Profile of Colm Toibin

Life

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Works

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Criticism

Commentary

Hayden Murphy, review of talk given by Tóibín at the 7th Biennial Edinburgh Book Festival (Sept. 1995), in Irish Times (9 Sept. 1995), [q.p.]; [Colm Toibin Tóibín talked on] ‘shared prejudice and common bigotry in Ireland and Scotland’ to ‘rapturous audience’.

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G. V. Whelan, review of The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe (London: Jonathan Cape 1994), in Books Ireland (April 1995), pp.84-85; highly commended as being a near-perfect experience for its prose, and the work of one of the ‘the best people-watchers you could hope to meet’.

Brendan Hamill, review of The Story of the Night, in Fortnight Review (Nov. 1996), [q.p.]; notes humdrumness of narration, passed off as ‘picaresque’ in blurb; narrator Richard Garay (or Ricardo), brought up in Buenos Aires, child of Argentine businessman and English woman who never integrated after her arrival in 1920, growing obsessive about emblems of British empire during the Falklands War; Garay assists Americans in establishing an acceptable Western capitalist democracy; he is homosexual; meets Pablo Canetto; associates with Americans Susan and Donald Ford, who work with the CIA; his mother delights at learning he is homosexual as increasing her hold on him; tests HIV positive; reviewer notes a ‘mysterious plot which is seamless and emotionally coherent’.

John Dunne, review of The Story of the Night (1996), in Books Ireland (Nov. 1996), p.320; remarking greyness of prose that is ‘functional to the point of being utterly banal, and notes to the author’s credit a low-key ending that gives a ‘heartbreaking rendering of a tragedy that is more inevitable than predictable’.

Eithne Farry, review of The Blackwater Lightship (1999), [q. source, cited in Amazon Online book notices, Oct. 1999]; ‘Set in Ireland in the 1990s, The Blackwater Lightship tells the story of the Devereux family. Helen doesn't get on with her mother Lily, and Lily doesn't get on with her mother Dora. Three generations of women, tetchy with recriminations and memory, are forced together when they discover that Helen's younger brother, Declan, is dying from AIDS: "It was like a dark shadow in a dream, and then it became real and sharp." This novel is an intense examination of Colm Toibin Tóibín's signature themes: death, loss, illness and morality. However, if the themes are a continuance from his previous books, the style is a distinct departure from the lyrical prose of The Story of the Night and The Heather Blazing. In The Blackwater Lightship Tóibín strips his style down to spare sentences, and what is said is bleaker: "It was clear to her now that it did not matter whether there were people or not--the world would go on. Imaginings and resonances and pains and small longings, they meant nothing against the hardness of the sea." It is almost as if he is writing us and himself, as the novelist, out of the picture. The familiar poetry of landscape: "the sudden rise in the road and then the first view of the sea glinting in the slanted summer light", is all that is left. There is not much plot, the book concentrates on the gradual unfolding of talk between the Devereuxs, and two friends of Declan's, who have fine lines of catty commentary. Dora asks: "Is there a need to rake over everything?" But words, even bitter ones, are shaky constants, when everything else is crumbling. This puts a lot of pressure on the prose; when it works well it's charged with suppressed emotion, strangely lulling in its determination to be quiet and ordinary. But sometimes its simplicity makes the book a little static, threatening to becalm the reader. The Blackwater Lightship is a book about the frailty of humanexperiences, in the face of indifferent nature: "soon they would only be a memory, and that too would fade with time." Tóibín deals with the tricky balance between hopefulness and hopelessness with elegant economy, and very few stumbles.

