An interview with Alan Cunningham
Author of 'New Green Fool'
My old Berlin mucker and fine literary maker Alan Cunningham has a new book out. So I thought I’d give over this week’s edition to interviewing him.
Why don't you introduce who you are and how we know each other to readers of SUQ?
I'm Alan Cunningham, writer, amongst other things, originally from Ireland, now based in London after spells in Dublin, Melbourne and Berlin.
It was in Berlin that we first met. We were both English teachers at a place called Linguarama, and I'm sure we bumped into each other initially at their office on Friedrichstrasse, perhaps around 2008. I clearly remember meeting you one day in the atrium of the office building - a massive glass-clad entity - and you mentioned you were going to perform at a upcoming Christmas work party, though I'm sure we'd spoken before that. Can't remember exactly what you were going to perform. Maybe something in a Welsh accent? Sounds about right.
Berlin was an interesting place in those days. Can you tell me a little about why you were there and what the city meant to you?
It was. I first went there with a couple of Irish friends - we took a bus all the way from Dublin, via London - to see a couple we knew from our time at University in Belfast. One of the pair was originally from Berlin and they had settled there. I had little awareness then of the cultural significance of the city, its literary and artistic history. But I had been harbouring a desire to write - exactly what, I didn't really know - for a while and something of the atmosphere of Berlin, the architecture and the layout, suited that aspect of me. Probably something to do with space.
After finishing a PhD in London, I sorted out some teaching work in Berlin and moved, around 2007, I think. The city certainly gave me a sense of urban space I had not previously experienced, but it also gave me time, being quite a cheap place even then. And there was something about being around the German language which I appreciated - a nice state of linguistic disorientation (I had no knowledge of German at all); a removal from the comforts of English.
Tell me about what you were writing back then. Was it your 'Gentleman Jim' era? (This refers to my aborted science fiction Western about a cyborg cowboy with a robot horse, one of Alan and I’s many running jokes, such as our mutual ongoing attempts to nail impersonations of the actor Christopher Walken). Were you writing about Berlin?
Initially, it was all very historical fiction or bildungsroman-esque. And I finished those early novels - then put them in a drawer after sending them out to a few publishers and agents before moving on to the next idea.
My early years in Berlin were productive in terms of getting work done - I think back on my time then as quite tame and bookish in relation to some of the stories that come out of Berlin! I came to a bit of an impasse two-thirds of the way into a novel about 18th century Belfast - think ‘Russian Ark’ meets ‘Perfume’ (Süskind) by way of Eco - when I realised it was all a bit emotionally distant, and I had other things to say, necessary things about my *own* history within the context of being Irish in a European capital city.
The next thing I wrote was a pretty contemporary novella, composed in fragmented sections, very much capturing something of the positives and negatives of Berlin and what it offered me, a young man ashamed of a somewhat different body and absent any real emotional sense or intelligence of what an acceptance of vulnerability as part of life could offer to that shame. This became my first published work, ‘Count from Zero to One Hundred’.
I still think some of those historical works have legs and might still come back to them, but this turn away towards more personal writing - some might term it auto-fiction, though I think my work is still a bit too formal and lyrical to be exactly that - took up the next 10 years of my writing life. And I'd say this phase has culminated with the publication of my most recent book, ‘New Green Fool’.
Tell us about ‘New Green Fool’. Well, maybe tell us about the old Green Fool first.
Meet the new fool, same as the old fool. Well, I think what occurred was one of those old recirculations Joyce wrote about - from Ireland to London/Berlin, back to London, then back again to Ireland. But a very specific part of Ireland.
I found myself reading ‘The Green Fool’ one Christmas, a work by Patrick Kavanagh. He's much better known as a poet (some might she he prefigured Heaney - he certainly influenced him!), but this work is a collection of short prose pieces, half essay, half short story. Something in them intrigued me, though I don't know if I'd call them good.
But there we come back to the issue of place, for Kavanagh was from, and often wrote about, the South East Ulster region, where I spent much of my time in Ireland (Wexford filled up most of the rest). Kavanagh was born in Monaghan, not far from Armagh - Ulster here for me includes the original nine counties, not just the six of NI.
And something in The (old) Green Fool provoked me to think about using it as a frame, to take extracts from the text as a touchstone to write about what was going on in my life, my own complex relationship to Ireland, my need to write and many, many other things. ‘New Green Fool’ is a pretty wide ranging work in that respect.
As you say, it's quite consistent in style with the more autofictional works you've produced earlier. Do you see yourself reflected in Kavanagh? What do you think your engagement with his work freed up in you?
