Colm Tóibín: House of Names

Kalume Tobin is an award-winning Irish novelist short story writer essayist playwright journalist critic and poet he began writing at the age of 12 and after graduating from University College Dublin moved to Barcelona where he taught English for three years before returning to Ireland to begin a career in journalism from the late 70s to early 80s he worked as a columnist and editor for several Irish papers and magazines ultimately becoming the editor of McGill Ireland's leading current affairs magazine during its heyday in the early 80s after leaving the magazine he moved to South America settling in Argentina where he wrote about the trial of President Galtieri and other authorities accused of human rights violations in 1987 he published walking along the border account of a journey by foot along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland which was the first of many travelogues he published between his novels the first of which the South was completed in 1986 but not published until 1990 when it was met with widespread acclaim his many many other lauded works include the master about Henry James which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and other Awards he is also the author of Brooklyn which won the cost of fiction award and was later made into a highly acclaimed motion picture Tobin is a regular contributor to the London and the New York reviews of books and is taught at the new school at Princeton at Stanford at the University of Texas at Austin and he's currently the Irene and Sidney B Silverman professor of humanities at Columbia his books have been translated into more than 30 languages and I just learned today he is also embarking on a career as a museum curator he is curating a show entitled Henry James and American painting which will open June 8th at the Morgan Library in New York and then move on to the Elizabeth Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston his most recent novel the house of names is a gripping retelling of the story of Clytemnestra and her children just released this month already critics have praised it as heart-stopping a violent page-turner about the mother of all dysfunctional families and the insidious ravages of revenge and distrust an intimate saga of suffering and a creative reanimation of these indelible characters who are still breathing down our necks across the millennia light fare for a Saturday afternoon in any case Tobin has been praised as a gorgeous stylist capturing the subtle flutterings of consciousness better than any writer alive today so please join me in welcoming colum Tobin to the Getty Villa [Applause] thank you very much for coming I want to invoke a moment at the beginning of the 20th century but when the Irish woman Lady Gregory and was having supper with friends of hers whose political views different began to differ from hers and they were demonstrating with her for moving in the direction of Irish nationalism what actually happened lady Gregory was born in the West of Ireland in 1852 and when she was thirty she married a man who was 35 years older than her and he left her a widow at the age of 40 so in so in 1892 she's a widow and what she begins to do you know you know although she's somebody who's welcome in many houses in London she's a friend of Henry James's and her husband had been a director of the National Gallery in London she has a house still in the West of Ireland called cool Park and she could easily have moved between her husband London and her house in the West of Ireland and attended many grand dinner is in Dublin Castle or indeed in Buckingham Palace and what she decided to do instead was to learn Irish and in the New York Public Library in the burgh collection we can see her notebooks and she's writing out carefully each word pour on beau a dull good D and dark daddy the cow is going to the well and of course if she needed a word and she had the Bible she knew the Bible that a good Irish promise and she knew the Bible very well in English so she had the Bible decider in Irish a translation she could check one word against another but if she needed if you need to find out something more she just sent out to one of her farm hands or one of her tenants because she owned a big estate what this word what does that word mean and then she realized slowly that among her tenants among the people who were living and paying her rent on her estate were people who were in possession of an extraordinary range of folklore and mythological tales and that these had been passed down from generation to generation in an intact oral tradition and she began from house to house I'm talking about the smallest house I mean a two room house but whether we some old person in the university sitting by a fireplace who would have a story now what she also discovered was that these stories had in fact been written down and their importance was that they that they had remained in the oral tradition to some extent but they also hadn't written down that when Christianity came to Ireland in the fifth century there was no obvious friction at the beginning or at any time between pagan tradition and Christian tradition for example crow Patrick in the West of Ireland in County Mayo it was a pagan mountain and until Christianity came and then it became a Christian Mountain It was as though it this happened without any particular difficulty you know there are no there are no martyrs in the early Irish Church and obviously there must have been some difficulty some moments where the pagans wanted their day and the Christians of their day but if you go there now even on the last Sunday of July and see thousands of people walking up the top of the mountain which which overlooks clew Bay and in the West of Ireland it's actually clear that this that this was a great pagan site and analysis since the arrival of Christianity it's been a Christian side what happened with the development of Christianity in Ireland say in the 6th 7th and 8th centuries was that they began to require monasteries and build monasteries and the monasteries became wealthy and they began to use certain monks ascribes and the monks began to write down the stories and that were going that were being told all around them so we have if example in Trinity College in Dublin in the Royal Irish Academy and also in Oxford actual manuscripts dating from those from the 6th 7th 8th centuries and then copies of those manuscripts done in the 9th 10th 11th centuries for example my name which column I'm called after same color McGill and suppose you see the great first copyright in that M he was M he was a monk and he was and he went to another monastery and he saw a manuscript and he thought he'd like to make a copy of it so he sat day and night making a copy of it and then he and he was leaving he said well thank you and they said well no thank you for making the copy but you leave a copy here behind you as well and he said no I want the copy I made the copy and so there was an enormous I suppose a sort of a Supreme Court decision as it were and they said that m m in the end to the to the cow her calf was a decision and he was exiled to Iona and off the north coast of Scotland and he only came back to Ireland once when and I used to love this story when I was a kid that his M that he wasn't allowed ever sets foot in