On Nature and Artifice

A Conversation with Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín

My third novel, Small Rain, has just been published. Please pick up a copy at your local bookstore, or you can find links to online retailers here. Links for UK readers are here.

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Tour is almost over, but there are a couple of chances left to say hi. I’ll be in Montreal this Friday, October 18, my first trip ever to the city (please put recommendations in the comments); it would be great to see you at Librairie De Stiil at 7pm. (Tickets are required; full info here.) And next week, on Thursday, October 24, I’m so excited to be in conversation with Mark Armijo McKnight at the Whitney Museum in New York City. What a way to end tour. That’s also a ticketed event; you can find all the information here. 

Reviews of Small Rain have continued coming out, along with other media coverage. Here’s a little round-up: 

• The novelist Lauren J Joseph wrote a very beautiful review for The Observer: “This is a frightening, penetrating, ultimately illuminating novel, one with a scope far beyond its 300 or so pages. Reading it you feel as though you were holding a single grain of rice in your hand which, upon examination under a microscope, reveals itself to be engraved with the history of the world.”

• In The Chicago Tribune, John Warner calls the novel “One of the most profound reading experiences I’ve ever had.” 

• In a perceptive, theologically-informed review for America, James K.A. Smith places the novel in a tradition of mystical writing. 

• In The Times, Johanna Thomas-Corr says the book “captures the ferocious inwardness of illness.” 

• In the Wall Street Journal, Sam Sacks, who was not a fan of my first two books, praises the novel’s “crystalline immediacy” and says that it transforms a medical emergency into “a kind of poetic happening, marked by terror and grace.” 

• In The Guardian, Grace Byron writes that “Through intimate descriptions of hands on shoulders and prodding needles, [the novel] explores how to overcome the meaninglessness of pain.” 

• Max Liu reviews the book for The Financial Times, calling it “the work of a born novelist.” 

• Anthony Cummins, who was also hard on the first two books, calls Small Rain my best in The Daily Mail. “‘Pure life’ are the last words of the novel—no spoiler—and that's what we get here.”

• In The Spectator, Francesca Peacock calls Small Rain “A quiet but forceful novel about the beauty of ‘pure life’, and the wonder of paying attention to details.” 

• Finally, at

  Meghan O'Rourke's Substack
  , O’Rourke wrote about the book as “incredibly beautiful and optimistic,” which made me very happy. 

The other day I was asked by an interviewer what I’ve been obsessed with lately, and it made me think about the fact that one of the worst things about book tour is that I’ve been spending most of my time thinking about myself and my work. I feel desperate to fill my head with other things. Thank God for my Henry James seminar, which has been immense fun; and last week, I saw my first concert of the fall, the tenor Karim Sulayman and the guitarist Sean Shibe in recital at the Armory. It was a beautiful program—maybe I’ll be able to write about it; it felt like emerging into sunlight after spending months inside. 

So: I’m ready for tour to be over. But I’ve had some fun, too, and I’ve had some good conversations. One of the best was with the great Colm Tóibín at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. I’m very grateful to Colm for letting me share it with you.

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Garth Greenwell

I want to start by saying what an extraordinary honor it is to get to be in conversation with Colm Tóibín, who I think is one of the genuinely great writers of our time. I’ve been reading Colm since I was fourteen years old, long before I imagined becoming a writer. My salvation in the pre-internet American South was an independent bookstore in Louisville called Hawley Cooke, where there was a dark, shadowy, clearly very beloved corner dedicated to Gay and Lesbian Literature. I would pull down books knowing nothing about them except that they were in that section. I first read Colm then—and not just his fiction, but also his great, great book of essays, Love in a Dark Time, which is a profound meditation on gay art and gay artists. It was one of the two or three books that, when I was an adolescent, set my aesthetic compass, and it has been guiding me ever since. 

