Eleanor Wachtel: Your hometown of Enniscorthy in County Wexford, Ireland, and the nearby coast where you spent many of your summers: These are the places - the “sacred spaces” of your childhood, as you once put it - that you return to in your fiction. What draws you back there so often and so insistently?
Colm Tóibín: When I said “sacred spaces” of my childhood, I must have been trying to impress someone. Oh God, I can’t believe I said it. I mean, you didn’t make that up.
Wachtel: And then it was published too.
Tóibín I know! They published it without a notice saying “This guy is losing it.” But I wonder if it’s true in certain countries, Ireland being one, where the notion of the state is fragile and somehow invented, that it’s almost a myth, or it’s not there. I almost don’t have an idea of the nation itself. This means the small town in the southeast of Ireland where I am from represents, for me, somewhere absolutely real, tangible, touchable, nameable, and it’s like an anchor. In a novel, if I had characters coming back from America, I’d have no idea what it would be like if they went to Wicklow, which is not very far away from Enniscorthy; Waterford I just wouldn’t know. Basically, I wouldn’t have that anchor in topography. Let’s call it topography as opposed to “landscape of the soul.” In other words, I wouldn’t have a clue where to bring them. I don’t have another town. If you turn from the market square down Slaney Street, I know exactly what shops you will go through or will pass in 1976, which was about the last summer I was there all the time.
Tóibín Am I alone in this? In our housing estate in Enniscorthy - I think there were twenty-four houses - I could take you through who lived in each house. But it’s much worse than that. I could take you through the names of their dogs. This is up to about 1970, which seems very near in some ways, though that’s fifty-four years ago. I could tell you the Lynchs’ dog was Looza, Looza Lynch, and the dog was sandy in colour. There was Buttons; Máire Brennan’s little dog was called Buttons Brennan.
Wachtel: Can you tell me more about growing up in Ireland in the 1950s and early 1960s, the world around you as you experienced it?
Tóibín My father and his brother were part of Fianna Fáil, a political party that has been in power in Ireland, more or less permanently, since 1932. They were also both members of the Catholic Church, meaning they were always raising money for a church or always with some priest, so the full authority of the state and the church was ours. My grandfather took part in the rebellion of 1916 to create the Irish state, and after that my uncle was involved in the civil war. By the time I’m born, we’re running the bloody place. In certain ways, it makes you take everything for granted - ideas of authority. Authority is the church below the church. Somewhere lingering there is the state. We had full access to both, so the idea of being brought up in a place that was in any way colonized, or even post-colonized - those things didn’t really mean anything. The country was economically, of course, very depressed, but my father was associated with that wing of the party that really did want to open up the Irish economy to the World Bank, to the IMF, and to what’s now called global capitalism. But at the time we didn’t have those words.
Wachtel: You apprehended all this as a child?
Tóibín I licked envelopes in the 1964 general election. I would have known the names of the candidates, which I could still recite to you if you want.
Wachtel: No, no, it’s all right. You probably knew the names of their pets as well.
Your father was a teacher, and he died when you were only twelve. What was he like?
Tóibín He was very nice. Over the years, especially in America or Australia or England, someone would come up to me at an event like this, while I’m signing books, and say, Your father taught me in school. It was always lovely. There was a lot of corporal punishment in Ireland, in schools. We all suffered it, but my father didn’t do it. He did other things. He would, I suppose, try to teach students.
Wachtel: You’ve often said that there’s silence between fathers and sons. Was that the case?
Tóibín No. Silence for me was the silence of death. There wasn’t that tension ever.
Wachtel: Your mother was younger than your father and didn’t have the same educational opportunities, but you’ve said she had an appetite for learning. What did she think of your books?
Tóibín First of all, my mother saw my father when he was going out on his bicycle to give a Latin lesson to someone in the countryside. Latin lessons - it’s Ireland! My mother was about fifteen, and when she saw him, someone said to her, “That’s so-and-so, and he’s going out to give a Latin lesson to Nancy Connolly.” Nancy Connolly being someone else in the town; I’d give you her oral history if you wanted, but we’ll just leave it at this. My mother remembered looking at him and saying that for all the things she wanted, she wanted to marry a man who knew Latin. That would be a big reason for marrying someone.