Ireland again because of his cheek and he connected with the soil of Iona into his shoes because you could only step on the soul of Iona I mean they were very good about and that he and that he therefore could come back to Ireland once but M these manuscripts then were very well protected in Trinity College Dublin in the in the Royal Air Academy in Dorset Street in Dublin and in Oxford and in various other places and in the 19th century scholars began to work on them but in a dispassionate way attempting to for example do additions out them do scholarly editions of them but by the end of the 19th century when for example the figure of Lady Gregory began to work on them she realized that she was dealing with political dynamite that if it could be established that M these these stories that these manuscript speak that that they were Irish that they would exalt the idea of Ireland that they would establish in everyone's mind fully but there was an ancient Irish culture which had once been intact before it was as it were destroyed by outsiders by the Danes by the Normans and of course by the English and that M so that when our friend said to her this particular evening what you're doing is really dangerous because you're these these poor people who are suffering so much from emigration who have who have gone through a famine who are living in tiny places you are attempting to suggest to them that they come from a very rich culture these people have no culture they merely speak Irish and that's no use to them and we just be said about Irish that you couldn't sell a pig in Irish you lose English for that purpose so there's even the language itself was seeing was it was seen as a degraded thing and lady Gregory simply said to her friends and old Irish the the actual language that I'm translating from is as close to modern Irish as ancient Greek is to modern Greek and the people who are speaking outside our tenants the people who are living in the small in the small cottages that they actually are using the same words and as are in these ancient manuscripts and some of them have the same stories as told to them and that em of course people who she was speaking to would've understood the implications if you're saying that you wish to invoke an Ireland an ancient Ireland for the purposes of political activity and if you're mentioning if you're mentioning to the Greek experience in this case you're talking about nationalism you're talking about a country attempting to wrest itself from an empire as the Greeks had attempted to do from the Ottoman Empire to found a state in the name using an idea of of an ancient entity which people skilled belong to despite the passing of centuries or despite the changing indeed of the EM of the language or or indeed of many other things that so that as Lady Gregory began to work on her translations and she realized that that she was the face that that she used was that she was adding dignity to Ireland but what she was actually doing was she was giving nationalists in Ireland an idea that that that they booked that if they wanted a free and independent Irish stays free from England they should stop talking about economic reasons for wanting this and they should start talking about cultural reasons that Ireland it was before England was even thought about a culture before Shakespeare was even imagined Ireland had an ancient and intact an extremely valuable culture and the signs of this we're in the libraries for the the art or the act of translation became around 1900 a deeply political act which would inspire people to say not only do I want independence from England because I feel different to England or I will be richer if Ireland is independent but somehow or other my Irishness my my entire personality as an Irish person will connect to that ancient Ireland and be enriched by knowledge that that even though I myself am poor I come from a tradition which is immensely rich and immensely valuable and so she began to work and of course one of the problems they had was there was no tradition in theatre that M that she was absolutely alert of the abdi of the importance the Greek theater had in the creation of the modern Greek imagination of those figures of Medea Electra and chickeny Oedipus actually mattering in the building up of Greek nationalism and that what was needed in Ireland since since em didn't have a theatrical tradition she decided to invent one and in 1898 she met the poet WB Yeats who who was in his thirties he was a floppy haired poet mainly living in London she met him in the West of Ireland arthur simmons who was there when they met said when she cast her terrible eye on him I knew she would keep him she was a very determined person she had a big house and with a lot of paintings with a with a big library and her only son was living mainly in London and for WB Yeats she something that he desperately needed she had a typewriter and at the beginning he saw as having great value to him because he came from 1898 until his late marriage in 1917 WB Yeats spent four or five months of the year actually living in her house he had a master bedroom he sat at the head of the table and he had the run of the library and of course she would bring him out in the day to meet her tenants and she would translate for him what the tenants were saying and the tenants had stories of ancient Ireland that went back to before Christianity as I said story that had been written down and on the way but had also survived orally and at one point her son came back from England and went down into cellars and his father had laid on a wonderful wine cellar over the years and all the wine was gone and she said to his mother friends all our wine and she said o WB WB Yeats so she had to write him a letter and again that the letter in the burgh in your public library saying next year when you come I wonder if you could perhaps bring your own wine because they've used up you've used up all of ours so what she gave him was yes she gave him absolute peace and harmony for four or five months of the year and also she connected him to this ancient world which was all around her and this and then the two of them began to dream of this theater that he would make which was founded in 1904 and is still there as the Abbey Theatre or the National Theatre of Ireland and they got the patent because was very difficult you couldn't just build a theater that there was serious legislation governing theaters they got a patent to create a theater to put on only new Irish work and nobody thought that would matter because there wasn't any Irish work we didn't have I mean the playwrights who were M for example who were still living or who had which would be the contemporary Irish playwright George Burns show for example or Oscar Wilde had gone to London had produced a place in London and even in the in the earlier centuries a figure like I figured like Sheridan had to London that there was no tradition of putting on new Irish plays in Ireland we didn't have a rich 16th century we had a disastrous 16th century and therefore what had to happen was the place had to be written and you got the place had to be made from the very beginning but but Yeats and Lady Gregory understood as they produced new Irish plays in their theatres that they were not merely entertaining people this was not their purpose the