Michael Harding: ‘Solitude sounds beautiful, but what you get is isolation’

“It’s the wrong week to be away from Ireland,” says Michael Harding over the phone from Portugal. “I mean, f**k me.” It is an unseasonably sunny day in Dublin on the day we speak. On the other hand, he is, he later reveals, “Standing here looking around at the sea [contemplating] the mystery of being here.” This feels like exactly the sort of thing Michael Harding should be doing.
He’s good company. He apologises at one point for being “long-winded” but he’s not long-winded, he’s meticulously philosophical and morosely funny. His new book, I Loved Him from the Day He Died: My Father, Forgiveness and A Final Pilgrimage, features thoughtful ruminations about life, ageing, and his relationship with his father, who died when Harding was only 22 and with whom he had a complicated and distant relationship.
“I began to really be affected by something that somebody had said to me in the previous year or two,” he says. “And that was simply: ‘You remind me of your father.’ I look in the mirror and [realise] the kind of fragile little chicken-winged animal that he was in old age is exactly where I’m going … There’s a psalm I always quote. It says, ‘What is man’s life? Seventy years. Or 80 for those who are strong.’ Turning 70 has a profound effect on you, that you’re shifting into a new part of your life.”
He sees the book as the last chapter in a cycle. “A long chronicle of ordinary life. I always use that phrase. I use it for the column in The [Irish] Times as well. It’s the one narrative, tying to create a long chronicle that in some way gathers up Ireland, but accidentally … I didn’t plan that the last one would be about the father and yet it seems to be, for me, an eloquent conclusion of that whole memoir series. It all rounds up for me as a template of fatherhood that is still hugely important in my psyche.”
In some ways it’s about masculinity in general. It recounts the younger Harding’s obsession with older men he knew who represented a more robust form of masculinity than his father, who was relatively frail and shut off from the world. He wishes now that he could have known him better.
“He didn’t live long enough for me to have a conversation with him really,” he says. “I spent a long time gallivanting in pubs and in some way lionising the beauty and the power of masculinity. I remember [the writer] Tom McIntyre saying to me one time: ‘You seem to be always in the house of the fathers.’ I always liked old men. They had an aura of clarity about them. They had done their thing. For good or ill, they had played the game, and the game was over.”
Was he disappointed in his father? “I was proud of him in a thousand ways, particularly because he was a writer [he wrote book reviews for the Irish Press], but I was ashamed of him in another thousand ways. I mentioned in the book, for example, that he just couldn’t get into a simple thing of being playful. And that’s something that you pass on, I think, because I saw the weakness in myself when I had a child. I’m so bad at playing a bit of table tennis or having a bit of fun.”
Another theme in the book is solitude. It draws a comparison between the way his father cut himself off in his house and the way Harding has, in the past, cut himself off in his writing room. “I have this endless longing for solitude and very often I would say I was romanticising it … In midlife it actually got me into trouble when I hit depression. The romantic idea of wanting to be alone had sort of enveloped me with a very unpleasant sense of isolation. Solitude sounds beautiful, but what you get is isolation.”
Working in the memoir genre helps him connect with people. “It’s a creative way of naming the life you’re living,” he says. “I’m always aware that memoir is not autobiography. Memoir is the way I remember it and it gathers inside it all the ideas about faulty perception. I got so much pleasure as I went on [with memoir] and I dropped from plays, and I dropped from writing novels, and I just found that the memoir was like standing in front of people and talking to them.”
He does this literally too. “With every book, I’ve done a tour where I do 90 minutes on stage and it’s 90 minutes of the book. But I don’t use any text. I just tell the stories.”
He often writes about meaningful interactions with complete strangers. Why is that? “There are anonymous spaces, where because they’re anonymous, people can be very, very personal. It’s so beautiful when a stranger tells you something.”
Is it because we’re imprisoned by expectations when we’re with people we know? “That’s a perfect way to put it,” he says. “All the social mores and expectations create a kind of a net around you, they create parameters around you, beyond which you’re not allowed to say anything. But if you meet somebody, let’s say on a bus, particularly on a bus that breaks down, it suddenly sets you free … Solitude can never name who you are. But every time you have an exchange with somebody socially, you’ve named who you are.”
And that’s when, if you listen carefully, the contradictions start, he says. “You meet somebody sometimes, and you say, ‘What kind of person are you?’ And they say, ‘You know, I’m a very loving person. I love my family.’ And they go on like that for about 10 minutes. Then at some stage, at the end of it, you hear them saying: ‘You know, maybe I’m not so nice to my family.’ Because the negation comes. As sure as you announce who you are, there’s a voice inside you that says, ‘You’re only making that up.’”
It’s no different when he writes his own story, he says. “When I write columns or books, they’re not about facts or truth, they’re just letting go of story. When you let go of the story, you’re more deeply in your own space. You’re in a space of wonder and a space of uncertainty. It’s so beautiful. All the mystics, like Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich, they all talk about the sense of unknowing of letting go.”
Rather aptly, he undertook a pilgrimage for the book, the Camino de Santiago in Spain. “Four years ago, I came out of Beaumont [Hospital] after two operations on the spine,” he says. “And the last four years were a struggle to try and get the body right. There’d be nerve damage down the leg. So the real reason that the Camino came up as a thing to do was something about having walked down corridors in hospitals barely able to walk … I would have started off with 1,000 steps four years ago and that would have been a big achievement.” He never thought he’d be able to do the Camino then, he says. “I did a very small Camino, and I did it very slowly.”
[ Michael Harding: The Camino only makes sense when it’s overOpens in new window ]
He writes movingly and honestly about his own human vulnerability. “On the second-last day there was this long walk,” he says. “I felt triumphant, having done it, and then woke up in the middle of the night pissing the bed … I think probably it’s in those moments of complete shame, where your body lets you down in a way that could affect you socially, those are moments that I found a strange laser connection with the old man, my father.”
The title of the book comes from a line by Michael Hartnett in his poem about his mother, Death of an Irishwoman. “It’s a beautiful, beautiful poem. And it kind of sung out to me in the year or two after my father died. I knew what he meant. Something turns over and awakens [when] you realise that they’re gone. You just well up with the love and the potential that was never fulfilled.”
If this book marks the end of a certain cycle of writing, what does he think he’ll do next? “Something new and something the same,” he says. “I imagine that if I did another book, it would be the same in the sense of trying to chronicle ordinary life in my small neck of the woods … But would I be doing it through an exploration of my own narrative? I don’t think so.”
The truth is, he says, he never knows what he’s going to write before he does it. “I write myself into something and it evolves. My editor is very tolerant.”
I Loved Him from the Day he Died by Michael Harding is published by Hachette Ireland, €16.99. Michael will be signing copies of his book in Hodges Figgis, Dublin on Tuesday 8th October at 6pm.