Colm Tóibín on writing, stammering and having his sexuality shunned

From growing up in Wexford to the Oscars, a new show explores the novelist’s life, writes Niamh Horan

Writer Colm Tóibín attending a photocall during the annual Edinburgh International Book Festival in August 2017. Picture by Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

Niamh Horan Twitter Email

April 18 2021 02:30 AM

Colm Tóibín has described how his father’s death led him to develop a stammer as child he still carries with him today. The writer, widely regarded as one of the world’s greatest living novelists, was speaking as part of a landmark documentary for RTÉ One which explores and celebrates his life.

Recalling growing up in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford he says: “I think I was eight and my father... it was always called ‘an operation’... and he went to Dublin and my mother went with him and so for some length of time, maybe three months, they were away and myself and my younger brother went to stay with an aunt who looked after us and we didn’t really know where they were. We knew he was having an operation, but we didn’t really know what that meant

“He died in the summer and I think anyone who has been through that knows that you don’t deal with it and, in those years especially, people didn’t think things could have a big affect on a child.

“I suppose I can pinpoint the development of a stammer or a stutter from then. If someone asked me my name, it’s an unfortunate name for a stutterer because it has two very hard consonant sounds, I simply wouldn’t be able to say it and I still couldn’t. So if you asked me outright ‘what’s your name?’ it would take me a lot to get the sounds out. And that was very disturbing but I didn’t connect it to that and no one else did.”

Elsewhere in the documentary, Tóibín describes the pain of growing up in a country where his sexuality was shunned. He says: “In my knowledge of the gay world here, a lot of people would tell a number of their friends and maybe not anyone at home. And some people would be out to people at work — but maybe only to two people. There was a whole way of compartmentalising your life and I did that too. The scars that leaves are real. It just makes people like us, I mean gay people, different. It leaves a mark to do with silences, to do with shame and to do with worry.”

Directed by Brendan J Byrne and produced by Belfast-based independent production company Below The Radar TV, the documentary follows Tóibín as he completes his latest novel The Magician, based on the life of the German Nobel winner Thomas Mann, most famous for his short novel Death In Venice.

In a journey to Venice, almost completely empty in the pandemic, he shares the challenges of writing about a figure as complex and unknowable as Mann. Speaking about the creative writing process, he says: “In order to evoke something, as a writer, you have to feel it. Nothing will happen unless you feel it. You have to see it, and feel it and be within it. And working from that, you then can write very short sentences, which seem to be doing nothing much but actually, they are building up a sort of emotion.”

Matthew Dinneen's got bigger fish to Fry after comic videos go viral in pandemic

He also reveals an awkward encounter while he was attending the 2016 Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, after his 2009 novel Brooklyn was adapted for the big screen.

“The Oscars were very very funny because they have no interest whatsoever in novelists. And I didn’t write the screenplay. Emma Donoghue had written her own screenplay, so she got to go in on the red carpet side and I got to go in where there wasn’t even a carpet. And I wanted to say hi to Saoirse [Ronan] and her people but there was a man whose job was to stop me. He said ‘move on sir’ and I tried to explain to him [who I was] but he said ‘Sir! You are going in there now’ [pointing to the theatre].

“The seat we had was really far back,” he says, “but it was good because, at the time, I was interested in drinking as much as possible. So I got to go to the bar at every break and get some drink. That was the only advantage. Otherwise you are just ‘the guy who wrote the book.’”

Tóibín, who was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2018, was also asked if he learned anything about that time in his life. True to form, he takes a dispassionate and self-deprecating approach.

“I don’t say ‘oh now my life has become much richer since my chemo’, no it hasn’t,” he laughs, “or that ‘I learned something about the meaning or preciousness of life’.

“No, I didn’t. I just sat on a sofa feeling pretty anguished with all this chemo in me. I lost six months and I was intent that I was going to laugh at it. So notice this effort on my part to do so.”

Colm Tóibín: On Memory’s Shore airs on Monday 9.35pm on RTÉ One