Alert! Horrelpoot/Trencherman author Eben Venter placed a call from Prince Albert to Dublin, Ireland recently. Colm Tóibín picked up on the other end, and the two had an engaging chat, parts of which were published in Afrikaans in Rapport last week.
As Venter recently wrote to BOOK SA, certain issues that he and Colm spoke about – for example migration – were left out of the newspaper because of space restrictions, and whereas the Rapport article was written as a news piece, the original text is in Q&A format.
The interview makes for very interesting reading, and we’re pleased to bring it to you complete:
* * * * * * * *
In the tradition of great Irish writers, Dubliner Colm Toíbín has taken one man, in this case the writer Henry James, and wrote an evocative fictional account of his life. For this novel titled The Master, he won the richest English literary prize, the Impac Dublin Literary Award. Both The Master and his 1999 novel, The Blackwater Lightship, have also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Toíbín’s most recent novel Brooklyn, again takes a single person, Eilis Lacey, and lets her migrate from her beloved Irish coastal town across the Atlantic to multi-ethnic Brooklyn. During this life changing migration Eilis loses much of her old world Irishness, gains a lover and husband and a certain enlightenment in the new world of America of the fifties.
EV: Your name, do you say Colm or Colim? I know the Irish say ‘filim’ as you do in Afrikaans. And your surname, Toíbín, how do the accents influence the pronunciation?
CT: Col – i – m’ with the ‘i’. And Toíbín is pronounced without the first ’i’. The Americans make all sorts of things of my name!
EV: Except for The South I have read all your novels and short stories; I admire the way you write. What struck me in your latest novel Brooklyn was the simplicity of the language. An old world is evoked where every phrase, word, object, person and gesture has its place and its meaning.
Would you say this simplicity of language is true of the story?
CT: I recently went to an exhibition in NYC called Gray. The exhibition examines the use of the color gray by the American artist Jasper Johns, i.e the range of emotions available in gray. It didn’t surprise me.
EV: The word monochrome was used in connection with the Johns exhibition; the same word has been used in connection with your work.
CT: I don’t care. [He laughs.] I’ve read a few reviews on Brooklyn and they have all been good. I try not to read reviews, but I always do. You gain by using these simple sentences; it is a case of not fooling the reader with anything intricate or complex. The simplicity of The late bourgeois world by Nadine Gordimer, a novel I particularly admire and have read many times, has given me enormous satisfaction. I almost feel guilty after my previous book and will do anything to make preparation with my readers by trying something else. I invent in every book: but it isn’t as instant or deliberate as that. I do worry! [Toíbín means he does worry about presenting something new to his readers. The simplicity of the language in Brooklyn was an attempt to do just this.]
EV: The romantic would say: there is an essential Ireland to be served and a definitive Irish mind to be described.” (Declan Kiberd in his introduction to James Joyce’s Ulysses). Would you say that about your characters in Brooklyn, Eilis Lacey, the mother, the sister Rose, about their nervous laughter and carry-on, the banter at the dance hall, the specific take of the mother on the shopkeepers: all they have is a few yards of counter … I don’t know why they think so highly of themselves… Does an Irish picture emerge here?
CT: I am not conscious of a national feeling (or culture) across Ireland. Someone in Belfast might speak and act very differently from a person in a country town (like Enniscorthy). I’m not sure that the Irish got together long enough to form a nation (and a national culture). The speech and culture I use in Brooklyn refer to a specific town and area, i.e Enniscorthy in the south-east of Ireland.”
EV: Cush Gap and the Wexford Coast re-occur in a number of your novels …
CT: One day I sat down and wrote down just anything, like a painter who simply continues making brush strokes and using colours, nilly-willy.
EV: Like a stream of consciousness?
CT: Yes, but it was still on a very intense level what I wrote down. [He stresses this point.]
Then I wrote: The sea, a gray shine on the sea. The line was summoning something, a stretch of coast. And this is the part of the east coast that occurs in The Heather Blazing and The Blackwater Lightship, and it is also the coast visited by Eilis Lacey on returning to Ireland after her sister Rose’s death in Brooklyn.
EV: Having lived outside my country for almost 22 years I could relate well to the migrant experience in Brooklyn. The migrant seems to experience confusion, the sense of being moved around by forces outside of him- or herself. I’m talking about the fact that Eilis Lacey eventually settles very well in the USA – she conflates the lovely feeling of being at home with her longing to be with Tony, her future husband – yet after a while back home the same thing happens. She could go either way.
Is this the migrant’s dilemma? Did you want to say something about that in your story?
