Colm Tóibín on 1970s Barcelona, Trump's America and Escaping into Art

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1:55What you remember then becomes important. Don't write anything down. Leave it. Because what you're waiting for is not an idea. It's a melody. It's a rhythm. It's a sound. And whatever it is, you've been waiting for it. Colm Tobin, celebrated Irish novelist, returning in his new book to a place he discovered as a young man. Tell me, Colm, about what Spain meant to you when you arrived there aged about 20. So many of the things that were happening were so close to things that had happened in Ireland in the years leading up to independence. I'm talking about the feelings of love for your country, that your country has been victimised.

2:34There were so many things that fascinated me because they echoed Ireland, but also I understood them through the lens of Ireland as it were. From Bloomberg Weekend, this is The Michelle Hussain Show. I'm Michelle Hussain.

2:52I think the first Column to Bean book I ever read was the incredibly successful Brooklyn, later made into a film with Saoirse Ronan in the leading role. But in the years since, I have appreciated this writer of fiction and non-fiction more and more. I am far from the only one. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times. He's able to write from within the head of a female as well as a male protagonist, and able to capture attention through dialogue and also convey silence. With a new novel called The Bridge coming out, there was a chance to speak to him. And when I read an advanced copy and compared it to what I knew of his life, I realised Colm Tabin has used that book to return to a place that is meaningful to him, the north of Spain.

3:48He himself is from a small town south of Dublin, though he lives these days mostly between Los Angeles and New York, where he teaches at Columbia. As ever, there are written notes to accompany this episode, my notes, and you'll find them at bloomberg.com forward slash Michelle. That's where Bloomberg subscribers get a deeper sense of what we discuss, the history and politics, for example, behind the places in Colm's writing. And with that, we can dive in precisely where the conversation begins. Hello, Colm. Can you hear me? I can, of course. How are you? Very well. Thank you so much for talking to us.

4:30You're in LA. Well, thanks for having me. I am, yes, this morning in LA. And I want to tell you right at the start that I really enjoyed reading The Bridge. It's fantastic. I found it really moving. Oh, The Bridge. Oh, great. You're probably the first person who said that. You're the first person who wasn't involved in his production who has read it. So that's just great. I thoroughly enjoyed being taken into this world. And I was thinking that the last time you and I spoke, it wasn't face to face, unfortunately, but I think it was when the film of Brooklyn was coming out. So it must be more than 10 years ago now, 2015 that was.

5:06Yeah, that's right. It's funny the way this time goes, isn't it? I'd love to begin with the bridge because there is so much that I want to explore with you about the world that you've created in that book. I wonder, first of all, how you would describe it, the plot and the setting. Introduce us, if you like, to the bridge. There's a part of the Catalan Pyrenees called the Pallars. And there's a part of the Pallars called Pallarsubira. Yeah. And that area was for many, I mean, for all the centuries, cut off from the rest of the world because there was no bridge, there was a footbridge merely across the river.

5:44And you can imagine if you're a smuggler, because Andorra is not very far away. And for really, you know, all the time, all the cigarettes, all the brandy, all the rum, everything you need comes down by smugglers from Andorra. And of course, if you're a smuggler, the idea of a new bridge, is the new bridge going to be good or bad for us? Is it going to mean easier access to the other side? Or is it going to mean it'll be easier for us to be caught? That's really how the story begins. There's a man and his son and they're watching out and you realize that they really don't know what they're doing.

6:16Yeah. That they're just not smart. They're not cunning. They're not strategic. And of course they will be caught. They will be the first to be caught on the new bridge. And my job is to try and make you see the world through the eyes of the sun, Miguel, to sort of immerse you in the way he notices things and feels things. He's obviously extremely sensitive. He's gay. This is 1950-something. He's a rural part of Spain. You wonder how is he going to manage? And then you wonder, when they get imprisoned for being smugglers, how they're going to manage a prison sentence. So I'm fascinated that you're telling me it's set in the 1950s because as I read, I was trying to figure that out because even though it's a young man seeing a time of change around him, there's not only the bridge being built, but there's roads being built.

