Desmond MacNamara, a prized Logos contributor, died January 8 at the age of 89.  Mac, as he was known to friends, was one of the most remarkable people that at least three Logos editors ever met. This profoundly Irish artist, a sparkling wit and inexhaustible raconteur, lived in London since 1951 with his charming English wife Skylla, a film studio script reader. In Dublin in the 1940s Mac worked as a valued set designer for the Abbey and the Gate Theaters and as a prop designer on films, including Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of Henry V.  Mac also became the model for the kangaroo-suited ‘MacDoon’ in J.P. Donleavy's classic novel of post-war bohemian Dublin, The Ginger Man. His sculpture is on exhibit in the Irish National Gallery and the Dublin National Writer's Museum.

Mac also published books on puppetry, uses of papier-mache in sculpture, and the art of picture framing. In the 1970s he won a film award for his work in animation. His Celtic comic novel The Book of Intrusions, published by Dalkey Archive Press in 1994, won plaudits in the international press. A second novel, Confessions of An Irish Werewolf, had just been completed at the time of the interview and is available through Ushba International Publishers (salvi@pk.netsolir.com).

As a farewell, we reprint the 2003 interview and pair it with the opening chapter of  Irish Werewolf (the excerpted third chapter having appeared earlier in Logos).  Readers, we suspect, will see why he will be sorely missed by those of us who were fortunate to have known him. His final book review appears in our next issue.

 - Kurt Jacobsen

ACCORDING TO MEMOIRS WRITTEN ABOUT THE 1940S AND 1950S IN DUBLIN, YOU ARE PORTRAYED AS THE IRISH ANSWER TO GERTUDE STEIN IN THAT YOU RAN A NON-STOP SALON IN YOUR SCULPTOR’S STUDIO ON GRAFTON STREET WHERE MOST IRISH NOTABLES – AND SOME NON-IRISH, LIKE PHYSICIST ERWIN SCHROEDINGER - WOULD SHOW. HOW DID THEY ALL COME TO GATHER THERE?

It's simply that by accident I had a studio in a tall house in the middle of the city in the narrow ravine of a street and I started using a pub around the corner, McDaids - and people would drop in casually. My wife at the time, Beverlie Hooberman, kept an open house. When pubs shut people dropped in. People dropped in before pubs opened, people dropped by when the pubs were open, and people dropped in for a free cup of coffee instead having to pay for it because there was usually coffee bubbling away.

People sunbathed on the roof. There were three studios on the floor. One used by John Ryan, one by me, and one by a sculptor called John Bourke. There was no furniture whatsoever. No living accommodation. So I furnished it with everything that I had. Theatrical props. Cows heads. Anything to reduce the room from the empty barn it was when I first saw it.

HOW DID YOU COME BY IT?

Through John Ryan.1 It was over the Monument Creameries, which is now gone. So there it was. Up on the Gothic heights opposite Woolworths where I could watch pigeons fornicating on ledges which no one else could see from below. That's really all there was to it. This period of my life lasted only three to four years, but it was a formative three or four years for me. The end of my life as a student and my first evasions of the obligation of living elsewhere or in some other way.

WERE YOU BORN IN DUBLIN?

I'd been born in Dublin. Born in a Georgian crescent near Merrion Square. My mother was Dublin-born, although my paternal family comes from Kileloo. My grandfather was a bespoke-shoemaker. He had a small shoe factory which made riding boots, livery boots and things like that. He was a Fenian .2 He was out at the rising at Tallaght in 1867.

HE WASN’T NABBED BY THE BRITISH?

He came home in a cab. Buried his gun and came home in a cab. When the redcoats appeared.

YOUR SCULPTURAL MEDIUM SEEMS TO BE PAPIER-MACHE. YOU’VE PUBLISHED A BOOK ON ITS USES IN ART. YOU BEGAN BY APPLYING IT TO STAGE PROP DESIGN, DIDN’T YOU?

Yes. A lot of my work was theatrical. Papier-mâché was simply an accident. I had trained in sculpture and done my diploma at the National College of Art, as it then was called. I had always been interested in the theater and I had belonged to rather a progressive theater group.

