"Maeve's already here," says the desk clerk at Arbutus Lodge in Cork City, where PW is meeting Ireland's bestselling and most beloved living author. Maeve Binchy has driven down from Dublin this morning, and as we introduce ourselves she explains with an infectious laugh that she's early since she allowed extra time, "because I'm a terrible driver. I only got my license four years ago, if you can imagine that. Most people won't admit to being bad drivers -- they would sooner tell you they're bad in bed!"
Binchy in the flesh (of which there is an ample amount on her six-foot frame) is beguiling and irrepressible storyteller. Her focus is acute and her smile is genuine. Conversation is an enthusiastic, generous flow of anecdotes and observations, punctuated by quips, queries and conspiratorial asides. Not only is Binchy one to suffer fools gladly -- she would do so graciously.
Binchy's fifth novel, The Copper Beech, was published in Great Britain and Ireland by Orion, and is out in the U.S. from Delacorte. This more or less simultaneous publication on both sides of the Atlantic is a first for Binchy, who calls it "a huge vote of confidence" on the part of Delacorte. The success of her bestselling previous novel, Circle of Friends (Delacorte, 1991; Dell 1991), was undoubtedly a factor. Last year's invitation to lunch at the White House with Barbara Bush, who has called Binchy her favorite author, probably didn't hurt sales either.
Additionally, the Dell paperback of The Lilac Bus (also a 1991 Delacorte hardcover), a collection of stories which was made into a British TV film last year, hit the paperback bestsellers list after its publication this past July.
The Copper Beech is a series of linked stories about the lives of characters who have shared years in a small schoolhouse in the Irish village of Shancarrig. Their romances, secrets, betrayals and triumphs are told with a vivid charm; the result is a lively portrait of the entire village.
With a whopping first printing of 160,000 copies, The Copper Beech is a BOMC main selection and a Time-Life Book Digest Condensed Book. First serial rights have gone to Good Housekeeping. Meanwhile, Binchy remains notably modest and easy to work with. Jackie Farber, her editor at Delacorte, calls their relationship "a joyful experience."
Binchy, now 52, has developed a style that has made her four previous novels, three collections of stories and three plays extraordinarily successful. Her audience, she has discovered, "is grateful for the absence of sex and violence. They're people who like being able to buy a book that will suit their mothers and their children."
This distinction is inadvertent on Binchy's part. "It's just that I would be embarrassed to write about sex, and I wouldn't get it right. I try to write the way people talk, and I can't imagine talking with my friends about our sex lives the way we talk about our feelings, and wishes, and disappointments."
Binchy recalls a British editor's observation that in her books everybody is obsessed with sex but nobody ever actually has any. "I was thrilled, because I knew that I had got the '50s right!"
What Binchy does write about is life in Ireland and England, and she does it in a way that has universal appeal. Her books have been translated into six languages; she loves the story about the French translator who kept calling the Irish consulate in Paris with questions like "is eejit stronger or less strong than idiot?"
She writes about romance, but her characters are realistic. "I don't have ugly ducklings turning into confident ducks." Her characters tend to be her own vintage, she admits, because she knows all the details will be right. ("Having lived it, I've already done the research.") Other themes common to her fiction include the contrast of small village to big city, the differences between England and Ireland, the hypocrisy of the powerful, and the constant issues of friendship and betrayal.
As Binchy and PW chat, Patsy Ryan, one of the lodge's proprietors, comes over to remind her that she taught with Patsy's sister in Cork years ago. "Oh yes!" Binchy exclaims. "I remember that we used to huddle together in a tiny lounge at the school – the room was so small one person had to breathe in if the other breathed out – united in our loathing of that frightful headmistress!"
It sounds like the beginning of a Maeve Binchy novel. Schools and schoolteachers often figure in her fiction; Binchy, born in 1940 in the village of Dalkey, outside Dublin, became a teacher after graduating from University College Dublin, and thought for several years that she had found her calling. But at 23, on a visit to Jerusalem that was a gift from the parents at a Jewish school in Dublin where she had taught, she lost what Christian faith she had had (and now calls herself "a collapsed Catholic") when she visited the site of the Last Supper, and realized that "none of it was true." This revelation made her question other assumptions about her life.
Her letters home to her father – she had now joined a kibbutz – were so fascinatingly full of her observations about kibbutz life and the threat of war that he submitted one to the Irish Independent, which printed it. Binchy thought she "had arrived," as the article paid £18 and she had been earning a weekly £16 teaching. But it was four years before she was able to break into the Irish Times with some freelance articles, and finally a job, in 1969. Today, she is a fixture there, and writes a twice-weekly column and occasional celebrity interviews.
Two collections of her Irish Times pieces were published in the early '70s, My First Book and Maeve's Diary (Which Binchy recalls was humiliatingly remaindered for five pence), but thoughts of writing fiction didn't surface until Binchy's husband, former BBC commentator and writer Gordon Snell, encouraged her to give it a try. (They've lived together, in London and Dublin, since 1973, and were married in 1975.)
