This interview with Colm Tóibín was conducted in connection with research for my thesis.  In my thesis I try to explore the role of history in Tóibín’s two first novels The South and The Heather Blazing.  It is with this in mind that the interview was done.

JUN: How does history affect your protagonists?

CT: There is a poem by an Irish poet called Derek Mahon called 'The Last of the Fire Kings'.  It talks about wanting to be through with history.  Being finished with history.  I suppose in the first novel  [The South] Katherine wants to be through with history.  Her own work is almost entirely abstract and if it is not abstract it relates to the landscape.  Landscape as what is seen in front of you, it could be anywhere.  I think there is a sentence in the book 'She could have loved him anywhere'. [The South p.131] The police has come and she wants to go.  For him going is impossible.  She says she could have loved him anywhere and that for her is a central idea.  Afterwards, when I had written the book or written those words I saw the film 'Out of Africa'.  And I realised its exactly the same story.  Somebody in the north goes into an exotic landscape and meets somebody and all that.  There is also a novel, which had a very big impact on me, by Nadine Gordimer called Burger’s daughter, which has the same idea of public life as a form of entrapment and once you strain close to it, it takes you in.  There is a scene in Burger’s daughter where Rosa Burger goes to France.  She is utterly free for a whole summer.  But she realises that she is going back and when she goes back she is her father’s daughter.

JUN:  In that case, I’d like to ask you why does Katherine return to Ireland at all?

CT:  Because of something she doesn’t understand.

JUN:  But isn’t she captured by history in that way?

CT:  Yes, but her first escapade into marriage has been is such a disaster.  She has to go somewhere.

JUN:  But I suppose she has Michael Graves in Spain.

CT:  But she has to go somewhere.  She can’t stay on there forever.  She doesn’t understand.  She does something that she doesn’t understand.

JUN:  Why doesn’t she end up in England like her mother?

CT:  Yes exactly.  So it’s something she doesn’t understand.  But the reader understands.  Firstly, there are personal matters completely unresolved.  And that I suppose is what she does and also you could say that she is interested in a certain sort of light, a certain sort of landscape and that pulled back.  That in itself is a sort of history.  Even if you want to take getting used to this sort of light [points out the window] and a certain sort of landscape.  And being pulled back towards all that is exactly what the past and all that idea of belonging is about.  [...]  She never gets any of that except maybe towards the end, slightly.

JUN:  Could you say that she needs to narrate her past by going back to Ireland and painting it?

CT:  She doesn’t know that she needs that.  So I suppose it’s something elemental – a homecoming.  Also, it belongs maybe much more to the history of narrative where you write about someone going on a journey and then comes home.  It’s in fairy stories; it’s in almost everything.  Someone, who goes, comes back.  So the story in its unfolding is a very essential story.  So that may be why she comes back, because the story requires it, as much as the psychology.

JUN:  So you could see Spain as a rite of passage for her?

CT:  Yes exactly.

JUN:  As a fairy tale model?

CT:  Yes

JUN:  As something she has to go through?

CT:  Yes exactly.  And there were things I wanted to play with.  The idea that she should change, that when she comes back she is completely different.  There were things like that I wanted to do but she isn’t different.  The attitudes are the same.  At least the attitude towards certain things.

JUN:  Isn’t that to a certain extent the problem with Ireland.  If you’re born a Protestant you’ll always be a Protestant.  You can’t escape?

CT:  I suppose that’s what I’m talking about.  There is also, I mean, I just want you to imagine in Denmark as a child being taken out on a Sunday for drives.  I had an uncle and aunt and we used to go in the car with them.  My uncle would often point to a house and say:” We burnt that” or ”we broke into that house”.  My uncle was a respectable man, I mean wearing a suit and entirely respectable and a pillar of society.  And in 1922 this is what he did in this landscape.  So when in The Heather Blazing they give a list of the houses they burn, it includes Katherine Proctor’s house.  And the other houses in that list are real and did happen.  I’ll find you this quote, p 172: ”We gutted a few good of them [...] Wilton”, Wilton is actually not accurate.  It was burned but later on.  ”Old captain Skrine” is the father of the novelist Molly Keane and she describes the fire in her novel Two days in Aragon.  So you can find that fire described in a novel as well.  ”The Proctors on Bunclody Road” and certainly ”Castleboro” was burnt.  That was a wonderful big house and certainly they were burnt.  The landscape for me always had this idea behind it that this was where all this had occurred.  It wasn’t you know a rumour.  It was an extraordinary idea, even as a child we thought it was astonishing.  And of course if we asked a question there would be silence.  But sometimes [when Tóibín was a child] you’d get a piece of information like that.