CONSISTING OF WHOM?

Oh, various people. I can't recall many names. Many are quite well known in the theater now. An ambassador in Luxembourg, Stockholm and Delhi, Val Iremonger, was our last producer. The founder of the Lyric Theater in Belfast was our secretary. Many others passed into acting. So I took to making theatrical props as one of my means of - hardly making a living - an existence, a subsistence, really. It so happened that at the time Hilton Edwards discovered that I was able to do things that previously hadn't been obtainable in Ireland or, for that matter, in London. Certainly not at a cheap price. I started to reduce the amount of scenery, the amount of painted backdrops. That was a fashionable thing then. And I concentrated on huge props like statues of Apollo or Venus or whatever. And so simply because people knew I was there, they tended to come to me from the Abbey and the Gate and other separate productions. And from the odd film when they were on Irish locations.

DONLEAVY INDICATED THERE HAD BEEN A SEPARATION BETWEEN THOSE WHO LIVED UPROARIOUS LIVES AND THOSE WHO DID THE ARTISTIC WORK.

 I don't remember any particular distinction of any kind. There were no separate zones of living that I can think of. I went many, many times to the Catacombs. On one occasion I lived there for about ten days, in a most superior room.

IS THIS AFTER YOU VACATED GRAFTON STREET - ABOUT 1948?

I think that it was probably 1949. I've forgotten exactly when I left Grafton Street. I left quite early on because the huge place had been taken over. It was an entire floor of the most expensive property in the middle of the city. Grafton Street district was the equivalent of Bond Street in London or Avenue Louise inn Brussels or anywhere like that.  I was squeezed out and ended up in a Georgian mews off Baggott Street. It was a mews off a mews. It was full of hens. You had to pick your way through them to get to it. And so I moved everything up there and expanded to fill up the space. You could hardly move around in it. It was about that time that I met people like Gainor Crist, the Ginger Man.

HOW DID YOU COME ACROSS THAT NEST OF AMERICAN STUDENTS AT TRINITY? HOW DID DONLEAVY, CRIST, AND O’DONOGHUE STRIKE YOU AT THE TIME OF YOUR FIRST ENCOUNTERS?

I can't remember any first meeting. But I do remember the first time I talked to Donleavy at any length. It was at Crist's house at 1 Newtown Avenue, Blackrock .3 He had a little house there with two rooms downstairs and basically one room upstairs. I was there several times. There were problems with Gainor who was rather given to the bottle. I remember one occasion when Petra tracked him down in Blackrock village waving a dirty nappy.

SO WAS CRIST GINGERY?

He had ginger hair. Not violently ginger, I’ve known more gingery people. He was about six feet tall, slender, very well spoken, a slightly T.S. Eliot way of speaking. I don’t think this was an affectation. He actually used rather Dickensian phrases like ‘My good man,’ ‘God's teeth’ and even ‘zounds.’ He would affect, very mildly, a satiric kind of pedantry but he said these things in a comic spirit which you were meant to know, and you were meant to laugh. Many had reservations about it of a violent kind. Somewhere in this flat I still have his law notes in an old ledger with half an acre of foolscap. He left many pages untouched. 

DID YOU EVER SEE HIM STUDY?

Law, No.  But he read a lot. He read everything.

WAS HE RECOGNISABLE IN THE STAGE PRODUCTION OF THE GINGER MAN YOU SAW IN DUBLIN IN 1999?

He is strangely recognizable. All the characters in The Ginger Man are recognizable - with exception of, I think, of Mary.' There were moments in his life when he became very testy and rather outrageous. These were usually followed the next day by remorse and apologies. It was a feature of his character that Donleavy tends to forget or didn't find convenient to use. He came from Dayton, Ohio and his next door neighbors were the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Gainor's father had been a respected physician who had been to the South Pole with Admiral Byrd. He married a second time, Gainor’s mother died when he was quite young. Some people attribute his slightly necrophiliac tastes to the death of his mother.

