Colm Toibin

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is the writer Colm Tobin. His novels, plays, and short stories give voice to highly regarded works dealing with identity, loss, notions of family, and the meaning of home.

Presenter0:46

These days his own home is often Dublin, on occasion New York, now and then Barcelona, and at times a little place near Enniscorthy, the town in South East Ireland where he grew up, and where, aged just twelve, he would begin to write as a release from speech.

Presenter1:02

One of five children, his father was a teacher at the local school, his mother a published poet. The little front parlour of their family home boasted two bookcases crammed with history volumes. Yet interest in the past didn't preclude engagement in the future. His grandfather became a political prisoner in the fight against British rule, and his father was a member of the Republican Fiona Foil Party.

Presenter1:25

It was shock at his father's sudden death, and the untreated and untouched grief that it gave rise to that would, many decades later, fuel a novel that was fourteen years in the writing.

Presenter1:35

He says with writing, thinking is often the enemy of rhythm. You start something because an image, a character, a moment, a scene moves almost of its own accord into rhythm. It seems to want to become a sentence. So call uh welcome. You have these homes dotted all over the place. Where and when do you write best?

Colm Toibin1:55

I can write anywhere as long as there's a blank wall in front of me, no great view, and a pretty uncomfortable chair. But I've been working a lot recently in Wexford in the house you mentioned, in the place where we went every summer in the years before my father died. And it's funny, you know, when I'm going down to the Strand, the smell is the same smell. Harvested fields, clover, but even animals, because we were from the town, so it's going right back into the past, which means I'm getting images. And even if I'm not writing directly about it, it's quite emotional, even being there.

Presenter2:30

Productive writing is such a discipline. You you're not somebody who'll take a lot

Colm Toibin2:35

Bongla

Presenter2:35

Yeah.

Colm Toibin2:35

Yeah.

Presenter2:35

Yeah.

Colm Toibin2:35

I think the big thing is never do lunch. You know, you need a lot of silence and time on your own. Things happen of their own accord, but only if you give them, I suppose, peace. If y and I mean, music can be helpful, but not while you're working.

Presenter2:51

Is it true that you once told a creative writing class that you have to be a monster to write?

Colm Toibin2:56

Yeah, I I meant that, you know, stop worrying about your grandmother's feelings, your mother's feelings, your girlfriend's feelings, or your own feelings. Your job is to get the thing down. And if you have to use something that belongs to you or to somebody else, write it down. But don't be saying, Oh, you know, when my Auntie Mary finally dies, I'll be able to write the most wonderful story. Write it now and tell your Auntie Mary you're just sorry, but you've told a story that is really quite private and belongs to her. But now it's going to be published and it's coming out next week.

Presenter3:27

Have you had to do that with people in your own family?

Colm Toibin3:29

Um yes, certainly with my mother. She was very funny about uh it was an early story. There was a lot of children in the house, so she would get all the knives and forks and put them in the middle of the table and just take what you needed. I put that into a story as an image of a mother who wasn't very tidy and good with housekeeping. And she said, Well, wasn't that awful the way you put it in into the story? If I'd known that I would have set the table properly every

Speaker 23:39

Yeah.

Colm Toibin3:52

Every day. Tell me about your first piece of music. Well, there's been a big generation of Irish traditional musicians who've inherited stuff from their grandparents or their parents and have made it their own. And prime among these is the fiddler Martin Hayes, whose father would have played the fiddle, whose uncle would have played the fiddle, and he's added a sort of beauty and a sort of magic to Irish fiddle playing. I mean, just listen to this.

Presenter3:55

But there's been a big

Presenter5:16

That was Martin Hayes playing The Lark's March. So con to being in May, Ireland became the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage through the popular vote. Shortly before that referendum, you had given a talk entitled The Embrace of Love.

Presenter5:30

In the event, 62% of the people who voted voted in favour. Wh where were you when you heard the result?

Colm Toibin5:37

I was actually in Haiwai and I was following it all day, and I was so proud of Ireland in a way that day. It was almost a very conservative campaign because the argument we were making was, what would you do with your son or your daughter?

Colm Toibin5:52

If they tell you look I'm gay.

