How Colm Tóibín Burrowed Inside Thomas Mann’s Head – The New Yorker
After “The South,” more Tóibín novels arrived in rapid succession. He told me that he has never experienced writer’s block. Initially, the novels offered variations on his Irish heritage, on the interplay between secrets and lies. In 1996, he published “The Story of the Night,” about a young man pinned down by his secret homosexuality and by the societal corruption of Argentina in the years of the junta. It was Tóibín’s first novel with a gay character. Three years later, he published “The Blackwater Lightship,” which centers on a young Irishman dying of aids. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize. Soon afterward, Tóibín returned to Dublin after making appearances in London and New York, where he’d been doing “some piece of self-promoting.” At his town house, the refrigerator was bare, so he went out to buy groceries. Suddenly, he noticed cars honking their horns and flashing their lights. “Eventually, a car stops and a young man gets out,” Tóibín recalled. “He goes like this at me”—he raised his arms in the air, as if he were an exultant fan at a soccer game—“ ‘Yah! Yah!’ ” His countrymen were saluting the Booker acknowledgment. Later, his mother sent him a long letter consisting entirely of the names of people in Enniscorthy who had congratulated her.
Tóibín first read Thomas Mann’s “Buddenbrooks” when he was in his late teens. He was immediately struck by the plot’s parallels with his own life: a father dies and leaves behind a widow with an artistic child. Later, he was struck by another parallel. Mann, too, had to leave his old life, becoming a watcher in foreign places. “Losing a whole place, for a writer, is hugely traumatic but really rich,” Tóibín said. “The rooms you’ll never walk into again is something I think I know I am interested in.” He revisited “Buddenbrooks,” and happily made his way through “Death in Venice,” “The Magic Mountain,” and “Doctor Faustus.” In 1995, a published excerpt of “The Story of the Night,” the Argentina novel, effectively outed him, changing what journal editors approached him to write about. “I became their sort of pet queer,” he told me. He didn’t mind—he was sick of reviewing books on Ireland. So when the London Review of Books asked him to write about a trio of new biographies of Mann that made use of Mann’s journals, which had appeared earlier in Germany, he said yes. Tóibín was gripped. “It isn’t as if we’d known this all along,” he told me. “We hadn’t. I really started to think about it.” He saw for the first time that “Mann had been withholding so much, and concealing so much.” He now understood Mann’s body of work to be “a game between what was revealed and what was concealed.” “Death in Venice” revealed; the Biblical tetralogy “Joseph and His Brothers” concealed. Tóibín said, “It’s a very gay-closet thing to do, this current that someone can see and someone else can’t see.” This was a conflict, reminiscent of the secrets of Ireland, that he could dramatize.
But a related idea—examining the contrails of Henry James’s repressed sexuality—came together more quickly, and Tóibín published that novel in 2004. He thought of turning right away to “The Magician.” Instead, he decided to write again about something closer to his roots. “I felt I’d done enough posh people,” he told me. “It was almost a class issue.” And so he started “Brooklyn,” which required him to push beyond his traditional Irish knowledge and do research on the immigrant experience in America. His transplanted characters love the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Tóibín knew nothing about baseball. One day, Francisco Goldman took him to Montero, an old longshoreman’s bar in Brooklyn, to watch a televised playoff game. The Yankees’ starting pitcher was Andy Pettitte, and there were many closeups of him on the mound. “Oh, my God,” Tóibín kept calling out to Goldman, in a loud voice. “He’s so beautiful! Do you know anyone who knows him?” By the fifth inning, Goldman had ushered Tóibín out.
As the years passed, Tóibín continued to think about Mann. When he received a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for “The Master,” in 2005, he asked the newspaper to arrange for him to visit the house that Mann had built in Pacific Palisades after fleeing Europe, in 1942. The house, which Mann named Seven Palms, was then in private hands; it is now a residence for scholars, owned by the German government. Tóibín felt Mann’s steely presence in the house, particularly noticing the back stairs that allowed the novelist to enter and leave his study without bumping into his wife and children. He took notice of the bright sunlight and the palm trees. Mann had grown up in a dreary northern German city, but his mother was from Brazil. “It struck me how close it would have been to a dream he might have had of his mother,” Tóibín remembers.