[Applause for Colm]

Colm Tóibín 

I want to start by wondering why we don’t really have great literature about hospitals. People who go to hospital tend, once they get away from hospitals, never to want to hear about it, know about it, or imagine it again. And those who die in a hospital obviously don’t get to write a book at all. The actual business of the day in, day out-ness of a room in a hospital, with nurses coming in, injections, cannulas—that is not part of literature in general, compared to say, love. We have so many poems and books about love, so few poems and books about hospitals. I wonder if you had any sense, as you were writing the book, that this was new: describing a cannula, or describing the nice nurse, the not so nice nurse, the waiting for the doctor part, the lover coming in to see your protagonist part—that all of that is material that has not been mined.

GG

Well, I wasn’t thinking, Ah, I’m going to conquer some new territory for literature, but I was aware that I couldn’t think of very many examples of great hospital sequences. You know, you have written one of the great things about hospitals. And James Baldwin, at the beginning of Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, has a great hospital sequence.  Of course, when I was a kid, one of my formative reading experiences was AIDS literature. Like Hervé Guibert, who is extraordinary in writing about the Kafkaesque, labyrinthine bureaucracy of clinics and hospitals. 

I was fascinated by what existence felt like in the hospital. I wanted to try to capture the way that time is at once regimented and also utterly distorted. I wanted to capture these fascinating asymmetrical relationships between patients and caregivers. As a patient, you’re going through something utterly unprecedented, something that changes your life; you’re facing the possibility that this illness may end your life. And you become unbelievably attached to these people who are just doing their jobs, for whom that day in and out-ness of the hospital is routine. They had a patient before you, they’ll have a patient after you. All of that was fascinating to me. 

I was worried when I began, because this is a book about a guy who basically never gets out of bed, and I thought, “can you sustain that?” But in fact, in this paradoxical way, that radical fixedness of the narrator somehow gives the book license to go everywhere. My first two books were very much about someone wandering. I think this book wanders farther than those first two books. 

CT

He stays in bed, but he’s always watching and waiting—and then, of course, he’s remembering. And it gives you a license, I think, to let the protagonist imagine or remember certain things and not others. You don’t have to give a full backstory, but merely a set of images. You can explore what it is about the building of a house, the buying of a house, for instance, that becomes really important—which I think, is another subject we don’t hear enough about in fiction. 

You’re talking about asymmetrical relationships, and just to take you back to Cleanness, to the last story, where our protagonist goes out for a night with some students. And really you realize what’s in his mind is some sort of idea that they too maybe in some deep recesses of their minds will be gay as well, or will be gay friendly, or somehow the night will come together. But he realizes slowly, there’s a moment in the bathroom, and he realizes that’s not what’s happening here; he realizes, I’m alone here. They don’t have a clue what’s on my mind. And if they did know, they really wouldn’t like me, right? 

What you’re doing is you’re taking that configuration of an asymmetrical relationship, and you’re bringing it into a new context, where you’re the one in bed, and everyone who comes to visit you, especially the nurses and doctors, then have a funny relationship with you. It’s certainly never equal. But it’s also asymmetrical because you’re the one in control of the narrative, or at least your protagonist is. It’s not as though they get to tell the story. So you’re telling the same story, almost, as in the previous book.

At the event.

GG

That’s a fascinating way to think about the books. But there are discontinuities, too. My experience of Small Rain is that this is really a book about happiness, and I don’t think that’s true of my first two books. But it’s true that Small Rain is also very concerned with shame, and that’s something true of What Belongs to You and Cleanness. But I often feel alienated by the way people talk about shame in my books, I feel like something has gone wrong in the reading. Very often with discussions of shame in my first two books, it’s as though the source of the shame is the narrator’s gayness. And while it’s true that the narrator grew up in a deeply homophobic place and he was taught certain lessons about himself, I think he has pretty clearly rejected those lessons. I remember at one of the first readings I gave for What Belongs to You, it was actually in San Francisco, there was this older man who stood up to ask a question, and I could see he was shaking, he was so disturbed or angry. He said, “Why can’t your protagonist just be an out and proud gay man?” I was so taken aback. I remember thinking, my protagonist is an out and proud gay man—and in a place where that’s a lot harder than San Francisco. What I realized is that that comes from a mistaken reading, or at least I think it does. What’s actually the source of the shame in my first two books is not gayness, but desire, because desire is something that strips us of our will and our agency, it is something that lays us low. None of us gets to choose what we desire, and that is humiliating. 

