Interview with Colm Toibin

A Sensual Education - Eithne Farry Original Source

Booker Prize short-listed author Colm Toibin explains to Eithne Farry how he became a writer and why he'd always choose sex over drugs and rock and roll.

Born in 1955, Colm Toibin worked as a journalist in Dublin before embarking on a journey of sensual self-discovery which took him beyond the shores of his native Ireland to Barcelona. Colm Toibin has published four novels, The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night and his most recent The Blackwater Lightship, shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. A former journalist, he is also the author of several works of non-fiction, including Bad Blood and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe. In an exclusive interview for Amazon.co.uk, Colm Toibin explains to Eithne Farry how he became a writer and how ballads inspire his stories.

Amazon.co.uk (AM) How old were you when you realised that you wanted to write?

Colm Toibin (CT) Very young, I would have had the idea lurking in my head from an early age. There were a lot of books in the house, my father was interested in local history and my mother in poetry. And I suppose there was a sense in the Sixties that your could be whatever you wanted to be, from being a priest to a doctor. And of course, if you could be a priest or a doctor, you could also be a writer.

AM Did you start with the intention of being a novelist?

CT I made various efforts along the way. At school I wrote poetry. And I wrote poetry throughout university, but it didn't work out at all and I just stopped. I didn't write anything except letters home from Spain. Then I started journalism. Irish journalism was being deeply affected by what was happening in American journalism and you were always trying to out Dideon Joan Dideon and out Wolfe Tom Wolfe. I worked on In Dublin, which still exists but has gone soft porn, it had listings as its spine and then around that we wrote 6,000 word articles.

AM Was being a journalist helpful?

CT Magazine journalism gives you all the tricks of fiction. Endings, openings, stopping, starting. You deal with story and you are absolutely reader-shaped. You had to catch the reader.

AM So when you're writing do you have a reader in mind?

CT If I had one, it would be a woman in her fifties, in the Irish Midlands, whose children were more or less grown up, whose husband was busy and who had learned an awful lot from her children. Therefore she was into everything, she used novels as a window onto the world and she would judge novels in the same way other people might judge horses. That would be my ideal reader, someone who is utterly open-minded and experienced.

AM Although you're an Irish writer, much of your work is partly set in other countries, in the Pyrenees, in Argentina. What drew you to travelling?

CT Ireland is a bit like Cuba, if you can get off the island every so often you're much happier. I love the idea of just being able to wander around. I used to love the business of just sitting in a square in Lithuania and then going into the Aeroflot office and heading off for Kiev. These days I go a festival somewhere and it's all very nice, very lovely, but I'd like to go back to just wandering around without having to give a reading the next day.

AM Which was the first country that you lived in after you left Ireland?

CT Spain. I arrived in Barcelona in September 1975, to the heat and Mediterranean light. I just couldn't believe it. I've never had that same shock again, but I still remember the shock of walking through the most beautiful place that has ever been, the shadows and the light. Henry James's father said he wanted to bring the James's back to Europe because he wanted to feel that they were having a sensuous education. The Christian brothers and the way you were brought up in Ireland didn't make you feel that a sensuous education was important. I got my first intimations of what a sensuous education might be like when I read Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises, (the sentences were so tough and modern). So I went to Spain as soon as I could. I was 20 when I arrived to stay and I got a sensuous education there, thank you very much. If anybody was panting for a sensuous education it was me.

AM Was it because you felt restrained at home in Ireland?

CT No, no, no. I never felt that, and finding a place where no-one else felt it either. Oh ... .!

AM Was Barcelona a hedonist heaven then?

CT I've never been good at taking drugs. I've been drinking and done bits and pieces of other stuff, but I'm not a big druggy. And the rock and roll part of the thing? Well I'm not even into rock and roll that much either; probably just the sex then. Sex, drugs and rock and roll? I'll have the sex please. I spent three years in Barcelona and I read infinite amounts of books, I went to concerts twice or three times a week. I went on every march and demonstration and I went out every night. You don't realise that life won't be like this, you don't even think about it, you just do it. It was a marvellous time. It's only afterwards you realise "Fuck, that was a marvellous time" and that you won't have it again.

AM You mentioned Hemmingway, who else has been an inspiration to you?

CT I read Lawrence's Women in Love when I was about 17 and certainly there was a time in my life when Birkin and Ursula were living presences, although I'd be afraid to go back and read him now. I think that sort of sensuality is in The Story of the Night. And the film maker Bergman, he's all over my books.

