Colm Tóibín writes about mother-son relationships and the silences in the life of Henry James
Tóibín spoke with Eleanor Wachtel in 2007 about his story collection Mothers and Sons
As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive.
Colm Tóibín is a celebrated Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. Born in Enniscorthy, Ireland in 1955, he's written numerous books including the short story collection Mothers and Sons and novels Brooklyn, Nora Webster, The Master and The Magician.
The Master is an imaginative recreation of the life of Henry James. It won the International Dublin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Tóibín's 2009 novel about migration, Brooklyn, won the Costa Best Novel Award and was made into a popular movie starring Saoirse Ronan. His latest novel Long Island is its sequel.
To celebrate its release, Writers & Company revisits a 2007 conversation about short story collection Mothers and Sons, novel The Masters and Tóibín's personal experiences.
On losing his father at a young age
"We missed him. He was a sort of wonderful man. And one of the stories [in Mothers and Sons], 'The Name of the Game' deals with that to some extent, although my mother didn't have a shop.
"I suppose it was like being Hamlet, except that there was no Claudius. In other words, Gertrude didn't remarry, but there was a ghost, you know what I mean? And you wandered the Earth for a few years wondering what it hit you, putting an antique disposition on. But my mother was terribly good, in that she found a new life for herself, and she managed things very well. So some of the stories are about that idea of rebuilding a life and what that's like.
Some of the stories are about that idea of rebuilding a life and what that's like.- Colm Tóibín
"I was 12 and [my brother] was eight, with my mother. So that there were those winters, or those three years when it was just the three of us in the house that were very memorable in the sense that we watched her very carefully and none of us ever discussed what the problems were.
"And I became interested in writing at that time. And I think my younger brother became very interested in being studious. And both of us just found something to preoccupy us: me by writing poetry and him by being really good in school."
A magical stint in Spain
"Somebody told me that you could easily get a job as a teacher in Barcelona just by turning up. And I was getting ready for my finals and I didn't know what I was going to do. Whatever way it was said, I remember exactly where I was thinking, 'I'm going to do that.' And so I told the folks at home that I had got a job in Spain and they believed me. I hadn't.
"But I did find a job very quickly. In those days, English language teaching was not professionalized. You didn't have to do a qualification, just turned up. People gave you work. I was 20 years old and I stayed there for three years. I'd read Hemingway. I'd read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia. I'd read Hugh Thomas's book on the Spanish Civil War. So Spain, for me, seemed like the most glamorous possibility.
"But it was much more glamorous than I imagined and much more interesting and totally absorbing. And I had a really wonderful time.
Spain was much more glamorous than I imagined and much more interesting and totally absorbing.- Colm Tóibín
"Franco died two months after I arrived. But that wasn't such an enormous change as it sounded in the way people lived. There was already great sexual freedom there. There was already great food and drink and the colours of the Mediterranean had not been obliterated by this old dictator.
"But then the politics became a sort of beauty themselves, the way in which the king and Suárez organized democracy so quickly.
"The first elections were just the most wonderful thing to see and to see the crowds marching as they're going to get what they wanted finally, which was democracy. And the night the Communist Party was legalized was a really great night there. All the old exiles flew from places into Madrid airport free at last. They ran for election and they were elected and they weren't a majority, but nonetheless.
"Parliament was made up of all the forces that had fought the Civil War. But they weren't going to fight another. It was a remarkable thing to see. It was really extraordinary. And with me it's mixed in with other freedoms, with bars open late with hot weather, with beautiful food, with sexual freedom, with paintings, with classical music, with all those things.
"I couldn't find anything else to do other than teaching English as a foreign language. And it was tedious and there was no future in it. I suppose I was ambitious. I just wasn't going to do that forever."
Writing about Henry James
"Actually, the silences in this life are really interesting to explore. In other words, the novel form can explore silences and withholdings. You could explore James Joyce running away to Trieste with Nora Barnacle. It's a well known story. We know their emotions. They were in love and they wanted to get away and it was all wonderful. They left letters. They lusted after each other. For me, that story is told, but the James story was untold, in that there was so much silence surrounding it. And I thought I could do it.
"It was only when I started I realized that as the paragraphs were getting longer and the sentences was that I was really, for the first time, sort of managing to enter into another consciousness and getting all its flickering and all its different motives surrounding moments.
The silences in this life are really interesting to explore.- Colm Tóibín
"And I had the books all around me if I needed help at any point. I had a letter. I had something else he wrote in that year, or that month, or that day. He's one of those figures. We can trace him day by day and I had nothing else to do anyway.
"I thought that I wouldn't in any way try and write as well as he does. I wouldn't in any way mimic his prose style, but I would just try and describe in a set of scenes things that happened to him that I thought hadn't been fully described before.
"But I didn't worry about the consequences of failing or of taking on too great a project. In other words, I think a novelist who might have had a much higher reputation than I did, taking on a project like that, there could be high stakes involved in failing so dismally to come up with the goods about a novelist as wonderful as that. And it might look like an act of not not just bravery, not just foolishness, but of actual, pure cheek. But I didn't have any of those problems. I didn't have any great readership anywhere. It didn't really matter if the book failed."
Colm Tóibín's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
