Colm Tóibín at home in
Dublin Photo: Jackie Nickerson
The Telegraph - 25 Oct 2012
‘Listen,” Colm Tóibín says. I listen, though there is nothing to hear. “And
it gets even quieter at night,” he adds, “because nearly all the properties
around here are used as offices.” We are standing in the upstairs study of his
four-storey Georgian house in Dublin, the place where he does his writing in a
hard-backed rattan chair, at night.
The 57-year-old author shows me a work-in-progress on his desk, written in
longhand in a notebook. “I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen
before I type it up as a second,” he explains. “John Lanchester and Philip
Hensher do the same. I bumped into them the other night and we were all doing
our pen talk.”
Tóibín talks in a strong but ponderous voice — which is, by the way, as Irish
as whiskey with an “e”. The deliberation, he reckons, may be a compensation for
a childhood stammer. He avoids starting sentences with hard consonants. In
conversation with him you have to hold your nerve and not rush to fill the long
silences, as he is probably half way through a thought.
“I was waiting to get money out of a machine last night,” he tells me, “and
there were these two lads who were slightly drunk messing about in front of me
in the queue. The cheekier one looked at me and said: ‘So you’re busy at the
moment?’ I must have been looking quite severe and was about to say ‘Yes I am,
and I want to get home’ when he added ‘with the writing?’ and I had to smile. I
took out my ink pen, held it up and went ‘Yeah’.”
His manner, if not his appearance, is friendly and humorous. It’s his
formidable bald head that makes him look, as he puts it “severe”. That and his
dark clumps of eyebrow and the deep, ventriloquist’s dummy creases that frame
his mouth. Given that he describes things for a living, I ask him how he would
describe himself. “I have no sense of it at all. None. None.” He must have read
some of the descriptions others have given of him, though; how his appearance
seems at odds with his smiling demeanour?
Full story at The Telegraph
Full story at The Telegraph
