(Noreen Tomassi, Colm Tóibín, Rachel Kushner) Colm Tóibín (The Testament of Mary) described Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers as, “an ambitious and serious American novel. The scope is wide. The political and the personal are locked in a deep and fascinating embrace.” And in Tóibín's latest novel he takes on nothing less than the Mother of Christ. Hear these two authors read and speak about the larger ideas that inspired them and the need for scope in the contemporary novel.

Published Date: September 3, 2014

Transcription

Voice:

Welcome to the AWP podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2014 AWP conference in Seattle. The recording features Rachel Kushner and Colm Tóibín. You will now hear Elise Blackwell and Noreen Tomassi provide introductions.

 

Blackwell:

My name is Elise Blackwell, and I am a member of the AWP Board, which means it is my glamorous job to ask you to please turn off or at least silence your cell phones and to please refrain from flash photography during this afternoon's session. I also want to thank all of the sponsors from this year's conference—they enable AWP to throw one heck of a literary party every year—and to thank you all for being here to be part of it.

 

This afternoon I want to particularly thank the Center for Fiction for making this afternoon's event possible and to introduce you to Noreen Tomassi of the Center for Fiction, who will introduce today's presenters. Thank you.

 

Tomassi: 

Thanks very much. Thank you very much for coming. Before we begin, I will just say a few words about the Center for Fiction in New York City because you may not know it, and I think you should know it. We're the only nonprofit literary center in the United States solely devoted to the art of fiction. And you can find us at Center4Fiction.org, and I encourage you to go to that site. It’s chock-full of content, including essays, original fiction, interviews, audio and video, and a host of interesting things, so please give us a visit on our website. I think you'll enjoy it. We present over 100 writers a year at our home in New York City. Everyone from Colson Whitehead to Colm Tóibín to Elmore Leonard and Margaret Atwood, with lots and lots of emerging writers as well. We also give an annual first novel prize called the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, which awards 10,000 dollars to a debut novelist, and we do, we have writing workshops, and we do a lot of other things, so please visit our website. Follow us on all of those things. You know...Tumblr, and Center4fiction with a “4” is our Twitter address. I'm sure you'll find lots of interesting stuff on all of those places. I'm especially liking the Instagram and Tumblr these days, so give us a look. We have been now for three years a literary partner to this amazing conference, and in 2012 we presented Marilynne Robinson, Ha Jin, and Paul Harding. Last year we presented Don DeLillo and Dana Spiotta, moderated by Scribner editor and publisher Nan Graham at this writers and conversation event. And because I can't stop twisting Nan Graham's arm at Scribner this year, we have Colm Tóibín and Rachel Kushner. This session is entitled "Image and Idea," and we want to tell you a little about what Colm said about Rachel's novel The Flamethrowers, and he said, "This is an ambitious and serious American novel. Its scope is wide. The political and the personal are locked in a deep and fascinating embrace." In his latest novel, he too has a deep and fascinating embrace of a very interesting subject: the mother of Jesus, Mary. And so, this session will talk about how novelists reach and what the scope of a contemporary novel ought to be.

 

I'm going to very briefly read their bios. I think you know who they are, but: Colm Tóibín is the author of seven novels including The Blackwater Lightship; The Master, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Book Award, as well as two story collections twice shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. He lives in Dublin and in New York. In 2012, his new collection of essays, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families, appeared, as did his edition for Penguin Classics, including De Profundis and Other Prison Writings by Oscar Wilde. Also in 2012, The Testament of Mary, which he'll read from today, was published and shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2013. In April 2013, The Testament of Mary opened on Broadway with Fiona Shaw and was nominated for a Tony award. The Broadway production will actually transfer to London in May 2014. And very exciting news: His new novel Nora Webster, which will be published in the UK in October 2014.

 

Rachel Kushner's second novel, The Flamethrowers, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Best Seller and Notable Book. Her debut novel, which I also love, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It won the California Book Award and was a New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book. Kushner is the only writer ever to be nominated for the National Book Award for both her first novel and her second novel. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Bookforum, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

 

Today each offer from there; then I will moderate the discussion about that interesting discussion of scope in the contemporary novel. I'm sure they will provide lots of insight into their recent work.

 

We will begin Rachel Kushner reading from The Flamethrowers.

