Colm McCann, ‘The World is Sometimes Too Full for Us’, in The Irish Book Review (Summer 2006), pp.20-21.

[Colm McCann describes the genesis of his new novel Zoli and how it took him from New York City into the heart of an unfamiliar culture.]

The old adage is that you write what you know. It seems fairly simple and straightforward - after all, it’s a logical and philosophical impossibility to write about what we don’t know.You won’t find loaves of bread under breadcrumbs. However, if we write about what we know, or seem to know, or pretend we know, there comes a certain stage where we must figure out exactly what it is that we really do know. And that degree of self-knowledge is as slippery as trying to establish what it means to tell the truth.
 Rather than tying myself in a cumbersome literary knot, here are the facts as they present themselves: I am in my early 40s. I was raised in suburban Dublin and now live in New York City. I don’t exactly trip over lemonade stands when I go out the front door, but it’s a nice area, a little antiseptic, but close to the park, and my kids go to a good school. Having three youngsters has put a lid on a lot of the literary parties that I used to want to go to, and, besides, the hangovers last longer these days. Most mornings I sit in front of photographs of some of my favourite writers - amongst them Berger, Kiely, Harrison - and they stare down as I write. I feel like I have a good life. At times one can pretend that even the vacuum sounds like a violin.
 If I were to write this - or at least attempt to put it in a novel - I fear that I would end up with one of those vast, housebroken books full of endless and half-clever little curlicues.
 Happiness writes white, said Henri de Montherlant.
 Certain writers have, down through the years, brought the walls down on the universal - McGahern springs immediately to mind - and carried them seamlessly into the local. Others like Ondaatje step into whole new landscapes each time they write. Great writing, and indeed great reading, doesn’t only confront what we know, but it delves profoundly into desire. We go forth on our journeys precisely because we know we can never go back: that old footstep doesn’t exist anymore, we cannot remain unchanged, there will be no arrival home.The unfolding of our imaginations is unaccountable and splendid. Mystery is forgiving.
 Instead of writing what we know, we write towards what we want to know.
 It was her face that got me first. A photograph in Isabel Fonseca’s book Bury Me Standing. She looked a bit like Nadia Mandlestam, eyes a little sunken, a long, dark, aquiline face. Her story, too, held my attention. Her real name was
 Bronislawa Wajs, but she was known by her Romani name, Papusza. She grew up in Poland and, while travelling with her kumpanija of harpists, she taught herself how to read and write. Under the Communists, she became one of the great Gypsy poets and singers, but when she died in 1987 nobody knew her anymore - she had been exiled from her people for living a life that went in lockstep with the outsiders. She was irreversibly excluded from her old ways. She died in a little cottage in Silesia , unknown except to a few who later revived her poetry and began to use it as a foundation stone for Romani literature.
 Certain stories pierce us. We cannot shuck them, no matter how hard we try. I knew nothing about the world of Gypsies. In fact, to be honest, I didn’t really want to know about them. After spending four years trying to come to terms with the world of Rudolph Nureyev in a novel ( Dancer ) I wanted to write an easy novel, something off the top of my head, something close to home ... something I knew about. Then I wondered what it was I knew and eventually had to consider the fact that nobody wanted a novel about an Irish writer living in NewYork, sitting on his fat arse, wondering.
 And, so, I went back to Papusza’s photograph. She haunted me. I had to confront her. And the only way to confront her was to write about her, to give her to other people, readers. But I didn’t want to write non-fiction. Facts are much too mercenary. I like the freedom of invention on the foundation of suggestion. I ended up, over the course of another three years, inventing a whole new persona for Papusza and her life. She became Czechoslovakian. She fails in love with an English expatriate. She is betrayed. She walks across Europe and ends up in Italy , in the mountains, living a quiet life, a search for the notion that she is never fully complete. This is a notion which, in many ways, operates like a novel.
 One of my favourite things about writing - apart from those brief, blinding, precious moments when the words are actually touching each other well on the page - is the fact that I get to live on a different level than I normally would, in a different world, or country, or time.The literal travel into another place fascinates me.
