Colm Tóibín on Writers and Their Parents

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MAURICE FITZPATRICK , Köln Colm Tóibín on Writers and Their Parents

Broadly, the career of Irish writer Colm Tóibín falls into three categories: from 1982- 1987 he was a journalist and editor at various current affairs magazines in Dublin; leaving journalism, he embraced the life of a novelist for the following decade; since the late 1990s, he has combined fiction writing with the busy life of guest lecturer on the circuit, teaching literature and creative writing for extended periods at Stanford and Princeton and he is currently Mellon Professor of English and Comparative Liter- ature at Columbia University. His academic, journalistic and creative writing backgrounds have informed his own work considerably. This book of essays is structured in two parts – Ireland and Elsewhere – and according to the chronology of the authors under examination. It is a profound study of the backgrounds of writers and their families. Indeed, the subtitle of this collection, ''Writers and their Families," provides a more accurate, if less provocative, description of its contents. Similarly, Tóibín's collections of short stories ( The Empty Family and Mothers and Sons ), both published over the past five years, largely focused on families; they did not, however, unlike the present book, concentrate on writers and their families. ''W.B. Yeats: New Ways to Kill Your Father'' is a study of John Yeats' astonishing reaction to his sons' success: Jack Yeats excelled as a painter and W.B. as a poet. A painter himself, John never came close to enjoying the same success as his sons. As a septuagenarian he started to send poems and plays to his son, W.B., one of the direc- tors of The Abbey Theatre, for his opinion on them. Yeats prevaricated, ignoring his father's frequent entreaties in their correspondence for evaluation. When W.B. could withstand his father's pleas no longer he finally gave him a one-line put down which, absurdly given W.B.'s huge standing in world literature, John took to be nought and presumed to lecture his son on literary taste and appreciation. The correspondence between father and son is amusing but Tóibín overuses it here; it drags and the burden of John Yeats' high opinion of his own literary prowess is wearisome. The literary career of V.S. Naipaul's father, such as it was, also developed in pro- portion to that of his son: the father becoming emboldened to write when he saw his son's rise to prominence in the literary world. Tóibín attributes the intensity of some writers' ambition to their fathers' having failed at the task: ''V.S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father's failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man of the household'' (Tóibín 2012, 202). 1 This aspect of Tóibín's study is strikingly original. Literary parents are central to this book. Tóibín is fascinated by how literary achievement shifts the balance of power in families, creating dissonance and bringing ghosts to the sur- face.

1 Colm Tóibín's New Ways to Kill Your Mother . London: Penguin, 2012. All page references will be to this edition.

Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 24.2 (September 2013): 195-200.

Something similar occurred in Tóibín's own family. Tóibín's mother held literary ambitions throughout her life. As her son, Colm, became known internationally as a writer she would send him, on publication of each of his novels, a formal letter cri- tiquing his style and intimating that she was about to write a novel of her own. As Tóibín put it: ''Unwritten books and poems mattered to me when I was growing up; there was a melancholy sense of what was never achieved'' ( The Guardian , 17 Febru- ary, 2012). The story of J.M. Synge's life is oft told but Tóibín brings out fresh and interesting connections in his treatment of it. Synge attended Trinity College Dublin and later studied music at Koblenz and French Literature at the Sorbonne. It was in Paris that he encountered Yeats. Scholars differ as to the specific impact of this encounter though all agree that it was a seminal one. Synge took Yeats' advice to live in the west of Ireland and to allow the poetry of the life there to seep inside him. While Yeats may well have had highly romantic and nostalgic notions in mind when he advised Synge to live among ''peasants'' on the Aran Islands, Synge wrote very progressive work indeed. Declan Kiberd provides a clue for the direction that Synge's work took. Kiberd draws a fascinating link between J.M. Synge's work and Jean-Paul Sartre's thought in an interview with Yulia Pushkarevskaya-Naughton (2010). Simone de Beauvoir, in her autobiography, recounted Sartre's insistence on multiple viewings of Winter Journals Synge's The Playboy of the Western World (1907) during their courtship in Paris. That Christy Mahon, the protagonist of Synge's masterpiece, decided to create a ver- sion of himself, his past, and his relationship with his father and subsequently lived that creation was, for Sartre, a great example of existentialism. It is a novel way to kill one's father – to create a new reality without him. Tóibín also references Nicholas Grene who has illustrated the importance of for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution Synge's great-grandfather's owning over 5,000 acres in County Wicklow (81). Having benefited so much from being members of the Protestant Ascendancy class, it is thus unsurprising, as Tóibín puts it, that ''the Synges were staunch defenders of the union