 

Kushner:

Thanks, Noreen, for that introduction. And thanks to the Center for Fiction, which is a wonderful organization, and AWP for having us. I don't want to sound like a sniveling idiot, but it is a huge honor to me to read with Colm, who is someone I admire so much, as a person, as an artist with a vast intellectual mind. I'll read a short passage from The Flamethrowers.

 

All you need to know is that the narrator of this book, she's a young woman that has moved to New York City from Reno, Nevada, in the mid-1970s, and she really knows no one and has just arrived and is kind of at loose ends, and then she encounters these two people in a bar and she is so lonely that she decides to speak to them.

 

(Kushner reads from The Flamethrowers)

 

Thanks.

 

Tóibín:

Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Noreen, for having us here...a sort of dream to be reading with Rachel Kushner. We haven’t done this before. It’s great. This is Mary, and she’s going to Cana. One of the great things about being a novelist is you can just move things around. If you decide that really it’s too much trouble to have Lazarus in (inaudible)’s family in some other place than Cana, you just move them to Cana. I suppose that’s how they felt when they were writing the gospels. They must have done a bit of that themselves. But they were divinely inspired; I was just working on my own.

 

(Audience chuckles)

 

(Tóibín reads from The Testament of Mary)

 

Noreen Tomassi:

Thank you so much. I had an immediate question already. But I'm not going to ask it because instead I have to say I'm so struck by the sound of your work, so beautiful, and I know that the last testament was, The Testament of Mary was a play. But Rachel, I was struck by your sense of voice and of dialogue in those characters speaking so beautifully. Can you talk to me just a little bit about the sound of language and how much it, how much of a factor, it is when you sit down alone to write?

 

Kushner:

Gee, it's a tough question to answer because it's a huge factor, but some of it is filtering in on a semi-unconscious level in way, in which I think probably all writers are speaking to themselves while being silent, because silence is, well, at least for me, is the first necessary, absolute precursor to writing.

 

I will speak on occasion, as I am right now, but it is not my favorite thing to do. And when I go to write, I don't want to have committed any speech act that day whatsoever and I think the quieter I am, the more I hear what I'm trying to do in my writing, and there's a way in which I am getting the word out loud in some part of my mind as I'm writing, especially the dialogue, which is something I have grown to love building and making, and I always had known I would be that kind writer, but I do love it. I love to listen to other people and the way they speak, and I never use what they say, what I overhear, but it teaches me something about the way people could speak in my fiction when I go to invent them and what they express. I get to a point when I'm writing that I do read things out loud. I like to read work in progress. I didn't today, but I'm not to that point yet in this book and that forces me to read things out loud and really listen to them and try to be objective, so that kind of second level, hearing a more literal version of it.

 

Tomassi:

Colm?

 

Tóibín:

In the year 2000, I was teaching for the first time in The New School in New York, and there was quite a lot of competition among professors over how many students you would get, and if you got none or very few, you would be cancelled. And of course I start to become very worried I would have to go home and so I thought, I've got to do something urgent. So I decided to call the course Relentlessness. And I thought that it being The New School, I might get a certain sort of student, you know? And I did. They all came, you know? Then I thought I'd better put something together for this course, you know, that was “relentless” and so we worked on the Greek text, on Medea, on Elektra, on Antigone, and then on various modern or contemporary versions of that, including the poems of Sylvia Plath, say, novels by Joan Didion or Nadine Gordimer. And so that when I came to this, certainly I don't think I could have done it without...I owned a record of Sylvia reading, I mean an LP vinyl, this is for during the 20th century and I know I owned it in 1975 and I used to play it a lot. And I knew a whole lot of it by heart. Quoting Sylvia Plath: “Darling, all night I have been flickering off, on, off, on. The sheets grow heavy as Elektra's kiss. Three days, three nights. Lemon water. Chicken water. Water make me wretch.” And it used to give me pleasure really.

 

And certainly when I came across the way American poet Louise Glück had grafted, had taken on, a certain mythological sort of paradigms and had adapted her own voice to them, I also got a lot from that, so that I was thinking in a way, with that voice, and I was imagining that voice, and I wasn’t…I’m not sure if hearing is the word, because you are, as Rachel says, you’re working in silence. You’re hearing nothing. But, but, but you’re attempting to find a voice and hold and wield a voice, or a tone, that tone for me has a lot of literary resonance. I mean, I, you know, I did make it up myself, I just worked with something I had already found.

