Interview: Colm Tóibín, author of New Ways to Kill Your Mother

COLM Tóibín shares other writers’ family secrets, but will he reveal his own?

What book lover hasn’t felt the urge to peer into the psyche of a favourite author to better understand their art? Better still is finding a wonderful guide for that journey, and we have exactly that in Colm Tóibín. A superb writer, critic, and lecturer, he is ideally positioned to explore this issue inside and out, and some of his discoveries have been issued as a new collection of essays entitled New Ways to Kill Your Mother, which peers into the family dynamics of everyone from William Butler Yeats to James Baldwin, with stops at Samuel Beckett, Thomas Mann and John Cheever, among others.

There’s tension between those who insist art must stand up for itself, and those who find it worthwhile evaluating art in light of what we can learn about its creators, I say. Chuckling, Tóibín admits he’s not sure he doesn’t belong in the first camp. He presumes we’ve read the texts he’s discussing before diving into his essays.

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But some will never go beyond the work, and for them the work will suffice, I say. “And some people will never go beyond the gossip, and the gossip will suffice,” he retorts. “There’s no happy ending in this.”Among the revelations in Tóibín’s book is the stand-off that existed between William Butler Yeats and his father, who also fancied himself a playwright and an author. One essay looks at John Cheever’s lifelong struggles with alcoholism and homosexuality. Another offers an unsparing portrait of Jorges Luis Borges’ domineering mother. But it’s Thomas Mann and his family who really captured my imagination. The essay “Thomas Mann: New Ways to Spoil Your Children” overflows with homosexuality, incest, suicide, and gerontophilia. We learn that Mann’s wife may have been in love with her brother, that Mann was gay and fancied his son, and that rumours abounded about the closeness between his children Erika and Klaus.

“Yes, they’re wonderful,” agrees Tóibín. “I wish I could make moral judgements on them. I hope you notice that I don’t. I am just fascinated by the idea that Thomas Mann, the Nobel prize winner, lived in that way. Every morning Mann went into his study and was there for about four hours, day in day out, irrespective of what was going on around him – but what was going on around him was really fascinating, in that relationship with his wife and children.”

Tóibín has persistently resisted revealing too much about his own inner workings, rationing biographical information as if with an eye dropper. Still, I tell him, our library presented me with 80 pages worth of clips about him and his books. He howls with laughter. “Oh no! I think there must be big things left out.”

Not least, I counter, because he’s adroit at sidestepping questions. He unearths so much about these authors, yet once told an interviewer that knowing he is gay wouldn’t help a reader to read the stories in his collection Mothers and Sons. “Yeah, but, if I’m listening to Schubert, then is that a gay person listening to a gay composer, or is it me listening to Schubert? I think it’s me listening to Schubert – but there are people who would like to think, oh, no no no, you’re gay, you go away and be gay. I find that reductive and irritating.”

Or go away and be Irish? “Yes. Or be African-American. With James Baldwin it’s a very big issue – being gay and being black. Instead of someone saying you are the greatest stylist of your age, everyone will say, ‘How come, since you’re black?’ ” He tells me Baldwin was “probably the best American essayist of the 20th century. I can hardly think of a better one. He wrote a great number of very, very personal essays. Sometimes he was very controlled in what he wrote about himself, and sometimes not, therefore how he wrote about himself is really worth examining. He was attempting to use his own feelings and what had happened to him as a way of helping America out of certain dilemmas he had identified. You can read the novels, but some of the best Baldwin is Baldwin writing very, very personally about himself.”

Doesn’t he feel guilty writing these intimate essays while keeping so much of himself off limits? “I understood from early on that in this business I had more rights than responsibilities. I understood, also, that the issue of remaining slippery, morally speaking, seems fundamental. If you say, ‘Oh, but your position makes no sense morally,’ I’d say, I’m sure it doesn’t! If you are willing to have yourself written about in the same way you’re writing about these people, you’re wanting to be an awful fool.”

Does he fear biographers? “Somebody sent me a book she’s written that’s out soon. It’s a critical work and quite astute. I thought, ‘Oh, OK, oh dear.’ There’s nothing I can do about that. You realise that anyone reading all the books together is finding things that seem to add up to something. She went to a lot of trouble. I also know that there were certain moments where she was trying to work out what I’m doing, but what I’m doing comes from something very personal, that probably no-one really knows about.”

• New Ways to Kill Your Mother is published by Viking, priced £20. Colm Tóibín will be at the Aye Write! Book festival on 13 March at 7:30pm. For tickets, see www.ayewrite.com