Colm Toibin5:54

And they told you that at night, and you would stay awake all night worrying, Is there anything I can say to them in the morning?

Colm Toibin5:59

To make sure that it'll be okay.

Colm Toibin6:02

And say they'll be embraced by this society rather than rejected. I went on the radio one day and said, you know, I represent Ireland in various ways, but I don't have rights you have. Like, how come I don't have those rights and why won't you give them to me? Like, what harm would it do to you if I have this right with you? In other words, it wasn't a rejection of anything, it was an embrace of things. We didn't emerge as an angry group demanding rights. We came as somebody's grandson, somebody's brother, and somebody's lover.

Presenter6:34

You you've won a a huge fist of awards and famously three times nominated for the Booker but never won. Do do you give us stuff that you've never won?

Colm Toibin6:42

Yeah. I mean it's a terribly funny evening if you don't win because you you you really think you're going to win and then when you don't win they turn off all the lights on you. People just don't know quite what to say to you because you're sort of a loser and no one really likes a loser and I didn't mind the last time so much. It was the second time with the master. I was a bit surprised I mean I for the few days a bit surprised. And then I have a psychiatrist who said to me, You really bounce back all the time, don't you? You just bounce back.

Colm Toibin7:13

I thought it was a lovely thing to say to me because it's true, but it was also enabling. It also made me feel free to bounce back. A few days later, I was back working again and I'd forgotten all about it. So while other people talk about losing a year or going into a deep depression, not a hope. I mean, it just didn't happen. I it's fine. It's fine. Probably if I'd won I would have got a big head or something or, you know, actually I would have enjoyed winning and I would have been able to handle it perfectly.

Presenter7:39

Some more music then. Kom Tabine, let's uh let's hear your second. What's this?

Colm Toibin7:42

This is a really beautiful song sung by Mairaidney Gonel, who again would have inherited a tradition in Donegaul, and it's one of the great old Irish love songs in the Irish language.

Speaker 37:55

A won stubornashki.

Speaker 38:05

Fahu bhidha cha na no buis nacha.

Speaker 38:15

Is Shami Khaness?

Speaker 38:20

Tahua Agaski.

Speaker 38:26

Istagra Namragan Tahofra Dashki.

Speaker 38:41

Pota mora at home ya la ga.

Speaker 38:51

It's for you.

Colm Toibin8:52

You

Presenter8:59

Donald Og, Young Donald, sung there by My Raid and Triona Nigonal with Donald Looney on guitar. You've written the novel, of course, Brooklyn, very well known and acclaimed, has been made into a movie. It's about life as it was lived in Ireland in the early 50s from the point of view of a young woman on the brink of adulthood. And I'm wondering how you you were born in the mid-fifties, fifty-five. How was life for you as a a little boy?

Colm Toibin9:24

Well, my mother had two younger sisters who didn't marry until a bit later, and my two nearest siblings were two girls, and my father had a sister who didn't marry. And so the w the house was filled with women, and they could talk clothes for about an hour, even though it was some it might be some winter coat that someone nearly bought and didn't buy, and oh, did you not buy it, and where and what colour? And the problem they had with me was that I remembered everything, that nothing they said escaped me, and even years later I mean I'm talking thirty years later, I would say, No, that wasn't that, it was that and they say, Where? I said, No, I was there, I was listening.

Colm Toibin10:02

So, you know, you should always put children out of the room when you're talking because they'll become novelists later on. And so that story of Brooklyn, they talked about a girl who had gone to Brooklyn and come home and on the boat she'd taken off her wedding ring because she just didn't want to tell them she was married because it would break their hearts because it would mean that she would be going back forever. And that stayed in my head for all the years. I was able to use it eventually.

Presenter10:28

And so, how did school feel for you? You were at the Christian Brothers School in Inniscorthy.

Colm Toibin10:33

Did you enjoy it? No, I was no good in school and um

Presenter10:37

A tennising?

Colm Toibin10:37

At anything? No. I could do um mental arithmetic if they said multiply, which I couldn't do now, but, you know, four hundred and two by by seventy seven. I'd be quick with that. But nothing else. It it was hard because my younger brother especially was very clever. He was four years younger and he could read before me.

