Jessica Gross | Longreads | February 2015 | 17 minutes (4,283 words)
The Irish writer Colm Tóibín has written eight novels, two books of short stories, and multiple works of nonfiction. His latest novel, Nora Webster, follows a widow in 1970s Ireland as she moves through her mourning toward a new life. That book was almost 15 years in the making, and Tóibín’s previous novel, Brooklyn, which centers on an Irish immigrant to the United States, grew out of Nora Webster’s early pages. Both novels—like all of Tóibín’s work—subtly portray their characters’ complex inner lives, the details accruing slowly to finally reveal an indelible portrait. I spoke with Tóibín, who splits his time between Dublin and New York, by phone about the protagonists he’s compelled to write about and how he goes about creating their worlds.
In Nora Webster, the pacing of the writing follows that of Nora’s movement through her mourning and grief. Did that come naturally through the writing process, or did you maneuver the pacing in revisions later on?
I think if you don’t do that naturally, then attempting to think about it or to force it would be to make the reader start noticing the tricks you’re using and the tactics. You would lose the reader following you and believing in you. So in other words, the tone of the book is actually organic. And the thing is that I’m trying to judge that at the same time as do it, but if I spend too much time judging it, then I lose the doing it.
In the same way, if you’re running and you start thinking of running, something goes wrong with your breathing and your pace, whereas if you just let the running happen, you will get something from it. Or playing sport, in that if you decide you’re going to hit an ace in tennis and then you think about your ace, you don’t hit one. It’s only that funny moment where you get a mixture of almost no concentration and at the same time fierce concentration that you then start getting the ball in.
You began writing Nora Webster in 2000. How did you get to the point of actually completing it, and what was that process like?
I put a lot of thought into the book. It was always in my mind, even when I wasn’t writing it, and I would go through days where I would think, “Oh, I know what I’m going to do with it today,” or “I know what I’m going to do with it the next time I go back to it.” A really good idea might come to you at night and seem really wrong in the morning. So you’re always testing things. And then every year I would add to it in some way or another.
But a few years ago I found that I had all the different parts of the book and I needed to sit down then and connect them. And therefore I’m constantly reading over, checking if, “is there enough there for that, okay, so now this”—so it became quite strategic, as well as trying not to think too much. I mean formally strategic: that material can go there, I’m going to leave that out completely, this scene is going to need one more thing.
This novel intersects very slightly with Brooklyn: In the very beginning, the mother of Brooklyn’s protagonist pays a visit to Nora. But the overlap ends there. Why did you want to do that instead of making each a complete stand-alone?
Well, what happened was that I was reading over the first chapter of Nora Webster about five years after I wrote it. And the story of Brooklyn jumped out at me from those early pages. And so I went and wrote that. And if you look at that opening chapter of Nora Webster, you find that there are mentions of various women’s names who could help her. One of them is from The Blackwater Lightship, and another is from The Heather Blazing. And there are women who come in from some of the short stories as well.
Is that pleasurable to you, carrying characters over from one story or book to another?
Yes, yes, it’s sort of fun. And it anchors the book in something of a “real” world that is actually a fictional world. It just connects things. Henry James did it a few times, actually. And of course James Joyce does it. Some of the characters in Dubliners emerge in Ulysses. And it happens in Joseph Conrad’s work, too.
Is there an aspect of it that’s also a reward for the careful reader, or the reader who’s read many of your books?
Yes. It was funny—when I was in China, some of the audience thought that it was almost an error, like an offense. One woman said it to me accusingly: “You took the character from one of your books and put it into another book!” And I said, “Yeah, yeah, I did that, yeah.”
She thought it was cheating?
She looked at me, yeah, like it’s cheating, serious cheating. I said I thought it was terrific.
As if you plagiarized yourself.
Exactly.
You experienced a trauma in childhood that parallels what Nora’s children, particularly her son Donal, experience: Like him, your father became ill, you and your brother were sent to live with your aunt and your mother didn’t visit or write at all for months, and your father passed away when you were young. And many of Donal’s traits, including his stammer, are ones you shared. How did you decide to tell this story from the mother’s perspective instead of the child’s?
I felt there wasn’t enough depth in the boy, Donal, that he was too young, and that you could write a very melancholy, Irish short story about his coming home from school but it wouldn’t be any more than that. You couldn’t actually chart his development, because there wasn’t enough to start with. He’s too young. You could write one of those very naïve child books of the world being watched from his perspective.
So, I mean, I did think about it. And it is there, to some extent, especially in The Heather Blazing. But I thought if I did it from the mother’s point of view, I would get more, that there was more of her there to work with. It’s almost as though if you’re painting, say, trying to paint a child is very difficult. You can get something innocent and sugary and naïve, whereas when you paint an adult you get an entire personality with all the experience that goes into that personality.
Do you paint?
No, but I look at paintings a lot.
It’s interesting that you lay it out as practical, novelistic concern. I wondered if there was an element of trying to challenge yourself to empathize with your mother?
It’s not exactly my mother, but it’s the mind, the spirit of somebody of that age at that time who had gone through that experience. And some of what I did was from personal observation and memory. Some of it was from imagination.
I understand that Nora is a separate character, that she isn’t your mother, but was there any part of this writing that involved processing what had happened to you?
It doesn’t work like that, in the sense that you’re manipulating the material too much for it to be a form of therapy. It just doesn’t come out like that. What I was doing was I was building the book. So I didn’t really get anything more than what is in the book. At least I don’t think so. How can you judge, you know?
In your books, there is so much meditation on being alone and how it is a double-edged sword. A lot of your characters are really pained by solitude, but then, in other moments, crave it. Could you talk a little bit about solitude in your own life?
