Thomas Cahill

Scholar and former publishing executive Thomas Cahill launched his planned seven book series, The Hinges of History, in 1995 with How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. Despite the daunting title, this fascinating, wonderfully written account of how Irish monks almost single-handedly preserved Western culture went on to spend a year and a half on the New York Times Bestseller List. His next book, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, spent six months on the list. Cahill, the son of Irish immigrants, still lives in his native New York. O'Connell Street reached him by phone recently during his tour to promote the third book in the series, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, which was published in November.

See the note at the end for information on his upcoming Philadelphia appearance.

When you were writing How The Irish Saved Civilization, did you have any idea how popular it was going to be? History books typically don't do as well commercially as that book did.
No, I suppose not, but on the other hand history books are so often written in the dry and exclusive style that I'm not surprised that not that many people read them. I've always thought that history was a category that publishers failed to recognize; that every once in a while someone writes history for a large audience and people really gobble it up. I think the last person to do that on a similar scale was probably Barbara Tuchman, who had a very large audience. So I have to say that I always felt that How The Irish Saved Civilization had a good chance of gaining a wide audience. But, I also know, having been in publishing, that many books fail for all sorts of mysterious reasons, and that many bad books succeed for all sorts of mysterious reasons. So, you know, there certainly is a kind of fate about books that is very hard to penetrate.

You referred a moment ago to your writing style. You manage to write in a style that is much more accessible and engaging than what's found in most history books. Does that require a conscious effort or does that come naturally for you?
Probably no writing comes naturally, wouldn't you agree with that? [Laughs.] All writing is artifice. At this point I've been writing this way for so long, long before I began to write these books, that it is kind of part of me. I don't think about it or strategize what I'm going to say. I just write. It feels natural to me, though I suppose it's taken a long time to come to this [point]. But I have to say that one of my early models was a film critic, Pauline Kael, who used to write for the New Yorker. She and I are good friends and we became good friends on long car rides that we used to take from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to New York City -- I happened to live there for a while and she lived there, she still does. And she would go down once a week to Manhattan to see all of her movies and I was driving down to teach a course and we would go down and back together, and we would have these long, rollicking car rides [laughs] because she speaks the same way she writes. And I think that she gave me a little more nerve than I would have had before meeting her to write the way I wanted to write, without fear of being disapproved of. I get any amount of disapproval for going from what people consider to be a high and exalted style to getting down in the gutter -- and I'm very happy to do that. I mean, I think it's the way all minds work and people who pretend to be shocked are just not admitting a part of themselves. I think everybody would agree that Shakespeare is one of the greatest of all writers and he wrote for both the masked courtiers and for the groundlings. And I enjoy that alternation, and in fact in some ways I prefer writing for the groundlings [laughs].

What led you to write How The Irish Saved Civilization?
I think just that the story was there. My wife and I spent a year in Ireland, 1970-71, and we together wrote a book called The Literary Guide to Ireland. And we divided Irish literature between us -- I did Yeats, she did Joyce, I did Swift, she did the Abbey Theatre playwrights, that kind of thing. And I did ancient and medieval literature, which we didn't put a lot, we didn't put a lot of it in there because very few people are familiar with it. But I read a lot more background at that time than actually got into our book, and I realized that there was this bridge between the classical world and the medieval one, and that the Irish were really that bridge, and that outside of Ireland, almost no one knew about it. And even within Ireland, it had a kind of reverential pall around it, and I don't think the Irish themselves by and large knew how much exuberance and joy had been in that period. Everybody thought of it as a bunch of monks sitting down scratching out words. But I had thought of this series of books, The Hinges of History, in about that same period, and it took me a long time to decide to start with the Irish. I was going to start with the Jews, who are the beginning of Western civilization, but then I realized how difficult that book would be, which turned out to be the second book of the series. And I wanted to start with a simpler story and persuade people that even though they thought they knew a great deal about history they didn't know as much as they thought they did, and that there are all these hidden cupboards in Western history that no one seems to open.

Was there any difference between the feedback you got on the book in the United States as opposed to in Ireland?
Well unfortunately, and I'll be blunt about this, I allowed the book to be published in London by a publisher who -- I don't whether you would print this or not, I don't really care -- who hasn't done f--- all about it --

I can, by the way, but go ahead.
-- Hodder and Stoughton, and it proved to be a very bad decision. They published it so quietly no one knew it was there. After many years it has caught on to a certain extent in Ireland, and many people have read it, no thanks to Hodder and Stoughton. Anyway, that's what's happened, and it's not a beautiful story. However, I know that in her New Year's address for the year 2000 [Irish] President [Mary] McAleese quoted from the book, and it's been the subject any number of times in dialogues between the Taoiseach [TEE-shuck, the Irish prime minister] and President Clinton, so it has a certain fame at this point. But it was just badly published -- badly [laughs] is far too mild a word.

Your latest book, Desire of the Everlasting Hills -- was that also imagined early on as one of the books in this series?
Yes, it was. I've finally admitted that the next book, book four, will be about the Greeks, and then I haven't told anyone what goes beyond that -- and normally I don't talk about what's going to be because I haven't written it yet, but at the same time I have a very clear picture of what I want to do with the whole series There are always surprises when you sit down and start writing, sure -- sometimes great, overwhelming surprises.