purpose was to imagine a country or was to imagine a nation and this of course if you were in nationalist watching this this had immense political implications which led of course to the 1916 rebellion and led in 1922 to the independence of the south of Ireland from with the first country to be let loose from the British Empire but it has not done by a group of economists this is not done by a group of politicians this was imagined by a group of poets and translators who set about attending to fire up the spirit of people using the experience of what has happened in Greece to say you are connected to something that is ancient and valuable now this made its way obviously into the public realm courtesy of archaeology as well as translation and the father of Oskar was Sir William Wilde was an important amateur archaeologist and antiquarian and we see him he's in the Aran Islands of the West of Ireland in the in the 1850s and he he and his wife and again because of very early transcriber of stories that she hears from the West of Ireland and attempting both of them to do that in quite strange which it which is what Yeats and Lady Gregory with would later do which is to have a strange set of allegiances a sort of gnarled set of allegiances while they were Protestants in Ireland part of the ruling class in Dublin they were lending their to an Ireland of the future this didn't stop them collecting rents I mean lady Gregory was particularly good at making sure that all her tenants no matter what stories they have our didn't have that they paid the rent sometime and she threatened them with the eviction at various times and the wilds also owned various and owned various property but but for all of them they had an idea that they were living in a country which was going to change and they wanted to be at the forefront of the change and so for the wild and their son Oscar he went to Trinity College Dublin which is a bastion of English privilege and power in Ireland but it was also very studied classics and was also where he studied Greek and for example we have him as a student writing about Euripides and we have him in an essay in 1887 writings for though Euripides M has not the Titans strength of Ageless that Michelangelo of the Athenian stage nor the self-restraint and artistic reserve of Sophocles yet his qualities that are absolutely and entirely his own his broad acceptance of the actual facts of life his extraordinary psychological insight into the workings of the human mind his keen dramatic instinct for some scene and situation and his freedom from theological prejudice make him the most interesting of studies he was a poet a philosopher and a playwright most modern of all the ancients there is something of browning in him and not a little of Douma feel if he broke with the traditions of the Greek stage at least he made me and ER inevitable if he sets passion about perfection he is for that reason all the more human though he died sex life he never desecrates it and the mere fact that the dramatic critics of his day spoke of him as an immoral Roger shows how s achill was the impulse that stirred him this wild at his most wildly and already in 1887 and that he saw indeed that men and women as they are are more interesting than men men they ought to be he never tried to make humanity real by exaggerating its proportions he cared little for Giants or for God's the sorrows of mortals touched him more than all the gladness of Olympus and it's interesting to note for example that one of the most famous scenes in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest is the whole idea of the the boy who's been last to have been found and was found in a handbag and the famous the famous moment where Lady Bracknell said a handbag and that M actually that M scholars have been able to trace the original of this from a play by that is actually by Euripides and it well actually took this from Aeon where the child found in a basket and that M so that he was working and he went to Greece M he he actually looked at archaeological sites in Greece as a young man and if you look at Deborah funders for example the long letter that he wrote in prison is filled with Greek phrases or it's filled with Greek references and in the meantime the Abbey Theatre is thriving and WB Yeats is beginning to translate the e difference plays M also WB Yeats is famously in love with the firebrand revolutionary who's called Maud gonne and of course he wishes to marry her and she's constantly turning him down and she becomes in a way his muse his doomed muse the woman he cannot marry and he can bite these great love poems to her without having to settle down you know into domestic disharmony with her as clearly would have occurred as clearly would I think she was made particularly for marriage and so he didn't have to you know he didn't have to get him to the sphere in the morning he just he just swords nice sometimes when she was willing to see him but he did and I mean what was interesting was the lady Gregory was asked at one point are you working for home rule because home rule was associated with sort of violence and firebrands in Ireland and she said no she was always very wise lady Gregory she said no I'm working for after her rule in other words in other words what she was attempting to build with a culture in Ireland and I was a sense of dignity and idealism in Ireland for is what Morgan wanted was very close to what Oscar Wilde's mother wanted she wanted revolution in Ireland and so when Yeats attempts to deplore in a poem the woman he loves who he wants to in a way domesticate he wants to marry once of children with and she's instead going around the country making speeches and trying to stir people up towards revolution he writes a short torn to her and he invokes Troy he invokes Helen of Troy he invokes her beauty as the beauty of Helen of Troy but but also the amount of trouble she causes as being close to the amount of trouble that Helen of Troy caused the poem is called no 2nd Troy why should I blame her that she filled my days with misery or that she would have late have taught two ignorant men most violent ways or her little streets upon the Grace had even courage equal to desire what could have made her peaceful with a mind that nobleness made simple as a fire with beauty like a titan beau a kind but is not natural in an age like this being high and solitary and most Stern why what could she have done being what she is was there another Troy for her to burn and then when Lady Gregory produced her famous translation of the coin which is I suppose M our homer you know it is the Irish very M is the book that describes Irish heroes and warriors and in the pre-christian era you know it was an international bestseller it was read by the President of the United States and it set up the idea of this lone warrior who was called kou : and that and that he was was not afraid of death and he would only operate a long he was not in any was not in any way socialized and he would sacrifice himself for anything and this became this figure of kou : and became the inspiration before the 1916 rebellion so that later on in a poem wbh begins to worry about plays of his that had been written about the warrior crew : whose inspiration had come from lady Gregory's translations but who as I say there were always conscious that