Second of all, unfortunately, there was a local library, which could often do a lot of damage in a small town. My mother, going along the rack, found Saul Bellow, and she took him home, and she read him, and she loved him. She thought he was tremendously clever and smart. His books were always about interesting people doing interesting things. She would say regularly, “I love Saul Bellow. His novels are so fast moving, so smart,” and then she’d look at me. Meaning, your novels are not fast moving and smart. But she never said that. She implied it, which is a thing you can use in a novel. You know, just with her eyes and the whole way she’d look and say, “Saul Bellow, marvellous.”
Wachtel: Your mother, widowed with five children, was the inspiration for your character Nora Webster, from your 2014 novel of the same name. How did she manage?
Tóibín She went back to where she worked before she was married. This is a strange world. It’s Ireland, 1967, before the adding machine. If you don’t have an adding machine in a big company, you have to have a woman whose tots - the word was tot, meaning totting things up - were utterly perfect and without a single mistake. Her great skill was that her tots were considered the best in Enniscorthy, and she did another tot for greyhound racing. You had to work out the odds very, very fast while the betting changed. My mother could do that without a machine.
Wachtel: And you were cooking at home.
Tóibín I was great. I’d get out of Christian doctrine early. I’d stand up, bow, and leave the class to go home and cook dinner. Dinner in Ireland had to be religiously at one o’clock. The idea of dinner in the evening was unheard of. The French did that, maybe.
Wachtel: Your mother taught you to cook?
Tóibín I knew how to boil. She’d leave things to be heated up, but I wouldn’t call it cooking.
Wachtel: When you say “great,” is it just because you got out of school early or -
Tóibín It was really sad. When I say “great” I mean exactly the opposite. I was in the school my father had been a teacher in. I was in the classrooms where he had been teaching. And, well, obviously he was dead. Then I would go home to the house where there was no one, and I would cook the dinner, which my mother had done the year before, when my father was still alive, and it wasn’t a great time at all. I was a housewife, and all the housewives and me were making dinner for all the men who were going to come and eat.
Wachtel: You said those few years after his death really marked you. Your mother went back to work, but how did you manage?
Tóibín I think the great thing about back then - I mean great-not-great - was that no one really knew children had any emotions beyond the ones they displayed. The idea of somebody withholding - they didn’t know anything about that. It was useful if you’re going to be a novelist, but it wasn’t useful in any other way.
Wachtel: I think one critic described it as “the psychic wound from which nearly all [your] fiction stems.”
Tóibín “Psychic wound.” I didn’t say that, did I?
Wachtel: Not you. No. No, you just said it was great.
Tóibín Yes, it was great.
Wachtel: You’ve said the loss of your father was the first thing that came up when you were in therapy.
Tóibín Oh yes. I didn’t find a psychiatrist; I had a friend who was married to one. He kept looking at me and eventually said, “You need to come and see me.” I suppose I was using great when I didn’t mean it so much. The first thing that arose, unexpectedly, was all of the things that happened.
Wachtel: Did you actually turn to writing around the time of his death?
Tóibín In that world, there were all these shadows. My father’s younger brother, who died of tuberculosis in 1940, had written poems in Irish and Gaelic that had been published. You could see them, his name in print. There was always a sense that if he hadn’t died, he would have become a writer. On the other side, my mother had also published poems before she married, and again, you could see them. Even still, I find a book that belonged to my father or my mother, and pasted into the back is a poem by my mother, often with just her initials, printed in one of the national newspapers. So I had all that there as shadow.
In our house, you were meant to study. I don’t know if that happens still, but aged twelve, you get sent into a room, and you spend two hours on your own each evening, and it’s called “Colm is in there studying.” Anyway, I wrote poetry in those evenings, and I did it on my own. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it.
Wachtel: Did it offer you some solace?
Tóibín I was serious about it, but I didn’t know you had to revise poems. I thought you just wrote them, which is what Walt Whitman did, I think. I would try to rhyme and stuff, but I was serious.
Wachtel: Women’s lives are so richly depicted in your fiction. How did it shape you to grow up in a world of women, your mother, your aunts on both sides?
Tóibín They were interesting in a way the men weren’t. The men were boring, and desperate to remain so. My father, his uncle, and some other local politician or the priest could be sitting there talking about a goal scored the previous Sunday by some local fellow. One of them would say, “That was a good goal on Sunday,” and the other would say, “Hmmm.” On the other hand, the women would be upstairs, and my auntie Harriet could have almost bought a winter coat in Dublin. And my mother would say, “What colour was it? Green? Green never suits you.” Then Auntie Maeve would come in, and Auntie Kathleen, and my two sisters, and some neighbour, and they would gather together in a course of discussion about the colour green, tweed versus linen, and eventually one of them would look at me and say, “You, get out.” I would be listening so closely to the entire conversation about green and Auntie Harriet. If you’re a novelist, what you do is go downstairs and listen to the men for a while more, and then you sneak out of the house when no one’s looking, and go next door to Mrs. Hayton and tell her the whole story of Harriet’s coat, but you make it a fur coat. My mother might later say to me, “Did you tell Mrs. Hayton that Harriet bought a fur coat from Dublin?” And then I’d realize I was caught. Writing a novel was marvellous because you could do it without feeling caught.
