This article originally appeared in Trinity News.
Nearly five years ago, on the way to a first date with a girl who would soon after become my girlfriend, I saw Colm Tóibín, dressed in a long black coat, turning the corner at the top of Grafton Street in the direction of Baggot Street. When I got the pub, I told the girl that I had seen Colm Tóibín and that, noticing that I was carrying a copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tóibín had looked up at me and said something like: “Oh Eliot, is it? Very good!” In fact, he walked past me without a word.
What I had told was a completely unnecessary lie – the first of many I was to tell the same girl in the two years that followed. My arrival at Tóibín’s house to interview him about The Empty Family – his new collection of stories, in which the poetry of T.S. Eliot just happens to make a minor appearance – represents a small, personal exorcism.
It is now twenty years since Tóibín published his first novel, The South. Set in Barcelona, where Tóibín moved to immediately after graduating from UCD, it won plaudits from such luminaries as Don DeLillo and John Banville. Since then, he has published a further five novels, including The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, all to more or less critical acclaim.
After The Master, his fictional portrait of Henry James and arguably his finest work, Tóibín published a book of short stories entitled Mothers and Sons. It is a form in which he thrives. Now, in the wake of Brooklyn, yet another novel of huge critical and popular acclaim, he has turned again to the short story. A pattern seems to be forming. “The first thing you’ve got to understand,” he says, “is that short stories are of no commercial value. But working with something that is of no commercial value is actually very useful. There’s a great purity about it.”
The Empty Family is a collection of nine stories that are each marked by some concern with the notion of connectedness and disconnectedness. Though the majority of its stories were commissioned and written in the last three or four years, Tóibín underlines the fact that some of these pieces were conceived a very long time ago indeed.
“I’d had a sentence for The New Spain since 1988. I had always planned for it to be a novel – but the only image that stayed with me fully was that the mother would put a chain around the fridge.” Going back even further, the story Silence, depicting the secret affair Lady Gregory had with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, has its roots in an entry marked ‘January 23d, 1894’ in the notebooks of Henry James – a document full of unwritten James stories which Tóibín plans to pinch from again.
Other stories here seem intensely autobiographical. The protagonist in The Pearl Fishers, for instance, is a gay writer from Wexford, living at an address quite close to the one I visited Tóibín at for this interview. But Tóibín is quick to point out that, though some of the details in these stories may seem autobiographical, their inclusion has more to do with being able to write better about the things you know.
“I could have put him living in a fictional space,” he says, “but I know what that space is like, walking up Kildare Street or Dawson Street. And once the word ‘murderous’ occurred to describe all those buildings filled with ad agencies and auctioneers, that was it. I mean, I’m not sure if the word even slightly accurate. But it still struck me and so it stuck.”
He stops to utter the word once more – “muhrrr-derous” – as if to prove its authenticity. “And so I brought him further along down Pembroke Road,” he continues, “because I have an idea of what that walk is like, which I wouldn’t have if you’d asked me to take him down the North Strand or Dorset Street. You’ve got a repository of images that you can raid.”
The protagonist in Barcelona, 1975 seems to be Tóibín again – a young gay man, who, on finishing his exams at the age of twenty, takes, “the boat first to Holyhead, the night train to London and then the plane – my first plane journey – to Barcelona.” The character subsequently discovers himself sexually and ends up partaking in several gay orgies. “There’s an element of playfulness to it as well. Somebody reading this book of stories in particular could think: ‘Holy fuck! This guy is crazy.’ It would take a lot to explain to somebody just how dull your life is instead.”
Answering a question, Tóibín will often rest his hand ponderously on top of his bald head, his fingers spread out across his scalp as if some strange sea creature were making its home there. Though this meeting resembles it in no way apart from this very minor detail, I cannot help but think of the half-lit scene in Apocalypse Now, where Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) meets the deranged clarity of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) for the first time. Willard looks feebly across the room at Kurtz who – watch it again, if you can’t recall – spreads his fingers across his moistened scalp in the exact same way. Holy fuck! Maybe this guy is crazy.
“You’ve got to raid memory a lot of the time,” he confirms, “and then when memory doesn’t work, you raid imagination. But once you’re working, you’re involved in self-annihilation and self-suppression. The self who might answer the telephone or give interviews to Trinity News ceases to exist. It’s simply not there. The page is blank. It’s not a mirror – if you want a mirror, go and look into one. The page is blank. What you’re doing is filling it. The self might emerge metaphorically or using masks, but what you’re really interested in doing is finding a tone or rhythm.”