Colm Toibin10:58

I think they they just thought I was no good and were puzzled because they couldn't think what what you do with with a especially in a family like mine, what do you do with the child who's no good? Like what what work would you be able to do in the future? And my mother did one day pointed a shop to me and said there was a men's clothes shop and said, you know, maybe you could work in there. But then I developed a stammer and you couldn't really work in a shop if you had a stammer. So, oh, the future was very looked very if well, if I ever thought about it, which I tried not to do really, it was very bleak, you know.

Presenter11:32

And you say, especially in a family like mine, your father was a school teacher, an educated man with a degree, and and I mentioned in the introduction, although I think your mother had left school at fourteen, she was a published poet.

Colm Toibin11:35

Educated man

Colm Toibin11:43

Yes, and they c yeah, I did, and they cared about books, and they really cared about studying, getting on and getting a job, and all those things really mattered in the house.

Presenter11:52

Time for your third piece of music home

Colm Toibin11:54

Then, of course, you become a teenager. And I mean, we all of us have been through this, where you bring a record home, you have your own pocket money. And one day, suddenly it was there in the town, Blue by Joni Mitchell. I bought it, brought it home, and of course, they couldn't believe the older generation, this Joni Mitchell, get that woman up, this woman can't even sing. And I loved those melancholy songs from Blue, all about lost love. I mean, I didn't know anything about love, I didn't know anything about anything, but lost love seemed more real somehow than anything else you knew. This is the last time I saw Richard.

Speaker 312:29

The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in sixty eight, and he told me Our romantics meet the same fate some day, cynical and drunk, and boring someone in some dark cafe.

Speaker 312:46

You laugh, he said, you think you're immune Go look at your eyes, they're full of moon You like roses and kisses and pretty men to tell you all's pretty

Presenter13:04

Joni Mitchell, the last time I saw Richard, you said, Comtoping, that you developed a stammer when you were eight. Wha why did you develop a stammer?

Colm Toibin13:09

Well

Colm Toibin13:10

My um I didn't know at the time and nobody knew, but um afterwards I realized of course I d developed it exactly when my father got sick for the first time and they had to go to Dublin'cause he had to have an operation and in that in that time when they had gone I started not be to be able to say a whole lot of words. Anything with a hard consonant. The worst one unfortunately was my own name because it has two hard consonants k k k k k k k.

Colm Toibin13:39

I mean, it was a nightmare because I couldn't do anything about it. It it made writing, you know, uh uh such a relief.

Presenter13:47

Your mother sent you and your brother to stay with an aunt I mean with the best of intentions one imagines just to protect you maybe from what was going on with your father's illness.

Colm Toibin13:55

There's illnesses. But there was no one else to look after us. You know, he he wanted her in Dublin.

Presenter13:57

Alright.

Colm Toibin13:59

And therefore, myself and my younger brother simply had to be looked after by somebody. And we arrived, you know, in this house that wasn't our house. But it wasn't that as much as we just didn't know what was going on. I think it affected both of us very deeply. I find with the novels that a novel is going on great, and suddenly I'll have the character being abandoned by somebody. And I'll find that, oh no, not again, here it comes, you know, every time there's someone abandoned. And it comes up no matter what I do in short stories, it really interests me. Because the emotion remains raw with me. There's a DNA in you, I suppose, that comes from experience. And that no matter what you try and write, it won't work unless you give in to this.

Presenter14:47

And was I correct in in saying in the introduction, as I had read, that you started writing almost every day from the age of twelve?

Colm Toibin14:53

Yeah, that my father died in uh when I was twelve and I would have written a poem a day or two. There was no one to share that with. I mean you couldn't go to school with your new poem at that time. What I did was I found a magazine and they seemed to print poetry by teenagers and I sent them to the magazine and they printed a whole lot of them and then my uncle found the magazine with my name. My name is slightly unusual in Ireland, so he brought him up to the house and they all s said, Did you write that?

Colm Toibin15:25

It was a big long poem about the arrival of spring, the complicated stuff of feelings. You know, I'm about thirteen or fourteen at this point. I said, Yeah, yeah, no, I did. I wrote that, yeah.

