reader Posted September 19, 2021 Posted September 19, 2021 That's the closing sentence in a highly personal profile of writer Colm Toibin that appears in the current issue of The New Yorker. The author of many gay themed novels, Toibin didn't learn to read until he was nine. But once he found his groove, he began to make up for lost time. If your tempted by this piece, you can read Toibin describing an orgy in Barcelona at this link: https://www.scribd.com/document/93681837/Barcelona-1975-a-story-from-Colm-Toibin-s-THE-EMPTY-FAMILY "Secrets and Lies" by D.T. Max he Irish writer Colm Tóibín is a busy man. Since he published his first novel, “The South,” at thirty-five, in 1990, he has written eleven more books of fiction. He has also published three reported books, three collections of essays, dozens of introductions to other writers’ work, prefaces to art catalogues, an opera libretto, plays, poems, and so many reviews that it’s surprising when a week goes by and he hasn’t been in at least one of the New York, London, or Dublin papers. When I asked Tóibín—the name is pronounced “cuh-lem toe-bean”—how many articles he had written, he could only guess. “I suppose thousands might be accurate,” he said, adding that his level of output used to be more common among writers: “Anthony Burgess, whom I knew slightly, used to write a thousand words a day. He produced a great amount of literary journalism, as well as the novels.” But, unlike Burgess, Tóibín gravitates to assignments demanding considerable diligence. Reviewing a recent biography of Fernando Pessoa, by Richard Zenith, Tóibín read the eleven-hundred-page text and three translations of Pessoa’s “The Book of Disquiet.” Tóibín sometimes assimilates his subject to the point that the writer in question begins to sound like one of his own characters. His Pessoa essay, published in August in the London Review of Books, begins, “As he grew older, Fernando Pessoa became less visible, as though he were inexorably being subsumed by dreams and shadows.” “I have absolute curiosity and total commitment,” Tóibín, who is sixty-six, told me. He described his appetite for pickup work to me as a form of intellectual fomo. “You learn a huge amount by opening yourself to things that are going on,” he explained, offering as a case in point his new novel, “The Magician,” a fictionalization of Thomas Mann’s life. “I could not have done the book had I not foolishly taken on three biographies of Mann in 1995 that were all this size,” he said, spreading his hands far apart. There are many other demands on Tóibín’s time: he is a literature professor at Columbia University and the chancellor of the University of Liverpool (“You have no idea how beautiful the robes are”). He occasionally helps curate exhibits for the Morgan Library & Museum, in Manhattan, and, with his agent, Peter Straus, he runs a small publishing imprint in Dublin, Tuskar Rock Press. “I really enjoy anything that’s going on,” he told me, adding, “If there was a circus, I’d join it.” When many novelists are done writing for the day, they want to be alone. Tóibín wants company. At literary festivals, he is a charming presence—modest, attentive, and eager to entertain the audience. “A novel is a thousand details,” he likes to say. “A long novel is two thousand details.” He has distanced himself from the trend for autofiction by declaring, “The page you face is not a mirror. It is blank.” Richard Ford told me, “Colm’s the best on his feet of any writer I know.” Once the panels end, Tóibín is up for an escapade. Ford went on, “He’s great fun and naughty, not constantly watching his back.” Last year, Tóibín and Damon Galgut, the South African writer, attended a festival in Cape Town. When Tóibín asked him what would be fun to see, Galgut suggested that they visit the Owl House, a work of outsider art ten hours away, in the Eastern Cape. Off they went on an almost nine-hundred-mile round trip, completed in four or five days. Tóibín was not much impressed by the art, but along the way he did a mischievous imitation of a novelist they both know, played with the idea of a foreign-language film with subtitles that told a completely unrelated story, and discussed why baboons have red buttocks. “It was an absolute lark,” Tóibín told me. Michael Ondaatje recalls running into Tóibín in 2005, after a five-day literary festival in Toronto. Tóibín told him that, during the event, he’d written a short story in his hotel room. Ondaatje exclaimed, “But . . . you were everywhere! ” Tóibín’s appetite for social life is reminiscent of one of his idols, Henry James, who accepted a hundred and seven invitations to dinner in London during the winter season of 1878-79. Tóibín thinks that his own record occurred in 1981, during his years as a journalist in Dublin: almost every night, he said, he was “out drinking with friends and hanging out in every pub, going to every art thing.” In part, Tóibín is searching, like James, for an anecdote that will grow into a story. The germ can lie fallow in his mind for a long time. His best-known novel, “Brooklyn”—which was published in 2009, and later was adapted into a film starring Saoirse Ronan—took its inspiration from a chance comment made by a visitor paying a condolence call after the death of his father, more than forty years earlier, when Tóibín was twelve and growing up near the Irish coast, south of Dublin. “One evening, a woman came and said her daughter had gone to Brooklyn and showed us all these letters,” he recalled. “When she was gone, I heard people saying that the daughter had come back from America and not told anyone she’d married there.” I asked Tóibín several times why he enjoyed being so busy—was it a way to escape “the dark side of his soul,” as his Mann character muses in the new novel? Tóibín resists analysis in general. Once, when I inquired if he was happy, he answered, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘happy.’ ” This time, he initially quoted the musical “Oklahoma!”: “ ‘I’m just a girl who can’t say no.’ ” But I pressed him, and eventually he said, “I think I’m sort of sad, and I’m not sad when I’m out with people—the sadness just sort of goes, departs, leaves me.” I wasn’t sure if I’d achieved a breakthrough or been rewarded for my persistence. Tóibín tries to please, if he can. Continues at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/20/how-colm-toibin-burrowed-inside-thomas-manns-head Lonnie 1 Quote
