Christmas Reading I
I’m usually a fiction tragic but anything my Colm Tóibín is worth reading so I was happy to take his new essay collection away with me on my Christmas break.
Most, but not all, of these essays were originally published in the London Review of Books. The book is divided into three parts: the first part is basically memoir ; the second concerns his writings about the Catholic Church and, in particular, the Popes and the Vatican; and the third is about writers – Marilynne Robinson, Francis Stuart, and John McGahern.
The most engaging is the first: Cancer: My Part in its Downfall (LRB 2019) and not just because of the opening line – “It all started with my balls.” He charts, with candour and detail, what led him to see a doctor, his examination, procedures, diagnosis (testicular cancer which had spread to his lungs), more procedures, surgery, chemo therapy, and recovery. He obviously wrote the piece well after it was all over; how else could he have written it with such dry humour, frankness, and detachment. Despite the content it’s a very revealing, educational, and entertaining piece of writing. The namesake piece, A Guest at the Feast, first published by Penguin in 2011, is a memoir of his early recollections about growing up in the small town of Enniscorthy, in County Wexford, south east Ireland in the 1960s. His early life was dominated, like all children in Ireland at the time, by Family and the Catholic Church with very little space between them. A Brush with the Law (The Dublin Review 2007) centres on his years as a journalist and the fight to repeal, or at least amend, the laws governing homosexuality in Ireland.
Part Two concentrates on the Vatican, Karol Józef Wojtyła who became Pope John Paul II and his determination to avoid any change whatsoever in policies concerning morality, women, and child abuse; Among the Flutterers (LRB 2010) the dragging of the Church, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century causing it to begrudgingly admit to the coverup of child abuse by the clergy, and the ongoing fight for apologies and compensation; The Bergoglio Smile: Pope Frances (LRB 2021) focuses on the current Pope and his very vague attitudes and activities during the political upheaval of the 1970 and 80s in his native Argentina, involving kidnappings, murders, and ‘disappearances’; The Ferns Report (LRB 2005), the official Irish government inquiry into the allegations of clerical sexual abuse in the Diocese of Ferns in County Wexford which placed the blame for child abuse firmly in the hands of the Church and the Police.
Part three contains essays on the American writer, Marilynne Robinson, and how her Christianity pervades her work; Francis Stuart, the controversial Iris writer (though born in Townsville, Queensland in 1902) who spent most of WWII in Berlin broadcasting to Ireland. He said he didn’t support Hitler, he supported change. His latter fiction, all inspired by his time in Germany, tries to explain his position and exonerate himself in the eyes of his readers; and John McGahern (1934-2006) arguably one of the most important Irish writers. His work is imbued with darkness, the Catholic Church, abusive fathers, long-suffering sons, and stoic women.
Above all this book is shadowed by the Catholic Church and Tóibín’s response to it. He was raised a Catholic, contemplated the Church as a career to ‘hide’ his homosexuality, now shares a Los Angeles home with his partner, Hedi El Kholti, a writer and editor. He teaches at Columbia University and was appointed Chancellor the University of Liverpool in 1917. He has written numerous books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays and is ‘perhaps Ireland’s greatest living male writer’.I don’t know Tóibín’s current belief, or stance, on Christianity but what I took away from this collection of essays was that the Catholic Church, the Vatican, is going to continue to decline in influence, and may never recover, because of its basic premise, and number one flaw, indeed, it’s paradox: we are born sinful but must live to be good.
You can buy the book in various editions here.
Michael K Freundt 