In Small Rain, I think the shame comes from being an organic being whose only destiny is to die. The narrator spends most of the book connected to machines and surrounded by technology that’s keeping him alive. And he thinks, I don’t know how any of this works—like, I don’t know how lights turn on, how toilets flush, I don’t know what my aorta even is, I don’t know any of this. I only know useless things, he says. All the technologies I know are useless technologies, like iambic pentameter and the ablative absolute—these utterly worthless things. He’s someone who cares about art and literature, he likes to think about theology and philosophy; and the fact that all of that—God and love and poetry—depends on whether or not his bowels work, that is humiliating. And so examining the shame of being embodied—that’s how this book, I think, takes that old obsession of mine and I hope enlarges it. 

CT 

Small Rain also enlarges the idea of pleasure, which is everywhere in your Substack: the idea of what it’s like to listen to music you love, what it’s like to hear a new, great singer, what it’s like to make judgments on certain moments, especially in opera. 

But this novel allows you to ruminate in a way the other two books don’t. The other two books are really led by place, by character. You know, they’re moving in a direction. This one obviously isn’t, so that you can write about things that really matter to you in strange ways in this book. For example, the figure of the English contralto, Kathleen Ferrier, who’s probably very dear to your heart. I mean, it’s in the book! And listening to your own voice speaking, I can hear a singer’s voice underneath, or somewhere in that voice. 

GG

You know, I didn’t discover Ferrier as early as the narrator of Small Rain. The figure who actually played that role for me was Jessye Norman, especially her recording of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. That recording is one of the miraculous human accomplishments for me. But when I did discover Kathleen Ferrier, and when I discovered her recording of the Rückert-Lieder—I mean, the reason that’s in the book is because I wanted to describe it, I wanted to talk about that experience. 

My family were tobacco farmers; I was the first generation raised off the farm. I found opera because there was a choir director in my public high school in Kentucky who heard something in my voice. I thank two people at the end of this book, and he’s one of them. He heard something in my voice, and he started giving me voice lessons after school. He gave me my first opera CDs—well, tapes, I guess—and he gave me my first tickets to the opera. The second opera I saw at the Kentucky Opera was Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, which was my introduction to Britten, who is a lifelong obsession, and also my introduction to Henry James, who has been a lifelong obsession. 

But that experience of hearing classical music, hearing this kind of singing, was life-changing. I so obviously did not fit in the world in which I was born, you know. Growing up, I felt that my body was too big, my emotions were too big, my gestures were too florid. Everything violated the canons of Southern American masculinity. When I heard opera, it felt like a promise. It felt like the opposite of Kentucky, which is now something I try to complicate—my idea of Kentucky has gotten a lot more complicated since then. But when I first heard it, it sounded to me like the opposite of Kentucky, it sounded like a world where I might be in scale. 

The experience that the narrator describes is such a private experience. I’ve never tried to talk about it until this moment in the book. When he describes first listening to Kathleen Ferrier, he’s trying to convey the feeling that something is being made in you—some new chamber of the self, some new possibility of humanness, is being made in you by this moment where Mahler creates this kind of illusion of a simultaneously major and minor chord. The narrator says, It humanized me. That is something I felt very strongly as a child.