Her first fiction consisted of interlocking short stories. Two collections, Victoria Line and Central Line, were moderately successful, selling 5,000 and 4,000 copies respectively. (Dell issued them here in 1986 in a single volume, entitled London Transports.)
Binchy's agent, Christine Green, urged her to produce her first novel, suggesting that she write about what she knew best. That, she realized, was "the differences between the Irish and the English." She was living in London at the time, and she wrote for the Irish Times during the week while working on what was to become Light a Penny Candle on weekends.
Green, who Binchy says "typed the manuscript herself, she believed in it so much," first sold it for £5,000 to a fiction editor at MacDonalds, Rosemary Cheetham. (Cheetham also discovered Colleen McCullough, who has since become a good friend of Binchy's.) When Cheetham moved to a fledgling publishing venture, Century, Binchy agreed to repay the MacDonalds advance and follow her. Light a Penny Candle was the first book Century published.
Binchy has stayed loyal to Cheetham through Century/Hutchinson and Random/Century permutations, and now that Cheetham has moved to the new British house Orion, it seems a good omen that The Copper Beech is Orion's first titles.
The prepublication paperback auction for Light a Penny Candle set a British record for a first novel at £52,000 from Coronet, the paperback arm of Hodder & Stoughton. (In the U.S., Light a Penny Candle was published by Viking in 1982, and in Dell paperback in 1989.) Binchy was stunned by the news, as she had hoped for "the amazing sum of £10,000 at the most." For a long while afterward she wondered "if it was all a mistake and I would have to give it back."
A steady series of successes followed: Echoes (Viking, 1985; Dell, 1989); Firefly Summer (Delacorte 1988; Dell, 1989); Silver Wedding (Delacorte 1989; Dell, 1990) and Circle of Friends, in 1991, her first American bestseller. On the other side of the ocean, Binchy has long been both a household name and a regular on bestseller lists. (In Ireland, the tiniest, barest shop stocked with little more than biscuits and tinned beans is likely to carry paperbacks by Jeffrey Archer and Maeve Binchy.)
Binchy was apprehensive about her first author tour, for Light a Penny Candle. "A book signing is a masochist's dream," she says with a chuckle. "There are so many potential humiliations. When I go into a bookshop for a signing, I still wonder, are all these people the relatives of the owner?"
She recalls arriving in Manchester sympathetic about the sales rep's dilemma ("He probably thought, 'God help us, some book by an Irish woman with no sex and no violence!' "). The rep, expecting her at the airport, had brought a carton of Penny Candle copies and spread them around the airport bookstall, promising the clerk to collect them after Binchy had come and gone. When he discovered that Binchy's plan was to arrive by train, he took another carton of Penny Candle and spread those books around the bookstall at the train station, explaining to the clerk as well that he would be back later to collect them.
What happened next, says Binchy, was his hysterical call to the head office to tell them they had a runaway bestseller on their hands. By the time Binchy's book signing was over and he had returned to both places to retrieve his books, they had all sold out.
Binchy's daily life hasn't changed much since her success, except that "obviously, we don't worry about money anymore." The Snells maintain a habit from earlier days: they discuss money matters only on Saturdays. "Bills, checks, whatever, it all goes into a drawer until then," she says.
Binchy and Snell are now making a trip around the world, with a stop to visit Colleen McCullough on Norfolk Island. "Your readers can imagine us together, two large, cheerful, bestselling authors in the South Pacific!" she says with glee. In January they return to their daily routine in Dalkey, the town from which Binchy couldn't wait to escape and to which she now escapes. (She and Snell have no children, but do have two very important cats who reside there, which makes Ireland their main residence.)
In Dalkey, they sit side by side at a large desk, sometimes for more than six hours daily, with two word processors "like twin pianos." (Snell has become a successful writer of children's books.) "Anyone who sees this thinks we're mad," says Binchy. "But the discipline of another writer sitting beside you makes you work."
Binchy feels she has been blessed by enormous good fortune, despite crippling and painful arthritis, though she regrets that her parents didn't live to see her success. "I had a happy childhood, and they told me how marvelous I was all the time," she says. She also recalls the way she would interrupt her father when he would start to tell her a bedtime story.
"He would say, 'Hansel and Gretel were in the woods,' and I would ask, ''Where was I?' And he would say 'You were right there behind the tree.' I always wanted to be part of the story."
Wishes like this one have abetted the creation of various characters who may seem all the more real because they have some basis in Binchy's own desires. "I would like to have been a really good teacher like Maddy in The Copper Beech. I would like to be Aisling in Penny Candle. I rewrote history when I had Benny in Circle of Friends have great success at the dance -- I was an absolute failure at a similar dance! I was the most awful looking person there, even though my parents had told me I looked great. I wore a terrible borrowed dress that had to be let out, and I had painted-on earrings, and blue ink ran down my neck, and no one danced with me."
Perhaps that was the night a fiction writer was born; when the miserable blue-inked, un-danced-with Maeve came home, and her parents inquired eagerly how it had gone, she recalls, "I told them it had all been absolutely marvelous. I couldn't bear to disappoint them, you see. So I made it all up, and described everything in glorious detail!"
