Looking for Des

I am kind and I care about people—at least I like to think so. But I've come to realise that my altruism often has more to do with what frightens me than with helping others.

The story starts in 1981 when I was 27. I was in Bafta's sumptuous premises on Piccadilly. A film I had made for the Arts Council about the Irish in Britain, Over Here, was being shown. As I drank at the bar, a man who might have stepped from the pages of an Isaac Bashevis Singer story introduced himself to me.

He was big-boned and well groomed and he spoke with the spectacular clarity of those who have overcome a lisp. He had a piercing gaze when silent but looked away whenever he spoke. Somehow this stranger knew of my film. Later, when I knew him better, I saw this wasn't surprising because he was friendly with a lot of people and had a way of picking things up. But at that moment it seemed incredible that this intense, lyrical, otherworldly man who had the manner of a shtetl mystic could have picked up this—or indeed any—kind of information.



He was from Ballinasloe, Galway, where he was born in 1950. He founded the Irish Writers' Co-operative with Neil Jordan in the early 1970s, and was now living in London. He was the author of the novel The Ikon Maker and the collection of short stories The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea, both of which I had read. His prose was studded with extraordinary images but emphatically these were narratives with strong stories, not poems masquerading as fiction. His name was Des Hogan.

The next part of this is a blur. I had a 1962 Austin Cambridge estate car, and with this I would go and visit Des in a succession of rooms that he rented. His lodgings were always on London's outskirts, near traveller sites and totters' yards. These were areas that had only been recently incorporated into the city, and in all of them the rural was still palpable .

The last of these outposts, the one where Des lived the longest, was in Catford. I made my first trip there for a Sunday lunch. I got lost—Des's road wasn't listed in the A-Z—and I had to call Des's landlady from a phone box for further instructions.

His home, when finally I got there, turned out to be a suburban villa. The landlady occupied the top two floors and Des had the basement. I approached through a garden teeming with flowers. The entrance was a set of french doors (never locked, as I later discovered). Inside were two minuscule rooms: one where Des slept and wrote on a manual typewriter and where now his cat, Eamon, was lying asleep (it was Eamon who had led him to this place, he said); the other a kitchen-cum-sitting room that was occupied by a vast table and an eclectic mix of chairs.

I took a seat; it was now impossible to move because the room was so tiny and the furniture so large. The other guests included Kazuo Ishiguro and his partner, Lorna. Des had decorated the walls with postcards and coloured fabrics from Berwick Street market. His interiors left me in no doubt that he was an artist in everything he did.

There was an oven somewhere and once several bottles of wine had been drunk, Des produced a vegetable stew, scones, and aubergines baked with cheese. The meal, improvised I suspected, rather than created from a recipe, was healthy and delicious.

The conversation was only partly serious: I remember a long debate about the value of working as an artist as opposed to a social worker (like Ishiguro's partner) and Des also recited some Mandelstam and Akhmatova. There was a lot of gossip too, but it was genial. Des loved to know everything about everyone but his curiosity was tempered by tenderness. He had an aura of probity. I felt he was a man I could trust and was sure that whatever I relayed would never be used by him to hurt or undermine others.

We remained friends for the rest of the decade. He would come to my flat in Maida Vale. Or I would go out to Catford. Or we would meet in Patisserie Valerie in Soho. He always claimed not to know anybody but whenever I was with him in central London he seemed to know almost everybody.

Then in 1989 I went with my wife and two children to live in Enniskillen. We rented a flat in a house on lower Lough Erne, where, it transpired, Des had lived at some point during his peripatetic career. On 11th July 1990, the night before the 12th when the Orange Order march in celebration of the victory of William of Orange at the battle of the Boyne, we did a reading together in the Robin's Nest, a pub in Lisburn, near Belfast. We were in a function room at the top of the building, and throughout the evening inebriated Orangemen kept peering round the door to see what was happening. Northern Irish loyalists on 11th night can be volatile, especially when softly-spoken southerners appear on their radar. I was quaking. Des, however, seemed completely fearless.

After that I saw him a few more times in London. On one occasion I was staying in a flat in Portobello; he had a hunch and rang the bell. "I just guessed you might be here," he explained. At that meeting he was diffident and withdrawn. He was having troubles and didn't like London any more, he said. He had a satchel filled with manuscripts and he wouldn't sit down.

Then, at some point soon after this, we lost touch. I sent a Christmas card to Catford. It came back stamped "Not known at this address." I assumed Des had got on his bike (he was a dedicated cyclist) and headed somewhere. He would return. But he didn't. Occasionally, when in London over the following years, I would ask mutual friends but no one could tell me exactly where he was. All I got were vague rumours. He was in Berlin. He had a German friend, Sammy, and Sammy was dying and Des was nursing him. Then Sammy was dead and Des was gripped by incapacitating grief. He was in Prague, where he haunted the old Jewish quarter. He was in Amsterdam. He had given up fiction in favour of travel writing. He was at the University of Alabama. Then I heard he was in Galway. Then he was in East Clare and local yahoos were tormenting him. And then he vanished again.