CT

It could be argued that your style, especially in the first two books, is a way of getting as far away from Kentucky as you possibly can, the way you use sentence structure, diction, commas, semicolons, and then a further rumination, all within the same sentence, going down to the bottom of the page. We can hardly say, Oh, that’s a very Kentucky way of writing. But, the other argument would be, of course, that Kentucky gave you the freedom to try to start to work with style, to realize that nothing in style can be taken for granted. Not just as a gay man, but as a gay man with a certain sensibility, with an interest in opera in Kentucky, maybe the most Kentucky thing you could be then was you. Your job is to wrestle with style, is to find a way to, I suppose, use style as though it is not natural, but something artificial that must be worked on. And then in this book, to be able to refine that again, to be able to say there’s no such thing as a fixed DNA of style. 

GG

My feelings about Kentucky have so changed. But Guy Davenport, you know, the great Kentucky writer who is as gay and ornate and erudite as—

CT

Could you take us through his bio just briefly, just so we know—

GG

I really can’t, I’m sorry! I should know it but I don’t. He was born not in Kentucky but in the South—South Carolina, maybe?—but he spent most of his life in Kentucky, teaching at the University of Kentucky. He was translating ancient Greek literature and teaching it to his students in Kentucky and he nurtured a whole generation—multiple generations—of writers who came through Kentucky. All of these places have these secret histories. Everything in my childhood, everything in the world around me, was structured such that I would not find Guy Davenport. If I had found Guy Davenport when I was 13, my life would have been utterly different. But it was an impossibility for me to find Guy Davenport. 

But this idea of a kind of attachment to artifice: I do feel that. Because certainly, if nature was the world to which I was born, then give me anything else. I have always been attached to a sense that art is about artifice and that it’s also that art can encompass— 

Well, before I start pronouncing on art, I should say that art is always bigger than anything we can say about it. But this sense that there is a tradition of radical expressivity—and again, it felt like the opposite of that Southern masculinity I grew up with. I think about my father— well, my father was always sort of blowing up. But my grandfather, who was just utterly tapped down, you know. Being a man for him meant being utterly unexpressive, being unmoved. It was so important to me to find this other tradition that prizes expressivity, that works to make syntax not natural, but instead, utterly saturated with affect, with expression, with meaning. 

You know, my favorite thing that anybody has ever said about my work was in a negative review of What Belongs to You. And I have to say—I have this problem, because on one hand I’m Southern, and so I’m so good at holding grudges, but on the other I’m so bad at remembering names. So I have this grudge, but I can’t remember against whom. But it was some reviewer in the UK, who said this amazing thing complaining about my sentences in What Belongs To You. He said, “Greenwell perverts the natural order of his sentences.”

What an asshole! But also, I love that so much. I thought, Give me a T-shirt! Perverts the natural order of his sentences. Of course, we should complicate our sense of nature versus non-nature. But to be human—this is something James Baldwin was always saying—to be human is not to be natural. It’s the claim that is always made against homosexuality, that it is against nature. And I just think, well, yes, and so is civilization, you know. So is any order of things in which we can live with one another and not kill each other, any structure of the world that is not just bare conflict all the time. So is beauty. So is art. I want the most artificial life possible. I want a life that is oriented around art.

CT 

And the mystery, then, is how does a novel come? It’s possible that a novel comes from something tiny —you don’t know how or where; something seems to come to you rather than being a strategic decision. However, I wonder sometimes if it’s possible that somewhere in you you will say, I need to reply to Cleanness. I need a book that does almost the opposite, stylistically, thematically. So that the male body is suddenly not only vulnerable, but there’s a tenderness about how it’s described.

For instance, when the nurse comes in, the nurse gets seen. The nurse gets studied. What’s she going to do later? What’s her shift like? What’s she going to do to you now, with this cannula, this needle? And so it is as though the body has moved in another direction, but also the style has moved in another direction. I think this is probably unanswerable, but the question is: to what extent is this strategy? To what extent did you write down, I need to do something new in my fiction? Or was it the other way, which is much more likely, I suppose: did it come to you strangely or organically, almost like nature?