7:02But I almost felt it could be any time from the 50s, even possibly through to the 70s. So I thought there's this weird combination of time changing. And yet, at least I was a bit unsure about which decade exactly this was set. But it's a part of Spain you know, right? Oh, yeah. I've been going there since, I think, 1976. So I've been going there for, is that 50 years? But yeah, I've been going there for all that time. So I sort of know the landscape. I suppose one of the clues about the time is that they're smuggling styluses for record players. And that suggests a sort of time slightly later when people have more record players.

7:39And obviously they smuggle condoms as well. Yes. And I found myself also, I have to tell you, the few place names there are in it right at the beginning, I found myself looking up these places and figuring out how many people live there. and I realised that La Varsie has a population of 343 and Rialp, the next town down, is 654. Yeah, these are remote, small villages in which everything is watched and everything is known, in which they sort of protect you in some ways but repel you in others. And so Miguel and his father have already had to leave a village for being very unpopular, and they've arrived in this new one.

8:17And in a way, the prison itself is a sort of village. Yes, that has its own life. And obviously, we're not going to give the story away, but I found many elements of it really moving. Tell me, Colm, about what Spain meant to you when you arrived there aged about 20, around the time of Franco's fall. What did it give you? What did it open up to you? What happened in Spain before Franco's death is a sort of big change. The big change probably happened in 1968 and 69. So the young people, it wasn't as though there was a sudden moment in November 75 when Franco dies and everything begins to change.

8:58I think in people's minds and in families and in relationships, the change had already taken place. And now where we're getting is public manifestation. I arrived in Barcelona in September 1975. And what was absolutely fascinating was how little hope people had then that any change was going to take place in the public realm. People saw the king as a sort of puppet for Franco. They saw fascism as something that was likely to continue. But slowly underneath all this, in places of power, people were getting ready to introduce democracy very, very quickly. And this, in its manifestation for me was massive demonstrations for amnesty, for freedom, for democracy, things that were already coming in any case.

9:43So that while there were baton charges at the very beginning and there was tear gas, that really faded out. Really by the spring of 1976, it was absolutely clear to everybody that they were marching for something they already had. And then divisions began. I mean, I saw a barman in a bar I would go to in a march as a communist. I had no idea he was a communist. But the big thing that happened in Barcelona was the Catalan movement, was the revival of Catalan nationalism and its emergence in two particular forms, one being sort of socialist nationalism and the other being much more conservative nationalism.

10:19Because I'm Irish, so many of the things that were happening were so close to things that had happened in Ireland in the years leading up to independence. Obviously, it didn't include a 1916 rebellion. But I'm talking about the ingredients. I'm talking about the feelings of love for your country, that your country has been victimized by this larger country that would emerge in singing, that would emerge in dancing, that would emerge in culture of various types, including in Barcelona, of course, football, which was very close to the Gaelic Athletic Association in Ireland, the hurling and Gaelic football.

10:52the way in which sport was commandeered to be part of the cultural movement that should lead eventually to political independence. And of course, fetishising various places in the landscape, a place called Canigo or Munseign, or even the Pyrenees, the whole Catalan Pyrenees was considered the real home, the sort of ancient home of the Catalans. And there were so many things that fascinated me because they echoed Ireland, but also I understood them through the lens of Ireland, as it were. Yeah, I still can't help thinking what an immense contrast, though, to your life growing up in a very small town in Ireland and then being in Barcelona at this incredibly intense, febrile, still quite uncertain time, even if everyone was sure that, you know, democracy was coming.

11:40Look, some of it is almost funny in retrospect where you, I really didn't know, or I didn't know much, that you were meant to enjoy food. My mother used to say, eat that now. You don't eat to enjoy it, you eat to live. No one in Barcelona believed that. The entire pleasure taken over the table, over going with friends to eat, over restaurants, how cheap restaurants were and how good the food was. The pleasure people took in colour, in beauty, in painting walls, in the sort of architecture of the city, both the 14th century city and the 19th century city. There was a whole sense of soaking in vast quantities of beauty and beautiful food, beautiful looking people.

12:25The whole way life was conducted was to give pleasure to the population. In Ireland, we really had a lot of rain and drizzle and that often gave way to mist and rain. Pubs closed early. And there's a general sense of life as a sort of punishing thing. But the other thing was, of course, that I was gay. And there were no gay bars in Barcelona then. They came very quickly, by 77, say. But because there were no gay bars, there were streets that were just entirely filled with gay men at night. That certainly wasn't true in Dublin. And there was no shame, I could tell you. So there was a lot of excitement that has never really, I still can walk through Barcelona going, you know, with the whole sense of newness and excitement and pleasure.

