wonders? When I taught oral history this fascinating discrepancy between immediately-after accounts and memories on which the dust of years had settled, provoked hours of classroom discussion. Our past is not what happened, it is what we remember.
Caitríona goes back to her job after both her maternity leaves.Once, she and her colleagues are trying to get rubbish bags down a staircase out of a conference venue, and have to cope with a cross female conference organizer and dumbly indifferent female conference attendees, at a conference about the gender pay gap. But this kind of incident is rare. Most students, academic and administrative staff are friendly – the professor who is surprised that cleaners would need parking spaces is exceptional, thankfully. Caitríona isn’t resentful about being a cleaner at all, and crucially, she isn’t doing it to make a point or to ‘do research’. She is neither George Orwell nor Barbara Ehrenreich.
It is parenthood rather than paid work which holds up her artistic life but despite her children’s (quite serious but thankfully, temporary) illnesses and her own intermittently bad health, the writing happens, as do the media appearances, the reviews, the prizes, the interviews. She basks in the small luxuries her new-found fame gives her; she loves a hotel stay and freebies, free wine and petrol-station flowers, and she likes meeting other writers. She isn’t too happy talking about writing but she’ll do what she has to, to get by. Thinking about her cleaning work leads her to research domestic workers in the past, and she refers to one of my favourite books of all time, Alison Light’s Mrs Woolf and the Servants.
These books embody two different approaches to living the creative life. Sara is inspired by her friendships with other artists and by her own art/craft-making which she tells us a little about in this book and in another non-fiction book about creativity, Handiwork. (I found that one heavy going, I have to admit.)Living in a remote rural location seems to suit her too; she describes the artist Gwen John’s solitary, convent-adjacent life with something like envy. Caitríona is inspired by the mental quietude she finds in routine manual work, but she also relishes the companionship of work, and the hum of the city. Sara has no children because she fears that motherhood would make art difficult or impossible; Caitríona could testify (fervently) that it does make art difficult, but not impossible .
When I pulled out Wunderland to check the publication date, I saw on the cover that Sara Baume called it ‘my novel of the year!’. I doubt if she hands out endorsements lightly, or exclamation marks either, so this is a nice coincidence.
Sara Baume, Opening Night (London: Granta 2026)
_________Seven Steeples (Dublin: Tramp 2022).
_________Handiwork (Dublin: Tramp 2020).
Caitríona Lally, Home Economics:a memoir (Dublin: New Island 2026).
___________Eggshells (Dublin: Liberties Press 2015; Harper Collins paperback 2018).
___________Wunderland (Dublin: New Island 2021).
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Gollancz 1933).
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: undercover in low-wage America (London: Granta 2010).
Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants (London: Fig Tree 2007).
Clear Classics is a blog where I write about books I like, mostly old books, but new books too.
Clear Classic Books 
Leave a comment