GG

There are writers who work that way, I mean strategically. Like someone who was very important to me, Louise Glück: after every collection, she would say, I am outlawing these moves that I have made too many times. I can’t imagine working quite like that. I’m not strategic as a writer. You know, I’m hyper-invested in a kind of neurotic close reading and analysis when I’m engaged in criticism. But in artmaking—well, I guess I do think that the art that most interests me comes from things we don’t understand, comes from a sort of deep urge, and also from an experience of bewilderment. I mean, I do have ambitions for my work—I would like to be funnier, for instance. I actually think all my books are funny—though I’ve always been called a humorless writer. I remember Christian Lorenzen wrote this wonderful piece about What Belongs to You where he was said, This is one of the only novels I can imagine where utter humorlessness works. And I was like: thanks? 

But I think there are funny things in that book! Like the scene where he has this incredibly sexy hustler in his apartment spending the night, and what does he do? He pulls a volume of Cavafy off the shelf. That makes me laugh, I think that’s very funny. The visit of the mother I think is funny; the little boy on the train. I think things in that book are funny. Or those two students in the last story in Cleanness, I think they are comic figures. This book, though, I do think it’s funnier, though I guess not everyone agrees. In any case, I would like to try to have more humor in my work. So I do have these ambitions. But the way that manifests when I’m working is a feeling that there’s some space that hasn’t been filled, and so there’s sort of like a pressure or a tendency, a sort of movement into that space. It’s not strategic, really. 

With Small Rain, I did not say I want to write a book about domesticity, for instance. I should say that the narrator is the same through all three books, and this is a narrator who has been very invested in an idea of his life as adventure: geographical adventures (the first two books are set in Eastern Europe), and especially erotic adventures. Well, now he is seven years into a long-term relationship, he shares a mortgage on a house in Iowa—to a certain extent, I think that feels to him like the opposite of adventure. And I think he feels resentful of that; I think there is a way that when we meet him, he has become deeply ambivalent about his life. I think a lot of us resent our lives—not dramatically or catastrophically, but a little bit, a kind of low buzz of resentment. Maybe that’s just because they’re our lives, because this existence, that at one point seemed to be a kind of open field of possibility, over the decades has calcified into the particular circumstances that happen to be ours. That feels like an affront to our freedom, and the affront comes from precisely those durable commitments that give our lives value. 

Certainly the narrator in Small Rain has stopped seeing his life, stopped really perceiving it. Domesticity has kind of dulled him—again, not in any way that I think is catastrophic. He’s not deeply unhappy. I think it’s a very normal thing. He has stopped really seeing his life, and then, at the beginning of the book, this annihilating pain, this illness, takes that life away from him. And in this paradoxical way, in taking his life away from him, illness returns his life to him. It delivers his life back to him, because when he is in that ICU bed, he longs to be with his partner, in his bed, in that house, more intensely than he has ever longed for anything.

The title of the book comes from this 16th century song, Western Wind. The title comes from the first first half of that poem, but it’s really the second half that’s important for the book. The poem goes, 

Western wind, when wilt thou blow, 

The small rain down can rain. 

Christ that my love were in my arms 

And I in my bed again. 

The poem only appears once, early in the book, but I hope the reader will remember those last two lines at the end of the novel, when the narrator gets to go home, and gets to take his partner L in his arms.

What I hope makes the real narrative arc of the book is this narrator coming to understand that domesticity, this long intimacy with a singular other, is itself an adventure, that it accommodates mystery and revelation and surprise and discovery. He says at one point, you know, I’ve always felt like I could just slip out of my life, like if I stopped exerting my will, I could just disappear from all this. I think he feels at the end of the book a sense of commitment, a realization that the life he is in is an adventure that he wants to keep having as long as he can.