Any in this case, in the latest book?
I think what's always surprising is that along the way you usually meet someone you didn't expect to meet, a historical figure that you didn't know was going to be there in such gorgeousness. In the first book it was Patrick -- I mean, I knew that Patrick was there but I had never read his Confession and I knew very little about him except all the misinformation that everybody knows. And as I began doing the book and spent a lot of time with his writing, he became more and more real to me, and that was a revelation. I had never expected that the book would be so much about him as I turned out to be. In The Gifts of the Jews, I would say the surprising figure for me was King David. Once again I didn't know that I was going to find such clear evidence of a human being in the pages of the Bible. The external story of David is told in the book of Kings -- well, the book of Samuel, really, and a little bit in the book of Kings. But his internal story is told in the book of Psalms, and some of those Psalms are his and they are the first personal poetry in literary history. So you get inside a human being in a way that you don't at any point earlier than David; David is the first person to write personal poetry, personal lyric poetry. He tells you everything about himself, how he feels about everything. And that was a real shock when I finally put it all together. In the new book I think the most surprising figure has been Paul for me. I'm not surprised at Jesus -- though there are moments that surprised me. I was not as aware of Jesus' humor as I am now, having really spent time with the Greek of the New Testament and seeing that there is so much humor there that is so often dampened by biblical translators who are having attacks of reverence. But Paul is a very difficult person, and it's easy to see why so many people dislike him. He's a prickly pear, and he's under tension, and he's always trying to do more than can possibly be gotten done, he an extremely impatient man. He's not the kind guy you'd like to sit down and have a drink with, but he's a really interesting man and he really is a wonderful character. but he's very much a character, and I think many people have simply misunderstood him, or not been willing to see who he really is. And the longest chapter in the book is the chapter on Paul. It took me a lot of time and effort, and I really felt that it was worth it.

Some people are extremely sensitive to portrayals of Christ or interpretations of the Scriptures that fit what they've been taught.
I know [laughs].

Have you encountered any negative reaction thus far?
[Laughing] Yes, I certainly have. The pastor of my church told me that he felt the book lacked 'gravitas.' And I thought, well, you know, Jesus lacked gravitas, and the problem is that everyone has seen too many bad Hollywood movies about him, in which every time he speaks he has a choir behind him, and a glow, an unearthly glow around his head. And obviously he wasn't like that at all, the people who knew him thought he was a regular human being -- an extraordinary one, but a human being. There's no suggestion in anything that seems to be an eyewitness account that these people thought they were meeting anything but a human being. As I point out in a number of places, he sweat, he spit, he lived in very close physical proximity with other human beings, he wasn't in any sense an apparition. What I want to do with each book, for me what the real achievement will be is if the reader closes the books and says 'Now I know what it would have been like to have been a slave in pagan Ireland, or to have heard David play his harp and weep over what he had done, or to have met Jesus and heard him speak and been touched by him.' And that experience would have been a much more down-to-earth experience than either his Hollywood portrayals or the liturgical portrayals one is likely to come upon in church, which are nothing but gravitas, very often, unfortunately. They don't give you the person. But the Gospels do. The Gospels give you a much more informal, earthy human being than the little snippets that we get of these things as they are portrayed in the general culture.

How much difference does it make reading the scriptures in those older languages than in reading what is commonly available in a bookstore today?
It all depends on whether you've got a good translation or not. When I was doing The Gifts of the Jews I used a translation of the first five books of the Bible that I thought was really accurate, it was new a translation by Everett Fox. I thought it was wonderful and I was very happy that I didn't have to do the translation of that. But when I came to the New Testament I did not find a translation that I felt really hit it, so I decided to do it myself, and this thing that I referred to earlier about biblical translators having attacks of reverence, that happens all through the New Testament. Both Jesus and Paul speak much more informally in Greek than you would know very often from the English translation. It's just too bad. But I think the translators very often say to themselves, 'Well, we can't say this in church.' [laughs] So they take sandpaper to it, kind of smooth it off.

You mentioned that the next book will be about the Greeks. Can you say anything more about that?
Well, it will go from Homer to Byzantium. It will really be Greek culture from the beginning, not to the present, but the great sources of Greek culture that have had an impact on the Western world. Normally you do classical Greece and then you do Byzantine culture, and I want to show the connections between the two. That's one of the things it will do.

Have you ever been approached about film adaptations of any of your books?
I'm in conversation with a number of television producers about turning the series of books into a series of television programs. Beyond that, I've had occasional interest in making a film of the center of How The Irish Saved Civilization, the story of Patrick as I tell it. Liam Neeson expressed some interest in playing Patrick, but he's too big I think.

Physically?
Yeah, I think of Patrick as a scrappy little guy -- you know, sort of small and tough. I think Liam would be better playing one of the mad chieftains. He could be Patrick's slave master.

Cahill is scheduled to speak at the Free Library of Philadelphia, 19th and Vine streets, on Thursday, Feb. 3, 2000. Tickets are on sale now -- $12 for the auditorium, $6 for the video simulcast on the lobby. To order, call UpStages at 215-569-9700.