Photograph by Dustin Aksland
Irish writer Colum McCann won the National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin. Now he’s written another lyrical tour-de-force, TransAtlantic, in which he twines the lives of Frederick Douglass; an Irish maid named Lily Duggan and her descendants; the U.S. senator who brokered the Good Friday agreement for peace in Ireland; a journalist in Newfoundland; and Alcock and Brown, the aviators who first dared to cross the Atlantic. A satisfying chunk of the book takes place in Civil War-era St. Louis, so we had to call him.
Why St. Louis?
I didn’t want Lily in Boston, and I didn’t want her in New York, which is where she expected she’d be. To land the unexpected for a character is always a good thing.
You mention Florissant, Carondelet, Gravois, an apartment on Cherokee, a rooming house on Locust Street, a tenement in Carr Square, a Wells Fargo bank on Fillmore, Tom Turpin and his Rosebud Café, the bare-knuckle boxing fights near the newsboys’ home on 13th Street, birds migrating along the Mississippi… Did you read old St. Louis newspapers, hunt down old directories, what?
Basically, what you do is, you imagine it first. You write, “The bank on—” and make up a street name in your head, and then later on, you put a map on your imagination. OK, where is the bank in St. Louis? You go down to the public library, and you find out there was a bank here and a jazz musician here. Instead of starting out with the facts, you put the facts in later, because the imagination is much more important than the facts.
Granted. But then how did you find such richly textured facts?
I went to the New York Public Library and spent a lot of time there. It’s much more detailed than Google. There’s a St. Louis map from the 1850s at the New York Public Library, and it had the names of families and what they did—so-and-so was a barber; so-and-so was a trumpet maker—and all the addresses. There are always odd documents that fill out the fiction in interesting ways.
Like the extraordinary details about Lily’s Civil War nursing.
Some people said to me, “The ice is incorrect.” Well, the ice is entirely correct. I talked to a doctor who told me that the Civil War doctors and nurses recognized a form of PTSD, and their cure for it was plunging these men into ice baths, and so, even in summertime, they would do whatever they could to have ice baths ready for those soldiers who had gone into shock.
And then Lily marries an ice farmer, of all things...
I have to say, that’s one of my favorite parts of the book. I had great fun writing about it. Being Irish, we don’t have a very good relationship with ice. I’ll tell you a story that’s totally irrelevant. When I was about 18, I was working as a junior reporter, but my brother had a golf and travel business. These were big corporate clients from the likes of IBM and Coca-Cola. And I used to drive a bus for them! Well, a minivan. I soon learned that what mattered most was not telling them the best stories or getting the best parking space, but having enough ice. I had to go round to all the little pubs and hotel places and ask them, ‘Would you have any extra ice?’ And they’d come out with a little tray of ice cubes.
It’s rather a jump, from there to ice farming.
I did hear about five years ago about ice farming in upstate New York, and I just thought, ‘What a gorgeous thing.’ To have ice in summertime was the height of good taste, especially in the South. I thought, well, how in the world did they get the ice? People told me that Missouri was too far south to create ice. I checked it out. There were more than a few ice dealers in and around the warehouses on the Mississippi, and I thought, OK, there we go. And I followed that backwards.
So where did you learn about the stained glass on the battlefield that was destined for Missouri churches?
Y’know, that’s pure invention. I checked out the geography and the Civil War stuff, the Mitchell stuff and Frederick Douglass in the first part—it’s all forensically correct. If I’m going to have half of it be fiction and half be nonfiction, I thought, I must be sure I get those details right.
How do you decide what needs to be factual, then, and what you can and should play with?
That’s the thing that’s on your mind. You have to say to yourself, “What is going to be true, and what do I manipulate?” I don’t want to sound pompous, but you want to be true to a sort of deep, emotional, human texture. Something about who we are that rings true to a reader. I think your responsibility is not so much to the bare nature of fact but much more to the shaded nature of what it means to be human. You try to get those things Faulkner talks about—love and pride and pity and sacrifice and compassion—as good as you can get them. And you hope that the reader will supply the rest.
Also, to be honest, you try to find an extreme detail that’s true, which makes the rest of it ring true. I couldn’t learn everything about ice farming. But the sounding of the ice, when they make a sort of Celtic spiral and set their boots down on the lake to test its thickness—I called it falconing, which I don’t think is a real term, but I know the farmers used to do that.
Reading, I felt like I was in Dublin, in New York, in Newfoundland, in St. Louis in a new way, and in midair. What’s the secret to writing about place?
Language. It’s all about the rhythm of the language. Because you will not write the same way about London as you will about Dublin, or New Orleans. It’s all about how the words touch each other on the page and how they reflect the topography of a place. With St. Louis, you close your eyes and think of water. The gathering point. Even though it’s not correct, as a non-American I always think the Mississippi goes from St. Louis to New Orleans. So you want to have a big, broad river running through the words, and some amount of jazz, and some amount of Southern mystique. You are Southern and you are Northern at the same time. And I love your Missouri accent. It’s complicated. It has a music to it—a complicated music.
Earlier you mentioned the importance of emotional honesty—do you ever write something and then strike it out, because it doesn’t feel honest?
It would be a lie to tell you no. There were parts that killed me, parts I had a really hard time with, and had to strain to write, and at that stage you have to examine your honesty. I wrote a whole section with Lily as a housemaid in St. Louis, but I threw it out. She just felt a little bit made of cardboard. What’s that thing on the front of a maid’s uniform? It felt like I was only getting the bib.
Maybe she didn’t want to be a housemaid.
That’s it! She felt much more at home when she took off and went and farmed the ice.
I really hate to be trite and ask about your “process,” but do you save those bits you cut?
I always want to know people’s processes. Do they write with a pencil? Onto a typewriter? I began as a journalist, so immediately I was typing. I graduated to computers and now I can’t write without my laptop. It would be wonderfully romantic to say I write with a pen. Or even better, a pencil.
Better yet, a fountain pen.
And at the end, be splattered with ink. Yeah, it would be great. But it just ain’t true. I save file after file after file. I might have Lily1, Lily10, Lily29. But the original one is always the most interesting, that point where it asks me, “Do you want to save the changes that you made to Lily?” It seems an extraordinary comment on the nature of fiction.
How did you become so deeply empathetic?
Oh, there are people out there who are so much more deeply empathetic than I could ever dream of being. People out there doing social work, working with kids, doing their thing in quiet or anonymity or religious fervor. Their beauty comes from the fact that they are selfless, but also they know how wicked and dark the world can be, how much sadness they have to confront. Me? Nothing. Except—I learned very early on that other people’s stories are much more interesting than my own.
You’re famous for writing novels that braid lives across generations, letting them twine and meet. Has that kind of thing happened in your own life?
Yeah, life is full of braiding, isn’t it? Don’t you at least once a day sort of shake your head at the massive coincidence of it all? We are deeply, deeply, deeply connected. And we refuse to acknowledge it.
TransAtlantic (Random House, June 4, 2013, 320 pages) is available at area bookstores. For more information, click here.