The tone and rhythm he finds embodies his narrative’s concern for shadows and half-light. Indeed, the space between what is said and almost-said, what is seen and almost-seen, what is understood and almost-understood plays an elemental role in The Empty Family, as it does in much of his other work. “It seems to me quite satisfying to create images of the light being grey or something or somehow of the end of the day being what they call in Italian l’ora ambigua – the ambiguous hour – when light is ambiguous. In other words, I create a world of shadows rather than a world of meaning. And within that world of shadows, a narrative of shadows in which much is unclear, much is unsaid, much is left in silence and much is half-understood.”
There are only two things in these narratives that come through purely: music and sex.
Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, the last songs of Schubert and the music of a (fictional, so far as I can tell) Pakistani band called Wooee seem to cast light on the half-light and draw truth from the half-truths in these stories.
For all that is merely suggested in The Empty Family, it is also a very explicit book. Three of the stories in The Empty Family contain graphic depictions of homosexual sex. In The Pearl Fishers, for example, Tóibín writes: “I remembered that nothing made him happier when he had had a few drinks than to have me lie on my back while he knelt with his back to me and his knees on either side of my torso. He would bend as I pushed my tongue hard up into his arsehole while he sucked my cock and licked my balls.”
When his last book, The Pregnant Widow, was published, Martin Amis spoke quite a lot about the impossibility of writing good sex. “Novels can do bad sex, or unreal sex, cartoonish sex, insincere sex,” he wrote. “But no one’s ever written well about significant sex.” By the time the writer puts down the first details of the act, Amis believes that it has already become non-universal – too particular, too peculiar. It becomes “embarrassing for the reader and impossible for the writer.”
“It’s difficult to be prescriptive about this,” Tóibín replies. “I think with something like sex, you just have to be very precise. No metaphors, no similes. Just describe a set of actions. I’m not interested in society in the way Martin Amis probably is. I’m not interested in universality. I’m interested in psychology – the psychology of one.”
“But with regard to gay people, the sort of sex you have and how you remember it is surrounded by so much emotion that it’s almost not sexual when you’re describing it. It has more to do with fundamental areas of transgression. Writing it down has a sort of power.”
“But every person’s experience of sex for the first time or with somebody special for the first time is so memorable that it’s really very important. It has nothing to do with gay sex actually. If you’re trying to render truthfully what it’s like to be somebody, their memory of that is probably very important to them.”
“At the same time, with the gay thing, there’s an element of mischief involved. With Barcelona, 1975, I was aware that this had not been done before. You know, instead of saying, ‘they had a really good time; all the things they did were great,’ I wanted to portray just how difficult and embarrassing and strange it is to do these things, especially if you’re an Irish guy fresh from the provinces.”
When Tóibín returned originally from Barcelona, he worked as a journalist for periodicals like Magill, In Dublin and Hibernia. I ask him what sort of effect journalism had as a training ground to his fiction. “Well I made my living that way, which you couldn’t really do now,” he tells me almost apologetically. “It was essential, too, in terms of learning to type and so on. But all of us were looking to America for people who we wanted to – not necessarily to model ourselves on – but to understand in some way. Writers like Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul: these figures writing for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, who were putting as much work into the openings and endings of their pieces as they were into their fiction.” But his intention was never to stay in journalism; he always wanted to write novels. “I never worked in a newsroom. And if I ever came across people who did, I found them very strange people indeed.”
Though he has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker, he has never won it and views the prize as something primarily for those strange people who work in newsrooms. “It’s worth remembering that Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh achieved great fame and huge audiences without the Booker Prize. And, if you think of images of them, there was something about the dignity of those two which mightn’t have been there if they had constantly been wheeled in to make victory speeches for this and that.” Imagine, I suggest, what a nightmare Waugh would have been if he’d won something like the Booker. “Imagine,” counters Tóibín, “what a nightmare he’d have been if he’d lost to somebody like Rose MacCauley or Anthony Powell.”
Speaking of Graham Greene, when the Paris Review came to his house to interview him in 1953, he spoke to the two journalists for about twenty minutes before essentially kicking them out. After moreover an hour talking to Tóibín, the interview draws to a close, not because I no longer feel welcome – in fact, I feel the complete opposite – but because I have quite simply run out of questions.
As I turn to walk out the door, Tóibín promises that, next time he sees me walking down the street, he’ll say: “Hey, that’s an interesting book you’ve got there!’”
“Then,” I reply, “I’ll make sure it’s interesting.”
