Maeve Binchy (23 page)

Julia is a 29-year-old virgin who at last has a boyfriend, Michael, who wants to sleep with her. A very nervous Julia goes in search of a book to teach her what to do in bed and, having browsed the shelves in a porn shop in Tottenham Court Road, discovers that there is nothing specifically dedicated to 29-year-old virgins. People like her must be an embarrassment to society, she concludes.

Julia can’t possibly tell her would-be lover that she is a virgin at twenty-nine and expect respect and tenderness. She must
have a book which will make up for ten years’ lack of experience in a few short hours. Michael is waiting, after all.

She needs to know whether he will expect her to undress him or whether she should strip off, lie down on the bed and wait for him. She needs detailed information about what to do with her pelvis, whether to go up and down or round and round. She would also like to know whether, because she has been a virgin so long, she might face some medical difficulty or associated consequences in getting it on at all.

Unable to find what she wants, Julia seeks the advice of the manager of the store. She says she’s looking for a manual of instruction for a niece. The manager says they don’t have anything quite like that and suggests that perhaps Julia would do better to have a talk with her niece. Julia answers that she can’t advise her niece because she doesn’t know anything about sex, adding (under her breath) ‘I’m a nun.’

What the press had missed, of course, was that
Light a Penny Candle
was set in the 1950s. Maeve once said that she was thrilled by an editor’s observation that in her books everybody is obsessed with sex but nobody ever actually has any, ‘because I knew that I had got the 1950s right!’ It was Oliver J. Flanagan, an Irish Fine Gael politician, who famously claimed that ‘there was no sex in Ireland before television’ – and the first TV station did not arrive until the early 1960s.

Century was already of the opinion that Maeve was unique and inimitable. Forget bodice-rippers, she was in a genre of her own. Maeve couldn’t believe they were so excited about her work
and kept examining the manuscript, wondering what it was that was so good.

But that only lasted a short while before she got on with the stories that became
The Lilac Bus
(1984), a clever idea – fictional case histories now – about a group of people whose lives are linked by a small schoolhouse in the little village of Shancarrig. They go up to work in Dublin during the week and then return to the country on a Friday. Their romances, secrets, betrayals and triumphs are the meat of each character’s story. In 1990 it would become a ninety-minute television film.

Meanwhile, Anthony Cheetham, with no paperback imprint of his own at Century, planned to cover his investment in their new author by auctioning paperback rights in
Light a Penny Candle
to an outside publisher.

Maeve had asked whether she could attend the auction before it was explained to her that it wasn’t like what went on at Sotheby’s; it would be conducted by Anthony over the telephone after a multiple submission to selected paperback companies. On the day, she was so excited that she went out and looked for something to distract her and chanced on a shop offering ear piercing. She’d been afraid of having her ears pierced for years so thought that would be the ideal thing to stop her thinking about the auction.

Back home and with studs in her ears, the phone rang. It was Anthony, who asked whether she was sitting down. Maeve lied and said she was. Anthony knew she wasn’t and commanded her to sit down. The deal had been done, he told her. Coronet, the paperback arm of Hodder & Stoughton, had bought UK
and Commonwealth paperback rights in
Light a Penny Candle
for £52,000, the highest sum ever paid for a first novel commissioned by a British publisher.

Maeve asked ever so quietly, ‘Excuse me, but do I get that, or do you?’ Cheetham said that he was very much afraid that it was hers.

Light a Penny Candle
was published by Century in 1982. It entered the Top 10 immediately and remained there for
fifty-three
weeks.

Gordon, meanwhile, had kept himself busy. Three of his books were published in the same year:
The Book of Theatre Quotes: Notes, Quotes & Anecdotes
came from Angus & Robertson, and two children’s books from Cambridge University Press –
The Fastest Snail in the World
and
Tiddle and the Time Machine
, both illustrated by Alan Burton.

In celebration of his wife’s bestseller status, he bought two garden chairs and a bottle of champagne and they sat in the garden together and drank it. That was as mad as they got.

No, Maeve told the press, she didn’t think that the money would change her. (She had only just found herself. She wasn’t about to reinvent who she was now.) As ever larger sums of money accrued she was generous to a number of charities, such as Arthritis Ireland, Alice Leahy’s Trust (for the
homeless
), Amnesty International, the Hospice Foundation, Friends of the Elderly and Guide Dogs for the Blind, but first she was almost recklessly generous to her friends. A journalist colleague reported that when Maeve received the money for the paperback rights in
Light a Penny Candle
, she gave much of it to family,
friends and colleagues, in his case enough to pay his mortgage for a month.

Publishers like authors who are also journalists because very often their journalist friends will review their books. But press reviews were never the mainstay of the marketing of Maeve. She was so successful so fast that perhaps a little envy crept in. Certainly she suffered a plethora of articles about how rich she had become and where she stood in the wealth stakes, rather than anything much being written about her work. ‘Last year, she earned £1.4 million, more than Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell,’ claimed one paper. She couldn’t understand why it should be of interest to anyone that Maeve Binchy was one of the richest women in Britain.

In a review in the
Irish Times
in September 1994 Maeve tore into a biography of Catherine Cookson for its ‘endless
discussion
of advances received and appearances in bestseller lists’.
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This sort of thing was to her ‘meaningless’, even demeaning.

