“I don’t think of writing as a profession. If I can get money for it, that’s fine. But I’d rather wash dishes than write just for money.” – Richard Wright
February 2018. I’m in the thick of rehearsals for my latest musical role – Rapunzel’s Prince in Carrick-on-Suir Musical Society’s ‘Into The Woods’. “Agony!” and what have you.
It’s a very manageable role in a huge ensemble production and while rehearsals often involve long hours and plenty of repetition, it’s great fun.
The company has always been wonderful on and off stage in Carrick and in hindsight, all the more so now from this juncture, it’s a show I’m truly delighted to have been part of.
By then, I was working away on ‘I’m Fine’, the life story Enda O’Doherty, to my great surprise and delight, asked me to collaborate on – which is now available to buy – what a pleasure to write those words on day one of its published existence.
Enda and I were meeting on a regular basis, more often than not in the meeting room at Waterford’s De La Salle College where he teaches; I’d pop in just after 8am and spend an hour with Enda – then he’d go teach while I’d go report and edit.
My days in and around then were all go from 7am to 11pm between the book, journalism and rehearsals so there was many a day when I was running on fumes. I can concede that now but I didn’t at the time.
At the end of a very productive rehearsal, I made for home, then just three miles away in the tranquil townland of Faugheen, as proximal to Kilkenny city as it is to Waterford and just seven miles from the famed mountain of Slievenamon.
It was after 10pm by the time I got home. I was pretty jaded but I felt like I needed to break open the laptop and get another chapter written before bed: beginning, middle and end, the whole shooting gallery.
I’m pretty sure I’d a pre-9:30am work commitment for The Munster Express (my then employer) the following morning so that effectively ruled out some pre-work writing so I made a pot of tea, made for my dining room table, drew the curtains and got writing.
‘I’m Fine: Thoughts on Life, Addiction, Love and Health’ was written primarily in Faugheen, a home I rented between March 2013 and November 2018. I couldn’t have asked for a better refuge following a fundamental realigning of my personal life but for the purposes of my day (and night) job.
Other slivers of the book were assembled during my lunch breaks at The Granary Café/Restaurant on Hanover Street (not a word was written during my regular working day), my current address in Williamstown, the family home outside Portlaw and in a mobile home in Argèles Sur Mer in Southern France.
The first character introduced in a chapter which would be ultimately titled ‘Working on a Dream’ (thank you, Mr Springsteen) was a man I’d never heard of until Enda, his eyes dancing at the time, brought him into conversation: a Danish explorer named Peter Freuchen (1886-1957).
“He packed a lot in over the course of his life without reaching the 28,000-day mark which constitutes the average human life nowadays, dying in 1957, aged 71,” Enda told me, words which moreorless forms the introduction to that particular chapter.
“Possessing an Indiana Jones-type spirit in a Chewbacca-sized body (he stood all of 6’7”, weighing over 300lbs and was three times married), Freuchen, a bear of a man with astounding spirit, wrung every imaginable drop out of life.
“During an expedition in Iceland in 1926, Freuchen was effectively entombed by an avalanche, and it hit him so hard that he rolled into a ball, only for the snow and ice to compact right around him. By the time the avalanche stopped, he attempted to dig himself out only to discover that the ice was so compacted that his fingernails were chiselled off in the process.
“He was encased in what amounted to a concrete orb…So he sat there for three hours; he could feel the hypothermia kicking in and he knew he was dying. And what happened next is not only disgusting but it revealed this man’s inability to look beyond failure, to see that there is a superhuman quality which I feel sits deep inside all of us, but few of us are prepared to realise, whatever the odds.”
I’m listening back to Enda, pausing between paragraphs and enjoy another slurp of tea. The pot is soon drained, it’s gone midnight, I really ought to be in bed but I feel I need to keep listening. I need to keep writing.
“Three hours into his living nightmare, Peter Freuchen, encased in snow and ice, opened his trousers and defecated into his own hand. And with his own waste, he formed it into a chisel - something he’d seen those native to the Arctic do with the frozen poop of their sled dogs – so he created a shank from his own shit, pointed it, waited for it to freeze and then dug himself out with a tool hewn from his own stool.”
Incredibly, Enda continued: “Freuchen couldn’t stand up – his toes were frostbitten – and he crawled for several hours until he reached the basecamp, by which time everyone else involved in the expedition had left - they assumed he’d literally perished in the avalanche. But when Freuchen reached the camp, he examined his toes, by which time were completely black and permanently deprived of blood flow. He knew the next stage was gangrene, followed by death. So he took out a pliers and removed his toes. Another account of his survival says he then ate what he amputated, and this explains why there’s an oil portrait, to this day, of Freuchen, hanging above a fireplace in the trophy room of the New York Explorer’s Club, with a ‘peg leg’ clearly on display…
“People like Peter Freuchen inspire me, and remind me why following a dream is worth pursuing. We should all dream the impossible dream and strive to run where the brave dare not go. We should give ourselves permission to chasing and achieving the maddest and most inconceivable of goals. But in this frenzied, overly-busy world we live in, it appears a lot of us, whether we’re students or adults, have lost the ability or discarded the willingness to dream the impossible dream.”
By the time I reached the ninth and final page of that chapter, it was 2:30am. I may have been tired but the adrenaline of my rehearsal (ask anyone involved in theatre how long it takes to come down afterwards) and the pleasure of the writing more than compensates for the lost sleep.
Knowing this was someone else’s story made it easy for me to admit that this was incredibly interesting stuff, more than good enough, I felt, for a publisher to pay attention to.
Thankfully, after some polite refusals and a few false dawns, Orpen Press recognised the merit in the story Enda had shared with me – and here we are. And while it’s disappointing that we don’t have a bells and whistles launch today or over the weekend just past, I must admit I didn’t need that validation. The book being published was the ultimate objective from my perspective and to see that ambition realised is incredibly satisfying. It’s a big day for me. A very happy day for me.
Now that Enda’s story is out there, the universe will decide how many or how few decide to read it. If it’s a success, that’ll be fantastic and might well allow Enda and I to dream of other prospects.
If it’s not, I’ll be no less proud of the end product and either way I’ll be forever grateful to Enda for giving me a chance to tell his story and flex my writing muscles in a way that the day job simply cannot permit.
Said Philip Roth: “My goal would be to find a big fat subject that would occupy me to the end of my life, and when I finish it, I’ll die.” I’d like to think I’ve not yet stumbled upon that big fat subject, but as debut books go, I couldn’t have foreseen working on one as stimulating as ‘I’m Fine’.
And now the book is out there now as its own organism. It’s no longer just something Enda and I worked on. And that’s incredibly exciting. I’ve climbed an altogether different mountain from the one Enda set out on over three years ago. And that, for me, is a win all in itself.
To order ‘I’m Fine: Thoughts on Life, Addiction, Love and Health’, published by Red Stripe Press, visit https://orpenpress.com/red-stripe-press/ or https://endaodoherty.ie/im-fine-new-book/
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