Colm Tóibín: “I write as though I will never get another chance.”

BNR: In Nora Webster and Brooklyn, Enniscorthy and Wexford are very important — there’s a lot about the importance of place, the muted colors, the sea down at Cush. [Colm would later mention in his talk that much of the movie of Brooklyn was filmed in Enniscorthy, giving it a stronger connection to reality.] There’s a lot about the small-town atmosphere, where everyone knows one another’s stories. It’s where you grew up — is it in some way an homage to home?
CT: Well, homage would be a strong word, I think.
I just mean that it’s harder, it’s very hard to make up a place. It’s easier to use a real place. So it’s using Enniscorthy, it’s taking the easier option, which is to really evoke a place that you know where the sun came up in the morning and where the sun went down.
BNR: And you have some fantastic awful characters, who are part of the claustrophobic small town. Mrs. Kelly at the beginning of Brooklyn, who hides the nice bread and tomatoes, only giving them to the higher-caliber customers, and Francie-Pants Kavanagh in Nora.
And Francie-Pants has this great back-story — how Nora and her friend left her behind on a bike ride and laughed when she got a puncture. And she never spoke to them again. And this is really important to the story, even though it happened when they were young, and now they’re in their forties.
CT: Oh, I think that maybe is one of the ways where it does make a difference being older, when you realize, if someone — something happens — people never forget, really.
You’ll find this when you’re older; that if someone doesn’t like you now, they’ll never like you. And you’ll meet them in twenty, thirty, forty years’ time, and they still won’t like you.
BNR: I thought people grew out of that sort of thing.
CT: No. No. Not things like that, it doesn’t.
I mean, I’m sixty. I could meet someone on the street in Dublin that I was at university with and there will be something about them that I won’t like and they won’t like about me, and we’ll always be conscious of that.
That’s one of the things you learn as you grow older. That if you don’t like someone, you never like them, and they never like you. It’s not something you grow out of, no.
BNR: I’m also interested in the importance of religion in your novels, and the role played by those with religious position — the power they have. In Brooklyn it is Father Flood who gets Eilis the position in America, and in Nora Webster there’s the nun — Sister Thomas — who sort of glides through the novel and makes people behave.
CT: Yeah, also what I was trying to do was soften the religious figures, you know? It would have been very easy to have made the nun into a sort of monster figure, but she was sort of softened in the book.
And she makes people do the right thing — you’re right [like when she makes the older Mr. Gibney allow his son to marry his pregnant girlfriend]. She’s sort of an enabler.
BNR: You’ve also written about religion through a re-telling of the events leading up to Good Friday in The Testament of Mary. Is religion important to your writing?
CT: No, but in that book it is. In that book I really wanted to go back to the story told from Mary’s point of view, but it was Mary interested me more than religion, you know. Her figure — the real figure. And the distance between this sort of idealized figure and the real figure.
BNR: In paintings she’s always depicted in this expensive blue, and very holy, so it’s a challenge to take her and make her real.
I’m also interested in this thing with the dead — the presence of the dead, or the death of a loved one is a common theme in your novels — Nora Webster, Brooklyn, The Blackwater Lightship.
At times they become present — Sister Thomas says, “We walk among them sometimes,” and there’s a point in Nora where a very vivid ghost appears, and it’s not clear if it’s real or an illusion.
CT: Yes, I wanted to leave it like that. That it wouldn’t be clear.
You know, it’s one of the things that people who have been through an intense loss talk about — the thing, the possibility of such things occurring. Days when you’re not sure what is what.
BNR: And in Brooklyn you take away Rose, who is so alive, so beautiful, vivacious, kind.
CT: Yes — in order to get her [Eilis] home, something big has got to occur. That’s the only thing that really can do that. There isn’t anything else that would work in the same way.
And there’s always a sense of her in Rose’s shadow. So her in shadow. Rose in shadow. So when she comes home she’s moving into becoming Rose almost, getting work in the same place. So with the Lacey sisters, it’s substance and shadow playing with each other.