Presenter15:37

And what did your mother say?

Colm Toibin15:39

puzzled and proud, but also puzzled, you know, because the suddenly the guy who couldn't do anything in school could do this.

Presenter15:47

Let's have some more music. Tell me about this. We're on your uh

Colm Toibin15:49

And you know, there were very few records at home at the beginning and then my mother started to acquire records and there was a Joan Sutherland command performance and this is I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marvel Halls which I've used in when it's in the novel The Heather Blazing and it was sung at my mother's funeral. So it's a sort of important song for me and I'm a sucker for Joan Sutherland still. I hope I'm not alone in that.

Speaker 316:21

With most wool and sunshine.

Speaker 316:29

And the whole side within those walls that I was falling

Speaker 316:46

Behind a bridge was to the rich to come.

Speaker 316:55

I am safe.

Speaker 317:07

Oh for the land which bliss.

Presenter17:15

Michael William Belfs, I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls from the Bohemian Girl performed by Joan Sutherland there with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Bonning. So, Con Tubing, you went to the University of Dublin after school. You lodged with one of your sisters who was already at the university. Did it feel.

Presenter17:32

Something of a relief after a house that had been, you know, devastated by the death of your father.

Colm Toibin17:36

Yeah, it was um intellectually absolutely brilliant. Um it was a great place to go. I just settled down and studied and I made a lot of friends that I still have. I don't know how we managed to drink so much on so little money and uh there wasn't a day I wasn't happy. Something worked for me for a change, you know.

Presenter17:55

Where and when did you find your confidence? Because here you were exercising your intellectual muscle and

Colm Toibin18:00

Some of it, some of it came, I went to a diocese in boarding school for the last two years. It was a Catholic boarding school, and some of it came from that, where there was one teacher in particular who just noticed that I could write and said to me, you can write. And so I did come out of school for those last two years with an idea of myself that somehow or other I had a gift. And the thing to do was I remember the Latin teacher saying to me, don't abuse this. And even when he met me a few years later, he said, Are you writing every day? If you don't use this, it'll be such a mistake, because you have something that most people don't have. And so I arrived in Dublin without any difficulty and managed. And no one knew about my stammering. I gave up stammering, you know.

Presenter18:44

To whom did you first say?

Presenter18:46

I will be a writer, or I want to be a writer.

Colm Toibin18:49

Oh, see, the problem would have been competitive within college. There were a number of people who were better writers than me. We were all writing poetry. By twenty, say, I thought, you know, I'm not Seamus Heaney, I'm not Paul Muldoon, you know, I'm not Yvonne Boland. And Ireland produ was in the generation before man, there were so many great poets that you really were aware by twenty that it it's not yours.

Presenter19:13

And so why is that why you went to Barcelona? Did you need to find a bit of space to do it your way?

Colm Toibin19:19

I went to Barcelona on a whim. Someone said you could get work there and I just thought, wow, imagine you could just go.

Colm Toibin19:24

I had a very good time there. It was too b I was too busy to write anything except letters home. I always say there was um it was drugs, sex and rock and roll, but I had no interest in drugs and no interest in rock and roll.

Presenter19:35

So it was the ramblest thing.

Colm Toibin19:36

It was really an amazing time to be alive. Franco died just as when I arrived. The place exploded. I mean, it's amazing what democracy can do for nightlife.

Presenter19:47

Um where you you you once said a great thing, which is, you said, um, you've never known happiness to help a prose style. I've never known glee or ease in the world to be the thing that makes the difference. Is that why you weren't writing then? Were you sort of too happy to write?

Colm Toibin20:00

You know, I was trying to find myself in lots of ways, but I do think something was l was in me that I hadn't dealt with. I hadn't dealt with my father, I hadn't dealt with all that loss. So I was almost one of the walking wounded without knowing so. A few people recognized it in me, said, There's something in you that you're not ever talking about, isn't there?

Presenter20:23

Let's have some more music control. What are we gonna hear?

