Saint Peter’s College, Wexford, a seat of south eastern learning whose prevailing atmosphere was, according to many alumni, so camp and queeny it could’ve come straight out of Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education.
Enniscorthy-born novelist Colm Toibin was a boarder at St Peter’s from 1970-72 before moving onto UCD and establishing himself as one of the country’s most acclaimed (and prolific) journalists and authors. He’d left before the college reached its peak Fellini years in the ‘70s and ‘80s, but the subject of institutionalised sexual scandal forms the background to two of the short stories in his current Mothers & Sons collection, his first book since 2004’s The Master, winner of the IMPAC award, the biggest literary prize in the world.
“Everywhere I went people were just congratulating me and saying it was marvellous,” Tóibín says of the win. “I don’t know if it’s the Celtic Tiger thing or the patriotic thing or just people being really nice, but there wasn’t one fucker who stopped me and said, ‘There’s the fuckin’ millionaire.’”
Sipping mineral water in the Conrad Hotel lounge, Tóibín rejuvenates old adjectives like ‘charming’ and ‘gregarious’. We’d never met, but having grown up in the same small town, and with only 13 years between us, it turns out we have no shortage of mutual friends and acquaintances. Indeed, once the tape is turned off, the writer takes great relish in relating salacious tales of prominent Wexfordians, not to mention filling me in on the local and autobiographical details of the new stories.
Of those stories, ‘The Use Of Reason’ and ‘A Priest In The Family’ deal with the subject of institutionalised abuse in a tangential rather than direct fashion. In the former, a Dublin gangster recalls the psyscho-sexual punishing of a fellow inmate in an industrial home, while the latter is a Bergman-like study of a mother dealing with fallout from her clergyman son’s involvement in a paedophile scandal.
“The first story, that scene in the boys’ home, was told to me by Martin Cahill in 1985, and I didn’t get its significance,” Tóibín says. “He told me that he saw a brother masturbating while this guy was being hit like that (strapped across the bare buttocks). I was editor of Magill then, and it was almost like someone had led me through a Magdalene laundry or something. It was too strange, too psychological to be current affairs. ‘A Priest In The Family’ one just occurred to me one day. It’s absolutely Enniscorthy, I was just trying to get a set of streets I knew that she could walk in and stuff.”
It’s also a neat inversion of the old truism about a priest in the family being the pinnacle of respectability.
“I put the quote at the back of the book, ‘A well in the yard; a bull in the field; and a priest in the family.’ No-one knows that quote except me. Did you know it?”
I did indeed.
“It must be a Wexford thing then. But by that year, a priest in the family became a black mark.”
That reversal was just one consequence of the Ferns Diocese scandal, and while many of us who grew up in the south-east long suspected that, like any rural region, the place had its Blue Velvet side, few could have anticipated that what happened in our backyard would eventually make the cover of Time magazine and hasten the end of the Catholic Church’s iron grip on this country.
“The extraordinary aspect of Saint Peter’s College in my years was that everything was open for debate,” Tóibín recalls. “We were having debates on abortion, contraception, they were the buzz words to be discussed. There were priests as judges of our debating style on these issues, the very priests that appeared later in court. Everything was open, but homosexuality was never mentioned once. Not once. It was the elephant in the corner that was really unmentionable. I think Ireland was really unusual in this respect, that it had such absolute fear of homosexuality that you repress it so fundamentally.”
So was Saint Peter’s really more camp camp than boot camp?
“It became that in the seminaries, and not only in Saint Peter’s. We need to study this business, masculinity. The whole business of blokes going around the place like this (Tóibín makes a valiant attempt to imitate macho heterosexual speech and body language) is an invention. In the 18th century they didn’t go round like that at all, it seems.
“But there are stories about the arrival of, for example, the satin-lined soutane as a fashion item in many Irish seminaries. Or the constant playing of (Handel’s) ‘The Arrival Of The Queen Of Sheba’ from stereo speakers as certain senior clerics crossed the quadrangle. In some American seminaries, pink broke out as a colour. Masculinity itself as a construct broke down, and they began to… flutter.”
Excuse me – to flutter?
“Yes, ‘fluttering’ broke out in the Irish seminaries! (Laughs.) This wasn’t the case when I was there, it happened afterwards. There are descriptions of certain years in Maynooth, in the 80s I think, where fluttering was the most common activity. I mean, flutter, flutter, flutter, flutter! So that’s what they describe as camp. You could have 20 seminarians who would look like a scene from The Leopard, the only thing missing were the fans fluttering away. And because they were all doing it, a new guy arriving would start doing it too, and it would become what they did. And you can’t stop it, because you’ve to name it to stop it.
