COLM TOIBIN: An Interview

Colm Tóibín has published four novels, of which The Blackwater Lightsbip (I999) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His prose is spare and lucid. He unearths the tow key tremors and emotions in a young Catholic boys experience of his father's death in The Heather Blazing (I992) and gently dissects a family coping with a gay son's homecoming in The Blackwater Lightship. In The Story of the Night (I996) Tóibín traces a man at cross purposes with his country, Argentina, and his sexuality. He is also known for trenchant works of non-fiction: Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Border (I987), Homage to Barcelona (I992), The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catbolic Europe (I994), as well as numerous incisive essays such as New Ways to Kill Your Father, about revisionist tendencies in Ireland. His editorial undertakings include The Modern Library: The 200 Best Books in English Since I950 (I999) with Carmen Callil, and an all encompassing anthology in the Penguin Book of Irisb Fiction (2000). Tóibín was a writer in residence (2000/0I) at the Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. His next novel, still in its early stage, centers around Henry James and the humiliating failure of his play on the London stage.

LIT: The subject of your next novel is Henry James. How is that research coming along?

CT: I’ll go back to Ireland in June, and I’ll spend a year or two or three curled up with Henry James. I really don't know how long it will take. I've done most of the research, but I'm such a swat that I'll probably go back and do all the research again. It has to enter your DNA before you can do it. Before the plot comes and everything. If I get a run on it, that's different. Sometimes that happens.

LIT: So where's the dividing line between biography and fiction?

CT: Biography by necessity has to include everything certainly enough to satisfy the reader, but I can do anything I want. I can swoop down on just a day or a tiny idea and make that into everything. In other words, you have complete license, and therefore the responsibility to try to capture something that will hit the reader emotionally. So it's completely different. But at the same time, Leon Edel's five volume biography of James could be a work of genius, but it's not. It just isn't . . . art. In other words, it doesn't have that emotional quality of entering into James’s spirit imaginatively. It does so in other ways, though, in terms of information and analysis.

LIT: Have you ever felt you wanted to do any experimentation, or try any metafictional devices, such as those of Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace?

CT: I have a great interest in Borges, and I have a great interest in Joyce. Actually, a book I really admire is William Gaddis' The Recognitions, and his Carpenter's Gothic I love. But none of the American perpetrators interest me very much. You have to follow your own roots, irrespective of what others tell you. But modernism I don't know what postmodernism is really about but modernism has helped enormously to refine the way prose is written, the way that consciousness is put into language, even if you don't write, say, in the style of Joyce in Ulysses. The whole way Joyce and Woolf dealt with consciousness affected everybody afterward. All you have to do is read the novels of Thomas Hardy and took at novels, say, by Evelyn Waugh to see that there's a ... snappiness in relation to consciousness. But I notice that most of the so called post modernist works have been written by young men. Women don't seem to be playing that particular game. They don't write unwieldy books. It's curious.

LIT: And its interesting that you call it a "game."

CT: It looks like a game, but it might come from very deep fears.

LIT: Hemingway admired Joyce very much. And that's interesting, since they are almost at opposite extremes.

CT: Hemingway's discovery was greater than Joyce's. His discovery was that in between words there's something which can give you emotion, and you can do this in prose as much as in poetry, that in a number of simple statements you can hit the reader's nervous system in a way that the reader doesn't know where that energy is coming from. in order to do that, you have to feel it yourself first and you have to convey it simply. I suppose it was someone like Paul Klee, Kandinsky, or Joan Miro, who did the same thing in painting. But Hemingway's discovery was that you can do this forever. It was an absolutely marvellous thing, which no one gives him any credit for. Because it's such a basic thing, people thought it was already there, but it wasn't really.

LIT: But doesn't this mean that writers at the other end of the spectrum, like Lawrence Durrell, or even Joyce himself, overused words, their prose is too full?

CT: No. It's just that Hemingway's discovery is a simple one. But it does seem to have come from him. I think that Joyce did other things that were equally important, the whole business of registering the way consciousness works in language is something that he did. And it's so open to self parody that he paro- dies himself later on. But he gets it right even in the later work, the early work more so, but even in the later work there's a huge amount to be learned from it. It's astonishing.

LIT: How do you think Beckett fits in?

CT: He doesn't fit into it. I suppose there's a kind of genius there. The way in which you minimize the emotion and the amount of activity. So that you make the activity itself a sort of disease that people are running away from. But you make it intriguing and captivating and memorable; you fill it with energy. Sentence after sentence. I particularly like the late prose pieces. You can spend your life reading them. He's someone I keep very close to me.

