"Where are you from?” Colm Toibin asks in Spanish, before launching into an accurate impression of the typical Mexican singsong accent. My own ice-breaking gambit involves unwrapping a lemon-shaped soap: bright yellow and still fragrant, it is a memento of Toibin’s appearance at a Brazilian literary festival two years ago, during which he threw bars of Sweeney’s lemon soap (the same that Leopold Bloom buys in Ulysses) at the audience. “You two will obviously get on fine,” his publicist says, leaving us to our lunch.
Toibin, 51, is here to discuss his latest book, a volume of nine short stories, Mothers and Sons. Sitting across from him, I am fascinated by his deeply grooved and almost formidable face. Its apparent severity is undermined by the playfulness in his voice - excitable, conspiratorial and always on the verge of laughter.
Mothers and Sons is Toibin’s first short-story compilation and, he suggests, it may be his last. “I can’t write short stories,” he says, “I think everything is going to be a novel.” It was with novels such as The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992) and The Story of the Night (1996) that Toibin first attracted a devoted readership. The Blackwater Lightship, a stylistically spare but emotionally wrought novel about three estranged women - grandmother, mother and daughter - gathering in a house on the Wexford coast to watch over a son dying of Aids, was on the shortlist for the Booker Prize in 1999.
The Master, a dramatisation of Henry James’s twilight years, was hailed as Toibin’s most accomplished work of fiction. It was nominated for the Booker in 2004, and went on to win the most lucrative international literary prize awarded to a single novel, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Writing that book, he says, demanded an unusual level of sustained physical and emotional effort. He wrote for three years, day in, day out. “The Master was a great adventure with words. When it was all done, I thought: ‘I have nothing.’ The fluency I had developed from working on the book was gone. And then some stories came to me.”
One of those stories, “A Song”, is about a man who finds himself face to face with the mother who abandoned him as a child, now a well-known Irish folk singer. Another, “A Priest in the Family”, is about a mother who learns her son will be accused of abusing a youngster. “Henry James was very helpful. His early stories all happen during the Civil War, but he writes about the women at home. In one of them he apologises for writing about ‘the reverse side of the picture’. So in the middle of all this stuff about priests abusing children, I wondered: what about their mothers?”
Next, Toibin rescued “A Journey”, originally written in 1979, and the only story he’d ever kept, in which a mother drives her depressed son back home from the hospital. “I thought: ‘Actually, these stories are OK.’ I had two more, which were unfinished because I couldn’t find a conflict, a way out of them. I looked at what I had, and realised I could use the mother-and-son theme as a way of giving those unfinished stories a second act. Thinking of the title facilitated the writing.”
The first of the incomplete manuscripts grew into “The Name of the Game”, in which a shopkeeper’s widow in a provincial town (a thinly disguised version of Toibin’s native Enniscorthy) hatches a plan to up sticks and leave for Dublin, unaware of the effect this might have on her son’s own aspirations. “The Use of Reason”, for which Toibin had only the sketch of a character based on a real-life art thief, acquired a new lease of life when he included the thief’s mother.
The latter, set in the aftermath of a big heist, is uncharacteristic of Toibin, whose fiction has depended not on heightened drama but on the minuscule revelations that occur in moments of stillness. His novels are less driven by plot than by the almost imperceptible accretion of emotional sediment. “I was really fed up with myself. I thought: ‘You really are a wimp, and everyone is tired of reading you, and you should write about violence.’ I’m so used to painting only in black and white, it’s annoying. I thought I’d like to add a big daub of red. With a story you can do that. With a novel I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Perhaps more typical of Toibin’s earlier work is “Famous Blue Raincoat”, which takes its title from the Leonard Cohen song (”I have a friend who sings that better than anyone,” he says.) It tells the story of Lisa, once a singer in a moderately successful Irish music band, who is forced to confront painful memories when her son, Luke, unearths her old vinyl records.
Sorrow and desire overlap in “Three Friends” as Fergus, still grieving his mother’s death, attends a rave on a beach near Dublin. It is one of two stories in the collection with an overtly gay protagonist. “I thought it was a way of getting out of writing about melancholy mothers,” Toibin says. “My friends call it my ‘two-fingers story’. I’d like everyone in Ireland to read it because it’s an emotional snapshot of a society.”
Even so, the story’s emotional register is muted. Like others in the volume, it derives its power from the silences, from the absences, from the events that fail to materialise. “The book is full of that: sex that doesn’t happen, violence that doesn’t happen.” A lovely thing you can do with a short story, he says, is hover over a subject, without landing on it. “Every word, every bit of dialogue counts. It’s hard work getting nothing to happen.”
