“What is a novella?” Colm Tóibín asks rhetorically in an essay, In Brief, from his tremendous new collection of writings, Ship in Full Sail, covering his three years as laureate of Irish fiction. “First of all, a novella is something no one wants. Publishers live in dread of them because no one much will buy them.”
Why then, one might wonder, is he also publishing this week one such outcast, A Long Winter, which furthermore was already published 20 years ago, at the end of his short-story collection Mothers and Sons?
The answer perhaps lies in the fate of John McGahern’s novella The Country Funeral, which Tóibín cites in In Brief as one of the finest examples of the form, alongside The Dead, by James Joyce; Heritage, by Eugene McCabe; Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad; and The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. McGahern gave Tóibín a manuscript copy of The Country Funeral, which he mistakenly thought had never been published.
McGahern’s novella, “which may be his best piece of fiction”, was rejected by several magazines before finally being published at the end of his Collected Stories. “Very few readers noticed it,” Tóibín declares. “In France, however, he published it as a single volume and it was recognised as the masterpiece it was.”
A Long Winter may not be Tóibín’s masterpiece – his novels The Heather Blazing, The Master, Nora Webster, Brooklyn and The Magician have all won prestigious prizes – but it holds a special place in his heart, and, like a cherished album track that should have been a single, it at last gets its place in the sun.
In a sense, Tóibín literally bought the plot for A Long Winter. In the early 1990s he and a friend had bought and converted a barn in Farrera, a remote Catalan village more than 1,300m up in the Pyrenees. In 2004 he had bought an adjoining plot and discovered that a ruin on it had once been home to a woman who had perished in a snowstorm trying to make her way back there from the other side of the mountain after falling out with her husband. Her body was not found until the spring, when the ice thawed.
In his version the woman leaves after a row with her boorish husband over her secret drinking, only to be lost in a blizzard. The story is told from the perspective of a son, whose brother has also recently left to do his military service. As the desperate communal search becomes a long waiting game for spring, grief’s frozen season plays out.
As Tóibín wrote A Long Winter in February and March 2005, the snow in the story was swirling outside his window.
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He is speaking to me, aptly, from his home in the Pyrenees, where he spends every August, with nothing to distract him from work. He has been coming here since 1976, with a group of friends who had moved there from Barcelona. He first met them through Bernard Loughlin, a fellow teacher at Dublin School of English in Barcelona, who, with his wife Mary, went on to run the Tyrone Guthrie Centre artists’ retreat, in Annaghmakerrig, Co Monaghan, from 1981 to 1999, after which they returned to Farrera for good.
Colm Tóibín: ‘Sometimes you think you know what the origin of something is, but that’s often because you don’t.’ Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
“In the period around the death of Franco, people wanted different lives to their parents. I was much more an urban cat at that time. Looking at the mountains day in day out wasn’t my thing. As I got older I would come for longer. It’s the end of the known world: there are no shops in the two nearest villages. It is really good for work, long days.”
In Losing the Plot, another essay from his new collection, Tóibín reflects on two different literary traditions: fiction that is driven by plot, where actions have consequences, and fiction that succeeds primarily by creating an atmosphere through rhythms and textures of language.
He is usually in the second camp, along with writers he hugely admires such as Mike McCormack and Eimear McBride, but twice a plot has fallen into his lap. The first time was for A Long Winter, the second for Long Island, his sequel to Brooklyn.
Edward Mendelson, a colleague at Columbia University, had unpicked the misguided contempt for plot of the author and New Yorker magazine editor William Maxwell. “I found it fascinating. I don’t think I could have written Long Island without that, thinking about consequences.”
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Maxwell thought “plot belonged to genre fiction, full of cheap coincidences such as you find in Thomas Hardy and Maeve Binchy. I have a poem in Vinegar Hill called Variations on a Theme in Maeve Binchy.” She could pull off a joyous reunion of long-lost Sicilian relatives in Evening Class, whereas he could not. “Becoming a high priest of disappointment is a bit wretched.”
It has been said that if Binchy had written Brooklyn or Long Island, it would not have got the same praise. “There is one novelist, I can’t remember her name,” Tóibín says, “but every time she has a book coming out she says that about me: ‘If it was by Eileen or Mary Tóibín, nobody would pay any attention to it.’”