and it is not hard to imagine their horror at the growing Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) involvement of Synge in cultural nationalism'' (87). Synge moved away from his fusty class to the world, half created and half extant, of garrulous tramps and poetic fishermen; he embraced their language, their stories and their pastimes entirely. Again Grene's research is crucial. In an essay Synge wrote describing his own class, Grene has shown that Synge omit- ted a sentence – ''Still, this class, with its many genuine qualities, had little patriotism, in the right sense, few ideas, and no seed for future life, so it has gone to the wall'' (90) – an assessment which would surely have made Synge's mother very cross. Synge's revolutionary idea of seeking enlightenment by living among "peasants," learning from them rather than preaching at them; accepting their faith rather than converting them to Protestantism (as Synge's evangelical uncle had done on the Aran Islands), was a direct assault on Kathleen Synge's views on proper conduct. But Synge's poor mother was not spared the 'scandal' of her son's personal life. Well into adulthood, Synge would spend extended spells at his parental home while keeping his romantic life secret – Synge had fallen for a young Catholic actress from a working class background, Molly Allwood. When Kathleen Synge, a fervid uphold- er of the Protestant faith, found out, she could scarcely bear it. The atmosphere of his mother's house was asphyxiating for Synge whose development both as a writer and a person involved repudiating all the values for which she stood.

In the chapter on Samuel Beckett, Tóibín draws liberally on Anthony Cronin's biography of the great minimalist. Tóibín comes to the theme of parents, a mother in this case, rather late in his treatment of Beckett, but the chapter is one of the strongest in the book. The conflict between Beckett and his mother came from his decision to become a writer and not an academic. Unfortunately for his mother, Beckett's extraordinary abilities as a scholar were not matched with an enthusiasm to teach: despite his credentials, he abruptly resigned from his lectureship at Trinity College Dublin. After a period as a translator he eventually spent long periods at home, sleeping late, nursing hangovers and worrying his mother profoundly – this period of Beckett's life is beautifully echoed in First Love (1946). The following passage is characteristic of Tóibín's criticism in its concise wedding of solid research and creative use of anecdote: The Becketts had a lovely habit, over the generations, of producing one or two really sensible members of the family, such as Beckett's father and his brother, who never put a foot astray, and then various complex figures, such as Beckett's Aunt Cissie and Beckett himself and indeed his first cousin John Beckett, whose serious, intelligent and eccentrically minimalist style of conducting Bach cantatas in Dublin, and wonderfully laconic and informative introductions, were, for me, one of the very great pleasures of the city in the 1970s. (125) It was clear that Beckett, with his quirky mixture of deference and brazenness, was never going to yield to family pressure over a short story in which his cousin, Peggy Sinclair, then only a year dead, appears as ''Smeraldina;'' in a letter he refers to her mother as ''Smeraldina's Ma.'' Tóibín takes the Beckett estate to task over their refusal to publish some of Beckett's letters, doubting, quite rightly, their position to judge which letters ought to be included. Beckett stated that letters ''having bearing on my work'' may be made public. It is fine for the critic to be miffed, but Beckett's spec- ifications were, in this instance, very difficult to interpret. Who, if not the estate, can conclusively make the call? The essay on Hart Crane, though interesting and economical in length, scarcely belongs in this collection. That Crane's father was a successful syrup and chocolate entrepreneur and longed for his son to find an occupation (other than writing poetry) is hardly a revelation. It is true that Crane's problems escalated as stock values – and his expected allowance – plummeted during The Great Depression; but a meditation on Crane's short and painful life would have found a more convivial home in Tóibín's Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar . One of Tóibín's strengths as a critic of novels is his ability to empathize with the writer's difficulty in establishing credible characters, timing, excitement and past histories. He is subtle and fair in his assessment of Brian Moore's career which took him, disaffected by his Catholic and nationalist background in Belfast, from Montreal to Malibu via New York. Moore seemed, over the course of forty years of writing fiction, to gain his voice, lose it and regain it. Ireland never left Moore, though he valiantly tried to leave it. Tellingly, Moore wrote of John McGahern's fiction that Ireland is a ''harsh literary jailer'' (145). Moore faced the dilemma of putting Ireland aside and creating an American novel much in the same way as Tóibín himself did in his most recent novel, Brooklyn (though it should be said in passing that Tóibín's subject matter in that undertaking enabled him to hedge the burden of producing a fully American creation by setting the novel partly in Ireland; and its American di-

