Colm Tóibín

By Sager Castleman

Two well-dressed people were walking out of Colm Tóibín’s office in Philosophy Hall when I arrived, more anxious than I had been in a while. “They’re just from London to talk to me about James Baldwin,” he told me as he sat back down, not helping my nerves. But then he turned to look at me with his twinkling eyes and asked in a gentle voice how I was, and, almost miraculously, I felt myself starting to relax. When he asked me questions about my life before and after our interview, they strangely didn’t feel like small talk. Instead, they revealed his love of stories, which he seemed to always be listening for. When I told him how my parents met, his face lit up and he said, “That could be a novel!” 

Illustration by Jorja Garcia

A prolific novelist (his 11th comes out next month), writer for the New York Review of Books, and the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities, Tóibín may be the most engrossing person I’ve ever met. He alternates between glimmering smiles and pensive looks into the distance, little jokes and phrases that made such a strong impression on me I wanted to pause the interview and write them down. We talked about his popular Ulysses seminar, the relationship between his characters’ consciousnesses and his own, and why the humanities degree is more important than anything else. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

…

The Blue and White: Do you think that being a novelist influences the way that you teach?

Colm Tóibín: Yes, it does. I’m always interested in the idea that the next chapter—of any book, but in particular of a book that people have awe about, such as Ulysses—is unwritten, and has not been written yet, and that a strategy will have to be developed by the author to write the next episode as a result of the last one. So all the time you’re imagining the book unwritten, and you’re also thinking about the book as a set of untidy processes, a set of solutions to problems. You’re trying to think, “What is the problem here that this section is a solution to? Why is the writer doing this here?” This is one way of looking at a text as though it is entirely written by the writer, as an act of will, as a set of strategies. And this may be a different way of reading a text than other writers who would put it in historical context, or see the book as belonging to the reader as much as it does to the writer. But in the way that I view it, writing is a set of decisions made in a single moment by a writer for strategic reasons, or, often, as a mistake. 

B&W: In that perspective, would the most important thing be understanding the writer’s intentions?

CT: No, because if you’re trying to figure out the writer’s intentions, you enter into the realm of speculation. What you’re doing is you’re seeing how, say, in Ulysses, the next episode is a response to the previous one on the part of the writer. For example, in Episode 3 of Ulysses, you realize there’s no future, it’s about Stephen Dedalus’s mind, it’s filled with obscure references to his mind, it’s so informed by what he’s been reading as a philosophy student in university, and you realize that at some point the author has to be aware that Episode 4 is going to be entirely different. You realize that there’s something happening, that there’s an energy in it that’s so intense because he knows it’s going to end soon, that the next episode is not going to be a continuation of the style. But it’s not about his intentions as much as the problems that arise sometimes, like “Why is there this particular level of intensity here?” or “Why is the energy fading?” or “Why is the opening of Episode 4 so bright, so filled with interesting detail, and so filled with the naming of very particular things, whereas in the previous episode there’s no object that doesn’t have huge resonance or symbolic [meaning]?” So “intention” is too imagined, it isn’t like that.

B&W: Of course that [approach to literature] is connected to writing because it’s what you do when you write. But I feel like there’s another level to that in that the writing you do is often itself doing that for another writer.

CT: No, I’ve only done that twice. So “often” is not true.

B&W: But also in some of your poems, like with Gerard Manley Hopkins.

CT: No one has read my poems.

B&W: I read the whole book.

CT: You did not!

B&W: Yeah.

CT: Well, you’re alone in that.

B&W: That was actually my favorite one in the book.

CT: Oh, the Hopkins poem! You know, he did make that visit. It was the only time I could find that he connected in any way with literary life in Dublin. He went across Stephen’s Green from the Jesuit House, which is on one side of the Green, to the studio of Yeats’s father.

B&W: I read that poem shortly after I took a class where we had read a fair bit of Hopkins, and it occurred to me that what the class was doing and what you were doing in going into his head seemed related—they were both trying to understand the writer beyond just the work. You did that twice in your novels, and the New Yorker profile of you said you do something similar in your book reviews, that you “assimilate your subject to the point that the writer in question begins to sound like one of your own characters.” What motivates you to go so deep into these artists’ heads?

CT: You drift into everything if you’re a writer—maybe in other ways too, maybe in life—but as a writer, you drift. Something occurs to you and it doesn’t mean anything, but you stay with it. I never take notes. If you take notes you lose something. If you’re going to forget something you should forget it. But something stays in your mind and it doesn’t do anything. At first I was going to write the sort of book I wrote about Elizabeth Bishop. Bet you haven’t read that?

B&W: No.

