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Interview with Colm Toibin
Recently, you published a story in the Dublin Review called 'House for Sale' which is set in the the landscape of the Wexford coast by now very familiar to your readers. It turns up in 'The South', 'The Heather Blazing' and 'The Blackwater Lightship'. Why is this landscape so important for you?
We went there every summer until I was maybe ten or eleven. It was not a seaside resort, but was made up of small farms, and the farmers would let a room, or an outhouse or a hut. Eventually, we rented a house, and every year, when we came back there, the coast had eroded further. The back walls of my godfather's house are still there, but the front part fell into sea almost twenty years ago. When I was a teenager I had no interest in this place. I thought it was dreary, but it somehow stayed in my memory. I did not decide to set books there. Rather, the most powerful images that came to me as I was thinking about a novel were images from there: the pale horizon and the sea and the way the land lies, all this stayed with me. I suppose I might also associate it with life before my father died, but I am not sure about that.
The other places which appear in the books are the town of Enniscorthy which is in 'The South', 'The Heather Blazing' and 'The Blackwater Lightship', and the cities of Barcelona and Buenos Aires which appear in 'The South' and in 'The Story of the Night'.
I am, I think, more interested in the atmosphere of certain houses than I am in cities or towns. I was born and brought up in a small house in Enniscorthy and certainly that house, in all its contours, comes up over and over, and seems destined to continue doing that. It's also true, I think, about flats in Barcelona and Buenos Aires. But those two cities have meant a great deal to me, and it was easy to imagine novels using certain streets and atmospheres. And I know Enniscorthy like the back of my hand. However, I have lived in Dublin for many years, more than I have lived anywhere else, and I have never really managed to write about it. I do not think I would know how to begin. It might be like writing straight autobiography. Impossible.
How much of you is in the novels?
Oh dear. I presume that there is a core, hidden me, and it has made its way mysteriously into the books, into the way the stories are shaped, into the tones. Most of the places are real, and all of the people are made up, but that's not the point. The imagination remains forbidden territory. We cannot know why a certain sentence or a tone or a character offered itself at a given moment. We simply have to trust it and go with it. When I am writing there is no 'I', I don't exist.
How do you write?
Something occurs to me. Often, it has come when I am under pressure. And sometimes, as I think with 'The Story of the Night' and 'The Blackwater Lightship', it comes suddenly and clearly in a given moment that I can remember. Then it a process of waiting, writing nothing down, leaving it to settle or grow or whatever it must do, and then simply going, again when you least expect it, and writing down the first sentence. With all the books, I thionk, I have written a first chapter and left it a long time. The bodies of the novels have mainly been written in hotel rooms and forign cities: Lisbon for 'The South' and Budapest for 'The Heather Blazing' and Spain for 'The Blackwater Lightship'. But I'm trying to stop that now. It became too lonely. And I have gone back to longhand. I did it first with 'The Blackwater Lightship' and I felt I got a fluency and simplicity with that and I'm staying with it.
You wanted to me a poet? Is that correct?
Want is the word there. I wrote poems right through my teens into my twenties, but had no success with them, they didn't work, and so I stopped. But I still read a lot of poetry, and there are certain poets who have been crucial for me in trying to develop a prose style.
Who?
A few poets from the sixteenth century like Fulke Greville and Thomas Wyatt, and then in the twentieth century Eliot, especially the Four Quartets, and more contempory poets like Robert Lowell, Thom Gunn, Elizabeth Bishop, Anthony Hecht, Geoffrey Hill. Poets who take an inordinate interest in form. I love form.
No Irish poets?
When I was starting to read seriously at the age of, say, sixteen or seventeen, you could go to Dublin and buy Penguin paperbacks cheaply. It was the time after censorship had been dropped in Ireland. So the first novels I read that I had bought myself were by Sartre and Camus and Kafka and Lawrence. You wouldn't dream of reading an Irish book when you could be reading 'Women In Love'.
Not even Joyce?
Not even Joyce. My interest in Irish writing came much later.
Hemingway?
I didn't think he was Irish. I read 'The Sun Also Rises' when I was seventeen on the beach in Tramore. And that was a memorable business. I still love the prose, the rhythms and allowing the emotion to come from what's between the words. I suppose I went to Spain first because I liked that book so much.
How did the transition from journalist to novelist take place?
I never worked in a newsroom. The journalism I did was always at my own pace and always depended on establishing a tone that was anything but neutral. Writing for magazines helped me enormously, gave me a sort of sharpness and a sense of the reader. 'The South' was written mainly while I was editor of Magill, which was then a very influential monthly news magazine, which required a great deal of concentration and time. 'The South' became my blueprint for survival. The tone of it is, I think, more poetic, and the structure more experimental than the other books. This was because I spent the rest of my time checking copy, proof-reading, editing, talking and drinking politics. It was my dream life and, to some extent, it was my real life.
The recent story 'House for Sale' is notable also as the first piece of fiction in almost ten years that has not dealt with homosexuality. For many of your readers, especially those who liked 'The Heather Blazing', the themes dealt with in 'The Story of the Night' must have been surprising, to say the least.
I wrote the first chapter of 'The Story of the Night' for an anthology called 'Infidelity' edited by Marsha Rowe, who had been my editor on 'The South' and was someone I trusted and liked. When I told her the basics of 'The Story of the Night' and mentioned a few other ideas, she convinced me that I should write the book and write it soon. I think she felt that confronting my own homosexuality in fiction was an imperative for me, something I would have to do, a sort of release. I haven't read the first chapter of the book for a while, but I remember feeling, as I was working, like someone let out of a box. But the use of the first person was also a liberation and Buenos Aires had a set of associations for me that made it a pleasure to write. At least the opening.
What are you writing now?
I am writing a novel set in the last five years of the nineteenth century.
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