About a decade ago, he had a stint teaching at Princeton, where Mann and his wife had first moved after coming to America, and he got to walk through the house where they had lived. While touring Europe for “Brooklyn,” he visited Lübeck. Four years later, he was at an arts festival in Paraty, Brazil, to read again from “Brooklyn,” and he took a side trip to see the house where Mann’s mother grew up. Though Tóibín was not yet writing the novel, he was, he told me, “always adding to it in my head.”
In 2017, he was enduring a rare rough patch with his writing: he had just put aside his novel about the German academic in New York. He went on vacation with El Kholti in Havana and woke up, as he recalls it, with “a bad rum hangover.” As the signature tune from “Buena Vista Social Club” wafted ceaselessly up to his hotel room, he asked himself, “Why am I such a disaster?” In a moment of “absolute clarity,” he thought of “The Magician,” and told himself, “The reason you’re postponing it is you’re afraid of it.” He decided to begin writing it at once.
A novelistic portrait of Mann would involve some technical hurdles for Tóibín. There were six children he would have to keep straight. He read no German and knew little about Germany. He was quite sure that Mann desired men, but he wasn’t sure what else he was sure of. “Mann was hard to understand,” he told me. “The personality was fluid, and there was no pinning him down.” And Mann lived a far bigger public life than any character he had written about. He was first a German nationalist, then an enemy of Hitler’s and a friend of Roosevelt’s, and finally a target of the F.B.I. “You’re dealing with epic material,” he said. “And these are subjects that I’d rather not deal with.” But his greatest fear, he remembers, was that writing the book was so important to him that he was “afraid of it being over.”
The writing came quickly, and by June, 2018, he had completed four chapters. Then he learned that he had cancer.
The disease had originated in one of Tóibín’s testicles, but his doctors soon found that it had spread to his lungs and his liver. He began chemotherapy, which left him unable to read, let alone write, for the first time in his life. Only after he began taking steroids did he have just enough focus to write. His treatment lasted six months, during which he composed two poems.
By the end of 2018, his oncologists had told him that the cancer was in remission. In January, 2019, he began teaching his regular semester of literature classes at Columbia. He told few people in New York about his illness. It was a relief, he said, to have “no one asking me how I was.” Tóibín told me that he generally maintains a low profile at Columbia, noting that young gay students are not particularly drawn to his classes: “Whatever aura I have, it’s not as a gay guru—I’m not Edmund White. ‘My mother’s reading your book’—I get that a lot.”
Tóibín told me that he never works on his novels in New York—he wasn’t sure why—but he flew to L.A. at every opportunity and fervently resumed his efforts on “The Magician.” He composed on a computer for the first time, to speed the process. “I don’t think I said to myself, ‘Look, I might only have six months,’ but I felt like I had a window.” (The cancer has not come back.)
Parts of the book presented a familiar challenge to Tóibín. Like James, Mann was—to quote a passage from “The Magician”—a “bourgeois, cosmopolitan, balanced, unpassionate” artist. But, because Mann was more comfortable with his attraction to men than James was—at least privately—Tóibín could be bolder in connecting his erotic life and his literary life. In one sequence in “The Magician,” Mann is working on “Buddenbrooks” in Italy, and starts daydreaming about handsome young men he has spied on the street; he recognizes, with satisfaction, that “the flushed vitality he felt was making its way into the very scene he was composing.” Even Mann’s wife and children—some of whom were queer themselves—accept his sexuality as an engine of his creativity. Tóibín conjures a touching scene from late in Mann’s life, when he is struggling to write fiction: at a Swiss hotel, his wife sets up a solo luncheon for Mann, so that his imagination can be enlivened by the presence of a waiter whom she knows he finds attractive.
In Tóibín’s portrait, Mann is less oppressed by his desire for men than by his rancorous children—who frequently criticize him for being too timid in denouncing fascism—and by political upheavals that he cannot control. Mann was obsessed with keeping his books in print in Germany, and this apparently made him reluctant to antagonize the Nazi regime, even as he and his family fell under direct threat. Tóibín told me that he made sure not to judge Mann by contemporary standards, adding, “If you start judging him, he comes out very badly.”
