Sebastian Barry

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Ramona Koval: Sebastian Barry began our discussion with a reading from The Secret Scripture in which the dramatist in him really shines through. Here Roseanne McNulty is remembering being with her father when she was about ten years old.

Sebastian Barry: [reading from When I was ten or so my father... to ...the hammers are falling still.]

Ramona Koval: So is that what it's like when you're writing? Do you lock yourself away and perform like that? That was probably the best reading I have seen a writer read his own work.

Sebastian Barry: There would be a terrible attrition rate in the furniture if...my workroom is quite small so there's simply no room. The curious thing is I do write plays as well or am fortunate enough to write plays, and it is always done in a special sort of silence maybe, a particular kind of silence, where you're sitting very still, like the salmon fisherman stands beside the river for hours and hours just trying to get a sense of what's going on in the water, and that seems to require complete silence.

In fact I just opened a play last week in the Abbey with the very wonderful Stephen Rea, and in the first read-through which would be now seven weeks ago or so, I am anxious not to hear the play until the actors read it, as if to sound it too soon would be a disservice to it or a little assault upon it.

Then when you come to read from the book for the first time there's always an enormous anxiety that in a certain sort of way that there's nothing there, that you'll start and she won't be there or he won't be there. I still remember the great shock of reading and realising that Roseanne, the character, was fully present. That's an enormous companionable feeling and engendered by that curious silence.

Ramona Koval: It turns out that that character, so well read, of Roseanne McNulty at the centre of The Secret Scripture is based on one of Sebastian Barry's great aunts who disappeared into an institution after somehow falling foul of the social codes that governed Catholic Ireland. Here Sebastian Barry explains how the idea for this novel began during a drive with his mother.

Sebastian Barry: My mother died two years ago. She was a very extravagant woman. Like Gaul, she was divided into three parts, I suppose; there was a very private part of my mother which you would never reach, and there was the public part of her because she was an actress in the Abbey Theatre, and then there was the part I knew as a child with her. I think I was probably in my 40s already when she was doing a play in Sligo where she'd grown up and I went out to see her for a day and I stayed for week and I'm very glad I did because it was one of those gifts to you as mother and son I suppose, and quite feisty mother and son and not always agreeing about things, not always in cahoots, and this was a very nice time together, unexpectedly.

But anyway, we were driving around Sligo together, as one does, waiting for the evening show, and we went out to Strandhill which is a little seaside place where indeed my great-uncle, her uncle, had had the Plaza Ballroom just beside the Strand, and all of that in the '20s and '30s and surviving Irish history by means of dances and Hollywood music. The true mythology of Ireland is more likely Fred Astaire than Cuchulainn if the truth were known. And her being put up on the counter to sing and dance like Shirley Temple and all the Shirley Temples of Sligo, and all of that. And all of that still in my mother because she never...I think after the age of 17 she decided to have no more memories, she would concentrate on those first 17 years, and no matter what happened to her afterwards this was always more important, even when she was dying.

So we were driving around and we saw this little ruined hut, and she said, 'That's where your woman was put.' And I said, 'What woman is that?' Because 'your woman' is a special sort of phrase in Ireland, it can be pejorative and then just because you don't know the person's name, there's a sort of taint to it. 'Actually I don't know her name but she was your great-uncle's first wife who was a piano player in the band and she was put away in an asylum and I don't know anything else about her, but that's where she was put in this time when her marriage was being annulled.' And that's all she knew about it and that's all she wanted to say about it.

I realised afterwards that her father had been against this woman, my grandfather had been against the woman, and she had taken that 'againstness' into her, as we do, without thinking about it. So she had an unconsidered prejudice, I suppose, against this person. But I was interested in her, whoever she was, and I wanted her back because I'd been writing these books and plays about people like that and I wanted her back because I thought these erased, unconsidered people in our families are often the heroes, they're the most important to us. And if you have your own children and your own babies you want them fully to know who they are, for better or for worse. Positioned in a complicated country like Ireland you sort of need to know who you are.

Ramona Koval: Roseanne is in this mental hospital, and you look at that very deeply, about how these people got there and why. Was there a lot of information available on that for you?

Sebastian Barry: You come at everything from the side, don't you, as a writer. You really are the mouse wandering in through the wainscotting and you don't quite know what you're looking at because it's human matters, and you can get a sort of privileged view. Because you're that slightly detached creature, you have to describe exactly what you're looking at, and it's only afterwards you might find that there's a multiplicity of views, it has happened to many, many people.

When I did a play about 14 years ago called The Steward of Christendom with Donal McCann, it was in the Royal Court in London, and I thought I was writing a play about my old great-great-grandfather in his long johns in a county home who had been head of police in Dublin before independence and therefore was considered a traitor and didn't get his pension and his wits were gone.

