Colm Tóibín’s new book, The Magician, deals with the life of Thomas Mann.

Tóibín finished the book before lockdown but he went back to it in that period and amended it and edited it. The subject matter has added to the natural anxiety which Tóibín feels as he releases a novel. He is not writing about Ireland, he says, or Wexford. Or Enniscorthy. He is dealing with one of the great German writers from a family that have intrigued many for a long time.

But the pandemic too has increased that anxiety. Tóibín came into the The Currency studio to talk about the effect of lockdown on the psyche, Thomas Mann and his many ambivalences and repressions, as well as Ireland today.

Tóibin on the pandemic

Colm Tóibin (CT): I also think the pandemic has – in ways we don’t understand – has upped…any emotional response to anything is now doubled, or can seem uncontrollable in certain moments.

Dion Fanning (DF): How do you mean?

CT: I mean anxiety. It seems to me that anxiety, which is a natural thing, and we all suffer from it, for various reasons, seems to me worse now. If there’s something to be anxious about, you know. If you’re, if you suddenly think you’re going to run out of money, you become much more worried about that. Or if you’ve got a novel coming out, you become much more worried about that, as a result of the last 18 months.

DF: Is that because our normal devices for sort of managing our anxiety or alleviating anxiety have been taken away? We’ve been left to sort of sit and ponder for a long time.

CT: Yeah, it’s that plus also that socialising releases so much energy, that if you don’t have socialising, that energy has nowhere to go, just the normal business of meeting people. talking, listening, responding, that gets an awful lot of things out of the self. But if you keep them in, and if you have a lid on them, and also if you..if you’re sort of locked into a space, a domestic space, it just means that certain things will become darker than they might. And, oddly enough, that includes the publication of a book.

DF: And did you find, how did you find coping with that? Because you are, you know, obviously as a writer, you’re used to solitude and the solitary life, but you’re also a social animal, too. Would that be fair?

CT: Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, I just got more worried and in a state of high tension, and, you know, that I would, I would wake in the night and I would, yeah..but I mean, there’s no point in getting into a state about this because people who lost their jobs were in a much worse state. I’m just saying that everything…that we have to allow for the fact that people’s response to ordinary problems that arise seem to me greater and I think that people, I think it’s really changed people in ways that they won’t understand for a long time.

DF: And do you think there will be a permanent change?

CT: I do, yeah.

DF: Because there’s some people who think that, you know, you look at the Spanish Flu in 1918, there wasn’t much, that people seemed to move on from that very quickly.

CT: I think the lockdown was longer. You know in other words, that idea you must stay home. And the number of people telling you this, and the number of media available by which this information could be disseminated was really enormous. And figures in Ireland like Holahan. And that sort of assistant of his, looked like a greyhound.

DF: Glynn.

CT: Yeah. And in America, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx and Trump and then Biden, you know. There was no end to the number of people who were telling you what you should do. And, you know, people became very obedient in certain countries, such as Ireland, and less so in places like Oklahoma.

Tóibín on the evolution of Thomas Mann’s politics

DF: Let’s talk about the book. As you said, it’s about Thomas Mann. And his life and times which were extraordinary. If you look at the years he lives they were there the story of modern Germany, born in 1875, died in 1955, born four years after German unification. And his life and his own ambivalences was reflected in the times if you like. Talk about what drew you to him and what you felt you could do with a life like his in a novel.

CT: The interest really is what you said, it’s the ambivalences. You know, it’s not as though he moved with great certainty through this period, say, as a visionary democrat, or as someone who sort of saw what was coming all the time. None of those things happened to him. And what was really I suppose the most shocking thing were his antics during the First World War. But I had to really think about that. You know, that when he was effectively apolitical, or just conformist or someone who just didn’t bother much with all of that he was busy writing and he had a young family. And suddenly, in 1914, he gets fired up as a sort of Prussian militarist, and he uses terms that are very close to what Patrick Pearse was talking about, the need for bloodshed and the need for cleansing in Europe. And he was using phrases like that. And it was really irrational, but you realise that, actually, most German writers were doing the same thing. And of course, people in in England on their side of patriotism were doing the same thing as well. But nonetheless, it’s strange to watch him.

DF: But he had this belief in the German spirit.

CT: Yeah, and that never left him, the idea that somehow or other what he had inherited on the literature, from someone like Goethe, and, even more on the musical side from Beethoven and Wagner was a sort of culture that unsettled the spirit and gave it a need for this extraordinary quality of yearning. And he would compare that to what was a sort of complacency in the spirit in England, and in France that had a sort of civilization, he used that word, rather than a culture, which Germany had.

So you can see where this might move, I mean, this idea that the specialness of Germany and that Germany was surrounded by its enemies, or at least had Russia on one side and France on the other. And that it had a reason to be paranoid. He was feeling all this in the First World War, but you can see where these feelings might have led. So the question then becomes, why did he not become a National Socialist since, you know, the emotions he was feeling and expressing in 1914 to 1918? And the reason I think, is that his wife was more intelligent than he was. And she was a natural democrat, as he was a sort of natural monarchist. So she talked him out of it, but also circumstances, that defeat, watching the wounded coming back into the cities with the full defeat for Germany, I think also woke him up and to some extent, and he went back to work, he wrote his great novel, The Magic Mountain after the war. But the transformation was really enormous, from being sort of militarist to being someone who became interested in the preservation of democracy and what democracy meant. But I mean, you can never pin him down.