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Quotations

Novels versus short stories: ‘[...] in a country where history wiped out any hope of us forming a cohesive, safe, secure, well adjusted, class-ridden society. We were left instead with something broken and insecure, a post-colonial society which remained in spirit part of the one-time mother country, and part of America, and part of its own invention. How can the novel flourish in such a world? The novel explores psychology, sociology, the individual consciousness; the novel finds a form and a language for these explorations. Short stories occur in a limited time and a limited ace. In our post-colonial societies, it is a perfect form: we need not deal with the bitterness of the past, the confusion of the present or the hopelessness of the future. We can offer merely small instances unassociated with other instances.’ (‘Martyrs and Metaphors’, in Letters from the New Island, Raven Arts Press, Dublin, 1987, p.6.)

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Penguin Book of Irish Fiction (1999), Introduction: ‘Ireland, from the time of Jonathan Swift to the present, has been, it seems, awash with ‘national and intellectual mood’, especially national mood, so that those writers who have sought to evade the opportunities to interpret this, who have sought to deal with the individual mood, however trivial, perverse and fleeting, seem now oddly heroic and hard to place. The purpose of much Irish fiction, it seems, is to become involved in the Irish argument, and the purpose of much Irish criticism has been to relate the fiction to the argument.’; further, ‘In 1929 the Censorship of Publications Act was passed in Ireland, and work by most Irish writers and many foreign writers was banned; this did not encourage Irish writers to feel that there was an audience out there hungry for their work. The sense that there was no reader fed into a tradition which was already strong in Irish writing, a tradition which insisted that a book could read itself, hermetically sealed in a deep self-consciousness. From Tristram Shandy to Ulysses to At Swim-Two-Birds to Beckett’s fiction to John Banville’s Birchwood to John McGahern’s The Pornographer, pastiche and parody combine with the idea of the built-in reader.’; Further, ‘While there has been stylistic innovation in the work of, say, Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle and Patrick McCabe and Aidan Mathews, a playing with tone, an ability to write sentences like no one had ever written them before, most of the work being produced in Ireland now is formally conservative. This may be because, for the first time, there is an audience for books in Ireland. You can have readers outside the book as well as within it. This new conservatism among fiction writers both north and south of the border is most clear when you compare the calmness of contemporary Irish writing with the wildness of contemporary Scottish writing. It is as though the legacy of Sterne and Swift, Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien had taken the Larne-Stranraer ferry; in the writing of James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway and Alan Warner there is political anger, stylistic experiment and formal trickery. Books are written, as in Ireland in the old days, to replace a country.’; finally, ‘For the first time in its long life in fiction, has become post-Freudian and post-feminist and, of course (three cheers!), post-nationalist.’ [END; quoted by Des Traynor, reviewing Tóibín, ed., Introduction to Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, Viking 1999, in Books Ireland, Dec. 1999, pp.370-72.)

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‘New Ways to Kill Your Father: Historical Revisionism’, in Karl-Heinz Westarp and Michael Böss, eds., Ireland: Towards new Identities? (Aarhus UP 1998), pp.28-36 [on Roy Foster’s Modern Ireland]: ‘using such an arch tone as that it gives the game away. It suggest that underneath the brilliant insights and real originality … there is an ideology, perhaps not as crude as that of any nationalist historian writing school texts in the 1920s, but just as clear’ (p.32). Further, ‘Roy Foster loves two minds, the dual inheritance. Although the essays in Paddy and Mr Punch were written for different occasions and contexts, there is a single concern running throught the book - the way in which the intersection between Ireland and England affects individuals and institutions. He is always deeply aware that this intersection can be dangerous and dark, but, in a few essays, he shows that it has also been enriching, and these essays are important and original.’ (p.35); reproaches Foster for lacking the ‘same level of nuanced study to the contradiction and complexities of the Irish revolutionary tradition […] as, say, Elizabeth Bowen’ (idem.) ‘I know that ambiguity is what is needed in Ireland now. No-one wants territory, merely a formula of words ambiguous enough to make them feel at home. If we cannot understand Elizabeth Bowen’s Irishness, and her British allegiances, then there are other forms of Irishness, and other allegiances, more insistent and closer to us, that we will fail to understand as well. Foster’s position is clear, he wants Ireland to become a pluralist, post-nationalist, all-inclusive, non-sectarian place. So do I. But there are other (I hesitate to use the word atavistic) forces operating within me too that I must be conscious of. Maybe it comes out in odd moments when I read a book like this, or Thomas Pakenham’s The Year of Liberty, and know that I am not part of the consensus of which they are part. Maybe it would be good if they looked again at Catholic Ireland. We, in turn, are learning to talk in whispers. It will take time.’ [END]. (p.36.)

