Biography of Colm Toibin

Quote of the Month

"When Helen went back to the bedroom, Declan was having cramps again, this time more severe. While waiting for the next attack, he mumbled and muttered words which she could not make out. But as Lily wiped his face and forehead and held his hand, and talked to him softly, he began to call out under his breath and, when the next attack came, Helen for the first time understood what he was saying. He was saying: 'Mammy, Mammy, help me, Mammy.'
Helen wanted to leave the room; she felt she was in the way. Declan's tone when he spoke was abject, childlike, desperate as he called out again, 'Mammy, Mammy, help me.' Lily whispered to him words which Helen could not hear.
Helen tiptoed out of the room, and when she told Paul in the kitchen what was happening in the bedroom, tears came into her eyes.
'He's been wanting to say that for a long time,' Paul said, 'or something like it. It'll be a big relief for him.' "

(from 'The Blackwater Lightship', 1999, p. 259)

Biography of Colm Toibin

Perhaps Colm Toibin had been having dreams of Katherine Proctor and her difficult journey towards reconciliation for years before ‘The South’ appeared in 1990; ten years later, when he talks about his novels he sounds almost like a mother talking of her children, remembering the time of their gestation, the things seen while carrying each child, knowing how this sight shaped its coming to wholeness. ‘You know, it starts in your head and it just grows’, he says. ‘Before you work, you have them fully in your mind. I went through South America on trains with Eamon Redmond (the protagonist of his second novel, ‘The Heather Blazing’) in my mind, all day, every day. I didn’t write a word, just had the character in my head. So by the time I started to work, that was all done’.

Those who watched as he produced his acclaimed first novel must have wondered where he got the time to nurture characters; by 1990, Tóibín was one of Ireland’s best-known journalists and current affairs commentators, having quickly moved up the ranks on his return, in 1979, from a sojourn in Spain, where he had spent the four years following his degree in English and History from University College, Dublin. After a time as features editor of In Dublin, he became editor of the highly-regarded Magill; he was also a regular contributor to the Sunday Independent, and in 1984 the Supreme Court ruled in his favour in a case concerning press freedom.

In 1987, he published his first two works of non-fiction; the first of these, ‘Martyrs and Metaphors’, was part of a series of pamphlets published by the Raven Arts Press to revive an ancient Dublin tradition going back to the ‘Drapier’s Letters’ of Swift. The publishers hoped that the series would provide “a forum for a retrospective look at our past, an examination of our present condition and blueprints towards our possible futures”. The brief was right up Tóibín’s street; indeed, in the pamphlet he set out themes and theories which would later be subjected to imaginative exploration in his novels. Not least among these was the idea that Ireland lacked a unified sense of history, that the past was understood only in fragments, and that this bore interesting consequences for national identity: reading the six failed insurrections of Irish history as six disjointed narratives, six stories or poems, he saw “no connection between the stories in the fiction we have been given as our history, no continuity and no legacy.” And this bore interesting consequences for national identity. “We were left…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.”

But with ‘The South’, which won the Irish Times / Aer Lingus Prize for Literature in 1990, Tóibín began to address a need which had long shadowed him; he has described how, like Katherine, he was driven by the urge to create something more like art, to invent his own names, his own stories. “It’s almost exactly the same motivation as if you thought you had a serious singing voice,” he put it in a 1999 interview. “And you’re at a party where other people were singing, and you watched someone else sing and you think – if there was a break I could come in. You want to do it, and you want the people to listen to it. It’s that you’d love to sing too.” With ‘The South’, Tóibín found his singing voice; in places, he seemed already to be nearing perfect pitch.

Intriguingly, his first protagonist is on the run from just those patterns of continuity and legacy which he had perceived to be lacking in Irish identity; the responsibilities of historical and cultural placement, of language, of lineage, of loyalties unwished-for and unobserved. But Katherine Proctor is a different sort of Irishwoman, and in truth she is fleeing the breakdown of those patterns as much as their restrictions. She is the child of a dying class, the old Protestant Ascendancy which, by the 1950s in Ireland, remained only in the charred ruins of grand estates, in the few heirlooms salvaged or looted as souvenirs, in the memories of those who had watched helplessly as the last trappings of their heritage went up in flames. A generation before her, Lois, the discontented heroine of Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Last September’ had secretly craved the burning of the Big House which smothered her with its dusty furniture and its lifeless gentility; unable to relate to her country, she longs to travel, “to feel real”. Katherine Proctor feels similar longings, but she is not the Lois who emerges from art school. More brooding, more introverted, impossibly more distant from those around her, Katherine carries a further generation of “damage”; in these novels, history sets down its burdens in uneven layers, rendering the individual consciousness lonely, different, fundamentally unchangeable, like sedimented rock. The past in his writing, Tóibín has said, is “almost like the band of a radio, where if you move quickly along it, you get all sorts of different sounds. And you can play with that idea, that sometimes something really matters, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Katherine brought with her the themes, the things that would really matter to the characters of all Tóibín’s novels: the uncertain self; the urge to escape yet the need to belong; the question of community; the family, its inescapability; childhood, its vulnerability; memory and the desperate attempt to be rid of it. On the run, having abandoned her home, her husband and her young son, it is purely for herself that she has come here. “I am absorbed in myself all the time”, she muses, “Sometimes I don’t see things around me. I think about myself all the time. What I’m going to do now; how in God’s name I’m going to survive.”

