In late May 2021, toward the end of Ireland’s third Covid lockdown, the novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry, often mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate, gave an unusual public lecture from his dining room in Wicklow. The occasion was a Dublin literary festival, or its online incarnation, and hundreds had signed up to hear Barry speak. His subject that day, as it often tends to be, was family — both his own troubled clan and the wider human fold. “The good news is, we are all the same family,” as one of his characters says about the discovery of DNA. “The bad news is, we are all the same family.”
At 65, Barry had spent the past four decades furiously shaking his crooked family tree. The fruit of this effort was an extraordinary sequence of novels and plays inspired by Barry’s real-life ancestors. Collectively — which is how he intends them to be read — they amount to a kind of Irish “War and Peace,” in which the country’s violent 20th century upends the lives of two ill-fated households, the Dunnes and the McNultys. Now, as Barry loomed behind a music stand with a gooseneck lamp clipped to one side and a microphone protruding from the other, it seemed that he was going to speak plainly about the flesh-and-blood people he’d transfigured into fiction — as well as his more immediate kin.
Announcing his title, “The Fog of Family,” Barry began to describe the time his older sister shattered his nose by pushing him down the steps of their house in the Dublin suburb of Monkstown. He was 1½. “Then it duly healed and then she pushed me out a window,” Barry went on, the light flashing off his rectangular spectacles and imparting a sheen to his tousled gray hair. “But it was the ground floor and it merely served to break my nose again.”
His sister, Barry was keen to emphasize, was “not a murderer, she was a child consumed by a powerful emotion.” Until recently, she’d been the only child. “Then, the interloper arrived.” Another early memory, he continued, as though he’d just discerned it through the haze, “was me smearing the contents of my nappy on the wall behind my cot, to the distress of my sister, who shared the room — maybe she had a motive for murder after all — but which my mother interpreted as an early sign of artistic ability.” When he was only 2 weeks old, she put a pencil in his hand, enjoining him to write or draw.
If she had known the havoc he would wreak with it, it’s possible that his mother, Joan O’Hara, a celebrated actress, would have hesitated to arm him. As the nappy-smearing episode seems slyly to signal, Barry would become, at least in the eyes of some of his detractors, a befouler of Irishness. At the time of the lecture, Barry was in his final year as the Laureate for Irish Fiction, heralded both at home and overseas, but for much of his career he had courted outrage by humanizing the villains of the Irish national story, from the country’s Protestant minority to former servants of the British crown.
Among the outraged were members of his own family. The cursed marriage of his maternal grandparents served as the basis for an early novella, “Time Out of Mind” (1983). “You fucker,” his grandfather, a widowed veteran of the British Army, exclaimed after reading it, having summoned Barry to his Dublin flat. “To hear that out of my grandfather’s mouth was shocking,” Barry once said of the fraught conversation, the last they ever had. “He kept asking me how I knew all these things.”
The answer turned up in Barry’s lecture. “He told me everything about his life except the (myriad) bad things,” Barry informed his digital audience, which “would have worked even better if my mother had not specialized, usually in another part of the flat, in telling me all his secrets anyway.” These secrets included runaway alcoholism and gambling debts that drained his wife’s inheritance. He also used to beat Joan’s sister in the days of their childhood, a reason she may have wanted to expose him, if only to her son. Whatever the case, her example clearly stuck. Barry has been telling secrets ever since.
His father’s secrets proved harder to elicit. Francis Barry, who went by Frank, was a charismatic architect and also wrote poetry and fiction on the side. “He was a man with many hidden things all his life,” Barry said in the lecture, “including his chin.” He was referring to his father’s “rich red beard,” which, as a boy, he would reach out longingly to touch. “He was cloaked in a raiment of gold,” Barry has said of Frank, or of his worshipful child’s-eye view of him, even if he could be remote and inaccessible. “I missed his company even as I enjoyed it,” Barry remarked in the lecture, groping the air with his large, restless hands. This made his following words all the more striking: “By the time I was in my early 30s, various family troubles had separated us permanently.” The declaration seemed to set the table for a feast of disclosure.