mension occurs in an Irish-American enclave). Moore's fate was that of a mid- Atlantic castaway: ''Moore was clearly damaged by exile because the sort of novel he wanted to write required a detailed knowledge of manners and morals; imaginatively, he lost touch with Ireland and never fully grasped North America'' (154). As a journalist in the 1980s, Tóibín travelled to Argentina to cover the disgraceful ''disappearances'' (these articles appear in his book, The Trial of the Generals ); he also lived in Buenos Aires and set one of his novels there – all of which he brings to bear when writing on Jorge Luis Borges. Borges was appalled by the assault on democracy that Juan Perón's ascension to the Presidency of Argentina represented. An outspoken opponent of the regime, Borges soon lost his state job (he was a librarian) and also saw the Argentine Society of Writers, of which he was president, closed by the gov- ernment. So how does Borges' losing his library job and adopting an anti-Peronist stance relate to the theme of Tóibín's book? As Tóibín puts it, ''Borges was so pleased at the end of the Peronist regime that he was happy to support the new one. He had lunch with General Videla and thanked him 'for what he had done for the patria, having saved it from chaos, from the abject state we were in, and, above all, from idiocy'. This support was noted by Chile; Pinochet offered him an Order of Merit, which he accepted'' (240). Borges's betrayal of his fatherland did not continue for long. Tóibín argues that Borges finally saw sense about the political scene in Argentina because of his exile in Spain. This is a perceptive view of Argentinian society: Tóibín lived in Buenos Aires and set one of his novels there. Tóibín shows how Borges' book reviewing occasionally inspired his fiction. As was the case with Borges, so it is with Tóibín. Tóibín's book of short stories, Mothers and Sons , almost certainly came from his meditations in reviews and lectures on the theme in other writers' work. Growing up in Dublin, Hugo Hamilton received the Irish language through one ear from his zealot father and German through his other ear from his mother (a Ger- man national); and he got boxed on both ears by his father if he dared to import an English language word from the street. English was the cool language of Cowboy and Indian games, the currency in a world that was not linguistically sealed off or buried inside the house like his father's anti-Semitic writings. Coming from this strange ma- trix, it is understandable that Hamilton writes of his childhood with irony. Tóibín quotes historian J.J. Lee on the Irish language – ''It is unusual for descendants of a destroyed culture to join in the disparagement of a lost language. It smacks of a parri- cidal impulse'' and adds himself that this offered Hamilton a ''whole new way to kill his father'' (181). When Tóibín's essay on the Manns and their pathological inter-familial relationships appeared in the London Review of Books it carried the infinitely better title, ''I Could Sleep with All of Them.'' Here, recast to fit the book's motif, it is, simply, ''New Ways to Spoil Your Children.'' Tóibín quotes Auden and Kallman's joking suggestion that Klaus Mann's autobiography be entitled The Subordinate Klaus . Thomas Mann, in apparent seriousness, wrote: ''To be the son of a great man is a high fortune, a considerable advantage. But it is likewise an oppressive burden, a perma- nent derogation of one's ego'' (202). Tóibín recounts many of the hilariously silly pursuits of Thomas Mann's offspring while weighing up, much less portentously than Mann himself, the burden of their father's fame.