I suppose one of the funny things about writing is that it’s solitary, compared to playing in an orchestra. And if you’re writing, your main aim is not to leave the house at all in a given day. So you do know something about that.
But also in fiction, especially in the lives of women, how do you deal with solitude? You look at how Jane Austen deals with it, for example, or how Henry James deals with it, about giving a woman a rich solitude. You’re giving her a funny power, the power of rich reflection, which can be very dramatic in a book. It’s very dramatic in Pride and Prejudice and in Portrait of a Lady. So it sort of works in the sense that as long as you fill it with enough intelligent sensitive life you can actually get quite a lot of dramatic effect. Whereas with men it’s harder because you do need to get them out of the house and it’s what they’re doing in society or at work or at sport or something that makes them matter. With a woman it’s often domestic space.
In a Los Angeles Times review of Nora Webster, Darin Strauss writes, ” Tóibín’s method is of a piece with the book’s approach to drama. Or, make that drama avoidance; this is a novel that abjures not just plot twists but plot advances. Tóibín never manhandles life and would in fact prefer not to leave any fingerprints on its lapels.[…]Tóibín’s written a book that de-pressurizes—that, when faced with a dramatic moment, shies up its collar and ducks into the alley.” How do you respond to that? Do you agree?
Well, I think that what’s happening in the novel are a set of changes which are almost imperceptible. And there’s no big moment of release. There is no pure drama in the book, it’s all tiny aggregation, something new, or Maurice, her late husband, is left out for a few pages—you give her other thoughts, other things that preoccupy her. So it does move, but not in a way you can easily find. But certainly there is a big distance between the Nora at the beginning and the Nora at the end. But what your problem as a reader is, you wonder: Where did this start? So to that extent, what you’re reading is correct, that it isn’t as though she has a big epiphany scene on the beach. She doesn’t.
Your protagonists are not passive, but they’re also not at all larger than life, or even particularly active. I get a sense of verisimilitude from your work.
Yeah. I’m interested in a way in the submerged figure, in somebody who you wouldn’t notice on the street, and what you can do with that figure. If everything in a novel has to be more exciting than the last then I think the reader will grow very weary. But it doesn’t mean that you have to make it as thin as life. In other words, if you ask somebody what an ordinary day in your life was like, the answer to that is, well, it’s very thin. I mean its fine in its way but it’s very thin. Fiction does have to have a greater density and sense of pattern, but it doesn’t mean that the characters have to be constantly colorful.
Why does the submerged figure interest you more than the person who would be noticed on the street?
Because I think you can work, and certainly I can, with the sort of northern light—short days, long winters, silence. I’m not good with long summers or lots of sunshine. Grayness and shadow and shade interest me. If I was Brazilian, I’d probably have a different attitude.
To be quite literal about what you said, do you think of yourself as somebody who moves along in the shadows, observing, and is not really noticed on the street in this way?
No, I’m not like that, no. I always think it’s bad manners to go around a place with a morose look on your face. I might be wrong about that, but that’s my view there.
I wanted to talk a little bit about Brooklyn. There is a scene in which Father Flood, Eilis’s priest in America, informs her that her sister, Rose, has died back in Ireland. What was writing that like?
Well, I found all that episode very difficult. What you’re trying to get is shock, without using the word shock too much. You’re trying to get this slow business of her realizing, From this moment onwards, my life is going to change. And yet all that episode has to be fully convincing to the reader. And the reader must never feel for a single moment that their heartstrings are being pulled too much. So you have to withhold an awful lot of her easy emotion. And yeah, it was very difficult to write, because you can’t really write it unless you feel it. So you have to give yourself the feeling.
How do you do that?
You start imagining it, and then you start having it.
Do you ever cry as you’re writing?
Yes, I have done that. There’s a particular place in The Heather Blazing where I did that, and I found with Brooklyn, writing the letter—there’s a letter Rose’s brother, Jack, writes her from Ireland—I found that particularly difficult. I wouldn’t want to do that again.
What about that letter in particular?
Well, it had to be written in a very particular voice, because he was not especially literate. And I suppose that made things more vivid for me as I was working. There is also a scene in Nora Webster, towards the very end of the book, where Maurice almost appears to her. Again, I found that very difficult, I mean emotionally difficult.
I have to also imagine that writing the scene in the Testament of Mary in which Mary watches Jesus, her son, being crucified—
Yeah, yeah, that particular scene was also very difficult. With every book I find that the book needs a moment of great, pure emotion. But in order to write it, I have to be ready.
How do you ready yourself?
By entering into the character’s spirit in full, by imagining the scene in full, and then almost living it moment by moment as I’m working.
Once you break off for the day, how do you recover from that experience?
With those scenes, the scenes I’m talking about, you actually finish them in a day. You start early enough that you know you’re not going to actually have to try and sleep with the work half done. With these scenes, I built up to it and I knew it was coming and my main effort was to try and get it right the first time because you can’t write it from the beginning twice. In other words you almost have to do it as though it’s real.
It is such a strange thing that the more forceful the writing is, the less the reader feels it.
Yeah. I think that’s the big thing. The more bright color you’ve used, the less the reader trusts you. It’s like the difference between a scream and a whisper.
Like some of your other work, in The Testament of Mary—which tells the story of Jesus’s rise and then crucifixion from Mary’s perspective—there is a lot of meditation on death. At one point, Mary says, “I had been made wild by what I saw and nothing has ever changed that. I have been unhinged by what I saw in daylight and no darkness will assuage that, or lessen what it did to me.” Have you ever had that feeling, that there was no going back from an experience you’d had?
I think that if you’ve had a close friend who dies, for example, that you can have that feeling. I think anyone who’s been through all that knows all that.