One winter day, when she was six or seven, my daughter Alice asked if I would take her to the beach to build sandcastles. I was busy writing a book, as usual, and felt I could not afford the time, but Alice was so insistent that in the end I relented.
At the beach, despite the cold, we discarded our shoes and socks and near the water’s edge raised our fort, complete with turrets, gate and moat. Alice was delighted. ‘Oh, this is great!’ she said, and heaved a happy sigh. ‘It’s just like having a real Dad.’ Out of the mouths of babes . . .
Shortly afterwards, I was invited to contribute to an anthology of six-word stories. Ernest Hemingway was the inspiration for the venture, with his famous and heart-breaking mini-tale: ‘For sale — baby shoes, never worn.’ I did not have to meditate for long before coming up with my own little vignette.
Booker prize winning author John Banville writes that he was too selfish to be a good father to his four children
Glancing back over a lifetime of striving with the intractable medium of language, and in a spirit of rueful humour, I offered this: ‘Should have lived more, written less.’ The squib was duly printed, but by the time I got a copy of the book, I had forgotten what my contribution had been.
When I read it on the page I was struck not by the humour of it, but by the melancholy. It was, I realised, an all too accurate indictment of the writer and the writing life.
More...
Emily Lloyd: How I was emotionally scarred for life by a brutal sex abuser - when I was five
The cruel stigma that haunted my mother and why I only told her I loved her the day she died - A tender and beautifully written memoir by Melvyn Bragg
But what, I wondered, did it mean, exactly? What, for me, would ‘living more’ have entailed? Love, of course, but to whom had I not given sufficient love? There is Alice, now 16, and her sister, Ellen, 23, born to the wonderful woman with whom I’ve been in a relationship for well over 20 years. Then, of course, there are my two sons from my earlier marriage.
I found myself recalling a little incident at the end of the Seventies. I was in my early 30s then, and had been married for nearly a decade. After a five-year childless idyll, which was probably too long a time to have waited, my wife Janet and I produced two sons, Colm and Douglas, in rapid succession, after which we had said: Enough!
John Banville's two sons making bread, Colm age six Right, Douglas age five. He said that he rarely saw his children as he was writing his novels
We were living in a rented house near the top of Howth Head in the north of County Dublin. The room that served as my study was at the front of the house, and had a bay window that offered what seemed almost an aerial view over Dublin Bay.
However, for a writer there is nothing more distracting than a spacious view, and so I worked all day with the curtains pulled, by the light of an electric lamp.
At the time I was writing my novel, Kepler, based on the life of the great 17th-century astronomer. It was a difficult task. I had a day job, too, except that in my case it was a night-job, as a sub-editor on the now defunct Irish Press. The Press was a daily paper, which meant that I worked there during the hours of darkness and had the daytime for my own writing. It was not the worst of arrangements, for me, though I am sure it was less than congenial for my family.
My wife had a teaching job during the day, and my sons were at nursery school, so I rarely saw them, except at weekends, when no doubt I resented the time they took from my wife and me.
In that Seventies summer I am recalling, the weather in Ireland was positively Mediterranean. For weeks there were long, cloudless, blue-gold days and softly southern nights. A friend of ours from London was staying with us, and one afternoon she and my wife decided to have a picnic on the sloping lawn in front of the house, with the roofs and spires of Howth village below them, the twin piers farther out, and the blue bay beyond.
Hunched at my desk in the lamp-light, I could hear them outside, the boys at play, and my wife and our friend desultorily conversing, with the occasional clink and gurgle as they refilled their wine glasses.
His daughters with his second wife. Ellen, age nine, (left) and Alice, aged two. he writes that he may have been more generous with his girls
At one point, stalled in the midst of a particularly difficult passage, describing the fact that Kepler’s wife and a brood of children had died on him, I went to the window and opened a chink in the curtains.
At first I was dazzled by the bright light of day, but when my eyes adjusted I looked with something like awe upon the pastoral scene: the two women reclining on the grass and the two children disporting themselves in the sun, and the impossibly picturesque village below, and the farther azure of the sea. It might have been a summer scene on a southern golden coast painted by Monet.
Now, any normal human being, any right-minded husband, friend and father, would have put the cover on his typewriter — remember typewriters and their sturdy plastic covers? — turned off the lamp, and gone outside to join in the picnic on the grass.
My children would have been surprised to see me, but it would have been a nice surprise. I could have played with them. It would have been so simple. Did I do it? Of course not. Instead, I closed the chink in the curtains and, my eyes readjusting to the gloom, sat down at my desk and set to work again.