Colm Tóibín: ‘I’m so good at deluding myself.’ Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
It’s famously a duff question to ask writers where they get their ideas from, yet Tóibín can usually pinpoint the moment of inspiration, such as seeing the judge Declan Costello in full regalia at the Four Courts, which led to The Heather Blazing. But often the magic happens subliminally, when the surface subject chimes with some struggle in the writer’s subconscious. The shape and substance of the story evolve, as bad ideas are rejected and the true essence emerges like a sculpture from a block of stone.
“Sometimes you think you know what the origin of something is, but that’s often because you don’t. In other words, you have a surface alibi,” Tóibín says. “Someone told me half a story and I thought it was interesting and I pursued it. I got some preposterous versions of it along the way, which I hope I refined out.
“The initial story was to be someone like me arriving in a place like this, trying to convert a barn without knowing what had happened, but that would require ghosts, and I didn’t want ghosts.
“I brought it back down to the story of the son and kept foreigners out. It was a particular period after my own mother had died, and my own brother. I didn’t know where the story was going to take me when I started it. I knew the general shape, but I didn’t know its length or the amount of intensity that would go into it, the sense of mournfulness, the sense of ritual going out every day to see if he could find her, the other brother completely missing, the deep melancholy sense of it.
“I’m so good at deluding myself that I thought it was maybe even coming from the Schubert song. It was a good while later that I realised that it was all this emotion I was suppressing or concealing that I didn’t know what to do with, which was grief. That’s probably what the story is. If I’d done it deliberately it would have been awful. The metaphors would have been too clunky and easy. I had a vehicle, but it was really unconscious.”
The great thing for me about not drinking is not that you don’t waste time or have hangovers but that you don’t get the exuberance
He started work on what would become Nora Webster at about the same time, but that was more deliberate, he says. “This comes first. It’s almost stages of grief.”
Tóibín was a friend and patient of the late Ivor Browne, the eminent psychiatrist, for 40 years. There is a story, Sleep, in his forthcoming collection, already published in the New Yorker, based on him being formally hypnotised by Browne.
“He said to me once, ‘There’s something wrong with you: you’ve fully repressed a tremendous amount of pain. I can see it in you, and the more you make jokes, the more you deflect, the more you will have to deal with it at some point.’
“We’d all shout at him to stop looking at me at the dinner table. He’d say, ‘Tell me again, what age were you when your father died?’ I did a workshop with him that lasted a weekend, very intense, which included ketamine injections. I’ve never been a druggie, but I loved the ketamine. A lot of it was just opening yourself up to extraordinary levels of unconscious feeling and knowledge.”
Tóibín likens the perfect simplicity of the novella’s plot to the clean lines of a ballad or folk tale.
“At a certain point with A Long Winter I realised I won’t get anything as pure as this again, the way the story was working, the sense of ritual, going out every day, the weather, his solitude, his father, his brother’s absence, the neighbours, the arrival of a servant boy.
“All of this had some element of almost prefiction, as if set in medieval Europe. You need a shape for it, the shape of a ballad. I’m thinking of The Croppy Boy and a version that predates it called The Holland Handkerchief. It has some very short four-line stanzas that manage to do a huge amount of work, convey an extraordinary amount of action.”
Colm Tóibín photographed by Nick Bradshaw for The Irish Times
The family’s isolation is intensified as the father has fallen out with his neighbours. In an early version the disputes were about the Spanish Civil War, but Tóibín came to realise that, although the war had been fought bitterly locally, the village itself was not divided, as Franco’s forces were all outsiders. However, there were often huge disputes over water rights and fences.
A piece of music also influenced his story, he believes, Bryn Terfel singing Schubert’s Litany for the Feast of All Souls, a prayer for the dead. “It seemed to be right. I kept putting it on. The melody interested me. Every so often there is a song that really gets in on your ear. There is an extraordinary song” – Killeagh – “by a group called Kingfishr, about a hurling team.”
At a certain point Tóibín decided that A Long Winter would be part of Mothers and Sons, so that focused his mind on tailoring it to fit that theme, making it the story of Miquel and his mother, favouring the son’s perspective – “slow, immersive, third-person intimate” – rather than the mother’s or father’s or multiple points of view.
“If I concentrate on that configuration it will give me a purer drama than if I try a number of perspectives. Once I got that in my head I was away.”
He wishes something like that would happen to him now with his work in progress. “I can’t work out, is it first person, third person, is there an author who is seeing all this from above? What is the point of view? That can become an intractable problem.”
Does he have a style or does the work sometimes require a deviation?
“I don’t see it normally as a style. I see it as a non-style or anti-style, trying not to have loads of side clauses and flourishes, but you can overdo that and become a sort of parody of yourself. Thinking too much about your own style is like Narcissus: it ends badly,” he says.