And so in his will, he said that his diaries were to be published 35 years after his death and then he crossed out 35 and put 25. If you were a Mann scholar, and you would have been writing very serious papers about Death in Venice, which is the story of Aschenbach, the German writer who comes to Venice on his own, and sees a beautiful young boy and cannot stop looking at him. And the desire feels almost, well it is sexual, but it’s also some sort of idealised body.

And the scholars thought this was all metaphor, all symbols, was all about symbols of beauty and maybe even symbols of decay. But actually, when Thomas Mann’s wife’s memoirs came out, it was clear that it was an actual narrative based on experience and that he had been in Venice the year before and he had seen this boy and he couldn’t take his eyes off him.

Mann’s sexuality

DF: And that was the other like the ambivalence and then the repression was the other because you’ve talked about his family, he had six children. He had his wife who was maybe the only woman he was ever attracted to.

CT: Yeah, she says that later on that her father was a tremendous philanderer and it was such a pleasure to be married to someone who at least didn’t look at other women. She meant this ironically, I mean, you can’t really call him bisexual, in that he really only had an interest in the woman he married and it wasn’t as though there were any other women in his life or in his dreams, in his diaries, whereas he is constantly looking at young men. I mean, it’s fascinating the idea that he’s giving these very stiff German lectures, and they often go on for ages, and they’re very scholarly and buttoned up and serious. And he’s very serious but his diaries later on say that he’s just gazing all the time at someone in the third row. And his gaze was enormous because, as you say the repression was so great, that the gaze would have been very intense. So when the diaries came out, the poor German scholars had to rethink the entire business.

Mann and fascism

DF: And there is there are echoes of of today, I suppose in some of those ideas, too, you know, when a writer who thinks that, you know, what, what use is humanism in a time of barbarism.

CT: Yeah, there was, I mean, it was a funny moment where I was trying to think, I was trying not to use words like totalitarianism in the book, because it’s just too long and too meaningless and too abstract. And I was trying to find an image of what it would be like, of the first disturbance, the first thing in a totalitarian state that would get you and it came up into my head,  I didn’t do research on this, I just put it in – because people often think that the post is slowing down, even if it isn’t. I put in ‘the post slowed down’. And then I was reading the book over and I realised – I was in Los Angeles – and the post literally had deliberately been slowed down by one of Trump’s minions and stuff sent from New York just wasn’t arriving and everyone was talking about it, you know, nothing was coming.

And I was gonna take it out of the book, because I thought, well, people will just think I’m just trying to, you know, use a contemporary image, but I left it in. Certainly, there are moments when his son Golo was trying to explain to him, these Nazis mean business. Don’t look at the figures for their election, like getting 2 per cent, 3 per cent, but just look at their determination, look at the amount of space are taking up.

And I think in Ireland, we could see, there was a certain moment where Sinn Féin were really very low in the opinion polls and in their electoral results, but actually, if you watched them, you realised something else was happening. And it was certainly the same with Trump, that even on the day of the election, people just presumed that he couldn’t, it just couldn’t happen in America. And then it did. And certainly when I went to Hungary, spent time there in 1990, 1991, the last thing you thought was that someone like Viktor Orban was going to change so fundamentally, and become this great figure spreading hate. Also, I’m one of the few people left who will admit to thinking that Russia, the old Soviet Union, was going to embrace us with open arms and attempt to become democratic like Europe and have nice elections and Parliaments and human rights. There was a good moment where I believed this [laughs]. So I mean, that idea of human foolishness in relation to threats coming is in this book. There were so many times he failed to see what was coming. You know, he’s not smart. It’s not as though he’s a sort of public intellectual right? He’s just not. I mean, he’s the fool of the family.

The writer vs the person

DF: There’s a wonderful line in the book as well, where he talks about, he’s comparing the craft of a novelist to a composer. And he says, it is a grubby business writing novels, composers can think about God and the ineffable. We have to imagine the buttons on the coat.

CT: Yeah, I think you feel that very much in Ireland, where there’s so many poets. You’re passing a poet on the street, and you think, ‘Oh, my God, I spent the whole morning setting up a scene with every detail with you know, yeah, the buttons on the coat, what exactly somebody, the tone’. And all the poet has to do, they can say anything, they can say, the sun came out at night. And readers will say, ‘well, that’s a poet, a poet can do that’. Whereas in prose, if you tried the sun came out at night, people would say, ‘no it doesn’t’.

DF: But it does also make you more reluctant to make sweeping statements as a public figure. Because you’re always aware, you have to get the buttons on the coat, if you like, you have to deal in the realities and contradictions.