John Banville says he is happy that his son Douglas is freer with his five-year-old grandson
Nowadays, I think of that younger version of myself, crouched there in the shadows like a spider, spinning out the story of Kepler, another obsessed mind-worker and negligent father, and I ask myself if it was worth it.
Was it? I tell myself — and my ex-wife, in her generous, wifely way, tells me so too — that I had no choice, that the business of being a writer precludes many if not most of the ordinary familial and domestic pleasures.
Henry James was emphatic: a writer should not marry, for he will not only hamper himself as an artist but will also, inevitably, neglect his wife and children.
It was not all gloom and guilt in those early days. My younger son, Douglas, when he was six or seven, suffered from insomnia. On one of my nights off from the newspaper he came to me and asked if I would be working later on. I said no, that his mother and I would be having dinner.
‘Oh, please,’ he said, ‘please write for a little while — I love to hear the sound of the typewriter when I’m in bed, it puts me to sleep.’ So when he had gone upstairs I went to my study, directly under his bedroom, and typed up some outstanding letters.
Sure enough, within ten minutes, my wife came to tell me that the boy was asleep. I felt like the Orpheus of Greek myth, charming all living things with my music, even if all I had for a lyre was a rackety Remington.
Now that my sons are grown up — the older of the two will be 40 in a few months’ time — the question that haunts me is whether my remoteness from them during their childhood was indeed an unavoid-able necessity of my trade, or if I merely used the excuse of artistic commitment for selfish reasons.
Maybe if I had been something else, a businessman, say, I might have been equally ungenerous with my time. It seems to me, though, that writers, and artists in general, are an especially self-centred breed.
I would not have the courage to ask my sons now if they feel that I was remote and neglectful of them when they were young, and even if I did ask I am sure they would deny it, since fortunately they have inherited their mother’s generosity of spirit.
Certainly I loved them both, and treasured them, when they were little: but at how much of a distance?
I did like to take them for walks when they were toddlers. In those days, Howth was still a thriving fishing port, and I would go with them down to the harbour of an afternoon to watch the fishermen in wooden clogs packing salted herring into kegs for export to Europe.
The young John Banville placed too much importance in his writing and did not spend enough time with his family
And I would take them to admire the cows on the farm at Howth Castle. They were close enough in age to travel in a double buggy.
As they grew bigger and heavier I would have to turn about and walk backwards and haul them up the hill to the Castle. Do I take too much comfort from the memory of myself labouring there on that long slope, hauling my boys along?
Nowadays I have two daughters, Ellen and Alice. The younger girl at 16 — dear Lord, where do the years go? — is already straining at the ties that bind, yearning to take flight.
I look at her, the last of my children, and feel a stab of grief. Love too, of course, and pride, and happy expectation. What things she will do in the wide world! But always that steady, grieving premonition of eventual loss.
And there is guilt, as well, residual but real. Perhaps I have been more generous with my girls than I was with my boys — but not much more.
My older daughter is living in Paris. Visiting her, I took her to the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain for a hot chocolate and a sandwich. The only other customers were a couple of typical Parisian lovers — typical except that both of them were clad from head-to-toe in leather.
My daughter was fascinated by their outfits, and as she gazed in awe at the couple I leaned over and whispered that I was sure the girl’s knickers, like everything else she was wearing, must be made of leather too. This provoked a hoot of shock and delight.
I often recall that visit, and those leather-clad lovers. It is, I realise, something my daughter will always remember. But will the memory compensate for all the things I did not do with her, when there was still time for me to be ‘just like a real Dad’ for her, too?
I have a five-year-old grandson now, thanks to my son Douglas and his wife. I watch Douglas and his boy together and I am not sure if it is just my guilty conscience that makes it seem that they are freer together, and happier in each other’s company, than Douglas and I were, when he was five.
The other day my grandson took my hand and examined the liver-spotted back of it with deep interest, before making the solemn pronouncement: ‘You’re old, Grandad — and I’m new!’
I was amused, and startled, not only by what the child had said but by the uncanny echo it provoked of my own son, the child’s father, saying exactly the same thing to me, 30-something years ago.
Time is shortening now, for me. What legacy have I left to my offspring? A shelf full of novels, a little money in the bank. It does not seem a great achievement.
Should I have written less and lived more? I shall leave the question to posterity, in hopes that it will look upon me, as dedicated writer and neglectful father, with more tolerance than I am inclined to grant myself.