“But even when I was working as a journalist there was a lot of laughter about my little sentences. It’s always been a problem. A few times I realised I couldn’t go on with the short sentences.”
I have it in for this business news, which seems to be on four times a day
He wrote both The Master and The Testament of Mary in “first-person staccato”.
The vital thing, however, is that “if you don’t feel it, you can’t write it. If you do it without feeling it, it will show. No one is looking for it. A friend would say, ‘I have to go and write this book.’ I said, ‘Is someone waiting for this book?’ No is the answer.”
Whereas a short story can reach an audience in literary journals, “the novella is a lonelier and sadder thing, because it won’t fit into a magazine”. Tóibín regrets not really pushing for A Long Winter’s stand-alone publication 20 years ago. He did suggest it, but his publishers demurred.
As well as being published as a novella in Dutch, Swedish and Catalan, A Long Winter came out in an expensive limited edition of 25 copies for bibliophiles by Tuskar Rock, an imprint Tóibín set up with his agent Peter Straus to publish books and authors who they felt were being ignored by British publishers, and limited editions of writers such as Alan Hollinghurst.
“It was a scandal that László Krasznahorkai was not being published at all, beyond belief, so we simply sought to rectify this. In Ireland we publish Adrian Duncan. We did very well with The Slap. Christos Tsiolkas’s book was not being published in the UK. He wrote to me and asked what’s going on. I read it and thought, This is a disgrace.”
Colm Tóibín:’Why don’t we put cows or a data centre in Newgrange?’ Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
Did the success of Claire Keegan’s Foster enlarge the space for novellas? “Very much so. I suppose the reason why Foster did so well is it’s so good. You realise, stop moaning about the novella, just make it good.”
Did Foster also hit home more personally, given that he was fostered out for a time as a child, when his father was gravely ill? “Yes, in a good number of ways, one being her description of Gorey – it is so accurate, and when she goes to the coast, the particularity. There were things in Foster that I recognise, but I think that is true of any story where there is a parent missing. I would get it in McGahern as well.”
Miquel is guardedly gay. This emerges through where his gaze falls, but it leads not to action, only to disappointment. Tóibín’s story is being published in the United States with Annie Proulx’s novella Brokeback Mountain. “Mine is like hers except all mountain and hardly any brokeback,” he jokes.
“I suppose the big issue was how self-conscious to make him. In other words, when he is alone does he think about his sexuality? And, no, he doesn’t. It’s all what he sees, notices, remembers, wants. When you talk about points of view, include that one: how self-conscious is he? And he is not at all.”
The limited edition helped him identify passages to remove from later editions. What were they? “Oh, a horrible bit where Miquel starts to muse about the meaning of the universe and think about time. They are very banal, these thoughts, but they are mine, the idea of things being inhospitable, areas of the globe from oceans to mountains to the tundra, complete rubbish. A writer trying to give his character opinions. You must give the character full autonomy, not mix them up with you.”
This reminds me of Tóibín’s wince-inducing revelation that he had cut 55,000 words from his novel The Magician on his editor’s suggestion. “Editors are very important for some books and not others. With A Long Winter I don’t think there was any editing. With those big books, The Master and The Magician, the problem is how much information do you need to give the reader? When does it become tedious? What is the drama? What are you trying to do? Is it possible that 20 pages are beyond belief in their banality and badness and dullness?”
His editor Mary Mount made him realise that his fascination with an intellectual argument involving Theodor Adorno, Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann was choking the emotional heart of the novel, which was about Mann’s relationship with his son, who kills himself.
The house of The Dead is intact but is being allowed to rot. It could have been a national monument
Tóibín spends most of the year in Pasadena, on the northern edge of Los Angeles, in the home of his partner. “You can live in LA without Hollywood impinging even slightly. I don’t drive ever, which calms life down a lot. Your backyard becomes your realm. It’s very good for work.”
He teaches one 14-week semester at Columbia, in New York, where he stays in university accommodation, and divides the rest of his time between his Georgian town house in Dublin and his beachfront retreat in Ballyconnigar, in Co Wexford, where he spent whole summers – “My father was a teacher, and you could rent huts there very cheaply” – until his father died, when Tóibín was 12.
It’s a peripatetic lifestyle. If he hadn’t been a writer, “I think I would have gone with the circus.” He is working on a long piece about The Beatles. “John Lennon has this marvellous thing where he says, ‘I’m a cross between a monk and a performing flea.’ I thought that was great. I wrote it out in longhand.
