Henry James loved the story about his friend the novelist Anna Thackeray Richie who wrote a much-admired novel about French Protestant youth. When asked how it was she knew so much about this group of people, Anna Thackeray Richie said that once in Paris, as she ascended a staircase, she passed an open doorway through which she saw that ‘some of the young Protestants were seated at table round a finished meal.’

That was as much knowledge as she had; it was either a little or a great deal. James, fascinated, wrote of ‘the power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern.’

Is that how novels begin? In the Louvre, there is an enormous queue, like something in a busy airport, with barriers and security people, to see the Mona Lisa. Until recently, hanging precisely behind it was Titian’s painting ‘A Young Man with a Glove.’ By any standards (or in my opinion), this painting is much better than Leonardo’s portrait. It has now been moved over to the side in the same large room that houses the Mona Lisa.

No one looks at it, or no one did when I was there earlier this year.  

The novelist George Eliot made two visits to the Louvre, one in 1859 and another in 1864. She saw Titian’s painting then and used the figure, the young man with a glove, in the making of the Jewish hero in her novel ‘Daniel Deronda’. Daniel is described in Chapter 17: ‘Look at his hands: they are not small and dimpled, with tapering fingers that seem to have only a deprecating touch: they are long, flexible, firmly-grasping hands, such as Titian has painted in a picture where he wished to show the combination of refinement with force. And there is something of a likeness, too, between the faces belonging to the hands — in both the uniform pale-brown skin, the perpendicular brow, the calmly-penetrating eyes.’

In that gallery, George Eliot learned as much about Deronda as she would need to know. It might have happened in a second, one glimpse, and then taken longer to soak in. In the young man’s gaze, his face, his pose, she sensed, perhaps even grasped, what would amount not only to a character but a moral universe, and also, because Deronda becomes an early Zionist, of destiny in history.

I wonder how much this happens, how often a book begins in a moment when you see something, catch a glimpse of something, or see a moment composed in a photograph or arranged in a painting. And that becomes enough, like Anna Thackeray Richie seeing a group of people through a doorway, and that becomes all the research you need to do.

I am sure that some of the momentum for my novel ‘The Blackwater Lightship’ came from seeing a photograph of three women somewhere in rural Ireland, three generations of the same family standing at a gate. I might have imagined that the light in the photograph was light from the sea. But whatever was in the faces, I had what I needed. Just from looking at the photograph.

A single visit to the Four Courts in Dublin offers scenes that could nourish a number of novels. I have a vivid memory of being in the front hall in 1983 and witnessing Judge Declan Costello walking by. But ‘walking by’ is hardly the term. The judge was on his way to court in his full regalia, proceeded by a tipstaff. His eyes were cast down. His aura suggested power, distance from the rest of us. Yet he was a mortal too, indeed had once been a politician. That glimpse of him gave me some of the inspiration for my novel ‘The Heather Blazing.’

On Fridays in the early 1980s I would often take the evening train from Westland Row to Enniscorthy. And one evening – could it have been 1980? – there was a woman in a seat on the other side of the aisle who looked unusual. She was in late middle-age, maybe older, wearing faded tweeds, good shoes. She was alert, unsmiling. I wish I had kept a diary so that I could be more precise about her. I don’t even remember at what station she left the train.

She became Katherine Proctor in my first novel ‘The South.’ I don’t think I ever heard her speak. I caught a glimpse of her then and it stayed with me.

So, too, one night in a cheap hotel room in Buenos Aires, I saw someone talking on television. That was all. He was not a well-known figure but someone involved on the margins of the film world. Something about his look, his tone, interested me. Within a few years, he had morphed into Richard Garay in my novel ‘The Story of the Night.’

This idea that something fleeting and casual can be transformed happened, then, mysteriously, as it moved from image to book, but it occurred more intensely for me when I worked with a photographer, when we both looked at the same scene and I got nothing except some notes and he (I am thinking specifically about Tony O’Shea with whom I worked first at ‘In Dublin’ magazine and later on two books ‘Walking Along the Border’ and ‘Dubliners’) got an astonishing image, with a richness in its ambiguities and a sort of fierce theatricality that had not been pre-arranged, had instead been captured and framed.

Tony O’Shea’s retrospective is running at the Photo Museum Ireland until 18 February, and a book ‘The Light of Day’, a collection of his best work, has been published. In 1982, when I was Features Editor of ‘In Dublin’, Tony O’Shea would deliver his commissioned work once a fortnight, coming into the office where ‘The Winding Stair’ is now, with a box of black-and-white prints.

He had a smile that could hover between warm and wintry. He did not want his photographs cropped, and he had strong views on where and how they were to be used. He spoke softly; he meant every word.

One week, as a way of getting him to stop complaining about how we had used one of his photos, I suggested to him that he should simply get on a double-decker bus, go upstairs, and take pictures of people. It was not an inspired commission. He surely would have done it anyway.

In any case, Tony O’Shea managed to take pictures of people upstairs on Dublin buses that others will still be wondering at when the rest of us are long forgotten.

O’Shea is interested in the moment where the ritual and the casual face each other. He likes gatherings and public spaces. And he is watching for the second when a guard has been let down.

In some of his photographs there is a tension between the ordinariness of the scene and the intensity of the image. The old man in the front seat of the upper deck of a bus, for example, in one of the most iconic of his photographs has cleared some of the condensation away and now stares through it. The image is stark, severe. It is not merely a portrait of old age, however, or the implacable human spirit. It is not a photograph of something that can be easily summarized. The camera has captured the man himself in all his particularity and physicality. And then it has moved the image out of time, away from what is simple and can be seen, towards mystery.

In another bus photo, a young man with a bird in his hand is looking directly at something outside the frame; his gaze is open, free of shadow or suspicion. His companion is engaged in a different way; his gaze is slanted, he is amused. The third gaze belongs to the bird; it is sharp and focused. Beyond the window of the bus is a house and a small tree; pasted on the glass is a sign prohibiting smoking.

Photo credit: Tony O'Shea 

The rich energy in the image comes from the attention paid to different perspectives, the refusal to settle for one single, stable meaning.

Many of O’Shea’s photographs happen when people are about to do something else, when symmetry is about to appear. He composes his image before the image has composed itself. He captures the scene in a sudden moment of unexpectedness.

If you were to write a story or a novel based on one of Tony O’Shea’s photographs, you would have to be sure you could match the intricacy of his textures, the ambiguity of his vision, the suddenness and surprisingness of what he creates. It would be an interesting challenge. I must go down and look again at the exhibition of his work.

Colm Tóibín (December 2022)