I thought I was writing a play about an old fella in a bed, basically, and Donal was going to play the old fella in the bed. But it came on between the two ceasefires in the '90s, and somehow or other, much to our surprise and maybe even slight dismay, it became something to do with all those loyalist Catholic people before independence and all the people who came out to say that their grandfathers or their great uncles had been in similar situations and they had lost their wits. You realise there was a demographic that you could do of it.

Similarly with this, but this is a more mysterious demographic because I wrote a novel about the Irish soldiers in WWI, also very hard people to locate but much, much easier to get numbers on that—200,000 men went out, 50,000 killed—than to get numbers on these women, and also men who were put away not for mental health reasons but because they were surplus to requirements on farms. It made inheritance easier. So if you could take the slightly eccentric son and slip him into one of these places...it was a sort of housekeeping, it is ethnic housekeeping rather than cleansing.

People like Roseanne, I think her greatest crime, having lived with her for a few years now, is her crime was she was beautiful in Ireland in the '20s, which I think probably was a very dangerous thing to be.

Ramona Koval: Why?

Sebastian Barry: You mentioned the Catholic Church, but Father Gaunt is the priest in the book, and I'd just written about a priest called Father Buckley in the WWI book A Long, Long Way, and the Irish Catholic chaplains were allowed into the frontline, unlike the Church of Ireland chaplains or the Church of England chaplains, it was just a rule. So a lot of the men had the benefits or the grace of Irish Catholic priests tending to them after battles or tending to bits of them after battles or whatever. So you got this incredible group of probably enormously traumatised men trying to do their duty, I suppose, by God and man out in the front line. And he's a sort of heroic priest in my work.

But just a few years later you get a man like Father Gaunt who is a young priest in Sligo after independence where we have forgotten Wolfe Tones' command to us 200 years before that Catholic Protestant descendents in Ireland, and Jewish, would have a new accommodation together, we would forgive each other's history and we would go on from there as an independent country. But by the time we got to independence, suddenly for some reason we seemed to be creating a Catholic country, and enormous power was given to these young men swishing along in their soutanes in the small towns of Ireland and elsewhere. And it is no mystery or surprise that this was very, very bad for them.

As I was writing Father Gaunt I was desperate for him to do something wonderful to redeem himself, because in another way he's also based on a cousin of mine who later became auxiliary Bishop of Dublin under Archbishop McQuaid, and anyone who knows those names will have the little chill going through their spine as I speak them, and in fact there's going to be a new report published shortly about the strange collusion of the Dublin bishops over the child sex abuse issue and the way they kept quiet and moved people on. My cousin, Patrick Dunne, will be named in that as one of those bishops who kept silence.

You can't save the Catholic Church but you can just take one individual and hope for the best for them in the course of the book. I think that...it's too easy to say...in the American edition they say it's about the Catholic Church's traditional whatever on women in Ireland and I suppose it is about that but it's really about an individual, because I think you're safer in history with individuals.

Ramona Koval: But why the danger that she was beautiful?

Sebastian Barry: Well, he's a young man, isn't he. I mean, let us not speak of the sexuality of men, it's too horrible to contemplate, but if you put a long dress on yourself and you're not allowed to have any sex, inevitably that's going to cause problemettes, you might say, in society, and surely it did. Also she was Presbyterian and in the book he asks her to convert to Catholicism so he can marry her off nicely, and she won't. She's 16, she certainly is not going to do that, and I do love her for saying no because I wasn't quite sure what she was going to say as I was writing it. And that sort of seals her fate because then she has to be tidied away in some way.

Our actions as human beings, are they ever really conscious? We bring things into courts of law and we try to get sense on them, but there is something dangerously, dangerously unknowable about the human creature, and his understanding, his apprehension of Roseanne as a beautiful young woman who happens to be Presbyterian in that moment of history in Ireland compels him, this man, Father Gaunt, to collude really with her family to remove her from sight, as if she is something literally obscene. And I think that has formed Ireland.

As soon as independence in the '30s, books were banned and all the rest of it. There was a huge effort to make us into holy Catholic Ireland, but no thing on Earth could be such a...probably even if it's a desirable thing, a human creature, Homo sapiens sapiens, a beautiful ape standing on its back legs trying to reach the higher apples cannot be made into that thing or that country. But we did make this insane effort to achieve that, and people like Roseanne were the victims, although if you read the book, she is not a victim to herself, she is heroic in her syntax, so she survives by those means.

Ramona Koval: Here Sebastian Barry talks about his mother and the often blurred boundaries between memory and history.

Sebastian Barry: It only really came upon me like a little storm of wind in making the book, again, caught up with my mother's...you see, my mother was very reliant on her ancient stories of childhood. Her parents had been alcoholic and it was a truly horrible childhood but it was her childhood, and she didn't spare us as children the details because we didn't think she was supposed to spare us. We heard everything and were told everything from the age of four because she obsessively recounted and reiterated them.