I think what's attractive about Kavanagh is what he himself focused on as a writer. He's interested in nature and the rural, but he's also not necessarily uncritical of it - a lot of that comes from his background as a working farmer and living in an agricultural community, and some of that resonates with my own childhood.
I spent a lot of time around similar communities, somewhat in Newry, but much more so with my family in Wexford, where my mother is from. My grandparents on that side were farmers, many of my uncles and aunts were farmers, so I'm familiar with that life, and after time away in cities as an adult I think I was probably drawn back to some sense of mingling the urban and the rural, or perhaps city culture and the rural - not to say there isn't culture in rural communities but it is very often different from city culture. Kavanagh was an important figure in the project of shining a light on rural reality, as it occurred in Ireland, but he was also a poet so there is some abstraction, some lyricism there that I'm also interested in.
Though I think now I may be overplaying a conscious attraction to Kavanagh and ‘The Green Fool’ - more simply, sections of the text intrigued me when I read it, almost in isolation from the book as a whole, and seemed to encourage me to write about other more contemporary or personal things. Sometimes books just work like that - they hit something that's going on with you at the time, without much obvious reason. Taking sections of the original Green Fool text - random statements like "a dying person was well watched" - allowed me to frame some thoughts on death for example, or rituals around dying.
In retrospect I can now put a sheen on it and say, well, the original book touched on this or that, but I think it might have just been an interest in an older turn of phrase, maybe just the beauty of some of that language in itself.
He's not much known these days, Kavanagh, is he? Tho I believe Russell Crowe is a fan.
Hahaha - yes, Crowe has been known to throw a few lines out now and again. Kavanagh is quite established in Ireland and his reputation is pretty secure I'd say - he's perhaps less well known outside of Ireland.
In a way he lived a little too early, and you could say Heaney took some of his thunder, as their poetic themes are very similar. Heaney himself acknowledged the considerable debt. As I get older I prefer Kavanagh’s poems - they're a little bit more uncertain, a little bit less clear than Heaney’s work. Helps them age better I think.
NGF is certainly not only about Kavanagh and the original Green Fool though - rereading it for the proofs I was surprised at the ground it covers and the range of additional texts used as touchstones as the work progresses. This seems natural now, as I see the book being somewhat about abandoning the idea of a clear identity, whether that is even something so simple as the idea of being Irish, or a writer.
One of the things about your writing is you're always open to a lot of different influences, a sort of cultural wash as it were. There’s a great bit in your previous book ‘Sovereign Invalid’ about seeing a Batman film, for instance. And I know you well enough to know that, like me, you're steeped in all that '80s genre imaginary. How does that fit into how you see your work?
Yes, I like utilising "high" and "low" culture in my work, something akin to an appropriation art ethos though a bit less explicit. In the NGF it feels a bit more like sampling and mixing, producing something sui generis, I hope. Essays, but not quite. Short stories, but not quite.
You've made a shift to more visual media recently, but also at the same time to poetry. Could you tell us more about that? Is it linked?
That all comes from an increasing dissatisfaction with language - and an understanding of my relationship with it as perhaps historically one of control, proof of ability, those kinds of things. Language can bring us somewhere, but it can also keep us from somewhere else too.
I think my work with moving image (and poetry also, 'tho perhaps that is merely a more sparse engagement with language) is a reaction to this, an attempt to get away from language. More embodied, somehow. But probably there is also something related to expression generally, a thought about why I'm compelled to express anything and why in language, mostly. So I'm experimenting with other forms - to me poetry also seems the most visual of written forms - but also with the idea of expression generally. I feel pretty unproductive in that sense, like not forcing expression unless it feels quite necessary. Also makes me a slow maker, but that's ok!
So we're not going to see you working on Dr O'Bollock, our putative comedy set in an STD clinic, any time soon?
Only time will tell Jim...
Order the new Green fool: https://gorse.ie/book/new-green-fool/
Alan Cunningham works primarily with text and moving image. Current work explores nostalgia/time, vulnerability, personhood, the concept of the boundary, spatial ethics/aesthetics, sanctity/profanity and the mythologies of nature and the 'able' body. Previous work includes Count from Zero to One Hundred (2013), Sovereign Invalid (2018) (both text), Sangar (2019) and How They Have Performed Their Buildings (2022) (both moving image). His moving image work has been most recently exhibited at Antre Peaux (FR), the Werkleitz Centre for Media Art (GER) and NeMe (Cyprus) as a member of the Forms of Ownership (FOO) collective. He is the recipient of funding from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, EMARE/EMAP and Film London (FLAMIN Fellow 2021/22). Originally from the north of Ireland, he is currently based in London.