 For the writing of Zoli I spent the course of two months in Slovakia, with side trips to Hungary , Austria and Italy. Not a bad life, if you can get it.The research took me from some of the nastiest housing projects in eastern Europe, to the mud-and-wattle huts of the Roma camps, to the clean streets of Vienna , to small Gypsy pubs in the backstreets, to the high grass meadows of the Dolomites. Along the way I met musicians, ethnographers, activists, drunkards, taxi drivers, sociologists, journalists, bureaucrats, smugglers. I too lived out so many different roles - listener, provocateur, watcher, money lender, singer, storyteller. I travelled with two guides who solved problems of language and access and interpretation for me. Staying in the Gyspy camps of Slovakia was something I would never forget. I saw some of the worst poverty I have ever come across, and I got a brief glimpse into a world that I tried, then, to recreate in my imagination.
 The world is sometimes too full for us. On my first morning in Bratislava I was wandering alone through the streets, trying to decide where to go and how to access some of the housing estates I had read about. I decided to hire a taxi for the day and I wanted the right sort of driver, one who would take me into the roughest areas of the city. I went and hung out in the taxi rank, watching and waiting for the right face to appear. I finally found a man named Oliver who gave me a good price for the day. He was a bit skeptical of my desire to see the areas where the Gypsies lived, but I finally convinced him and we drove to a housing project called the Pentagon in the northern suburbs of Perialka. The tower blocks were built in the shape of a star, but that was the only thing celestial about them.A lot of Gypsy men stood against shuttered windows, brooding and malevolent.The grafitti on the wall read: Skapete Dileri. Dealers will die.There were a few needles scattered in the corners. Oliver and I walked along the balconies. I could feel my heart thumping in my dirty shirt.
 It was early morning and so things were still relatively safe but it turned out that Oliver had once worked for the local cable company and he knew what floors were safe and what floors would be trouble for us. ‘Don’t go there," he said, “unless you want a knife in your belly!” Later in the day, after we had visited dozens of housing estates, Oliver and I sat down in the grounds of an old monastery in the centre of town. He talked about his hatred for the Gypsies, how they did nothing but steal, how they milked the system, how their children were savage, how Europe would be cleansed without them.
 "I should know,” he said. “My mother was a Gypsy.”
 I love the notion that we can still be stunned by life, by the likes of Oliver and his generous blindness, the acute irony of who we are. It happened to me many times in the course of writing the novel that I felt as if the world was showing me how alive it still happens to be ... the child in the rural camp who drew a picture in my notebook, the teenager in the Sivinia camp who wore the Irish football jersery and screamed out (as he missed a penalty) that he was really at heart an Irishman, the old accordionist who put his head on my shoulder as he played an ancient tune, the children who gazed at the picture of my wife and were quite convinced that she was a Romani too.
 Writers are the worst people to talk about their own work. Most of us have no idea what the deepest implications of our words are upon readers. Good writing is an act of empathy rather than a declaration of truth. Beware of the writer with an absolute idea: they are in danger of becoming politicians.The best writing might actually come from those people, or places, or things that we don't really know. We make a shotgun leap into the unknown, only to pick up pieces of shrapnel along the way, wounds that later help us to uniquely create our own cures.
 The best writing, then, is suggestion and mystery. After all, it is the reader who must complete it. It is the reader who becomes the final writer.
 At this stage, so close to having finished my novel (at the time of writing I have just turned in final manuscript proofs to my British publisher) I am so confused and in fact frightened by the book that I find it difficult to open the pages.There are days I hate it, I declare it a fraud, I literally turn away from it, I want nothing to do with it. And yet there are other times an e-mail comes from a friend, or a kind word is said by an editor, and I walk tall and proud. I feel that I have done most of what I intended to do, but not all of what I wanted.
 Every novel is a failure. All writers know that. Each of us hang, above our desks, the old Beckett quote: No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. If the quote is not there, if the writer feels that he or she has done something faultless, then they should give it up, throw away the pen, and go sit on the clouds with the other idiots who practise the politics of perfection. The real triumph comes in getting as far as possible towards what we want to know.
 What stuns me, still, and comforts me also, is how much there is to learn, how unfinished our lives are, even within the pages of a book. I have no idea what sort of project I will attempt next time around.There are a few images circling my heart but each of them seems more difficult and complicated than the rest.
 And yet maybe that is the peculiar and wonderful curse of the writing life, that we cannot face away from the story that terrifies us. After all, the best stories are those we are afraid to tell.