:00:08. > :00:12.Welcome to HARDtalk. I'm Stephen Sackur.
:00:13. > :00:15.My guest today is an Irish writer whose intense, lyrical novels have
:00:16. > :00:20.won him awards, acclaim and most importantly millions
:00:21. > :00:24.Colm Toibin isn't so much a flamboyant storyteller, he's more
:00:25. > :00:27.an acute observer of character and the deepest human feelings.
:00:28. > :00:32.There are recurring themes in his work ` loss, mourning, exile,
:00:33. > :00:40.which might suggest a dark, brooding presence ` but how close
:00:41. > :01:13.Colm Toibin, welcome to HARDtalk. Thank you.
:01:14. > :01:16.Your writing is deeply rooted in Ireland and yet you spend much of
:01:17. > :01:22.You teach in America, you have homes in Europe...
:01:23. > :01:25.Does it help or hinder you that you now have quite a lot of distance
:01:26. > :01:34.I think I live in my mind and in my memory and something can
:01:35. > :01:49.And I come in and out of Ireland, so it is a really funny thing that
:01:50. > :01:55.happens when you arrive at JFK in the Irish sector, which is to
:01:56. > :01:58.say, you get the flight to Dublin, and you suddenly see the Irish.
:01:59. > :02:01.So many of us live in America. There are so many Irish.
:02:02. > :02:04.We are going home for the first time in a year
:02:05. > :02:07.and there's a funny sense of belonging in two countries
:02:08. > :02:10.People get very comfortable with the air hostesses with Irish accents.
:02:11. > :02:13.And then you arrive in Ireland and you think,
:02:14. > :02:15."If I could get out of here tomorrow morning..."
:02:16. > :02:17.When you join that line at JFK Airport in New York
:02:18. > :02:21.and you're in the Irish section, as you put it, do you feel
:02:22. > :02:25.I can recognise every gesture, every halftone in the conversation.
:02:26. > :02:29.I see a couple coming towards me and I can tell you where they're from.
:02:30. > :02:32.You are as utterly Irish today as you ever were?
:02:33. > :02:39.If someone spoke in a northern accent, a Dublin accent or a Wexford
:02:40. > :02:52.Fintan O'Toole, another great Irish writer and commentator,
:02:53. > :02:53.says emigration and exile, the journeys to and
:02:54. > :02:56.from home, are the very heartbeat of Irish culture.
:02:57. > :03:00.For 150 years, it has been the secret history of the country.
:03:01. > :03:03.lost two or three people to immigration.
:03:04. > :03:09.If you went to America or Australia, you often never came home.
:03:10. > :03:12.If you went to England, you did come home but somehow your
:03:13. > :03:18.children had English accents but their cousins had Irish accents.
:03:19. > :03:23.Even in the difficult years between Ireland and England, the families
:03:24. > :03:26.The big difference was if you went to America,
:03:27. > :03:28.you could become anybody, you could become a millionaire.
:03:29. > :03:29.Your descendants could become president,
:03:30. > :03:33.But in England, you could not become queen.
:03:34. > :03:34.There was legislation to prevent you.
:03:35. > :03:40.America was glamour and England was work.
:03:41. > :03:43.I wonder if in your experience and maybe for yourself as well, when you
:03:44. > :03:47.are an Irish person abroad, you tend to romanticise and look very fondly
:03:48. > :03:53.back at the homeland but maybe when you go back, once again, you
:03:54. > :03:55.remember the frustrations and the difficulties and some of the
:03:56. > :04:05.I teach a course at Columbia University on Irish literature.
:04:06. > :04:09.Of course, the literature is so gloomy.
:04:10. > :04:12.It's so filled with death and melancholy and houses burning.
:04:13. > :04:18.and it is very nice and people are very friendly
:04:19. > :04:23.but all this literature is so filled with darkness."
:04:24. > :04:25.And if you're studying the literature with students and you
:04:26. > :04:32.offer a sort of background, you are looking at a darkened Ireland.
:04:33. > :04:35.It's not an ideal. No writer has idealised Ireland.
:04:36. > :04:44.People find the darkest things about the country and dramatise them.
:04:45. > :04:49.When we talk dark and melancholy, there are lot those qualities
:04:50. > :04:54.For our audience who don't know your personal story,
:04:55. > :04:57.I want to relate that to your own upbringing in Ireland.
:04:58. > :05:02.Your father died when you were 12, I think, and I wonder whether...
:05:03. > :05:05.I mean, it's easy to assume in a sense that
:05:06. > :05:07.that coloured a lot of your personality.
:05:08. > :05:11.Loss and mourning figure in your work a lot
:05:12. > :05:16.and clearly, as a child losing your dad, that marked you forever.