“Every time I leave Wexford I’m sorry,” Tóibín says. “I wish I could spend more time there. It’s very familiar.” He spent many years in Dublin as a student, then as a high-profile journalist, and was very sociable, but those days are gone, he says. Unlike his fellow Wexford-born writer John Banville, the capital has never inspired his fiction.
“I’ve never really written about Dublin. It’s not my place. I am much less sociable now, as I don’t drink any more. The great thing for me about not drinking is not that you don’t waste time or have hangovers but that you don’t get the exuberance. I’m pretty solitary these days. I work every day. I’ve left all that behind, really.”
Having just celebrated his 70th birthday, is Tóibín conscious of the clock ticking more loudly? “What should writers do at the dying of the light?” he asks in Ship in Full Sail. “What about one big final statement about life and death?” Or, like Thomas Mann at 80, a comedy. He has written a comic libretto.
“You realise that a decade hence you will be 80,” he says. “It’s not as if there is any great tradition of writers producing much work after a certain age. The problem is you get less sleep, and for work you need to have slept properly. Otherwise something won’t come. I think that makes a big difference.”
Colm Tóibín: ‘I’ve never really written about Dublin. It’s not my place.’ Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
He has a new collection of short stories out next year, his third and probably his last. It has no particular theme. One of the stories he has worked on for 20 years.
He usually feels, however, that work is abandoned in a drawer for good reason. He has written a few poems and is trying to start a novel. He has been writing its beginning for a while, but it’s not working. His method is to write the first chapter and then leave it for a year.
“That’s intentional, so you can keep ruminating on how to proceed. The process is you write it and probably don’t even look at it again even, then leave yourself free to see if it is going to continue to ferment and to bubble, if you’re going to get new ideas, new ways of seeing it.
“That must happen in the ordinary random business of getting on a train or driving somewhere. If you force it, or make it deliberate, then the whole idea of it fails you. You get the most preposterous ways forward.
“Just write something down that has a point of view. How much is going to be known? Who is it going to be known by? It doesn’t matter if it sings. It just has to be clear to me so I can proceed. Once I had the first line of Blackwater Lightship I had the book. I had an espresso at 6pm, went to see a film, walked past pubs with everyone drinking, went home and wrote that sentence.”
Tóibín has spent a lot of time researching Irish military archives, pension applications and censuses, but unlike Roddy Doyle, some of whose family, like his, were active in the revolutionary period, he has no plans to fictionalise it.
“I don’t know why. I lived with its legacy, but the events themselves seem to belong to ballads or historians. I can’t imagine setting a novel in that period, but you can never tell.”
Nor, having written about Henry James in The Master and about Mann in The Magician, is there a third writer he might fictionalise to create a trilogy.
In a marvellous essay A Toast in the Dark, which ends with a virtuoso celebration of the light Irish artists shone in a dark time for the nation, Tóibín recalls Anthony Cronin telling a group of Irish artists that they probably lacked the courage to thank Charles Haughey in public for what he had done for the arts so they should go home and raise a glass to him in the dark.
There will be no toasts in the Tóibín household to Patrick O’Donovan, the Minister for Culture. “There is no artist I know who thinks the current Minister is the best thing that ever happened to the country, “ he says. Josepha Madigan, one of his predecessors, gets short shrift too for her failure to secure for the nation 15 Usher’s Quay, where Joyce set The Dead, despite the lobbying of Tóibín and many others.
“I got thousands to sign, including Salman Rushdie. Imagine if Don Quixote’s house was still in Madrid. The house of The Dead is intact but is being allowed to rot. It could have been a national monument. Why don’t we put cows or a data centre in Newgrange? If Michael D had been minister, if Haughey had been taoiseach, if Cronin had been an adviser …”
He shares Brendan Gleeson‘s frustration at the low priority RTÉ gives to reporting on the arts, in contrast to its saturation coverage of business news, literally a turn-off for Tóibín every morning. He cites such newsworthy items as Mars, Mark O’Connell’s opera with Jennifer Walshe, which is set to tour the world; Garry Hynes’ Macbeth; Conor McPherson’s new production of his play The Weir.
“Why isn’t that being mentioned as news? I have it in for this business news, which seems to be on four times a day. I mean, really, it has to stop.”
If he were minister, what’s the first thing he would do? In reference to the controversial departure of the head of the Arts Council he says: “I would apologise to Maureen Kennelly.”
A Long Winter is published by Picador. Ship in Full Sail is published by the Gallery Press