JUN:  It would come out without anybody meaning it to?

CT:  It would come out as a remark but if you asked too much about it [the conversation would end]

JUN:  Is history always bad, something that is difficult to deal with?

CT:  Well, certainly in Ireland it is and certainly in Spain it is.  There must be somewhere where it isn’t.  But I suppose the history we’re talking about it’s very difficult to avoid that issue.  If you own a farm on the Slaney valley in Wexford and you’re Protestant because you probably came with Cromwell.  And that’s difficult.

JUN:  But in other places you wouldn’t say that history is necessarily something that’s bad.

CT: [laughs]

JUN:  You have this idea about escaping history, about transgressing it.  And you talked before about the end of history, the end of opposition between Protestant and Catholic.

CT:  Certainly with her [Katherine] and Michael Graves.  Them becoming friends is important.  As is the relationship in The Heather Blazing between the grandfather and the grandson.  So both of them offer possibilities for, a word I really hate, reconciliation.  Both of them offer, at the end, some sort of image whereby opposites can join.  And I think that’s something you can dream about here in a way, which may not happen elsewhere in the same way.  That does have something of the magical properties that coming together would have.  And we’re always waiting for the images so the images we’re most hankering after, we all sort of want are the Good Friday Agreement rather than the Omagh bomb.  Some way we want the narrative to come up like that in the end.

JUN:  But are the people here willing to make the sacrifices, to subsume their own identities into that reconciliation?

CT:  People here have no problems about that, because no one has do to do anything.  There is a terrible interest in money.  But in the North it is much more difficult.  But I don’t know about the North.

JUN:  Katherine emigrates from the society in which Eamon prospers.  Do you see her story as an inversion of Eamon’s?

CT:  Well I didn’t know anything about that until there was a review in The Guardian by John Lanchester.  He said that I had I had written a diptych about the Irish War of Independence and I really didn’t know that I had done that.  And when I read it I said: Fuck, that’s what it is, it a diptych.  And when I met him and he said was I going to write a trilogy?  Absolutely not.  In a word, that war was created for him [Eamon], not for her [Katherine].  So they are opposites in that way.

JUN:  Eamon declines, when Katherine comes back [from Spain].  She couldn’t live in the Ireland of the late 50s, but the late 60s, 70s whenever she comes back.  There is reconciliation on the way.  When she comes back it is possible for her to see Michael Graves.

CT:  I think it is just that she is older and she has fewer expectations.  It’s nothing to do with the changes in society because the whole point is that on that farm, nothing like that affects the farm.  They live as they always lived.  I know her son has married a Catholic but that could have happened in the 50s.

JUN:  But would it have happened?

CT:  It could equally have happened in the 50s.

JUN:  But her seeing Michael Graves [wouldn’t have happened]?

CT:  But that only happened in Spain.  That would never have happened in Ireland.  But that’s only because they’ve cemented their friendship while much older.  But it’s not to do with.  The South isn’t affected with changing morals in the Republic.  It doesn’t change people because what matters is that she is older.  The changes in public morality make no difference to her.  She is essentially bohemian so it wouldn’t matter to her anywhere, whereas Eamon isn’t bohemian.  I think it would be a mistake to read the return in The South as a returning to a more liberal society.  It just doesn’t matter that much.  If she was a younger woman returning home it might have mattered enormously.

JUN:  Eamon discovering history as a possibly narrative.  Is that what happen in The Heather Blazing?  That history for Eamon is no longer History with a capital H but a history [out of several].  Is that what he discovers?  That the Fianna Fail ideology that he has been brought up on is just a possibly way of telling things.  It is not the only way you can see society.