Nearly five years ago, on the way to a first date with a girl who would soon after become my girlfriend, I saw Colm Tóibín, dressed in a long black coat, turning the corner at the top of Grafton Street in the direction of Baggot Street. When I got the pub, I told the girl that I had seen Colm Tóibín and that, noticing that I was carrying a copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tóibín had looked up at me and said something like: “Oh Eliot, is it? Very good!” In fact, he walked past me without a word.
What I had told was a completely unnecessary lie – the first of many I was to tell the same girl in the two years that followed. My arrival at Tóibín’s house to interview him about The Empty Family – his new collection of stories, in which the poetry of T.S. Eliot just happens to make a minor appearance – represents a small, personal exorcism.
It is now twenty years since Tóibín published his first novel, The South. Set in Barcelona, where Tóibín moved to immediately after graduating from UCD, it won plaudits from such luminaries as Don DeLillo and John Banville. Since then, he has published a further five novels, including The Heather Blazing, The Blackwater Lightship and The Master, all to more or less critical acclaim.
After The Master, his fictional portrait of Henry James and arguably his finest work, Tóibín published a book of short stories entitled Mothers and Sons. It is a form in which he thrives. Now, in the wake of Brooklyn, yet another novel of huge critical and popular acclaim, he has turned again to the short story. A pattern seems to be forming. “The first thing you’ve got to understand,” he says, “is that short stories are of no commercial value. But working with something that is of no commercial value is actually very useful. There’s a great purity about it.”
The Empty Family is a collection of nine stories that are each marked by some concern with the notion of connectedness and disconnectedness. Though the majority of its stories were commissioned and written in the last three or four years, Tóibín underlines the fact that some of these pieces were conceived a very long time ago indeed.
“I’d had a sentence for The New Spain since 1988. I had always planned for it to be a novel – but the only image that stayed with me fully was that the mother would put a chain around the fridge.” Going back even further, the story Silence, depicting the secret affair Lady Gregory had with the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, has its roots in an entry marked ‘January 23d, 1894’ in the notebooks of Henry James – a document full of unwritten James stories which Tóibín plans to pinch from again.
Other stories here seem intensely autobiographical. The protagonist in The Pearl Fishers, for instance, is a gay writer from Wexford, living at an address quite close to the one I visited Tóibín at for this interview. But Tóibín is quick to point out that, though some of the details in these stories may seem autobiographical, their inclusion has more to do with being able to write better about the things you know.
“I could have put him living in a fictional space,” he says, “but I know what that space is like, walking up Kildare Street or Dawson Street. And once the word ‘murderous’ occurred to describe all those buildings filled with ad agencies and auctioneers, that was it. I mean, I’m not sure if the word even slightly accurate. But it still struck me and so it stuck.”
He stops to utter the word once more – “muhrrr-derous” – as if to prove its authenticity. “And so I brought him further along down Pembroke Road,” he continues, “because I have an idea of what that walk is like, which I wouldn’t have if you’d asked me to take him down the North Strand or Dorset Street. You’ve got a repository of images that you can raid.”
The protagonist in Barcelona, 1975 seems to be Tóibín again – a young gay man, who, on finishing his exams at the age of twenty, takes, “the boat first to Holyhead, the night train to London and then the plane – my first plane journey – to Barcelona.” The character subsequently discovers himself sexually and ends up partaking in several gay orgies. “There’s an element of playfulness to it as well. Somebody reading this book of stories in particular could think: ‘Holy fuck! This guy is crazy.’ It would take a lot to explain to somebody just how dull your life is instead.”
Answering a question, Tóibín will often rest his hand ponderously on top of his bald head, his fingers spread out across his scalp as if some strange sea creature were making its home there. Though this meeting resembles it in no way apart from this very minor detail, I cannot help but think of the half-lit scene in Apocalypse Now, where Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) meets the deranged clarity of Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) for the first time. Willard looks feebly across the room at Kurtz who – watch it again, if you can’t recall – spreads his fingers across his moistened scalp in the exact same way. Holy fuck! Maybe this guy is crazy.
“You’ve got to raid memory a lot of the time,” he confirms, “and then when memory doesn’t work, you raid imagination. But once you’re working, you’re involved in self-annihilation and self-suppression. The self who might answer the telephone or give interviews to Trinity News ceases to exist. It’s simply not there. The page is blank. It’s not a mirror – if you want a mirror, go and look into one. The page is blank. What you’re doing is filling it. The self might emerge metaphorically or using masks, but what you’re really interested in doing is finding a tone or rhythm.”