If there is a dominating note running though Toibin’s fiction it is an uneasy attachment to the landscapes of his childhood and youth - Enniscorthy, to be sure, but also those sea-weary places along the Wexford coast: Blackwater, Ballyconnigar, Cush. It is there that his characters often return to take stock of their lives, like Eamon Redmond in The Heather Blazing, or to salvage some shred of hope, like the women in The Blackwater Lightship. “If you’re Irish,” Toibin says, “you’re expected to write Irish novels about Irish people.” Yet he has always been able to defy such expectations. The Story of the Night occurs in Buenos Aires (”But nobody bought that book,” he complains). The South is set in Barcelona (where he lived in the 1970s, and which he describes in Homage to Barcelona, 1990) and in a village in the Catalan Pyrenees, not unlike the one where he now owns a house.
It was that unforgiving mountainous backdrop that he chose for the last of the stories in Mothers and Sons. “A Long Winter” is a novella-length jewel of luminous prose filled with dark foreboding. It tells the story of Miquel, a young Catalan villager whose mother disappears during a fierce snowstorm. This actually happened, Toibin explains, to the mother of the man who sold him his house. “She died while walking from the village where she lived back to the village where she was born. And no one found her body. It was extraordinary to hear. Because I know those blue days, so deceptive in the winter, where you need to be really careful how far you go.”
His publishers describe it as “Colm Toibin’s finest piece of fiction to date”. Toibin agrees. “It belongs in a different realm to the other stories. The line is purer, and the emotion is clearer. I wanted to make it like one of those ballads: ‘There was a woman went out one day, she went out one day in the snow…’ I was pretty happy when I finished it. I’ll probably never write something like it again. Never again. I’d never get the purity. Maybe I’m wrong.”
In the past, Toibin has shown impatience with writers who pour their own lives into their fiction. “Saul Bellow’s entire oeuvre is like that!” he says, his voice rising an octave. “There’s a scene in Herzog where the hero’s wife leaves him for a man with a wooden leg. It was a wonderful episode in fiction. When I found it was based on an autobiographical episode I felt: ‘Oh dear…‘”
Hasn’t he, I wonder, done the same in his own novels and stories? “Find one episode,” he challenges, his face crumpled into a smiling mask of jutting cheekbones and folding skin. I mention a scene in The Blackwater Lightship: Helen, whose brother is dying of Aids, recalls a time when her father was ill with cancer, and nuns came calling to announce that, during mass, they would knock on the church tabernacle to ask Jesus to make him better.
This scene is retold, almost identically, in a snippet of memoir included in Toibin’s non-fiction book about European Catholicism, The Sign of the Cross (1994). “The problem,” he says, “is no one is supposed to read all my books. So don’t do that. And do say that in the piece. No one is to read more than one or two of my books!”
He recovers from a fit of laughter before making a more serious point. “I’m not going to fudge the question. I think my fiction follows the contours of an emotional life, but obliquely. I’m the only person who has the full key, and I have no intention of unlocking it.” Yes, he grants, one uses details all the time, but one also has to allow the possibility of artifice, of creation.
“One reason why I wanted to do the James book was to write about a character with a father who doesn’t die, as an intellectual exercise, just to see if I could” (his own father died when Toibin was 12). “Yet in certain ways The Master was an autobiography. Every bit of it, almost. I was working unconsciously. But now I could take you through very obvious examples of the ways in which I used personal experiences and fed them into Henry James.” For instance? “I knew what it was like to be miserable in Venice.”
Toibin says that in Irish literature there is a woeful scarcity of references for gay readers to claim as part of their history. He has written extensively about the matter himself, and published a volume of biographical essays on outstanding homosexual artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, Love in a Dark Time (2001). “But I’m also alert to the fact that in most of the stories in Mothers and Sons the characters might not be gay, and that has to be a freedom as well.”
Somewhere between coffee and dessert, Toibin stops mid sentence and looks as if he’s caught a glimpse of his own ghost. “That’s not something you see every day,” he says, pointing through the restaurant window at a black cab with his name tacked to the door. Our time is up, it seems, and the taxi is there to take him to his next meeting.
As Toibin is whisked away by his efficient publicist, I am left behind in the stillness with two desserts and a yellow soap lemon. Only then do I realise that I failed to ask the one question that seemed both crucial and, perhaps, unnecessary: what was your mother like?
Mothers and Sons
by Colm Toibin
Picador ₤12.99, 312 pages