Yet Barry didn’t sit down to it. Instead of divulging the source of these “troubles,” he moved on to other recollections of other family members. When he returned to his parents later, his tone remained cryptic: “I didn’t know them, I mistook them, and they didn’t know themselves, to a tragic degree, and if they did, hid what they knew, from us, and just as tragically from themselves. Their narratives were menaced by a foggy disarray.” But so was Barry’s lecture, which never explained what it was his parents knew or why their evasion came at such cost.
When Frank died the following January, at the age of 91, it seemed as if Barry might finally unburden himself. In an interview at a literary festival later that year, he said that his next novel was going to center on his parents’ marriage. The book would be the 10th and last in the series about his complicated forebears, which stretches from the mid-19th century to the turn of the millennium. This was how he’d always imagined the sequence would conclude, and now that both his parents were gone, his mother having died in 2007, the way ahead seemed clear. “I felt, just in the grace of time and in his mysterious way, he might have given me a sort of gentle permission,” Barry said of his father. “Not that I had seen him for 10 years,” he clarified. “I’m just reading that into it.”
After stumbling across the interview online, I wrote to Barry to suggest the new book might serve as the occasion for a career-spanning profile. He replied enthusiastically, promising to keep me abreast of his progress. It was then mid-January 2024. His aim was to finish by the following spring. “But the gods,” he added, “will have something to say about this, I am sure.”
Barry and I corresponded for the next year and a half, during which the novel appeared to be on course. Then, in July of last year, he sent me a surprising email. Something had happened in the time since his father died, Barry explained. “Where there was once a great need to proclaim aloud,” he wrote — neglecting to specify just what it was he’d felt the need to proclaim — Barry now found himself in a different state of mind. “A matter I thought so urgent and in need of saying” had come to seem better served by a “strange new beneficent silence.”
Instead of tackling his parents’ marriage, he was writing what seemed — on its face, at least — a very different kind of book. “The Newer World,” which came out last week, tells the story of Tennyson Bouguereau, a Black freedman making his way in the post-bellum South. Bouguereau appeared in two earlier novels. The first of these, “Days Without End,” which won a 2016 Costa prize, is narrated, in a wonderfully crooked English, by Thomas McNulty, a figure based on one of Barry’s ancestors who fled Ireland for America during the Great Famine (1845-52) and ended up fighting in the so-called Indian Wars. McNulty, a victim of colonial violence, has mixed feelings about inflicting violence on another native group. “When that old ancient Cromwell come to Ireland, he said he would leave nothing alive,” McNulty muses on the English conquest of the mid-17th century. “Said the Irish were vermin and devils. Clean out the country for good people to step into. Make a paradise. Now we make this American paradise, I guess.”
In a strange way, however, McNulty really does make an American paradise amid all this horror. Early in his time as an innocent abroad, he falls in love with another down-and-outer, a New England youth named John Cole. Together they find employment dressing up as girls to titillate the patrons of a mining-town saloon before joining the army for want of other work. When their service is completed, they settle on a farm in Paris, Tenn., with a group of other social undesirables. Among them are a Lakota girl, Winona, the adopted child of McNulty and Cole; as well as Bouguereau, a tireless farmhand; and his sister Rosalee, the household cook. In paraphrase, it may sound like a salad of diversity tropes, but Barry’s extraordinary prose — demotic yet precise, lyrically compacted yet anti-sentimental — provides the crucial binding agent.
The characters in Barry’s Irish books are often cast out by their families of origin. In his American books, those outcasts form families of choice, which offer them refuge from the storm of history. That refuge, though, is hardly impregnable. Early in “The Newer World,” shortly after the Civil War breaks out, a group of Confederate troops drops by the farm, having heard that its owner has joined the Union Army. After the men seize the farm’s horses, one of them, a local dignitary named Tim Petrie, asks if Rosalee has been “bred.” (“The young butternut laughed like he’d said the best thing since the Bible,” Bouguereau tells us.) A nightmare scene unfolds, as Petrie hauls Rosalee into a nearby shed and, as the others listen on, rapes her. “No one can measure the shame of it,” Bouguereau says. “Rosalee screaming and then not screaming. The Petrie boy coming out of the dark door and fastening his belt like he had just pissed.”