The tone and rhythm he finds embodies his narrative’s concern for shadows and half-light. Indeed, the space between what is said and almost-said, what is seen and almost-seen, what is understood and almost-understood plays an elemental role in The Empty Family, as it does in much of his other work. “It seems to me quite satisfying to create images of the light being grey or something or somehow of the end of the day being what they call in Italian l’ora ambigua – the ambiguous hour – when light is ambiguous. In other words, I create a world of shadows rather than a world of meaning. And within that world of shadows, a narrative of shadows in which much is unclear, much is unsaid, much is left in silence and much is half-understood.”
There are only two things in these narratives that come through purely: music and sex.
Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, the last songs of Schubert and the music of a (fictional, so far as I can tell) Pakistani band called Wooee seem to cast light on the half-light and draw truth from the half-truths in these stories.
For all that is merely suggested in The Empty Family, it is also a very explicit book. Three of the stories in The Empty Family contain graphic depictions of homosexual sex. In The Pearl Fishers, for example, Tóibín writes: “I remembered that nothing made him happier when he had had a few drinks than to have me lie on my back while he knelt with his back to me and his knees on either side of my torso. He would bend as I pushed my tongue hard up into his arsehole while he sucked my cock and licked my balls.”
When his last book, The Pregnant Widow, was published, Martin Amis spoke quite a lot about the impossibility of writing good sex. “Novels can do bad sex, or unreal sex, cartoonish sex, insincere sex,” he wrote. “But no one’s ever written well about significant sex.” By the time the writer puts down the first details of the act, Amis believes that it has already become non-universal – too particular, too peculiar. It becomes “embarrassing for the reader and impossible for the writer.”
“It’s difficult to be prescriptive about this,” Tóibín replies. “I think with something like sex, you just have to be very precise. No metaphors, no similes. Just describe a set of actions. I’m not interested in society in the way Martin Amis probably is. I’m not interested in universality. I’m interested in psychology – the psychology of one.”
“But with regard to gay people, the sort of sex you have and how you remember it is surrounded by so much emotion that it’s almost not sexual when you’re describing it. It has more to do with fundamental areas of transgression. Writing it down has a sort of power.”
“But every person’s experience of sex for the first time or with somebody special for the first time is so memorable that it’s really very important. It has nothing to do with gay sex actually. If you’re trying to render truthfully what it’s like to be somebody, their memory of that is probably very important to them.”
“At the same time, with the gay thing, there’s an element of mischief involved. With Barcelona, 1975, I was aware that this had not been done before. You know, instead of saying, ‘they had a really good time; all the things they did were great,’ I wanted to portray just how difficult and embarrassing and strange it is to do these things, especially if you’re an Irish guy fresh from the provinces.”
When Tóibín returned originally from Barcelona, he worked as a journalist for periodicals like Magill, In Dublin and Hibernia. I ask him what sort of effect journalism had as a training ground to his fiction. “Well I made my living that way, which you couldn’t really do now,” he tells me almost apologetically. “It was essential, too, in terms of learning to type and so on. But all of us were looking to America for people who we wanted to – not necessarily to model ourselves on – but to understand in some way. Writers like Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul: these figures writing for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, who were putting as much work into the openings and endings of their pieces as they were into their fiction.” But his intention was never to stay in journalism; he always wanted to write novels. “I never worked in a newsroom. And if I ever came across people who did, I found them very strange people indeed.”
Though he has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker, he has never won it and views the prize as something primarily for those strange people who work in newsrooms. “It’s worth remembering that Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh achieved great fame and huge audiences without the Booker Prize. And, if you think of images of them, there was something about the dignity of those two which mightn’t have been there if they had constantly been wheeled in to make victory speeches for this and that.” Imagine, I suggest, what a nightmare Waugh would have been if he’d won something like the Booker. “Imagine,” counters Tóibín, “what a nightmare he’d have been if he’d lost to somebody like Rose MacCauley or Anthony Powell.”
Speaking of Graham Greene, when the Paris Review came to his house to interview him in 1953, he spoke to the two journalists for about twenty minutes before essentially kicking them out. After moreover an hour talking to Tóibín, the interview draws to a close, not because I no longer feel welcome – in fact, I feel the complete opposite – but because I have quite simply run out of questions.
As I turn to walk out the door, Tóibín promises that, next time he sees me walking down the street, he’ll say: “Hey, that’s an interesting book you’ve got there!’”
“Then,” I reply, “I’ll make sure it’s interesting.”
Labels: books, colm toibin, interviews, novelists
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