LIT: Some people find his work difficult to read, though.

CT: I came to Beckett first through a one man show put on from his prose work rather than his theater work. That was when I was sixteen. So it was a great introduction to him. In other words, you get it as voice. Because that's what it is. Really, after Murphy, the great trilogies, the work of the late '40s. It's voice, and you follow the voice. It had a greater timbre, and he could control that, yet at the same time only describing somebody lying on his back in the dark. I just love that.

LIT: It's not even certain that Beckett is describing any knowable character or identity.

CT: If he were a painter, there certainly would be no face. There'd be a lot of lines, but no face. He wouldn't even have what the sculptor Ciacometti has, which is the basic features down to the face. He'd have less than that. Yet it has such emotional resonance. Thats because the "I" the writer's "I" is a sort of face, a voice.

LIT: How does being Irish help or hinder you to define yourself as a writer?

CT: I think the whole business of Irish writing over the last century is so astonishing. That it renders ordinary Irish experience, it gives it an extra layer, which hasn't happened in, say, Uruguay, in the same way. You find your ordinary Catholic experience of going to school, of learning your prayers, of doing a retreat, of having the priests, of growing up with your parents all that being written about in the great books, which even if it isn't a great book when you read it, you think, I didn't know it could be done like that. Or even, take a midsummer day in Dublin, where you have a wonderful day from early till late which you can do in your twenties you can meet someone, and something happens. The city itself, the city you live in, gets a whole lot of meaning attached to it. I used to live very close to one of the mental hospitals, and some of the people let out during the day had Beckett all over their faces, Beckett in their voices. There was one guy I talked to, he was straight out of it: going on, starting, going, you can just tell em all, ab, what are ya talking about, I won't tell ya any more, you can just stop, well get to the end o'that. And he'd just go on like that. I didn't think of madness or my family, I thought of Beckett. And similarly, you can have moments where there's a thing in Ulysses where, you see the same person in the city all day he's called the Mackintosh man. And it can happen because Dublin is so small that if you're around the city in the same day, you see the same peculiar person. So there can be loads of things happening to you on an ordinary day there, which can be so close to the Portrait of the Artist, so close to Ulysses, so close to Beckett, that it enriches your whole city living if you've read those books it adds to it in a way that's hard to imagine. I can't think of it happening in Montevideo, what the experience there would be like.

LIT: Doesn't it sort of depend on whether the Irish people have not only read those works but also whether they love and admire them?

CT: I'm saying just me, personally-I’ve read them; it matters to me. Obviously, as Beckett would say, other people "couldn't give a fart in their trousers" about, you know, writers. Other people have other pleasures.

LIT: Do you feel being Irish affects how you are treated in the English literary tradition?

CT: I think it's much like being an Indian novelist. People expect certain things from you. Southern England remains oddly open to fiction in a way that it isn't open to various other things. People who would vote for the likes of Mrs. Thatcher would take down a novel by someone like me and read it with an open mind. When I say open, I don't know how open it is. But it isn't closed enough for anyone to dictate how I should write the next novel. it doesn't do anything other than buy the book and read it, as far as I'm concerned. I'm certainty not going to castigate these people just for being Brits or anything like that. They're absolutely marvellous people and I'm grateful to them.

LIT: So this brings us to the Booker Prize. Apparently Kingsley Amis always thought of it as a joke, a total irrelevance until he won it, that is. In his acceptance speech he said that during the last five minutes he'd changed his mind, and the Booker was the most distinguished and discerning prize he knew. How did you feel when you were nominated?

CT: It's a very serious business, the Booker Prize. If you win it, because of the way it's televised and publicized, you will really sell vast numbers of books, and your earlier books will sell, and you'll spiral your way into the consciousness of vast numbers of people, which is what you're setting out to do in the first place. This is aside from winning £20,000. Being on the short list for me meant that the sales of the hardback went up by a factor of four. That's pretty serious stuff. The presentation dinner, where you have to wait, is terrible. They don't announce the winner until the end, and it's absolute agony for writers but good for everyone else, for the cameras. But I'm not sure I'd like to go through it again. I've done that now. It was good but that's enough of that.

LIT: I'd like to ask you about Jorge Luis Borges? Could you describe meeting him?

CT: He was a great man. I met him in I982 in Dublin, and he was so well dressed, so dapper, so European.

LIT: What about Borges's impact on writing?