this idea of translating text of using the theatre of suggesting an ancient culture had large connections with what has happened in Greece that M hero did did those words of mine send out certain men the English shot because he was sure that one particular play of his that had invoked heroism that had suggested ancient heroes had inspired a great number of young men who took part in that rebellion but once M peace broke out in Ireland WB Yeats in 1923 he was a senator he had won the Nobel Prize his main interest at this time was disrupting the peace was think there was anything he could now do to stop his own respectability sort poisoning him or eating him alive he had another 16 years to live and by God did he want to cause trouble and in this time and so he wrote a poem which was which was referred to as senator Yates's filthy swamp poem in the newspapers but it wasn't it was he had looked as I was happening initially and a cataclysm that had resulted from the first world war in Russia and initially and that he felt was going to sort of them take over Europe and he published this poem and in 1923 called leader and a swan a sudden blow the great wings beating still above the staggering girl her thighs caressed by the dark webs her nape caught in his bill he holds her helpless breast upon his breast and those terrified vague fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening sighs how can body laid in that quite rush but filled a strange heart beating red lies a shudder in the loins and genders there the broken wall the burning roof and power and Agamemnon dead being so caught up so mastered by the brute blood of the air did she put on his knowledge with his power before the indifferent beak could let her drop and then that line and like a Memon arm dead of course that what d8 is suggesting wasn't one act the rape of leader had led in turn to the killing of Agamemnon by his wife who was quite a master and so I want to end by reading two short pieces from this novel house of names and the first one is the immediate aftermath and when Clara Mester has finally killed Agamemnon I mean he has lured her or he had lured her years earlier with her daughter Iphigenia to the place of sacrifice telling her that if a denier was in fact to be married to killers the warrior and what she had decided to do an Italian was to wait until he came home and in my version of the story to catch him at that moment I think when men are perhaps at the most vulnerable when you have one foot in the bath and the other foot almost in the bath and she got him at that moment and she had killed him as she had killed Cassandra and she had ordered that their bodies been left out in the Sun because everyone could see them and so this is the this is the opening of the novel in the aftermath of that killing and it's spoken by Plato Master I have been acquainted with the smell of death the sickly sugary smell that wafted in the wind towards the rooms in this palace it is easy now for me to feel peaceful and content I spent my morning looking at the sky and the changing light the bird song begins to rise as the world fills with its own and then as day wanes - sound - wanes and fades I watch as the shadows lengthen so much has slipped away but the smell of death lingers maybe the smell has entered my body and been welcomed there like an old friend come to visit smell of fear and panic the smell of fear like the very areas here is returned in the same way as light in the morning returns it is my constant companion he's put life into my eyes eyes that grew dull with waiting but are not dull now eyes that are alive now at brightness I gave orders that the body should remain in the open under the Sun a day or two until the sweetness gave way to stench and I like the flies that came but if the bodies perplexed and brave buzzing after their feast upset by the continuing hunger they felt in themselves a hunger that I had come to know - and have come to appreciate we are all hungry now food merely whet our appetite it sharpens our teeth meat makes us ravenous for more meat as death is ravenous for more death murder makes us ravenous fills the soul with satisfaction that is fierce and then luscious enough to taste for further satisfaction a knife piercing the flesh under the ear with intimacy and precision and then moving across the throat as soundlessly as the Sun moves across the sky for greater speed and zeal and then his dark blood flowing with the same inevitable hush as dark night falls unfamiliar things and as I was writing the book I realized how much that I was the Shakespeare had taken from this story in the creation for example of Macbeth and you know the whole idea of a killing of a king in the creation of Coriolanus but also in the creation I think especially of Hamlet that M after the killing of Agamemnon by his wife Clytemnestra I mean what she wants of what she asks in my book is really she wants her son arrest gaze and who's about 12 to be taken away she really doesn't have to witness the murder of his father she's not to be taken away from the palace so that day you can come back after when it's done and but of course he's kidnapped and then he and two boys managed to escape and then they are looked after by an old woman in a place by the sea for many years and then they finally when the old woman dies and one of their friends died they decided it's time to go home and they eventually come home and arrests days I mean there's in in the Greek originals there's really no one to tell you where he was when he was away so for me was very useful as a novelist because there was nothing to go on therefore I could invent at all and and then also his personality he's often presented as heroic and there were times when I was working when I wished I was a Greek playwright when I we you know thought be such fun if I could just you know how do you get someone to kill his mother in a modern novel you know within a Greek play it's really easy just get the mother to go offstage you get the son to follow her with a knife you have some screaming and then you have him coming on with blood on the knife well it's dead it's over well you try that in the modern novel so you have to sort of build up the whole idea of him as someone who's easily led as someone who is um he has no strategy all around him his sister Electress killed with strategy his mother has strategy just as his mother's lover is all strategy his father Agamemnon but he somehow has no strategy he follows he people like him he will do what he's told and therefore he's a sort of lethal weapon because he will under certain pressures do anything at all and under these pressures he kills his mother the problem I had then was what do you do the next page I mean you have someone killing his mother and she dies I mean and all the life goes out of her and he's there what can he do that night is he gonna have dinner you gotta meet his sister he's got to go to his room on his own he's going to have you go to feel and no matter what I thought of I saw it's not right because he'll hundred different things you feel nothing everything and so I went back to look at Hamlet and I realized of course the ghost that those scenes are so important in Hamlet where the supernatural is let into the play even though the play is so filled with Hamlet's wish with Hamlet's will and with Hamlet's