CT: When you’re away for three months or longer, the past seems to crumble. When you’re back in a familiar house in familiar rooms, the most recent and rich things (right there) seem to have lost a dimension (because of the long absence – cf. Eilis Lacey on return to her mother’s house in Enniscorthy in Brooklyn). It is as if there can be only one place that one can be in at a time.
EV: Another question about the migrant’s experience. In your first novel, The Heather Blazing, there is continuity within the extended family. The continuity is beautifully drawn in a swimming scene at the beginning and end of the novel: first you have the boy Eamonn with his arms around his father’s neck, then, when Eamonn himself ages you have his (illigitimate) son’s arms around his neck.
In Brooklyn however Eilis leaves, forever. The continuity between herself and her country is severed; in the final paragraph you say something about that. What effect do you think this physical and eventual mental break have on people?
CT: The image of continuity is very powerful, ecpecially for families. [Here Toíbín emphasises that he did not want to moralise about continuity in the family in his novel The Heather Blazing but rather dramatise the idea of continuity.]
EV: Would Eilis would returned to America if she hadn’t married Tony shortly before she left for Ireland, after the sudden death of her sister Rose?
CT: No! But because she did get married she was damaged goods. [He laughs.] No-one will touch her! Towards the end in Brooklyn Miss Kelly considers the news that she has about Eilis Lacey as a piece of dynamite in that small society. The fact that a person back home [in the town of Enniscorthy] knew about her marriage [in America] catapulted Eilis into making her decision. Immediately she booked her passage back to America.
EV: Yet another question about the migrant experience. This one concerns the reserve which the migrant sets up between her- or himself and the beloved family and vice versa. I’m referring to Eilis’s brother Jack who on two occasions tells her: enough of that, when she so badly wants to hug him. Very moving too is the way Eilis’s mother says goodbye to her by going to bed early on their last night together: I’d rather say goodbye now and only once.
What does migration do to us? To our emotional life and to our hearts? Or is this reserve an Irish thing? I’m thinking too of the stand-offishness of the grandmother after her husband dies in The Heather Blazing: “No one is to touch me, she said. No one is to come near me any more.”
CT: It is an Irish thing. Eilis and her brother Jack had never done that sort of thing, hugging and so on, and when she meets up with him after a long time, she thinks this is what she has to do to express her emotions towards him.
In Brooklyn Eilis finds Tony, her boyfriend and eventual husband, difficult to read. Only to find out that what she sees in him is all there is. He hides nothing, he is completely clear in what he presents to her. Eilis on the other hand is everything, she’s deep, unknowable. The difference between her and Tony mirrors the difference between the old society of Ireland and the new society of the USA. It is the difference in attitudes on the two sides of the Atlantic.
If you’re charming in Ireland, you always think: what’s beneath. [Toíbín laughs a lot when he talks about what’s hidden beneath the charm of the Irish.] You wouldn’t trust this charm,” he adds. While in the USA you’re just like that, you are what you are. You spend your time studying the Irish: what’s beneath the charm – darkness, grumpiness, snarling?
EV: The portrait of Father Flood in Brooklyn is very sympathetic, the portrait of the priest in your short story: A priest in the family less so. My question: priests in the Republic of Ireland have been getting bad press, was it intentional to draw a sympathetic portrait of Father Flood in Brooklyn?
CT: Yes, that’s right about Father Flood. I would never draw an unsympathetic portrait of a priest – it’s too much of a cliché. It wasn’t like that …
EV: The fall of apartheid had an immense effect on people of my parents’ generation. It was their foundation that they believed in and built their lives upon. What effect did the recent report on the Catholic Church had on the people of Ireland, considering that the church had such a controlling influence on the state which implies the complicity of the state in the misdemeanours uncovered?
CT: The report wasn’t as cataclysmic as the fall of apartheid in SA. It has been a slower and more gradual process. Since the sixties fewer men have become priests. All information in this report have previously been made available through TV documentaries and books on the subject. The report has told us nothing we don’t know. It’s not about dioceses and priests and so the impact is lessened. The report about dioceses and priests is forthcoming.
EV: There is a scene in both The Master and in Brooklyn which I would describe as an in-between-scene. In The Master the scene is about Henry and a returned soldier, Holmes who have to sleep in the same bed. The scene runs for a few pages and a spectrum of emotions comes up but nothing really happens.
In Brooklyn the scene I’m referring to is the one where Eilis Lacey tries on bathing costumes with the shop owner miss Fortini looking on. Eilis has the following thoughts about miss Fortini: there was in the way she stood and gazed at her something very clear that Eilis knew she would never be able to tell anyone about.
