Kevin Barry: ‘People expect me to be a raging alcoholic – but it’s all oatmilk and yoga these days’
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
In his cheerfully chilly house in a small Irish village in County Sligo, Kevin Barry is explaining why his latest novel took so long to write. Samuel Beckett is glaring at us from a large framed photograph hanging above the fireplace: even that most costive of writers might have thought a gestation period of 25 years for one book is going too far.
Barry, 54, is transporting me back to 1999, when he was taking time out from freelance journalism to write his first novel. “I bought myself a small caravan, a little Father Ted job, put it on a beach in a beautiful spot in West Cork. And I had f------ nothing to write about.” Glumly wandering around the coast, he stumbled one day on the abandoned copper mines in Allihies.
“The miners left when the mines played out in the late 19th century and I found out they all went to Butte, Montana, where they were starting to take up the copper to electrify the US,” he explains. “The Irish community operated out there in the way it always did in the US: first thing they did, they opened 38 pubs. Then they took over the police and then they took over the political apparatus. Always those three steps, in that order. I immediately thought: this is a novel – a Western with Cork accents.”
Barry hotfooted it to Butte, a 14-hour Greyhound bus journey from Seattle. “It’s a kind of hard-knuckle, old working-class, not very good-looking town high up in the Rocky Mountains.”
A community with a proud Irish heritage, everybody was happy to talk to the visitor from Cork. “Including Norma Jean, the last madam of the last brothel in town. It had just closed at this time and she was re-opening it as a brothel museum. They’d dug up an old sign with the tricks that were on offer written in Irish, because a lot of the West Cork copper miners wouldn’t have spoken English. And every trick was index-linked to a miner’s daily wage.”
Back in Cork, Barry encountered a problem: he had too much material to squeeze into a book. “After about 120,000 words I quietly abandoned it. It’s upstairs under a bed, I haven’t been able to look at it.”
Barry went on to make a reputation as an outstanding writer of short stories and, in 2011, eventually published his first novel, City of Bohane, a pawky vision of the West of Ireland in the 2050s. His second novel, Beatlebone, a portrait of John Lennon, won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize; his third, Night Boat to Tangier, about two Irish gangsters, was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.
After that, having learned how to shape a novel, he was finally ready to return to Butte. The result is The Heart in Winter, a glorious book with all the heart and excitement of a classic Western, couched in the mixture of lyrical style and offbeat comedy that has become Barry’s trademark.
His hero is Tom Rourke, photographer’s assistant and balladeer, who keeps himself in funds for booze and opium by helping the miners write marriage proposal letters. “It was common practice to write to these Irish girls, in service in Boston or Chicago, that they’d never met: ‘Come out here and you’ll have a house.’ And these brave young women would come and marry these dudes straight off the train.”
In Barry’s story Polly Gillespie marries a mining boss within minutes of her arrival in Butte, but gets the hots for Tom: they run away into the mountains together, dodging the husband’s hired pursuers and encountering all manner of eccentric characters. “I would say this was the happiest writing experience of my career,” says Barry. “The Western gives you plot, it gives you momentum: you’re always hopping up on a horse and lighting out for fresh territory in a hurry.”
With Sebastian Barry, Paul Lynch and Joseph O’Connor all having written Irish Westerns in recent years, the genre is in vogue. “A diaspora is a great way to write about your own people,” says Barry. “It’s also kind of instructive to remind ourselves that Irish people have always been migrants, economic refugees trailing off around the planet and always getting pretty warmly welcomed, when now much of the migration is into Ireland and causing all these tensions and pretty nasty rhetoric.”
Drink plays a large part in the new novel, as it seems to in all Barry’s work. “I think people expect me to be a raging alcoholic – no, it’s all oatmilk and yoga here these days. But I write a lot about Irish men from working-class backgrounds – my own background – so [alcohol’s] inclined to come up. Also pubs are wonderful settings because people say all sorts of crazy things in them.” He’s an inveterate eavesdropper, trying to capture the poetic comedy of everyday talk. I ask him for the most memorable phrase he’s overheard, and he recalls staying in a hotel with an English couple in their 60s in the next room. “They started to make love at some volume, and at one point your man just roared out at the top of his voice: ‘Oh you exquisite b----’. I don’t think you can top that.”
He is also famous for the lovingly inventive use of profanity in his work. “I have had walk-outs at readings in the US over the c-word, and I tend to make it worse by saying: ‘But look, in Ireland when you call someone a c-word it’s because he’s your friend.’ Working-class Irish men use swearing as a defence, a shield. There’s hundreds of years of politics and class and religion behind it. I would have to say I also grew up in a very profane household in a very profane small Irish city, so it feels very natural to me.” That was Limerick, where, Barry says, “I was a kind of Goth teenager, lying around the cathedral graveyard, trying to write poems. They never worked out, I was too happy.”
Despite the earthiness of Barry’s work, there is usually a strong element of the spiritual too: ghosts and witchcraft feature in The Heart in Winter. “It just comes out of the way Irish people are. You see that circle of trees over there?” he asks, pointing out of the window. “Just behind that is a fairy fort. And it’s not that the local farmers believe in fairies, but they won’t cut the trees there, ever.”
Barry lived a peripatetic life all over Ireland, Britain, Europe and the States until 2006 when he settled in this house – a former Royal Irish Constabulary barracks – with his wife, the academic Olivia Smith. “The people who live here are very amused, I guess, that I’m here writing these nutty books, but they would never ask me about it. We talk about the weather.
“It’s affordable to live in a place like this in the rainy north-west. I don’t teach or anything, I can get by just going to my shed and making up my stuff.”
The house is certainly in a beautiful spot, surrounded by fields in all directions, although as we go outside Barry seems less interested in communing with nature than in cursing the cuckoo (“we call him Brendan”) that offers a constant noisy accompaniment to life throughout spring. He takes me to see his shed – a former holding cell – replete with comfy sofa and dartboard, but no Wi-Fi.
“I can’t write if the internet’s in the room. Like everyone I’m just too inclined to pick up the phone, and start looking at bullshit like ‘how can things possibly get worse for Ten Hag’s Red Army?’ ” He thinks people find it harder to read novels now too, which is why he keeps his books short and intense, boiling 1,000 words down to 300, seeking a rhythm that will pull the reader through the story.
Barry suspects that a growing “nostalgia for the pre-digital world” accounts for the success of Winter Papers, an annual anthology of Irish writing which he and his wife co-edit and publish in the form of a beautiful cloth-covered book.
“Olivia does 98 per cent of the work, I would say. It’s interesting that since we started it 10 years ago, all the artists and writers have moved out of Dublin: they just can’t afford it. But it’s good for the smaller places. Growing up in Limerick, the thing was to get out as soon as you possibly could. When I go back there now, it’s a very different atmosphere – people are, in a very DIY way, doing their own music labels and films and theatre shows.”
The anthology also shows that Irish literature is in terrific shape, he says. “The weather plays a massive part, I think. The fact that in this village it rains more than 300 days a year certainly inclines me towards the desk. These are the conditions for an island of fabulists and yarn spinners.”
The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry (Canongate, £16.99), is out on June 6