BNR: I’m interested in your writing process, because much of the power, particularly in Nora, comes from what isn’t said. There is a lot of inference — with her relationship with her mother — for instance. So I was wondering how you refined this, what is your editing process like?
CT: Oh, there’s no editing process. I mean, you just write down what’s needed — what you think is needed. And while I may change words, or pluck things, I mean not much. There’s no actual editing process.
BNR: So you don’t write then cut?
CT: No, you see, that won’t work, because if you don’t get it down right the first time, I mean — it doesn’t mean you don’t have to do editing or re-reading, re-writing, but not editing; meaning I’ll write this long and later on I’ll make it short, that won’t work. That won’t work.
I mean, well, there are writers who do drafts, knowing there will be later drafts, and that works for them, but I don’t do that. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be later drafts, but I write as though I will never get another chance.
BNR: I love the prosaic details and the way you bring to life the clothes and the housework. There’s a point in Nora where, where she’s at Catherine’s house — I actually felt the physical presence of a sink of dirty dishes very palpably, and I wanted to climb into the pages of the book and just wash the damn things so Catherine wouldn’t come back and find them. There is something very physical about this domestic detail — but they’re very much part of the female domain, and in the ’60s in Ireland this would have been even more true.
CT: It’s just a question of watching, and obviously in a domestic sphere that business of who does what when becomes a sort of power game, almost, you know? You watch it — but you don’t have to be a man or a woman to watch it — you know, you just sort of watch.
Particularly if you’re a child. You’re with the women more than you’re with the men. You pick up on your mother not doing the washing up –you wouldn’t have to be a girl or a boy to notice that.
BNR: The small things are very important., like when she tries on the dress and walks downstairs to look at herself in the hall mirror — and then her daughter doesn’t bring her boyfriend home again
But at one point you say, “She wondered if she was alone in having nothing between the dullness of her own days and the brilliance of her imagined life.” I find myself disagreeing with this, because Nora’s outer life isn’t truly dull, it’s richly developed.
CT: Yeah, but you know, the work she has to go back to is dull. The daily business of going off to do bookkeeping, you know, is dull, I mean that part is dull, so there are some things that are dull.
BNR: Considering how central the inner life is in your novels, I was wondering if you were worried about how that would translate to the screen in a film like Brooklyn.
CT: No. It’s a very good script by Nick Hornby, and, she, Saoirse Ronan, manages very well to convey an inner life — and the camera — John Crowley, who is the director, he managed very well to convey all that. You know, an actress can do that. That’s really what actors do. They convey an inner life, by, you know, by simply resting, letting the camera linger on their face.
BNR: You and Nick Hornby, you’re very different writers, so I wondered how that worked?
CT: I wanted him because he knows something that I don’t know. And he’s much more alert to visual culture and popular culture than I am. Everything he does, he has a sort of magic touch, and he’s somebody I kind of associate with just knowing something when he’s working, how to relate to an audience that I don’t really know.
He was in a sense my “dream person,” and that would have been like the main reason why I wanted to sign a contract with his particular people — what I said was, ”Can you get me Nick Hornby?” We are different, but if you want someone like yourself, then just do it yourself. I wanted somebody who just had one thing I don’t have, and he has ten things I don’t have. He had written the script for Lynn Barber’s An Education — he has something in his relationship to an audience that I don’t even know anything about.
***
Tóibín went off to meet the photographer who was taking his picture prior to the talk. I went back to the media tent.
Later, at his talk, he read an extract from Nora Webster; the part of the book where Nora revisits the summer beach where she used to come with Maurice and their children, in winter, after — “almost stabbing her boss with a pair of scissors.” She finds it desolate, but there is something else too. A feeling that Maurice, too, is there.
His voice is that of a storyteller: slow, smoky, drawn out. I am reminded of a priest who used to come and speak to us in school assembly when I was a child, telling stories that fascinated us though we were loath to admit it.
When I returned home, and picked up another of his novels, The South, I found myself reading it in his voice.