COLM TÓIBÍN has a calm, mildly humorous voice in several genres and as a literary critic and professor. He’s probably best known for his descriptions of his native Ireland in novels about women— The Blackwater Lightship, Nora Webster, and Brooklyn (which was made into a movie starring Saoirse Ronan as a young Irish immigrant to New York City in the 1950s)—as well as his novels exploring the lives of two influential 20th-century writers, Henry James and Thomas Mann. In this collection of essays, originally published from 1995 to 2022, Tóibín discusses personal topics (his bout with cancer, the small town where he grew up) and public topics (the legal status of homosexuality in Ireland, priests and popes, the work of other writers). As an openly gay man from a notoriously homophobic culture, he seems to have found a certain comfort level as a citizen of the world with an engaging public persona. He divides his time among homes in Ireland, New York, Los Angeles, and Spain. The title of this collection hints at the author’s general approach to his subject matter. He expresses himself as a humble guest at every “feast” he attends, not the host or the guest of honor. In the title essay, the reader is given a tour of Enniscorthy, the town where Tóibín was born in 1955, and where Irish history seems to be embodied in the land itself. Tóibín explains: “the hill that overlooks Enniscorthy ... was the last stand of the rebels [against the British] in 1798.” Tóibín mentions his grandfather, who was arrested and imprisoned for his role in the Easter Rising of 1916. The author himself emerges as more of an observer of history than a participant. Tóibín’s sexuality is treated almost as a peripheral issue, a personal characteristic that was not spoken of for many years. In an essay on a constitutional challenge to Ireland’s laws against homosexuality in 1980, which Tóibín covered as a journalist, he describes the double consciousness of his community: “In George Orwell’s 1984, the most severe punishment for citizens was to forbid them the right to love. To most readers of the book, this seemed a cruelty farfetched and almost impossible, but for most gay people it was a nightmare we inhabited while pretending, sometimes even to ourselves, that it was nothing, or while telling ourselves that it would not easily change and that it was dangerous to complain.” The challenge to Ireland’s laws in 1980 The World According to Colm the Violin Concerto, and Knoxville Summer of 1915, no longer figures regularly on the programs of the world’s major orchestras. Among his American contemporaries, Aaron Copeland is certainly encountered more often in performance today. Who, then, might be interested in a 700-page life-and-works study of Barber? Pollack’s biography interweaves twenty chapters on the composer’s major works with nine chapters on his life. The latter do a good job of situating Barber in the American classical music world of his era. Because he knew virtually everyone from an early age, the biographical chapters offer windows on the activities not only of Barber and Menotti, but also of Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, and many others. Some things are lacking that could have been interesting. We learn very little about what music Barber encountered while in Europe in the 1930s. Perhaps there is no documentation on this, but brief sketches of who was performing what while he was in Vienna or London might have been useful. It would have been interesting to learn what Barber thought of his contemporaries’ works, but he evidently left nothing about that either. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have shown much interest in any of them. Nor does he appear to have thought of himself as a particularly American composer, unlike, for example, Copeland or Gershwin. And he did not see himself as a gay composer. Perhaps not surprisingly, today’s leading American classical composers don’t seem to demonstrate any desire to emulate Barber. Howard Pollack greatly admires Barber but admits that he had a “relative unconcern with creating a distinctive style of his own or anything particularly original.” It’s hard to continue in the line of someone who never really created a distinctive line of his own. JEANROBERTA A GUEST AT THE FEAST: Essays by Colm Tóibín Scribner. 336 pages, $28. Jean Roberta is a widely published author based in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. 32 TheG&LR
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