But everywhere, too, is the knowledge that what seems external and alien has actually become internal and ingrained. Like the TB in Wexford which has gone unnoticed by Katherine Proctor, holed away in her Protestant mansion, like the strokes which distort the voices of Eamon Redmond’s father and his wife, like the virus which devastates the gay community of the 1980s and the 1990s from Argentina to Ireland, the forces which destroy lives emerge from within those lives; never can Tóibín’s characters know with confidence everything that is hidden in the depths of their own selves. Because their creator draws on the Jamesian idea of portraying the world as it is experienced by one central consciousness, neither characters nor the readers will gain complete knowledge, find easy answers. He likes it that way. “Certainly, relationships are always fraught,” he has said of his novels. “Because when you get access to one mind and the one mind is very uneasy in the world, and very uneasy about relationships, mortality, memory, almost everything, yes about history… the books become a sort of study of unease”.

And it is true that his characters are never truly at ease in their worlds, or in their relationships to those around them. Eamon Redmond, the protagonist of ‘The Heather Blazing’, which won the Encore award for the best second novel of its year in 1992, makes a career out of casting judgements on the lives of others, but he is not always sure of what he does; and in his own life, he is even less sure - he has not listened carefully enough, he has placed himself at a deliberate emotional distance, he has failed to remember when memory is the most important thing of all. Tóibín does not cast moral aspersions; rather, he creates characters who are ultimately responsible for their own futures. "I think it’s probably true that the characters are not necessarily good people, in the sense that characters of Jane Austen can be very good," he says. "Even in contemporary fiction, you often are allowed presume that the main protagonist is essentially a good person, whose side you’re on. But in my novels I think it’s always slightly to the side; the characters are capable of doing something either selfish or wrong."

And so Tóibín has created an ensemble of characters who will turn away from responsibility, who will neglect those who need them, who will indulge their own instincts and desires first, who will act on a whim and point the finger of blame elsewhere. “I don’t think any of the characters is there as a model for young people”, Tóibín says wryly. Yet he admits that the mistakes they make are not all of their own doing; for each of his protagonists, there is a sense of loss, a memory of early trauma, of grief, which just will not go away. The freedom to choose is theirs, but it is heavily shackled by circumstance, by history both private and public. “The characters I’m interested in are determined. They have to struggle against something they don’t quite recognise,” he explains. “The novels are entirely Freudian, in the sense that they take on board the idea that a child’s consciousness is a deeply vulnerable and woundable object and that damage done there is a very difficult damage to unravel.”

It is when he explores that damage, when he brings his characters through scenes from their childhood, lays bare the wounds they have carried with them into adulthood, and goes back to the source of those wounds – the savage burning of a sanctuary, the raw devastation of a parent’s inexplicable illness and death – that Tóibín’s prose is at its most unforgettable. Katherine, Eamon, Richard, Helen; they are all haunted by a sense of early abandonment, of the memory of unbearable grief in childhood. Tóibín himself lost his own father, a teacher and historian, when he was twelve years old, and he writes unforgettably about the loss in ‘The Sign of the Cross’ (1994). But, he stresses, this original trauma is simply the motivation for a story, not the story itself. “That’s the beginning of the problem,” he stresses. “It’s what you do with that that’s interesting. It determines the problem, but not the drama of how the problem is worked out.” As for the use of autobiographical material in fiction, he says he has “old -fashioned” ideas; he is adamant that a sharp distinction be drawn between drama and real life.

The themes explored in his last two novels, ‘The Story of the Night’ (1996) and ‘The Blackwater Lightship’, barely on the shelves of bookshops before being nominated for the Booker Prize in 1999, saw Tóibín negotiate this distinction between fact and fiction. As he deals with the loss of the father or the devastation of the HIV virus, his depictions are vivid and frighteningly real, but they do not act as a mirror to his own life. Regardless of what really happened, Tóibín is concerned with the art of making stories. “It’s just a question of trying to imagine,” he says. “The skill is exactly like painting. Painting, realistic painting is about creating verisimilitude, and just simply… imagining; it’s like trying to do what Vermeer did, and have people say, ‘God, this must have been a real scene’.”

He has little respect for writers who allow autobiography to masquerade as fiction, describing how he felt “outraged and offended” to discover that the novels of Saul Bellow were replete with scenes straight from the life of the author. Neither is writing there as a sort of therapy for the author, or a purging of the self; the presence of the authorial self in the work, he argues, is something much more subtle and elusive than any of these forms will allow. “The well in which you search for water is the well of the self, and there really isn’t any other one,” he admits. “The self has infinite numbers of guises. But it has to be carefully guarded.”