Wachtel: Why did the women kick you out?
Tóibín Because they were about to say something very interesting. Obviously they weren’t going to talk about the coat for the whole afternoon, and I knew that. They would immediately see me, and it was called “Does little pitcher have long ears?” Little pitcher had long ears.
Wachtel: There are complex, intimate portraits in your fiction of mothers and daughters and mothers and sons. You seem drawn to those relationships. Why is that?
Tóibín It’s very hard to know why anything happens because I don’t work strategically. Something occurs to me, and I go with it and see where it will take me. Sometimes it won’t work, but often what I’m interested in is configuration rather than character, meaning how a set of relationships works. I’m interested in the idea that at a certain moment, relationships can be snarled. Children are meant to love their parents, who are meant to love them in turn. What if that wasn’t exactly right? The words love or in turn. My psychiatrist tried to explain to me that there’s a moment when you’re about eighteen when you try to separate from your parents and set up your own life. I thought this was bizarre, and I said, “Really? How do you know what moment to do it?” He said, “You just do it.” I thought it was the most interesting idea: What if that didn’t happen? What if it didn’t work properly? What if something in that relationship began not to work? And out of that, you can eventually make a drama, because the aim is to dramatize rather than describe.
Wachtel: You have a book of stories called Mothers and Sons. You have a book of essays called New Ways to Kill Your Mother.
Tóibín They were gimmicks. I thought it would be better to have a title that might interest people, rather than, say, Snow on the Mountain. Who would read a book called Snow on the Mountain? But I thought, Mothers and Sons, at least there were a lot of mothers and a lot of sons. I was going to put a note on the book saying “Dear Mother” - this would be a Mother’s Day present - “I know things are bad between us. This is your son, not as bad as some of the people in this book.” I thought that would be a good ad campaign, but publishers didn’t want it.
Wachtel: How would you describe your relationship with your mother?
Tóibín Sometimes words won’t work there. You need images, and you need a lot of drama, and you need a lot of time, so I can’t really answer that. Is that all right?
Wachtel: Whatever you say is all right. When I asked about your father, you answered much more directly.
Tóibín Because he died when I was twelve.
Wachtel: In your latest novel, Long Island, you return not just to that landscape of your childhood, but to the central character of your award-winning novel Brooklyn, which was later adapted by Nick Hornby into a popular movie starring Saoirse Ronan. Why did you want to revisit the story of Eilis Lacey, set twenty-plus years later?
Tóibín I didn’t really want to revisit it. There are fourteen years where I didn’t do that; I wrote other novels. Then two things happened: One, I got an idea, which is often fatal. You’re walking down the street minding your own business, something comes to you: It was an image, which is the opening pages of Long Island now. And it was too melodramatic, it was too cheesy, it was too much. I thought, Leave that aside. But eventually I wrote. It was a pandemic, and I just wrote it all out. And then something else: I saw the movie of Brooklyn a lot over a period of years. One of the problems, if you’re Irish, is that a lot of the heterosexual men in Irish drama, Irish film, Irish novels, are alarming. They’re always unstable. They’re charming, or they’re drunk, or they’re going to commit an extraordinary act. They’re going to cut off their finger or something. I wanted to do the opposite. Do something with someone who’s stable, who’s reliable, who isn’t charming, who isn’t drunk, who isn’t dark, who couldn’t be played by Gabriel Byrne. I love Gabriel Byrne, but the character Jim couldn’t be played by him and couldn’t be played by Stephen Rea. Domhnall Gleeson, an Irish actor, played that character in Brooklyn in an astonishing way because he gave it a richness, he gave it a knife. He made the character almost sexy. I thought, Wow, I could work more with that. I could give Jim much more, taking from an actor’s performance of the previous book. That’s a pretty good gift to give a novelist. So thank you, Domhnall.
Wachtel: Can you briefly tell us about the image that came to you as you were walking down the street?