CT: Ha, gotcha! I’ve written a short book about Elizabeth Bishop, it’s not fiction, and I’ve just written another one about James Baldwin, they’re little critical books about reading their work. I was planning to do that with Henry James. I really was, I had all sorts of structures for it, and it just moved on its own into being a novel. Part of the reason is that I had written a previous novel called The Blackwater Lightship. It’s set in Ireland and it’s got six characters over seven days. They’re all locked in this house, and they’re all arguing. There’s a lot of tension, a lot of making tea, a lot of rain, it’s miserable. When it was over, I thought, I never want to do that again. I never want arguing people, I never want rain, I never want tea-making, I never want any of that sort of religion, recrimination, I don’t want any more of that. And then there was only one solution, really. It was Henry James. There were duchesses, Florence, grandeur—just get me out! Then I started to work on it. I think the problem is that James comes to us in so many guises, and he could be very very funny in conversation. But I couldn’t deal with that. I wanted to show what people are like when they’re really alone, just work with that. And it was nice work, not to be writing about rain. 

B&W: I did read the book about Henry James. Does the description of the writer’s consciousness that you have there come more from research about him or more from your own experience as a writer?

CT: I’ve written all these books and a lot of people haven’t read any of them, and it’s good, because no one had read an earlier novel I had written called The Heather Blazing. And there’s that same idea of this very solitary male figure haunted by certain things, and I could just give him any number of experiences and see what would happen. I don’t know where this comes from, it’s hardly autobiographical, but it’s an exploration of someone using an intense system of the third-person intimate, where everything that’s seen, noticed, felt, and remembered is through this particular consciousness in a very intense way. But if you break it for a second you lose it completely, and therefore there’s no author. The beginning is a form of self-suppression, and then once the suppression has been done, you begin to use each sentence as a response to the previous one, where you’re trying to refine things, you’re trying to vary the sound and tone of the sentences, but what you’re more intensely doing is trying to move things along as slowly, gradually, and imperceptibly as possible. You’re following this particular consciousness that is skilled at silence, repression, and is much happier alone, so that the relationship to other people, to memory, is fraught. And you just work with that. It seems to me that it’s something that I do almost naturally. It’s certainly not chosen. Once James moved from being a critical “reading Henry James” book to being the novel, then I didn’t really have to do anything. The research didn’t really matter. Yeah, for a few days I might read some letters or some biography, but the books were just there, the main thing was here. [Points at laptop.] 

B&W: But where did it come from?

CT: Self.

B&W: So your conception of Henry James is very related to your conception of yourself.

CT: Yeah.

B&W: Would you say that’s true with a lot of your fiction?

CT: Yeah. All of them. But in ways that I don’t understand. If I did understand, I don’t know what I would do, because it would be just clunky, plain efforts to disguise yourself, make yourself a woman, make yourself in the 19th century, and it’s not like that. In other words, I don’t know when I’m starting that I’m doing this, it’s only halfway through that I realize, “Jesus Christ, here I am the second time with Thomas Mann. Family of five, second brother. More athletic older brother.” I really didn’t realize with Mann—the dead father, the moving out of your own country to other countries, the melancholy homosexuality. And all of it makes its way in some way into the fiction. And sometimes you’d do anything to stop it. “Don’t give me another dead father.” 

I’ve just written another novel, it’s coming out next month, and it’s my first novel in which someone doesn’t die. I didn’t plan it, you can’t plan that. There was a woman in Australia buying a book I had written who said to me, “How many people die in this one?” I didn’t know what to say to her. I ended up saying, “Quite a few, but I hope that’s okay.” She wasn’t blaming me or anything, but in this new one there’s nobody, and I don’t know what that means. Maybe it’s that I’m getting old and I can’t write as freely about those things as I once could.

B&W: It’s an oversimplification to say that there’s a biographical connection between you and these writers, but there seems to be some kind of connection. Do you think that that was part of what drew you to them?

CT: Yeah.

B&W: What was that process like for Henry James and Thomas Mann?

CT: The process begins during a two- or three-year period when I’m 18 or 19, when I start to really read their stuff. And for some reason those books really, really—I don’t want to say spoke to me, but I just wanted to read more of them. I wasn’t thinking about “speaking to me” and I wasn’t even dreaming about writing about them. I was just a reader. 

I’m reading them in the ’70s, but when you get to the ’90s, there’s a big change that has occurred with both of these writers. Because of the publication of some letters and the publication of a number of biographies, James’s homosexuality has become much plainer. And elements of his life, of his secret life, of the solitude and hauntedness, all of that become much clearer. With Thomas Mann, the diaries have appeared and the diaries change everything, because you get to see that his erotic dreams are homoerotic dreams. And also that his politics cannot be as easily trusted as being liberal, or even his support of democracy by 1914. 

So you’ve got whole new ways of looking at these people, but also I have started to write these pieces for the London Review of Books where I would become intensely engaged with some writer for an essay over a period of a month or two, where I’m reading everything and trying to find a new way to look at these works. I probably did three pieces on Thomas Mann for the London Review of Books, and I did a few pieces on Henry James in the same way. Out of that came some sort of energy, and I won’t do a third. I don’t have a third. If I had a third I’d do a third. If I felt the same way about Virginia Woolf I’d write a book about Virginia Woolf, or Edith Wharton, but I just don’t have it. 

