A Guest at the Feast
“It all started with my balls.” The very first line of Colm Tóibín’s first essay in a collection newly out gives some idea of his preoccupations and his writerly ways. He is known for the pared-down style of his fiction and has, himself, written about the gruelling extent of forming it: cutting and rewriting and cutting again. So it’s not surprising that the start of an account of the testicular cancer that overtook him in 2018 should be brief.
The essay, “Cancer: My Part in Its Downfall” came out in the London Review of Books in 2019, and is classic Tóibín. It is a model of clarity, despite the medical terminology, and self-deprecating humour runs through it. After consulting Dr Google before legitimate specialists, he discovered the harmless word “hydrocele”, which he decided he had. “Had I been sure how to pronounce it,” he wrote, “I might even have started to boast about it.” When the real doctors got onto it, they discovered a cancer that had already spread. He survived it all and the final sentence – no spoiler – is wry.
That the opening essay is about his private parts hints at his preoccupation with his sexuality. Its meticulous recall points to the degree with which he engages his own life as the inspiration for his novels: from his Irishness, his Catholicism, his childhood in a tiny village then in a Catholic boarding school in Dublin, his homosexuality, and his political progressivism and writerly activism. Some characters, even plots, began with a passing reference in a conversation or the fleeting sight of an interesting personage decades earlier. None of his novels feels autobiographical, though, so dispassionate are his economic translations from real life.
A Guest at the Feast contains 11 essays, eight of them from the London Review of Books reaching back to 2001, one from The Dublin Review from 2007 and one from The New Yorker in 1995.
The first three are explicitly autobiographical. They are about his brush with cancer, his childhood in the village of Enniscorthy and his courtroom observation in the 1980s of Ireland’s first challenge to its homosexuality laws. “In George Orwell’s 1984,” he points out, “the most severe punishment for citizens was to forbid them the right to love. To most readers of the book, this seems a cruelty far-fetched and almost impossible; but for most gay people it was a nightmare we inhabited while pretending, sometimes even to ourselves, that it was nothing, or while telling ourselves that it would not easily change and that it was dangerous to complain.” How far we have come in just 40 years certainly bears remembering.
The other two sections come at religion and politics from various directions: testing, toasting and vigorously criticising the
Church. The first, titled “The Paradoxical Pope”, is about Karol Wojtyła, John Paul II, who was dying at the time. Tóibín begins with a typically literary flourish and a nod to the political times, channelling Yeats:
“Somewhere now, surely, among the College of Cardinals, the stately old men of the Roman Catholic Church, there is a Gorbachev in the shadows slouching towards Rome to be born.”
Another essay, “The Bergoglio
Smile: Pope Francis”, published last year, is a fascinating trawl through the current pope’s hyper-conservative Peronist past in Argentina. “He seemed unaware of any of the teachings of Vatican II,” Tóibín writes,
“It was all St Thomas Aquinas and the old church Fathers.” Tóibín tells us he had been “austere, a disciplinarian, humourless”, before doing a quite extraordinary about-face while fighting with the Kirchners – then Argentine president Néstor Kirchner identified himself as a “progressive” Peronist – to become the humble, leftist leader we know today, washing the feet of sinners in jail and welcoming all to his worldwide parish – including gay people whose union, short of marriage, he now supports. It is one of those flows of writing that, even if it sounds uninteresting, hooks the reader after the first couple of paragraphs.
“Putting Religion in Its Place: Marilynne Robinson” is pure Tóibín in essay mode, full of rhetorical flourishes. Discussing the great novelist, an unabashed promoter of the Catholic faith in these evasive times, Tóibín roams the literary world, exploring the thoughts of famous writers as well as his own, while equivocally praising Robinson. Though quite open about his relations with the church, it is not so apparent in his fiction. “My problem isn’t about belief itself, however,” he says at one point, “it’s simply a technical one: how do you create a religious or non-secular protagonist in a novel without making a dog’s dinner out of the book.”
The jewel in the crown, however, is the essay the book is named for: “A Guest at the Feast”. Published by Penguin in 2011 as a slim 51-page memoir, it is a form of journalism. Through the very precise details of his quirky home village, Enniscorthy, of his family and its deep roots in Irish republicanism and of Dublin – where he was sent to be educated in a Christian Brothers boarding school after his father died and then stayed on – he is searching for himself, and through that for a kind of universal self for us all. Showing us the way.
It is Tóibín at his discursive finest: descriptive, incisive and, at heart, deeply poetic.
Picador, 352pp, $34.99