{"id":18360,"date":"2025-12-15T13:04:56","date_gmt":"2025-12-15T13:04:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=18360"},"modified":"2025-12-15T13:04:56","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T13:04:56","slug":"a-conversation-with-carlo-gebler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2025\/12\/15\/a-conversation-with-carlo-gebler\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with Carlo G\u00e9bler"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carlo G\u00e9bler\u2019s work spans fiction, nonfiction, memoir, history, theatre, and film. Born in Dublin in 1954 and raised in London and Ireland, he has published more than thirty books. The author of plays for stage and radio, screenplays, and documentaries, he has for many years taught creative writing in prisons, currently in HMP Hydebank and Loughan House Open Prison. I am fortunate to have been tutored by him at Trinity College Dublin. In this conversation we discuss his prolific working practice, and how he draws on memory and personal history in his work.<\/em><\/p>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> What are you working on at the moment?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER:<\/strong> I’m writing two nonfiction books. One is about my maternal grandparents\u2014my mother’s mother and father\u2014who my brother and I were sent from London to Ireland to stay with throughout our childhood. They lived in East Clare in a house called Drewsborough\u2014the book is called Drewsborough<\/em>\u2014and they were remarkable people. John McGahern said, more-or-less, that until the 1970s everyone in Ireland was a Victorian, and Lena and Michael O\u2019Brien, my maternal grandparents were exactly that. They were very strange and unusual people. Drewsborough <\/em>is about what I remember of them and its focus is my half-understanding\u2014and sometimes quarter-understanding\u2014all the things I was hearing from them about the family\u2019s back history. I got so much wrong, but all the mistakes and misunderstandings formed my psyche\u2019s geology; the errors of comprehension are now me.<\/p>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> When you return to these family memories, are you trying to restore something, or revise your understanding of what you experienced?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER:<\/strong> The second. I\u2019m trying to understand what I thought and what I think now which is different to what I thought when I was a child. I know so much more now\u2014about Ireland then, about my family, about the forces acting on them. I\u2019m also as I age increasingly attracted to non-fiction. I like that I don\u2019t have to invent or fictionalize; and I\u2019m just giving an account of that world as it was.<\/p>\n

RUBY: <\/strong>And the second non-fiction book?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER: <\/strong>That\u2019s a book about death. 2024 was my death year. My mother died, and three other really important people also passed that year.<\/p>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> Oh, I’m so sorry.<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER:<\/strong> But the book I\u2019m writing, tentatively called No One Tells You; the final years of Edna O\u2019Brien<\/em>, is less about death itself, and particularly my mother\u2019s death and more about the impact that death, and particularly her death, has and had on me.<\/p>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> You also have a play in the works?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER:<\/strong> Yes\u2014The Elephant in the Garage<\/em>. It\u2019s a true story of a woman who kept an elephant in her garage in Belfast during the Second World War. The producer found the story through a connection he had with someone who used to run a jazz club in London and who told him this story which he told me. It\u2019s remarkable story and fiendish to stage! My job is to write it, which I\u2019ve done; the rest is up to the production team.<\/p>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> You once told me at Trinity that writing is like descending into the basement, where the characters are already. How do you get down there?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER:<\/strong> The unconscious is always communicating\u2014in dreams, daydreams, slips of the tongue. You need to pay attention to the intimations and signals coming from below and when they\u2019re signalling you to come, don\u2019t tarry, make haste. And that place when I get to it is like an old theatre; and there they are, on stage, in costume, make up on, the characters and they \u2018do\u2019 the scene and I watch and follow and write it up. David Lynch says, which is not so dissimilar, that the creative space where the unconscious gifts you its fruits is a dark room with a TV in the corner playing something, and your job is to record or transcribe what\u2019s on the TV. You shut up and you listen because there they are on the screen, in costume, lines learnt, your characters, acting out the scene. In order to facilitate access to this magical, numinous space where the unconscious gives you what it has, regularity helps: you do it, i.e. you write at the same time every day and pretty soon you\u2019ll find your psyche will be ready at that time to offer you whatever it has. The unconscious wants to cooperate but the writer must make that process frictionless and easy. So, the writer mustn\u2019t do things that mess that relationship up.<\/p>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> Much of your work is memoiristic or rooted in memory. Is there nostalgia in that impulse?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER:<\/strong> Of course. In times of chaos or disorder, it\u2019s comforting to return to the foreign country of the past. But it\u2019s more than nostalgia: the present and future are made by the past. Going back to excavate your own geology, you drill down through layered strata and find out what your life has been formed from which helps you to understand your present, the present.<\/p>\n

Nabokov<\/a><\/span> does this brilliantly in Speak, Memory<\/em>. He does it by giving you pictures, one after the next, and as his understanding deepens, so the pictures he offers get richer and better and brighter. In the memoirs I\u2019ve written or am trying to write, I\u2019m attempting to do something similar, to give a deep understanding of the past and the connection of the past to the present, though obviously my efforts have never been and never will be as good as Nabokov\u2019s efforts. I mention Nabokov\u2019s memoir, among other reasons, because it\u2019s always good to have a sense of what is possible, what can be done, which, even though better than what one can do oneself, nonetheless spurs one on.<\/p>\n

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Vladimir Nabokov<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> Your advice as a writing teacher was to describe events plainly, without sentimentality, and to avoid editorializing. How did that sense of restraint develop?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER<\/strong>: From talking, listening to people tell stories about themselves, and talking about my own past over many years. What I learned is: get out of the way. Keep things plain. Don\u2019t moralize from the present. Don\u2019t tell the reader what to feel. Readers don\u2019t like it when they sense the writing has designs on them\u2014Keats put it far better than I ever could when he wrote, he was speaking of poetry but his observation applies to all forms, \u201cWe hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us\u2014and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one\u2019s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.\u201d<\/p>\n

