The quiet one

IT'S HARD TO find a recent article that doesn't refer to Jennifer Johnston as the 'grande dame of Irish letters'. But the designation still sends the 75-year-old writer into a strop. 'Some idiot thought that up,' she says. 'And if I'd have seen him, I would have punched him. It's just because I'm old.'

Johnston says she prefers 'the quiet woman of Irish literature'. She insists, without bitterness, that the literati regard her as a second-tier author. Roddy Doyle, who recently called Johnston as important a writer as James Joyce, would disagree.

Still, the stylistic reserve, domestic themes and novella-length of Johnston's books make her far from a trendy author. Her novels aren't even published in the US. But for three decades Johnston has been turning out critically praised fiction, delineating domestic conflicts with a graceful economy, tempering what would in lesser hands become schmaltz.

Discussing her lates novel, Grace and Truth (Review), she could be talking about any of her 14 works. As she says, in crisp, staccato sentences that mirror her prose: 'We have to understand our own lives. We have to work endlessly on ourselves. We have to be prepared to be forgiving. We have to understand our own secrets.'

Grace and Truth is about Sally, a successful thirtysomething stage actress obsessed with knowing who her father is. Her mother guarded the secret, going so far as to deny Sally even had a father. Now that her mother is dead, Sally's only living family is her estranged maternal grandfather, an aged bishop. Sally approaches him with her question and is received with chilly disdain. But the ailing bishop is writing his memoirs, which, it transpires, are for her eyes only.

But this isn't a story that hangs on a revelation. The identity of Sally's father is apparent from early on. Johnston's concern is with the question of forgiveness. 'It was a challenge to make the reader feel sympathetic towards the old man,' says Johnston. 'The reader could go on hating him, or they could turn this corner and say, 'He's a bit of an old crank, but he's got something there. He needed love so desperately that you can understand what happened'.'

Johnston says that her exploration of paternal incest is unlikely to send tremors through Ireland, with incestuous abuse reported in the media with horrifying regularity. 'The entire country seems to be filled with creepy, incestuous relationships and destroyed people,' she says. 'When I was 19, my best friend in Trinity told me her father raped her. I didn't believe her. But now if she told me, my God I'd believe her.'

Johnston is prone to disarmingly critical assessments of her work. She casually mentions The Gates, Fools' Sanctuary and The Railway Station Man as books 'you could throw away and not worry about'. She's generally satisfied with Grace and Truth, only lamenting the 'disposable' plot carriers. She says the novel would have worked just as well without Sally's skirt-chasing husband Charlie, who announces he's leaving her in the novel's opening pages. Johnston uses Charlie 'like a table or chair' - a mere prop to spur Sally's search for her father. 'With Chekhov, every person on the stage is very important,' Johnston says. 'But I've always been too lazy to learn that.'

Johnston was born in Dublin in 1930. Her father was the playwright Dennis Johnston, whose career as a war reporter kept him away from the family. Her parents separated when she was eight. It wasn't until Johnston was 14 that she learnt that her parents had divorced - a friend at school broke the news. 'I assumed it wasn't true,' she says. 'I was incredibly angry and upset, because they could have told me.'

Her mother was a stage actress and director. Johnston describes her as a powerful woman with a flammable personality. 'She was not a sane, straightforward woman,' she says. 'You did everything you ever could to avoid having rows with her.' Often, her mother would storm out of the house - and return with gifts for her children. 'She was very aware that she wasn't always fair,' Johnston says.

As a teenager, Johnston aspired to a career on the stage, - until her mother got wind of her ambitions. 'She screamed,' Johnston says. 'I stopped wanting to be an actress in 10 minutes. She didn't want people to know that she had a daughter who was going to be on the stage, too, as she was very, very conscious of her age.'

On her deathbed, Johnston says, her mother apologised to her and her brother for failing them as a mother. 'We kept saying, 'Stop apologising. You haven't done anything wrong.''

Johnston's father never talked to his daughter about her career. She only found out his opinion when she saw him interviewed on television.

'He suddenly started to talk about my work, and said he thought it was absolutely wonderful,' Johnston says. 'I just burst into tears, because never - never once - had he said anything about it to me. It wasn't until he was 75 that we started to become friends. That didn't leave much time.'

She recalls burning with jealousy when her father drove her brother to Cambridge for their annual college reunions.

'I thought, 'All that talking. He never talked to me'.' When she confessed her feelings to her brother, he laughed, and said: 'We never spoke a word. We would drive totally silently.'

Johnston was thrown out of Trinity College in her third year when she repeatedly failed a crucial exam. 'I never told my parents that I failed,' she says. She married when she was 20, moved to London and raised a brood of four. London provided a contrast to the cultural anorexia of 1950s Dublin. 'London had this wonderful freedom,' she says. 'London was learning to be young and at peace. Ireland was a very unfree country at that time. You still weren't allowed to put everything on the stage.'

Johnston started writing when she was 35, and makes no effort to hide the egotism behind that decision. 'I thought, 'I'm half way through my life and should I be run over by a bus, nobody would ever give me a second thought. I'm my father's daughter and soon I'll just be the mother of my four children. I don't want to be that. I want people to know about me'.'

Johnston's trajectory goes against the stereotype of the writer whose novels start off autobiographical, but become decreasingly so as they mature. The protagonists of her first three novelists were men. Ever since, she has written about middle-class women from the South who 'aren't me, but could be me'.

Johnston draws a direct link between the onset of her writing career and the break-up of her first marriage. 'I became truly free for the first time,' she says. 'I suddenly thought, 'I have a voice'. I just couldn't take the whole marriage thing any more.'

During the so-called Troubles, Johnston felt alienated in London, and returned to Ireland after separating from her first husband. 'It was that old idea that if you don't live through the bad times in your own country, you don't really understand what those people have been through,' Johnston says. 'I felt, 'There's nothing I can do, but I want to be there'.'

Johnston now lives in Derry with her second husband, and is conscious of being a Southerner in the North. 'We look at things in a totally different way,' she says. 'I'm basically an amiable and friendly person, and it's difficult to find a person here whose not looking at things through a veil of hatred.'