CT: I think it's really interesting how hard his style is to do. You must not drop the tone for a second. The Story of the Night began for me as a Borgesian narrative. It was a story about an apartment in Buenos Aires that had been sealed. Somebody had died there, and it contained boxes of manuscripts, a large number of thirteen line sonnets, which I thought was a marvelous Borgesian notion. But actually, luckily, one of the great things about reading is that you learn to read your own work to some extent, and when i read it, i was horrified by it, and wanted nothing more to do with it, having written it But I did have the initial apartment in Buenos Aires with the porch, which I used in The Story of The Night. So I did gel the idea from it. But I realized that those Borgesian accounts of a country that’s in an encyclopaedia, according to certain volumes of books, are really, really difficult to do at least so difficult that I certainly couldn't do it It requires enormous control, enormous conviction, and concision and a serious amount of emotional attachment to it. Its built on quirky detail that seems not to be made up. So when I tried it, which was only once, it was an absolute disaster, and I shudder to think.

LIT: The Story of The Night is different from your other novels. It doesn't include Ireland, and it also seems more personal. How did it develop?

CT: I was in Buenos Aires in I985 where I covered the trial of the Generals Caltieri, Viola, and Videla, and the Falklands conflict, the crimes, and so on. I went back then to write the story of Maradonna, the soccer player, for Esquire. I never wanted to write about the tortures and the disappearances because I felt there was nothing I could add to it in a novel. But anyway, when I went back, it seemed that the whole society remained in denial about what had occurred. All the soccer players just shrugged when I asked them about the disappearances a! though to say: I just play soccer, I don't get involved in things like that. Tho business of denial seemed to me really interesting. So the story came to mi very quickly, in a few days in Buenos Aires, probably in about I99I or '92. Ver quickly-almost in its entirety.

LIT: Including the AIDS theme?

CT: Yes. All of that. And I went home, but didn't do anything with it. The Heather Blazing had just come out I didn't know what I was going to do. I often leave a year between books, especially fiction. So I told the editor of the first book who wasn't in publishing any more, just casually told her about it, and she said that not writing about being gay was hampering me, in general, not just as a writer but as a citizen. So I went ahead with it.

LIT: How much gay experience did you include in your work?

CT: In Buenos Aires, you have to walk down through what they call El Microcentro to get the train. And those streets might look to everybody else half empty as though nothing's going on. But in those years, in '85, cruising grounds of a very old fashioned sort, you know the figure, watching and the watching back and the turning, and nobody would notice unless you knew it. And of course, I was an outsider, so I met a tot of people and I heard a tot of stories that nobody would tell anybody else. And the ones that were most striking were the people who said no one knew they were gay. Nobody. You know, it wasn't just no one at work, absolutely no one was ever going to know. And I found it very striking.

LIT: Wouldn't a similar sort of thing happen in Ireland, that kind of secrecy?

CT: No. It wouldn't happen in the city. Maybe in rural Ireland, but someone always knows. But they'd tell you as though it was the most reasonable thing to say. And even when the book came out and I went back there, which isn't that long ago, three years; you'd still hear that story [whispering]: No one will ever know. You know, the guy's getting engaged, getting married and: No one will ever know.

LIT: This is very different from what is considered to be the "gay' novel, the kind of hip urban gay theme of Western countries, where it's supposed to be all very PC and gay affirming.

CT: I just didn't really know anything about that. I'm not like that.

LIT: What I find interesting about your novel is that it doesn't bother with that fashionable stuff at all. It goes into this macho hidden behaviour, in other societies, in different cultures, and a lot of people are not aware of how that really works.

CT: Yes, I'm interested in the drama surrounding what, for shorthand, we call the closet. I don't really know what a "gay" novel is, just as I couldn't really tell you what an 'Irish' novel is. I suppose if I sat down and looked at twenty novels by Irish writers, I could find things they had in common. The "gay" novel is a sort of American phenomenon, isn't it? I can't think of any French ones.

LIT: Does it bother you that people try to label things by saying you're a "gay writer”?

CT: I'm just a shambles first before anything! And I'm bald for fuck's sake! And I'm better at night than in the morning, and so on. I don't label myself. It just doesn't happen like that. It's not life, especially not when you are just shuffling around in a morning. Its not important.

LIT: So how did you come to writing The Blackwater Lightship? Was that in reaction to The Story of the Night?