CT: Yeah, I think it’s also in looking at a figure like Thomas Mann you realise the distance between I suppose the man who suffered and the mind that created. You know, the figure that’s…the sort of mess that sat down for breakfast versus the figure in the study composing the sentence. So that some of the novels are magisterial, and filled with control and filled with command. But the figure who wrote them was not. And so that becomes a really fascinating idea where the shivering figure filled with weakness, attempting all his life to seem plausible, was the one who wrote the books. And that that gap, in a way, is a gap filled with energy. It’s not merely a chasm. It’s not an abyss. It’s actually something rich, that gap between the shivering figure and the magisterial artist.

Sinn Féin in power

DF: I wonder what you do think about the kind of inevitability it seems to me now that Sinn Fein will be in government at some point in the near future, and will that be a transformative thing for better or for worse? How serious is that?

CT: I think there are two ways of looking at it? The first way is that that is the history of politics in Ireland, with the exception of the Labour Party. In other words, that people had to get used to these gunmen in Fine Gael if you don’t mind, you know, who had no mandate from anyone suddenly coming into power. And then suddenly de Valera, another one, you know the Civil War loser coming into power, as I say, with the pike still in the thatch. With Clann na Poblachta, getting Sean McBride out of the IRA into political movement. And then if anyone remembers the Stickies, eventually becoming great democrats and you know, going to the European Parliament…the Stickies. And the Stickies joining the Labour Party.

And then there must be some other groups I just haven’t remembered. Oh, yeah, the PDs and the Labour Party seemed to me to come out of a different thing. So it’s another example in emerging countries that came out of the British Empire, there tended to be in power, people who had once held guns. So you just look at it as a natural thing that happens to terrorist groups in Ireland, that they eventually end up having the keys to the kingdom and putting through budgets, and dealing with old age pensions.

And the other one is that I still don’t know who did the Kingsmill massacre. I don’t know who put the bomb in Enniskillen, but they’re presumably still alive. And they’re wandering around. And we haven’t had a truth and reconciliation or indeed people writing their memoirs, saying I’m the one. And it would be a most interesting idea to know who did Kingsmill? Who planned it? And who agreed to it? Because of all the things I mean, there are perhaps other things that happened, such as the disappearances and the kidnapping of…

DF:  Jean McConville

CT: Yeah, with Jean McConville, but just in Kingsmill, there are going to be 12 men coming home in a bus, get the Catholic to stand aside, shoot the 11 Protestants. And see what happens. And you go-who wanted this? Who did this? And was this in the name of what? But who did this is still wandering around. They’re living in Louth or South Armagh. Some people know who they are. That seems to me to be still an outstanding sore in the business.

Also, if Sinn Fein get into the Department of Finance, are they’re going to give us….it would be great if they spread around through the country, the proceeds of the Northern Bank robbery. Yeah, I mean, I’m not suggesting they know where the money is, but just say they did, wouldn’t it be lovely in one budget, if they were giving extra money to old people, ‘it’s the Northern Bank money’. And we could all say [laughs], ‘Oh, it’s marvellous, having them in power they’re so generous. a giveaway budget’. But I don’t hear the Northern Bank mentioned as much as I’d like to. [laughs]

Why Sinn Féin can solve the housing crisis

CT: Yeah, you see it’s a generational thing as well, where there are young people who just don’t remember. If you’re looking at who’s likely to solve a housing crisis, well I don’t think Fine Gael is, I don’t think Fianna Fail is and I don’t think the Greens are, they’ve had a good chance and they’ve not done it. So you know, the only chance we have maybe of doing something about it is if a very radical party, hungry for power, gets in and actually tries to do something about this, about the price of building land, about public housing, about homelessness. And if you’re young, if you’re under a certain age, you think, well, actually if we want this problem solved, certainly, there’s no chance that the people in power now are going to do it.

On Michael D and why language matters

CT: It is a strange situation Ireland where nobody was looking for territory. It wasn’t as though anyone was saying I want your farm. You know or I want redistribution of land. It wasn’t about land, it was about words or about symbols such as flags, or symbols such as passports. So if you’ve put on a commemoration, and you’re saying you want to commemorate  – which means in some way or other honour or accept -, and you use the word, the partition of Ireland, everybody goes, ‘hold on a moment. I don’t think we want to do that’.

I mean, if you want to say that we want to commemorate the settlement, or the establishment of two democratic governments on the island, however, way you want to view that, but partition is a loaded term and to commemorate it in a way that honours it rather than say, interrogates it. So if you’re having a conference on partition with historians, but to have a solemn occasion with the four churches and the Queen for partition, I think the President of Ireland has a duty to stay out of that. But the organisers have a duty just to change the words. But changing the words is always easy. I mean, we move ‘decommissioning’ to ‘putting out of use’. Just a diplomat went home. It’s like a poet, a diplomat went home and people said could you get that word decommissioning and find another word that people might be able to assent to. And similarly the idea of civil rights really had run its course – the words – so parity of esteem, which, by any standards is not a good word, parity of what? And so that, you know, the whole idea that the finding new words.

DF: They need new words for Irish Language Act.

CT: Yes, if you find new words for the Irish language itself, I mean, fine. There’s got to be another word for the Irish language for, you know, plurality of speech, for example, just to give you an example, that we recognise plurality of idiom you know, and you know, the idea that you’re always looking for. If you get the words right, you might get the thing right.