Novelist Sebastian Barry explores the personal stories behind Ireland's political history
His latest book, Old God's Time, is longlisted for this year's Booker Prize
This fall, as Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33 year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. This episode originally aired Oct. 19, 2008.
The former laureate for Irish fiction, Sebastian Barry writes richly invented stories inspired by people in his own family – from his grandfather in the 2014 novel, The Temporary Gentleman, to Days Without End about his grandfather's uncle, which won the Walter Scott Prize. Barry remains the only writer to win the Costa Award for best book of the year twice – once for Days Without End and earlier for The Secret Scripture. His latest book, Old God's Time, is longlisted for this year's Booker Prize.
Born in Dublin in 1955 to the well-known Irish actress Joan O'Hara, Barry has written poetry and acclaimed plays in addition to novels. He's spoken to Eleanor Wachtel several times over the years, starting in 2008 about his novel, The Secret Scripture. It tells the story of Roseanne, a 100-year-old woman forcibly confined to a psychiatric hospital, who has decided to write an account of her life. The novel was inspired by the wife of Barry's great uncle and looks at the political tensions of 1920s and '30s Ireland.
The unknown history of an unnamed woman
"She remains unknown and forgotten. All that remained of her was a rumour of beauty, as she says herself in her book. Somebody who had worked in my great uncle's dance band as the piano player, and she made the mistake, possibly, of marrying him. But whatever happened, the family conspired against her to commit her sometime in the 1940s, and she disappeared from view. So much so that her name wasn't even remembered.
"When my mother first spoke about her to me, she referred to her as 'that woman' or 'your woman,' as we say here in Ireland. So it was a person I particularly wanted to try and fetch back, even by these devious and untruthful means of a novel, for that very reason that she'd been so completely erased."
A sympathetic writer
"She's very careful. She admonishes herself. She says she must be even-handed when she writes about these people. She must be fair, because I think Roseanne is a writer in that sense.
"She is an isolated person. She's living in a room at the top of a building. Few people come to see her. It is the actual quintessential writer's life.
"She doesn't want to go back to an account of her life in order to accuse. She just wants it there so that somehow, just before she dies, because she is nearly 100, perhaps is 100, she may leave an account of herself that is, in a sense, her own apprehension of immortality, even though, rather wonderfully, she doesn't want anyone to see it and she hides it under the floorboards."
Writing to combat the dangers of secrecy
"I was a child of an Irish family and I'm always looking for these supposed outlawed people in the family. But I was a child of an Irish family in an epoch of secrecy, where the very walls of the house became impenetrable, as if they were houses without windows and doors that the child could neither enter nor exit from.
The dangers of secrecy, even necessary secrecy, even discretion and even civil behaviour, can be far greater than the benefits of keeping silent.
"And I grew up concluding that there's nothing that cannot be said, there's nothing that shouldn't be said out loud. Because as soon as you choose an area for secrecy, terrible, terrible things happen inside that silence.
"So sometimes, you know, I've gotten into trouble. I wrote a play a few years ago called Hinterland, which was supposedly about one of our prime ministers, but in fact it was really about my father. But I got into serious trouble for doing that here in Ireland. The dangers of secrecy, even necessary secrecy, even discretion and even civil behaviour, can be far greater than the benefits of keeping silent."
A sense of pride for Ireland
"I astonished myself a couple of years ago in Philadelphia. I was doing a reading with John Banville and Colm Tóibín – two great figures, scare you to death reading with them.
"The lady asked me, 'Well, you've written about your country […] how do you feel about [it]?'
"And I said without thinking, 'I love my country,' which is a slightly mad thing to say. But there it was.
"Well, there was a great snort from John behind me, quite rightly, being a more sardonic character. And of course the audience applauded and it all got a bit strange for a moment, but nevertheless. And John said, 'If I stood up and said I love my mother, I'd get the same response.' So he made a wonderful joke about it and it was interesting. But I made that connection between mother and country immediately and later thought about that.
"People sometimes, if they read the books, they do read them with a sort of hunger to have these stories back. So therefore I feel I'm edged a little closer to citizenship by hook or by crook, even by stealth and thievery. And I look where I live and I look at how my country treats me generally, and how we're allowed to live. In Ireland, writers are not taxed. It's possible to bring up your children from books and plays. These are all miracles to me, and I have to conclude that I love my country and it is a country infinitely worthy of that love.
We should always look at that dance of peace with eyes of amazement, and never eyes of indifference or habitude.
"And yet I know it's an accidental country. If by chance I had been born, like my mother, in a ship off the Rock of Gibraltar, would I not have to love that patch of sea? Of course. It's not that Ireland is this place that is particularly worthy of love, but we have achieved something in Ireland. I don't know how we did it, but we finally have become a sort of grown up country, which is a tremendous victory. Not the victory we sought, our people sought or thought was good – a different sort of victory, the best sort of victory, a sort of accidental human victory.
"And we have seen magical events in Ireland since 1994, the Good Friday Agreement… all these things were impossibilities. No one can state often enough that peace in Ireland was never possible. It was never going to be achievable, like peace in the Middle East may seem now, but something happened, something got in upon the people who were dealing with it, and this resulted.
"We should always look at that dance of peace with eyes of amazement, and never eyes of indifference or habitude."
Sebastian Barry's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
