Colm Tóibín

It was​ all sweetness verging on smugness. On the evening of Monday, 6 January we sat in the hot tub in the backyard and looked at the unfull moon. There were really only two small questions preoccupying me. Was that star actually Venus? And, also, was I wrong to feel slightly sad that the Christmas tree had finally been disentangled from its ornaments and was going into the garbage?

In the...

On​ 2 November 1921, James Joyce wrote from Paris to his aunt Josephine in Dublin asking if it was ‘possible for an ordinary person to climb over the area railings of No. 7 Eccles Street, either from the path or the steps, lower himself from the lowest part of the railings till his feet are within 2 feet or 3 off the ground and drop unhurt. I saw it done myself but by a man of rather...

McGahern was amused by many things and people. There was no telephone in the house in Leitrim on my first visit (‘I’m uneasy on the phone,’ he wrote in 1998. ‘I think it comes from having to “mind” the phone when I was a boy in my father’s police station’) and I noticed no television. I realised that he had no interest in music as he was tone deaf. But most of all, he had no interest in Dublin.

Pessoa evokes the city of Lisbon with a nostalgia all the more intense because he has not lost it. Sometimes he is nearly a novelist, managing to make his own quotidian life almost credible and his voice, as he narrates ‘my factless autobiography, my lifeless history’, almost real. What he doesn’t do in ‘my haphazard book of musings’ is relax his control. He can be precise, exact and restrained – like a chess player or a mathematician. But the thinking in The Book of Disquiet is almost light. At times, he can make Bernardo Soares sound like Oscar Wilde (‘I see humanity as merely one of Nature’s latest schools of decorative painting’); at other times, like the J.M. Synge of The Aran Islands, utterly alone in strange weather, trying to make sense of his own solitary condition. Like Synge, he can write simple phrases that do nothing more than say something simple: ‘I love the stillness of early summer evenings downtown.’

Since Bacon was known for his tangled personal life, his gambling, his drinking and the chaos of his studio, with the stories of his sexual habits and ghastly Irish childhood in circulation, something needed to be done to explain that his paintings were not just garish expressions of his own neuroses. David Sylvester and Michel Leiris, who both wrote perceptively about his work, emerged as friends and champions. As early as 1951, Sylvester asserted that Bacon was ‘the major English artist of his time’. He soon had access to Bacon’s studio and saw paintings before anyone else did. Sylvester was practised at making eloquent, high-toned, oracular statements and, spurred on by John Berger’s contrary judgments, applied this skill to Bacon: ‘In these claustrophobic curtained settings, there loom up before us beings whose shadowy, ambiguous, unexpected presence takes command of any setting they survey, making real beings seem like shadows. They are as appalling as they are compelling, for these are creatures faced with their tragic destiny.’