:05:17. > :05:19.I think in those years, especially in the 1950s and the years before
:05:20. > :05:23.it was the silence that affected you more than the event itself.
:05:24. > :05:25.No`one knew how to... How to talk about it.
:05:26. > :05:29."It will be OK. Children get over things quickly.
:05:30. > :05:38.Well, they don't, obviously. These days we know that.
:05:39. > :05:40.There are counsellors and systems in place.
:05:41. > :05:52.I became interested in the poetics of silence.
:05:53. > :05:55.What silence does is in the words not said,
:05:56. > :05:58.the sense of something that can never be mentioned again.
:05:59. > :06:01.And in fiction, you can really work with that because you can show
:06:02. > :06:04.the reader what the person is thinking and then you can show
:06:05. > :06:06.the reader what the person is saying
:06:07. > :06:08.and the big distance between the two.
:06:09. > :06:12.A lot of this world must really be kept within.
:06:13. > :06:14.And maybe the most obvious and best example of that
:06:15. > :06:17.in your work is the most recent novel you have written,
:06:18. > :06:26.which you invite us to see as very much autobiographical.
:06:27. > :06:28.It's about a woman who has lost her husband
:06:29. > :06:30.just like your mother lost her husband.
:06:31. > :06:33.It's also about the relationship between the woman and her son,
:06:34. > :06:35.who, frankly, sounds very much like you.
:06:36. > :06:38.Is it autobiographical? Yes.
:06:39. > :06:48.was trying to describe those years in a provincial town
:06:49. > :06:51.with a family where the father dies and the house is empty.
:06:52. > :06:56.There is a palpable absence and nobody knows what to do about it.
:06:57. > :07:00.It's not a ghost, it's just that nobody is there
:07:01. > :07:06.If you wrote it from a child's perspective,
:07:07. > :07:10.A short Irish story where a boy is sad.
:07:11. > :07:13.I didn't know how to deal with it until I realised, of course,
:07:14. > :07:16.I watched my mother in those years so closely and I can remember
:07:17. > :07:22.everything she said and what was wearing, the things that she had,
:07:23. > :07:26.and I could tell it from her point of view because I was watching her
:07:27. > :07:30.so closely that I had a sense of what her point of view was.
:07:31. > :07:43.For example, this is a woman who as her husband was dying,
:07:44. > :07:46.the fictional Nora Webster, she sends her youngest boys off to
:07:47. > :07:49.live with an aunt and she doesn't contact them for months on end.
:07:50. > :07:58.Yes, my mother did that. Are you angry?
:07:59. > :08:00.Well, the telephone was not used very much
:08:01. > :08:05.She really needed to be with my father and he needed her.
:08:06. > :08:08.We were sent to a safe place where we were perfectly safe, of course,
:08:09. > :08:14.And I think it affected myself and my brother very deeply.
:08:15. > :08:17.And of course, I became the novelist, so I'm the one who
:08:18. > :08:25.and try and see it from her point of view rather than from ours.
:08:26. > :08:29.But then slowly, you do see it from the boy's point of view.
:08:30. > :08:31.The novel was not an act of revenge in any way.
:08:32. > :08:37.I don't think I was ever angry, really, but I wanted to use it.
:08:38. > :08:39.I was exploiting it, getting that material and going,
:08:40. > :08:42."I can put it here to get this story right
:08:43. > :08:54.You pick away at emotions and they develop and they change slowly and
:08:55. > :08:58.it makes me think that because of the density of the way you write,
:08:59. > :09:00.you must be quite an introspective, maybe even quite
:09:01. > :09:05.Am I right or is that a silly way of using the author's work as a
:09:06. > :09:09.I think there are two ways to look at it.
:09:10. > :09:11.Personally, it's very bad manners to go around being melancholy.
:09:12. > :09:15.Even Hamlet got fed up with doing it and started being funny
:09:16. > :09:20."I would like to integrate the fact
:09:21. > :09:24.that when I go out at night, I'm really cheerful and enjoy things
:09:25. > :09:26.and this other part of me is this brooding guy
:09:27. > :09:30.The psychiatrist said, "Which would you like to be?"
:09:31. > :09:32.And I said I didn't know and he said, "Go away."
:09:33. > :09:37.In other words, I think it is quite normal
:09:38. > :09:41.for someone who's funny in print to be very sad when you meet them.
:09:42. > :09:44.You know, the sad clown ` we know that one.
:09:45. > :09:49.She wrote quite melancholy stuff about death and time
:09:50. > :10:05.It's not as if her novels are funny.
:10:06. > :10:07.But personally, people said she was absolutely hilarious.
:10:08. > :10:09.She once said TS Eliot came around wearing a four`piece suit.