 

Tomassi:

Both of your books have incredible reach and scope, and you take on daunting subjects. And I want to go back to Flamethrowers, because that book for me just overturned my expectations of it at every turn. You move from what was a wildly interesting time in New York City in the late 70s, 1977, in that kind of radical artsy to a time of great political unrest in Italy. You move back and forth in so many ways, and you do it through a female protagonist. Moving between two worlds at a time when those worlds were very male dominated and very “macho.” And so that was a very interesting component of the novel, and I wonder why you decided on that, and did it have anything to do with the background of some of those artists, who, not as well known as their male counterparts, were making a kind of subversive art at that time.

 

Kushner:

Female artists, you mean.

 

Tomassi: 

Yeah.

 

Kushner:

Well, when I go to write, it never really has that very nice, precise logic that you just elucidated. I was interested in the New York art world in the 1970s. It’s a time when it was no longer at all cool or even viable to make paintings or sculptures to a degree, and people were making work that was so ephemeral and about the gesture: performance, dance. And a lot of what’s left of those works is just photo documentation. So you can see what Soho looked like, and get an idea of who people were, and I spent a lot of time around artists, and the 70s wasn’t that long ago, so a lot of those people are on the scene and you can talk to them, and I did, just in a natural way—not because I wanted to write this book. It was the other way around. And then in terms of…it never occurred to me to have the narrator be any other than a young woman. I don’t know why. I wanted a narrator who would be very impressionable because I thought that would make her more sensitive to what was going on around her. When people are overly concerned, I think, with their station vis-á-vis the other people in the room…especially in the art world, because it kind of has a tense hierarchy to it, people get very interested in themselves, and people want to talk about themselves and tell you about their show. And you know I’m not denigrating it or anything, but I was more interested in a narrator who didn’t want to tell you all about herself. She wanted to share what she encountered. And that was just structurally, for me, a more interesting prospect for the book. There were a lot of very interesting women artists at that time, and I maybe was thinking of some of them. There’s a really beautiful lyric film by Chantal Akerman called News from Home, where she just reads letters that her mother has sent her, and it’s just a voiceover with this kind of languid camera panning through the streets of lower Manhattan, and it’s kind of empty. I mean, I was already well into the book and I’m always trying to come up with "this is why,” but really it just happened as it happened, but when I have an idea and then it resonates with what I find in the world and I like what I find, like that Chantal Akerman movie—I’d never seen that until maybe five years ago—and then it spurs me to keep going, and it just seems like the young woman was a good conduit for the book.

 

Tomassi:

The character, Reno, she’s not what you expect, though, and she’s not what any of the people around her expect in a way. She doesn’t conform to their expectations of her, it seems, in New York or in Italy. And I thought that’s what’s so, kind of, that’s what’s so fascinating about The Testament of Mary, as well. Mary is the iconographic falsism, is the kind of petitioner to her son, who if you pray to Mary, she will secretly slide him a note and you will get what you want. and in your novel she’s very unlike that. She’s nothing like the Mary of Catholicism. Can you talk about that decision?

 

Tóibín:

Well, I suppose the Mary of Catholicism comes in a number of guises. For me there is an important moment when, I mean there is a wonderful, glorious painting in the Frari in Venice of Titian’s Assumption. And Titian loved painting red robes and he loved angels and he loved the sky and he had a great (inaudible) and it’s enormous and it’s over the altar in the Frari. Go and look at it. But for every Titian there is always a Tintoretto. And Tintoretto’s always wondering if there is any way I could undermine Titian this week. And if you go up the road from there, and of course it’s not in a church because I don’t think a church would tolerate it, is Tintoretto’s crucifixion, which is filled with chaos and untidiness. Yes, it has a cross in the middle, but all around people are doing other things that day. They’re busy that day. They didn’t know that crucifixion. And they're hungry or they are talking or they’ve got horses or something. And so it was that idea, that what it might have been like then, I don’t just mean trying to create the full atmosphere, but nonetheless, just trying to forget the whole imagery, the iconography of Mary as the weeping mother, or as the mild mother, but actually what she might have been like as a very old woman who was traumatized by what we know now about trauma.