For all their gore and mayhem, it can sometimes seem as though writing his American novels offers Barry a respite from writing his Irish ones. “It took a little bit of self-possession to communicate to you — to confess to you — that I had written another book,” Barry told me one mid-May afternoon.
That morning he’d met me at Dublin Airport in his Land Rover Discovery, since, as he put it in an email, “transportation is in its infancy in Wicklow and will remain ever so.” We were now en route to the converted rectory where Barry has lived for the past 30 years.
“I did feel a responsibility toward you,” he went on, as we wound our way up a narrow lane whose verges were frothing with Queen Anne’s Lace. Barry, a rangy man with a graying goatee who can sometimes lose track of mundane goings-on, had just taken a wrong turn.
“I’ve never been up here in my life,” he said, squinting through the windshield.
“I hope I didn’t throw you off,” I replied.
“No, not at all,” he answered rather breezily.
“I mean with the book, not the driving,” I clarified.
“Oh, no,” he said, cottoning on. “No, no.”
To hear Barry tell it, the decision was entirely out of his hands. He speaks of his characters dictating their stories, and himself as merely an inundated scribe. “It would probably shock you, the degree to which I believe that these are living-present persons, that Tennyson Bouguereau has been in my work room with me for a year and a half,” he said.
On our way to Wicklow, he told me he remained unsure if he would eventually return to the novel about his parents. One of his closest friends, the Irish historian Roy Foster, once urged him to steer clear of the subject. “It’s the creative wound from which so much has come,” Foster said to me. “And I think to cauterize it in a novel might stop the process.” Barry, for his part, was “thrilled” that Bouguereau had taken his attention. “It meant I could postpone that discussion with my soul.”
During my time with Barry, I seemed to overhear that dialogue of self and soul. One moment, he appeared to be on the cusp of revelation; the next, he would retreat, change the subject, crack a joke. “The modern habit is to tell everything, isn’t it,” he said one day over lunch in an unrelaxed tone. “Let’s start a new fashion of people not communicating their central despair!”
As a child, Barry was incorrigibly “pass-remarkable,” as the Irish idiom has it. “If a lady went by who had a mustache, I would just say so out loud,” he admitted. “Writing novels is like pass-remarkability on an enormous scale. It’s just saying the thing. And it’s been so bred into us as Irish people never to say anything that to say something is very thrilling.” Except there were clearly things he wasn’t saying about his own past.
Barry had a confusing childhood; the fog, it seems, was there from the start. For a long time, he assumed all mothers were like his, disappearing in the morning and returning late at night. When he was 8, he went to see her perform for the first time. The play was “Cathleen ni Houlihan” (1902), a nationalistic allegory by Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats. As the lights went down, Barry grew perplexed. Normally when you went into a room, you turned the lights on. His bafflement increased when his mother appeared onstage, transformed into a frail old woman — the title figure, a personification of Ireland. Barry, horrified, assumed the change was permanent.
“We’d come in on the bus from Monkstown, and my first thought was: How are we going to get home now?” he told me at the Abbey Theater in Dublin, where his portrait (fur-trimmed parka, impassive gaze) now hangs in the stairwell alongside those of Gregory and Yeats.
When she wasn’t at work, his mother could be an enchanting companion. Visits to the beach or mushroom-picking outings were imbued with what Barry called an “urgent poetic necessity.” But the work of mothering, the daily round of care, never seemed to interest her. (At the end of her life, as she lay dying, a doctor told Barry she was bipolar.) His father, meanwhile, was even more disengaged. “My mother ran an enormous P.R. agency for him,” Barry said. She was always telling her children how much their father loved them; it wasn’t something he made clear on his own. In Barry’s phrase, Frank was a “Sartrean nihilist” who believed that, in the wake of the Second World War, “everything was over,” including love and family. Which, Barry said, “was not very convenient if you happened to be his child.” Paternal neglect bred sibling solidarity. “My sister was like an extension of my body,” he told me. “We were the same person, in a way.” (Barry also has a brother who is 12 years younger.)