13:11Yeah, I did wonder about that side of freedom, the sexual freedom and what it meant to you as a young man at that time in your life. And of course, Spain's been there in a number of your books in fiction and nonfiction. Were you at this point already writing or already sure that writing was what you wanted to do? No, I was not. I was a failed poet. I think there are large numbers in every country, really. But in Ireland, it's a particular thing where you realize at a certain age, I must stop because there's so many good poets around that I get caught out as being a bad one. And so I had really written very seriously as a poet from 17, 18, 1920.

13:51By the time I went to Barcelona, I had stopped and I had no idea how to write fiction or anything about fiction. And the only thing I wrote were letters home. And so for three years, I wrote nothing. And I wonder if this wasn't a good thing, that somehow or other, it left me a lot of material to use or to soak up. And that I also, I think what's important is that I wasn't thinking, oh, I can use this for a book when something was happening. It all came fresh and raw and unmediated. And that isn't the case now, for example, if I were somewhere and there was some excitement going on, I'd start framing it and thinking about it and watching it.

14:30There was all free. There was no sense of this material could be anything other than personal, private and all the more fun for that. But memories do lead to books, right, later on. And I wondered if there are images from this, like there are people you remember or distinct places even, because I think at one point you lived in a village in the Pyrenees. You weren't always living in Barcelona. Yeah, I think what really gives you impetus is loss. So after three years, in 1978, I went back to Ireland. I went back to Ireland partly because I was always going to be an outsider in Catalunya. I couldn't vote in elections and I always spoke with a funny accent.

15:14And I wanted to go home. But the going home then left me with this massive experience, filled with richness, filled with detail, filled, as you say, with things that are really not only to be savoured, but can never be forgotten. And my job was now in those years to put shape on that experience, to find a metaphor, to find some character who would go through what I went through. So it wouldn't be autobiographical as much as it would be a novel. And yes, friends of mine had gone to live in that village in the Pyrenees that's in the bridge. And I went up there a lot, spent a lot of time there. Later on, I went there much, much more.

15:50I mean, in recent years, I tend not to stay in Barcelona as much as go to the village. It's just about middle age into old age. You want to just be somewhere really, really quiet. But the memories remained and it remained sort of unresolved experience that I needed in some way that I'd done nothing with. I missed this place. I remembered this place. And what I got next then was a way of registering all of that in a story I could tell in a novel. And that was my first novel, The South. And Ireland to you today, because you're in the US talking to us, you've essentially made your home in the US for decades now.

16:27How rooted are you in the Irish side of your identity today? I read the Irish Times every night before I go to sleep and I might check it once or twice during the day. I talk to friends every day on the phone in Ireland. I keep thinking I'm absolutely up to date on what's going on in Ireland and that I'm almost like a lot of people in America that I'm actually living in the old country I think much more consciously than I'm actually in America now this sounds true but of course it isn't this year on Good Friday which famously Irish pubs were closed by law on Good Friday but 15 years ago this changed so if you've been living in Ireland you've forgotten about this law But I said to someone on Good Friday, it must be hard today, but the pub's closed.

17:16And she said, you are in exile syndrome. This is the past. This is the country you left. Forget about it. The pubs are wide open. They're packed with people. Would you stop trying to invent an Ireland of your own memory? And so I felt suitably chastened that you think you're actually living in Ireland. And I go back and forth quite a lot. And I have a house in Wexford in Ireland. And I think I'm there. I think I really haven't left at all. But that's not true. I find it fascinating that level of, you know, keeping up with the news of Ireland to the extent you do. Like, does that mean you're also really politically engaged in Ireland?

17:54I'm imagining, like, let's say if there is to be a border poll and there's a campaign on a reunited island, could you imagine yourself actively campaigning? Yeah, it's a very serious matter and it has to be worked out very slowly and carefully in advance, not on matters of emotion. You know, do you feel you'd love to be in a united Ireland? That's no use. What's this going to do for health? Is the NHS in the Northern Ireland going to close? If so, under what circumstances? How is Northern Ireland to be policed? Is it to be policed from Dublin using Dublin-led police in difficult parts of Belfast, for example?