 

You know, in other words, there’s no point in pretending that this is a contemporary novel. And you’re grafting on things that we know. What might it have been like if she just simply hadn’t recovered from the experience that was locked in her, and one day it just came out in a torrent of speech? What would that sound like, if you did that? So I suppose that was the idea.

 

Tomassi:

So that sound was terribly important to you then.

 

Tóibín:

Em?

 

Tomassi:

Thinking of her speaking.

 

Tóibín:

Well, the sense that she wouldn’t have much time, so there would have to be a tone in the book. I suppose the issue, I suppose, is, best rehearsed really in The Charterhouse of Parma, where poor Fabrice is thinking about love, and he really is in love, but he might have been at the Battle of Waterloo. But he’s not sure, it was only afterwards of course, it was called the Battle of Waterloo. And he’s going along and later he thinks, "You know, I think I was at the Battle of Waterloo, but I was thinking about love," and I think that every novelist has a choice sometimes. Are you at the Battle of Waterloo, or are you thinking about love? And you know, there’s a novel by Jim Crace called Quarantine about Jesus’s 40 days in the desert, which is filled with beautiful sentences and the haze of the desert. Jesus appears now and then in the distance, and it’s a very beautiful book. It’s a perfect novel in a certain way. But what I wanted to do is move into the center of the story. And I think what you’re talking about there is that idea of “Are you going to move into the private realm, and if so, to what extent? Are you sure that you want to stay there when your characters are operating in a space for just all so public? And how are you going to navigate that?" And I think that’s something that really operates both in Telex From Cuba and in The Flamethrowers, that idea of finding a public moment, and finding characters who are involved in that public moment and then doing your work in the funny spaces in between the private and the public.

 

Tomassi:

What do you think of that?

 

Kushner:

Well, it’s a sort of, if I understand correctly, it’s a kind of classic way of handling history in the novel, is that a character either misses or makes his appointment with a central event. And if they miss the appointment, you can make just as much of it in your fiction as if they make the appointment. Meaning, you know, like with Sentimental Education, with Flaubert, the revolution of 1848 happens. But he’s, you know, with a hooker in a hotel, and the reader needs to understand what’s not being portrayed in the book. And it is just offstage and very craftily negotiated. But then in another sense, in my own fiction, in The Flamethrowers, the narrator, she makes the appointment, but she’s not the character who was cast for that role. She can’t interpret or understand what’s going on around her when she ends up in Rome during a demonstration that kind of very quickly converts into a melee, so I don’t know if that’s what you meant to (inaudible).

 

Tomassi:

So do both of you look at your whole body of work, and do you think of yourselves as writing historical fiction? 

 

Tóibín:

Henry James is very good on the subject. A friend of his wrote a historical novel and sent it to him. He sent it back immediately; he wouldn’t read it. He said there’s a fatal cheapness about a historical novel and that he didn’t approve of them. And he thought a novel should be set in the foreseeable future or the very near future. But I think I’m uneasy about the idea of historical novel, fiddled with detail that so filled with period detail, period costume, that it means nothing other than that the author has been in the library for too long. That in other words, if it doesn’t have a contemporary resonance, then I think you are lost.  

 

Kushner:

Yes.

 

Tóibín:

And there’s no point in pretending with the book you’re working on that there are not pressing, depressing urges of now involved with the book, and I think that that tension between now, then, I think it’s missing a great deal. So I’d be very uneasy about being called, or being, or writing, an historical fiction.  

 

Kushner:

I agree completely. Yeah. I mean, when I brought up history, I mean, history happens in all novels. Even contemporary ones, they have a past, there’s some consciousness of a before. But that phrase “historical novel,” I try to distance myself from it. But I guess for the reasons Colm decided, I don’t think of what I’m doing as historic. I’m writing a contemporary novel now, but my first novel, granted, took place in the mid-1950s leading up to the Cuban Revolution, and the new one takes place in the 70s. I don’t write in order to recreate a time that’s dead and passed. My interest in being a writer and writing novels is not about resurrecting something else; it’s a mode of being in the world for me, but the mode of being in the world has to have a subject—something to gnaw on. So with this book I chose the 70s, but all because the things were happening around me in the world that are reflected and kind of transmitted into the pages of the book and for me, the occasion to write has to be a kind of intermeshing of those two things—what I’ve chosen to write about and what I know and understand about life as I’m living it in that moment. I am interested in history in the sense of having some conception of why things are happening, or how it is that people are shaped by their environment, but I think that way of looking at things can be present in a contemporary novel just was well as it can be in a novel that takes place in the past. But I wouldn’t want to call it historic.

