At Swim, Two Boys (O'Neill)

Author Bio
• Birth—1962
• Where—south of Dublin, Ireland, UK
• Education—Presentation College, Glasthule, County Dublin
• Currently—lives in County Galway, Ireland


Jamie O'Neill is an Irish author, who lived and worked in England for two decades; he now lives in Gortachalla, in County Galway, Ireland. His critically-acclaimed novel, At Swim, Two Boys (2001) earned him the highest advance ever paid for an Irish novel and frequent claims that he was the natural successor to James Joyce, Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett.

O'Neill was born in Dún Laoghaire in 1962 and was educated at Presentation College, Glasthule, County Dublin, run by the Presentation Brothers, and (in his words) "the city streets of London, the beaches of Greece." He was raised in a home without books, and first discovered that books "could be fun" when he read Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. O'Neill was unhappy at home; he had a very difficult relationship with his father and ran away from home at age 17.

O’Neill met Russell Harty in 1982, during a two-week holiday in London. They became a couple and lived together in London and at Rose Cottage, Harty's home in Giggleswick, Yorkshire. Harty encouraged O'Neill's writing and read his manuscripts; he even mailed manuscripts of early novels to publishers without O'Neill's consent or knowledge, and a book deal was agreed with Weidenfeld. Soon after that, in 1988, Russell Harty died of Hepatitis. Hounded by the tabloid press, O'Neill's nude photograph was splashed across the front of the Sunday Mirror; the picture was taken shortly after his arrival in London when he earned some money as a model. He turned down offers of up to £50,000 for interviews about his private life with Russell Harty.

This newspaper coverage was how O'Neill's parents in Ireland discovered that their son was gay. This event would have been traumatising enough; his distress was deepened when members of the Harty family threw him out of the cottage, burned his clothes and left him homeless. They did, however, allow him to take the couple's pet dog, Paddy; even though they did want it.

After Russell Harty's death, O'Neill sought therapeutic help. The following year, O'Neill's first novel, Disturbance, was published; Kilbrack followed in 1990. Both novels had been mostly finished while Harty was alive. But then, grieving for Harty and alone in London, O'Neill struggled to write, parted company with both his agent and publisher, and took the job as a night porter at the Cassell Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Surrey from 1990 up to 2000.

Two years after Russell Harty's death, Paddy was to accidentally introduce O'Neill to his future partner. O'Neill was in a London pub when he noticed the dog was missing. Paddy had been found by a ballet dancer named Julien Joly. They began a relationship and Joly was instrumental in helping O'Neill put his life back together. During the ten years that followed, O'Neill wrote At Swim, Two Boys, which was published in 2001. Its official launch at Somerset House in London was abandoned on the day—it was September 11, 2001. (From Wikipedia.)

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• I was reading in Toronto last year, in the big library there (I should say now that At Swim, Two Boys culminates in the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916). Well, there was a big crowd, appreciative audience, curious, listening. We had a great Q & A afterwards, with intelligent, searching questions. After an hour and a half of this, I began to think we had my book nicely wrapped up. Then, just at the end, this hesitant hand pokes up at the back. "I was just wondering," says its owner, ‘what is this Rising thing anyway?' And everyone turns and says, ‘Yeah, I was wondering about that too.' And you realize how small, how insignificant is your tiny country's big history.

• But my most favoured memory is of a reading at Concordia University in Montreal. I stood on the podium and looked out on the faces. Generations of Irish faces, the high complexion of the men, that particular kink of the women's hair (those are some genes, I tell you). In the front row sat a priest, suited and collared. On his left, a lesbian couple. On his right, two gay men growing old together. Students, teachers; the university GLBT society. And I thought to myself, what a privilege to have brought such unlikely people together. What a very great privilege it is."

• When asked what book tht most influenced his life, this is what he answered:

Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott. I come from a home that had no books. Shelves we had, wide sweeps of shelves, with capidamonte roses, holiday china, objets not so much d'art as d'artifice. But no books. And the only reading was the local evening newspaper, read out loud at tea-table, religiously, column after column of the classified ads. Even at school I never read, leastways I never finished, the books on the English syllabus. I took my exams, even, without reading them. I don't know why, but those books were chosen specifically to dampen teenage spirits. It wasn't that life was too interesting. Life was already dull enough without being further wearied by dried-up withered prose.

It came to my final exams and, the way schoolboys do, I thought to cram 13 years of idled study into the last two weeks of term. I cleared all distractions from my room—music, games, everything. The last thing on my shelf was an old crusty copy of Ivanhoe. It had been given me by a mean-minded aunt (as I had thought) some years before, and had been gathering dust on my shelf ever since. There's no point throwing that out, I thought—I'm never going to be reading that. Well, of course, it's all I did those two weeks, read Ivanhoe. Read it two, three times. It was a revelation to me. Books can be fun, they can be entertaining, you can learn things out of books—a book can be interesting. Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott. Whoever would have thought? (Interview from Barnes & Noble.com.)