Colum McCann had already written his latest story, about a man punched in the head on the streets of New York, when the same thing happened to him. The coincidence didn’t occur to the author as he lay on the sidewalk last summer, his eye “slightly knocked out” and several teeth broken. It didn’t occur to him when he was brought to hospital and treated for a fractured cheekbone. It even eluded the author when his assailant was arrested, and the unexpected attack — outside a New Haven hotel while McCann was on the phone to his teenage son — was reported in the press.
The coincidence did not occur to McCann until a long time afterwards, perhaps after his eye socket developed shingles and his blood pressure shot up. He saw his trauma as life imitating art when he started to feel down, something the happy-go-lucky author never expected.
McCann was attacked on the night of June 27, 2014. Earlier that evening he had shouted at a man who was beating a woman on the street. When the man left, the author asked the woman whether she was all right. In the subsequent investigation, it emerged she was married to the attacker. He returned to the vicinity later, and punched McCann in the back of the head.
“It had a much more lasting effect than I thought it could have,” says the Dublin-born author, who lives in Manhattan. “This sort of thing, I think, happens on O’Connell Street virtually every Saturday night, and it happens in New York and in New Haven. Sometimes it catches you. I had injuries before, football injuries. This one just caught me unawares and kept me in for a while.”
McCann wasn’t sure he would talk about the assault. Then he received about 200 letters, mainly from female victims of assault, and realised there was a responsibility to speak out. McCann eventually took ownership of the attack. Thirteen Ways of Looking, which comprises a novella and three short stories, ends with an author’s note connecting the collection to his attack. It advises us to visit his website — colummccann.com — and read his victim-impact statement.
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The eponymous novella is about a retired judge who is attacked after leaving a Manhattan restaurant. The short stories feature a deaf son who goes missing; a nun confronting her abuser; and an author writing about a US marine in Afghanistan.
“I was horrified by metafiction,” says McCann. “I promised a few years ago that I would never put myself in a story — it’s so pretentious and ridiculous. And then I end up writing a story about a writer who can’t write a story. That story is pretty honest.”
For months after the attack, McCann couldn’t write. It was his victim-impact statement that brought him back to the page. “I think I discovered something when I said I forgave him but I did not excuse him,” he says. “The ability to tell your story allows you not to become a glass-half-empty person. Carrying this shit inside, it can become a stone and begin to weigh you down. Now I own the incident, it doesn’t own me any more. It’s my way of punching back. There’s a little bit of retribution.
“I don’t want it to define me. That’s the most important thing. I know it won’t. I’ve written several other books on lots of different issues. And I’m going to go away and do something completely different again.”
Thirteen Ways of Looking is McCann’s ninth book. Let the Great World Spin (2009) won the National Book Award and the Impac prize; JJ Abrams is still attached to direct the film adaptation. The post-9/11 novel, which features Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the twin towers, sent McCann to the next level in Ireland and America. Transatlantic, his 2013 follow-up, was a bestseller.
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His work tends to feature real-life characters — Petit, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the dancer Rudolf Nureyev — but Thirteen Ways of Looking doesn’t. McCann says it is his most personal collection. “The [judge] character Mendelssohn is on 86th street. I live on 86th Street and Madison, for my sins. Then there’s a story about me,” he says, referring to the metafiction. Thirteen Ways of Looking was initially about surveillance. The title is taken from Wallace Stevens’s ominous blackbird poem about unseen spectators and the fluidity of meaning. “More cameras in the city than birds in the sky,” writes McCann.
This is also an excellent study on ageing. The elderly protagonist must contend with an ailing memory and the indignity of wearing nappies. Internally, he remains sharp and admiring of the female form. “My father passed away in February,” the author says of Seán McCann, a respected journalist. “I was really close to him, and he lived a great life. In the last couple of years, I watched in a significant way. I was able to give him Thirteen Ways of Looking before he passed away. He read everything of mine. He laughed about some of the things, because he was definitely in some of that.
“The whole process of ageing was really interesting to me. My dad died two days before my 50th birthday. All this collided at once. I didn’t have any hang-ups about ageing. I’ve lived pretty well and I don’t have any real regrets about what I’ve done or the time passing.”
Many life paths are determined through a series of small decisions but McCann once stood before a crossroads and consciously chose the road less travelled. “I was working on the newspapers here. I had my own page on a Thursday afternoon when I was 19. I left when I was 21,” he says. “It was ‘the year of youth’, so I was the youth correspondent for the Evening Press. I used to have such a laugh. Myself and my friends would go out ligging. I’d get invited to all these concerts and launches of new products. I could have stayed. I could have had a very good time, but I wanted to get away and I wanted to try to write a novel.
“I went to Cape Cod, bought a typewriter, got one of those giant rolls of paper. I was thinking Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road [like] that. I was going to be like Kerouac, so I sat down to write.”
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McCann worked as a taxi driver and in a golf club while writing dismal prose. Still in his Beat Generation phase, he organised a bus journey across America to acquire the life experience of which a happy, middle-class upbringing had deprived him.
“I used to joke with Frank McCourt that he got all the misery in Ireland and left none for the rest of us,” he says. When his co-conspirators pulled out of the road trip for college or jobs, McCann headed off on a six-month cycle with a girlfriend, after which he continued alone. He ended up working at a Texas ranch for juvenile delinquents, where he attempted two more unsuccessful novels. “I thought they were the greatest thing ever,” he says. “I look at them now and think, ‘Jesus.’ I actually wallpapered a bathroom with the rejection slips.”
He turned to short stories, and Fishing the Sloe-Black River, his debut collection, was released in 1994. McCann has returned to the shorter form to give himself a break.
“[In the mid-2000s] I knew I wanted to write about 9/11, so I wrote Let the Great World Spin. And I wrote Transatlantic. I pushed pretty hard with that — I’m proud of that as a piece of structure. I knew I had to take the temperature down because if I went with another novel I would go to cracking point. In a certain way, the short stories give me breathing room. Now I’m going to go really hard again, at another novel.”
His next book will feature Israel, and McCann will spend time on the West Bank. As usual, the plot will involve Ireland and other locations. Like the all-seeing blackbird of Stevens’s poem, McCann seems to hover above the world, linking stories he sees below. In Thirteen Ways of Looking, the characters are located in one place but thinking of another.
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“I’m fragmented, I suppose, in that sense of being a person of two countries, two passports,” says the author. “I like that sense of fracture, and readers are good at understanding it. I think it’s how we live.”
Thirteen ways of looking, and a thousand ways to live.
Thirteen Ways of Looking (Bloomsbury, £16.99) by Colum McCann is out now