Tóibín She’s happily married, as it were. She’s domestically complete on Long Island, and suddenly, one day, a man, who happens to be Irish, comes to the door and says, “Your husband made my wife pregnant, and if you think we are keeping that baby, we’re not. We’re giving it to you. You can look after that baby, that bastard.” So I wrote that, and then I thought, I have to spend the rest of the novel trying to compensate for the amount of melodrama and easy, cheesy stuff in that opening.
Wachtel: When you had the idea, you immediately knew it was Eilis?
Tóibín Yes, I did. I was living in New York, so it was easy to go out there and look at Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, Tony says to Eilis, “When we marry, we’ll go and live on Long Island.” That’s where people moved to. It was on my mind, Long Island, and is a place where a lot of the Irish had gone, but she isn’t in an Irish community.
Wachtel: Eilis is now in her forties. She’s very self-contained, self-possessed, even somewhat enigmatic. What is it like to look through the eyes of a character like her?
Tóibín The first thing is that the perspective is third-person intimate, meaning that for the first section, everything is seen, noticed, remembered, felt, examined, through her. She is sort of remote in the sense that she sees the room, so the room doesn’t see her. Therefore, my job is to give that as much credibility, plausibility, and depth as I can, the theory being that by about page seven, the reader should be in her mind. To that extent, her perspective almost becomes the reader’s.
Wachtel: You said that Eilis is based on yourself. In what sense?
Tóibín Did I say that?
Wachtel: Yes.
Tóibín Oh. Did I really say that? That’s an awful, stupid thing to say. And I need -
Wachtel: You need the context.
Tóibín Can I raise that?
Wachtel: You can. You said, “I come fourth in a family, and you never decide to do things for yourself. You’re always looking over your shoulder to know what you should or shouldn’t do.” And you gave that to Eilis.
Tóibín That idea of asking people, if I was a psychiatrist and working in the country with big families, “Where do you come in the family?” - if you said, “There are three older than me,” I would automatically know certain things about you. In this case, I’m talking about the youngest who has a very powerful older sister, and there’s always a sense of her. Eilis doesn’t go to America to take Manhattan; she goes through America almost unwillingly, carefully watching, always watching, and not in any way self-conscious. I was working with that idea.
Tóibín There’s a cliché in any country that has had huge migration or immigration about what happens when people return. In Ireland, it’s called “the return Yank,” and they come home with dollars. Even if they don’t have dollars, they look and often behave as though they do. When Eilis comes home, everyone’s watching her clothes. They’re watching her rental car, her hairdo: the whole sense of her being someone who has known glamour. So she comes back and presumes it would help if she bought her mother a fridge. Her mother doesn’t have a fridge: This is 1976 and she should buy one immediately. But instead of asking her mother, she stupidly buys one, and her mother’s really insulted and says, “Did you think I had to wait all the years for you to come home?” The idea that anyone who goes away like that then comes back then goes away again makes it so you’re never in a space that you can fully take for granted. There’s a moment in Long Island in a hotel in Ireland where Jim says to her, “Of course, you must know the wonderful American hotels.” She can’t tell him she’s never stayed in a hotel before. She’s not from that world in America.
Wachtel: What did you want to show about Eilis in terms of how she changes over twenty years?
Tóibín What I’m interested in is a moment that occurred in our house in Enniscorthy, where The Irish Press was the newspaper of my father. I think they had even paid some money to set it up. It was a newspaper of Fianna Fáil, and it was in our house every day. My mother got tired of reading it and realized there was much more fun to be had in The Irish Times, which had been a Protestant newspaper but now had a lot of young women writing provocative and fascinating articles that were going to change Ireland. So my mother made a compromise. My job was to go next door, once more to the Haytons’, who were Protestants, to get The Irish Times from them each day and swap with The Irish Press. They didn’t want The Irish Press, but I would give them The Irish Press, basically around seven each evening, and bring The Irish Times into our house. My mother would devour the paper she thought was really well written. I think she liked semicolons. That change in our house led to us dropping The Irish Press and buying only The Irish Times. I’m thinking about that as a moment when all those names in feminism that we might want to mention - Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir - didn’t matter as much as buying that paper. That was an act of independence, a pursuit of nourishment that provided a sense that change was coming. Eilis gets The New York Times on a Sunday. It’s a big moment in her house. This probably happens about 1975, and the newspaper is filled with Nixon. It’s that idea of creating a character who is not affected deeply by the words we might use, such as feminism. Things are changing for her in ways she can’t quite name or put her finger on, but she does have a job by this point. She’s also become immensely articulate since Brooklyn. I thought if it came in her speech rather than in her thoughts, it might actually matter, it might do something, be dramatic. Giving someone thoughts is all very well. What would they say?