She was herself well read, in the French language as well as in English, and thought nothing of accepting an invitation to be interviewed in French on Bernard Pivot’s highly cerebral arts programme,
Apostrophes
. Suddenly they had asked her, as only the French would, ‘Madame, what is your philosophy of life?’ She sensed impending confusion but answered spontaneously in French, ‘I think that you’ve got to play the hand that you’re dealt and stop wishing for another hand.’ It was the first occasion she had coined a phrase which she would use time and again to describe how she had taken control of her life after her moment of truth at UCD. She looked up nervously to see how they took
it and thankfully they were all nodding sagely in agreement. Afterwards, quite rightly, she applauded herself and said ‘That’s the kind of motif I bring to the books – that people take charge of their own lives.’

But precious, flapping literary London couldn’t even be bothered to read her, and so she eschewed them, just as she did discussions about how much money she was worth.

Of course, there are snobs everywhere and Maeve never lost her sense of humour over it. One of her favourite moments, as an avid fan of the UK TV soap opera
Coronation Street
for many years, was an episode when Ken Barlow’s mother-in-law, Blanche, presiding over a row between Ken and his partner Deirdre, suddenly says, ‘Well, you can talk about literary life, I’m going to knock them down with my Maeve Binchy.’ Blanche then bequeaths all her Maeve Binchy books to Ken, whose face contorts in horror when he hears the news.

Maeve watched flabbergasted. She thought she was having one of those crazy moments you hear about when people on the verge of going mad think the television is talking to them. And then she laughed ’til the tears ran down her face.

If being a real person in someone else’s fiction appealed to Maeve’s sense of the absurd, in 2005 she went one better by stepping into her own fictional world, making an
appearance
in a film of her novel
Tara Road
. Alert viewers will spot Maeve making a cameo appearance seated at the end of the bar after the scene when Ria takes a job at the cashier’s counter at Colm’s restaurant.

One significant reason behind Maeve’s success was her
talent for promoting her books in front of an audience – she was a great speaker. So hard did she publicise her books for her publisher that Chris Green likened her to a swan, a bird that conceals a great deal of activity beneath the surface. And Maeve did put in a lot of work: three-week publicity tours in the UK and for months at a time around the world, the signing sessions, meeting the booksellers, meeting her public,
creating
her own family of readers in country after country, year after year.

The upside of these tours for Maeve was the opportunity actually to meet this new family. After months staring at a
typewriter
and wondering whether the book she was writing was of any interest, she thought it was great to meet her readers.

What sort of readers were they? She claimed to have had a letter from one, saying, ‘In case you’re looking for a readership profile, I bought your book for myself, for my weasel-like old rip of a mother-in-law and my serpent’s tooth hell-cat of a daughter.’
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Members of her new family would stand in line, sometimes for hours, to tell her how much they liked her stories. Typically, in defiance of the parable of the vineyard,
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she gave those who’d been standing in line longest the most attention, but that was because she did really care.

Barbara Taylor Bradford, whose first novel,
A Woman of Substance
, was published in 1980 and became a massive international hit around the same time as
Light a Penny Candle
, was also out on the book promotion circuit with Maeve. She relates how they appeared at one venue together.

Touring could take up as many as three months in a year and she could be quite a challenge to interviewers. John Corr of the
Philadelphia Inquirer
once had an appointment to interview Maeve at ten in the morning. When he arrived at her hotel suite she indicated the bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey on a nearby table with a nod of her head and said, ‘I suppose it’s a bit early to offer you a taste of the Irish.’

Chris Green had sold hardcover rights in
Light a Penny Candle
to Viking for $200,000 in time for US publication in 1982, the same year as the novel appeared in the UK. But the American public was actually quite late to take Maeve to its heart.

Her second novel,
Echoes
, came out there in 1985, but neither of these was a
New York Times
bestseller until they appeared in paperback under the Dell imprint. The paperback publisher then bought hardcover and paperback rights in the books that followed, right up until
Tara Road
(1998). But while the
paperback
editions continued to be bestsellers, it wasn’t until
Circle of Friends
, first published eight years after
Light a Penny Candle
, that Dell’s associated hardcover imprint Delacorte gave Maeve her first American hardback bestseller.
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It is part of publishing mythology that this was engineered by the best possible piece of publicity Maeve could have hoped for. Barbara Bush, First Lady of the United States from 1989 to 1993, let it be known that she was an avid fan of all Maeve’s books and invited her to lunch at the White House.

On the day, Maeve’s concern was not so much what to wear but whether she would know when to leave. When everyone was asked what they would like to drink, she politely requested a white wine rather than her usual gin and suffered increasing agony as one by one the other guests ordered non-alcoholic drinks, while a whole bottle of wine was fetched for her.

Carole Baron, Maeve’s longstanding editor in America, denies that Barbara Bush’s approbation of her author was the reason why the book did so well, however, dismissing it as

She recalls the occasion when the Mayor of Chicago gave Maeve a float of her own at the annual St Patrick’s Day parade. And how she stood up and spoke to the multitude on the first night of the celebrations and slayed them all with her wit – the perfect way to conquer whole countries in the international publishing game.

On this occasion, Maeve took family and friends to Chicago with her, Mary Maher among them. Maher remembers how Maeve took an airline stewardess aside during the flight from New York to Chicago. The woman was about to be married, but wasn’t at all sure that it was either the right time or the right man. Maeve listened attentively and thoroughly dissected both the woman and her problem. As ever, this girl-to-girl situation saw her at her best. She wanted every detail of the situation, and advised the stewardess in uncompromising terms
according
to her philosophy of life. With champagne in hand, the conversation took the entire flight. Having arrived in Chicago unsuccessful, Maeve was so upset that the stewardess was still going to go ahead with her marriage to a man she didn’t love that that night she fell out of her hotel bed and broke her nose and toe.