Skylla MacNamara interjects: Gainor had this wily charm and would get anything out of you, your background, and whatever you were thinking about, your whole life history perhaps. This was truth night. And then`when he had you really flung out, then he'd borrow money. (laughter)

IT SAYS A LOT ABOUT CRIST THAT IT IS A FOND MEMORY. WHAT’S THIS ABOUT NECROPHILIA?

He was hitchhiking to County Down and got as far as Drogheda. It was a hot day and he entered the large cool Cathedral.and, slipping off his shoes, would sit in the back pew with his swollen feet on the cold marble.  He fell asleep and was awakened by childish laughter and saw little girls putting pennies into a slot which turned on a light which lit up the mummified head of the blessed Oliver Plunket, now Saint Oliver Plunkett. Gainor was most taken by this and sent me a photographic postcard of it. Two or three years later Brendan rediscovered it and dubbed it the BOP in the box. - B dot., O dot. P dot.  Brendan sent me a beautiful postcard to pass onto Gainor and scribbled on it - I think it was Brendan's last piece of verse : ‘The blessings of Ollie, so jovial and Jolly be on you dear Crist till next we get pissed.’

At Gainor's request I made him a small copy of the BOP fitted into a match box. He carried it around in his pocket and would show it. It looked very like the BOP, like someone very dead with teeth showing. a papier-mâché head. Years later he showed me a brothel in Barcelona. They'd had a small morgue: a mortuary chapel and bier awaiting the next customer. I don’t know if the brothel had any specialities - probably had to arrange that the day before. Another occasion in Madrid with Peter Walsh, an ex-IRA man, he took me to see Spanish funeral hearses with jetblack horses with nodding plumes six feet high, lined with cut glass windows and velvet linings. Then was taken upstairs to a hearse garage where there were very impressive ones with ebony life sized angels - six more small hearses, pearly white, with weeping angels carved in them. About half life size. This was for kids, He thought it was one of the tenderest things he had ever seen. Very impressed by it.

WHAT WAS CRIST UP TO IN DUBLIN?

Trying to screw money out of the American government. His wife had access to his grant before he laid hand on it. That's his first wife, an English woman, whom he met while in the Navy during the war. They were just around and I got to know them better. Mike Donleavy struck me as an appallingly bad painter which he was and which apparently his then wife M.W. still believed since she’d barred his paintings from their stately home in Mullingar.

HOW WAS DONLEAVY FARING?

He had a house in Kilcool, a cottage surrounded by concrete blocks which he built for pleasure, I think. Maybe they were abstract pieces of sculpture. They looked just like tank traps in the meadow by the sea.  He painted pieces on plywood and Swedish hardboard. He raided the Daisy market and bought off the frames. If the paintings didn't fit the frames, he'd saw them down until they did. The borders of the paintings, which were on scrap pieces of hardboard, were very large. I remember an exhibition Mike held on St. Stephens Green.

WHAT WAS THE SUBJECT MATTER AND STYLE?

Many of them were fruit. They had titles like ‘Three Large Happy Apples’ or  ‘Rich Delicious Tomatoes’ - and there  were three circles. They were rather minimal; they were still lives. Very often the tomatoes or cucumbers or whatever they were would just float into space. They were quite naive. Any resemblance to any school of painting that happened before or since is quite coincidental. One very avant-garde woman painter went to the exhibition with me. She said, "We'd better go along and see what Michael Donleavy is doing." She had previously slapped him down because of his tendency to ask people sexual questions about themselves. He never revealed anything about himself but he'd ask people how many times they'd had it last week and that sort of thing. So on our way over we met him standing on the corner of a side street off Grafton Street and she greeted him with ‘Michael Donleavy! Are you sill in your celluloid penis stage?’ He said, ‘What's that, Phyllis?’

‘Sculpting your apples,’ she said. ‘Your celluloid penises.’

Well, I went with her to Mike's exhibition and we walked around this beautiful Dublin painter's gallery with all the other people. Though tending to frankness, Phyllis did not want to offend Mike by saying anything openly. So when Mike asked her what she thought, she said, ‘Well, some of the color is quite interesting and indeed quite good.’ And Mike said, ‘So it should be That Chrome yellow cost me fifteen shillings.’ 

