IT IS not unusual for successful writers to practise other
trades. It is well known that T. S. Eliot worked in a bank; perhaps
less so that Harper Lee was an airline reservation clerk. Both
Anthony Trollope and William Faulkner worked for the Post Office:
Trollope, it is said, dipped into the lost-letter box for
ideas.
Thomas Lynch is an internationally acclaimed poet, essayist,
and short-story writer who also has another job. What makes him
unsual, though, is how committed he is to that other trade, and how
highly regarded he is for it. Lynch is also a funeral director.
The form and content of Lynch's writing is evidence that he is
the master of two distinct professions. Yet so inextricably linked
are they in the heart and mind of Lynch, that, in conversation with
him, it is almost impossible to talk about one without the
other.
"A good poem and a good funeral have a lot of similarities," he
says. "When you mess with a poem or a funeral, it's really awkward.
People know right away when you go to the wrong cemetery, or have a
too easy rhyme. They both depend so utterly on metaphor and symbol,
and acted-out things rather than said things; so I think of them as
the same impulse to address the unspeakable things."
At 12 years of age, Lynch's father received his calling to be a
funeral director. A powerful calling it must have been, too; for
its echoes were heard decades later by his son, and subsequently by
his grandsons. In the prologue, or "Introit", to The Sin-eater:
A breviary, Lynch's latest poetry collection, he describes
the moment.
As a young boy, his father sees his uncle, a Roman Catholic
priest, dead on the mortuary table, being attended to by the
morticians. "Then they carefully lift the freshly vested body of
his dead uncle from the white porcelain table into a coffin. Then
turn to see the boy at the door. Ever after, my father will
describe this moment - this elevation, this slow, almost ritual
hefting of the body - as the one to which he will always trace his
intention to become a funeral director."
THIS location of the moment of such a calling is clearly held
dear by Lynch and his family. Was there a call of this kind to
writing?
"I've always thought there's something about the experience of
reading that makes you want to take part in a conversation, because
there's such a powerful sense of voice in any book," he says. "It's
not the writer's second-best effort. Usually, by the time it gets
to be a book, it's been so properly polished and sharpened it comes
as close to the voice of the author as it possibly can.
"When we engage with really good writers, what we engage with is
a very good conversation. So I do think that writing - the sense
that you should participate in a conversation - follows on from
reading. There is an ongoing conversation between people that use
language that way. Other people use music, or visual arts, or
architecture, or mathematics, but for those people who are called
to writing, I think it's the voice of other writers that does
it."
In 1974, Lynch graduated from mortuary school, and took over the
family business in Milford, Michigan. But he was also listening to
those well-honed voices, preparing to enter the literary
conversation.
"I suppose it was in the early 1980s when I purposefully decided
to start writing poems. After I'd written some, I wanted to see how
they compared with other writers. So, I called writers I knew.
"Specifically, I called a former teacher of mine, and said:
'Where would you send these poems if you wanted to find if they
were any good?' He gave me some addresses of magazines, and I sent
them out; and, for better or worse, I met with some success, which
was more than I needed by way of encouragement. So I kept going
forward with that."
AND forward he has gone, faithfully following his two callings,
and meeting more encouragement along the way in both. The
Undertaking: Life studies from the dismal trade has won the
Heartland Prize for non-fiction, and the American Book Award. It
was also a finalist in the National Book Awards, and has been
translated into seven languages. Bodies in Motion and at
Rest won the Great Lakes Book Award.
His poetry collection Skating with Heather Grace won
the Knopf Poetry Series. Meanwhile, Lynch & Sons Funeral
Directors is the only firm in the United States to have received
the highest awards for excellence from the National Funeral
Directors Association, the Cremation Association of North America,
and the International Order of the Golden Rule.
Lynch talks to me from his second home in West Clare, where he
spends a portion of each year. And here is the third strand in the
densely woven twine of Lynch's life - as much a part of him as the
writing and the funeral directing - Ireland.
In 1970, he crossed the Atlantic, to find his family, and read
William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. He now owns the small cottage
that was the home of his great-great-grandfather, given as a
wedding gift in the 19th century. Lynch divides his time between
continents as well as professions - fuelled, it seems, by a need to
be forever returning.
"I think I'm trying to replicate the feeling I got some 40 years
after I came here, that first very deep sense of having come home.
It helps me understand my parents, grandparents - the culture I
grew up in, in middle suburban America.
"Rural Ireland in 1970 seemed almost primitive by comparison.
There were no tractors, no telephones, or toilets. It felt I was
going into a different century rather than a different country,
and, for me, that was very, very useful.
"My cousin Nora led me into the little bedchamber that had been
prepared for my arrival in this house, newly wallpapered by a
neighbour, and she said: 'You see, Thomas? Just like America. The
same, but different.' And I thought, how very wise. I've loved that
Irishness ever since, because everything is the same, but
different."
We are talking on the telephone, but I can hear the smile
in his voice, as he seems to experience anew the truth of it. "It
is! It is the same, but different, and, coming back here, I keep
marvelling at how this is different for me, but it still feels like
coming home."
LYNCH's latest poetry collection follows the outer and inner
journey of a man called Argyle, also in search of home. He is a
"sin-eater", a common practice at 18th- and 19th-century funerals
in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. By eating bread and beer over the
corpse of a body, saying sorry, and receiving a payment, sin-eaters
took on the sins of the dead person, enabling their souls to find
rest. Lynch contemplates how much of his story is in Argyle's.
"He has no family; I have a huge family. He's skinny; I'm fat.