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1916 Rising, ‘Playboys of the GPO’, London Review of Books (18 April. 1996): ‘The most important thing we have done is that we have made a modern art, taking our traditional values as a basis, adorning it with new material, solving contemporary problems with a national spirit.’ (p.14); ‘the fetishisation of certain parts of the landscape - Montseny or example, or the Canigo - bore a great resemblance to the sanctity of the Aran Islands and the Blasket Islands in Ireland. The attempt by Yeats and Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde to surround the Gaelic past with holiness had loud echoes in the efforts by Catalan architects and artists, from Gaudi to Miro, to establish the Romanesque tradition as quintessentially Catalan while the rest of Spain was Moorish. And the attempt, too, by Yeats an Synge, and indeed Joyce, to embrace modernity and Europe as a way of keeping England at bay was close to Domenach’s use of iron and steel and modern systems while Spain slept.’ (idem.); [contesting Kiberd’s account of colonisation as to blame for poor economic performance’] ‘it is just as likely, that the way in which Ireland was invented, with so much emphasis on the Gaelic past and foreign occupation an so little on how people lived and what they wanted, meant that economic performance would never become a priority for an Irish government.’ (p.16).

Revising the Revision: Review of Mairin Ni Dhonnchadha and Theo Dorgan eds., Revising the Rising (1991), in Sunday Independent (8 Dec. 1991), [q.p.]; ‘I have always had a problem with the idea that our state was founded as a result of 1916. The rise of the Catholic middle classes throughout the nineteenth century made the emergence of some sort of state a certainty; and the civil war was fought not about the North but, in many instances, between the settled middle class and the men of no property. To glorify the Rising as a cata[c]lysmic event in Irish history to the detrement [sic] of more abiding forces seemed to me to distort grossly what happened in the past.’ At the time of the 1991 celebrations, Tóibín was in Seville, preparing his book on Catholic Europe, and absence which he is willing to regard as an excuse, ‘ducking the grand occasion’. He asperses Deane and Kiberd, ‘The mythic Gaelic past is first of all mythic and then it is past. Declan Kiberd has been reading too much Yeats.’

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‘Martyrs and Metaphors’, in Dermot Bolger ed., Letters from the New Island (Dublin: Raven Arts 1987), pp.6-8: ‘Six short stories, six lyric poems in a country where history wiped out any hope of us forming a cohesive, safe, secure, well adjusted, class-ridden society. We were left instead with something broken and insecure, a post-colonial society whch remained in spirit part of the one-time mother country, and part of America, and part of its own invention. / How can the novel flourish in such a world? The novel explores psychology, sociology, the individual consciousness; the novel finds a form of language and a language for these explorations. We requite an acecpted world for the novel to flourish, a shared sense of time and place. .. What we have come to treasure instead are those small moments in our literature known as short stories. This is the legacy we have chosen to take form Joyce, not the vision and word play of Finnegans Wake, but the glimpses of life as it is truly lived in Dubliners, the sharpness of the realism, the precision, the detail, the ending of each story in pathos and bitter wisdom and purple prose, the individual in relation to landscape and memory. / Short stories occur in a limited time and a limited place. In our post-colonial societies, it is a perfect form: we need not deal with the bitterness of the past, the confusion of the present or the hopelessness of the future. We can offer merely small instances unassociated with other instances.’ (Cited in Irena Boada-Montegut, ‘Relations of Power and Violence in Irish/Catalan Literature, MPhil/DPhil UUC 1997 [draft], p.56-57.)

