The Master by Colm Tóibín

busy with other things. This new idea for a story about a brother and sister developed
with a sort of urgency, as something that he barely needed to write down. He would not forget it. It stayed fresh and clear in his imagination. Slowly and mysteriously, it began to fuse with the
ghost story told to him by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and slowly he began to see something fixed and exact as though the processes of imagination themselves were as a ghost, becoming more and
more corporeal. He saw the brother and sister, lonely and abandoned somewhere, banished siblings in a loveless old house, both of them operating with one mind, one soul, equal in their suffering
and unpreparedness for the great ordeal which was to come their way.
    Once it became more solid, the emerging story and all its ramifications and possibilities lifted him out of the gloom of his failure. He grew determined that he would become more hardworking
now. He took up his pen again – the pen of all his unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. It was now, he believed, that he would do the work of his life. He was ready to begin again, to
return to the old high art of fiction with ambitions now too deep and pure for any utterance.
    In the idleness of the afternoon sometimes he let his gaze wander through his notebooks again. One day he almost smiled to himself when he saw a few lines, which had seemed so promising less
than three years earlier that he had allowed them to fill his workday and his dreams alike, the very lines which were the cause of the months of lethargy and pain and disappointment through which
he now was emerging. He forced himself to read them to the end:
    Situation of that once-upon-a-time member of an old Venetian family (I forget which), who had become a monk, and who was taken almost forcibly out of the monastry and brought back
into the world to keep his family from becoming extinct. He was the last – it was absolutely necessary for him to marry. Adapt this somehow or other to today.
    His eye moved quickly to the list of names, ghost names taken from obituaries and death notices, names for characters and places, names which could lie inert in his notebooks or could still be
used; he could spend day after day giving life to them. Beague Vena (Xtian name) – Doreen (ditto) – Passmore – Trafford – Norval – Lancelot – Vyner –
Bygrave – Husson – Domville. Those last eight letters had been placed on the page in all innocence. He had no memory now of where the name had come from, nor indeed the exact
provenance of any of the names which came before it. Nor had he any real idea why that name had been used, and the others, left there, had not. The note and the name seemed distant now, and it
appeared extraordinary to him that his play had arisen from such unpromising beginnings and, once it was replaced by a new play by Oscar Wilde, had suffered an equally unpromising end.
    H IS PARENTS dying, he thought, had brought with it a strange relief. It was the sense that it could not happen again, his mother’s body could lie
in repose only once, she could be consigned to the earth on only one occasion. And that occasion, in all its black brutal sorrow, had passed. With his parents dead and Alice gone, he had believed
that nothing could touch him. Thus his failure in the theatre remained a shock, something whose intensity and sharpness he had never thought he would have to deal with again. It was, he had to
admit, close to grief, even though he knew that such an admission was a kind of blasphemy.
    He knew that he would suffer no further indignity at the hands of theatre audiences; he would devote himself, as he had pledged, to the silent art of fiction. If only he could work now, his days
could be perfect, full of the delight of solitude and the pleasure wrought from finished pages.
    Not long after his return from Ireland, as he settled himself into a routine of reading and letter writing and the creation of