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Jack Harte

THOUGH he speaks neither Hindi, Russian nor Bulgarian, retired schoolteacher and author Jack Harte has seen his short stories and books translated into all three languages in the past year.

And one of his stories has been made into a Bulgarian film.

Not bad going for somebody who retired as principal of an expanding and busy Lucan Community College to become a writer in the Millennium year of 2000.

At 55 years of age in that year Jack had reached the lowest retirement age for teachers. “I just ran when I got to the minimum age,” he said.

“Teaching is extremely demanding and being in front of a class is almost like acting on stage. You have to keep the audience interested; and the mental energy and the psychic energy that you expend is just enormous. Starting off something totally new, and making a go of it, was a new lease of life. It was great to have a change in career at the stage when people would be coasting in to the final straight.” said Jack.

Nonetheless, being school principal brings a different demand on personal resources. “Something new comes at you every few minutes and it keeps you on your toes; but it was a very satisfying job.”

Equally satisfying was an early part-time job undertaken in his teens during school holidays as a bog labourer in Bord na Móna. “There was all this turf to be harvested and especially at the footing you could get work with your father when you were able. I did that until I left for Dublin at 18 years of age,” he said.

Harte’s experience on the midland bogs forms the background for his first novel In the Wake of the Bagger.

Educational opportunities for those leaving bog work in Ireland in the second half of the 20th century were not as well funded as they are now.

Jack won one of only three county council scholarships for third-level education; but was to discover that it lasted him just six weeks in University College Dublin.

“I had to get a job, then,” he said. “I worked for a while in Odlums in Dublin docks. We sampled a load of wheat in the lab and if the test was alright they would accept the wheat or pay a certain rate. But it was not a very well paid job, either.”

A five-year stint in the civil service followed which saw Jack complete his degree and HDip at night, after which he took up teaching in Clondalkin in Co Dublin, for 15 years, in the old VEC vocational school.

He accepted the Lucan principal’s job in 1983 but continued teaching classes almost to the end of his career. “I always thought it important that students should see you as a teacher and not as a manager. And that teachers would see you as a fellow teacher.” he said.

However, the change from being a busy principal and teacher to being a solo writer working at a different pace did not yield an enormous amount of time in hand.

“The great danger is that you are not as productive as you might be when there are demands and pressure of deadlines and all the rest. It was a totally different pace; no longer was there this stream of things to be decided upon or adjudicated on. Now I could work at my own pace and do whatever I wanted to do.” he said.

As befits a former busy administrator, Harte’s work rate has been relentless since he began to take life easier. He has amassed a collection of short stories, two new novels and five plays.

His novel In the Wake of the Bagger was published in June 2006 and another; Reflections in a Tar Barrel was to be published in Bulgaria before the end of the same year.

“I sent off the first novel I finished about three years ago to a few agents and they were too busy to look at it or be bothered reading it. I sent it off to a few publishers and they couldn’t be bothered reading it or whatever and that was a strange experience on that front,” he said.

However, Sligo County Council awarded him a commission under the Per Cent for Arts scheme to write In the Wake of the Bagger over 2004 and 2005. It is the first time the scheme has been used to fund a work of fiction.

So Jack Harte was once more ploughing a fresh furrow.

He had led the way in the writing world before when he founded both the Irish Writers’ Centre and the Irish Writers’ Union, in the late 1980s.

But before that he had supervised the visits of an extraordinary collection of established writers to his Lucan Community College.

“When I took up the job in Lucan there were night classes going on so I said how about doing an extensive series of courses? There were really good people doing the courses and some very interesting people attending as students.”

Tutors and visiting speakers included Peter Sheridan, Bernard Farrell, Kate Cruise O’Brien, John F Deane, John McGahern, Brendan Kennelly, Sam McAughtry, Joe Jackson and many more household names.

For a while, Lucan was the centre of the Irish literary universe with Jack Harte standing in the middle of it all.

But that was then, and since he retired and by now a full-time writer himself, Jack was invited to Bulgaria to read at writing festivals. Connections made there saw his work being translated into Bulgarian.

Indeed, a Russian publisher at a reading in Bulgaria contracted to publish his story collection the title: Under Gogol’s Nose in that country.

A reading at a festival in New Delhi similarly brought an offer from an Indian publisher to publish Jack’s work in Hindi.

Bulgaria. Russia, India all recognise the storyteller for his worth; but reflecting on modern Ireland Jack said the old way of storytelling and of neighbours taking ime to chat is being eroded by modern methods of communications that leave little time for reflection.

To have grown up before the era of mass communication was a rich experience, he said.

It’s a long way from footing turf in the midlands to being read on the Steppes of Russia; but Jack Harte’s journey seems to have just begun.

© Brendan Nolan 2007

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