Colm Toibin20:25

Well, one of the problems I've always had is with money, I'm no good with money, and I really ran out of money as a student quite a lot. And my friend Katrina Crowe got a job before I did, and I remember going down and borrowing the money for the rent one week from her. And on the way up, I went into a record shop, and I saw this Kathleen Furrier LP. I had to go back to Katrina, say, can I have more money because I need to pay the rent? She said, but I said, no, I bought a record. Anyway, this record included this song, Blow the Wind Southerly, Kathleen Furrier.

Speaker 320:57

Southerly, southerly, Blow the wind south O'er the bunny blue sea.

Speaker 321:09

Blow the wind southerly, southerly, southerly Blow bonny breeze my love heart to me.

Speaker 321:25

They told me last night there were sheeps in the offing, And I hurried down to the deep rolling sea.

Speaker 321:40

But my eye could not see it.

Speaker 321:44

Wherever might be the bark that is bare.

Presenter21:59

That was Kathleen Ferrier and Blow the Wind Southerly. Where did that take you to, Colm Tobin? You looked s far away there, were you?

Colm Toibin22:06

Yeah, I I mean I was thinking about all that music, that that way in which you can really find in images in music weighs into prose. It's like holding a tune as you're writing, trying to hold a sort of tone or a sound, and it m the music becomes sort of a part of that.

Presenter22:25

The purity of your prose is often uh commented upon. When did you begin t to start writing prose?

Colm Toibin22:32

I found when I came back from Spain, the idea of a novel came to me. And once it came to me, I started to work. Something or other in me, almost like a singer wants to sing, wanted to perform or wanted what I was doing to be read. It took a long time to finish the book and it took a long time to find a publisher for it, but I became very ambitious about it and I persevered. I had a very b busy job. I was editor of the main Irish Current Affairs magazine at that time.

Colm Toibin23:01

We were involved in a battle in Ireland about trying to change attitudes, trying to change minds, about many matters, including, say, the violence in Northern Ireland, but also including the conservative nature of the society about sexuality and about even women's rights. But I would go home at the weekend with my novel about painting and exile so I could ha maintain some sort of private life, life of my own.

Presenter23:25

How had your family given that they were an Irish Catholic family and given that you'd been an altar boy and um you know, all that how did they react to your homosexuality?

Colm Toibin23:32

Oh, um we didn't talk about it. It was simply something that eventually became known.

Colm Toibin23:39

And was not spoken about very much. My mother asked my sister an interesting question at one point: Is he happy?

Colm Toibin23:48

which is very sweet, but she didn't ask me that, and we didn't talk about it.

Presenter23:53

Your mother died in two thousand and two and it would be just two years later that you won I think it's right to say it's the world's most valuable literary prize. It's the Impact Dublin Literary Award. One hundred thousand Euros, I think, is the prize there. It was for the master.

Presenter24:07

Often when people reach those points where they are very widely recognized with a big, big prize, the thing that they might miss is that their parents are not there to see it. Was that important to you?

Colm Toibin24:18

She was there for the first time I was nominated for the Booker Prize and she sent me a note and it listed everyone in the town who had stopped her to talk about it. And it was a lisp going down. It looked like the entire town. So, you know, she was alive for the publication of the, what, the first three or four novels. She'd an interesting way of handling it in that she would write me quite serious letters about the literary style. She'd become interested in fiction herself as she grew older and she was reading Sol Bellow. And she thought my novels were too slow. And she didn't really want to say that to me, but she would say, isn't Sol Bellow marvelous how smart he is? Meaning, is there any chance your novels could become a bit smarter, a bit snappier? But I suppose she was proud and she made that clear. Some more music then. Tell me about this. We're on your sixth. I think everyone went through a Leonard Cohen phase and I went through a Leonard Cohen phase via an Irish band called The Johnstons. And it's another example of how a teenager loves lost love. Before you've had love, before you've been in love, the notion of the melancholy nature of it's all over somehow appeals to you much more. So this is, hey, that's no way to say goodbye, the Leonard Cohen song.

Speaker 325:39

Her kisses deep and warm Your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm.

Speaker 325:52

Many love before us, I know that beyond our due.

Speaker 325:59

In city and in forest they smile like me and you

Presenter26:08

The Johnsons and Hey, that's no way to say goodbye. You mentioned earlier, Con To Been, that close friends of yours would say, you know, you're not opening up about something, there's something there and and you don't seem to want to talk about it, a part of you that was locked. When did it become unlocked?

