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| Claire Keegan |
Claire Keegan: 'Short stories are limited. I'm cornered into writing what I can'
It was Hemingway who perhaps came closest to defining the art and craft of the great short story. "If a writer knows about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows," he wrote. "The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-ninth of it being above the water."
Reading Claire Keegan's sublime short story "Foster", which Faber & Faber is about to publish as a standalone work – an accolade in itself – I was constantly reminded of Hemingway's definition. "Foster" is a thing of finely honed beauty and cumulative power, a story that deals in suggestion, exactitude and telling detail. It has the sure-footedness of great short story writing and a sense of confidence in the sparseness of the form that extends from the writer to the reader, allowing all that is not said to hold sway on the imagination.
"A lot of my work goes into taking any traces of my labours out," says Keegan, when I talk to her in Edinburgh, a few hours after she gave a reading at the city's book festival. "It's essentially about trusting in the reader's intelligence rather than labouring a point. To work on the level of suggestion is what I aim for in all my writing. There are so many things the short story cannot do; it's by learning those limitations that I am cornered into writing what I can."
Keegan is an exacting interviewee, cautious to the point of guarded. There is a definite sense that she would prefer not to have to comment on her work at all. At one point, she reprises the anecdote about Schumann being asked by a student to explain a difficult piece and, in response, sitting at the piano and playing it again. The work, she insists, is its own explanation. "Do you know Chekhov's great story, 'The Kiss'?" she asks. "I really think that story asks the question: what is the point in saying anything? The soldier is kissed. Then he tries to tell the other members of the battery what happened and he feels like a fool. To try and explain a story is to run that kind of risk."
Keegan describes "Foster" as a long short story. ("It is definitely not a novella. It doesn't have the pace of a novella.") Set in rural Wexford, it is narrated by a young girl who is fostered out to another family, the Kinsellas, by her father, for the summer months. They are kind and caring, giving the girl the space to develop and feel valued. It is a getting-of-wisdom story and one that illuminates the contrasting lives of the families, one struggling and overcrowded, the other contented but childless, the rural community that they live in and, by extension, Ireland itself.
Blessedly, Keegan's Ireland is not the familiar land of misery, abuse and constant drizzling rain, but a place of community, common decency and, most surprising of all, sunshine. "For me, the fact that the story unfolds in summer was primarily a practical matter," she says, smiling. "For her to go away, it would have to be a summer. I made it hot because, given that it is so long since we've had [a hot summer] it was pleasurable to write about, but because it also deepened the happiness of the summer."
Though it seems, in its depiction of the slow rhythms of rural life, to take place in a much older Ireland, "Foster" is set in 1981. The reader only finds this out when Kinsella tells his wife, in passing, of a news report about the death of an IRA hunger striker. It is an arresting moment, one that makes the story seem suddenly both more contemporary and more ominous. Without giving too much away, "Foster" is about love and loss, about how familial grief can be transformed into tenderness, about how hope endures and, with it, kindness. It is, at times, almost unbearably poignant in its evocation of childhood innocence and adult stoicism.
"It's an examination of home and an examination of neglect," says Keegan. "I don't trust that home is necessarily where one finds one's happiness. Families can be awful places, just as they can be glorious and loving. Also, I'm very interested in what we can do without, what we can go without. To a child, for instance, the difference between being able to be well-fed when you are growing, and not, is enormous." Complex terrain, then, for a story just 88 pages long.
In writing the characters, Keegan tells me, she "discovered" a wealth of detail about them that was left off the page. She knew, for instance, that "the Kinsellas talked in bed at night about what they should do with the girl, and agreed on it". Why would she leave such an intimate and telling moment out of the narrative? "Because the girl, the narrator, didn't know about it. If it's not in her consciousness, I couldn't put it in."
Keegan, who was born in 1968, was herself brought up in a large family on a farm in County Wicklow. "There wouldn't have been too many books in the house," she says, laughing. "Maybe a few lying about in an upstairs press [cupboard], and few Mills & Boons that an aunt used to bring around. I remember my mother used to talk about Jane Eyre, though. At college, I read it twice just to see if I had missed anything. The ending was so disappointing, a Mills & Boon ending to a tragic situation. I always remember the opening sentence, though. 'There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.' That's a lovely moderate beginning. There's room for the story to move up and out from there."
When she was 17, Keegan left home to live in New Orleans, where she took a degree in English and political science at Loyola University. Her life, she says, has been "a bit nomadic" ever since, but she has to be at home to write. In her 20s, unemployed and living in Carlow, she applied for a part-time teaching job in Dublin. "Twenty hours a week in schools out in Tallaght and Clondalkin. I loved it." She has a master's degree in creative writing and still teaches after a fashion – "private workshops in a boardroom I hire myself and intensive weekends in fiction".
Keegan's first short story collection, Antarctica, was published in 1999 and won the Rooney prize for Irish literature. Eight years went by before her second collection, Walk the Blue Fields, appeared and won the 2008 Edge Hill award for short stories. Reviewing it for the Guardian, Anne Enright described it as "seven perfect short stories" in which "the hurts she describes are so ancient and keen that we find ourselves scrabbling for a timeline."
In that collection, Keegan, who has often been compared favourably, if lazily, – lazily – with the late John McGahern, used an image from his memoir as a jumping-off point for a story called "Surrender". McGahern had described how his father, a tyrannical police sergeant based in Galway, had sat on a bench and devoured 24 oranges before he got married. "The image of the oranges just kept coming back to me," says Keegan. "Children in those days would get a single orange for Christmas, so it really was an extraordinary thing to do. And the fact that this terrible, mean-spirited man saw marriage as the opposite of pleasure and fulfilment so he had to gorge himself like that before he made the leap. As an image, it was irresistible."
Did it cross her mind that it would further frame her in some critics' minds with McGahern? "I knew there were comparisons, made, I suspect, because we both write about rural Ireland rather than because of any similarities in style," she says. "But I also knew what I was doing and that I had to do it. The fact that it was a McGahern image made me feel that I shouldn't not do it for that reason."
"Foster", too, sprang from a single image: "a well, a bucket and a girl's reflection in the water". And, again, the image nagged at her until she began writing. "That often happens," she says. "I have to write a story to make an image go away. It's like an elbow nudging you into examining something you don't quite understand, but need to. For me, writing is a way of understanding something and, as such, a journey into the unknown."
"Foster" has made it into book form by a surprising route. In February this year, it was published in the New Yorker in an abridged version that, according to Keegan, "was very well done but wasn't the whole story. It had some of the layers taken out, but I think the heart was the same". The original story, which Faber is somewhat belatedly putting out, won the Davy Byrne's Irish writing award last year. It was chosen by the American novelist, Richard Ford, who lauded Keegan's "patient attention to life's vast consequence and finality" and her "thrilling" and "sparkling" prose style.
When I ask her if she feels there is now a burden of expectation upon her, she says: "God, no. That award was a privilege and a pleasure, but not a weight. People have been extraordinarily generous and the stories seem to mean a lot to quite a few people. But I expect a great deal of my writing and I'm not writing to please anyone. I just try to write as best I can. I couldn't make it better for anyone else's sake."
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