The Permeable Boundaries of Colm Tóibín: An Appreciation

In 2017, Colm Tóibín assured an audience of appreciative Irish Americans that a "hard Brexit" border between Northern Ireland and the Republic would present no barrier to smugglers. They could, he stated, easily reopen routes they previously traveled, before the heavily guarded border was fully opened in 2005. Ireland has long welcomed border-crossing immigrants, said Tóibín, while England seeks to turn them away. The audience—members of the Éire Society of Boston, assembled to name Tóibín its eightieth Gold Medal Winner at its annual dinner—enthusiastically applauded Tóibín's declaration of a new openness in Irish life when he declared that "the symbol of Ireland has moved from the shamrock and the gun to the hyphen."¹

Boundaries, of various kinds, are a central preoccupation for Tóibín in his literary works. He has tracked artists who have crossed borders and found themselves strangers in strange lands. In 2018 he published long essays on two such artists, John Butler Yeats and Joseph Conrad, who abandoned their homelands, and on another, Oscar Wilde, who in 1895 did not leave England, his adopted home, for Paris, when he had the chance to avoid trial and imprisonment.² Wilde told his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, "I decided it was nobler and more beautiful to stay." Tóibín's assessment of the decision is colder: "To the end," he charges, Wilde "contrived in and embraced his own downfall by not crossing beyond England's border."³ Wilde's trials offered Tóibín a cautionary tale. His career has been one crossing after another—transits real, symbolic, and imaginary. The arc of Tóibín's journeys, actual, symbolic, and spiritual, exemplify the reach of his imagination and delineate the map of his hyphenated world.

Unlike Wilde, Tóibín knows both how it is to be rooted in one dear, perpetual place and how to fly past its nets. Born in Enniscorthy in 1955, he left Wexford for Dublin and Dublin for many far lands. His works reflect these journeys of understanding, beginning with his youthful jaunt to Spain, followed by his witness of oppressed lives in South America and Africa, then through his treks between the dangerous borders and mindsets that divided the Irish Republic from Northern Ireland. At the same time, Tóibín crossed other less well-marked but equally dangerous boundaries by establishing his identity as a gay Irish writer who articulates an original relationship with Ireland's repressive culture, its fraught history, its divided politics, and the dominant presence of the Catholic Church. Finally, the understanding and sympathy he expresses for women in his recent fiction show his success in transcending the restrictive limits of gender identity.

In "The Playboy of West 29th Street," a 2018 essay on John Butler Yeats for the London Review of Books, Tóibín dispassionately recounts the elder Yeats's exile: "On 21 December 1907 he sailed from Liverpool to New York. He would never return."⁴ Yeats remained in lower Manhattan for his last fifteen years, supported by the lawyer and art patron John Quinn. Painting and repainting his never-finished self-portrait during the years abroad, Yeats wrote cautionary letters to his son, reminding him that the "wild spirit of your imagination is wedded to concrete fact"—and in doing so, implying that his son's obsession with Ireland was a fantasy.⁵

In a 2018 essay on Joseph Conrad for the New York Review of Books, Tóibín traces another exile who discovered what Conrad described as "elusive spaces where the shivering self will not find peace." Tóibín sees value in Conrad's exile, describing him "as a writer who was a guest of the world, who was fully global avant la lettre." Reflecting on the lives of Yeats and Conrad, Tóibín refracts his own geographic and spiritual journeys within and beyond Ireland. He too has sought "metaphors for the place he had left, the place about which no matter how far he traveled, he never stopped...