Colm Tóibín: The Anchored Imagination of the Biographical Novel

colm tóibín was born in enniscorthy, co. wexford, and educated at university college dublin. his nine novels, including the master (2004), brooklyn (2009), nora webster (2014), and house of names (2017), have been widely translated; he also composes works of short fiction, journalism, literary criticism, and travel writing. the master, about henry james, and the testament of mary (2012), about the mother of jesus, represent tóibín’s major works of biofiction. in addition to having earned honorary degrees from the university of ulster, university college dublin, the university of east anglia, and the open university, he is mellon professor in the department of english and comparative literature at columbia university and chancellor of liverpool university.

bethany layne:

The first question that I wanted to ask relates to the transformation of roman á clef into biographical fiction toward the end of the twentieth century. I wondered if you had any thoughts on what happened around this period to give novelists this liberty?

colm tÓibÍn:

I wonder if for each writer the needs and impulses are different. Take Penelope Fitzgerald writing The Blue Flower, Michael Cunningham writing The Hours, or John Coetzee writing The Master of Petersburg.¹ Each of them, I think, would insist that this need came personally rather than as part of a movement or something that was in the air. I was fascinated by The Blue Flower because it was very subtle, dealing with whole areas of Romanticism and feeling. Fitzgerald was actually working with an interesting set of ideas in some beautifully chosen sentences. And Cunningham was playing a game between the idea of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, and the present, so that was a different sort of thing. I think Coetzee was working out something quite personal, most of all his interest as a deep reader in Dostoyevsky that appears throughout his work. But I also believe that he was dealing with personal matters to do with grief—to do with things that had happened to him for which he wanted to find a metaphor. And the death of Dostoyevsky’s son gave him that metaphor, offered him a way for certain feelings to be described and dealt with that he did not wish to deal with directly. Now, in the case of Henry James, I think if you were to give the immense amount of material available on him and his family to any number of people and say, “You must come up with eleven stories from this material,” each person would come up with a different set of eleven stories. That would in turn tell you something about the lives and the preoccupations of all of these people.

So biographical fiction is, in a way, like all fiction, a sort of veiled autobiography made of elaborated versions of the self that would otherwise remain hidden—using the bare bones or a set of facts that are available to deliver on feelings that have not until then had a focus. This is precisely what Shakespeare and Marlowe were doing in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They were getting bits and pieces of old stories and making plays out of them: Tamburlaine the Great, Faust, the history plays, or, indeed, Lear or Hamlet. In other words, making biofiction is not something unusual, but in the roots of the novel there are novelists who just do not work with the form. Jane Austen does not, and in general Henry James does not, although in some of his short stories he writes about the lives of writers and painters that seem close to certain people whom he knew—or close to himself. And there is something odd about these stories; you feel it would be much better if he had stuck more closely to the facts of a single painter or a writer, rather than trying to invent somebody who seems slightly too far away.

But I cannot give you a zeitgeist because I live in an imaginative country that is defined by the concrete. I live in the concrete...