HOW COULD SOMEONE OF THAT TEMPERAMENT STAY CLOSE ENOUGH TO RECORD THE ANTICS OF A MAN LIKE GAINOR CRIST?

I don't know. How did Boswell stay close to Johnson. Mike carried a notebook. I noticed him using it on occasion and I thought he was writing down an address and I discovered that he had written down little bits and pieces and, indeed, comments of mine and John Ryan and other people which he changed in some way into aphorisms - directed at nothing in particular. They were rather like the pieces of verse that he used at the ends of chapters. Gnomic little utterances.

DID YOU SUSPECT HE WAS WRITING NOVELS?

No I had no idea until Brendan told me about it. Brendan and I and two or three others had been at a weekend party in a very hospitable house up in the mountains near Glendalough. Brendan had a row with a journalist when they went out for a walk. The journalist was a very tedious man but Brendan also overreacted. So Brendan decided he wasn't going back to the house if so-and-so was going with him. And he set off across the mountains and walked twenty miles down to Greystones where he found Donleavy was out. And he broke in and found the manuscript for The Ginger Man. Donleavy was supposed to have appeared with a shotgun because Brendan, who had effected an entry, as they say, left a window open through which he came in. Donleavy crept up and crept up and looked in to see Brendan reading the thing. Brendan looked up and said, ‘Put that away. This book is fucking funny.’ That's all I know. That's what Brendan told me.

YOU MET BRENDAN BEHAN WHEN HE WAS IN THE FIANNA [REPUBLICAN SCOUTS], THE JUNIOR IRA?

The first time I ever spoke to him he was maybe sixteen and I was eighteen or nineteen. It was at the end of the Spanish Civil war. There was an attempt in the crumbling days of the Republic of Catalonia to get a food ship out to beleaguered Barcelona. A meeting was held and we were all issued with banners to carry, ‘Skim Milk for Spain’ and things like that. I'm not sure what the Spaniards thought of skim milk but that's what they got if they got it. The person carrying the other pole of the banner, marching past the General Post Office where Nelson's pillar stood, was Brendan. He was a very good-looking boy with a very bad stammer. A young Stewart Granger in appearance. His personality overpoured.

So I became quite friendly with him although a youth of nineteen looks upon a boy of sixteen as very much younger than himself. Nonetheless Brendan became part of my circle for a while, mostly connected with the theater group. The he disappeared and I heard that he had been imprisoned in England. The Second World War had started by then. A year had passed. Then one day, coming into my Grafton Street studio on a tram - I had a flat in Rathgar - someone appeared behind me and tapped me on the shoulder and it was Brendan who, wherever he was going, jumped off the tram with me and came down to the studio. It was then I discovered he had been released. The previous evening he had enacted the closing scene in his book with the customs officer greeting him in Irish off the boat in Dun Laoighaire. Had Borstal Boy been extended another paragraph he would have said, "Next day on the 15 tram I met  . . ." He went home but he wasn't too well received there. There were always rows going on in that family.

IDEOLOGICAL ROWS? PURE FAMILY ROWS?

I should imagine both. All mixed together. He spent the night there. I suppose that's where he was coming from. He didn't go back for about a fortnight. He stayed with me. No one drank a good deal at that time although we went into McDaids often. But we seemed to spend hours over a pint or a couple of half-pints. There wasn't a great deal of money then. And that was my meeting with Brendan. Later he shot at the policeman and went into prison again.

WHAT WERE HIS AMBITIONS AT THE TIME?

His ambitions were not to do house painting. So far as I know, they were purely negative.

BUT HE HAD BEEN WRITING POETRY.

Well, he made some infantile effort while in school. Many children do that. I think his interest was nurtured in prison, particularly in the Curragh, which was kind of a university with lectures going on all day by people like Roger McHugh and many others. People who subsequently took over the Folklore Commission were interned there. He started writing there and also in Arbour Hill, the military prison. His reason for writing poetry, as I wrote in a review of Colm Kearney's book on Brendan, is that the Irish Gaelic magazine paid very quickly and they always paid properly in guineas, never in pounds.  Because guineas are for artists and gentlemen and pounds are for the commonality, you see.  So it was two guineas a poem, which at the time was quite a lot. Many's the time that I and others waited while Brendan rushed off with a grubby piece of paper in his hand to come back with the money. If those two guineas hadn't existed, the poems would not have been written.