The business of the past is a crucial one for Tóibín. Throughout his novels he deals with the tension between versions of the self with relation to that past. Often, an official, historically validated sense of identity, an assumed identity which assures the individual’s place in the world, will be closely tied to institutions, but behind this accountable role, the personal self suffers a profound alienation from public history, and struggles alone to survive beyond the security of an established structure. ‘The Blackwater Lightship’, Tóibín says, is the only one of his novels not to have “a sort of public background”, set as it is in private spaces beyond the eyes of Church and State, “but it does, in fact, have a deeper structure.” The struggle in this book, he says, the imagery, “is constantly between belief and non-belief”; in contrast to the grandmother’s conviction that prayers will help the dying Declan, his sister Helen stares out to sea and feels certain that rules supreme, “that it did not matter whether there were people or not”. Meanwhile, the protagonist of ‘The Heather Blazing’ is tied to an official past by the name he has been given; tied to a whole system of beliefs and values which determine his life, to a certain extent, even before he was born. “I’m called after Eamon de Valera”, he boasts as a child, while neighbours and relatives who watch him grow up brand him “a real Redmond”. Often it seems that he has been born less into a family than into a political party. And yet, for all the apparatus of nationalist ideology which surrounds him, for all the dates in the fight for Irish freedom which he can recite, Eamon has no sense of an authentic personal history; he knows little about his mother, who died when he was a baby, he understands little about his father’s involvement in the War of Independence. Even the dispossessed Katherine Proctor is more certain of an inheritance than Eamon; the distaste with which she regards her son’s conversion to Catholicism confirms that she is rooted, despite her best efforts, in something like a tradition. But while Eamon continues to represent ‘the party that respects the Church in his public role, casting judgement on a pregnant teenager, in his private life he has rejected the beliefs of his childhood, he lives without faith:

“Somewhere here in the middle of the night with the moths and the midges drawn to the window, the idea of God seemed more clearly absurd to him than ever before; the idea of a being whose mind put order on the universe, who watched over things, and whose presence gave the world a morality which was not based on self-interest, seemed beyond belief.”

Between 1990 and 1994, Tóibín travelled through the towns and cities which form the bastions of Catholic Europe; he followed processions, took part in pilgrimages, he talked to theologians and bishops, he saw the Pope in his native land, he stood in a Scottish football stadium and inhaled the fumes of the most vicious sectarian hatred. Tóibín was fascinated by religion, its curious manifestations, and he produced a colourful, powerful, stunningly honest collection of meditations on his journey, ‘The Sign of the Cross’, published in 1994. Richard Tyrell in the Independent described the book as being close to “an act of faith in the evocative power of the written word”, and there are certainly moments where Tóibín’s narrative seems to ascend to revelatory heights. But this is the language of epiphany, rather than the experience of it, and while religion, and religious beliefs and fears, have shaped the world of each of Tóibín’s novels, that world is a fundamentally godless one, in which only the irrationality of nature reigns; above all, his protagonists are in awe of the ruthless inhumanity of the sea. That moment in ‘The Blackwater Lightship’ where Helen looks out over the sea and realises its utter indifference to human existence is a moment of angst in the purest form; but this is not the philosophy of Tóibín’s fiction, he says, “and I think you’re entitled to feel that it’s hers only in those moments. Those are moments of absolute blackness.”

He insists that his art is driven by no one philosophy; but the one thing that binds his novels together is the calmness of their endings. They close with images of protection and accepted dependency; with tenderness, fresh trust, and often, with the promise of sleep; they close with the realisation that it matters very much whether there are people or not. Tóibín may cite the fiction of John McGahern as an important influence, but he values “the idea of something ending in a sort of sanctity, in a sort of hushed moment of togetherness. I think it would be very hard to end with anything else, really”.

1999 was a busy year for Tóibín; he followed in his father’s footsteps by writing a concise book of Irish history, ‘The Irish Famine’, and with Carmen Callill he read through thousands of books of fiction published after 1950 to decide on the best two hundred which would form the basis of ‘The Modern Library’. He acted as a judge in the prestigious Hennessy Awards for Fiction, admitting to surprise at the prevailing darkness of the entries. Following the success of ‘The Blackwater Lightship’, Tóibín edited the mammoth ‘Penguin Book of Irish Fiction’. In 2000, he judged the International Impac Literary Awards, contributed a long piece on the Irish writer, Brian Moore, to ‘The London Review of Books’ and edited ‘The Irish Times Book of Favourite Irish Poems’. He is a regular contributor to cultural and political forums on Irish television and radio. A member of Aosdána, he lives in the Georgian townhouse he bought five years ago in the centre of Dublin, and spends much time travelling in Europe and America; but he is frequently to be seen striding down Grafton Street with a look of perplexity on his face, carrying his next generation of characters with him wherever he goes.

Author: Belinda McKeon

Published by: Local Ireland