If nothing really mattered, their father seemed to reason, then everything was allowed. In 1969, he published a collection of verse, “In Dante’s Wood,” subtitled “Love Poems,” though the love they celebrate is clearly not uxorious. “Young girls with vermilion muffs are/semi-precious, implode the mind,” one poem swoons. Another seems to describe a mistress’s love letter. Barry’s mother, who remained with Frank until the late 1990s, was endowed with what he called a “defensive obliviousness.”
So, too, was Barry, at least for a time. While visiting London in his mid-20s, he ran into his father outside a tube station, accompanied by a woman whom Barry didn’t recognize. “This is my mistress,” Frank explained. “You won’t tell your mother now, will you. I know you’re a man of the world.” On holiday in Greece a few years later, Barry confronted him. If Frank would only “put down his weapons” — his adultery and drinking — then he and Joan, Barry said, could still make a go of it. His father was unreceptive. “Young girls are attracted to me,” he replied, “and I’ll never give them up.” It was a crushing moment, and yet Barry seemed unable to stop hoping he might change. His first book, “The Water-Colorist,” a collection of poems, came out soon after, in 1983. It is dedicated to his father.
In 1987, Barry published his first full-length novel, “The Engine of Owl-Light,” now long out of print. The book, which owes more than a little to Flann O’Brien, the ludic Irish modernist, braids together six different stories, which range in setting from medieval Ireland to the present-day U.S. In one, a young man recalls his unusual childhood in a highly stylized, impressionistic manner. He has a loving mother, a distant yet terrifying father and an older sister who twice broke his nose. He accuses his father of multiple failings — emotional absenteeism, neglect of his wife, even wishing his own son dead — but when Frank Barry read the book, he objected to a charge the narrator doesn’t make. In one chapter, in what seems like a throwaway line, the family’s pet cat is likened to the father, in that both tend to go missing when you want them. Some 40 pages later, during a description of their bedtime ritual, the narrator says, in another seemingly innocuous sentence, “The black cat gets into the sister’s bed at night, and burrows down where it can’t breathe.”
This barely noticeable conjuncture provoked in Frank an extraordinary response. After reading the passage, he went straight to his barrister to complain he’d been libeled as a child molester. He wanted to bring charges against his son. The barrister, an old friend, managed to persuade him this would not be in his interest. When Barry learned what his father had said, he was stunned. He had intended no such imputation. “I had to sit there for hours,” Barry told me, “just trying to think what it was he could be talking about.”
In the end, it was Barry’s wife, the actor and screenwriter Alison Deegan, who provided him — and eventually me, during my visit — with the answer.
The two of them met in Dublin in 1985. Deegan already knew Barry’s mother from the Abbey Theater’s acting company, and they would later appear in several of his plays together. Deegan gave birth to twins, Coral and Merlin, in 1992. It would prove to be a destabilizing period. The first time Barry bathed his children, he was overcome with “an extraordinary and almost out-of-body distress,” a reaction he found hard to explain.
Things soon grew stranger. One day, when the twins were not yet 1, Joan came by their home in central Dublin to take them for a walk. When Deegan asked where she intended to go, her mother-in-law grew shifty. At once, Deegan realized what Joan had in mind: to show the twins to Frank, who still hadn’t met them. In distress, she went to speak to Barry and told him that Frank must never see their children. When he asked her why, she replied, “I’m going to tell you something now, and it’s going to be a huge shock.”