I have a whole play called Our Lady of Sligo which is about her mother, composed of stories I suppose I had been told by my mother, and I realised as she got...one of the tragic elements of when she got very, very ill is I realised actually to my secret horror and her old anecdotes and her old stories were failing her, they weren't actually sustaining her because they had the wrong sort of untruthfulness in them. Some of them are wilfully misremembered, and that helped me with this because Roseanne never wilfully misremembers anything.

As Dr Green says towards the end, 'It's obvious that Father Gaunt has some of the facts and Roseanne is not factually correct,' but he prefers Roseanne's untruth over Father Gaunt's truth because her untruth radiates health. And I suppose that's the degree to which the book is about mental health is that investment in story; if it is life-giving and it makes the brain tingle and spark and star, they are the correct stories, they are the truthful stories because they have the element that the brain requires in order to be radiantly alive.

Of course it's a nightmare for a poor writer with a little editorial top head to have three accounts of the same thing all differing and all contradicting each other, because one wants in one's despair towards the end of a book when you're editing it for it all to add up and for it all to be correct. And when you have to leave incorrectness in, it really is...and if you're a bit tired and you forget what you've done a few weeks before and you think 'why is that there, that's totally incorrect', and you realise it's supposed to be totally incorrect...it's really not good for a 54-year-old brain, let me tell you.

Ramona Koval: Dr Green actually writes a paper on versions of memory and talks about the absolute fascist certainty of memory.

Sebastian Barry: Does he?

Ramona Koval: Yes.

Sebastian Barry: My memory had forgotten that.

Ramona Koval: Tell me why you like to rescue these people from history? How did they get covered up and why is it important to uncover them?

Sebastian Barry: Because I need them. We all need them. They're our people. We talk about our families and we love our children to the upmost of our abilities. I suppose my parents were enormously eccentric...well, they weren't there a lot of the time because if you're a working actor you're not there and my father was seldom there. So I invested heavily love-wise (as the Americans would say) in my great-aunt and my grandfathers who were there. And when they, in due course, die or whatever is this mysterious thing we do at certain pointed days in our lives, I miss them in a kind of untoward fashion. I never went to their funerals. If you ever see me at a funeral you know I didn't quite love that person enough to stay away.

Because I didn't want them to die in that way, and I do feel...even if we have no heaven or hell and even if it's all just here in this mysterious, gigantic universe, our afterlife in the minds of our families and our friends is sufficient because to live a life...and she says that, if you have no anecdotes you do not survive in the world, and maybe that's also what she's trying to do, transmit her anecdotes. But there's a sort of incompleteness then in the child, and the people live on in your memories and you live with them far more intimately suddenly than sometimes you did when they were alive because they're so close to you and you're also responsible for them and they're in your care because they're in your mind.

I still over the years still walk the old yard of my great-aunt in Kelsha which is a little townland in Wicklow, and I can still see the wet noses of the cows in the byre there, and I can still see the Rhode Island Reds tramping up the packed stones, and the old sheepdog asleep in the suntrap, and she's there still coming out and Sarah her cousin shooing the hens out the house and Annie secretly letting her favourite hens back in. All that is so important really because it seems unimportant. And of course they are the important, essential things, so important that they have a red light flashing, they are emergency, they are the ambulances of memory, we must have them, they must come.

As I find out about these other people...my father was one of those people in the '50s who had that kind of Sartreian existentialism, that kind of cargo cult washed up on the Irish shore and became strangely changed because it was a license to have no sense of family, no photographs, love was dead, history was dead. Yes, yes, well that's fine for that generation but as a child you don't want those things to be true. So I was probably, when I sit here thinking on my feet, as it were, trying to make those things untrue, and part of that is to bring back the people who were buried in history and occluded by history in any Irish family or any English family, I'm sure, people we hid away, people who were Catholic when they were supposed to be Protestant, or Protestants when they supposed to be Catholics, who go to the wrong war and come back unthanked, who were...

My beautiful, beautiful great-grandmother, a woman called Fanny Hawke is my favourite grandfather's (forgive me other grandfather) mother, who was sort of a Quaker woman on Sherkin Island in Cork, they were waiting for the new Jerusalem and all the rest of it, and they were from Manchester and they ran out of people to marry. She finally let her family fall behind her because she was never allowed to come back if she married outside the sect. She married a Catholic from Cork city, and she was never mentioned to me by her son, her son whom I adored, my painter grandfather, he never mentioned her to me because she had been a Protestant. That's just...and then to steal them back and put them on the Abbey stage...it's a sort of wickedness too, as you can imagine.