indecision and with Hamlet's playfulness with full humanity as it were that M the fact of Supernatural is there almost sets out to heighten the human things that are in Hamlet and then so and so this is the last but I'm going to read it Sam you turn the page and it's try to master and it's her ghost in the aftermath of her killing we need to remember two things that she is also the daughter of leader and she's also she had been killed in the garden or what steps down to a garden by her son but earlier on in the book em both if a denier and a MEK and Agamemnon appears ghost to Elektra but he had no memory of how they were killed they're not back in the world seeking revenge for that or wanting to deal with it it's something else they're looking for in the world and so too with with bloody master she has no memory of the knife or exactly how she was gonna come here for a second but not in any real way or any important way this is her ghost there will come a time when the shadows fold in on me I know that but I'm awake now or almost awake I remember of some things outlines come to me and a faint sound of voices what linger most are traces traces are people presences sounds mostly I walk among the shade but sometimes a hint of someone comes close someone whose name I once knew or whose voice and face were real to me someone I once loved perhaps I'm not sure there's one remnant that comes and persists however it is my mother at some time in the distant past she's helpless being held down I could hear cry her cries and the shriller cries of a speaker above her or lying on her and then louder cries as the figure flips away a figure with beak and wings with a shape of wings the wings beating in the air and my mother lying breathless whimpering but I do not know what this means or why it comes to me I feel that if I remain still something more will come it will it is hard not to wander in these spaces where there is silence there are presences I wish to encounter presences that are close but not close enough to touch or be seeing I kind of think of the names their names I cannot see faces clearly although there are moments when I have been quiet when I have made no effort for some time to remember or focus moments when a face approaches the face of someone I have known but in his phase before it becomes anyone I can recognize I know that there was feeling and that is the difference between where I am now and the place I was once there was a time I know when I felt rage and I felt sorrow but now I have lost what leads to rage and sorrow maybe the only reason I wander in these spaces has to do with some other feeling I was left of it maybe that feeling is love there is someone whom I love still or have loved and protected but I could not be sure of that no name will come some words come but not the words I want which are the names if I can say the names I will know then whom I loved and I will find them or know how to see them I will lure them into the shadows when the time is right no one in their world knows how little there is here is all blankness strangeness silence hardly anything moved there are echoes like distant water flowing under a rock and then sometimes that sound comes nearer but it is still faint if I listen too eagerly it disappears maybe there are things that did not come to an end when I was there and they linger now like words that need to be said or words that have escaped me and will camera might come or must come as I wait here it will take time I do not know how much time I have or how much time there is but I know that I must fade that I cannot persist in this state the fading will be gradual by the end I will not know anything well I'm hoping for is one more surge some hours or even moments when I will go back into the world and settle into it briefly as though I were alive in the meantime there's memory which connects and attaches and with the drawers it is almost something a vague thought hovers was never stable like a figure with wings and edges towards what has been or was I live on the inside of what has substance I can feel some large set of pressing desires brushing past all I am left with though are the great traces the clues this must be what shadow is like or aftermath some lines or shapes that have made sense at one time or may make sense or may still make sense what seemed random now if only I could follow what their intention was or whisper to whoever made them that desire is the closest I've come to pure feeling and it is not close at all I would be left here for the hours or days or years I have been a lotta snow longer than that being perplexed and bewildered replaces truth and knowledge replaces what is real and tangible the space I inhabit is like a sad gift that was offered but will soon be withdrawn and in a word occurred to me a word of which I was sure it was the word dream once the word came I knew what dream was or had being and I was certain then that I was not dreaming in this nullus that none of what is happening is dream it is real it is actual and then other words appeared like stars in the darkening sky I became desperate to take possession of each one but I could not hold on to them they were falling or glittering or moving farther away was enough however to seen them to get some idea of their power and know that some of them would return and like the light from a full moon on a dark night become part of a shadowy stability that was guiding me I walked in the corridors of that Palace where had once lived I could remember I could almost remember some things that had happened there was an image of someone in a garden or on steps that led to a garden staring hard breathing hard but they're nothing to stillness in the garden and then there was not even a garden there was really a space but I was still awake I was waiting knowing that there would be change that it would not always be like this I was aware how easy it would be once I was in those corridors again for one of the guards to notice me if I made a sound or if I moved quickly so that there would be some disturbance in the air and then slowly I began to understand why I was here and who I was looking for his name did not come to me and I was not able to picture his face but I felt that he was close I could imagine the guard who had seen me who had noticed my presence consulting one of the other guards and then both of them approaching him that when I am searching for or his friend looks after him my husband is dead and my daughter they had become pure shade my other daughter is here but the one I am searching for is my son I'm awake the words I knew are sleeping sometimes they turn in the night or make some sound in their vast dreaming and then they wake too often if only for a second they open their eyes and watch me I hold their gaze so that they might remember me as they fall back into sleep I studied them in there in our state I'm alert to any movement they make I can hear their dark groanings in the night intermittent against their breathing I can see them reach their arms towards me to be lifted I can tell the difference between night and day now I know the silence that descends on the gardens and corridors at night a silence broken only by the soft movement of the guards or cats this is my realm where I'm free to wander as I come from the garden I'm aware the guards can