:10:10. > :10:12.She would make jokes about people she knew
:10:13. > :10:16.And I'm interested in that idea that the private self and the public self
:10:17. > :10:24.Is this not just about you but also about Ireland?
:10:25. > :10:26.You said something that struck me as fascinating
:10:27. > :10:30.about the importance often in human exchanges being in the silence.
:10:31. > :10:35.Do you think Ireland has long been a country of repressed feeling,
:10:36. > :10:37.of silences, rather than things said explicitly?
:10:38. > :10:49.I think there is a great deal of talk in Ireland.
:10:50. > :10:54.We're constantly telling stories and things but I certainly realised
:10:55. > :10:58.after my father died and I have watched it happening since,
:10:59. > :11:01.our people suddenly being so entertaining at a time when they are
:11:02. > :11:08.Something inwards that is eating them away inside.
:11:09. > :11:12.There is a lot of death in your books.
:11:13. > :11:16.There is quite a lot of sex in the short stories.
:11:17. > :11:18.It is quite explicit. I had fun writing it.
:11:19. > :11:21.I really should write more sex as time goes on and we are becoming
:11:22. > :11:30.Even as a young man, as a child growing into an adult, you knew that
:11:31. > :11:35.you were homosexual but you did not in the Ireland of the time...
:11:36. > :11:39.It was not decriminalised until '93.
:11:40. > :11:55.So, I'm just wondering for example, at school...
:11:56. > :11:58.Because you went to school, and we'll talk a bit about it,
:11:59. > :12:01.it was run by priests and sexuality was not an open topic.
:12:02. > :12:04.How did you cope with your growing awareness of who you were?
:12:05. > :12:09.the closet is actually quite a comfortable place.
:12:10. > :12:11.It's dark and there is no`one else there.
:12:12. > :12:13.You just keep that part of yourself utterly compartmentalised.
:12:14. > :12:15.Obviously, when I went to university,
:12:16. > :12:18.there were people who were there... I had a group of friends who knew.
:12:19. > :12:25.I never took that home. That was a common thing in Ireland.
:12:26. > :12:28.Your friends knew and some family knew and then not all
:12:29. > :12:31.of your family and then gradually someone would tell someone else.
:12:32. > :12:34.But that big coming out moment did not happen in my generation
:12:35. > :12:38.in Ireland in the same way that it happened in the US, for example.
:12:39. > :12:44.Going back to your senior school, St Peters in Wexford, we now
:12:45. > :12:47.know, although I guess you did not know or were not fully aware at
:12:48. > :12:55.the time, that it was a place where a number of senior clerics, priests,
:12:56. > :12:59.were serially sexually abusing some of the boys in the school.
:13:00. > :13:00.Again, I wonder whether you subconsciously were
:13:01. > :13:14.It was unimaginable that priests who later went to jail, the full details
:13:15. > :13:20.that were published precisely what they did...
:13:21. > :13:25.It was systematic and long`term and I knew these priests
:13:26. > :13:33.For all of us, it was really difficult to read this material
:13:34. > :13:35.all these years later and to realise...
:13:36. > :13:41."When he says he went up those stairs into that room,
:13:42. > :13:50.You really did not know anything?
:13:51. > :13:53.I had no idea that a priest would take their clothes off
:13:54. > :14:06.The idea of adults and children in any sphere
:14:07. > :14:07.was something I had never heard about.
:14:08. > :14:09.You have written about it very interestingly since
:14:10. > :14:14.I think that at one point, you tried to get inside the mind of the priest
:14:15. > :14:17.and you said that in a way, if we assume they were not
:14:18. > :14:22.homosexual but heterosexual and we assume for a minute that they were
:14:23. > :14:31.in a school full of young girls aged between 12 and 20,
:14:32. > :14:34.we wouldn't be surprised if from time to time
:14:35. > :14:36.they...they...expressed desires and fell from the standards
:14:37. > :14:40.In a way, people were shocked by that because it almost felt
:14:41. > :14:43.like you were trying to find excuses for these abusive priests.
:14:44. > :14:46.I was trying to think about things from their point of view.
:14:47. > :14:49.The whole society moved from loving priests and listening to them
:14:50. > :14:53.to hating them and thinking that they were all the same.
:14:54. > :15:01.I just find that when a society moves so quickly from one
:15:02. > :15:07.The school also had a seminary attached to it
:15:08. > :15:12.so I got to know some of the seminarians.
:15:13. > :15:16.A lot of the boys went in at 17 or 18 to become priests and they were
:15:17. > :15:20.homosexual and one reason why they went in was because if you are gay,
:15:21. > :15:23.part of you becomes much more internalised.
:15:24. > :15:26.You move inwards and that can hit a spiritual space.