All literature is a trick, of course. You\u2019re smuggling images from your interior into someone else\u2019s. The less interference, the cleaner the transmission.<\/p>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> How do you decide whether a project becomes fiction or nonfiction?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER:<\/strong> I would never voluntarily write a play\u2014they\u2019re too hard and too hard to get staged. So, it\u2019s always prose. Then the choice is between fiction and nonfiction. How do I decide?\u00a0 Each case is different. The first novel I wrote was The Eleventh Summer<\/em><\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s a fictional account (it might now be called auto-fiction) of life with my maternal grandparents, the Victorians in east Clare. It\u2019s a novel built out of the evocation of atmosphere and mood.\u00a0 It was published in 1985. But in the intervening forty or so years, I\u2019ve learnt so much more about those people than I knew as a child. In Drewsborough<\/em> I wanted to use that new material that has come to me, that has been given to me, but I decided I shouldn\u2019t and mustn\u2019t do it as fiction\u2014though the material is fantastic and could happily be novelised\u2014because to fictionalise would blunt the truth. The facts are so extraordinary it\u2019s better to leave them alone than trick them into fiction. So here was the reason I chose non-fiction rather than fiction, though every case is different.<\/p>\n

So, what do I mean by fictionalising \u2018would blunt the truth\u2019? Let me illustrate: for years my father\u2014pugnacious, left-leaning, and contemptuous of what he called the Irish peasant class\u2014maintained the O\u2019Brien family fortune, my maternal grandparent\u2019s money, the money that bought the estate and the house they lived in, Drewsborough, came from cough medicine sold in industrial quantities to gullible Irish navvies in nineteen century America who were dying of consumption. It sounded like pure myth and as a way to disparage my maternal grandparents it was a marvellous. I assumed it was a schtick. However, which I didn\u2019t know as a child, and which I didn\u2019t know when I wrote The Eleventh Summer <\/em>in the mid-1980s, it\u2019s absolutely true. But I only found out recently.<\/p>\n

The details are as follows. Three O\u2019Brien priests went to America pre-Famine and ended up in Lowell, Massachusetts. They were my great, great, great uncles. In Lowell they became pillars of the Irish-Catholic community and led the fight back against the Know Nothings. One priest became ill, probably with tuberculosis, and died; his brother, John, also fell sick, went to a chemist in Lowell, and was cured by a concoction of this liquorice-flavoured water the chemist made. His parishioners then began asking the chemist for \u201cFather John\u2019s medicine.\u201d These requests put an idea into chemist\u2019s mind. He went to Father John and he said, Let me use your name and picture; I\u2019ll put them on every bottle of the medicine, and you\u2019ll get a cut of every sale.<\/em> Father John O\u2019Brien agreed and the rest as they say, was history. Father John\u2019s Medicine, made in Lowell, Massachusetts, was a best seller. It sold in incredible quantities and on the back these sales, the O\u2019Brien family fortune was made, the fortune which bought Drewsborough, where I spent my childhood. Why fictionalize that? There\u2019s no need It\u2019s already more novelistic than fiction.<\/p>\n

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Father John’s Medicine at Crook County Museum & Art Gallery in Sundance, Wyoming.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> And how did that myth\u2014now revealed as true\u2014shape the family?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER:<\/strong> The fortune ruined my grandfather and his brother. The fact that Father John\u2019s Medicine made a fortune was a freak event but it created in my grandfather and his brother a deep, subliminal belief that extraordinary financial salvation was always just around the corner. They spent insanely but because they believed they\u2019d be saved they thought they were untouchable.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t. Financial salvation is never around the corner. The world is heartless and particularly heartless to those who get into financial difficulties, as Madame Bovary knew all too well. Debt and failure, with large side orders of shame, destroyed the O\u2019Brien men. As a child, staying in that house, it felt almost gothic\u2014Edgar Allan Poe by way of East Clare\u2014and I could sense this dark past even if I didn\u2019t then understand it or grasp how it came about. Understanding, as I said, came later. But the atmosphere experienced in childhood, wow, that was powerful and never forgotten.<\/p>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> And what about memory itself? Its accuracy? Its falsifications?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER:<\/strong> We\u2019re all formidable recording instruments. Everything floods in and is stored according to associative rather than chronological, logic. When you write you sift patiently, and the more you do this, the more the details of the past are yielded up to you.<\/p>\n

But accuracy is slippery. When I finished Father and I<\/em>, the book about my father and my life in London in the late fifties and early sixties , I sent it to Peter Robinson. He was a neighbour who had lived beside us when I was a child. We were the same age and he was my exact contemporary. Peter read the manuscript, corrected various details, and then he rang me up; \u201cI read the book,\u201d he said, \u201cand I don\u2019t understand why you make absolutely no mention of the fact that for two years we walked to and from school together\u2014sometimes four times a day.\u201d \u201cDid we?\u201d I said. \u201cDid we?\u201d Yes, we had but I had and have no memory of that whatsoever.<\/p>\n

RUBY:<\/strong> Not at all?<\/p>\n

CARLO G\u00c9BLER:<\/strong> Not at all. This is why memory is so tricky. On the one hand it\u2019s true, the more you sift, the more the details of the past are yielded up to you; but on the other hand, some things you can\u2019t find no matter how hard you look because they\u2019ve been stored somewhere where you can\u2019t put your hand on them, like my walking to and from school with Peter Robinson for two years. And by the way, the reason I think I have no memory of that experience, I can\u2019t find it, is because I was happy and it was the opposite of happy that mattered more to me and that forms the pith of that book.<\/p>\n