Wachtel: In the novel, Eilis’s former best friend, Nancy, whose wedding she attended decades earlier, is now the widowed mother of three grown children, and as we know from Brooklyn, Nancy married up. Her husband’s family ran a successful store in the town, but with the changing times it went out of business. To make ends meet, Nancy now runs a chip shop, which raises some eyebrows among the townspeople. Why is that?
Tóibín Oh, a chip shop is where people went after the pub, when they were drunk, to get chips and fish and onion rings and burgers. Outside on a Sunday morning there’d be litter, so posh people, respectable people, thought a chip shop in their square was a cheap thing. Poor old Nancy has to do it, and the smell of the oil is getting into the pores of her skin, and she’ll do anything to get out of there.
Wachtel: You had a similar situation in one of your stories in Mothers and Sons. Is it basically about class?
Tóibín Yes, but it’s also about change. They have fast food. That’s a new idea. The chip shops were only owned by Italians before this in Ireland, but here she is setting up her own. I did some research for a change, and there were profits to be made on chip shops in 1976.
Wachtel: But I thought that another element of it would have been a motivation to drive her, to make her feel desperate to get away from the chip shop because of the oil in her pores.
Tóibín One of her daughters is starting out as a lawyer, and she doesn’t want the smell of oil on her when she goes to a dance. Would you? It’s not good.
Wachtel: The story in Long Island unfolds not just from Eilis’s perspective, but also from Nancy’s, as well as her former - and, in fact, still - suitor Jim’s. Why did you choose that polyphonic approach, as I think you once put it?
Tóibín It’s sort of an autobiography of the books I was reading and also the books I was teaching. I was teaching a set of seminars at Columbia University on the nineteenth-century novel, and that included the novels of Jane Austen; it included George Eliot, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Thomas Hardy, and Joseph Conrad. I could almost take you through the number of things in Long Island that I have moved from, say, Joseph Conrad’s Victory, which is a novel where every single thing is told from two perspectives. They’re coming to get him one minute, and the next minute she’s waiting for them not to come and get him, and the reader sees the same scene from two perspectives. Similarly with Edith Wharton, say The Age of Innocence, where somebody comes back to America from Europe just as a couple are getting married, and she is glamorous, and the peace gets disrupted by her very presence: If you do it the other way around, someone comes back to Ireland from America.
But the big one is Henry James’s masterpiece The Golden Bowl. I’m not comparing this novel to The Golden Bowl; I just took certain things I needed from it, and I ran toward my own book with them. Then there is this idea of perspectives, of who knows what. Who knows that Maggie’s husband is having an affair with Maggie’s stepmother? No one knows, but Maggie finds out. And the fourth person in the triangle here is the reader. The reader becomes the one who has all the power. The reader turns the pages and says, “But if Nancy could just look over there at the wedding, she would see something that would end this novel now. Is she going to do this?” And then you can steal the Joseph Conrad thing that this wedding happens twice, because it happens from two perspectives. There’s a moment you think, Eilis, don’t! Be careful! If Nancy looks over, she’ll see! Then you realize that earlier, Nancy didn’t look over. So you’re constantly playing with ideas of who knows what, what secrets are being kept, why they’re being kept, will they be revealed. But all the time, at the centre of this is the reader, who turns the page thinking, Jim, don’t! Don’t do that because she will find out.
Wachtel: Where Eilis is self-contained, Nancy spills over in her thoughts. She worries, she strategizes, she’s pragmatic, determined, self-critical at times, at other times confident, and always conscious of how others might see her, which fits well in the Enniscorthy picture you paint. She’s very different from Eilis, more conventional in her concerns. Are you fond of Nancy?
Tóibín Yes. Part of the reason I could do this was that I spent the summer of 2000 working on that story about Nancy in Mothers and Sons, “The Name of the Game.” So I had her in my sights for twenty years. I had a sense of her. The same with Eilis. I started writing Brooklyn in maybe 2006, so Long Island became the culmination of a lot of work and a lot of imagining I had been doing. I’ve written a novel about Thomas Mann, who was tremendously rich and always making money and always travelling across the Atlantic, and one about Henry James. To get down to the business of a plumber’s wife who works in a garage, a guy who owns a bar in a small town, and a woman who owns a chip shop and see if I could make something - I didn’t use the word mythical, but something grand and large in the drama between them, then I would get somewhere. I’m absolutely on Nancy’s side. She’s been there all along, and suddenly, when she opens her door one day, this woman is back from America. Eilis has been on a diet, her hair, her skin . . . Nancy keeps looking at her, examining her. Eilis has to say to her, “You’re not listening to me!” No, she wasn’t, because she was looking at every pore of her skin to see, How do you get to look like that?
