Often, during the course of my interview sessions with Colm Tóibín, which numbered more than a dozen and took place across time zones—he was in Los Angeles, in the Catalan Pyrenees, on the Ballyconnigar coast of his native County Wexford—a disposable fountain pen would dart into view, held in his hand and used to emphasize a point about process or method or about the novel he had been working on before our conversation began and to which, after it had ended, he would return. Tóibín’s friends know that these pens are part of the deal. See Tóibín, see a Pilot V, or more than one—tucked into a jacket pocket, waiting on a desk, scattered like cigarette butts across the kitchen countertop at one of the parties for which his Georgian town house has been legendary in Dublin.
The novel in progress, a sequel to Brooklyn (2009), will be his eleventh. He is also the author of two books of short stories and several collections of essays and literary journalism. A book of poetry, Vinegar Hill, came out this past spring. Even before his debut novel, The South, appeared in 1990, he had published four works of nonfiction—a book about Barcelona, an account of walking the Irish border during one of the most turbulent periods of the Troubles, and a pamphlet on writing and public life and another about the trial of the Argentinian generals. There have been two plays and a screenplay, and the libretto for an opera, The Master, which is based on his 2004 novel about Henry James and was performed in Wexford this past fall.
Tóibín talks about writing as work. He says, “I was working very hard,” or “I was just working,” or, when describing a breakthrough with a character or in his sense of how to frame a narrative, “I could work with that,” or, even more forcefully and with a palpable sense of relief, “Then I knew I could work.” One gets the feeling that, for Tóibín, any non-Work, whether it be teaching or traveling or just attending a dinner party—people are constantly holding dinner parties in his honor—becomes a kind of debt that must be repaid back at the desk, on a daily basis and especially at the crunch point of each narrative, when there is the opportunity to face and banish whatever technical problem has been obstructing him from Work. He overcomes it—makes a decision about form or backstory or perspective—and then he is again in the glorious fullness of the work, and he writes and writes in his notebooks with those Pilot V pens, until he can stop. Sometimes, as a break, he will bid on a painting, which he did during our first conversation. Tóibín has more art than he has walls. He was born in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, in 1955, and these days he splits his time between LA, where he lives with his partner, the writer and Semiotext(e) editor Hedi El Kholti, and New York City, where he teaches at Columbia University. But there are pens on both sides of the Atlantic, and high up in the Pyrenees.
—Belinda McKeon
INTERVIEWER
What is your view on period drama?
COLM TÓIBÍN
A few years ago, every Sunday night I would visit a friend who was an old lady, Beatrice von Rezzori. I would walk across the park to her house in Manhattan, and we’d order Chinese food and sit together with little trays on our laps, fully content. We would watch what I called Downtown Abbey. When that ended, we watched Victoria. It was all oddly relaxing and it was, at the same time, simply preposterous.
I have no interest in the Victoria & Albert school of novel writing—descriptions of the upholstery in the cab and what the prime minister’s waistcoat is like. When I am writing a novel, I have no responsibility to the subject, only to the reader. In writing about Henry James, it was clear that my job was to keep the drama psychological—about his demons, what was haunting him. Obviously there are always temptations. There’s a moment in 1896 when James gets his Kensington apartment wired for electricity for the first time—if you’re a certain sort of novelist, set pieces like that are gold. I could have gone on for pages about where the plugs were, the kind of light, how the evenings were changed by electricity. I wanted to write it, but I realized that, if I got it right, people might respond, “It’s marvelous the way you capture the period.” I hate the period. I hate people capturing the period.
INTERVIEWER
But don’t you do a lot of research, like a biographer might?
TÓIBÍN
I read everything, of course. With The Magician (2021), I started really paying attention to books about Thomas Mann after I reviewed three biographies that came out in the same week in 1996. I knew by 2005, when I went to LA for the first time, that I wanted to see inside his house there, inside his study. I knew that if I could be in that room, I could get the sound or some sense of the book.
Later, I became interested in how Mann got to writing Doctor Faustus, the way he used Schoenberg as a model without understanding Schoenberg’s music. To come to terms with the music, he had to consult Adorno, and Schoenberg couldn’t bear Adorno. I was fascinated by these relationships and by the fact that Mann took pages of Adorno’s work and put them directly into Faustus without crediting him. To make sense of it all, I even had someone come and teach me the twelve-tone technique. The problem was that I was becoming involved in a sort of fictional game about classical music and all these famous figures. My two editors, Mary Mount in London and Nan Graham in New York, felt that whatever Adorno represented was taking away from what was actually emerging—without my having planned it—which was a family story about a man whose son commits suicide. If I didn’t recognize that, I was going to lose the book. So I had to do a lot of cutting.
INTERVIEWER
How much are we talking?
TÓIBÍN
Fifty-five thousand words, most of them