:15:27. > :15:30.And for a lot of the priests, nothing happened until their 40s.
:15:31. > :15:33.They went through 20 years with the celibacy
:15:34. > :15:38.and then something broke in their 40s, some loneliness.
:15:39. > :15:41.And the sexuality, if it has to be kept silent
:15:42. > :15:43.and cannot be mentioned, it can become really twisted
:15:44. > :15:49.People can move from being normal gay people to actually having all
:15:50. > :15:57.sorts of things that include getting pleasure from power.
:15:58. > :16:12.What has resulted from this is a fundamental undermining of the power
:16:13. > :16:27.Is that irrevocable and is the positive?
:16:28. > :16:29.The Church has lost its moral authority
:16:30. > :16:33.The only way it can move is in the spiritual realm.
:16:34. > :16:36.If it continues to try and move things in
:16:37. > :16:38.the civil space trying to continue with schools and hospitals, telling
:16:39. > :16:42.people how to vote in referendums, it will not help them in any way.
:16:43. > :16:46.The only way it can work is talking about prayer and the spirit and God
:16:47. > :16:51.and the Bible and things that matter.
:16:52. > :16:53.You were brought up as an observant Catholic.
:16:54. > :17:05.Is there a spiritual element to you still?
:17:06. > :17:07.I think there is a spiritual element to all of us
:17:08. > :17:11.You get much more than the pleasure of the melody.
:17:12. > :17:15.I wonder if all of us do not have a need
:17:16. > :17:31.For me, it would not be Catholic dogma.
:17:32. > :17:33.Any of us who have read The Testament
:17:34. > :17:36.The novel you wrote, it is fascinating.
:17:37. > :17:38.But for a Catholic, it is challenging.
:17:39. > :17:41.You get inside the head of Mary herself and write her view
:17:42. > :17:43.of what happened before and during the crucifixion.
:17:44. > :17:46.The message of Mary is a lot of the story is a lie.
:17:47. > :17:50.She was told to say she was by the disciples who are creating
:17:51. > :18:11.It is a view that many Catholics found very difficult to take.
:18:12. > :18:13.American Catholics seemed most disturbed about it.
:18:14. > :18:15.Her supporters seem to think it was a good thing.
:18:16. > :18:43.She was there for the crucifixion in my book.
:18:44. > :18:48.When I read it, I have in my mind about all religious
:18:49. > :18:52.They use experience for their own ends and try to create
:18:53. > :19:10.Was it a critique of not just Catholicism, but Islam today?
:19:11. > :19:12.That individual figure being chosen by the group to die.
:19:13. > :19:15.How that would be viewed by somebody without that pressure.
:19:16. > :19:18.I was thinking about the relationship between the big cause
:19:19. > :19:20.Trying to work that out using her voice
:19:21. > :20:27.I would work on her voice and see where it took me.
:20:28. > :20:59.Goading them is not a particularly brilliant thing to do.
:21:00. > :21:00.That sounds like what Peter Carey said.
:21:01. > :21:02.At the same time, once murder is involved,
:21:03. > :21:06.once you start going into the offices of people who do drawings
:21:07. > :21:09.and write cartoons and you murder them, we are in a different realm.
:21:10. > :21:12.You can have an argument with Charlie Hebdo about the content.
:21:13. > :21:14.Once there is murder the only argument you want to have
:21:15. > :21:17.is what the people who murdered them want to say to them.
:21:18. > :21:23.Once the murders happen, I am in a different space.
:21:24. > :21:33.I am absolutely on the side of Charlie Hebdo.
:21:34. > :21:36.I want to end by coming back to Ireland and another campaign
:21:37. > :21:41.You adamantly support the idea that Ireland should
:21:42. > :22:07.Nobody says to somebody else, civil partnerships will do for you.
:22:08. > :22:10.It is strong about the protection married people have and the family
:22:11. > :22:24.How you couple, how you make your love public and
:22:25. > :22:27.how you have the ritual surrounding that is fundamental to all of us.
:22:28. > :22:30.I am not saying everyone should get married, but to be told you can't
:22:31. > :22:33.in a country where a ritual is very important is exclusionary.
:22:34. > :22:36.Because this is in the Constitution, there had to be a referendum,
:22:37. > :22:39.and one government minister came out as gay, one ex`minister came out as
:22:40. > :22:46.But the arguments, it was a very decent campaign.
:22:47. > :22:51.It meant that we could put our case to the nation and say,
:22:52. > :23:55.We do not want to stop marriage, we want to embrace marriage.
:23:56. > :23:57.They are ready to accept dissent and difference.
:23:58. > :25:05.Two Northern Ireland, western parts of Scotland. Through the course of
:25:06. > :25:07.the night, it will stay dry. Here are,