Ramona Koval: And not everybody understood in your family about your need to revivify people. What happened with your grandfather?

Sebastian Barry: My other grandfather, he ended up as that magical thing in WWII...I don't know if you're familiar with the phrase 'temporary gentleman', he was given commission for the duration of the war and he joined the royal engineers because he was a very good engineer, and he fought in North Africa and various places. But one of the beautiful things he did was he defused bombs all over southern England, which I think is a lovely job for an Irishman. And I have his war medals still.

So he was a considerable man but he was also a drinking man, and that's the great poison of Irish history is this drug, and this caused enormous problems in his marriage, as you can imagine. And his wife, who had been a non-drinker when he married her, also quite creature, a woman manifest in the world, vivid and in her own way powerful, but in Sligo, God help her. Anyway, she started drinking around the age of 30 and she was dead by 53. And then he stopped drinking, and he was so full of grief that his hair fell out, his hair completely fell out. And he went back to Africa to work in the Foreign Service building these straight, straight canals across Nigeria. If you're ever in an aeroplane over Nigeria and see them, probably my grandfather made them. And his hair grew back.

Anyway, obviously I'm now writing a book for you about him as I sit here, but when I did write a little early version of that play Our Lady of Sligo, a little short novel, it was called Time Out of Mind and it was about that, but I was in Zurich or somewhere, I just thought I was writing a book, so I was very happy and it was being published which was, of course, miraculous because I'd been writing for seven years and no one had said boo to me about publishing a book, so I was really happy.

But he brought me to his apartment, brought me into the flat, and this is somebody I adored as well, he sat me down and he cursed me. He said, 'What do you think you're doing, you f—r?' He's a soldier so I'm sure he was cursing then but he had never said something like that to me. We have a certain politesse and courtesy with our grandchildren and our children, and this was very shocking to me. He said, 'How do you know all these things?' Because of course they were horribly true, like gunrunning in Africa. And I said, 'My mother told me,' his own daughter.

And we never spoke again, and when my sister was getting married, at the wedding dinner he said to my mother, 'Sebastian and I have to stop this now and we'll forgive each other and we'll just go on and be fine and it's time to do that,' and I was too stupid, too young, too arrogant, too nasty really to do that, and we did never speak again, much to my shame.

Ramona Koval: So is it worth it, the need to have this part of you as a writer tell the stories you need to tell?

Sebastian Barry: Well, since it's a necessity, 'worth it' doesn't really come into it. Because you're at the top of the mountain and there's an icy wind blowing through your head, you've got to get down. So there's a sort of necessity to it but I do think, after 31 years, that the writer is not essentially a respectable person, there's a sort of criminality in it that you have to sort of allow. At the same time, when I wrote this book I was very worried because my great-uncle married again after annulling his marriage with this woman, whose name I still don't think I know, I call her Roseanne...but he annulled his marriage and he had three children, and one of them is a man called Pauric [spelling] who lives in New York, he works for Time Life Books, he's writing a bit himself, and I was very concerned that I would offend and hurt him with this book because it is an enormous family secret. Because when his family died they were shocked to discover that he'd been married before, they simply didn't know. And of course in a cruel sense he hadn't been married before because an annulment is not a divorce, an annulment is saying to the woman, 'Actually you were never married. You must have dreamed that because that didn't happen.' And she calls herself Mrs McNulty in the book sometimes for that reason.

He rang me from New York and I thought, here we go, another cursing member of the family, but no, he said, 'Thank you for writing this, this has waited so long to be said and thank you for saying it. One of my sisters had her name on a piece of paper because we got it after my father's death. I don't know where it is, it's in one of the houses in the west of Ireland. I'll come over in the summer and I'm going to look through everything and I'm going to find her name for you.' Which is so like the end of the book that frankly it did make me cry, on a transatlantic phone call.

So that was a different sort of reaction, and maybe one shouldn't pride oneself on that either because there is no guarantee that somewhere in somebody's private world in the room of their lives you haven't upset them, they just haven't told you. So you don't know really what effect you're having. But I do cherish the fact that I lived long enough that a woman who had no friends all her life, who was abandoned in the matter of friendship, you might say, now has among her 500,00 readers many, many, many friends. And I hope she's not annoyed with me, wherever she is.

Ramona Koval: I'm sure she's not. We've come to the end of our completely entrancing hour with Sebastian Barry. Haven't we had a fantastic time? Thank you.

Sebastian Barry: Thank you.

Ramona Koval: Irish writer Sebastian Barry speaking to me at the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival in the UK a couple of weeks ago. His book is The Secret Scripture and it's published by Faber.

Sebastian Barry

Irish poet, playwright and novelist

Publications

Title: The Secret Scripture

Author: Sebastian Barry

Description: Faber