Hard work and focus have helped Colm Tóibín become a highly acclaimed novelist and critic, writes Rosita Boland.
'The Blessed Sacrament procession in Enniscorthy - the Booker Prize is like this. You have to wear your best clothes, and you are pushed around a lot." Wexford-born writer Colm Tóibín made this tongue-in-cheek comment on a radio programme in the US in March 2000. He will shortly need to dig out the John Rocha suit he wore to the 1999 Booker dinner again: this week, Tóibín was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize a second time, for his novel, The Master.
This has been a remarkable year for 49-year-old Tóibín. In February, the show he curated at the Chester Beatty Library, Blue - based on objects from the archives featuring that colour - was both a critical and popular success, attracting 26,000 visitors. In August, his first play, Beauty in a Broken Place, an exploration of the political fallout surrounding the 1926 première of Sean O'Casey's Plough and the Stars, opened at the Peacock Theatre. And now his fifth novel, based on the life of Henry James, is a strong contender for one of the literary world's most hyped prizes - a prize won only once by an Irish writer, Roddy Doyle, for Paddy Clarke Ha! Ha! Ha! in 1993.
Those who know Tóibín well view him as a prodigious and self-disciplined worker. Ambitious and full of energy, he possesses a fierce intelligence and a wide-ranging curiosity. He started his writing career as a journalist with In Dublin in the early 1980s, and was features editor there before moving on to edit Magill from 1982 to 1985. He resigned his editorship after a disagreement with publisher Vincent Browne. He then worked for the Sunday Independent as television critic and commentator.
His first book was the non-fiction Walking Along the Border (1987). His first novel, The South, appeared in 1991 and won an Irish Times Literature Award. Since then, there have been four more novels, including the Booker-shortlisted The Blackwater Lightship in 1999, and the non-fiction The Sign of the Cross, Travels in Catholic Europe. In 1999, with Carmen Callil, he put together The Modern Library, The 200 Best Novels Since 1950. Tóibín used the opportunity to draw attention to some lesser-known writers, notably Canadian short-story writer Alistair MacLeod, who has since won the Impac prize with his first novel, No Great Mischief. Tóibíalso edited various anthologies, and frequently contributes literary criticism and essays to the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. Recently, he spent a year on a fellowship at the Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
"Journalism sharpened his curiosity in the way Ireland worked and that's very apparent in his novels. They are marked by a very acute political sensibility," says Irish Times critic and commentator Fintan O'Toole, who worked with Tóibín during his days at In Dublin.
"He worked very, very hard always. He thought about writing not as some romantic journey, but as a piece of work. He has a very focused approach. He was a superb editor. Most first novels are wild and self-indulgent. Colm has worked the other way. He started out as a very restrained, precise and self-disciplined prose writer and is now allowing himself a wider palette of colours."
"He was the best editor Magill ever had - including myself," says columnist and publisher Vincent Browne.
Scottish novelist and critic Andrew O'Hagan has been a friend of Tóibín's for 10 years. "There's two things he's never done: he's never complained about his dinner and he's never worried too much about the price of anything, which seem pretty essential to me if you're not going to be a bore. And that's the main thing about him - he's never boring," O'Hagan says. "Colm keeps the greater part of his seriousness for his prose, which is where it belongs. He is the least pompous novelist of his generation." Then adds, "If he hadn't been a novelist he might have been a priest: he's just so very good at listening to people - and then giving them the wrong advice."
Archivist and critic Catriona Crowe has known Tóibín since their student days at UCD. He dedicated his first novel, The South, to her. She is one of the few people who sees all of Tóibín's work-in-progress. He writes first drafts longhand and then edits on a computer. "Any writer needs a few primary readers to keep the show on the road," she says.
Another close, long-time friend is Bernard Loughlin, former director of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, who first met Tóibín in Barcelona in 1975. Loughlin now lives in a village in the Pyrenees, where Tóibín has bought a house with Loughlin's brother. "He always has some project on hand, even in Spain," Loughlin comments. Part of The Master was written there, in between a round of parties and dinners.
"Colm is very generous, both with his success and with his generosity of spirit," Loughlin says. "He is forever sending us things - subscriptions to magazines, books, things he thinks we'll be interested in, or should know about, even if we live in the outback." When in Spain, he also plays tennis - badly. "At least in one area of his life, he's getting stuffed," Loughlin reports gleefully.
TÓIBÍN IS A natural networker, with a sheaf of contacts from the worlds of publishing, media and the arts on both sides of the Atlantic. The consensus among those who know him well is that you're either on or you're off Tóibín's radar. On his sexuality he says on his own website that he's gay and that it's an important question "because in the last 30 years for the first time in history gay people have the possibility of living great lives".
To his family and friends, he is, by all reports, exceptionally thoughtful and generous, and he periodically hosts lavish, well-attended parties in his Dublin home. He makes little apology about being opinionated and has undoubtedly bruised some egos along the way.
Tóibín wrote an infamously nasty anonymous article some 15 years ago about how anodyne Mike Murphy was as the then presenter of RTÉ's Arts Show. This was written at a time when Tóibín was a regular contributor to the show - although he was dropped after his authorship of the piece became known. Murphy was both furious and deeply offended at what he perceived as a betrayal, and said so publicly. As lately as 2000, Murphy referred to the incident in a newspaper interview. "Do it [make criticisms] if you must, but do it under your own name."
Should he win the Booker, the £50,000 prize-money will undoubtedly be useful, but probably not necessary. He lives comfortably in a large Georgian house in central Dublin, has a flat in Barcelona and shared ownership of the Pyrenees house. He is also maintaining ties with his home county of Wexford by currently building an architect-designed house there.
In a Q & A format interview with Kieron Devlin on his website, www.colmtoibin.com, Tóibín says of his previous Booker nomination: "The presentation dinner, where you have to wait, is terrible. They don't announce the winner until the end, and it's absolute agony for writers but good for everyone else, for the cameras. But I'm not sure I'd like to go through it again. I've done that now. It was good but that's enough of that." So will Tóibín turn up for the agonising dinner this year?
Speaking in Dublin yesterday, he said, "Yes, of course. What can you do?"