 

Just to echo off of something Colm said, I was thinking about, there’s a line in one of Flaubert’s letters, I can’t remember who he wrote it to, maybe Louise Colet, where he says about Salammbô, you have no idea how depressed a person has to be to recreate Carthage. And that book is considered to be a rather bad historical novel because its just a dead relic, it’s just a glittering object that had no relationship to 19th-century bourgeois society, of which we know that all his other work has a significant relationship to.

 

Tomassi:

So, if you’re not writing historical fiction, and I wouldn’t say either of you are particularly doing that, it seems that what you’re both doing is you’re writing a kind of, categories aren’t really helpful maybe, but the kind of novel that is really meant to have the reader challenge...the reader think about who they are now, and to kind of interpret the world being alive now. Even The Testament of Mary does that so much for the reader. So do you think of that when you’re writing? Do you think of your writing as philosophical, or of having an immediacy for the reader in confronting what it means to be alive now? Colm?

 

Tóibín:

Well, I suppose, I mean in Ireland I think that the image of the family is so exulted, that if you set a novel merely, I use the word merely ironically, in a house with a family, you are in Troy in somewhere other, you can actually do a great deal. And my colleague John McGahern would constantly—I mean, there was a conference in Paris, and they were all shouting at us, the French were, “Why are you all not writing novels”—this was during the really bad years of the Northern Ireland troubles, you know, the killings and the bombings and the mayhem—“why are you all not writing about that?” And John McGahern very, very seriously and solemnly took on, he said, “The only job a novelist has is to look after your sentences. Now if you look after your sentences, everything else will come into place.” But he himself had merely, and again I’m using merely ironically, over six novels really set all the novels in a single house, often the same house, often with the same people in the house, and he had created a literature, I mean a body of work, which had mattered enormously, nationally, in Ireland, which had changed the country in a certain way by depicting the father—the ex-patriot—as the bully in a domestic space, bullying his daughters. He had somehow or other freed the country by the images he made. So the more private and intense he became, the more oddly national and public he became.

 

So it is very difficult for you to say there’s only one way you can actually matter, I mean because the novel is written silently and read silently that it could have an enormous impact in power, which is almost its resonance, and it doesn’t really matter what its content is, some of the time, as long as there’s a level of deliberation, feeling, and seriousness behind there somewhere or other. It’s a curious business when you’re working sometimes, that if you think the next image I’m going to produce, and I just want to use, since I’m here, just to ask you something, Rachel—in Telex From Cuba there is an image of the cane workers cutting the sugar. Some of them are being forced to wear an iron mask. It’s so that they won’t eat the cane. 

 

Kushner: 

Yes.

 

Tóibín:

It’s so that they won’t eat the cane. And it’s one of those images where you think, I mean it’s entirely….a single sentence I think where you just think…(gasps)…I mean the idea that they were forced to put this over their face! What’s that farmer? Where did that come from? Or could you just tell me about it? Because when I came to it, I was just so shocked by it. So in other words, what I am saying is that sometimes just find one image and you have both something that will really hit the reader’s nervous system in a way in which you will not be able to predict the consequence of.

 

Kushner:

You know, it’s hard, I mean recreate the moment while I decided to employ or deploy that detail. I have to sort of guess, but Cuba had an immense slave economy. There was a time in the world where Havana was the largest slave market and slavery there very late—way, way after the Civil War—and even after slavery ended there were still slaves, you just couldn’t buy and sell them any longer. I think I must have seen a picture or read a very minor detail or saw one somewhere in a museum in Cuba, I don’t even remember, but I think a moment like that as a reader…I just sometimes want to know what I’m dealing with. You know? Like I’d been reading a lot of Zora Neale Hurston recently. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, in the very beginning, she lets you know that the grandmother was born a slave, but then very quickly passes and the grandmother dies and she goes on to live this life of relative independence and you don’t think about it anymore. But to me it’s an essential experience, personally, of reading the book is to understand that moment, and I want to think about it after I’ve read it. So, I don’t know, I mean, I guess the image, yeah, was evocative to me as well. I mean it’s always upsetting to think about things like that and we had Twelve Years a Slave by Steve McQueen last year, which I’m sure most of you saw, and the movie still resonates, you know, and it’s not just shock value either. It has something to do with who we are and how we exist that we have to incorporate that and it can’t be sublimated.