His life is marked by privations; I've had relative comfort. But
the notion that people are ambivalent about him is one that I do
identify with. They're glad to see him coming, better still to see
him going; an outlier, and isolated by his own work. I get that
part of it.
"The other thing is Argyle's general sense that his religiosity
proceeds from mighty nature, as he would call it, the physicality
of life. For me, that holds more truth than the Magisterium."
Lynch and Argyle both have to work in tandem with the clergy.
Lynch, who was raised an Irish Roman Catholic, has a natural
disinclination towards dogma and legalism, considering the
behaviour of what he calls the "management class" of the Church of
his upbringing a shocking disappointment. In terms of the
individual clergy he works with day to day, however, he is more
positive.
"They're my heroes, I think it's heroic to show up with nothing
but your faith in that deep end of the pool, where there's corpses
around. It's easy enough to speak of faith when there's a baby to
be baptised, or a young couple are requiring nuptials. But when you
show up when there's a dead guy on the floor, and say something
like, 'Behold, I show you a mystery,' you're liable to get hit, or
asked to leave quickly.
"I think it takes particular courage and bravery and faith to do
that, and the men and women whom I've seen do that over the years -
and there have been lots of them - are heroes to me."
AS A poet, Lynch relishes paradox and mystery. Too much
certainty about matters of faith seems to him almost sacrilegious.
As a funeral director, he knows more than most about the mortal
flesh-and-bloodness of humanity, and also that, when confronted
with the limits of our physical existence, we inevitably ponder the
nature of our souls. Curiosity and doubt are ingredients, not
enemies, of faith.
"In my imagination, all the religious impulse of the species
began with questions, and questions notably around the corpse. I
think of the first Neanderthal widow wakening to the dead lump of a
guy next to her, who's been a serviceable mate for 20 or 30 years.
Suddenly, she wakes up and finds him still in a way she's never
found before; she knows after a while she's got to get rid of the
corpse, because he begins to rot.
"So, she begins looking for some oblivion - a ditch or a cliff
or a pond or a fire - some way to get rid of him. And I think it is
looking into that oblivion, whatever it was - the grave, the tomb,
the fire, the sea, the scavenger birds, the breeze. Looking into
that is when she asked herself the signature human questions, and
this is, to me, incipient religiosity. Faith begins with
questions."
Lynch's conversation roams across literature, faith, and rites
of passage; the transition from writing poetry to short stories;
the paucity of cremation ritual in the US; and grave-digging in
West Clare, where rummaging among the bones of the newly dead's
ancestors gives rise to "some Shakespearean moments".
His poet's eye and ear, combined with the practical compassion
of a sleeves-rolled-up disposer of the dead, make him someone who
merits careful listening. Able to articulate the things that render
most of us inarticulate, and willing to gaze steadily on life's
brief and passing nature, Lynch, it seems to me, could not be the
master-craftsman of either of his trades without the other. And,
somehow, the strong ties with Ireland, home of his forebears,
ground him in both.
When asked recently to speak at an international conference of
"mortuary sorts", held this year in Ireland, Lynch was flattered to
see, on his name tag, "Thomas Lynch, Poet and Author, Ireland". "In
Ireland, poets and authors are regarded as doing something every
bit as useful and as gainful as being a funeral director. It's the
first time I've had to say, 'By the way, I also direct
funerals.'"
The Sin-eater: A breviary, is published by Salmon Poetry at
£10 (CT Bookshop £9); 978-1-908836-04-5.
Apparition and Late Fictions is published by Jonathan Cape at
£12.99 (CT Bookshop £11.70);
978-0-224062-19-0.
Walking Papers is published by Cape Poetry at £10 (CT Bookshop £9); 978-0-224-09006-3.
Free p&p on UK online CT bookshop purchases throughout
August.
The Greenbelt Festival takes place on 24-27 August at
Cheltenham Race Course. www.greenbelt.org.uk
Argyle the sin-eater came the day after -
a narrow, hungry man whose laughter
and the wicked upturn of his one eyebrow
put the local folks in mind of trouble.
But still they sent for him and sat him down
amid their whispering contempts to make
his table near the dead man's middle,
and brought him soda bread and bowls of beer
and candles, which he lit against the reek
that rose off that impenitent cadaver
though bound in skins and soaked in rosewater.
Argyle eased the warm loaf right and left
and downed swift gulps of beer and venial sin
then lit into the bread now leavened with
the corpse's cardinal mischiefs, then he said
"Six pence, I'm sorry." And the widow paid him.
Argyle took his leave then, down the land
between hay-ricks and Friesians with their calves
considering the innocence in all
God's manifold creation but for Man,
and how he'd perish but for sin and mourning.
Two parishes between here and the ocean:
a bellyful tonight is what he thought,
please God, and breakfast in the morning.
The body of the boy who took his flight
off the cliff at Kilcloher into the sea
was hauled up by curragh-men, out at first light
fishing mackerel in the estuary.
"No requiem or rosary" said the priest,
"nor consecrated ground for burial,"
as if the boy had flown outside the pale
of mercy or redemption or God's love.
"Forgive them, for they know not what they do,"
quoth Argyle to the corpse's people,
who heard in what he said a sort of riddle,
as if he meant their coreligionists
and not their sodden, sadly broken boy.
Either way, they took some comfort in it
and readied better than accustomed fare
of food and spirits; by their own reckoning:
the greater sin, the greater so the toll.
But Argyle refused their shilling coin
and helped them build a box and dig a grave.
"Your boy's no profligate or prodigal,"
he said, "only a wounded pilgrim like us all.
What say his leaping was a leap of faith,
into his father's beckoning embrace?"
They killed no fatted calf. They filled the hole.