feel a movement in the air it would just take one more thing to let them know that I'm with them a sound a darkened gesture when the time came I knew that I would hear his name my son's name enough to whisper it like someone imploring and come to me when I needed it I rest days I whispered on one of those nights and then I withdrew into the shadows are at space I repeated letting my voice echo down the corridor I saw two of the guards running back and forth and then summoning the other one my son's friend who strutted up and down checking doorways and corners Oasis until he had gone and then I whispered to one of the guards can I rest days that I am his mother he must come along into the corridor it must be along the guard made us though to run but then stopped himself speak again he said quietly his head bowed tell her a space to come along I said now yes soon Erastus must come soon do you mean to cause him harm no I do not mean to cause him harm [Applause] thank you I think we have time for some questions and we have mics and either side and so if anyone has anything maybe I just put reduce to everyone to silence but if anyone has any questions yes please just hear if she was holding a lady Reger's holding holding on to the folk we're trying to realize revive the folk tales to give the Irish narrative you're going back in history in writing this book and adding what are you trying to tell us now I mean I mean I think that em I mean I come from a country where there have been two civil wars in the 20th century and my uncle was interned in the first Civil War and my uncle lived until 1995 and I was very close to him so that that civil war was very close to us and was and remained I mean the two main political parties in Ireland were based on that civil war my father used to say about the other political party the one that wasn't ours that you could that you could salute them if you met them but if you ever voted for them your right hand would wither or and and and with the second war which which which became known at the troubles in Northern Ireland you know I wrote that book where I walked along the border and towards the end especially when I came into South Armagh on the is on the eastern side and I was on the northern side of the border I really came across stories and things that has happened that made clear to me that this idea of the violence was a sort of spiral that is what there was never an isolated killing but if you if you said well what happened a week before you realize that one killing was retaliation for a second killing but then the third killing they'd attempt to do something much more spectacular and to actually really fill the imagination of people with build it with fear the third will always be the worst and then it would go quite and would start again in retaliation for that and the spiral that I was that you know as you could not look at any case as an isolated case more questions you ask the more you found out that the once it began getting the to stop was going to be really really difficult and obviously when I was writing this book it was during it was during the war in Syria for example but I realized once once more this whole idea of civil war and so I was also interested in that idea that in the most innocent seeming person who is arrested who really really just seems to want an easy life who just is happiest living with the old woman and his two friends and the dog his place inside to see vaguely thinking of home vaguely missing home but that's where he's most content when he arrives back in the palace his innocence is really no use to him and that and so there's that idea that I think we get from the Greek plays which I think also mattered to Yeats an to Lady Gregory because they were operating in a country that had known rebellions and that and that was actually facing into what would clearly be at some point a civil war over the future of Ireland that M that a that violence within a family and especially that first civil war in Ireland brothers fought against brothers and brothers killed brothers so that and all of that is still there's absolutely you know it is still with us but but it's also these stories remain the bedrock for our our society I mean these great these great plays still live with us and I was interested also in the idea and that's implied a master and in a lecture of the relationship between power powerlessness and voice and this is something I think that matters and normally here at the moment as to who gets to speak and who listens to them and what tone they use when they speak that and and I used quite a lot of this in in the Testament of Mary the day which is a play and a novel about Mary the mother of Jesus that if you repress somebody and then if they speak their speech will have a very particular texture and tongue which will come from carelessness into power as though they might only get to speak once and you will get a sort of exhilaration in speech or sort of fluency or indeed a heightened speech and and them that this happens in especially in something like Antigone for example where I went them when crayon speaks it's like legislation it's dull you don't pay attention to its tongue but the miniature comes on the stage you watch her because she's going to speak now and her speech is diddled with drama but that can only happen when she hasn't spoken before and will not be allowed to speak in the future when she will be she has been silent silent and will be silenced again so that all of those other ideas remain I think whirling around in in in any country where there are inequalities or any country further where there are people silenced and so I'm afraid to say that all of this is oddly relevant and it and I did find I said to say that I took it on and halfway through I did find it frightening it wasn't it wasn't I mean getting a character like a rest ace who's so loveable in a certain way just jessica kilise mother was not a great way of spending an afternoon [Music] hi thank you very much I'm a big fan I noticed that a seam and a lot of you work is the idea of killing one's mother I just love to hear you respond to that what does that mean I look I wrote a book called new ways to kill your mother and honestly I mean along the way it was called new ways to kill your father and I just got changed no one can remember how that occurred but if it was it's a book of essays about writers and their families so it's that whole idea of especially in a you know in our limb but in other countries too of a writer and being seen as as as quintessentially treacherous and someone like John Millington Synge who wrote some of the early plays for the Abbey Theatre his mother really really read the Bible but she certainly didn't go to theatre she disapproved deeply of the theater and then he of her son John who she loved she'd going out of a day to go to this theatre of all things nearly killed her and did kill her in the end so that his working with actresses his bringing these illusions onto the stage really was a way of killing his mother his whose father had died just before that but but there are other essays that are about new ways to kill your father so there's that whole idea of writing as as a way of betraying or art of really frightening people who are close to you and especially in an essay in a very conservative Society and