 

Tomassi:

I have to leave a little time for questions from the audience. Before we do so, I thought it might be nice to end with a little mutual praise, and I wonder if each of you could talk a bit about anything in the other’s work that attracts you, or anything you particularly loved. Rachel raised her hand, Colm, so she gets to go first.

 

Kushner:

Colm is proud and so he’s like naturally, selflessly turning, weaving my work into his comments, and I keep trying to find a way to do that. So many things come up for me. I saw The Testament of Mary performed by Fiona Shaw, who many people think is the greatest living theater actress. And I had read the book right before I saw it, and then I saw her perform it. It’s a naturally stunning work, and it’s so alive and I was wondering if, well, this is praise and a question, if it’s okay. Well, I started thinking tonight I kept getting lost and trying to pay attention to the questions because I was thinking of the Pasolini film The Gospel According to Matthew, which reminds me very much of The Testament of Mary in this one particularly way in that it is soulfully alive to the now. And the person who did the music for that film included all these blues ballads and slave songs, and so it has these textures to it where it opens with a generosity where you are allowed to care what happens to Matthew, and I was just wondering if there’s a resonance for you between the two.

 

Tóibín:

Certainly where Pasolini, although I—I mean I like Pasolini enormously, and also that he was a poet as well, so that he was working with images, which is what I really want to talk about. The Flamethrowers, I mean the novel is about all these things, yes it is of course, it’s about the art world, and you know, it’s about a certain moment in Italy, and in America, and it’s about a certain person, but it’s also sentence led. And so it’s, I love the idea, God I love the idea, what did I just say? Going into a room in the morning before you’ve heard, what is it, before…no one’s allowed to speak to you…You’ve got a kid, I mean what do you do with the kid?

 

Kushner:

Well, you know there’s some…my husband.

 

Tóibín:

Oh, great. Great, oh great. I wish I had a husband...that you go in the morning in full silence and no one has spoken to you yet. I mean I love the idea of being in your mental pajamas all day. And that idea that you’re working with the sentence and the sentence has to have a sonorous thing in it. A cadence in it. With stopping and starting. And it’s followed by another one, which will do something slightly different. And there’s, so it’s a form of action painting almost, that it is, in other words, if you watch the way Pollock is dripping or one of those big brave heroic American painters…from Helen Frankenthaler, somebody like that. That sometimes when you’re working, that you have to be conscience of “ah, come on, get the next sentence with rhythm in it.” You’re working with rhythm, you’re not working with an idea, you’re not working with a character. And that’s what I thought about The Flamethrowers all the time, that I could go back to a sentence and think, “Oh my God, look at that.” But then if I didn’t do that, the sentence was having an effect on me. It was hitting my nervous system so that underneath the content of the book, or the subject of the book, there was something else going on, which was to do with rhythm. I mean, let’s say not sound, but that funny business of sentences having within them their own soul as well as a body. And that takes extraordinary amounts of energy. I mean energy to make. Because otherwise, you know if you don’t do it, you’re just giving the reader information.

 

Kushner:

Yeah, don’t you feel that you do that, too? I mean I read it…

 

Tóibín:

Well, I don’t know. 

 

Kushner:

Well, I read that so much in your work. I’ve been reading The Short Stories of Colm Tóibín, and if anyone here hasn’t read them… 

 

Colm:

No one has read them, by the way.

 

Kushner:

I don’t want to alienate any short story writers, because there are many masterful craftsmen of the form working today, but it isn’t really my form. It’s obviously, definitely not my form; as a writer I don’t write them. But I don’t read a ton of short stories because I don’t relate to this idea that you have to get to know the people very quickly and inhabit their world, and that something is going to happen and you know the sign and you’re moving toward the close and it’s quick. But Colm’s short stories are formally so different than any other short stories that I’ve ever read. They have a lifeness. They sneak in and perpetrate the land of the short story, but they never conform to any of its conventional dictates. And they also operate for me very much on the level of sound, and this kind of quiet humming along, and they are just hyper-controlled in that way, and that’s why I asked, “Don’t you feel that, too?” I mean I was just trying to personalize what the internal experience of the creation is for what you were describing, and for me it’s that, if I’m doing things right, or at least in my own…whatever manner or right is within my objective limitations, the work is almost memorized. And so that when I get it back from Scribner, if it’s in production and somebody has moved one comma, they’re on my hit list because then it’s wrong to me, and I can be very fussy about that. I mean that’s the bad side of it, but I’m assuming it might be the same for you, that when it’s done the first time, then it’s etched. Right?

