TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR FRANK MC GUINNESS, UCD School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin on 16 June 2010, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa on COLM TÓIBÍN
A Wexford man from Enniscorthy, Colm Tóibín graduated from University College Dublin in English and History. Since then he has pursued a career as teacher, journalist, critic and novelist. His fictions include, The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story Of The Night, The Blackwater Lightship, The Master and Brooklyn. He has also published Mothers And Sons, a collection of short stories. His travel writing includes Bad Blood: A Walk Along The Irish Border, Homage To Barcelona and The Sign Of The Cross: Travels In Catholic Europe. He has produced the distinguished critical work, Love In A Dark Time : Gay Lives From Wilde To Almodovar and Lady Gregory’s Toothbrush, about whom he wrote a play which was performed in the Peacock Theatre.
His work has been recognised with numerous prizes; the Whitbred First Novel Award and The Irish Times Literary Prize for The South; the Encore Award for The Heather Blazing; the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian and Gay Fiction for The Story Of The Night. He has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in 1999 for The Blackwater Lightship and in 2004 for The Master, his profound analysis of Henry James. The Master went on to win The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2009 Brooklyn received the Costa Novel award.
A great sympathy motivates Colm Tóibín’s writing. The root of its power is its sense of grief. He articulates the shifts and stresses of minds and souls in mourning for that which is lost and gone. His fiction patiently, passionately conveys its grasp of time passing, ranking him among the finest of historical novelists, an archaeologist who can detect the faintest, deepest wounds that suffering inflicts on human consciousness, shaping it, and ultimately, triumphantly, sustaining it, so that the dominant image radiating from his art is of a strength and substance comparable to the writings of Graham Greene and J.G. Farrell.
Like Greene, Tóibín’s sense of place is never predictable. The Story Of The Night is an extraordinarily assured journey through the intricacies of Argentine politics at the time of the Generals and the Falklands War, bearing testimony also to the rise of Aids, intensifying the darkness of the dark decade, the 1980s. Like Farrell, he carries the depth and breadth of his research lightly and with most splendid wit in The Master, his illuminating vision of Henry James, sharing the secrets and self- censorship that lay behind the monumental achievement of his work. Yet despite Tóibín’s reverence for the great tradition of the novel, he is emphatically his own man as is revealed by his latest book, Brooklyn. It charts the biography of Eilis on her journey from Wexford to New York and from adolescence into womanhood. He details this pilgrim’s progress with a tenderness and intimacy only the most informed empathy allows, an empathy spread to include a wonderful creation of his home town, Enniscorthy, in the novel.
The scale of Colm Tóibín’s writing is immense. And it is still continuing to grow. His is an art constantly striving to redefine itself, restless, driven, discerning, intelligent. He stands now, and will remain, one of Ireland’s most cultivated, most bold and most brilliant authors.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meum filium, quem scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneum esse qui admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Litteris; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.