Again lots of emotions, yet nothing actually happens: My question: do you think the truth between people comes out in these in-between scenes rather than in a scene where the action is pronounced and spelled out?
CT: I’m not as interested in people as what a scene like that in a novel can do, what you as a writer can let happen between people. A scene of almostness is more interesting, it holds much more than an explicitly told sex scene. I have done erotic scenes like the one of the three friends in the short story in Mothers and Sons. Did you do that, people would ask me later. They just presume I did! This sex thing remains a powerful business, here but in America too.
EV: Such a scene of almostness is much more evocative, more erotic. It fires the imagination of the reader.
I was very moved by the way you portrayed the characters in Brooklyn, by the amount of heart and understanding you put into Eilis Lacey and into Tony. The scene where Eilis is asked to join the singer at Father Flood’s Brooklyn Christmas Party for Irish migrants and where the singer takes her hand in his, is sublime.
Beckett once said that all that matters in his plays is the laughter and the tears.
Would you go along with that as far as your books go; or as far as Brooklyn goes?
CT: I suppose that’s not a bad way of putting it. I try to hit the reader’s nerve-end. The in-between area where it’s most sensitive. I try to enter into the spirit of the character. To let the reader almost become her. [Eilis in Brooklyn.] It is intended to let the reader move out of the self into the other self.
EV: Brooklyn has been described as having the ability to “finally change” the reader … What about emotional intelligence, for lack of a better word. You seem to really know people.
CT: I don’t really know people. Rather I specialise in watching people.
EV: I want to talk about your primary source of inspiration. That which informs most of your novels, that is, if it exists. In The Master you construct such a primary source for the prose of Henry James:
“He did not realise then and did not , in fact, grasp for many years how these few weeks in North Conway – the endlessly conversing group gathered under the rustling pines – would be enough for him, would be in effect, all he needed to know in his life. In all his years as a writer he was to draw on the scenes he lived and witnessed at that time … ”
Cush on the Wexford Coast, Blackwater – these places occur in at least three of your novel, even the surname Kehoe occurs in both Brooklyn and The Heather Blazing. You also mention the town of Enniscorthy in both these novels.
CT: My inspiration comes in the following guises:
* some weeks around the early illness of my father,
* some weeks after the death of my father,
* my early twenties in Barcelona,
* and the time during the building of the house in Wexford.
I would say these are my formative contexts.
[Toíbín adds that it is true about the primary source in Henry James’s work, it inspired him through all of his writing.]
EV: In Brooklyn you choose the straightforward, linear way of telling a story. No tricks like telling the story backwards or interrupting the story with past scenes or whatever. Why did you choose this way? Some will descibe it as old-fashioned. A Dutch editor once told me that she couldn’t give a book with a linear story-line to her readers.
CT: Just in this book [Brooklyn] actually. With the short story “The Long Winter” (in Mothers and Sons) I tried every possible trick of telling the story. Eventually I chose simplicity. That gave me the clue for structure in Brooklyn. The linear structure in this novel is new. My editor wanted me to add back chapters telling of Eilis’s father and her brother Jack, but I refused. I just felt I got more emotional resonance by telling it that way, more density by not going into the past.
EV: The syntax of Hibernian English follows that of the Gaellic. I find it fascinating, especially as I have a minority language, Afrikaans, as a mother tongue and have to deal with the threat of Afrikaans disappearing from public life.
Is Hibernian English a way of preserving a disappearing language within the dominant one? Even if it’s only remnants? [Examples of Hibernian English in The Heather Blazing "You’ll get your death in here" … and "Your uncle Stephen’s after taking a turn" ...]
CT: I have no specific views on Hibernian English. It’s a living speech, you get a flavour from it, it makes me laugh. By using it you can get a gap between an older person and the younger generation. Gaellic? No, I can’t speak it but I can read it. Again, it can be used to distinguish an older generation from a younger one. You get a lot of flavour in dialogue rather than with ordinary sentences. It’s an odd business.
EV: Do you have a specific daily routine? Stephen King says he aims for 4 000 words a day and only rests on Christmas day.
CT: I work much harder than Stephen King!” [He laughs.] “Some days I work much harder, others I don’t work at all. I don’t have a woman coming to the house to do everything, I have to go out and shop. Today I voted in the election for the European Parliament.
EV: Where did you get the story for Brooklyn?
CT: When I was twelve a woman came into our house and told that story.
EV: You have a brilliant memory then?
CT: “No, I just listened to everything people said that was interesting to me. That was what I remember to this day. If people weren’t interesting I would leave the room.
* * * * * * * *
Book details
Photos courtesy Victor Dlamini and the Guardian
Please register or log in to comment