CT:  Again I suppose [it is] what the story has to be.  If you want to write a story about a judge you have to deal with the whole business of convictions, of authenticity and conviction versus pragmatism.  So history isn’t an issue for him but the issue for him is faith.  The issue for him is how much do you believe.  And the issue for him is entirely personal.  Much more than it is for her [Katherine] which for him entirely relates to his own ......psyche..psycho-sexual sort of and his whole feeling of never having been loved.  Now this does have political implications in that he is brought up in the new society to be a ruler of it.  In the next generation or the one after they might bring children up to be happy or to be good citizens.  But him, he was directed in that way and half that was missing in that the mother is missing.  I wonder why the mother is missing.  One of the things, because I’ve just edited the Penguin book of Irish fiction, I’ve noticed that an infinite number of Irish novels have no mother or no father or a dead child.  You find it almost everywhere.  And if you look at Ulysses, Stephen’s mother has just died, Bloom’s father committed suicide, Bloom’s son is dead and they are moving around Dublin, with that in their minds.  I know that they are doing hundreds of other things but nonetheless that is important.  It would be very difficult to imagine an Irish novel in which Stephen, both his parents at home, and he went home and they’re both there.  Somehow it’s the first thing you do.  You put in the missing bit.  You put in the palpable lapse.

JUN:  One thing that comes to mind is the constitution where the concept of the family is central.  And you talk about someone always missing in the family.

CT:  The thing with the constitution is that it is just a form of words.  It never really had any impact.  It is not like the American constitution where it is always being quoted.  You almost quote that passage that I quote almost sarcastically or to attack it.  It is not as though everybody here believes that or people say: Oh Ireland, the country of the family.  No that is all hypocrisy.  I’m not sure that history has any impact on Eamon in the sense that history as history was there to create what he inhabits.  He is living in a free state; he is living in a free country.  History has echoes, such as he his father or his uncle, or the IRA prisoners that he has to put to jail.  Just echoes but no resonance.

JUN:  Like thinking about carbombs when he leaves court.

CT:  Yes.  It is just echoes, just small things in the background.  But the main issue now is that history is now over in a sense.  That there won’t be anymore bombs.  Or that Four Courts won’t go on fire again.  There is a line somewhere where he says to his son: ”The Four Courts has fallen”.  You see the Four Courts is where the Civil War began.  That won’t happen again.  You’re in an absolutely stable society like in Scandinavia.  The right to hospitals etc.  In other words, the things he is worried about are things any modern European states are worried about.  So that the history as we associate with Ireland for liberation - or whatever - is over now, everything has been cleared.  What you are dealing suddenly then with is a sort of crisis of faith.  I mean faith about all sorts of things, not just Catholicism.  Catholicism doesn't interest him that much either.

JUN:  No he is not a very religious man.

CT:  I suppose the governing issue is essentially existential.  I mean if you read that and read The Outsider [by Albert Camus].  My book arises really from my reading of all that.  It is essentially an exploration of a sort of philosophical dilemma to do with how to run a society.

JUN:  There is a quote somewhere towards the end.  ”He believed in nothing now, no soul, no cloudy spirit offered him consolation.  He believed death was absolute, the body died and became dust.”[p. 210]

CT:  Yes

JUN:  I read it as a very existential.  Is this what should be emphasised and then the Irish scenario is more arbitrary; it could have happened anywhere?

CT:  No because it is entirely about being this first generation of rulers, of a new state.  And the echoes of that are there all the time, that these institutions are being formed.  The echoes are there of what it is like to be brought up in a new state.  I did not put a year on his birth but if you wanted to put him born in the years around the formation of the new state.

JUN:  I worked out that Katherine was born in 1918.  So her and Eamon were born around the same time.

CT:  Eamon was born a good bit later.  Some time in the 1920s.  Mid ´20s rather than early.

JUN:  So today, do you think Irish people would accept talking about history in the plural.  Is it becoming more acceptable to say we don’t have one shared history but we have many histories?

CT:  I think that’s certainly been the big project.  And something that I’ve been really supportive of is to say that our version of things that we were invaded by the English and they caused nothing but havoc and they took all our land and women.  And then we later moved them out in a war of independence.  That is really simplistic and ridiculous and doesn’t help.  A) It isn’t true but more importantly B) it isn’t helpful.  You almost want to use the narrative that you can find most useful.  And that narrative isn’t useful at the moment.

JUN:  That leads me to an obvious other question.  Some people, like Declan Kiberd are very anxious to put Ireland into the post-colonial context.  Why would they want to do that?  Why would they want to subject the country into an almost ”savage” African country?  Drawing this parallel seems a bit strange because Ireland is still a part of Europe.