One evening in the late 1980s, Deegan said, she and Barry’s sister went out for a drink. Barry’s sister was going through a difficult divorce, but that was not the only thing troubling her. She told Deegan that her father had sexually abused her when she was a young girl, insisting Frank had done it only once and that he had been drunk, as though this were somehow a mitigating factor. She also asked Deegan to keep it a secret.
On some level, Barry had always known that his sister was unhappy, that there was something off about her relationship with Frank, who used to buy her outfits that seemed far too precocious for a prepubescent girl. What he learned from Deegan made appalling sense. “It was as if something had happened to you in Hebrew, and now you were being told about it in English,” said Barry, who has never spoken publicly about the abuse. (Through Barry, his sister declined to be interviewed, but she gave him her blessing to tell me what occurred.)
Barry at once rang his sister, who confirmed everything that Deegan had told him. At his suggestion, she began to see a therapist. Slowly it emerged that what his sister claimed was a one-off incident had in fact happened repeatedly over the course of many years. She later wrote to Frank to say that she forgave him. He never replied.
Barry’s sister did not want to bring charges or for the matter to become public, and her family respected these wishes. Unlike other Irish sex offenders brought low in the 1990s, when the scale of child abuse within the Catholic Church first became known, Frank retained his freedom and reputation. But Barry, who’d already been drifting away from him, cut off contact altogether. Oftentimes, when he saw his father coming down the street, he would simply run in the opposite direction. “I was frightened of him, like a child,” he explained. “I never lost that.”
Many writers need an inciting obstruction. For Henry James, it was his own sexuality. For Nabokov, it was a homeland to which he could never return. For Barry, it has been a family secret that it was not his place to speak of. Learning about his father’s offense was the hinge of his life as well as his career. All he’d written up to this point, in his own harsh assessment, were mere apprentice pieces. In the next few years, he came into his own with a series of works in which a palpable desire, as he put it in his email, “to proclaim aloud” keeps running up against the necessity of silence. Barry’s great breakthrough lay not in writing nakedly about his family of origin, in the vein of Philip Roth or Karl Ove Knausgaard, but in finding ways to hide them in his deeper family history — and in the history of Ireland.
The work that made his name as a playwright, “The Steward of Christendom” (1995), is based on the life of his paternal great-grandfather, a high-ranking officer in the pre-independence Dublin police force, of whom Barry knew nothing until his late 30s. The man he would portray as Thomas Dunne was supposed to have ordered a charge on striking workers in 1913, leaving several men dead. The existence of this relative was another shameful family secret. Following the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule, which sparked the war that led to independence, those who didn’t fit the romantic narrative of national struggle, like Protestants and former Crown servants, were pushed to the margins of Irish public life. Barry, who was born in 1955, had absorbed that narrative himself. He began the play believing he was writing about a textbook traitor. Only as it evolved did he come to see Dunne as simply a man.
One engine of the play’s emotional drama is Thomas’s conflict with his devoted son, Willie. Thomas effectively disowns the boy when he shows qualified sympathy for the 1916 rebels, then spends the rest of his life regretting it after Willie is killed while fighting for the British in the First World War. “What big, loud talking fools are fathers sometimes,” he says to Willie’s hallucinated presence from the county home in Wicklow where he is living out his days. “Why do we not love our sons simply and be done with it?” Barry’s mother always believed that the play was about his relationship with Frank. It is certainly possible to see it as Barry’s effort to imagine his way into his father’s mind following their rift. It is also possible to see the play as a poignant piece of wish fulfillment. If only his father were suffering like this, there might be hope for his renewal, or even, in the future, a reconciliation.
While many lauded Barry’s depiction of a man undone by political upheaval and the sudden reversal in status it entails, others saw it as an attempted whitewash. “If Thomas Dunne or his real-life counterpart broke the skulls of working men who were desperate to earn a living, then he should not have done,” wrote the British Marxist Terry Eagleton, who has Irish Catholic roots, in The London Review of Books. Barry’s claim, in an introduction to the play, that his ancestor was only doing his duty, or what he took to be his duty, was, Eagleton said, “an excuse with a particularly unsavory history.” The suggestion seemed clear: Barry was a traitor to the republican cause, cut from the same cloth as his forebear.