 

Tóibín:

Yeah, I mean the idea of drafting a book would for me be a—it doesn’t mean you don’t revise and revise, but you write down as though you might never get another chance, like you sort of have a knife in your hand and you’ve got a material to stab, you know, right? And I work in long hand, which is more fun, because you can literally stab the paper.

 

Tomassi:

What strikes me so much from what you’ve both said is that you’ve given real insight into the process of writing, but what I hear also is real, just about the best two descriptions I’ve ever heard of the process of reading and what a sensitive reader finds in a book, and so I encourage you all to go to the video tape, listen to that again, and think about it in terms of your own reading because it’s really revelatory I think, in that sense.

 

I can take, I guess, about three questions, and as I said earlier in this session today, could you do me a favor, and when you ask a question, could you just really only make it a question? Because we don’t have much time and you can talk with the writers at the signing table. So use that opportunity to do that. And it’s really hard to see, so stand up when you raise your hand. Here’s a person here. Go ahead.

 

Audience member:

Does your process of writing and your process of research overlap, and when do you feel you’ve done enough research?

 

Tomassi:

Did everyone hear that?

 

Audience member:

No.

 

Tomassi:

Does the process of writing and the process of research overlap?

 

Tóibín:

Well, Kathy Mahon, Thomas Mahon’s wife, was one of the wisest people to ever live. Thomas Mahon had no education of any sort and, but of course he wrote these weighty essays and these very weighty novels and she was quite educated herself. And she always said, “Don’t ask Tommy anything, because he never knows anything that wasn’t in the book.” In other words, he’s done enough research to write about music in Doctor Faust, but don’t think he knows about music. He doesn’t. And I think the thing to remember about a novelist is that we are chancers. That in other words, you don’t have a PhD, do you?

 

Kushner:

No.

 

Tóibín:

I mean in other words, I teach at Columbia in the English department and they’re always looking at me. Because I don’t have a PhD, and they think that maybe I should. But if I did have one, then I’d know what I was talking about, I’m always …if I’m teaching on Tuesday, on Monday night I am with the students wishing…And I never know enough because I—and it’s the same with research where, God, you know I read, even for this book, I think I read John’s Gospel. I should have done more, because there is so much commentary on John’s Gospel. And then someone reviewed the books saying, “He missed so and so’s commentary on John’s Gospel, which really makes Mary…” I said, “I missed it—I didn’t even know about it. I didn’t even…oh, my God.” And that week I think I was doing something else entirely, so that the whole idea of research is that you need a fact and you go in search of it. And you need an image more than you need a fact. And the image kind of comes of its own accord, so you can be very, very careful, if you need to research a book, that you’re actually trying to find tone, image, texture, by actually working rather than thinking, “Oh, my God, I’ve another two years’ research to do, and then I’ll write.” I think that is really fatal, and I wouldn’t try it. And I wouldn’t have the time anyway. Do you agree?

 

Kushner:

Yeah, I agree completely. Maybe I’m slightly chagrinned to say that last un-recommended method is what I did with my first novel, when I really had no idea how to write a novel. How to make something out of material of which you care a great deal. That was Telex from Cuba, and I spent years reading everything I could find and in ways understandable because it was about a time and place that I had no relationship with personally, so I had to totally immerse myself in it. Intellectually, I’d always had an interest in Latin America. I’d studied it in college, and I am interested in The Enlightenment and the way it affected the Caribbean, and I’m interested in the Haitian Revolution, and all these things you have to understand to depict Cuba, even by mid-century.

