Yiyun Li on the Master, Colm Tóibín

Yiyun Li In 2006, Colm was visiting a graduate class taught by a friend on the west coast where I was a young assistant professor, so I slipped into the class, pretending to be a student. During the hour-long class, I was stricken by this man—up until then I had never seen a face so brilliantly vivid, so wise, so patient (it wasn’t the most inspiring group of students), so sharp, and yet so amusing and amused. I swear I did the most impudent thing. I stared at him the entire time. I couldn’t take my eyes off. I couldn’t afford to lose a moment of watching him.

After the class, I scurried away, too shy to meet him. What came next—Colm always tells it better than I—he asked my friend, Who’s that woman? And then he asked my friend to take him to Diesel Bookstore in Oakland, where he bought a copy of my (only) book, before he went to the airport. He read the book on the flight from California to New York, went from the airport to the hospital to see the great late Barbara Epstein, and offered to piece on a new writer’s book for The New York Review of Books. And that, Colm told me later, was the last assignment Barbara gave from the hospital bed.

Over the years, we’ve met in Kilkenny, Cork, San Francisco, Edinburgh, East Sussex, Princeton, New York, and to this day I have met very few people who can be as vividly curious and as brilliantly amused as Colm.

Once, I listened to him give a reading from his collection Mothers and Sons. It is story called “Priest in the Family,” and it opens with Father Greenwood visiting an old woman, the mother for a soon-to-be-disgraced priest, to deliver some bad news. Here’s the paragraph, after a couple lines of small talk:

She could think of nothing more to say and hoped that he might go now. Instead, he reached down and pulled up one of his gray socks, then waited for a moment before he inspected the other and pulled that up too.

While reading on stage, Colm paused and pulled one sock and then the other, and explained that he had always been fascinated by men who would do that when embarrassed. Till that moment I had not paid attention to such a small gesture, but for the next eight years, I observed again and again my therapist doing that while trying to find something to say to me. And every time he did that, I would text a friend with the words: Dr. M performed the Colm Tóibín movement today.

Once, we were given a private tour together at Charleston House, Vanessa Bell’s home in East Sussex. The curator showed Colm and me to Vanessa Bell’s bedroom and told the famous story: when Vanessa Bell gave birth to a baby girl, Angelica, whose birth father was Duncan Grant, Duncan Grant’s lover David Garnett came in to see the baby, and announced that in twenty he would marry her. This upset Vanessa Bell, but in twenty years Angelica’s birth father’s male lover did marry her. I gasped, and gasped again when Colm turned to me and said, “How come we never got interesting parents like these people to mess us up?”

Let me return to our first meeting in 2006. In that class, someone asked Colm about his writing process, so he talked about having known Henry James’ life well but not having the right place to start the novel, The Master. He was walking in Italy then, as Henry James had done all those years earlier, and then something happened to Colm, a dream, which became the opening of The Master.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I’ve been thinking of this passage and Colm’s dreams and Henry James’s dreams on most of the days when I face a blank sheet. Something happened yesterday, I would think, and then would start a new day’s writing with Colm’s maneuver.

Dearest Colm, let that old door Henry James be the master for others. You are the master for me.