^{Barrie Cooke Night Lake Yellow 1979. Oil on canvas, 136 x 144 cm. Collection of the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon} 

I was writing a novel and there was something I needed to know. The novel would be called ‘The South’ and it would dramatize the lives of a number of painters, two of them Irish.

I needed to know something exact and precise about the act of making a painting, how you started a painting, for example.

I decided to approach the painter Barrie Cooke. He was a serious reader and he might appreciate what I was doing. We arranged to meet one day in a Dublin gallery where his work was showing. It was early in 1984. Standing in front of a painting, I asked him to remember how it emerged.   

‘How did you start it? What was the start?’

‘You make a mark,’ he said. ‘That is how you start.’

‘Any mark?’ I asked.

‘Maybe, but no mark is just any mark. You make the mark for a reason. It’s simply that you don’t know the reason when you make the mark.’

‘Do you ever discover the reason?’

‘It is often not worth thinking about. You have begun the painting.’

I kept this in my mind as I tried to describe in the novel how my painter worked, as she followed, for example, the foresters in the Catalan Pyrenees: ‘She followed the foresters with oil and board and a small easel and she painted the felling of trees, the havoc. She was fascinated by the new colours of dead wood, of wounded stumps by the small clearing in the forest breathing in freely while it could…’ 

‘She mixed colours carefully: the oily brown, fresh green, withered yellow mingling with the flat cold blue of the sky, the remnants of frost and snow and the beginnings of spring…’

And later, when autumn came, she painted autumn: ‘It was as though a fire had scorched the valley. Everything was coloured shades of red, or gold, or brown, or rust...She needed ten colours: ten shades of rust, red, gold, yellow. And out of each shade she needed to make ten more. Each stroke of the brush had to carry a different colour, each stroke had to be a different size with a different texture.’

Soon, it became clear that Katherine Proctor, the painter in the novel, and her companion Michael Graves would drift back towards Ireland. As I thought about this, I wasn’t concerned about where in Ireland they would go. It might be Dublin at the beginning and then anywhere, anywhere at all.

It was only when I came to begin the return-to-Ireland chapter that this became a problem. I was hesitating, putting the work off. I didn’t know why. One day, however, I decided to do it, just do it: begin the chapter. No sentence would come, though. No image appeared. My characters needed to be somewhere in Ireland. I let my mind wander over places. But I was still stuck.

I thought, then, of what Barrie Cooke had told me: ‘Make a mark.’ I wonder now, almost forty years later, if someone had knocked on the door in that second, or if I had felt a sudden pang of hunger, would I, if I had come back to the page later, have made a different mark?

I wrote two words, I wrote them fast, without thinking, I wrote: ‘The sea’ and then, once more with speed and no thought, I put in a full stop and added: ‘A grey shine on the sea.’ And that grey shine was the Wexford coast in Ireland. More precisely, it was the place where a small stream cuts through the strand, the place where Keatings’ house used to be before the erosion took the road and then the hill behind it, the entire hill with the lookout post, and then the house itself and all the outhouses.  

I was back there now in my imagination. This is where we had gone for long summers when I was growing up. But I could not see how it could hold or yield the kind of drama a novel needed. It was sparsely populated. It had no drama. It was the east coast of Ireland. Waves did not crash against rock there; the waves curled on small pebbles. But even the pebbles were sparse. The manners of the locals were mild. In the mornings in summer, the sun often fought against fog to break through, but it was a light fog, hardly fog at all sometimes, more a curtain of haze. At night, you could see Tuskar Rock Lighthouse.

This is where my painter in the novel found new colours: ‘The dull, grey light on the gun-metal sea at Ballyconnigar. Each colour a subtle variation of another: cream, silver, light blue, light green, dark grey.’ Soon, she would work on canvas: ‘She would start with grey Wexford light on a grey July day, with a certain pale, yellow warmth. And work from memory with the canvas leaning against the side of the hut. She would make everything fade into itself, build the colours up carefully so there was a texture; the sea itself a vague shimmer of grey light.’

As I worked on this, I took an almost physical pleasure in writing down the word ‘grey’. Soon, I wanted to finish that novel because I had something else in my mind, an entire new novel set in that landscape – the place where in the summer there was more drizzle than rain, more cloud that sun, the place that I had believed did not have enough inner life or energy for a novel to be set there. It seemed now that the very absences here, in what Elizabeth Bishop called ‘this literal small backwater’, were palpable, emotional, almost fruitful.

It must have made a difference that it was a place I believed I had lost: we never went there again after my father died.

In ‘The Heather Blazing’, the novel I wrote next, this is where the protagonist Eamon Redmond was taken when his mother died. This is where he spent summers as a child. And now he has returned here for the summer: ‘He walked south towards Ballyconnigar. The drizzle had completely lifted and the afternoon became mild and warm with patches of blue in the sky. Each time a wave rolled inwards it unsettled the small stones at the shoreline, forcing them to knock against each other. They made a clattering, gurgling sound as each wave hit them and then retreated.’

He witnesses the erosion: ‘The County Council had put more huge boulders just below the cliff in an effort to ward off the sea. He remembered when there was a road on this side of the house and a field beyond the road. He remembered the cars edging around the road in the years when the field had disappeared and the drop was sheer down to the strand. One of those Sundays in summer: a clear blue sky and a sharp sun glinting off  the windscreens of Morris Minors and Morris Austins as they turned gingerly, cautiously into the car park.’

‘This literal small backwater’ provided not only the setting for these novels but its calmness set a tone that made its way into the very sentences and dramas in the books.

Colm Tóibín (July 2022)