 

That said, it took me a long time to (inaudible) from the material in order to write a novel, because in a novel you don’t need all that stuff, as Colm just very articulately pointed out. You only need those few key things that are going to elucidate what happens next in the story and tell you something about a character, a situation. And my writing has changed, or my methods, because with Flamethrowers I only wrote about things that I knew about in a natural way just from being alive and being in the world, and that was part of the fun of the book, was just to put things in play and in motion that I knew I could kind of write about with a reasonable amount of authority, and, you know, it’s dangerous to make manifestos or blank statements, but I don’t think I’m interested in writing a book that would require a lot of research, unless it was something that I just wanted to know more about anyway, whether or not I was gonna write about it. I wanna use my way of being in the world and activate that.

 

Tomassi:

And yes, back there?

 

Audience member:

Yes, this is about The Master, which I thought was just an amazing book, and I understood Henry James much better when I read his novels that were written, after reading The Master. But you inhabited his voice so much, and I wondered, you know you were speaking earlier about the effect of the nervous system...(inaudible)...a voice. How is it that you got Henry James’s voice? What did you use that was real, in terms of his letters or whatever, and then how do you imagine...?

 

Tóibín:

This is a question about Henry James’s voice, and how you got it. You know I don’t think I did get his voice. He seemed...he was much funnier...and he often...it took him ages to come to the point. There’s a wonderful moment where Virginia Woolf and her sister, they used to fall and laugh at everybody really, they thought everyone was funny, the two of them...but he particularly was there one evening at their father’s table, and he was ruminating so much as he spoke that his chair fell over, and he continued speaking, and they tried to lift him and the chair up, but they, but it was like a German sentence: The verbs still hadn’t arisen. And then there were some subcourses to come. And Virginia and Vanessa were absolutely delighted, they were running in the other room howling with laughter at the fact that there was a way...and I have to be very, very careful because if you’d attempted to do this you could parody it, and also I made him, I think, sadder than he was, because what I was trying to do was find an internal version of him, rather than the one who spoke, or the one who had friendships, or the one who seemed to amuse people who knew him. It was a solitary figure I was interested in, and that solitary figure seemed to me to be much more somber in his tone.

 

But we have to be very, very careful that at no moment in the book, The Master, was there any sign of pastiche. That I just had found a style that I was easy with that I felt the reader could read freely without feeling that it was particularly based on his later style. You know they talk about James the First, James the Second, and then the Great Pretender, in that his tone became so baroque, especially in the last three novels. But so that it was really a question of trying to...and what happens really is that you have an idea, or an image, and it moves of its own accord into rhythm, and then you can work, once the rhythm is there. And really once I had the rhythm, I could then work, but I didn’t really think it was his voice, because it was a rhythm that I had made of my own accord, that had come to me, rather than having come from daily study of his particular style, which I think is a much richer style than the style of my book.

 

Tomassi:

So just one more quick question, in the back there.

 

Audience member:

Colm, I find your work incredibly diverse, and I was wondering if you could answer: In the root of your artistry, what are you interested in sharing with people?

 

Tomassi:

Oh...

 

Tóibín:

Oh, I mean I have no identity much to speak of, and especially when some of the books come...I remember when the second novel came out, Garry Hynes, who’s an old friend of mine, a theater director, said to me, “Who wrote that book?” And I said, “Garry, I...” “No, you didn’t...” Because she knew me sort of as a drunken fellow, wandering around Galway, having a wonderful weekend, and being about the plays and being up until nine in the morning. And this sad book came out. And she said, “Well, who wrote it?” And I said, “But I’m like that sometimes.” And then I realized that that idea of almost not existing at all, of almost not having a fully formed identity is very helpful so that each time you come...and I suppose what you’re trying to do then, is trying to establish that for some brief time I have an identity...and I’d like to make that clear to someone or other who might read the book...that there was a thing, a mark I wanted to make that time, and here it is, but what’s it come to again, I’ve faded away, I’ve dissolved again. And I’ve become somebody else entirely. It’s sort of said, I mean it’d be better if, for us, I mean I went to a psychiatrist, and he said, “Why are you here?” And I said, “Well, I’d like to have an integrated personality.” And he said, “Well, you know, would you like to be the sad person, or the person who’s up until nine in the morning drinking in Galway?” And I said, “I don’t know.” And he said, “Well, I think maybe you should go away then.”

 

(Audience laughter)

 

Tomassi:

All right. Colm, thank you, thank you very much. Thank you. There’s going to be a signing table right out in the hallway.

 

(Music)

 

Voice:

Thank you for tuning into the AWP Podcast Series. For other podcasts, please visit our website at www.awpwriter.org.

 


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