Maurice Leitch

Life and works – Ireland

Maurice Henry Leitch was born in the village of Muckamore, County Antrim, to Jean, née Coid, and Andrew Leitch of Templepatrick, Antrim on 5 July 1933. He was educated at Methodist College Belfast, and Stranmillis Training College, Belfast. (Stranmillis, now Stranmillis University College, holds a distinctive place in Irish education, established after partition to offer Northern Ireland a non-denominational training college. Resistance from the Roman Catholic schools – and Catholic bishops – to accepting Stranmills-trained teachers subsequently defined the college as Protestant.) For a novelist whose characterful Protestant voice was to jostle with traditional Irish Catholic writing throughout his career, his Protestant background continues to provide a nearly unique perspective on a troubled Irish history, indeed, according to The Cambridge Companion to the Irish Novel, anticipating the Troubles by revealing the 'terminal decay, sullen hatred and sour futility in his region', notably in his first novel, The Liberty Lad.

It was while teaching in the Protestant primary schools of Antrim that Leitch began his professional writing, with pieces about the Antrim countryside published in the Belfast Telegraph, a countryside that would later prove far from bucolic in his novels. He moved on to short stories for Northern Ireland Children's Hour, before following the career path that had been established by the poet Louis MacNeice (1907–1963), and poets and writers of MacNeice's generation including W. R. Rodgers and Sam Hanna Bell who had paved the way for Ulster writers to join the BBC. In the Corporation their sensibility was encouraged and flourished and Leitch, by contributing features, and joining the BBC Features department in 1960 as a producer/writer was one of the last significant authors to emerge from the fertile Ulster tradition.

Adding Radio Drama to his repertoire in 1960 with The Old House, he wrote and produced documentaries during his time at the BBC in Belfast. The Liberty Lad was published in 1965, adding to his growing reputation with its portrait of a schoolmaster, a threatened mill closure and a corrupt unionist politician. It also caused a stir that went beyond the currently political, not least because of its representation of sexuality, including male homosexuality. In the book Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the Irish Writer, Leitch describes the reception he received at a personal level: ‘I did get a lot of backlash, particularly my first book ... from people who knew me socially and from the village I came from. It still affects certain people. It seemed terribly shocking that I would actually mention the fact that homosexuality existed, particularly in an Irish context, whether North or South, because there's not much difference really between the attitudes North or South. It just seemed a subject worthy of writing about because it was another extension of repression. Ireland is sexually repressed; let's face it.’ According to Jeff Dudgeon, in his articleMapping 100 Years of Gay Life in Belfast, Leitch also documented gay history with that book: ‘The Royal Avenue (RA) Bar in Rosemary Street (the hotel's public bar, opposite the Red Barn pub) as portrayed in Maurice Leitch's fine 1965 novel The Liberty Lad (probably the earliest description of a gay bar in Irish literature) was the first in the city.’

His second novel, Poor Lazarus, was published in 1969, while Leitch was still living in Northern Ireland, and it, too, was banned in the South. This time the protagonist is Albert Yarr, an isolated – 'tormented' as described by Tom Paulin – Protestant in a predominantly Catholic area who is offered a temporary resurrection when he is recruited by a documentary film maker. This book, too, caused unease in the North, with references to the 'Romper Room' where the UDA tortured and murdered victims. The Belfast poet and cultural arbiter John Hewitt, a 'man of the left', was among those who objected. In her critical study of Hewitt, Poet John Hewitt, 1907–1987 and Criticism of Northern Irish Protestant Writing, Sarah Ferris points to Hewitt's cultural protectionism by quoting John Kilfeather: 'For years [Hewitt] black-mouthed ... Maurice Leitch and Robert Harbinson. He obscurely hinted that they let the Protestant side down – Leitch by his, in John's terms, extraordinary outburst against Orangeism in Poor Lazarus...' In England, Poor Lazarus was received with acclaim and awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize for 1969.

