by Colm Toibin
There were also a number of men, whose backgrounds were close to my small-town, Catholic background, who had become painters. I had known Paul Funge, for example, since the early 1970s. His paintings of Spain and the edges of towns in County Wexford began to interest me, as much as the freedom in his spirit did. Other painters, such as Patrick Collins, who had lived in France and painted the landscape of Sligo, or Tony O’Malley, who had made drawings and paintings of the Wexford landscape in the 1940s, and suffered from tuberculosis and then lived in St. Ives in Cornwall, or Sean McSweeney, who painted in Wicklow and then in Sligo, or Brian Bourke, who lived in Galway, began to fascinate me. These were figures who worked to create or re-create Irish light in paint; they had no interest in international fame or trends in the art market. I began to see them as examples of how to live in Ireland, and they made their way also into the fabric of my novel as I imagined the figure of Michael Graves.
The problem I had was the problem any novelist faces—when to begin, how to begin. As the characters became real for me, as the outline of what would happen in the book became apparent, as a sense of its tone and style took shape, I began to get more work as a journalist and as an editor. With one chapter of the book written—a chapter I later abandoned—I went to work in late 1982 as editor of Ireland’s main current affairs magazine. This was not an ideal job for a novelist. It took up most of my waking time. The novel lived on in my dream time. I was doing everything to it except writing it.
One day, as a relief from the tedium of thinking about Irish politics, I went to interview the painter Barrie Cooke. As we stood in front of one of his canvases, I wondered how he could combine what seemed to me like deep deliberation, a sense of line and tone that was fully controlled, and also a swirling energy which gave the paintings a sort of flowing power. He managed the paint and then let it loose, or perhaps did both at the same moment. I wished I was doing that with my novel, rather than sitting in the small office in Merrion Row correcting proofs and controlling budgets. When I asked him how he began a painting, he said something that became useful to me. “You make a mark,” he said, as he gestured the making of an almost random mark with an imaginary paintbrush.
Sometimes in the evenings and at weekends, living in the top floor of a house in Harcourt Terrace, I would make a mark, using a manual typewriter. Once some chapters had been completed, I began to go on free weekends to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, a retreat for artists, in Monaghan, close to the border with Northern Ireland. I would work all Friday evening, all day Saturday and then most of Sunday before travelling back to Dublin. If there is a jaggedness and an intensity about the tone and the structure of the novel, it comes from the fact that much of it was written in snatched time.
I remember in the summer of 1984 working on the book in hotel rooms on the Algarve in Portugal, and then in the Metropole Hotel in Lisbon. One day, when I had no idea how to proceed, when no new images came, when I felt I was blocked with the book, I remembered what Barrie Cooke had said. I made a mark. I decided that I would write the first thing that came into my head and then make it stick. What came was: “The sea. A grey shine on the sea.”
I was surprised by this and began to work with it. I had allowed Katherine to live in an apartment in Barcelona that I had lived in. Her house in the Pyrenees still belongs to my friends Bernard and Mary Loughlin, who had first rented it in the 1970s. In Dublin, I had given her the house in Carnew Street in Stoneybatter which I had bought in 1983 and where I began to live in 1989. I let her live there before I did. But the big house in Wexford where she was from and to which she returned I knew only from the outside. Now, as I wrote these sentences—“The sea. A grey shine on the sea.”—a world that I knew well could be conjured up. It was the stretch of coast between Ballyvaldon and Curracloe on the east coast of County Wexford. We had gone as a family there every summer for many years when I was growing up. Later I discovered that the painter Tony O’Malley had made watercolours and drawings there in the 1940s. It had not occurred to me before that it was a place which could be used for fiction, that I could get something from its modest colours and easy tones. I would come to conjure up that landscape again many times in fiction just as the village in the Pyrenees would appear again in the story “A Long Winter.”
The chapter, written in Portugal in 1984, called “The Sea,” was published in the Irish Times by Caroline Walsh, who was editing a series of stories for the paper. But the novel was not finished. Even when I left the magazine early in 1985 and had time on my hands, it remained two-thirds done. I travelled in South America and Africa and did not work on the book. Slowly, however, in the spring of 1986, I returned to it and finished it, and had another draft done by September 1986.
The problem was then that no one would publish it. Almost every London publisher turned it down. The first one to whom my agent, Imogen Parker, sent it lost it and did not ask for another copy. One other publisher presumed that I was a woman, and, on turning the book down, wrote: “If she writes anything else, do let us know.” Imogen one day said to me: “If it’s the last thing I do, I am going to sell this book.” Two years and two months passed before the book was accepted, by which time I had written my first nonfiction book and had almost finished my second, and I had written the opening of my second novel. I remember that day in London as I was passing through the city on my way from Barcelona to Dublin—it was close to Christmas 1988—when Imogen told me that she had a publisher for it. Over the next year, with the help of editor Marsha Rowe at Serpent’s Tail, I did a great deal of revision on The South, also cutting one chapter and adding another. The book finally appeared in May 1990.
© BRUCE WEBER
Colm Tóibín is the author of six novels, including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award. Twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Tóibín lives in Dublin and New York.
For more on this author, visit: http://authors.simonandschuster.com/Colm-Toibin/
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COVER ILLUSTRATION: PORTNOO, CO. DONEGAL (BOARD), COYLE, JOHN (20TH CENTURY)/JOHN MARTIN OF LONDON, LONDON, UK/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
Also by Colm Tóibín
FICTION
The Heather Blazing
The Story of the Night
The Blackwater Lightship
The Master
Mothers and Sons
Brooklyn
The Empty Family
The Testament of Mary
NONFICTION
Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border
Homage to Barcelona
The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe
Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodóvar
Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush
All a Novelist Needs: Essays on Henry James
New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families
PLAYS
Beauty in a Broken Place
Testament
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by Colm Tóibín Afterword copyright © 2012 by The Heather Blazing Ltd. Originally published in Great Britain in 1990 by Serpent’s Tail
First Scribner trade paperback edition October 2012
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ISBN 978-1-4767-0448-7
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