Colm Tóibín’s novels include The Blackwater Lightship, Brooklyn, Nora Webster, The Master and The Magician. He has written for the LRB on subjects including Thomas Mann and the Mann family, the Irish Famine, Mary Queen of Scots, Elton John, gay priests, Venice during lockdown and being diagnosed with cancer.
Suddenly, there was nothing to complain about. No cruise ships went up the Giudecca Canal. There were no tourists clogging up the narrow streets. Piazza San Marco was often completely deserted. On some bridges a few gondoliers stood around, but there was no one to hire them. Instead, dogs and their owners walked the streets, with no one pushing them out of the way. People greeted one...
Andy Warhol in 1955
‘Overlooked No More’ is the title of an occasional series in the obituaries section of the New York Times that prints obituaries of those – mainly women but also African Americans and homosexuals – who were ignored by the paper at the time of their deaths. Since the Times was launched in 1851, the omissions go back a long way. They include...
When Robert Lowell wasn’t writing sonnets, he was revising them, moving lines from one to another, giving them new titles, putting them in a new order. He turned old poems into sonnets, in the process ruining some of them, such as ‘Water’, first published in For the Union Dead in 1964. He used bits of his mother’s diary in a sonnet called ‘Clytemnestra 1’. Anyone’s words could be appropriated. A sonnet sequence dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop includes very personal lines in a letter from her (‘That’s what I feel I’m waiting for now:/a faintest glimmer I am going to get out/somehow alive from this’); a sequence called ‘To Allen Tate’ quotes from a letter by Tate; ‘Publication Day’ is a letter from Marcia Nardi rewritten as a sonnet. Elizabeth Hardwick felt a certain schadenfreude that the poems were, in her opinion, so bad. ‘It seemed so sad that the work was, certainly in that part that relies upon me and Harriet, so inane, empty, unnecessary,’ she wrote to Bishop.
He went to a hospital on the outskirts of Chicago where the patients had to do things for themselves. Elton found this hard: he had got ‘to the stage where I shaved and I wiped my arse, and paid other people to do everything else for me.’ He had to learn how to use a washing machine and try to work out how much things cost. ‘It was years since I’d done any shopping myself that didn’t involve an auction house or a high-end designer boutique.’ Being sober came at a cost. He didn’t feel like going to clubs anymore. ‘I tried not to think about how long it was since I’d last had sex, in case the sound of me howling in anguish frightened the staff.’
After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that Lucian had made, to show to the Central School of Art. Lucian was accepted as a student. His mother was proud of the piece, and displayed it on the mantelpiece. ‘My mother started worshipping it so I smashed it,’ he said. When his father introduced him to a potter friend, he said: ‘This wild animal is my son.’
In his introduction to our twelfth LRB Collection, Sisters Come Second, Colm Tóibín writes that most siblings dream of being only children. Malin Hay explores this idea with Colm and Andrew O’Hagan,...
Colm Tóibín talks to Thomas Jones about the breakdown of Elizabeth Hardwick’s marriage to Robert Lowell, and its literary consequences.
Colm Tóibín reads his account of being treated for cancer.
Colm Tóibín discusses The Testament of Mary and his life and work generally with Michael McGirr, at the Melbourne Writers Festival, 2013.
Colm Tóibín talks to Barney Zwartz, Morag Fraser and Peter Horsfield about the new pope and whether reform is possible within the Catholic Church.
Colm Tóibín unpacks the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Thom Gunn, and the relationship between the poets, with help from recordings from the archive of 92nd Street Y in New York.
Colm Tóibín tells the story of Easter 1916, following the main personalities involved, including Thomas Clarke and Patrick Pearse.
Colm Tóibín talks about the process of writing his history of the Easter 1916 rebellion for the London Review of Books.
Colm Tóibín is not the first person to advance an interpretation of Thomas Mann as a virtuoso of life in the closet, and he generously lists in an appendix the numerous works of scholarship he has consulted....
At the start of Aeschylus’ Oresteia a watchman sees a flaming beacon. This is supposed to be the sign that Troy has fallen and that Agamemnon is coming home from the Trojan war. The...
‘Nobody knows … nobody knows.’ Elizabeth Bishop said her grandmother’s remark was the chorus of her childhood. ‘I often wondered what my grandmother knew that...
Eilis Lacey is a young Enniscorthy woman who has never dreamed of leaving Ireland. Friary Street and Castle Street, the square and the cathedral: the grey co-ordinates of her small County Wexford...
‘It’s, on the whole, I think,’ Henry James wrote to Edmund Gosse, ‘a queer place to plant the standard of duty.’ The letter is dated 7 January 1893, 29 years before...
The possession and use of a toothbrush was a mark of the difference between us and them, gentry and peasant, or so Lady Gregory suggested when she made the remark – jocular, perhaps, and...
‘You know, in my family,’ remarks a gay Irish architect in Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship, ‘my brothers and sisters – even the married ones...
Colm Tóibín’s frustrating new novel starts from a pleasingly skewed perspective: its narrator Richard Garay (less often, Ricardo) was brought up in Buenos Aires, child of an...
In Kiev in 1992, Colm Tóibín met the Bishop of Zhytomir, who was dressed in his full regalia. ‘He had that wonderful, well-fed, lived-in look that reminded me of several Irish...
To write simply is always to seem to write well. Bad writing is usually identified with over-writing: too many adjectives and adverbs, flowery figures of speech, verbosity. No one is ever accused...
Ever since 1958, when his play The Birthday Party opened in London, Harold Pinter has been admired by the judicious for the witty realism of his dialogue and the engrossing mystery of his...
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