YOU HAVE A HEAD OF BRENDAN DISPLAYED ON YOUR MANTLE, BESIDE MANY OTHER BUSTS, DID HE ACTUALLY POSE FOR IT?

Well, Brendan, who was a monstrous egotist or egoist or both, conceived the idea of having a statue of himself erected in St. Stephens Green.  There were a number of grass bays around the perimeter of the north side of the Green, some of which contained statues, some of which didn't. In some cases statues had been there originally which were blown up during the Troubles. It occurred to Brendan that if you erected a statue like that- how long would it be there before people noticed it hadn't always been there?  The idea came to him, I think, because I had just done a life-sized replica of a statue of Queen Victoria which originally sat in front of Leinster House.4 It was for the Annual Horse Show Review at the Gaiety Theater. It was very uncomely.

SO WAS SHE.

She was. The statue was even more so. The monument was quite handsome, baroque. But she, sitting in the middle of it, was rather uncomely. It was known as "Ireland's revenge." Anyway, I'd done this copy complete with dried pigeon and seagull shit. Very effective. And indeed when taken to the Gaiety Theater in the back of a lorry was mistaken for the real thing. Brendan didn't want his own name on the statue. He wanted a statue erected to Rabelais with Brendan's head on it. This was to be set up on a plywood base treated to look like stone, with which I had some skill. He had even gone to the extent of persuading an engineer to design a retractable trolley so we could wheel the thing over, press a lever, so it would settle in the grass as if forever. I had to come, for various reasons, to London then and later he followed me over and we started to do it. The important thing was to get a portrait head of him from which the rest could be fabricated.

SO HE ACTUALLY SAT STILL FOR YOU?

He slept still. He fell asleep half way through, no, a quarter way through.  I had to prop up his head with half a dozen books.

WAS THE SCHEME THWARTED?

Well, I didn't go back to Dublin for sufficiently long to do it but the hoax could have been done. Our mutual theory was that it would take about three weeks before some gardener mowing the grass would bump into the base and discover it wasn't granite.

WHAT CHANGES DID YOU SEE IN BRENDAN OVER THE YEARS?

The only change that happened to Brendan is that he was drinking heavily toward the end. He always drank a lot socially but towards the end it was very bad, particularly since his visits to the States and Canada, it began. The chemistry of his body changed and his soul with it. Well the two are inseparable.5

PATRICK KAVANAGH’S HEAD IS ON THE MANTLE. TOO. WHEN DID HE ARRIVE AT GRAFTON STREET?

Kavanagh started coming into McDaids when Bev and myself and John Ryan established ourselves there.6 We hadn't much opportunity or domestic capacity for entertaining.  Damp turf fires and all that. So we would just take visiting people over to McDaids for a ham sandwich and half a pint of Guinness or porter, very often, at the time. And Kavanagh was one of the people there. I remember the first lengthy conversation I had with him, a rather irascible one. There was an exhibition of paintings by Irish painters.  One was John ffrench. Michael Morrow was another - he was Gothic even in those days - and I think Beatrice, Brendan's later wife, was one of the exhibitors in the Grafton gallery, which was owned by Tom Nisbet and next door to McDaids. There was a crowd of people at the opening. I was invited but there was no room to get in at the door. Eve the porch was filled. I'd thought I would go and have a drink next door and come back in twenty minutes since I knew most people had come fairly early and would leave the gallery reasonably soon.

But Kavanagh sort of craned over my shoulder, looked in and bawled over my head past my ear: "FRAUDS! IMPOSTERS! DECEIVERS!" Then he went into McDaids, ordered himself a small whiskey and he sat curled up in himself on a stool., not looking at anyone. I said, "That was rather cruel." He went on at great length to explain to me why it was true that every phony in the city was there. To some extent this was true. Every phony in the city was there. So were several dozen quite reasonable people. So was Oisin Kelly, who is now a celebrated sculptor. So, you know.