Clearly in no rush to dispel this impression, Barry spent the coming years composing what would eventually amount to a loser’s history of 20th-century Ireland. Though given to flights of rhapsodic lyricism, the books vibrate with a sublimated anger. Again and again, Barry writes characters rejected by their families and society at large, victims of unspeakable injustice who must mutely bear the wrong they’ve been done. “The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty” (1998), the first of his novels about the Barry family tree, was inspired by the life of a maternal great-uncle, another policeman, who was forced to flee Ireland during the Civil War (1922-23) after receiving a death threat from a nationalist enforcer. Like Virgil’s hero, Barry’s Eneas spends years in exile, dutifully weathering trial after trial — as a sailor in Northern England, as a soldier at the Battle of Dunkirk, as a canal-digger in postcolonial Nigeria — but he doesn’t found a city, just a poky hotel for destitute sailors on London’s Isle of Dogs. “All our founding myths in Ireland have been based on revolutions and new beginnings, and I suppose I wanted to write a book that had as its shadow the reverse of that, a kind of unfounding myth,” Barry has said.
The novels that followed, which hopscotch between the McNultys and the Dunnes, are likewise stories of men and women whose lives were written in invisible ink. “Annie Dunne” (2002) is based on a paternal great-aunt, the daughter of the police superintendent whom Barry quarried in “The Steward of Christendom.” Annie (her real name) had a privileged childhood in Dublin Castle, the center of British rule — poor preparation for the long littleness of life in post-independence Ireland. Born with a hunchback that rendered her unmarriageable, she washed up on a subsistence farm in rural Wicklow. Her brother, depicted as Willie in “The Steward of Christendom,” was another source of grief. He didn’t just die fighting for the British Empire in World War I, at the very moment Ireland was rising up against it — the subject of a later novel, “A Long Long Way” (2015), one of Barry’s greatest. His sacrifice, like those of the war’s 200,000 Irish veterans, was met, for many decades, by a conspiracy of silence.
“Annie Dunne” evokes a crucial episode from Barry’s childhood when he and his sister, aged 4 and 6, spent nine months living with their great-aunt on the farm in Wicklow while their parents looked for work in London. Barry and his sister were like the children she never had, late blossoms in a desiccated life. For them, she proved to be “a very philosopher and almost inventor of mothering,” as Barry once said, yet his novel portrays her without sentimentality. His Annie is rugged and resourceful as well as brittle and aloof, stung by her family’s precipitous decline: milking cows and mucking out manure are not how she’d imagined spending her old age. But her life is not in vain, Barry movingly suggests, for she makes all the difference in the lives of her two charges. “Will they remember anything of these days?” she wonders of the children.
If the novel seems to offer a resounding affirmation, one startling episode complicates the picture. On a bright summer morning, Annie goes to wake the children and finds them lying naked together in the same bed. “The boy is huddled between her legs, his face down near where her body joins at the center, near that special place that should be foreign to all eyes.” As their aunt stands there unobserved, the girl tells her brother to “give it little licks.” What Annie has witnessed puzzles her intermittently for the rest of the book. Was it just a game? Or was it a sign of something more troubling? At one point, while she lies sleepless in bed, “a strange thought” occurs to her. “The thought was but a shadow, a hint. Something about Trevor” — the children’s father — and “the little girl, a notion I could not make clear to myself.” Hamstrung by modesty, she is unable to raise the subject with the children, or with anybody else.
After speaking to his sister, Barry tried to tell his mother what had happened to her, but it was, he said, a “thankless task.” Though Joan heard him out as he recounted the details, she would later speak as though she had no memory of them. Barry suspects this selective amnesia was a strategy she learned from her own traumatic childhood. In moments of lucidity, Joan insisted she’d known nothing of the abuse, which Barry wanted desperately to believe. In reality, this was highly unlikely. When the family was living in London in the early 1960s, Joan had spent a few weeks in Cork performing in a play. Later, after she was told what Frank had done, she said of this period, “I knew I shouldn’t have left.”
