Colm Tóibín: the literature of grief
Nora Webster, Tóibín's new novel, draws on his memories of his father's death – in doing so, it joins a rich tradition of writing about loss, from Sophocles to Joan Didion
'Grief makes its way into a work in the way that waters from a flood may be channelled into a stream' … Colm Tóibín. Photograph: Kim Haughton
When I came to Dublin as a student in 1972, the writer Mary Lavin was a familiar presence in the city. I watched her as she moved with a sort of stateliness between the desks in the National Library on her way to the main desk, or as she sat in a small cafe known as the Country Shop, or as she drank coffee in Bewley's in Grafton Street. She was usually alone. She wore black. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled untidily into a bun at the back. Her gaze was kind and sad and oddly distracted, but it had a funny strength to it as well. She had spent her life describing others, and finding strategies to create versions of herself; it was not easy to categorise her or ever be sure about her just from looking.
I have no clear memory of how I knew that she had been left a widow with children at a young age, but I certainly knew it before I came to the city. I was interested in the word "widow" and I would have paid real attention to a writer, or anyone at all indeed, who was a widow, since my mother was one. It may have been when we studied a story by Lavin in school called "The Widow's Son".
I had read a good deal of her work by the time I saw her. Some of her stories meant nothing to me. The scenes of upper middle-class life in County Meath, north of Dublin, were too rarefied. But the ones that dealt with the life of a widow were almost too close to the space between how we lived then in our house and what was unmentionable – the business of silence around grief, the life of a woman alone, the palpable absence of a man, a husband, a father, our father, my father, the idea of conversation as a way of concealing loss rather than revealing anything, least of all feeling – for me not to have read her with full recognition. The recognition was so clear, in fact, that I do not remember recognising anything. I was reading with too much rawness.
But I must have sat up when I came to this passage in Lavin's story "Happiness": "When Father went to hospital Mother went with him and stayed in a small hotel across the street so she could be with him all day from early to late. 'Because it was so awful for him, being in Dublin,' she said. 'You have no idea how he hated it.' Maybe I thought this would be in other books in the future – such a precise image of what had happened to us – but I never found it again. It was only there. It is in the novel I have written, Nora Webster, but it took me a long time to find a dramatic form for those words.
In Lavin's stories about solitude and widowhood, her characters live in a twilight time. They barely manage. One of her stories about grief and its aftermath, controlled grief, is "In the Middle of the Fields". In the first sentence, she establishes that her heroine is alone in an isolated rural place. And then the next sentence reads: "And yet she was less lonely for him here in Meath than elsewhere."
The loss is complex, or it comes in a complex guise. People think she wants to talk about her dead husband, or be reminded of what she has lost. "They thought she hugged tight every memory she had of him. What did they know about memory?" She hopes for a time when she had "forgotten him for a minute". It is clear that the grief does not have to be named as "grief", or brought out for inspection. All she knows is that how she feels is not stable, it cannot be trusted. It is wayward.
In Lavin's stories about loss the newly widowed woman has to remake the rules for herself, including the most ordinary rules of behaviour. Emotions dart, fresh longings emerge; what her characters do can easily become irrational and hard to explain; they often do the very opposite of what they intend. Being unmoored by loss affects their every thought, even when they are not thinking about loss, and, indeed, affects their every action.
No comments:
Post a Comment