Colm Toibin26:23

I was working as a journalist as as an editor and

Colm Toibin26:26

We began to cover this very difficult story using a journalist who is older than me, um the journalist June Levine. I would go to her house quite a lot to work with her in the evening, just trying to get the story right, and her husband, Ivor Brown, is a psychiatrist, and Ivor started to look at me.

Colm Toibin26:42

And eventually one evening he said to me, There's something wrong, isn't there? There's something wrong.

Colm Toibin26:48

Immediately, I would try and say, Arbor, why don't we change the music or listen, you know, tell a joke? Or say, no, no, look what you're doing. You're avoiding it. He just kept saying to me, You have to deal with this. I'm telling you, I know by your body language, I know everything you're doing. And so they lured me into a workshop. And, you know, I didn't know what it was going to be. Some people were actually experienced their birth. Some people were really victims of abuse and they were getting all of that. I just became this 12-year-old with my father just died. And it came very quickly and it wouldn't go away. And, you know, it was hard afterwards to say, it wasn't as though you woke up the next morning a much happier or easier person, but the very recognition of it at least stopped me saying I was okay when I sort of wasn't.

Presenter27:36

So it was a literal regression therapy.

Colm Toibin27:38

Regression therapy. The theory would be that what we do when something like that happens, especially as a child, is you block it. So what you have to do is you have to have the experience, let it happen to you, which is a very, very hard thing to do. The big worry was, if you do all this, will it ruin your novels? Will it actually destroy your need to write? But what it does is the opposite. It almost opens things up so you have a clearer version of things you're working on. It doesn't affect, obviously, your style as a writer, but I think it gives you something extra rather than taking something away. You can't say the novels got better that Thursday. But I certainly couldn't have gone on in my life without doing it. I don't know what would have happened.

Speaker 228:18

Yeah.

Presenter28:18

Yeah.

Presenter28:24

And this novel that took fourteen years to write, as I mentioned in the introduction, Nora Webster, is that why it took fourteen years? Because it was those years of working out the truth of what had to be written.

Colm Toibin28:34

Yes, and being and being accurate about the small things, about what it was like in the small house, in the small town, in these years, after my father died, as we slowly stopped mentioning his name, as we all pretended we were fine, what that felt like, that although my father was filling our minds, we stopped mentioning his name, and what that does.

Presenter28:58

Time for some more music, Conteen. Tell me about this.

Colm Toibin29:01

I'm from Enniscorthy, County Wexford, and 10 miles away is Wexford Town. And we have one of the great international opera festivals. And when I was in boarding school, you could go to a dress rehearsal of an opera. And the one that I went to first was the Pearl Fishers. Here am I, sort of sixteen, with my Leonard Cohn and my Joni Mitchell and all that. And suddenly this music took me over. I remember coming out that night in my school uniform, getting chips, you know, going back up to the school.

Colm Toibin29:29

Something new had happened in me. In a way, if you ever want to wean your teenage kids off whatever dreadful music they're listening to, just try them on this duet for The Pearlfishers.

Speaker 330:03

Um

Presenter30:55

The duet from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, John McCormack, and Mario Samarco with The Victor Orchestra, that was recorded in nineteen ten. Um you've written, Colm to been, that you're appalled by the idea, I like this of a philosophy of life. Somebody must have asked you what your philosophy of life was. What do you mean you're appalled by it?

Colm Toibin31:12

Yeah. How well I think we don't know. And, you know, this fact that all these philosophers, we could name them all, we still have no clue where we go and we die, when we've no proof of anything, God, we don't know about God. I mean, really, so you'd be much better off, in my view, not to worry about that at all. Especially if you're a novelist, where you just think, tell the story, get on with the business of what did he do next? What did she think then? Who did she see coming in the door? But if you think, oh, I must deal with the large question of our being, of existence in my novel, well, that will kill a novel, will really kill one.

Colm Toibin31:50

But you're always working with small images, small details, where the bottle was on the table for a second she sipped water or almost it did. So you're almost as though you're making drawings or story boards all the time trying to see things.

