The Scribbler's Apprentice

When I was in school, career guidance ran the narrow gamut from you’re-useless-so-just-get-a-job-delivering-for-a-shop up to the dizzy heights of doing the open exams for the civil service. There was certainly no advice for the business end of being a writer, i.e., how do you actually make a living while you engage in unremunerated (or poorly remunerated) scribbling? So the only template available to me when I decided I wanted to write was a mélange of clichés, stereotypes, and literary biographies.

After finishing school I took a year off. This was not (try as I might) the Brideshead Revisited–flavoured “Grand Tour of Europe.” Not for me the Doge’s Palace or the waters at Baden-Baden. I spent a lot of time on the dole mooching around town, pretending to be in Trinity, haunting the Winding Stair bookshop, the Municipal Gallery, and Gallagher’s Coffee Shop in Middle Abbey Street, and attending a few very discouraging poetry workshops.

How did one get into the writers’ guild? You did not see ads in garret windows: Poetaster Requires Apprentice. Apply Within. According to the models available to me, university was the seemingly logical place for the aspiring writer to go and learn something. So go I did, matriculating by the skin of my teeth thanks to a C in Latin. I studied Pure English, popularly reckoned to be the third most unemployable degree offered by the National University of Ireland after Pure Philosophy, and Pure History. There was some learning, some loutishness, a lot of leaning on bars, and a little desultory writing—but that was, it seemed to me, part of the trajectory: a poem here, a short story there, and hours and hours of talking nonsense about writing something without actually doing it.

Kevin Holohan, MA? Not likely. After graduating, there being little else to do, I emigrated. I felt no draw to the alien familiarity of London. I opted instead for the teaching-English-as-a-Foreign-Languish route, believing it to be part of the Joycean/ Beckettian apprenticeship protocol of exile, introspection, and creation. What was to be one year in the Under the Volcano–like world of Puertollano on the plains of Castilla La Mancha turned into six. Franco in his paranoia had built an oil refinery in this landlocked town, two hundred miles from the nearest salt water. It was an odd town, far removed from tourist ideas of Spain, but it felt exotic, fascinating; it felt not-quite-Europe.

On return to Dublin I taught English privately, did odd jobs, and scribbled. I got a play on at the Project Theatre for two nights. It was not really a play, more like acted-out poetry or poetry acting out. It got savaged by the press to such an extent that Conor McPherson, the playwright, congratulated me by remarking that he had not seen such vitriolic reviews since his early plays. I took this as a compliment. Then I got a short story published in the now sadly defunct Sunday Tribune and subsequently short-listed for the ST/Hennessey New Irish Writing Award. Close but no cigar, but I did get to attend the posh banquet in Trinity College and meet then-president Mary Robinson.

When I moved to America I temped. That was what artsy types seemed to do. That and wait tables. I knew from past experience that I did not have the prerequisite neck to lie my way into a waiting job, so I temped.

Temping is corporate America’s unwitting funding of the arts. Here’s how it works: The prevailing presumption is that if you are a temp it is because you are maybe a little dim and cannot hack it in the real work world. So the average gig would start out with a kind of: “THIS is the photocopier, THIS is your computer. This is the SPREADSHEET. Each piece of paper here has id #, an amount, and a date. You type the id# into the field that says id#, then you enter the DATE in the field that says DATE, the AMOUNT where it says AMOUNT. OK?” Nod slowly but not too confidently. Wait for them to leave and begin.

Expectations are so low that they expect something to take maybe two days that will actually take the moderately accomplished individual maybe three hours to finish. 16 – 3 = 13 hours to do your own stuff and print it out, save it to a floppy (anyone remember them?), or e-mail it to yourself—a Ballad of Reading Gaol all of one’s own. I quickly became fluent in making my own stuff look vaguely like work on the screen, and got speedy with the use of ALT+TAB to throw up an impressive window of worky-looking windows if anyone came too close.  I think that influenced the way I write: short bursts without ever looking back until I have a pile of tatters to clean and assemble.  Over time some of the fauna that I had to work for had a corrosive effect, reaching a breaking point when I was in thrall on the trading floor at a large bank. That was my scribbler’s apprenticeship.

I now have a day job that matters to me, involving sifting numbers and data for a nonprofit humanitarian organisation. The widgets at the end of it do well and help people, so I can sleep at night. It has nothing whatsoever to do with scribbling. It occupies one side of my brain and I try to use the other side to scribble at the weekends or very early in the mornings. It was never a conscious strategy; it was something I stumbled into. The day job employs one bit of my brain and I make up stories with the rest. The day job and the scribbles are very different species, yet most of the time the two manage to play quite nicely together. That is not to say that a Medici-sized endowment to further my scribbling endeavours would not be welcomed, but it is not expected.

(c) Kevin Holohan, October 2011

KEVIN HOLOHAN was born in Dublin. He is a graduate of University College Dublin and a veteran of secondary school education at the hands of the Christian Brothers. His short stories have been published in Cyphers, the Sunday Tribune, and, most recently, in Whispers and Shouts. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and son and he reviews fiction for the Irish Echo (New York). The Brothers’ Lot is his first novel.

Combining the spirit of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim with a bawdy evisceration of hypocrisy in old-school Catholic education, The Brothers' Lot is a comic satire that tells the story of the Brothers of Godly Coercion School for Young Boys of Meagre Means, a dilapidated Dickensian institution run by an assemblage of eccentric, insane, and often nasty celibate Brothers. The school is in decline and the Brothers hunger for a miracle to move their founder, the Venerable Saorseach O'Rahilly, along the path to Sainthood.

When a possible miracle presents itself, the Brothers fervently seize on it with the help of the ethically pliant Diocesan Investigator, himself hungry for a miracle to boost his career – but as the miracle unravels, the Brothers' efforts to preserve it unleash a disastrous chain of events.

Tackling a serious subject from the oblique viewpoint of satire, The Brothers' Lot explores the culture that allowed abuses within church-run institutions in Ireland to go unchecked for decades. The novel inhabits a space where Angela's Ashes meets the work of Flann O'Brien and Mervyn Peake, while providing a look at a regrettable era that still haunts many countries across the globe.