Life and works – London

Radio Drama in London was a cultural powerhouse when Leitch joined in 1970, following the award of the Guardian Fiction Prize. Then, with Martin Esslin as Head of Radio Drama, it incorporated the Features Department (from 1967) that had produced Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood and the verse dramas of Louis MacNeice. It covered the spectrum from soap opera to Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, interspersed with literary readings and features across three of the BBC's four radio networks.

The legendary figures he followed into Broadcasting House and the BBC Club were to receive a kind of tribute in Tell Me About It (2007), Leitch's novel about a young Irish features producer in the 1960s, trawling the streets of London with a tape recorder and a thirst.

While the novels are at the centre of Leitch's achievement, his work in broadcasting was significant, and contributed to his MBE. Among the dramas he produced were plays by James Follett and a dramatisation of Seán O'Casey's great autobiography, I Knock at the Door. A breadth of interest saw writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and B. Traven, Edna O'Brien, Carson McCullers, V. S. Naipaul, Katherine Mansfield and F. Scott Fitzgerald figure in the Book at Bedtime under his editorship, and he introduce new writers such as Timothy Mo – although after leaving the BBC he was to say: 'Most writers do all their serious reading before the age of thirty-five. After that I just read for purposes of research. Writing is hard enough as it is anyway, and enough to be going on with.' Despite this he went on to produce over 30 readings of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, abridged for Corgi Audio with Tony Robinson as the reader.

Publications 1975–1994

His third novel, Stamping Ground (1975) makes a bleak, visceral return to Ulster. 'This is the first novel Leitch published after his move to England from Northern Ireland, and the dour erotics of his first novels give way to something altogether darker', wrote Caroline Magennis in her de-construction of the novel in the 2014 essay He devours her with his gaze. Charting the shifting perspectives of the novel, which involve sexual assaults and a cruelly distant, almost pleasurable observation of one assault, she says of Stamping Ground: 'Embedded in this ambiguous title, is the problem of how to make misanthropic novels about frustration and sexual aggression in the Ulster countryside saleable'. That was a problem she saw in the publisher's soft-focus cover art, rather than the novel. Magennis found little that was soft in the storytelling, a narrative 'wherein hierarchies of power, for better or usually worse, are played out in the sexual arena'. The book also figures in George O'Brien's The Irish Novel 1960–2010, a year-by-year study of Irish novels, where Stamping Ground features between 1974's Gone in the Head by Ian Cochrane and 1976's The Stepdaughter by Caroline Blackwood.

There was no softening of subject-matter in his next novel, Silver's City, which waded deep into the muddle of Loyalist terrorism, confronting Protestant paramilitary forces and far from idealistic paymasters and focussing on the conflicts within the conscience of 'Silver Steele', a freed 'hero' of the struggle confronting a new brutality outside his prison. It won the Whitbread Prize (1981). His novella, Chinese Whispers, made into a BBC film by Stuart Burge with a script by Leitch, did not appear until 1987, the same year as his collection of short stories, The Hands of Cheryl Boyd and other stories. Burning Bridges followed in 1989.

Burning Bridges, familiar to Country music fans as the title of a song about leaving the past behind – 'Burning bridges behind me/ It's too late to turn back now ... I moved to a far away city/ Trying hard to forget about you' – is the story of two uprooted exiles from Ulster, Sonny and Hazel, who meet at the London funeral of a friend and set out on a summer odyssey to the West Country of England, trying to realise Sonny's dream of emulating the singer Hank Williams. It is a journey that will resonate across decades.

A review of his 1994 novel, Gilchrist, by the Roman Catholic Northern Ireland novelist Robert McLiam Wilson in the monthly Norther Ireland cultural and political magazine Fortnight, is cited by Caroline Magennis and also by Sarah Ferris and in the Ricorso website, A Knowledge of Irish Literature 1992–2012. Magennis comments: ‘In this review, provocatively entitled, ‘Rhythm Method’, Wilson claimed that Protestant novelists lacked the ‘cultural credit card’ that he possessed, being ‘born Catholic and working-class... The Protestant vision, the Protestant version, isn’t popular. It’s got no rhythm. It’s white South African. It’s too complicated. The Catholic version is familiar, more Irish somehow’.