Presenter32:04

Are you able to turn that off? Are there times when you're not storyboarding in your head?

Colm Toibin32:07

No, because the an idea or a new way of seeing something can come to you in a second when you least expect it. In other words, you're having lunch with someone and the person says, You've just gone vacant. Do you know that? I say, Oh yeah, no, I I was just thinking about something and I don't need to write it down. I'll always remember it.

Presenter32:14

Yeah.

Presenter32:25

What about I've heard other writers say, and indeed you say this, that actually, you know, the process of writing is not in any sense enjoyable.

Colm Toibin32:32

I know, you know, you're trying to get this down, you're pulling things up out of yourself. This is sometimes very difficult material. I wonder if what writing comedy is like. But doing what I do, the novels are melancholy and they're personal. And so I'm trying to get it right. I'm not trying to amuse myself. Swimming, for example, is fun. Writing is not.

Presenter32:55

Right, that was good. That's what I wanted to ask you. Where is your fun?

Colm Toibin32:57

Oh, um my boyfriend lives in Los Angeles and we go on a Sunday to Redondo Beach and he's a really good I mean he's a body surfer, he can really do it. I'm just you know wading around but I just love the waves and the water and the sunshine. That's pure, pure pleasure. You know, I mean I do actually take pleasure from an enormous number of things, but being in the corner writing the sentence is not one of those things. But it's necessary if I didn't do it. It's an anchor. In a way, all the pleasure would mean nothing if this pain, if this working out of the pain wasn't there and I wasn't writing, I wasn't doing it.

Presenter33:33

On the island, on your own, how will you be with your

Colm Toibin33:36

Uh

Presenter33:36

Yeah.

Colm Toibin33:36

Theoretically I would have no trouble and then I would really worry who was going to read this? You know, and if you don't write for yourself, but I mean I would enjoy the solitude and I would like the waves and the water, but the notion of not having a readership, of not ha this book never coming out, would drive me nuts eventually.

Presenter33:58

Tell me about your final piece of music, then. What are we gonna hear?

Colm Toibin34:00

When we were making the film of Brooklyn, there were two things I wanted. I wanted Nick Hornby to write the screenplay. Which

Presenter34:04

Keep going.

Colm Toibin34:05

And then I wanted there's a moment in the book where

Colm Toibin34:09

All the old Irish, all the men who built the tunnels and the bridges, have nowhere to go on Christmas Day in Brooklyn, and they come to the parish house and they're fed turkey and they're sort of broken down figures, but of course one of them is a great singer and he sings this song, Cos on Tougoin, and I want it in particular, Erlo Linaud, and eventually he agreed, and he sings this song on Christmas Day, circa 1952, and all the men suddenly light up.

Speaker 234:38

Do Kaso Kalin das ahoromen oygnis nedro Erluibna kwill gliche urv yogrivla.

Speaker 234:57

Shinra hook shiruum kunaugus gut la tan segal ispogmi shun su shin bon.

Presenter35:15

Erla O'Leonard saying Casson to Goyne. So I'm going to give you now uh the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take an additional book along with you, Contebine. What's it going to be?

Colm Toibin35:25

Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. I notice something new in it all the time. I get infinite pleasure from that book.

Presenter35:32

It's yours then. And I'm guessing fr from when I asked you a moment ago how you would get on on this island. You started talking about writing, so I'm thinking I know what your luxury is going to be. What would you like?

Colm Toibin35:42

Well, I'd like a pair of scissors.

Presenter35:44

Oh, I thought you were going to say a pen and a piece of paper.

Colm Toibin35:46

No, because you see

Colm Toibin35:48

Oh, will I not have that?

Colm Toibin35:50

Oh, oh no, sorry, I'm ticked back my pair of scissors. Oh, oh, hello, I need a pen. I want a pen that won't run out of ink or anything, and I want some paper.

Presenter36:01

Fina, if you had to save one of these eight disks, which one would it be?

Colm Toibin36:05

It would be Donalogue because of the idea that over centuries people had been singing it, that it had been saved up and handed down, and I would love that idea.

Presenter36:15

It's yours then. Com to been, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Colm Toibin36:19

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Presenter37:00

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.