Q&A: Colm Tóibín, author, 66

“Nobody needs another Irish poet,” says Colm Tóibín. So why does he have his first poetry book (and a new novel) coming out?

Life in words: Colm Tóibín. Picture: RTE / Under The Radar

Why write a novel about Nobel prize-winning German author Thomas Mann and his life? His diaries came out in Germany around 1980 and then three biographies were released in a short period. And it was a revelation to realise the sort of mess that Mann’s life was… the revelation about just how much time he spent thinking about sex.

Complex: Mann in 1928

We know now that Mann was gay. And yet he had six children and seemed to have had a good relationship with his wife. Was he happy? There’s always the feeling that there’s something he wanted sexually that would have completed him. It wasn’t just that he was a closeted gay man… For Mann that absence brought with it a great sense of incompletion, of melancholy, of something that simply wasn’t available to him that he really, really wanted.

Working with the established biographical facts of a life, at what point do you, as a novelist, inject your own work? I think with Mann you have to watch it because sometimes you have to set a context – for example, that there’s a war about to break out. It’s really a question of being in his mind all the time… and just dramatise, dramatise, dramatise.

The Magician contains some sharp and hilarious observations of the English and their hygiene habits and so on. I had to take out some of that, yeah. I couldn’t stop myself with the shopping spree at Southampton where the Manns buy long johns. They don’t know what the English wear under their clothes. There are a few small swipes.

Why do you think the Americans feted Mann so extraordinarily? He had great credentials because he had never been left wing and he seemed to operate from the very centre of politics. And he was very formal and stiff. So they presumed that inside all this is something very solid. Of course it wasn’t solid but it looked solid. They wanted somebody who represented the future of Germany and they picked on this shivering figure. I thought that was really worth studying.

At the end of the book, Mann goes back to his childhood home of Lübeck. Do you ever return in the same way to your childhood town of Enniscorthy, Ireland? I do, I do. I have a house on the Wexford coast about 10 miles from town. I was there just recently... That house there is important to me.

How have you coped in the pandemic? There’s one thing nobody needs and that’s another Irish poet. We just have a lot of them in Ireland – I go out of my house in Dublin and I meet an Irish poet. Anyway, I have my first book of poems coming out next year. So that’s what I’ve been doing every evening during the pandemic. I’ve also started a new novel. I’ve played a lot of tennis. And my boyfriend and I didn’t split up. I believe if you didn’t split up in the pandemic it’s like an eternal nod. It means you’re blessed.

Did I read somewhere that at dinner parties you’re the guy who might spontaneously burst into song? That impulse often comes from having drunk too much, and I don’t drink anymore. It’s almost like being an Irish poet and bursting into song… it’s not needed. It’s especially not needed in my world where I have a lot of friends who are very good singers.

I understand you like prawns. You should come down to a place here called Ballina and have a big plateful of them. Oh, I’ve got to do this. Prawns would be great. For lunch. I would like to do that now. Is there somewhere I can swim too?

The Magician by Colm Tóibín (Picador Australia) is out on August 31.