YOU KNEW BRIAN O’NOLAN TOO.7

I got to know him when a man called George Jeffares, who was doing a Ph.D on Yeats, was having continuous rows with Nolan. I attended some of these argumentative sessions and I got to know him. He wasn't a person one talked to. He talked to you. He held court. There was little to contribute. Oddly enough, although Brendan spoke louder and externalized more, he was a listener and he was a question-asker. He'd ask endless questions and he'd pick you up on them. In between his mimicries and fantasies.

ERWIN SCHROEDINGER WAS LODGED AT THE DUBLIN INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDIES DURING THE WAR.8  HOW DID ONE OF THE PIONEERS OF WAVE MECHANICS ENTER YOUR LIFE?

I met his wife. I found her a very charming Austrian woman. She then invited myself and others to visit over afternoon tea. I met Shroedinger and liked him very much. He invited me to Dunsink observatory with him. His ideas were like toys to him and he liked explaining them to people. I don't suppose I met him more than two dozen times though most were lengthy occasions. I remember he had a loom, a shuttle loom which produced tapestries about eighteen inches in width. He changed the pattern the whole time. He'd try out mathematical curves and then arbitrarily stop them and change to another curve from a different equation. The effect was very beautiful. I wish I had one of them. He once offered to cut me off a couple of pieces. They went on and on in very long strips. He had them running down the walls. Random curves and slopes and colors.

HE HAD WOVEN FORMULAE ALL AROUND HIS ROOMS?

That's right. He dropped into Grafton Street a few times, mostly to hear a singer named Aine Woods, who was a superb Gaelic singer. My wife was compiling notebooks of traditional songs and people used to come over to sing. Schroedinger left Dublin when the war ended.

SOME PEOPLE, LOOKING BACK ON THE YEARS AFTER THE WAR, OR ‘EMERGENCY,’ PORTRAY THE PERIOD TO BE AS NEAR TO A ‘GOLDEN AGE’ IN THE ARTS AS DUBLIN HAS SEEN SINCE LADY GREGORY.

 It wasn't a golden age. Each age is an age that is dying or one that is coming to birth. I never thought it was golden. Gilt potato bread perhaps. It was a clearing of the lungs after the stagnation of those years of neutrality during the war. Ireland was spared the horrors of Europe but it did pay a price. It was pushed back on itself. Became insulated and cut off from news. Dublin was a city of rumors. Actual news of events in the wide, wide world was very hard to come by because there was censorship on both sides. So you couldn't find out what was happening. I think most people I knew at the time favored the Allies.  Most of the IRA then were more violently anti-Nazi and anti-fascist than the British government. Very much so. Many had fought in Spain. At the time the left was very republican, and a large part of the Labour party was republican-socialist. It's the rump of this that you find in the Official IRA.[i] 

YOU LIVE IN LONDON. WHAT’S YOUR RECEPTION BEEN LIKE OVER THE DECADES. AN IRISHMAN, GIVEN THE ‘TROUBLES’ GOING INTO THE MID-90s, MUST HAVE FELT QUEASY ON OCCASIONS.

Well, during rather critical times I've found myself rather embarrassed when going into pubs with plastic bags in my hand. I've been conscious of the fact. My attention has been drawn to them in pubs, but mostly where I'm known. The limeys, god bless them, are a very tolerant people. Harmless and tolerant. Not very imaginative or talkative. Or rather they do talk but not about things that interest me very much. They're not disputative enough. If I were to make an ethnic choice before going into a previously unvisited London pub, I'd choose a fellow Celt of some sort. A Glasgow man. An Edinburgh man.  A Welshman. You don't meet many Cornish so I can't judge them. But the Welsh and the Scots are much closer to us than the English I now realize. Anyway, in watching international sporting matches, for example, I am pleased when Scotland beats England.

WOULD YOU SAY DISPUTATIVENESS IS A CELTIC TRAIT?

It does appear to be. Years ago I would deny this but I am aware of it now.  Certainly the Welsh are as disputative as the Irish. I know that if I bump into a Welsh man anywhere, he'd talk the hind legs off me. About nothing very much. About life, death and resurrection. From such talk anything can split off.