I mean the relationships say between the poet Hart Crane and his father there are moments in in that correspondence where you feel he was trying to kill his father when he was writing those poems and so that that really the only time I've dealt with this before was in putting the title that unfortunate title on to that book which I have to say and did not M help it's it's sort of them did not have a commercially in other words it was not there were I'm not making yourself a few people have said is exactly the book my mother needs to read just now but but these people were few and far between and so am I hope never to read that subject I hope not to return to can you talk about the gradual disillusionment that the ancient Greeks came to feel about the power of their gods and you bring this up in your novel into technical problem that I had in the novel which is that the novel as a form tends in general to be a secular space and you really cannot use the God over and over in a novel so that an order to do think about it that if you had Jane Austen saying God that morning told mr. Darcy that he and mr. Bingley should rather horses over towards the girls and later on it was when only when Elizabeth prayed that M Lady Catherine de Bourg was sent on her way you know the father novels are filled with clergymen they're so filled instead with instead of spirituality or transcendence with money with with desires we've wanted to marry for money or our em love or the next generation and I think we just if you could imagine that scene in portrait of a lady where Isabel Archer is up all night and and there's almost a religious sense to it but there isn't I mean because she doesn't kneel down and pray and ask God please tell me what Osman has really been up to it's the count of Germany who tells her so that when I was planning this book and plotting it out I realized I let the guards into every bit of this book if I have your every moment of God coming up or down or arriving or saying this or that I will lose the novel because you will stop thinking the characters have choices and chances you will stop thinking about their human qualities and you will start thinking about their relationship to the gods so that very early on once em if a janilla has been sacrificed what I have to have is Claddagh master realizing that was nonsense that the wind change because he was lucky that's all that's all that happened and she has to move in this novel from an entire society believing fully in the power of this to one to herself that believes only in her own will that she was aside well actions she performs and this is this is why I Electra's in such a rage with her who said you could kill my father what God did you appeal to tie two mistresses no God I decided and it comes up again when the Leander asked ask the rest is you who said you could kill your mother and Electra interjects to say the gods we appeal to the gods and he said that over that's finished with and what I was partly using there was vogner's ring was the idea of the death of the gods that occurs throughout those operas there's a moment in Siegfried when am i de who's been earlier why for vote on and she's buried in the earth she's a figure of deep wisdom she's the men so or the contralto and she's she's got a deeply wise voice and he goes to find her to consult her to say what is happening to us I sort of don't once in fact where she was in an apartment building and I mean actually presses a bell in the apartment building and she comes down on an elevator but in most production she comes up from the earth with this extraordinary voice and it took about 45 minutes but she explained to and vote on but his power is waning that he's living in a time when the great power of the gods will actually go so I was using that but I was also using elements that I have witnessed in Ireland with Catholicism seeming to be on the wane or these religious practice or deep religious devotion or people really listening to priests and bishops all all of that fading from an earlier time that I remember very well was you know the churches were packed with people and the people were filled with devotion and they listened to everything the priests said to a time now when people are really looking at the watches that they're either not at Mass at all or they don't get to watch uh something about shopping I was remembering in when you were reading the poem of a line from the tested of mayor of Mary where you talked about the physical ugliness of the apostles and I was curious to know what relationship the physical attractiveness of the characters you write about plays because I thought that was something very interesting in that in that novel yeah well it wasn't their physical ugliness is as much other voices and not that bass note her she describes them as being misfits and and it would have but it wasn't that it was something actually physically wrong with it wasn't they were too small too tall or violently ugly or anything it was just that that their presence in her house with her son they started that there wasn't the the ordinary ones didn't come the misfits came and them so I don't think I attend in general in novels not to describe anyone physically the reason for that is that you you make a pact with the reader that you're entering the reader's imagination and you have to give the reader a sort of an autonomy to imagine the characters physically and if you go on too much for example in Brooklyn you don't know whether she's small I mean obviously in a movie you can see everything but in the novel you don't learn whether she's small or tall over color her hair is or eyes that is absolutely left blank in the novel and that's a deliberate way of allowing the reader to imagine her but I think even in the Testament of Mary with the figure say of Jesus he's not described physically I mean his face or his hair or anything else about him and it's and it's the same in this book that at that M that is the big physical thing is that a rest days when he comes back and his friend here se sees his friend who come back some more with a big gash down the side of his face he's helped he'd been in battle but that's the nearest thing I think to a to it to a moment where a physical thing is described and in the in the novel I think is very important is just is one of the reasons why I really hate when publisher put a photograph of something on the front of a character because um you want that's the last thing you want you want the reader to do the imagining so with for example with Norah Webster I think we just got them to the back of a character so you could you know you could assume the reader could do the work that's not um thank you for that wonderful talk I had a short question and a long question I was wondering but what's a book or a piece of writing that you haven't mentioned yet that would you think pair nicely with house of names that's the short question and the longer question is I was wondering how a Greek audience reacted not to the egregious violence on stage whether they had a sense of transgression that we have and I ask that in the context of what horror means and what we think horror means you know when you read or you watch something on television about the Syrian war I think oh that's horrible then you turn off the TV and shake your head and walk away and then