The Blackwater Lightship - Interview

The Lighthouse of Other Days - Eileen Battersby August 20 2000

It had been in his head for years. Then, one day on a roundabout in Wexford town, the novel came to him. Colm Toibin talks about The Blackwater Lightship as he walks the ways of his childhood holidays on the Wexford coast

Drive through Blackwater, the tiny Co Wexford village just outside Enniscorthy, follow the narrow country road, turn left at the old Ball Alley and the very real terrain of Colm Toibin's imagination unfolds in a swathe of clifftops and sea and sky and marl. Marl. It's a word Tóibín likes.

It describes the thick, brown soil which covers most of the Cush and Ballincorrig area which is the setting for his latest novel, The Blackwater Lightship. It's the same powerful landscape that featured in Tóib´in's The Heather Blazing, which we glimpsed first in the final chapters of his first novel, The South.

Tóibín travelled here each year from Enniscorthy, where he was brought up, for holidays as a child. Most of the holidaymakers were from Wexford but there were families from the capital, too. Dubliners who would mistake a small muddy pond ("a marl pool," says Tóibín,) for a lake. When he got older he wanted to go to Curracloe. "It was much more glamorous," he says. "It had more shops, more people, more of everything."

Tóibín surprised himself wanting to revisit the area in his writings. "I hadn't thought about the place for years . . . but it had obviously worked it's way into my DNA . . . when I wrote that chapter in The South it stirred something in me, there was this huge emotional resonance."

The idea for this novel had been in his head for some time. He remembers returning for an event at the Wexford Opera Festival one Sunday and driving around a roundabout when it came to him. "I told someone: `I got a novel on the roundabout today. A whole novel,' " he recalls.

He did nothing about it until two years ago when he was having a double espresso before going to see a Catalan movie in the Irish Film Centre. "It must have pumped me up because I went home and wrote the outline and the first two pages, and I worked on them until I felt I didn't want to change a word."

Then he packed a few notebooks and some biros and went to Spain, where he wrote most of the novel in long-hand. He liked writing the names of the characters, he says. Lily. Declan. Larry. Paul.

And Helen. It's around Helen that the novel is centered. The Blackwater Light- ship sees her returning to the scene of much childhood unhappiness - her grandmother's one-time guesthouse in Cush where she and her brother, Declan, stayed while their father was dying of cancer in a Dublin hospital. Now, years later, Declan is dying of AIDS. The family have kept their distance from each other for so long that, inevitably, nursing Declan in the shabby seaside home, they have to confront their past.

A constant presence in the novel's background is the flashing light of the lighthouse on Tuskar Rock. The title comes from the lighthouse which used to operate close to Tuskar but was removed, its absence seeming to symbolise a deeper void within the family. The characters walk on the beaches, through the remains of houses destroyed by decades of erosion by the sea. They see the thin sand tumbling down the cliffs in dusty rivulets as the process continues. And, as though we were inspecting the location of a movie, it was all still there, just as he described it.

"You can't fight this thing," says Tóibín, pointing at the sea, a calm, white speckled mass on the day he returns to visit. He is standing on a clifftop amid the ruins of what once was his cousin's house. In the book it is called Mick Redmond's. The hearth is still there, some of the walls, the space for the front door. The sea cut a neat triangle out of the cliff, leaving the land either side of the building intact, but claiming the guts of the lone house.

After a steep climb down the cliff face, Tóib& acute;in walks along the stony, sandy beach. A seal is turning somersaults in the sea. He looks around. "When we used to come here there would be little clumps of people all over this beach and we seem to have spent much of the time wondering whether it would rain. And then it would rain and everyone would go running up the cliffs to find shelter until it stopped."

There is no threat of rain today. He walks further on, up to Ballincorrig, and the pre-1963 chalets ("huts", he corrects) which his family rented on one of their trips. Back up the cliffside again is Keatings, an old guesthouse where the family also stayed; like his cousin's house, it's now a delapidated victim of the sea. The house features prominently in the book.

The main locations visited, Tóibín walks back the way he came, towards Cush, past his cousin's house, past palm trees that grow in the marl where more commonplace plants will not grow. Back up the cliff, and down a lane where another house, set on land where the erosion has mysteriously stopped, stands whitewashed and facing the sea. It's here that Tóibín set the grandmother's old guesthouse in the novel. His aunt had rented it as a holiday home.

With themes such as isolation, separation and the powerful depiction of a man in the final stages of AIDS, The Blackwater Light- ship suggests that Tóibín is in a rather dark place himself. He laughs and says that the job of a novelist is to observe and depict these emotions: "One of the best compliments I got after The Heather Blazing was `how could you have written this book?' Some people didn't think it was like something I would do at all."

Later he says: "I must write a funny book," and remarks that Irish novels, from The Vicar of Wakefield to The Snapper, include no depiction of domestic bliss. With The Blackwater Lightship he had Henry James's advice of "dramatise, dramatise" in mind. "This novel had so many touches of the 1950s all over it, that it was important not to get bogged down in making tea."

Before the visit, Tóibín had made it clear that he was reluctant to talk about two subjects: his family and his sexuality. But, back in Enniscorthy and away from the sea, he gives some sense of the real inspiration for the novel. He has long admired two books by the American author, James Baldwin - Go Tell It on the Mountain, an account of the writer's time as a preacher in Harlem, and Giovanni's Room, set against a bohemian homosexual backdrop.

"I always wondered why he didn't bring the people from Giovanni's Room to Harlem, joining the two parts of himself together. Then I thought, why don't I do it instead of just wondering why Baldwin didn't do it." So he did. Now, with the publication of the book, he feels like getting away. He doesn't say it, but he seems to mean escape. "It's like that line from the Yeats poem, Her Praise," he says. "I have gone about the house, gone up and down / Like a man who has published a new book . . ."

Colm Toibin will read from The Blackwater Lightship on Wednesday, September 29th, at 6.30 p.m. in Waterstone's in Dawson Street, Dublin