In writing of Roddy Doyle, especially in light of this book's themes, Tóibín might have drawn on Family , a four part BBC and RTE television drama written by Doyle and directed by Michael Winterbottom in 1994. Set in Ballymun, an extremely de- prived area of North Dublin, Doyle beautifully wove the tragic stories of a family through four compelling hours of television which offered a transformative view of Irish family life. This series forms a central part of Doyle's attempt, which follows, according to Tóibín, in the steps of Joyce and John Banville (''the novelists [who] sought to reassemble the nation'' (172)) in refocusing the Irish narrative: from stock images and recognizable heroes to unlikely protagonists. The short story writer, John Cheever, provides a surprising and interesting chapter here. Cheever felt that he had never been loved by his father and, following Freud, that that was a material factor in his homosexuality, which, in the conservative New England of his time where Cheever was anxious to conform, was taboo. He remained a closet homosexual all his life, confiding his frustrated sexual urges mainly to his journals; and occupied himself with, as Tóibín nails it in his chapter title, ''New Ways to Make Your Family's Life a Misery.'' At the end of this collection, Tóibín devotes two chapters to James Baldwin. The most powerful piece of prose Baldwin ever wrote, the eponymous essay of his collection, Notes of a Native Son , deals with his fraught relationship with his father, a preacher in Harlem, during a deeply unhappy childhood. In that essay, Baldwin treats of his father's death against the backdrop of state violence against the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. Baldwin highlights the total inadequacy of his father's religion in confronting the reality of white supremacy in the United States. Baldwin found his voice early and, as Tóibín shows, his style owed as much to Ernest Hemingway as it did to jazz and Pentecostal preaching. Whatever the influence, Tóibín notes that no ''young writers ever wish to give too much credit to the writers who could have been their father'' (299). Baldwin, a shrewd diagnostician of American life, saw in second generation emi- grants' shedding the language of their forebears a parable for his entire society: ''a father is despised by a son, and this is one of the facts of American life, and this is what we are really referring to, in oblique and terrible fashion, when we talk about upward mobility'' (304). Baldwin knew that the patria he and other African- Americans were shackled with identified only whites as its sons; moreover, that alt- hough whites down the centuries had become its heirs due to their willingness to accept such distortions, they too had been damaged by the process: ''No community can be established on a genocidal lie'' (312). It was in that vein that Baldwin saw, rather reductively, the Civil Rights Movement as "the latest slave rebellion" (311). Tóibín closes this book with an essay entitled ''Baldwin and Obama: Men Without Fathers,'' which appeared in The New York Review of Books on October 23, 2008. Tóibín argues that since both men lost their fathers at a young age they were liberated to explore their past more rigorously; and that they became endowed with ''a sense of destiny to fulfil'' (323). Their ambition, talent and will to transcend American life, as it had been constituted, enabled them to lead not only their race but all of America. A journalistic colleague of Tóibín's at Magill (a current affairs magazine Tóibín edited in the early eighties), June Levine, used to stay up late arguing the issues of the day with him. Her husband, the respected psychiatric doctor Ivor Browne, witnessing the vigour of their debates, once gently suggested to Tóibín that he attend therapy

sessions. Three decades and many books examining family relationships later, Tóibín took Dr. Browne up on his suggestion. As Tóibín put it: ''I must have shrugged as I tried to explain that my father was a secondary school teacher – [...] He died just before I was due to go to his secondary school, and I had dreaded the idea of him teaching me. So I told Ivor, in a way when he died I was relieved'' (quoted in Books Ireland, May 2008, 100). Dr. Browne was sure that Tóibín's feelings about his father remained complicated by the ambivalence he felt during the aftermath of his father's death it was a "blocked" trauma. To exacerbate matters, Tóibín's mother had left him and his brother at their aunts' house without a visit for months while his father was dying: this period of his life is explored in Tóibín's most searing story to date (which reads more like autobiography than fiction), "One Minus One." During a group ses- sion, shortly after Tóibín came to speak in therapy about this time of his boyhood, he retched his guts out. But he stuck with the programme. The therapy Tóibín has received forms one part of his facing the difficulties of his past just as his writing on the theme forms the other. This book is one of the richest explorations of child-parent relationships that Tóibín has written so far. It will not be the final instalment.