The biggest strategic question was how deeply Tóibín would saturate himself in the dense intellectual world of Mann, whose novels are suffused with the ideas of such thinkers as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Irony, parody, and philosophical discourse had become especially important to Mann’s work by the time he moved to Los Angeles. His 1947 novel, “Doctor Faustus,” swirls around abstract questions about the nature of music, and many of the ideas championed by the demoniac fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn resemble those of Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian modernist known for his bracingly atonal scores. Mann’s portrait of Leverkühn was shaped by exchanges that Mann had with the theorist Theodor Adorno about Schoenberg’s compositional methods.
Tóibín knew that he could nimbly capture Mann’s erotic yearnings and his conflicts with his children; but could he make repartee about abstract ideas come alive on the page? El Kholti’s writers at Semiotext(e) might excel at this, but he didn’t. Tóibín studied up, and, in extensive passages, he gamely tried to capture the back-and-forth between Adorno and Mann. But when he sent the manuscript to his editors—Mary Mount, in London, and Nan Graham, in New York—they told him that this material stopped the novel in its tracks. He reread the pages and reluctantly agreed. “They look like me showing off,” he told me now. He could see inside Mann’s talent, but this didn’t mean that they shared the same gifts as writers. “My book is about the intimate life of a man and family,” he said. “The reader has a right to say, Get on with a story. And it’s often a very good thing to say to yourself, too.”
“They call this the Sunny Southeast,” Tóibín said, with a laugh. We were at the beach, under a hazy sky, outside the Irish town of Blackwater—a short drive from where Tóibín grew up. He summered here as a child and built a vacation home nearby after “The Master” won a hundred-thousand-euro prize, the International impac Dublin Literary Award. The house is cluttered but neat—Tóibín has someone come to clean—and it is full of well-chosen furniture and art, a far cry from his bohemian days in Dublin. (“Colm has good rugs,” Beatrice Monti told me.) It was the longest day of the year, and the Irish Sea had a metallic tint. The waves were tiny but insistent, like uncoöperative children.
Tóibín walked along the beach in a linen jacket and long pants, looking like a figure from the nineteen-fifties, which was in keeping with the town’s ambience. On the drive down from Dublin, we’d passed a restaurant advertising ballroom dancing. Tóibín stopped drinking after the cancer treatment, but as he strolled along it was still easy to imagine a flask in his jacket pocket.
He pointed out a road sign that called the beach Ballyconnigar. Locals have always called it Cush. He explained, “The name comes from cois”—“beside,” in Irish, as in “beside the sea.” Tóibín likes to walk when he talks, but when he arrives at an observation that particularly interests him he stops, and then you have to walk back to him to hear it. At one point on our walk, he spoke admiringly about “The Queen’s Throat,” a book by the queer theorist Wayne Koestenbaum. Tóibín then shared his annoyance with the voguish use of “queer” to describe any kind of deviation from social norms: “It’s become a very broad term, and I find it useless most of the time.”
Gesturing at the chilly surf, he noted that such beaches had been recurring literary territory for him. In eight of his novels, he said, “someone takes a swim in cold water and hesitates before they go in.” (Mann goes for a dip in the Baltic.) Tóibín then admitted that he hadn’t been aware of this pattern until recently, when Bernard Schwartz, the director of the Unterberg Poetry Center, at the 92nd Street Y, noted it to him.
We went up a steep hill and continued along paths that he’d known since childhood. They were lined by dense fields of heather and exuded the smell of cut grass. He pointed out wild fuchsia and gorse by name. In “The Heather Blazing,” a cousin of the protagonist lives in a house half of which has fallen off a cliff and onto the beach below. We passed the remains of the house that had inspired Tóibín. He was pleased to come upon his literary symbol again. “You can see how they made the walls out of mud, dirt, whatever they had,” he said. We then walked by a house with a crumbling white stucco wall: during his boyhood, this was his family’s summer house. He mentioned that one of the subsequent owners had let him in to see the bedroom where he once slept. We continued up rutted dirt lanes. Occasionally, a car passed, the driver’s eyes craning to see who we were. Most of the people here were local, and still knew Tóibín or his family.