Barry seems to have taken the remark as grist for “Old God’s Time” (2023), a raw-nerved meditation on memory, truth and the problem of evil nested within what appears to be a crime novel. It features an actress who goes by her maiden name, Miss McNulty, and her young son, Jesse. She is in flight from her husband, whom she suspects (but cannot prove) is somehow responsible for their daughter’s recent death. In one scene, she recounts the trauma to her next-door neighbor, a retired detective who is the novel’s main character:
“First she had noticed problems with her daughter’s body. She had brought her to the doctor in London because there was blood in her rectum — the child was only a little girl of 6, and she had no idea what was wrong. The only thing she could think of was colitis, something like that. The doctor was in his 50s and not very concerned, and indeed the bleeding stopped for a good long while. But after she’d been away in Ireland working for a few weeks down in Cork, she discovered the bleeding again when she came back. She had not the slightest clue what was causing it.”
In light of what Barry had learned, he began to reflect on the distress he’d felt while bathing his children. “In these ancient cases, there are no proofs possible,” he told me. “It is all memory, half-memory and even absence of memory, when we are too young to register what is happening.” And yet, he went on, “I could in no way guarantee that my father didn’t do something to me.” In the late 1990s, Barry suffered a nervous breakdown. Around the same time, he and Deegan bought a 19th-century rectory in southwest Wicklow. The place was an unsightly wreck — roughcast exterior, hideous double-glazing. They spent two years restoring it, a therapeutic task. “He found a moat and pulled up the drawbridge and got on with his work,” said the Irish novelist Colm Toibin, one of Barry’s closest friends. “But there were demons that could not be got rid of.”
He tried to confront them in 2010, when he wrote Frank a letter about the abuse, a subject they had never discussed. It contained a forensic list of everything Frank had done to his daughter, from the actual violation to his refusal to acknowledge it. “Thank you for your very civilized letter,” Frank wrote in his response, which contained an invitation to meet for lunch. He promised to explain why his son was mistaken. Barry agreed, but when Deegan heard about the plan, she told him not to go, fearing for his well-being. So Barry rang his father to cancel.
A year or so later, Barry got word that his father had Alzheimer’s and called him to ask if they could meet in Dublin. They eventually agreed to have lunch at a hotel. Barry’s son Merlin volunteered to go with him. The conversation was awkward from the start. As Barry was describing his mother’s last illness, through which he had nursed her a few years before, Frank rose to his feet and began pacing the room. Sitting back down again, he extended his arms to reveal his wrists, which were crosshatched with scars. His father, Barry realized, had tried to kill himself. “I don’t want to play the blame game,” Frank declared to his son, “but this was because of your letter.”
Merlin, aghast, said it was time for them to leave. Barry and his father would never speak again.
One afternoon during my stay, Barry, Deegan and their third child, Toby, who was visiting from Dublin, sat drinking tea in the blossoming garden outside the rectory. Like the heather-flushed hills it looks out on, the Georgian house is built stoutly of granite. Sunlight strained through a gray lid of cloud, as the couple’s seven dogs yipped at their feet. “Silencio!” Barry commanded, to no obvious effect.
Barry’s response to having Frank as a father was to raise his children in the opposite manner, to give them what he’s called “the bounty of safety,” which he and his sister were painfully denied. Toby, who came out to his parents in 2015, shortly before Ireland’s referendum on gay marriage, said he had always felt that bounty. “Even before I told them,” he said, “I knew it was going to be OK.” “Days Without End,” the first novel in Barry’s loose American trilogy, was partially inspired by Toby, to whom the book is dedicated.