CT:  Let me explain what this is.  In the matter of language and say parliament and the way all That’s run with two houses of parliament etc.  In a large number of issues we follow the British precedent.  The argument then would go further to say that there is a place called Ireland, which is separate from England.  Ireland was essentially colonised by England in that there was a blueprint, which Edmund Spenser would be the best example of, to make Irish people into English people.  To actually force almost obviously in language, but more interestingly a whole identity, to graft it on to these people who were entirely different.  And in doing that and almost in forcing the Irish to start mimicking the English not just in their manners but in their souls.  That this involved a huge warping of the Irish personality.  And that everything Frantz Fanon describes such as being so child-like and the whole way the English people think that you are a genius on the one hand and want to lock you up on the other hand.  Sort of savage and a genius relates entirely to that Irish people can never be taken fully seriously in England.  So the argument is then, and also economically, Ireland was economically subservient to England up until 1922 that it was impossible for it after that to manage serious economy because of the way the economy had been colonised.  So that’s the argument.  It is very difficult to put oneself in the European mainstream for the simple reason that we didn’t have colonies and there is nowhere in Europe, no European country that didn’t have colonies.  And the definition I have of Europe is that both the Roman and the Nazis want it and neither the Romans nor the Nazis wanted to come here.  Therefore we are out of the loop.  I mean, there are no symphonies written here.  The image of painting [cp. The South] is actually really important.  I did a thing with Derek Walcott in England recently and I got him to agree that if you wanted to divide the world, you divide the world into the places that have been painted and the places that have not been painted.  So the business of painting in The South is actually much more than painting.  This landscape [Ireland] has never been painted, so painting it is actually creating it in a certain way.

JUN: Inventing it?

CT:  Yes.  So because we are out of the European loop in that way in terms of symphonies, paintings, just in terms of wealth, of colonial inheritance.  And to some extent out of the loop of the African countries or the countries that were entirely colonised.  In other words, what happens here is that there is so much coming and going between Ireland and England, the countries are so close to each other that you really have to work to make Ireland into a separate entity that was colonised.  That really by the 19th or 18th century there are about ten Irelands and certainly the west of Ireland, the Irish speaking, is entirely different to the East coast.  And certainly the power of the Catholic Church is a further colonisation, I mean that is what Joyce said, Ireland was colonised by bloody Rome.  It is a unique inheritance.  You can’t say they’re are simply colonised and that there is now post-colonial.  It doesn’t feel like that.  And you can’t say that it is a serious European country like Austria or Denmark.  And how you know is when you go to Austria or Denmark you know, this is not like where I was brought up in terms of habits, manners or heritage.  So therefore trying to put a name on it is difficult and it means that it is open to infinite amount of interpretations.  So if you want to call it post-colonial you have a wonderful argument ready for you.  And if you want to say that it is a serious European country you can say that the Irish monks go to Europe in the 8th century, you can talk about the amount of Latin word in the Irish language, you could talk about Irish Catholicism being so close to Spanish and Portuguese Catholicism, Italian Catholicism.  You could go on infinitely, claiming infinite number of things.  But in a way all that’s great if you are writing literary criticism but it’s not any use if you’re writing novels.

JUN:  Do you see your own novels as inventing Ireland or merely depicting what is going on?

CT:  The novels are written in language and therefore you start with a sound in your head rather than an idea.  The South is written in a certain style, as is The Heather Blazing.  But the novel that comes after them the third novel [The Story of the Night] is entirely set in Argentina.  But it is also the autobiographical elements in this that are important, because at the time I started thinking about The Heather Blazing I was editor of the main current affairs magazine here [Magill].  And therefore I was involved on a daily basis with public life, current affairs, all that and in a sense the novel reflect that.

JUN: You mean the court cases in The Heather Blazing.

CT: As The South reflects my involvement with Catalonia and all that as well.  Ireland is the subject really.  So I have no answer to that question.  I mean I wouldn’t even consider it such a thing.

JUN:  I just wondered if you wanted to tell us an untold story by saying this is also a version [of what happened].

CT: No

JUN:  I read The Heather Blazing as a story of what could happen when the whole ideology falls apart?

CT:  I suppose The Heather Blazing is firmly rooted here.

JUN:   But you wouldn’t see it as a realist depiction?