18:30What's going to happen to education? Now, also, the big question is what's going to happen to money? I think that the question has to be in what way will this improve the lives of people? Forget territory, think people. You're right. The detail is obviously really important. But if you think about the Scottish independence campaign or the Brexit referendum, those tend to be emotional rather than hard nosed in that way. And I wonder if you're saying actually that you would discourage it or you fear what it might unleash. I think it's really important in a campaign that you're ready to answer all these bread and butter questions.

19:10And I was tangentially involved in the gay marriage referendum in Ireland. And we were ready. I mean, the campaign was ready every day, if anyone spreads a rumour, to immediately get involved. In a referendum campaign, you really have to have a central headquarters that is run by people who have really done this before, who know a lot about elections. And unfortunately, neither the Scottish nor the Brexit one was, I mean, I was upset by the result of both. That they weren't run by people who were looking after what people really cared about and making the argument every single day.

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22:23As a writer, how do you maintain the balance between being engaged in the world, which you clearly are, and creating that sacred space for your own writing? I mean, I'm just someone who can't say no. So if something interesting comes my way, if someone suggests something I should write, a libretto for an opera or a set of songs or write a big article on some subject. I'm going to do that. And I teach one semester a year. So actually, oddly enough, the year is 12 months. And if you could devote five of them to writing a novel, that's actually quite a lot of days. If you're writing 1 ,000 words a day, which you should be doing, then you should really be able to complete a novel in that period if you really concentrate.

23:12And it's nice because sometimes you think, well, this is my time for writing a novel. If I don't use this, I'll be back at Columbia teaching and I won't have the novel written. There are writers who just write their fiction. I wonder what that's like where you wake in the morning and think, I don't really have to do it today because I can do it tomorrow. And I could do it next month and I could do it next season. I could do it next year. I never feel like that. I feel this is an emergency. This is an emergency. and it has to be done. If it isn't done, I'll lose it. It'll be too late next year.

23:43So it's actually, oddly enough, gives you a sort of impetus or at least a concentration or a discipline or a way of functioning that really, really means you know what you're doing, not only today, but this month. So your day, like right now, a typical day, will you plan it or you have a routine that means you sit down at a certain time and this is your writing time or this is your media time? Like how on a day to day basis, how do you organise it? I've just written down here on my right the list of things to be done today. And I have to finish this essay I've been working on on the Irish revival.

24:15I have to write an email to a friend, quite a long one about something serious. I have to read three or four short stories and I have to write, begin writing an essay on a poem, 500 words to try and deliver this week, plus two longer pieces. But all the time, I have a novel in my head that I am working out the details of, that in stray moments, as I'm crossing the room, it could happen any time I could get another image for. I will start writing the novel sometime towards the end of the year, certainly early next year. I'm not teaching next year, so certainly January and February. And I think I have the opening now.

24:51But it's also important not to start until you're sure you're ready to start. Don't force an opening image, that it must seem natural, It must seem like breath, the sentences in an opening of a novel. It must seem like something that the melody came easily. And in order for that to happen, you have to give the melody time. And forcing it would show. And you'd end up dropping it, abandoning it, erasing it. So I'm probably working harder on a novel than I think by letting these days go by without deliberately setting about writing. But I've got other things to do, all of which involve words. You've got a pen in your hand right now as you're talking.

25:30I certainly do. And that made me wonder. So that opening to the next novel, is it just in your head or have you written down a paragraph or two? I don't take notes. I think that if something is worth forgetting, it needs to be forgotten. What you remember then becomes important. Don't write anything down. Leave it. Because what you're waiting for is not an idea. It's a melody. It's a rhythm. It's a sound. even if the first sentence of the novel seems rhythmically not very interesting it has a rhythm and whatever it is you've been waiting for it and so someday when the winter comes I will write it down I love that but your work ethic is also I find it slightly shaming because what you get through in one day oh it's not an ethic I just drift into things and then I do them I'm also curious about the connection between the writing and the real life events, because I saw that there's one of the short stories in this book, The News from Dublin, which is a collection, is about an Irishman who's undocumented in the US and decides to leave the country before ice come for him, essentially.