CT: Because I edited the Penguin Book of Irish Fiction, and I did a lot of reading. I always do a travel book in between the other books. In between The Story of the Night and the Blackwater book, I just spent two years reading. And I did a book with Carmen Callil called The 200 Best Books in English Since I950. And that was good. And I discovered many things in the reading. I discovered a Canadian writer called Alistair MacLeod. No one'd ever heard of him. The New York Times has just done a thing on him. What attracted me about him was this drama of the pull of home, of returning home. Of two different worlds clashing, Very much like James Baldwin's depiction of his aunt and uncles in Hariern in Go Tell it on the Mountain. They are coming at the world from completely different angles. So anyway I got the first page which I wrote out in longhand, not sleepwalking, but almost. The first sentences were written way before anything else. It started one afternoon when I was in Dublin and I went to see a film which was in Catalan, and I had a double espresso very important, that. So I wrote that sentence, and the first page. I wrote the same things over again every day till I got it right, till it seemed perfect. I then went to Barcelona, a place I love, but that week I didn't like it at all for some reason; I couldn't enjoy being there. So there was nothing else to do; I bought a Biro and a notepad and went to my house in the mountains to write, It came very easily then, the whole story, I did it all in longhand. Then I finished the rest of it at Yaddo.

LIT: Let's go back to James Baldwin. Do you think he's not as appreciated as he should be?

CT: Well, he wrote beautiful prose. The style is still very interesting. And he has such a complex legacy. All sorts of people want to claim him as theirs; some want the black element, some want the fiction, some want the essays, others want only the gay side of him. That makes him difficult to assimilate in total. It's much easier to understand, say, someone like Saul Bellow than James Baldwin.

LIT: And why Henry James?

CT: Four or five of his novels are truly great. He was very worldly. He knew about greed. He invented the single consciousness in the novel. The thing about him was that he was so dedicated to his art. That's all he ever did. He worked at it all day, every day of his life, so that when he got to his old age, there was this unusual late flowering of talent, the richness of this work. it isn't like any of us today who think about the next drink, the next fuck. I worked here all day the other day, though, till very late, you know it can make me happy doing that, and all I did was go home and go to bed.

LIT: Do you believe that writing can be taught at all?

CT: Well, it depends which literary culture you come from. In England and Ireland there was no such thing as a writing school. The idea of discussing your work together would have been purely destructive. The things people say can be less than helpful. But at the same time, it gives you a peer group. You feet but this applies to being a journalist more you are no longer alone. it also than anything, which is how I started out gives a sense of finishing work, of working towards deadlines. I can't just go from one novel to another, so I write journalism and that gives me a sense of my audience. One thing I've noticed though in American writing schools is the way everyone tends to over describe everything. You know, they'll have a scene with the house, the mother, the father, the brother; and the house will be described, then the mother, then the father, then the brother till its overdone, and you're saying, just get on with it. I read three or four novels recently and I just wanted to say, cut, cut, cut. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen plunges straight in with hardly any description. There are no details of where or when or who, yet the character of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet is revealed marvellously. You just know what they are like without any fuss. So I do think that this only works if you feet it. You have to feel it strongly. It's okay to have loads of technique, but if you don't have any feeling, its useless. The other thing is people here tend to start young, so they don't have any experience. Recently a friend, an American writer, suggested coming to Ireland to study writing, and I said, "No. Don't." It's unimaginable. What they'd do to it. It wouldn't work. Can you imagine? It's just not the same approach.

LIT: So what about teaching? Did you enjoy it ?

CT: Well, I've done the odd one or two creative writing workshops, and that's fine. But teaching literature was new. Good reading is 80 percent of writing. The only way you can get that is through reading. It was great. I certainly derived satisfaction from teaching Macbeth. It's amazing the insights you can get into a work that you didn't realize before. Certain things become clearer. I loved teaching that. I adored it.

LIT: What's new in your current reading?

CT: I don't think I've read anything for pleasure for so long now. At the moment, I only read for work, so I don't have much time to read novels. I'm reading the Collected Poems of James Merrill, though. And I find it very disappointing. For me, the poems are too loose and too conversational, and the sense of privilege is very pronounced. I like some of them, but the book in general is a mistake, rather than a proper selection of his works. I've been working on two things. A long piece on James Baldwin and, before that, a long piece on Oscar Wilde, and I'm now looking through the lady Gregory material all day long here at the library.

LIT: Does your research get in the way of your writing?

CT: I think there are two sorts of writers, really. People who have some absolutely instinctual talent and those who read to feed their art. The first don't need to nourish their own writing from reading and emerge as though no one had ever written before. You get it in Ireland with contemporaries of mine like Patrick McCabe or Roddy Doyle, who seem to arise certainly not from reading. But for me it's absolutely essential. And I find that if I've been reading all day, I'll pick up a tot from it that I'm not always conscious of. And I've just discovered that research makes me happy, that physically, almost, that creates an aura of well being, and mentally interests me. It's the thing now that makes me happiest more than drugs or sex or rock and roll. It's called middle age. It's marvellous. Best thing that ever happened.