Wachtel: Nancy has been having a secret affair with Jim. They’re waiting for her daughter’s wedding to make it public. So much, as you were saying, hinges on secrets and things unsaid and back at home, what the different characters conceal from each other and, in some cases, competing secrets in this triangle. How do you see Jim in all this? Because he’s the third point in the triangle.
Tóibín It isn’t as though he’s good, he’s dependable - that’s not a novel. The novel only comes if you do something to him. How would he deal with being in love with two people at the same time who have competing demands? Then you watch what’s called drama. You get someone like that, and you usurp, you turn around, you play and see.
Wachtel: I know you said at the outset that we see things through Eilis’s eyes so that we know what she’s thinking. But throughout the novel, curiously, it feels as if we know the least about her interiority. You said you wanted to give her as little introspection as possible. Why?
Tóibín The only thing she needs to think about is what to do with the rest of her life. That’s not a good thing for a novel. It’s just too big. It can be so tedious and unending: Eilis is walking along the street once more; she’s wondering what she should do about Tony. She gets over it and moves on. She’s put that aside. You see, she’s home, so everything she’s seeing is new. Everything she’s feeling is new. You give her the sights and the desires and the feelings, leaving the big matter out of the present. What’s she going to do about this baby that’s about to arrive? She doesn’t think about that much - as little introspection as possible for her. It’s Jim you start working with. What in the name of God is he doing? He’s meant to be engaged to Nancy, and here is this returned woman from America. He has an entirely different feeling for her than he has for Nancy. So you’re getting someone like him, whose sensuality is sort of in the middle somewhere, and you’re seeing how you could stretch his set of desires to a point where he could become very interesting. I suppose part of the deal of the novel is that it better be very interesting, even if it’s just that business of Jim seeing Eilis on a beach and saying nothing to her. I’ve got to be careful with what I’ve just given you there, because if that’s all that happens between them, well, that’s not a novel. That’s a bad short story; that’s someone trying to be Chekov: They met and they said nothing. It was a grey day. The sun almost came out. He said to her, “Ah, I see you,” and she said, “Er.” Get rid of all that. What’s really happening here is she’s desperate to hold on, and she doesn’t know what to say; we’re going to get to see it from her side now, and she feels something entirely different than Jim thinks she feels. But the reader is following the whole thing, saying, “I wish these mortals would get more sense.”
Wachtel: It’s not giving anything away to say that, in a Colm Tóibín novel, no one gets what they really want. There’s a certain darkness in your work. As anyone who’s been in your company knows, you’re a very funny, witty man, and yet in your writing that doesn’t come through.
Tóibín That was another thing that happened with the psychiatrist. I went at one stage and said, “Look, I have a problem with these novels I’m writing. They’re really sad, and then I seem to go around the place making jokes.” And he said, “Which would you like?” “I’d like to have an integrated personality like everybody else seems to have.” He said, “Well, which would you like to be?” I said, “God, I don’t know. Could you just go away. Leave me alone.” There was nothing he could do for that. He said it’s normal.
Wachtel: You once told me you’ve been trying for years to write a comedy.
Tóibín I’ve finally written a comedy, and it opened in Ireland back in October. It’s an opera. I wrote the libretto, and it’s got twelve characters, and six couples by the end. Everything happens to them, and then finally at the end there’s a wedding for all the couples. Someone said to me, “Why don’t we put a devil at the end who comes and says, ‘To hell with all your happiness, I am going to destroy.’” I said, “No, I don’t want that.” I’ve done enough of that. I would just like everyone to be happy, and one by one they come out, the couples, and they express their happiness, and the opera ends. I have a feeling people are going to demand more. “Why don’t you have an earthquake?” or something. For once, I’ve done a comedy. But my heart’s not in it really.
Wachtel: Have you tried to write a comic novel?
Tóibín Yes, but it didn’t go far.
Wachtel: Your novel The Magician is about Thomas Mann, inspired by him. You remarked that you were amazed by the diaries he kept throughout his life. Did reading his diaries give you insight into the relationship between the public self and the interior life? Can you trust the diary?
