Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know

May 1, 2018

Who better to tell the story of Irish culture, history, and literature than Irish author Tóibín, winner of Costa and Los Angeles Times Book honors and three times short-listed for the Man Booker Prize?

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August 15, 2018
Irish literary geniuses and their fathers: three compelling portraits that measure just how far the apple falls from the tree.Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and James Joyce weren't just three of the greatest writers of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. As Irish-born novelist and critic Tóibín (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; House of Names, 2017, etc.) demonstrates, they also suffered serious daddy issues. If Wilde had exalted notions of his own class and intellect, consider that his father, William, was a man of extraordinary accomplishments: doctor, voluminous writer on travel, medicine, and folklore, archaeologist, and statistician. He was also knighted by the queen and lived as he wished. Neither he nor Oscar's mother, Jane, followed the rules. If Oscar shared their "sense of nobility and their feeling that they could do whatever they wanted," it didn't always work out as well for him. William suffered a bruising moral scandal but basically emerged unscathed; his son, decades later, wouldn't fare so well. Yeats' father, John, was a painter who couldn't finish a painting, even the self-portrait that consumed his final years. Sons William and Jack took the negative example to heart, taking pride "in finishing almost everything they started." Joyce paid homage to John Stanislaus Joyce in the very last line of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead." The older man was perpetually drunk, broke, and abusive; his son deserted him in life and redeemed him in art. "He allows him," Tóibín writes, "to be the man he is with his friends rather than with his family." Joyce said of Ulysses, "the humour of [it] is his; its people are his friends. The book is his spittin' image."A short but entertaining, thoroughly engaging study on the agony of filial influence.

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September 3, 2018
Fans of early modern literature will enjoy this look by novelist Tóibín (House of Names) at the fathers of three of Ireland’s most acclaimed authors. He explores a milieu they shared—the “small Dublin world” of the 19th century—and the many connections among their three families. W.B. Yeats’s grandparents and father knew Oscar Wilde’s parents, and a younger Yeats “would later dine at the house of Oscar Wilde in London.” His father “even met the young James Joyce on the street,” finding him “very loquacious.” Wilde’s father, William, excelled as a physician, as well as an “antiquarian, topographer, folklore collector, and archaeologist.” However, Yeats and Joyce’s fathers, both named John, and respectively a painter and a musician, found little contemporaneous fortune. Despite the focus on fathers, the works of the sons pervade this book, and Tóibín illuminates them with fresh readings. These include Yeats’s poems and Wilde’s prison letter De Profundis (which Tóibín once spent several hours performing aloud from the cell where Wilde was locked up for “gross indecency”), but Joyce’s fiction, filled with references to Yeatses, Wildes, and Joyce’s own family, receives particularly close attention. Originally delivered as a series of lectures, this study balances dexterous narration and Tóibín’s scholarly familiarity with his subjects’ place in Irish political and social history. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge & White.