CT  

One of your touchstone writers, whom you’ve mentioned a lot in various places, is James Baldwin. And Baldwin’s argument with Richard Wright—which began in Paris, in about 1949—was really about how to present an African American character. The question was, Are you going to allow racism to dictate this man’s fate? Or, as a novelist, are you going to allow your hero, your protagonist, to have a sort of freedom in the world? And if so, how are you going to do this? 

And of course, when we look at Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, he doesn’t give that freedom to his gay character, because the character’s fate really is dictated by his sexuality and by the repression all around. I wonder if Small Rain is also a way of exploring that particular question. Your gay protagonist in this book is given an extraordinary sort of freedom, the freedom to be domestically happy, which is probably the scariest freedom. If you’re a novelist trying to write about a gay character, people say to you, What? You’ve sent him to the suburbs and made him happy? Was that what it was all for? And the answer sometimes, as a novelist, is Yeah, for my novel, if you don’t mind, I mean, if it’s okay with you, can I? Could I be just that Western Wind? Could I be happy in a bed in a house? Would that be okay with you? 

But it’s a struggle to see if that tender image, that ease, that possibility of love and endurance, could be a big theme, and not just something lost or something that was never had, or never had properly, or someone stopped you having it. Instead, it’s there now. It’s actually within reach in this novel.

GG

You know, I think that this dichotomy that is sometimes drawn between a kind of radical “queerness” and “homonormativity” or assimilation is a false dichotomy. And I think if we have been fighting for something, we must have been fighting for the multiplication of models of life that we recognize as legitimate. And actually, you know, thinking of strategy, I remember when I was still a student at Iowa—this was very early in my life with Luis, my partner—I was taking a class with a brilliant poet and essayist, Brian Blanchfield, whose book of essays, Proxies, if you haven’t read it, is just one of the great things. He gave us this journaling project over the course of the semester, and I remember thinking about the texture of my life, which was absolutely the opposite from what I was writing about (I was writing Cleanness): this texture of domestic dailiness. And I remember asking myself, as I tried to track that dailiness in that journal: “well, what is this?” 

I believe that temperament is probably pretty fixed, that we have an emotional thermometer that is pretty steady. Maybe something happens and it flicks up a bit. Like, oh, you publish your first book, it flicks up. You think, “I’m a writer!,” and that feels like an experience of happiness or joy. But then the thermometer goes right back to where it was, and you’re in that spot that is temperamentally yours. My relationship with Luis was utterly unprecedented, for both of us: neither of us had ever lived with anyone. He’s a bit older than I am, but he had never lived with anyone. I had hardly had any boyfriends at all. I had always really been invested in a more diffuse sort of sexual sociality and cruising. And a couple of years into this relationship, I realized that, you know, waking up every morning and having the first thing that I did be hugging someone I loved, and going to sleep every night, and having the last thing I did every day be hugging someone I loved, I realized that—well, it had not made me happy, exactly. It hadn’t done that. There was no dramatic change, but maybe with that day in, day out intimacy, the thermometer had gone up like two degrees. Nothing dramatic, and yet those two degrees felt profound to me, and I remember thinking at the time, working on that project in Brian’s class, that I couldn’t imagine writing about Iowa. I couldn’t imagine writing about this life. This life feels to me like the opposite of poetry—which is always a false vision of a place, or of a life: poetry is everywhere. I knew that, but I didn’t feel it. 

But I remember thinking that this difference of  two degrees—that it was profound, and that literature lives there, and I wasn’t sure I had read it. And so thinking about your question about strategy earlier—I mean, there was no direct line from that moment ten years ago to this novel. But in some sense, I have been sort of feeling my way into that territory of ordinary happiness. I’ve always been attracted to the operatic. I’ve always been attracted to the extremes. But I began asking then what it would look like to write from what I felt was a place of profound human meaning, the space opened up by those two degrees of difference. And so in some sense, maybe I do think the course was set toward this book back then.

Thank you so much for these questions, Colm. And thanks to all of you for being here.

[Applause] 

A drink with Colm after the event.

And to you, reader: as always, thanks for reading—

G.