Tóibín Thomas Mann was born in 1875, and he died in 1955. Throughout his life, he was considered the most respectable fellow. For some reason, even though he published his novella Death in Venice in 1912, no one associated him with the protagonist. This is hiding in plain sight because he was obviously close to this figure, and he had been in Venice himself the previous year, and his wife wrote in her memoirs that Tommy could not stop looking at that beautiful boy on the beach. Thomas Mann, wearing a four-piece suit, would be giving a two-hour lecture on some ghastly aspect of German culture, and there would be an audience of two thousand people, and everyone would think he was the most serious German alive. He would go home and write in his diaries, Boy in the third row. Looked at him carefully, smiled once, caught his eye. And you realize that all the time, when he was doing this two-hour lecture on Schiller, on Heine, on Goethe, he was really thinking about this fellow in the third row. This may not be what he was actually thinking about, but it’s what he wants to write in his diary. There’s a wonderful moment when he’s seventy-five years old and he’s slightly depressed and he falls deeply in love with this slightly fat waiter in a Swiss hotel. He writes in his diaries about how he would exchange world fame, which he has at this point, for his favour. And his wife and daughter, instead of saying, “Could you just stop making a show of yourself in a hotel,” arrange meetings between him and this waiter to cheer him up. So hold on a minute, I could work with that, the idea of the wife and the daughter, instead of doing what they should be doing - being indignant, aghast, horrified - become collaborators in making the old magician happy by having him spend time with this fleshy waiter called Fritz. This is made for me: the political ambiguity and the constant sense of public and private being so far away from one another. Why did I not come across this before? It took the diaries to really open everyone’s eyes to the fact that Thomas Mann was a much more complex figure than he set out to suggest.
Wachtel: In your personal essay “A Guest at the Feast,” you mention that your mother destroyed her diaries before she died. Did that surprise you?
Tóibín I would have loved to have had them. God, I could be living on them still. It was sad.
Wachtel: Did you know she was keeping diaries?
Tóibín I did.
Wachtel: You don’t keep diaries?
Tóibín No. From my point of view, if I’m not writing to communicate, if I’m not directly involved in trying to work out where the reader is in something I’m working on, then there’s nothing I can do. The style would just dissolve. I wouldn’t know what to do with a sentence, and I actually wouldn’t finish it. I wouldn’t finish a page.
Wachtel: You’ve used the phrase “a ghost in his own life” to describe Thomas Mann. In The Magician, he comes across as rather contained, a quiet observer. Thinking about that aspect of his character, I was struck by a similarity to Eilis with her own ghost-like presence, as you’ve put it. What attracts you to them?
Tóibín I’m interested in that idea of the figure in the novel being self-suppressed in some way. For instance, Thomas Mann comes into a room where his family and some visitors are all engaged in a conversation. As the novelist, he’s watching them. Some don’t seem to even notice him. He almost isn’t there. And that seems to satisfy a part of him, while creating a tension. It is the same with Eilis, with her American Italian family: They’re having big lunches, and they’re all talking; they’re all eating. Sometimes she’s just there watching. She’s being a surrogate novelist. As a novelist, I’m unable to create a character who isn’t in some way a novelist, meaning a ghost in a society, a ghost in a room, a ghost in a nation. Henry James does this very well. You could be there one minute, but the next minute, in your mind, you’re already working out how you could use this. That’s not a decent way to live, I should tell you. I wouldn’t recommend that to children or anything. But it does give you a drama, the idea of presence and non-presence, of ghostliness, and of being substantial.
Wachtel: So much of Eilis’s story, in both novels, involves choice and risk. She makes her choices painfully, and once decided, she’s firm about them, whether she likes it or not. The choices feel almost circumscribed. Is that generally how it works? Do we feel that way even when we think we have agency?
Tóibín I can’t make any generalizations about anybody. That is what Eilis did. There were various choices, and she took sometimes the easiest one, the one which, in the end, wasn’t actually the easiest. You’re working all the time with the in-between nature of desire and choice and consequences, seeing that there isn’t a direct result, but the indirect result can be, in a way, more interesting. I don’t know about how we live, except that I think we drift. And she drifts: She drifts to America; she drifts almost into marriage; she drifts back to Ireland. That idea of emigration not as a strategy or as a desire or as a decision. I drifted into America. I certainly didn’t mean to go there. I meant to go there on my holidays, but I didn’t. I remember going to Texas for a semester. What day was that decision made? I didn’t want to be there. How did that happen? I drifted.
Wachtel: See, you have something in common with Eilis.
Tóibín Drift.