A few weeks ago, I opened the Irish Times to see a new story by Des. The blurb mentioned he was living in the southwest of Ireland and had recently given a reading in Galway. Brilliant, I thought. I wrote to him care of a third party but heard nothing. Then I realised that I would soon be in a town close to where he was living, in connection with a literary competition I was judging. I would try to find him, I decided, when I was down on business.

And so on 1st June, along with another writer who had offered to drive me, I found myself heading for the resort where Des was. I had no address, so when I arrived I went to the police station. It was unmanned but I pressed a bell in the middle of the front door and the voice of a guard in a distant barracks came out through the speaker above.

"How can I help you?"

"I'm looking for Des Hogan."

"What class of a fellow would he be?"

"He's a writer."

"I don't know of any writers of that or any other name," said the gnomic guard. "Why don't you go and ask at the post office."

I followed his advice. The postmaster was a huge man with a barrel chest who wore black and white braces and looked like a trainer from a boxing gym in south London.

I explained my business. He knew where Des lived, then added, "Of course you won't find him there. Up at dawn, off on his bicycle and away to the sea to swim he is… Every day, all 365 of them."

I thanked him but said I thought I'd try anyhow.

A few minutes later I found myself in a dusty lane at the back of a row of old houses. I saw a woman in her kitchen topping a boiled egg and I rapped on her window.

"I'm looking for Des Hogan."

She looked at me with her pale flat Irish countrywoman's face.

"Who is he?"

"The writer."

She looked blank.

"He has a bicycle."

"Funny," she said, "he's been living beside me a brave few years and I never got his name until now."

She marched back along the lane, her tweed skirt swinging, and halted in front of a metal gate. A garage with a flat roof loomed behind the gate and there was a workshop with old cars littered around it.

The woman banged on the gate with a strong red hand, making a booming sound. A dog appeared behind. He stuck his snout through a gap and began barking and whining.

A minute passed. No one was at home. I wrote a note and tucked it into the side of the gate. The woman went back to her egg and I retraced my steps to the post office. I had one of my books for Des and I left it with the postmaster. Caught on a Train is about Victorian travellers in Ireland who retell old Gaelic folk stories competitively, like the pilgrims do in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Des had always loved old narratives—especially told by Irish travellers—and of all my books, this was the closest to what he liked.

I left the post office, but I was not quite ready to abandon my quest. With my companion I went down to the strand where the postmaster said I might find Des. The sea was black. The clouds were grey. The sand was the colour of brass and it was studded with what looked like lumps of black jelly. On closer inspection these turned out to be slippery black rocks. I walked up and down and spotted several men in woollen hats. None turned out to be Des.

After a fruitless hour we got back in the car. My companion had a reading to give in the town where we were staying. As we nosed back the way we had come, I scrutinised every cyclist we passed. None turned out to be Des but then in stories you only ever get to find the one you're searching for at the very last possible moment. In life, narratives have a nasty habit of going their own way and refusing to be resolved, which of course is one reason why we need fiction. Stories compensate for the disappointments of experience.

Our car emerged into the countryside and we found ourselves on a long road that went up and down like a rollercoaster. A car overtook us while, at the same instant, a cat appeared ahead. A roadkill looked inevitable, but the animal sprang miraculously out of the path of the idiot overtaking us and made it to the safety of the hedgerow.

I settled back and thought about Des, who loved cats, and hoped he would enjoy as many lives. I felt disappointed and thwarted. I had wanted to find Des so I could discover where he had been, what he had done, what he had written and what he was going to write. I also felt guilty. I should have kept in touch.

Behind these predictable feelings, though, was something more troubling. Des, a great writer who had been cheerful and effective in London, had been driven on account of calamities of which I had only the scantiest knowledge, to the Atlantic edge of Europe. Now he led an energetic but largely solitary existence. Yes, he was reading in public again, and I understood the Irish publisher Lilliput was going to bring out his back list and his new stories. But this was not how I had imagined Des when I knew him in the 1980s. In those days, when he lived a pure, simple, almost priest-like life and devoted himself to writing, I imagined a very different trajectory for him. He wasn't accident-prone, and he didn't do drugs or have disastrous relationships and he was destined, or so I thought, for some sort of glory.

I thought that was the end of my ruminations but, like a Russian doll, there was one final thought lodged inside the last which I now unpacked. I had believed my trip was an act of friendship but I saw that it wasn't just that. I have fantastic control over my life: more than my parents, and much more that my grandparents, yet what I fear more than anything is losing that control and being pushed to where I don't wish to go and to do what I don't want to do. I had no idea if this was Des's story—his situation might be entirely voluntary for all I knew—but the reason I had come was to be assured that his story was not what I most feared for myself. That's the trouble with us human beings. We try to do good and sometimes we do, but any good we might do is mixed up with so much else, isn't it?