The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘Ireland produces Guinness, Viagra… and poets’
Pumped full of cancer drugs and listening to heavy metal, novelist Colm Tóibín felt his brain rewiring – and what came out was verse
Three years ago, Colm Tóibín found himself lying in the very spot where Leopold Bloom once slept. It was not a soothing experience. Pumped full of drugs, heavy metal pounding in his ears, the Irish novelist waited for his oncologist to tell him if he might die soon – and thought about breakfast.
The hospital where Tóibín was receiving chemotherapy for testicular cancer, Dublin’s Mater Misericordiae, had been built on the site of Bloom’s fictional home in James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was a coincidence Tóibín (now thankfully recovered) couldn’t resist addressing in Vinegar Hill, his first collection of poems, published this month.
“If the chemo/ Zaps the tumour/
And doesn’t kill me,” Tóibín writes, “I am going to have/ An exemplary morning.” Though the medication ruined his appetite – his waist shrank from 36in to 30in – he fantasises in the poem about imitating Bloom’s breakfast of “liver/ With grilled mutton/ Kidneys, and tea”. For a poem about a life-threatening illness, it’s surprisingly buoyant, its “chords filled with/ Tough life”, like the music improbably blasting from a metalhead’s bed in the next ward.
In conversation, Tóibín is funny, alert and animated. We’re speaking on Zoom, so I ask where he is. He peers out the window, and pulls a puzzled face: “I think this is New York.” That playfulness comes through in his verse. “The poems are closer to the way I talk, and the way I think, than the novels are. I think lightly, I take a very light view of things. The poems do that, and the novels don’t.”
Those novels – from his 1990 debut, The South, to last year’s fictional portrait of Thomas Mann, The Magician – have made Tóibín one of Ireland’s most acclaimed living writers. (In December, he won the £40,000 David Cohen Prize for lifetime achievement in literature.) But they’re “depressing”, he sighs, a little theatrically. “There’s a sort of gloom in them. I worry about people reading too many of them. They should probably read something funny in between.”
Poetry opened up new possibilities. “In the sort of fiction I write, you’re building plausibility. In poetry, you can have anything. You don’t have to make something plausible, you just have to make it true.”
Until recently, Tóibín used to write only “one or two” poems a year. “I thought, when I’m about 105, I might have a little volume.” They were usually short, “almost abstract” pieces such as “Curves” (see page 9); beautiful but cryptic, holding something back. “For the reader, all you’re getting is the emotion from the rhythm. But for me, that’s coming out of something very, very specific.”
But two things changed that. The first was his cancer treatment. “The sort of chemo I was on can really affect your hearing. You can go deaf. I didn’t do that. But I got a new sort of hearing.” Music would echo around his head all day, “in the most peculiar way, it would be fully with me, in a sort of inner ear”. Before chemotherapy, pieces of writing came to him as ideas, or plots; after, “they came as sounds”.
Steroids also helped. “They grind inside you and eventually, they give you this extraordinary shot of – clarity is maybe a good word. I didn’t know what to do with it. It was a bit of a nuisance in the evenings – I was trying to get to sleep!” One poem in the book, an elegy for a friend, was written in a single one-hour burst of steroid-induced concentration.
The second thing that opened his poetic floodgates was the pandemic. During the US lockdown, “I was in my boyfriend’s house, which is in suburban Los Angeles, which means there’s nothing whatsoever to do. My way of soaking in images, or getting them out, was much freer – because I didn’t have to f---ing go to dinner with anyone.” Lines started “coming unbidden”: in the middle of a meal, he’d dart away from the table to write them down.
There’s a pressure that comes with arriving as a “new” poet when you’re already a famous novelist. Expectations are high. When Tóibín published one four-line poem in The Times Literary Supplement in 2011, it was considered a headline-worthy event (the Irish Independent: “Tóibín tries his hand at poetry”). Today, he feels “sheepish, embarrassed” about having “come to the party late” at 66, when he has friends who have written poetry their whole lives. “I live around the corner now from [Pulitzer winner] Paul Muldoon! I’m not even going to mention my book to him.” Being from Ireland “is a particular problem. Because what else do we produce?” A comic pause. “I mean, we produce a lot of Viagra. And Guinness. And Kerrygold. But when you think about Ireland, what else is there, except poets?”
Ireland produces pretty good novelists, too, to be fair. In January, the Arts Council appointed Tóibín the new Laureate for Irish Fiction – but he’s uneasy about “Irish Fiction” as a generic label. “The general business of writing at all – maybe everywhere, but in Ireland particularly – is putting a flag up over a place. And the place is never ‘Ireland’. It’s an amorphous term, it doesn’t even mean anything. But if you talk about Wexford [his home county] then I can talk back.”
Irish fiction was something Tóibín used to resist. “When I was starting to read, I would not have willingly bought an Irish book.” He wanted to be transported to somewhere else. As a teenager in the late 1960s, Tóibín was just the right age to take advantage of the country’s loosening censorship laws. He recalls win
ning a book token as a school prize, then being stopped by “a priest and a pretty strict lay teacher” on his way back from the shops and made to show them what he’d bought: a bagful of godless existentialists – Kafka, Sartre, Camus. “They were really nice about it,” he says. “If that had been a decade before, they would have expelled you.”
But now, teaching at Columbia in New York, he’s immersed in Irish fiction, spending a semester each year “teaching Ulysses – just Ulysses. Read the book! Not critics or an agenda around Ulysses. Other people are teaching very serious things to do with gender and postcolonial…” He trails off. “I’m a dinosaur, but nobody minds.”
When not teaching, or playing tennis (“I’m very competitive. I have no style, but I’ll run after anything”), Tóibín is almost always writing. “I’m what Henry James called ‘a constant producer’.” He’s currently in the thick of a book he insists is “not a sequel to Brooklyn”, his 2009 novel which was adapted into a Bafta-winning film. “But it’s [about] the same people, 25 years on. I didn’t want to do it, and promised I wouldn’t. But then I got an idea. And the idea is what I’m working from, rather than the earlier novel.”
He’s itching to talk about it, humming with enthusiasm. “When I thought about it, walking down the street, it was just electrifying – that is an amazing idea! That’s dramatic. I can work with that.”
What was it? He gives a wicked laugh. “I can’t tell you, because it gives the whole f---ing thing away!”
Vinegar Hill (Carcanet, £12.99) is out on March 31