These two were there, and I wouldn’t dream of saying that I have a personal autobiographical connection with them. These are two of the great towering figures in my world, and it’d be like some guy on the street corner telling me that he’s like Bob Dylan because, “I sing, he sings.” But it’s not that as much as I couldn’t do any more than give them this melancholy response to experience and this wavering attitude toward feeling. So I put all of that in, and if there’s a blueprint for it it’d be the first 50 pages of J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg about Dostoevsky trying to identify his dead son in a morgue. The writing, the getting into the actual shivering nature of the character of the book—I felt that this was real, this was alive, this was there. This wasn’t a dry literary game. This was filled with life. 

B&W: Let’s go back to the class for a moment, which you’ve been teaching for several years now. Why Ulysses? Why not someone like James?

CT: I’ve taught James, but I felt like I needed a big new project. So it struck me that I could probably bring something to Joyce here that no one else in the department could do. Not only by dint of being Irish, but by the fact that I’ve done a lot of work on the related areas of social change, or of the cultural context in which Joyce was brought up. Not just that I went to the same university, but that I’ve been reading around all that all my life, and I thought I could bring something to it. I also thought that for me it would be completely new, that while I was reading Henry James and Thomas Mann in that intense way I described, I wasn’t reading Joyce like that then. So Joyce has been a gradual process, and it becomes more and more exciting. I’ll be 69 next month, so it’s nice having something to be excited about. Certainly I’m excited about reading more and more, rereading the book and reading commentaries on it and thinking about it and trying to get the class going on it.

B&W: You mentioned commentaries, but I know that you don’t assign literary criticism in the class. Why not?

CT: The idea is that our job in one semester for undergraduates is to read the book, to come out by the end of April with this book read. That takes a lot of energy on the part of the students, and if you start saying, “So-and-so’s commentary on this comes from a postcolonial perspective or a feminist perspective or a Lacanian reading of the book or a historical context reading of the book” you’ve got to slow the class down. And there’s enough going on in the book to read the book. If in the future anyone wants to go and start reading commentary—and there’s a lot of really good commentary—then people can go and do that, but for these 14 weeks we’re going to concentrate on reading the book. And by reading the book I mean literally turning the pages and saying, “What’s happening here is that he has moved from there to here. And look who’s with him. Now Buck Mulligan has been at George Moore’s house in the previous episode, and Stephen was not invited to that party. And crucially, what Joyce has to do is make sure that Stephen is not invited to anywhere in particular so that he can drift in the city.” So it goes on like that. And what you want in the end is an essay that doesn’t use anyone’s criticism, that is the student’s own. 

B&W: What do you think about creative writing as a subject, and why don’t you teach it?

CT: I did teach it for a while at Stanford, and at Princeton I was in both the creative writing and English departments. It’s very easy to do because you just read someone’s story and work out ways that they might rethink it. What you’re really doing is suggesting that revision is really important, and that maybe there’s another way of looking at something. And there’s some cruelty there, because of course someone has put so much work into something, and it’s done in public. So someone’s whole heart and soul has been put into something and then you have to take it asunder. And there are other times when you don’t do that because something is so good and so perfect and so instantly brilliant. And that’s happened a few times, where I’ve simply said, “Look at this!” And you realize that someone has it, just has it. And that’s the strangest idea, that someone has it, and with that person you can work. 

You see, I think there’s a problem because if you add up the number of people doing postgraduate work in creative writing in America now and the number of books being published, there really is [a disparity]. What I presume is happening is that you’re training teachers, editors, people who will move into the whole industry of the written word. It’s a curious dynamic, because often when I’m working I don’t know what I’m doing, and certainly when I was starting in Ireland, the idea of showing your work to a group of students and hearing what they liked about it—none of us would have done that. 

B&W: I feel like that could apply to postgraduate education in the humanities generally, where there are a lot more people doing it than there are positions in academia. What do you think about that, and do you see yourself as part of academia?

CT: There’s been a decline in the number of jobs available to PhD students, and you could look at the statistics there. But the other one is different, the other one is the undergraduate arts degree, the humanities degree. If it’s creative writing, you want to be a novelist or a poet. But with a humanities degree, you merely want to enrich your mind. You’re not training anyone to be a teacher, an editor, a lawyer, or anything else. It’s merely the lovely business of spending three or four years, when you’re at your richest because you can take in books better than you can at any other time, of having the opportunity to, without any specific career in mind, study things that are really vitally important, which is called culture. I can’t see this as anything other than ideal, and what we should all aspire to. And for me, when I did it, it was an extraordinary period in my life that gave me everything. And therefore I want to do anything to it other than make it dull. It is what’s important. What else is there?