Colm Tóibín began his writing career as a journalist. Although he wrote his first novel, The South, in 1986, it took him a further four years to find a publisher. Since that seminal moment, Tóibín has delivered five other novels; two books of short stories; two plays, as well as several works of non-fiction.
He has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times, and won The Costa Novel Award, for Brooklyn. In his latest book of essays, New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Tóibín explores the odd relationships that various writers, including W.B Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John Cheever and Thomas Mann, had with their families, and asks how it informed their work.
Tóibín spoke to the Spectator about his miserable childhood, his love of Henry James, and why he finds no pleasure in writing.
Did you begin to dislike some of the writers in this book after discovering their strange behaviour towards their own family?
Oh no! I wish I had a moral position on John Cheever or Thomas Mann. They are two writers that readers would have a right to feel are monstrous, but I don’t feel like that for a moment. I’m intrigued and interested, and trying to work out their next move.
Do you think novelists have a right to use their own family as a muse for their fiction?
I feel as a writer that you have only rights, and no responsibilities. However, I’m not sure that I would feel that way if I was on the other side. I think that when you are working, you tend to need an image, and put it in, and worry about that later. That can be very difficult and really quite a deceitful thing to do. I don’t know any solution to this, other than, if anyone asked me for advice about it on the writers side, I would always say, do it.
Yet you ran into trouble with this when you wrote your own mother in as a character to one of your books. Which novel was it you did this?
I’m not telling you that. As a writer you have to keep the illusion going that you are some sort of artist, rather than a figure desperately in need of self revelation and confession. I think if you give away too much, readers will say, hold on a minute, if I want to know about you, I’ll meet you for a drink.
How would you describe your childhood?
It was all miserable. Childhood itself is a difficult business, other children are awful and you can’t really chose your friends because they are the children of the street. Children are meaner than adults, adults disguise their meanness better, or you can just keep away from the really mean ones. Philip Larkin is the best on this. He said, he thought he hated everyone until he went to Oxford, but then he realised it was just children he hated!
Is Freud a big influence on the familial relationships you concentrate on so much in your writing?
I suppose Freud had already formulated a lot of things that were already in the air. It’s hard not to feel that Shakespeare read Freud, or maybe Freud read Shakespeare. Had Hamlet been treated by Freud before the play, or did Freud just get some ideas from Hamlet? What I mean by this is that it’s all over literature, and I presume it’s all over life: people’s relationships with their parents and their siblings being disturbing, nourishing, and of great interest. In my case, I just put those titles on books, because I like the sound of those words, Mothers and Sons, The Empty Family, and New Ways to Kill Your Mother, but I must get a new set of obsessions soon.
What attracts you to Henry James’ work, and what qualities did he bring to the novel?
All the things that James wrote about: the people who had inherited fortunes, the world of style, and the serious morality at the heart of his books. There is also a purity about how The Portrait of a Lady is constructed. James managed to focus on one individual’s consciousness, and gave her a third person intimate perspective, so that even when she wasn’t there in the book, people were constantly talking about her. So everything was focused on her. I’m not sure anyone else has really ever done as well as him since.
Your writing is famous for its rich cadence and sparseness of language, why do you write in this style?
It’s out of fear rather than ambition. I think if I just write this way, then there will be no chance of doing it wrong. But also maybe reading Hemmingway at a certain age really affected me, realising that you can get an awful lot from very little. It’s a sad business; some of those sentences are just sad little things.
How important was your career as a journalist in shaping you as a novelist?
It was very useful in giving me a sense that there simply isn’t time to get involved in self expression. Journalism also gave me a relationship to readers. It created a longing to write fiction.
How do you find the disciplines of writing short stories and novels differ?
With the novel, you can structure it in a much more deliberate way, whereas in a short story, it’s almost like a melody comes into your head, and you can’t force a melody. People who write songs hear a melody and then play a chord. The short story comes like that.
When you wrote The Story of the Night, was it a liberating experience for you to have a gay person as the central character?
I remember doing a reading with that book in London, and there were people in the audience, and even one person reading with me, who didn’t know I was gay. And whatever way I read, even though the guy in the novel is Argentine, all of them realised I was gay then. Some of it was enjoyable, some of it was slightly worrying, but yes, it was liberating.
Is it true you don’t enjoy writing?
Writing is not pleasure. You are dealing with memory, pain, and you have to settle down into the business of digging up parts of yourself that are better off left buried. Getting the book out into the world, even people liking it, and seeing it in bookstores, that’s not pleasure either. It all has a level of disturbance. It’s not a natural thing and it’s not good for you.
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