Wilson exempts Leitch from the generalisation, and finds a compelling, harsh metre in Gilchrist, a novel about a ‘smudged’ Ulster preacher on the run to Spain with the church funds. ‘Leitch writes brilliantly about the kind of pessimistic Protestant lust that threatens to burst Gilchrist at the seams [...] Leitch has given us a definitive Protestant portrait. A Prod with rhythm, a perverse and loathsome rhythm, but big passion, big grandeur all the same.’

Publications 1995–present

Leitch’s short story, ‘Green Roads’, originally published in The Hands of Cheryl Boyd and other stories, was collected in 1995’s The Hurt World: Short Stories of the Troubles, edited by Michael Parker, and his next novel, The Smoke King, was published in 1998. Robert McLiam Wilson’s words, on the cover of the Secker & Warburg edition, continue his argument from his review of Gilchrist: ‘With The Smoke King, Maurice Leitch does what he’s been doing for three decades, he raises his glorious, inconvenient voice ... a unique, troubling fiction, unpredictable and moving, shows Leitch’s customary unremitting integrity and profound knowledge of what the novel is for.’

The story he tells in The Smoke King is set in the prejudice-filled Northern Ireland countryside during the Second World War, with the American forces stationed in Ulster preparing for the conflict in Europe. A conflict nearer to home is what Tom Adair describes in his review in The Independent: ‘For the Yanks are bedding down in Ulster - but not alone. ... In the small market town near the edge of the lough, an American soldier, Willie Washington, is one of the gum-chewing black boys dispensing largesse in return for favours. Pearl is Willie's chosen dame; she's already a pariah, with her illegitimate children... But death stalks Willie like some memory of the Klan. In drunken confusion, he is caught up one night in a murder, and with Pearl's help, hides away on an uninhabited island in the lough. At this point Leitch's writerly shrewdness is at its sharpest. He cuts away from - not towards - the chase. The drama that fascinates him, and which comes to devour the reader, is the struggle within the novel's benighted characters. In the quietest, most desperate way, it is Lawlor, the local policeman, in whom that turmoil is written deepest.’

' With warm echoes of Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum', is the way Elizabeth Montgomery described Leitch’s next novel, The Eggman’s Apprentice, in her 2001 Guardian review, and Sue Leonard, in Books Ireland, welcomed it as 'a superb, beautifully structured novel, with its vivid characterisation'. The book was perhaps most succinctly placed in its cultural and stylistic context by the Belfast critic Ian Hill when he cited the novel while reviewing the acclaimed stage play Pumpgirl by Abbie Spallen in 2008: ' ... in truth, the characters in this four-letter word splattered tale have more similarities with Sam Shepard's tarnished trailer-trash losers and Maurice Leitch's masterly Ulster-set novel The Eggman's Apprentice which set out the mores of a rural northern Ireland where the lives of its poverty stricken dreamers - confined by soulless jobs and poor wages - are doomed by their addiction to a second hand proxy America of sugary beers, souped-up rusting cars, and Country 'n' Western music, where what sex they have is at the beck and call of any portly and sweaty local villain with a facility for fine quotations.'

His 2007 novel, Tell Me About It, was something of a ground-breaker, a novel published initially as an audiobook read by the author to great effect – Melissa McClements wrote in the Financial Times, 'Leitch narrates, and is the right man for the job. A natural raconteur, it sounds as if he’s down the pub himself, regaling friends with his spiky wit and tall tales.' Or, again, as reviewed in Publishing News: '’It's a darkly surreal comic novel, and it works especially well as an audio book.'

A rumbustious, picaresque tale, Tell Me About It takes its inspiration from the fabled BBC Broadcasting House of the 1960s, in the years just before Leitch moved to London when the corridors and pubs were roamed by legendary producers, writers and actors such as Reggie Smith, Julian Maclaren-Ross and George Baker. Two outsiders, the young Northern Irish producer Blair Burnside and the Dublin journalist Crilly set out on a search for stories with Burnside attempting to record everything, while he can hang on to his tape-recorder. An extract from the novel was published in the Dublin literary magazine The Stinging Fly in the Summer 2015, devoted to Irish writers in London.

Published works

Further television

Further radio