HOMOSEXUALITY - John Banville - [ 06/04/02 ]

From the tone in which he relates the incident in the introduction to Love in a Dark Time, it is apparent that Tóibín was shocked by the suggestion, and with justification, surely. What, one wonders, would have been the reaction of O'Hagan, presumably a heterosexual, if an editor had approached him to write a pamphlet about his sexuality? Of course, the cases are different; homosexuality is still a controversial issue in Western society, particularly in the light of the AIDS epidemic. Tóibín, as readers will know, was relatively late in "coming out" - in fact, at the time of the LRB proposal he had only written the first chapter of his novel, Story of the Night, in which he dealt directly with homosexuality for the first time. "My sexuality," he writes in the introduction here, "like Richard's in that novel, was something about which part of me remained uneasy, timid and melancholy. I told [O'Hagan] I couldn't do it. I had nothing polemical and personal, or even long and serious to say on the subject."

In their cunning, however, O'Hagan and the LRB found a way to get Tóibín to write, if not about his own sexuality, then about homosexuality in general, by giving him books to review about or by gay writers, so that "between 1994 and 2000, I found myself writing constantly on the subject, not of the idea or the theory [the theory?], of homosexuality for the paper, but of the work and lives of homosexuals". He has now assembled these extended reviews - some of them run to many thousands of words - along with a couple of other pieces dealing, loosely, with the same topic, and made of them an honest, stimulating, perceptive, and attractively subdued collection which, even if only by default, constitutes something very like an overview of what it is to be homosexual in what, despite increasingly enlightened attitudes, remains for many gay people an impenetrably dark time.

For all his stated unease, timidity and melancholy in regard to his own sexuality, Tóibín is quietly insistent that the "gay" life is as viable as the "straight"; one cannot help wishing that better terms might be found - not all homosexuals are blessed with the quality of gaiety, and many heterosexuals are very crooked indeed - and in a rare surge of almost-anger, in a review of Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde, he gives a firm rebuttal to Ellmann's contention that between Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas "money was the stamp and seal of their love":

In most societies, most gay people go through adolescence believing that the fulfilment of physical desire would not be matched by emotional attachment. For straight people, the eventual matching of the two is part of the deal, a happy aspect of normality. But if this occurs for gay people, it is capable of taking on an extraordinarily powerful emotional force, and the resulting attachment, even if the physical part fizzles out, or even if the relationship makes no sense to the outside world, is likely to be fierce and enduring.

In this context, Tóibín gently chides James Baldwin for basing the narrative of his early novel, Giovanni's Room, on a crime: "To place a murder . . . at the centre of his gay plot was to do to homosexuals what he had attacked \ Wright for doing to black people - adding impetus to the popular notion that they were alarming". Baldwin was, indeed, like so many other homosexual writers and writers about homosexuality, falling into the convention that to be gay is to be in some sense criminal, or at least a miscreant. Writing in the 1950s about the difficulty of finding a publisher for Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov pointed out, in his disdainfully jocular way, that among publishers at that time there were three themes that were utterly taboo: paedophilia, happy and successful miscegenation, and the possibility that an atheist might live a contented and useful life and "die in his sleep at the age of 106"; the homophobic Nabokov might have added a fourth taboo: lifelong love and loyalty between a homosexual couple.

Of course, many homosexuals gloried, and still glory, in the notion of themselves as outlaws, renegades, wild affirmers of authenticity against the grey conformities of the "breeders". Tóibín's approach to sexuality is never less than careful, measured; he remarks that the world is replete with images of heterosexuality to the point that no one notices, although "these images are none the less absorbed into the most secret and private part of the self", and that this "hidden part of the gay self remains hungry for such ratifying images . . ." This is a far cry from the banditry of Genet or even the comfy promiscuities of Edmund White. There is no doubting on which side of the electrified fence Tóibín stands: "Soon in the Western world, being gay will no longer involve difficulty and discrimination. In some places, especially cities, this is the case even now, to the extent that the phrase 'post-gay' is slowly becoming current."

Tóibín is as confident of and as enthusiastic for the complete assimilation of gays into the straight world as were, one chillingly realises, Jews in Germany in the century leading up to Hitler. To evoke even the shadow of such a comparison will disturb, perhaps enrage, many homosexuals, but history has shown time and time over the danger of claiming minority status while at the same time demanding full integration among the majority, for the majority, as we know, has a nasty habit, when times turn bad, of looking for and quickly finding a scapegoat in its midst. Tóibín is not naïve, and fully appreciates the ambiguous and troublesome nature of sexual identity. He writes about the American critic, F.O. Matthiessen, a homosexual who nevertheless in his criticism deplored, for instance, Whitman's homosexuality, and the tone of whose writing clearly displays his fear of homosexuality. "This fear," Tóibín insists, "belongs to us all: it is something that almost every gay person has felt at some level, at some age, in some place. The gay past is not pure . . . it is duplicitous and slippery, and it requires a great deal of sympathy and understanding."

Tóibín is deeply concerned with and attentive to that "gay past". Acknowledging that, trawl as we may through the works of, say, Gogol or Kafka, and finding there "a hidden world of signs and moments, fears and prejudices", we yet cannot be sure that what we have found is incontrovertible evidence of this or that sexual orientation. But why, anyway, he asks, should we bother? Why should it matter if Kafka or Gogol were dwellers of the closet? He answers his own rhetorical questions with firm conviction: "It matters because as gay readers and writers become more visible and confident, and gay politics more settled and serious, gay history becomes a vital element in gay identity, just as Irish history does in Ireland, or Jewish history among Jewish people." This seems true and, once stated, self-evident. Yet a certain uneasiness lingers. Is being homosexual the same as being Irish, at least in Ireland, or being Jewish, at least in Israel? Gore Vidal, who has some knowledge in these matters, insists there are no homosexuals, only individuals who prefer homosexual to heterosexual sex; he has even coined a term, "homosexualist", for such persons. If this is so, is it permissible even to speak, as so many do nowadays, of a "gay community"?

Tóibín treats these and many other questions with confidence and authority, both of which attributes are only strengthened by the moderation of his tone and the depth of his compassion. He writes with rare tenderness of figures as disparate as Elizabeth Bishop and Francis Bacon, Thomas Mann and Roger Casement, Thom Gunn and Pedro Almodóvar. At the close he returns to Ireland, with a review contrasting Mary Kenny's Goodbye to Catholic Ireland and Éibhear Walshe's ground-breaking study Sex, Nation and Dissent in Irish Writing. It is clear from Mary Kenny's book, Tóibín writes, that for all she may wish it farewell, Catholic Ireland is still very much with us, and he commends Walshe for reminding students and readers that "within the monolith, or not far away from it, there were individuals who had other things on their minds".

Colm Tóibín is one such individual, who not only has other things on his mind, but keeps his mind alertly trained on other things, to our benefit.