THERE IS THE CONTENTION THAT CELTS TALK THEIR BOOKS AWAY.

I've heard that. I don't know if there were any books there. I really don't believe that about writing. Because writing is an obsessive thing. Important writing is obsessive.

YOUR FIRST NOVEL, THE BOOK OF INTRUSIONS WAS WELL REVIEWED. IT WENT THROUGH A LONG PERIOD OF GESTATION.

I like writing. It's a very pleasant thing to do. It’s a bit awkward if you're arthritic, leaning over a hard table sitting in a hard chair. But otherwise it's a very pleasant occupation. It occurred to me that not only in Europe but over half the new world as well - Meso-America and South America - that people built walls. I started to put down an essay, as it were, about walls.

WALLS AS METAPHORS, WALLS AS REAL WALLS?

Walls as everything. There were vast areas of western Ireland along the Atlantic seaboard up to Donegal and the offshore islands where people built walls in crazy abundance - small walls, tiny walls, all made of gray stone and well maintained. Since they were very old walls, it occurred to me that many of these walls had been repaired down through the endless centuries. As small peasant farmers marry and acquire a bit more land they may take out a bit of the wall but usually leave the rest. Considering these things I introduced a couple of characters - a suggestion of Flann O'Brien on some occasion that it was quite unnecessary to invent new characters. There were lots of characters already invented.  You could take a lot of characters from Dickens and put them into a spy story, and you could have a detective named Nickleby.  Out of these frivolous cogitations you could take entire stories borrowing characters of a previous generation of writers who are already written about quite satisfactorily and far better than you ever could. So I went on from there. It occurred to me that it would be necessary to write a story to link it to someone who had gone before. Then there was Limbo. I read something about Limbo having been abolished by the Catholic Church of Pope John. If limbo was abolished, I thought what did they do with the inmates? Did they just turn them loose? All these unbaptized babies and 'meritorious pagans' like Virgil or Juvenal or Marcus Aurelius. So I got the idea very quickly of the emptied Limbo and of squatters. There was a lot of squatting going on at that time in London. And I started to fill it with characters.

FROM KNOWN WORKS, ABORTED WORKS?

Exhumed aborted works. It was great fun.

THEY ROUND BACK VERY ROUGHLY UPON THE AUTHOR.

Yes. They become visible. The tougher ones escape through a fissure. I pictured Limbo as a very old building made of ectoplasm. The ectoplasmic tiles were coming off and odd characters manage to escape. And two of them manage to escape through an early nineteenth century novel. They invade the writer's psyche and get into his narrative. It's a roomy warm place into which they camp quite happily. He discovers to his horror some time later that they have completely taken him over and use him as a place to become encorpified. They use the literary notes to extricate and to free other people. One is an actual creation by Brendan Behan, a translation of the late 18th century poem The Midnight Court by Brian Merriman. It's about a revolt of the women in Ireland who convene a court on the shortcomings of Irish manhood. Brendan did a translation when he was in prison. The governor of the Borstal put in a request for Brendan of the Irish version of the poem. The manuscript, was handwritten sometimes in pen and ink., and sometimes in pencil.  It was left on a scaffold. He lost the manuscript.

YOUR BOOK WAS IN DANGER OF NOT GETTING ENCORPIFIED ITSELF. YOU HAD A GALLING EXPERIENCE WITH A BRITISH PUBLISHER.

Someone connected with them. An agent. Someone I met in Bloomsbury in a pub near the British museum took it.  He was quite happy to take it to the publisher. Various people at Faber and Faber decided it was worth having a shot at. They had a final meeting on a Tuesday evening. An extremely important super-editor came in rather late. He'd been delayed on the tube or the train. They went through the business of the day very quickly. and someone said what about this Irish book. He said, ‘Don't mention that bloody country to me. No more Irish!’ At that time Belfast was ablaze. Newspapers were full of Celtic tedium and blood in the street. So the book was rejected on the assumption it was about the provisional IRA.

IF THERE IS SUCH A THING AS A NICE IRONY, ONE IS THAT THE BOOK OF INTRUSIONS WAS PUBLISHED BY DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS. YOU HAD DESIGNED THE DUST JACKET FOR BRIAN O NOLAN'S THE DALKEY ARCHIVE.