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‘Unreconstructed nationalists have always had real difficulty with the 26 Counties. The 26 Counties are limbo, they believe, waiting for the day when our island will be united and the British will leave. This leaves out any idea that Southern Ireland has been forming its own habits and going its own way.’ (Sunday Independent, 24 Nov. 1991; cited in Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994, p.34.) But letter from Eoin O’Neachtain (Times Literary Supplement, 9 June 1995), describing Tóibín’s classification of the political project of Field Day as ‘unreconstructed nationalism’ simplistic (‘a mite too pat’) while containing an essential kernel of truth.

History as comedy ...: Review of George Macbeth, The Testament of Spenser (Deutsch 1992). ‘In Ireland now, for at least half the time, history is the comedy from which we are trying to awake’; calls Banville’s Birchwood (1973) a seminal text of revisionism, not generally recognised by the historians as such. Macbeth’s novel is set in our own times, where one John Spenser comes to occupy a house under conditions a little like those of Spenser. At the back of the book there is a chronology of Spenser’s time in Ireland; in 1598 his castle was sacked and his newborn child perished. ‘We know what to expect’. An elaborate literary joke - post-modernism in a wet ountry. Times Literary Supplement, 13 Nov. 1992, p.16.

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‘The Best of Tomes:, book-choice in Guardian Magazine (8 Dec. 1995), p.23, review of Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, and Michael O’Loughlin, Selected Poems (1995), calling the former a ‘loving anatomy ... in which the point where nature and culture meet in the island is observed with great beauty and precision’, and the latter one of the most neglected Irish poets.'

‘On Not Saying What you Mean’, in London Review of Books (?Dec. 1995), cited as ‘thoughtful essay’ in Dick Walsh, Irish Times (3 Dec. 1995), [q.p.]; Tóibín writes, ‘I began to notice that if you put the word "not" in the sentences used in public life in Ireland ... you get a much better idea of what is going on ...those who speak for Sinn Féin ... deal in euphemism ... love the phrase the peace process ... [&c.]’.

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Notes

The Heather Blazing (Picador 1992): Eamon Redmond, is a High Court judge; brought up on Wexford, and groomed by the Fianna Fáil party machine. Dermot Bolger calls him ‘an existentialist with two capital FFs, and the novel, a portrait of the vast class of ordinary people whom Ireland’s writers have singularly failed to engage with. When Eamon asks his father, a school-teacher with secret War of Independance memories about burning houses, he answers, ‘We gutted a good few of them, all right. Wilton, old Captain Skrine. The Proctors on the Bunclody Road, Castleboro.’ The Proctors have been the central characters in Tóibín’s previous novel, The South, a study of Protestant Wexford, just as The Heather Blaze is an examination of what the Proctors would call the RCs. Redmond is a reserved character, hiding the secret source of his hurt, so much so that he doesn’t even tell his wife, who hates hanging, that he has helped draft the Bill to abolish it. The novel deals with the re-emergence of his unbearable pain at with the death of a loved one, and his first steps back towards life with his grandson. NOTE, For extract from Walking Along the Border, see de Valera, RX.

Tóibín's favourite book named as Tim Robinson, Aran: Pilgrimage in 'The Best of Tomes', Guardian Magazine (8 Dec 1995), p.23; see further above and under Robinson, Rx); also praised poems by Michael O’Loughlan and a work on Alexandria.

Name-caller: Tóibín credited with providing name for publisher Mike Hogan’s company KCD, owner of 38 journals including the Boyzone fanclub organ and Magill (purchased from Vincent Browne for rumoured £250,000 in Oct. 1998), when he gave him the advice, ‘Keep costs down’. (Irish Times, 17 Oct. 1998, p.7.).

Big IMPAC(T): Toibin was among the judges of the IMPAC International Dublin Literary Award (£100,000).

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Published by: Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco) 2001