CT:  No I wouldn’t see it as a realist depiction of society but I would expect the society in them to be accurately depicted in various ways and if you wanted to know what had happened in society after the War of Independence, you could read both books and get an idea.  But the characters are more important in their own quirky presence in the world.  In other words, neither is a typical example of anything.  For me the detail is more important than any overall picture of society.  A novel like Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy is probably a better picture of society.  The absolute madness of the book is probably a better version of what really happened.  But there are infinite numbers of them.

JUN:  I read in another interview somewhere [Lynne Tillman] that in your opinion we all want to escape history in some way.  Do you think we all do that?  What are the implications if one says I’ll leave this history behind, everything I’ve been brought up on?  Isn’t history a way of identifying yourself, a way of having an identity?

CT:  Yes, but I do mean history is something dark.  I don’t want to say atavistic, because I hate atavistic, but I mean that if you’re brought up here in a republican family, which I was, then in the Republic, certainly, you can free yourself of that very quickly and very easily.  This is not the case in the North so easily, I mean this shadow is there and also I suppose the most interesting example here is John Banville who has written the dark comedies about Irish history, whose involvement directly in anything, he would view society as a laugh.  And certainly when I was growing up that influence of his was very deep on everybody.  Wouw, you can just laugh....  But I don’t feel like that about it because I’m more involved in what happens here and have been as a journalist and as a commentator (but less so now).  Incidentally I’m writing a novel at the moment in which there is no public dimension, or very little, which is entirely set in a family and every time I’m about to put in a reference especially to the past. The past here for people is that their sister died or some memory but not reference to the Civil War or elections.

JUN:  Why do you want to escape that dimension?

CT:  Sometimes you use it to add significance to your characters when you should be working harder to make the characters themselves significant.  So, in other words, if you want to know about the period, the character in the book is more important than any event in the period.  I don’t know what year Madame Bovary was published.  What year was Madame Bovary published?  You should know your are the scholar.

JUN:  1870s?

CT:  There is a main event in France in the 1870s was the publication of Madame Bovary.  Madame Bovary is the most important event ok. The Paris Commune.  You try and make the character so the character will be the event.  You try.

JUN:  The parallel between Ireland and Catalonia.  Could the story [The South] have happened elsewhere?

CT:  No the story couldn’t have happened elsewhere because the business of Protestant plantations had and that survived in the new state is specific.  You can’t find that anywhere else in the same way.  I went to Barcelona in 1975.   I went there in September and Franco died in November.  A lot of Irish people have gone there after The Civil War.  A lot of writers and painters have gone there.  It has been a big deal for here to go to Spain in those years.  One of the reasons was there was no history and no politics, you simply kept your head down.  You would live in a village or even in a city.  You would be very careful and go then everybody was in opposition.  By the time I arrived that was no longer the case.  By the time I arrived the whole place just blew up and I was there for three years.  For that all that time, for the first elections, also the huge Catalonisation of Catalonia [took place].  Suddenly the language appearing on street names Catalan newspapers and people moving into factions.  These years were difficult years here [in Ireland] because of the North.  Everybody was having to change their opinions about the North.  Everybody was arguing constantly about the North.  Certainly in the period after the Civil War in Spain you could think there was no politics, but you would always get that wrong.  You would suddenly discover something about somebody all that time, even in those years.  She [Katherine] should have gone to the south of England really.

JUN:  The title The South, does that refer to Spain and the Republic?

CT:  Yes and to Keats ”O for a beaker full of the warm South” (Ode to a Nightingale l.15).  There is also a Spanish film called The South, in which the south never appears the film is set in the north.  So the south is Catalonia for us but Catalonia is the north of Spain.  And of course this state is called The South in my novel The South.

JUN: You have mentioned (Tillman interview) that Michael Graves is partly modelled on yourself.  Is there any idea behind this metafictional appearance?

CT:  You will find many references to real places and people in the book.  Also the Taylor Gallery (cp p. 234) where Katherine has her exhibition is a real place.

JUN:  Katherine calls herself English rather than American (p.15), why?

CT:  You would often not want to bother when you are abroad.  And we [the Irish] do fell pretty English.

 This interview was conducted on the 16th of December 1998 in Dublin. 

Copyright 1998 by Jacob Urup Nielsen

This interview was first published at The South
 

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