Yes.

DID HE REQUEST YOU SPECIFICALLY?

Yes. The editor contacted me. At about that time I had modeled and cast a head of Joyce. One of the few photographs I had was from a death mask.  All Brian said was that it had to be "under water" No one knew what he meant. When asked, he would say ‘I told you: Under water.’  He said, ‘You didn't put a miter on its head.’  I said, ‘Well I meant to.  Wasn't it obvious?”’

A CRITIC PRAISED YOUR BOOK FOR MAKING FUN OF ARTIFICAL BOUNDARIES AND UNNECESSARY BARRIERS, MENTAL AND PHYSICAL.

All nations are composed of lesser aggregations and they tend under stress to protect themselves, and to some extent to isolate themselves. That's how it is and that's how it has been throughout history.

SO YOU PIT SUBVERSIVE COSMOPOLITANISM AGAINST KNEEJERK NATIONALISM.

Well, that is so.

I GATHER FOR THE WEREWOLF NOVEL THAT IT WASN’T LON CHANEY YOU HAD IN MIND.

I was taken by the title. There were a few stories I know from the early Irish from around Kilkenny, which was a Norman town. It was famous for witchcraft. There was a story of three werewolf sisters who slept in a cave who lured passersby and ate them. They were particularly fond of pilgrims. I returned to Bram Stoker. I knew the Stoker house very well. Then he was a well-known surgeon. I remember seeing a collection of risqué slides. Not very dirty.

IT IS A MURDER MYSTERY WITH THE WEREWOLF PLAYING DETECTIVE.

Well, I didn't plot anything out. At one time he was a surgeon in the early nineteenth century. He sets out to find out what he suspects - that an artist’s model wasn't drowned but murdered. But in the course of this he discovers this Sapphic ring, which published this highly naughty magazine [in order to support themselves and their cause].

THE SOFT PORN OF ITS TIME.

 I've seen some of them. They are artful, and rather beguiling indeed. He goes to Paris at the time of the siege of the Commune. He hopes to pursue the matter further. He goes to their Sapphic headquarters and finds them completely guileless and cooperative. He also discovers, after starting out as a fairly orthodox werewolf who couldn't pass a day without a chubby child or a meaty piece of male or female venison, as it were, that, like society, as the centuries pass, his moral attitude toward eating has been affected. A degree of enlightenment begins. Just as in the time of the Crusades, barbaric things were happening to entire cities, entire populations were starved, slaughtered, burnt alive. As we came to an age of more enlightenment this became less acceptable. Similarly he prides himself on the fact that his taste for blood over the centuries is decreasing, and is less intrusive. He does not have to kill. He still does occasionally because that's his nature. He follows the urges of his palate but never very seriously. Very often he happily subsists on ordinary fare.

SO HE BECOMES A SYMBOL OF A MORE CIVILIZED SOCIETY.

Yes. In many ways Western society is becoming more civilized. It's unacceptable to eat each other. It still happens, you know, but only on extreme occasions.

DO YOU MEAN THIS NOVEL TO BE A KIND OF COMEDY?

Patrick Kavanagh corrected me and said, ‘The real truth lies in comedy. You wouldn't find much of it in tragedy." I believe it to be profoundly true - using comedy in Dante's sense of a happy or a hopeful ending.

LIFE DEATH OR RESURRECTION: ANY PARTING REMARKS ON ANY OF THESE TOPICS?

I seem to recall that when old Jack Yeats the painter was nigh unto death, about three weeks before he died an American critic wanted to meet him. This was rather difficult because he was bed-ridden at that time. But finally he consented: Yes, come along for sherry or whatever. And this rather eager young man - I've forgotten his name if I ever knew it - sat down respectfully by his bedside with the sherry and said, "Tell me, Mr. Yeats, what advice have you got for rising young artists?" Yeats looked around the room and then out the window at the mountains and he said, ‘Ah, well.’

WELL?

That's all.  Just, ‘Ah, well.’ As soft as the end of Ulysses: ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’