ESSAYS: New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their FamiliesBy Colm Tóibín Viking, 346pp. £20
EVERYTHING IN New Ways to Kill Your Motherhad a previous outing, the majority as reviews. Thanks to ingenious sequencing and immaculate prose, however, it reads like something entirely newly minted.
It opens with a chapter on mothers in Jane Austen and Henry James: Austen's mother outlived her, and James was "devoted" to his, yet despite a positive experience of mothers both frequently left them out of their novels. Why? Colm Tóibín believes the explanation is practical. To prove this he analyses the plots of several of their novels and demonstrates that the great advantage in omitting mothers is the space they leave into which Austen and James can then insert aunt figures who do things to help the story, the doing of which won't be believed if they're mothers but are entirely plausible if they're "aunts". For instance, in The Ambassadors, if Madame de Vionnet is a mother she can't seduce young Chad, but as an aunt figure she certainly can.
Characters, according to Tóibín, though they must seem credible, aren’t persons from life (the writer’s or anyone else’s), and we mustn’t judge them like people from life; we must judge them solely by how they serve (or not) the pattern of the novel.
At the same time, writers’ experiences, especially of their families, have a colossal impact on their works. (They are everything, we might even be tempted to say.) So, although one can’t read from the life to the work (and therefore expect to find the life in the work), the humus from which the writer springs – the family life – is the basis of so much, and it’s that relationship that Tóibín unpicks in the rest of the book.
The text is divided in two, with the first half given over to Irish writers, the second to non-Irish ones. The Irish section opens with two essays on Yeats. The first is on his slippery relations with his father, the portraitist, and the cunning way Yeats avoided passing judgment on his father’s writing. The other is on Yeats’s marriage and how Georgie Yeats made it work, first by faking (a term she hated) her automatic writing during a dismal honeymoon to secure her new husband’s attention and later, during his final decade, organising his erotic itinerary, even to the extent of escorting him from Ireland to England, putting him on the train to his mistress and then returning alone to Ireland.
Little wonder, then, that, in 1965, the centenary of Yeats’s birth and three years before Georgie’s death, Frank O’Connor, in the course of the oration he made at Yeats’s grave, in Sligo, said: “Another thing he would have wished me to do – and which I must do since none of the eminent people who have written of him in his centenary year has done so – is to say how much he owed to the young Englishwoman he married, and who made possible the enormous development of his genius from 1916 onward.” Ireland owes Georgie much.
The Irish section continues with essays on Synge (a marvellous counterintuitive description of how surprisingly little his pious Protestant relations impeded his theatre career), Beckett (the account offers a nastier Sam than we're used to) and Brian Moore (the painful consequences of his alienation from family and Ireland are illuminatingly charted). It ends with pieces on Sebastian Barry's play Hinterlandand on the new versions of Irishness offered by Roddy Doyle's and Hugo Hamilton's family memoirs.
The second half of the book opens with an account of Thomas Mann and family, and the literary consequences of their fraught relationships with each other. This essay, a model of intensity and compression, gives the story of every member of the clan (and all their stories are terrible) but devotes the bulk of the narrative to Thomas’s son, Klaus.
And what a story is Klaus's: born in 1906, the second child of six, his mother's favourite, his sister Erika's creature, a prescient anti-fascist way before his father, an alcoholic, a morphine addict, and a writer who produced despite an indefatigable talent for self-destruction, he spent his life pining for his father's love (which he never got) and died by suicide in May 1949, after learning that his masterpiece, Mephisto, couldn't be published in Germany. Thomas Mann, then on a lecture tour in Sweden, didn't break his schedule to attend his son's funeral, and of Klaus's siblings only Michael (who himself died by suicide in 1977) attended.
The book’s second half continues with essays on Borges (an extraordinary feat of abbreviation that in a few pages brilliantly connects the writer’s weird familial world and the work), Hart Crane, Tennessee Williams (the essay elegantly connects the work to Williams’s experience of his lobotomised sister, Rose), John Cheever (a beautiful introduction to this devious writer’s family relations and the impact on the work of his homosexuality, which he denied) and, finally, James Baldwin, who gets two pieces, examining his relationship to both his own father and the Great Father, the United States, which, with luck, will remind readers what a great essayist he was.
New Ways to Kill Your Motheris eclectic (and some may cavil at the absence of Joyce, though I didn't). Yet despite being so diverse, it coheres thanks to language that is consistently calm and pure, a tone that's unfailingly warm and compassionate, and the author's ingenuity with regard to the deployment of names, dates and facts. There are 15 essays here, all containing masses of detail as well as analysis of complex texts and all manner of other kinds of information, yet, reading through, I was never once obliged to go back to check something. It's not often one can say that.
Unquestionably, Colm Tóibín’s prose meets Orwell’s standard: it’s like a pane of clear glass, and through it I saw a number of writers in their family settings. For the most part the writers weren’t nice, didn’t have a good time and didn’t create much domestic happiness, but, then, I suppose, it was ever thus.
Carlo Gébler teaches at HMP Maghaberry and Queen's University Belfast. His new memoir, Confessions of a Catastrophist, will be published later in the spring by Lagan Press
