Fellow feeling Love in a Dark TimeColm ToibínPicador £16.99, pp279In 1993, Colm Toibín was asked by an editor of the London Review of Books to write personally and polemically about his sexuality. In his Introduction to this book, Toibín describes the meeting as if it were a scene from an espionage thriller (‘…he walked quickly past me and across the room to the window’). Would this spy come in from the cold? He wouldn’t. He couldn’t, since part of him remained ‘uneasy, timid and melancholy’ about this issue.
Love in a Dark Time is not the outpouring or manifesto that the LRB might have had in mind. Instead, it’s a collection of reviews and essays about gay writers, artists and public figures, many of which did appear in the pages of the LRB (the magazine conducted a sort of campaign of attrition, sending out a steady stream of gay-themed books).Writing these pieces helped Toibín ‘come to terms with things’.
When he does strike a personal note in these pages, it’s clear that he is still armoured against disclosure.
Writing about his boyhood discovery that two young men who lived together in his home town of Enniscorthy had been ‘packed off to jail’ and ruined, he declares: ‘It was clear to me as I grew into my teens that being gay in this country would require care and attention.’This is manifestly a fabricated tone, and even a fabricated vocabulary -‘gay’ would hardly have been the standard term at the time, even in a more metropolitan place.
If Colm Toibín had been capable of such dry bravado in the late Sixties, how could there be enough unease, timidity and melancholy left over to inhibit his self-expression a quarter of a century later?Very few books of essays are planned as wholes. More often they’re what the experts on the Antiques Roadshow (speaking of, say, Cromwell chairs that only loosely match a dining-table) refer to as a ‘harlequin set’. Their coherence is of a secondary order. The coherence of Love in a Dark Time is perhaps lower than this, with some slapdash readings and arguments scattered among sophisticated ones.
There’s a tendency to claim particular aspects of gay lives as beyond the understanding of the outside world. Describing the catastrophic relationship between Oscar Wilde and Bosie Douglas, Toibín writes: ‘In most societies, most gay people go through adolescence believing that the fulfilment of physical desire would not be matched by emotional attachment. For straight people, the eventual matching of the two is part of the deal, a happy aspect of normality. But if this occurs for gay people, it is capable of taking on an extraordinarily powerful emotional force. ‘He cites WH Auden and Chester Kallman as a parallel instance, also James Merrill and David Jackson. But is it so hard to find heterosexual equivalents, Platonic couples that border on folie à deux? Robert Graves and Laura Riding might be candidates, and so might John and Yoko. The extremity of legal consequences is what marks Wilde out, political inequality rather than existential difference.Writing about Roger Casement, Toibín suggests that ‘perhaps it was his very homosexuality… which made him into the humanitarian he was, made him so appalled. Unlike everyone around him, he took nothing for granted… his moral courage… came perhaps from his understanding of what it meant to be despised’.
But Casement exposed atrocities and abuses committed by rubber companies against the Amazon Indians which were first revealed in the magazine Truth (he was sent by the British Foreign Secretary to investigate the allegations). So there could be glimmerings of fellow-feeling even in those who weren’t listing young men’s genital measurements in their diaries and the sums paid out to enjoy them.
Toibín feels that it is important for us to know whether the diaries were forged or not’, yet he can’t quite make up his mind. Of course, if they were forged, then the government at the time of Casement’s execution for treason (which used the diaries to discourage campaigns for clemency) was inventively evil rather than merely unscrupulous – an attractive thought. But without the diaries, much of what Toibín admires in Casement – the quality of his desire, his passion, his erotic complexity, his openness, his doubleness, his erotic energy’ – would disappear (though how, exactly, was he open?), along with his status as a specifically gay martyr. Toibín’s taste for martyrs rather than survivors, what he describes as ‘an urge to have gay lives represented as tragic’, is something that he intermittently fights in this book.
Surely it’s possible to have a tragic sense of life without a contorted attitude to one’s own sexuality? He comes closest to a breakthrough of this sort in his appreciation of Thom Gunn, where he doesn’t have to choose, as a reader, between the suggestiveness of the early work and the later frankness, between his own preference for mysteries and the political value of self-revelation.
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