“(These were) guys who otherwise knew well, as all gay men do, how to mimic heterosexuals, how they walk, how they talk, how they look, how they go on generally, it’s like you learn a foreign language at a crucial level in order to survive. Some people don’t manage it so well, but most gay guys do. There’s a thing in all gay circles called straight-acting, as in looking for a ‘straight-acting’ guy, but no one ever protests about the ‘acting’ part ’cos straight itself is an act. How come women are allowed mince along the street and it’s perfectly normal, and guys are not? We’re not that different. All I’m saying is this is a social construct, how we walk, talk and behave physically. And that broke down with – for people who especially weren’t victims of it –the most hilarious consequences.
“But while I was there, everybody was still going on like farmers. It just couldn’t be discussed. And you learned so quickly how to disguise it. It was fundamental for you. So a number of people, including people who went to jail and became famous figures – I never knew Sean Fortune but I knew the others – entered the priesthood partly out of spiritual reasons, and partly because it’s really easy to mistake your homosexuality for a vocation for the priesthood.”
Could he elaborate on that?
“Well, in other words, the reason the other guys are not joining the priesthood is they couldn’t imagine it, their sense of a future is a sexual future; they know what it’s going to be like and how much pleasure that’s going to give them, they just know that using their eyes, so they can’t become priests, even if they do have very spiritual feelings.
“But if you don’t have that feeling of a sexual future, then you could think it wouldn’t be such a big sacrifice. And then you enter in and go to the seminary and go through your 20s, like a lot of them did, doing nothing to anybody. But there are no rules except the rules of repression, so there’s no age of consent for clergymen because it’s not just totally illegal according to the law, it’s totally unmentionable. So the idea of an age of consent, that it might be better to do it with somebody who wanted to do it with you, that might have been a novel idea in certain areas! This is not to say, like the rock star who was found in an orgy of sex with an immense quanitity of drugs and his spokesman said, ‘I blame society!’, I’m not saying that. But I am saying that what happened was an imperative, it was not a strange aspect or an aberration. If you do this, that’s what you get.
“The problem is, of course, if you’re the victim of one of those fuckers and you went back crying to your dorm in Saint Peter’s on a fuckin’ Saturday night while Father X had his way with you. The guys who suffered were the kids. But it isn’t just a simple monster created by monstrosity. It was a monster created by the very atmosphere which we all wilfully inhabited. There wasn’t one guy who spoke out and said, ‘What about gay people; surely they have rights too?’ It took years to get David Norris and a good number of other very brave and wonderful people to get the Irish thing moving.”
Tóibín himself served as an altar boy in the rather splendidly gothic Pugin-designed cathedral in Enniscorthy. To this day, when he describes serving holy communion, he remains bemused by the Bacon-esque panorama of oral protruberances that assaulted his eyes every Sunday morning.
“Little ones with glasses and knitted caps with these big muscular tongues!” he says, laughing. “Fuck! You got to know people gynaecologically, without understanding that it was gynaecology you were looking at!”
To return to the Almodovar allusion: the finest essay in Tóibín’s non-fiction book Love In A Dark Time was a fly-on-the-wall study of the director, specifically his description of Almodovar being utterly entranced and bewitched by Costa Rican rancheras singer Chavela Vargas’s performance at a party. Tóibín’s sensitivity to the nuances and subtleties of the gun-toting, cigar smoking, hard-drinking Vargas – who allegedly had a fling with Mexican artist Frida Kahlo as a young woman – is reflected in two stories in his new book, ‘A Song’ and ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’, both elegies to female singers.
“That happened, that scene in Love In A Dark Time,” he affirms. “Her singing at a party and him watching, alert to me, because he needed me to see this, it was crucial to what he was trying to tell me. And she was this little lesbian of immense power. But there’s another scene in Bad Blood:A Walk Along The Irish Border, I was in Fork Hill, South Armagh, 1986, when Maighread Ni Dhomhnaill out of the blue started to sing in a pub. It was electrifying, she sang a version of ‘Róisín Dubh’, she’s never recorded it. And I saw Dolly McMahon doing that a few times, she’d the most sweet voice. But yeah, Chavela Vargas would have fed directly into those two stories.”
This writer discovered Vargas late, through her cameo in Julie Traynor’s Frida Kahlo biopic. Her rendition of ‘Paloma Negra’ alone – the simultaneous embodiment of Andulasian duende, Portuguese saudade and Irish yarra – was so raw and electrifying I went out and bought the soundtrack the next day.
“I wonder if only country boys can take that sort of music with a full heart,” Tóibín laughs, “’cos Almodovar is the most country boy you’ve ever met. Madrid for him is still the fishbowl that his nose is up against, from the outside. I can’t imagine anyone in Dublin getting her voice, that quality of melancholy, the desperation, the sense of nowhere left for me.”