there's actually being in that moment of horror and knowing what it means and feels like to be horrified and I think that the second question we have to take the idea of catharsis really seriously and we have to say that these events were enacted and re-enacted in order to fill the audience with pity and terror was in order to give the audience a sense of their enormity and power of what they felt like and looked like now we may be wrong about this I mean they were talking about thousands of years ago the audience may have responded differently but but this was this we presume was ritual and this was ritual for a very good reason was in order for example to bring certain things into the open so they could be fully felt and see and and this is exactly the same reason as you writing novels so that the the so that instead of being able to turn off the TV in that second where whatever is in the corner just just seems like something was on yesterday as well that you're attempting to capture the reader's imagination so the reader will turn the page and the reader will start to feel what you have been feeling so that the act of writing is an act of communication and that you're attempting to slow time down to show what something is actually like in slow motion for whoever did it or whoever suffered it and or indeed whoever looked on and that there may be in fact a connection between the idea that I have of audience in Greek theater gather together for the ritual of theater feeling the horror of what's being presented to them in full it being presented them in full as horror and not in order necessarily to stop you know it's not as though what when is involved in a crusade to stop what is happening happening but to make sure that does not happen without everyone registering this is what it was like for those involved in this it was not something that you can put out of your mind just because you want to I have you now I've captured you by virtue of my words and holding you as long as I can because I need you to know what this was like for these people I have imagined so perhaps there is a connection between the two things and in relation to in the making of arrests days and I was certainly aware of figures like M de verre Locke in this Joseph Conrad's a secret agent or hyacinth Robinson and Henry James as Princess Catherine Massey man those figures who were caught in acts of terrorism of which in which they seem to be other people seem to be pulling the strings or doing or egging them on and they were the weak ones who were caught in that way so I saw so I was using those ideas of somebody who's in between and two sorts of power who themselves are oddly innocent oddly powerless but then because of their blankness fully lethal once a weapon gets into their hands first of all thank you for an outstanding presentation and I also wanted to thank you for reading those powerful poems by Yeats I wanted to know if James Joyce and Ulysses had also been something that inspired you or that you were dialoguing within this incredible look I'm really glad you asked that question if I ever hear because of course in the middle of all of this and born in 1882 is James Joyce and he is attempting to find a myth which will govern the great novel he wants to write and he has written some poems he has written a book of stories called Dubliners they're they're really in style he calls a style of scrupulous meanness to describe the the ordinary life and what he calls it a chapter in the moral history of my country and he writes a portrait of the artist as a young man and he writes a play called exiles but now he wants to do is to create it is to write a great book a book almost I will put an end to other books and it will be a day in the life of Dublin would be intensely personal it would be the 16th of June 1904 it said only in that day was the first day that he walked out with a woman with whom he spent the rest of his life who was Nora Barnacle so it's commemorating that day in his life but he needs something else for it and he and he uses the Odyssey you know he goes back to the Greeks in other words even though he said even though he wanted nothing to do with Lady Gregory and he really dismissed what I've been talking about there that whole idea of translation for the purposes of building a nation and he really laughed at us and and even even in Ulysses he makes fun of it but he told you eights even you're too old nothing I can do for you and he was most arrogant young man but he needed one thing more in a way in the same way as Ireland had needed one thing more one other country who had used its ancient past as a way of liberating itself from an empire and that Ireland had to use Greece and Joyce then actually went and and found that that he could base his book on the Odyssey and that that would be the governing myth that when he was seeking form and structure for his own book he would just look at the original to see what were they doing and he could instead of them being heroes he could make Leopold Louise everyman figure do it in a much less heroic way so it's almost an ironic commentary on heroism but he's using the Greek throughout the Greek form and he's and he's calling the chapters for example if there are a cyclops after the chapters of the Odyssey so yet he he is he is the figure I just didn't have time to go into any detail that is wild there's Yeats the lady Gregory but but I think the big one was Joyce so thanks for asking that well I read this along with Edith Hamilton so I would know all the mythology of the people and I I missed Leander I don't know where where you got Leander and I'd also love to know a good biography of Lady Gregory she sounds quite incredible oh and there are there are some body with Lady Gregory I'm sorry to say that I wrote one of them and and it's called it's actually called lady Gregory's toothbrush and it's published I think here by the University of Wisconsin press and yeah I said it should be listed there but it's a short biography there are probably better ones that are longer but if you were but but mine is anyway it's also there and I added a great deal to this story and I mean I took what I needed from the originals and then it was clear that arrestees has a friend but the friend really has no doesn't really have any agency in the in the originals so I am so he is entirely in invented Aeon say his sister his grandfather all of his family is completely from me and meet Ross and all his family and all the old woman episode all of that is mine and the so the basic story is there and then I felt free to work with us so it isn't a we're a translation or even a transliteration and it's an effort to M find something in the story and then build on that to see em where if ik it would take me so it's not a faithful translation and it's it's a novelist at work in other words it's a work of imagination so thank you very much everybody you

Channel: Getty Museum

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Rating: 4.4285712 out of 5

Keywords: getty museum, getty, Colm Toibin, Colm Tobin, House of Names, literature, Getty Museum, J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Villa, lecture, talk, Clytemnestra, Greek literature, getty360, getty talks

Id: wA3Y5ORn0v4

Length: 69min 42sec (4182 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 23 2017