AM For the quality of stillness?

CT I'm more interested in his way of trying to deal with Northern weather and the Northern soul. The long winters where people are locked into themselves and the landscapes. I also discovered Elizabeth Bishop fairly early on and she's all over The Heather Blazing, in the way that so much is left out.

AM Would you say it was true that all of your books deal with people who have built walls around their emotional lives?

CT Yes, that's what the novels are about. What really interests me is non bravery. I always say to myself, "hold on a minute now, are you doing something so obvious that the reader will yawn." If it is obvious, STOP IT. I don't want to teach you anything, the issue for me is to make the reader not forget what the characters have been through. No big thing is going to happen, it's always going to be dull.

AM There is a real sense of melancholy and absence in all your novels. Are you like that?

CT When I started out writing I would have considered myself to be quite happy. I'm not a sad boy, but the books are full of terrible melancholy. I've learned about it from writing the books. If I had known all this about myself before I started I probably would have gone into serious therapy instead of writing.

AM Why are you attracted to absences?

CT I wrote a bit about it in the title chapter of my book The Sign of the Cross. It's all about doing therapy and finding that my own father's death is blocked inside me and I haven't managed to release it. When somebody dies instantly, and my father died when I was twelve, you don't know at what point you're okay or when you're not. You find out years later, in strange ways, by doing therapy or by writing books.

AM TB is in all your earlier books.

CT That doomed business, yeah. That doomed male in the family, unable to cope with life and unable to cope with illness. It's there in all the books, isn't it?

AM But in this book the young man, Declan, is dying from an AIDS related illness.

CT Obviously it is something I'm interested in, the drama surrounding that. But he almost doesn't exist in the book, the other five characters are so interested in the sound of their own voices, that he is just fading slowly away from them. He's the son that you often get in Ireland and in other places too, the youngest one who everybody loves and who just basks in that love and can do anything he likes. Declan doesn't tell his family that he's ill because he doesn't want to disappoint them. You're meant to feel for him, without really knowing him.

AM Before you start writing do you always know exactly what is going to happen?

CT I have it all in my head, it's just a question of getting the bloody thing down. The Blackwater Lightship was easier because I made the decision very early on that the richness and the colour would be in the dialogue. You wouldn't say "Fuck that's an amazing sentence", you wouldn't even notice the prose and therefore it was more likely to get into your system. Towards the end of the book I was using music, Wagner, to push myself because I hadn't quite worked out Chapter 7. But almost without exception every scene, every moment, was already there in my head.

AM Do you always listen to music when you're writing?

CT Not when I'm writing, but I listen to music all the time. Now that I'm older I'm down to two things, chamber music and ballads. You can get a lot from one those four verse songs, a whole story. With a novel you should be able to produce what happens in the novel in those 12 lines: "It was early in the spring, when Helen was a-waiting and they came and told her her brother was a-dying ... The sea went in, the sea went out. That was the summer that Declan was a-dying." The plot should be like a ballad.

AM Does it matter where you write your books?

CT I don't write at home, ever. I rewrite at home but the first draft is always done in a strange room. It's that you need to pack your bags and GO. And work as though it were a very special time, time that must be used fruitfully and carefully. So there must be a strange room and there must be journey to a strange room. That sounds really pretentious! Most of The Heather is Blazing was written in Budapest, in a hotel beside the railway station, this one was written in The Pyrenees and at Yaddo, the writers colony, in America.

AM What was that like?

CT I was writing about Declan's death when I was there, the darkest bits that I couldn't really face myself. I wrote it in long hand, with a cheap biro and a cheap pen, which somehow made it easier. And it was so good to go into dinner after all that and hear the latest jokes, the stories from the day. The company was good, other writers and painters and I never laughed half so much, I enjoyed it a lot. And Americans are so polite, no-one ever broke a rule, they were all so law-abiding and decent and clean. They were all washed and they were polite at 8.20. Now in Ireland you'll get one or the other, but you'll never, ever get both together.

AM Are you nostalgic for Ireland?

CT I feel nostalgic about time passing, I mean it's a terrible business, we should protest about it. We should protest about the whole bloody business. In nature things can flower again, but we don't.

AM Not unless cryogenics sorts it all out for us.

CT Yes, but flowering again isn't possible because of knowledge. They'll never be able to do anything about that.

AM Do you think you've said everything you have to say about longing and loss?

CT I have a few books coming now. You want loss and longing? You'll have loss and longing! I've only just started.