WRITING THE SILENCE
Irish author finds drama in what’s not being said
Don’t call Colm Toibin a storyteller. He would be insulted. He finds depth in the silences between the
spoken words.
At the age of nine, Colm Toibin learned to read. It happened so late “because I was sort of stupid,” he said. “I just couldn’t do it.”
But once he got the hang of it, well, he just fell in love.
“Reading came quite naturally to me once I learned to read, which was quite late, but once I did, that was the world I wanted — that was where I wanted to be.”
Toibin was born into a household in Enniscorthy, the secondlargest town in County Wexford, Ireland, in 1955. It was a home where “actually no one talked very much and if they said something, they didn’t really mean it.”
Perhaps that explains his love of silence.
In Toibin’s lexicon, silence is much more than a lack of sound. It is the essence of his writing.
“I suppose I mean that the only thing that really interests me (as a writer) are things that are not said. Speech or conversation often serves to conceal as much as it reveals. What you can do in fiction is show the mind of somebody, of their thinking and how little of it they actually say and the reader can share both. You can have a sort of drama going on between revelation and concealment.”
Of course, he also writes in silence, scratching out his text in long hand with a cheap fountain pen. He had an expensive one but lost it.
“I think you need the door closed and you need silence, yeah.”
His family did not have a television “for a long time, eventually we got one, but no telephone.”
Whether that’s the reason he has been such a success as a writer of novels, short stories and essays, he couldn’t say. He does know that reading has made him a writer.
“The more you read, the more you can read yourself and know that a certain thing will or won’t work; that you can live (and write) in a certain rhythm and get to know it better.”
He’s got to know that rhythm really well over the years. Many of his books have been nominated for awards such as the Booker and won awards such as the Dublin IMPAC (The Master) and the Costa Novel of the Year (Brooklyn).
He cannot remember the title of the very first book he read, but he does remember that “I became very interested in Agatha Christie quite early.” He says he liked the plots.
He has moved on to other authors.
Hemingway is the big influence. He is particularly fond of the early stories and The Sun Also Rises. He has read Canadian authors, in particular Mavis Gallant, Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood and Timothy Findlay, but he has the most respect for Alice Munro. And, oh yes, Michael Ondaatje, who is a “friend of mine. I’ve read all his books.”
He is also immersed in 19thcentury literature. He mentions authors like Jane Austen (Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice) and ex-pat American novelist Henry James, who was the subject of one of his novels, The Master. He did not watch Pride and Prejudice on television. In fact, “I’ve never worked out the mechanics of the TV. I’ve never turned on the TV here (in his New York apartment).”
Toibin is currently the Mellon Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches two courses, one on Irish literature and the second on the 19th-century novel from George Eliot (pseudonym for Mary Anne Evans) to Henry James.
He says the whole of 19th-century literature intrigues him. “I do love the angular intelligence of George Eliot and then the more sensuous intelligence of Henry James coming in almost having an argument with her.”
In addition to preparing for students these days, Toibin is getting ready to watch a play of his appear on Broadway. The Testament of Mary is an adaptation of one of his novels. The experience of rehearsal has been stimulating, he says.
The play, starring the actress Fiona Shaw as Mary, opened formally on Monday, but at the time of the interview it was in preview.
“There were 900 people there last night. And there were standing ovations. They weren’t for me, they were for the actress.”
Watching his words come out of someone’s mouth is an experience that has him almost speechless.
“It’s amazing. It’s disconcerting. It’s exciting. It’s quite difficult to pin down.
“You come out afterward wondering about it. Actually what’s happening to me in this process is that I come out more and more filled with admiration for what the actress (Fiona Shaw) is doing and what the director (Deborah Warner) has managed. These were words on a page and they have managed to do all this with them.”
When he is watching, “what’s happening is that the emotion is coming back and hitting me and I have to deal with that.”
Once the dust settles from the play and the school semester ends, Toibin will turn to his next book. He won’t talk about it, but intends to finish it this summer.
And when he sits down to write, what catches his ear?
“An idea, a memory, something someone tells you. Something imagined completely moves into rhythm almost on its own accord.”
He doesn’t have a strategy involved in picking what to write about.
“But there is a strategy once you start (writing). You need to know when you are beginning, where you are going to go. It may change, but you still need to know it.”
One thing he won’t be is a “storyteller,” a conduit for the oral tradition.
“A lot of what I do comes out of that, but it also comes out of a literary tradition, which is one that includes all of English literature and some French literature and German literature. So it’s not a simple business of being a self-taught fellow coming out of a place where people wound up talking.”