Wachtel: Your writing takes many different forms, including non-fiction, but you seem to alternate between novels inspired by real figures like Thomas Mann and Henry James in The Magician and The Master, or revisiting characters from Greek tragedies like Clytemnestra in The House of Names, or even the mother of Jesus in The Testament of Mary. And then there are these more intimate Enniscorthy novels like Brooklyn, Nora Webster, and Long Island, drawing on your own personal experience, but then putting in fictional characters. Is it a different imaginative process for you to recreate the world you know so well in fiction as compared to imagining these historic lives in foreign settings? Is there a sense of homecoming in returning to Enniscorthy in your fiction?
Tóibín It’s hard to get an overall picture as you’re working. You write a sentence and you think, I’d better make the next sentence a different sound or length. I’d better make sure the next sentence is accurate, that it does something to the previous one that isn’t implausible. You’re working so slowly and tentatively that the large questions often come by accident. But the problem was when I wrote a novel called The Blackwater Lightship; it happens over seven days in the Irish countryside with six characters. When I say Irish countryside, I mean Irish rain, Irish misery, Irish nostalgia, Irish sense of victimhood. Every single thing you could get in an Irish house comes up over these seven days to these six characters. Honestly, I was using anything I could think of to get them all shouting at each other. There was too little silence in the book, and when it was over, I thought, I never want to do this again. I never want to see any of these people again. I never want to see this rain again. I never want to see recrimination again. I never want a cup of tea made in a novel again. So I came up with a solution, slowly drifted into it, of writing a novel about Henry James, meaning duchesses, Venice, dinners, balls, novels. Rather than having to go back to the dreary business of Irish people, I could go to the grand and grandiose business of being Henry James wandering around Europe and having great dinners. But when that was done, I wrote Brooklyn. There’s an element of guilt, almost, when you finish a novel - of, Oh God, did I get this right? And then you think, No, it’s not that; it’s just I never, ever wanted to see any of those people again. So this is pretty unusual because I’m back with these people with Long Island. But in general, I find it easier to move from the small-town novels to something much bigger. Who is grander than the mother of Jesus? There’s no one grander. She’s in heaven. Look at her. Queen of heaven.
Wachtel: She’s not queen of heaven in your novel.
Tóibín She becomes queen of heaven.
Wachtel: You’ve spent much of your adult life, you would say, drifting, but I’ll say travelling between your homes in the U.S. and in Ireland. How does it charge you creatively to move between these different places?
Tóibín It’s really good. The unsettlement, the arrival, the constant difference between things. It’s useful for novels. It’s not useful for anything else, actually, but it’s useful for keeping you on your toes, for getting ideas quickly and seeing what you could do with them.
Wachtel: And does one place or another produce more ideas?
Tóibín No.
Wachtel: But there are certain places you prefer to write.
Tóibín Yes, but I think the fetishization of spaces for writers is all nonsense. And what sort of pen you use. I write longhand. I could write anywhere. If you give me that corner there, I could be away, just behind you there. In other words, I think that’s an exaggerated idea. Except for one thing: When it came to the moment in Nora Webster - which is about the house with my mother and my brother and myself in the years after my father died - I realized I was going to try, for once, to work with a sort of magic, to have one of the characters basically come back from the dead. The novel is essentially a secular space. We’re not good at miracles. You know, having a leg that had been cut off grow the next moment, you won’t read that. Therefore, I wanted to get this right, and it involved things that were close to the bone: My mother became obsessed with the recording of Beethoven’s piano trios with Jacqueline du Pré, Daniel Barenboim, and Pinchas Zukerman. I put that on. I knew that I could only write this scene once. If I didn’t get it right, I could never have another go at it. It was where her husband was going to almost appear to her. So in the house in Wexford, up at about six or seven in the morning, putting the music on, but not writing, just putting the music on and having things near me in case I needed them: T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding, Hamlet, a poem by Milton about his dead wife, all the ghost stuff, so that if I needed I could go and read a line. Then I set about writing maybe three thousand words without looking up, stopping only to put on the piano trios and then turn them off again to write. The reward was to be that I could go for a swim in the sea, in the Irish Sea. As the day went on, it got cloudy, and it began to rain. But I thought, No, I agreed I’d go into the sea. Whatever is going on here, I am going into that sea. By the end of the day, I did go into the sea, and the three thousand words were done. That time it did matter that I was there in that place very close to where my parents had lived. I was using them, going into it, and almost performing as though it were an act of alchemy or an act of magic.
Hope not to have to do that again. |