Barry is no stranger to the United States; he has spent stretches of time there since holding a fellowship at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the mid-1980s. “I have a sort of citizenship of America that no American government, especially the current one, would recognize,” he said, speaking of the vast trans-Atlantic Irish diaspora. Barry learned about his ancestor Thomas McNulty, who fled to the States in the 1840s never to return, from his maternal grandfather, the prolific talker. This unfinished story was an imaginative goad, but Barry also did plenty of research, reading hundreds of books on American history.
Some of this research was brought to bear on a lengthy first chapter about McNulty’s Irish childhood and the death of his family in the Great Famine. After nine months of work, Barry came to realize that the chapter wasn’t right. These were the very last things that McNulty would want to talk about. The episode was cut from 30 pages to three paragraphs. “And that’s the end of that, I say, I don’t want to say no more,” McNulty announces at the end of them, sealing the subject into the past.
Except the past is never so easily sequestered. “I only say it because without saying it I don’t think anything can be properly understood,” he goes on a moment later, alluding to the violence he seems fated to commit. In one horrific scene, a massacre of American Indians is couched in uncomfortably domestic terms when McNulty and his comrades dig a pair of mass graves for the innocents they’ve slaughtered. “When all the bodies were in,” he reports, “we covered over the pits with the soil we had left, like we were putting pastry tops on two enormous pies.”
Though Barry appreciates that it can be “a perilous business” for a white male novelist to write across differences of gender and race, as he does in the American trilogy, the alternative strikes him as worse. “When it comes to people saying you can’t write characters that aren’t the same as you, that’s the end of literature,” he told me. “It is the deepest form of love to try to imagine your way into somebody else’s condition.” The terror and sense of vulnerability his father inspired in him seems to find an objective correlative in the violent frontier, especially as it was experienced by its nonwhite inhabitants.
One of the great achievements of the books is how distinct its three narrators sound from one another, how rightly they are fitted with their own persuasive idiolect. Thomas McNulty, who would have grown up speaking Irish, like a majority of his countrymen before the Great Famine, is powerfully estranged from the English language, a tool of British colonial oppression, even as he wields it with a reckless incandescence. Winona, upgraded to narrator in the second novel, “A Thousand Moons,” is given to a more “proper” style of expression. Her literacy and numeracy are her means of livelihood (she works as a clerk in the local law office), but her command of words also sharpens her sense of how coercive they can be. When a suitor sends her a comically bloodless proposal letter (“I hereby and to thee declare that my wish and love remain intacter”), she feels she must marry him not because she wants to but because of “the official terms I had been addressed with, like a treaty paper between Washington and the Sioux.”
Bouguereau, meanwhile, receives an education at a newly founded college for the formerly enslaved in nearby Nashville, and it shows in his speech. If English, for the Irish, was an unmotherly tongue imposed from above, for the Black bondsman it was a means of freedom, and acquiring it a subversive act: as Frederick Douglass’s owner put it, literacy would “forever unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass, who toured Ireland in the mid-1840s and drew parallels between the Black and Irish freedom struggles, wrote an ornate, Ciceronian prose that implicitly defied racist beliefs about the expressive powers of African Americans. Barry read Douglass closely while preparing to write “The Newer World,” but he told me that a closer model for Bouguereau’s voice was Henry Ossian Flipper’s “The Colored Cadet at West Point” (1878), whose style is more relaxed, less overtly rhetorical.
In “The Newer World,” Bouguereau’s desire for revenge against Petrie, his sister’s violator, continues unabated through his remarkable life, which takes him from the concert halls of Britain, where he performs as a member of a celebrated Black choir, to the bloodied plains of the American West. Late in the book, he gets his chance when, during a visit to Tennessee, he spots Petrie on horseback, singing to himself on a deserted country road. He has the man in the sights of his rifle, which was given to him by his former enslaver. Yet he can’t pull the trigger. “Why I did it I hardly knew, but I threw old Luther’s sacred gift into the trees.”
The decision is mysterious to the reader as well. Is it a pragmatic calculation? A principled refusal to answer violence with violence? Or is it a case of a white author reluctant to make his characters of color as vividly ruthless or aggressive as his pale ones, for fear of perpetuating baleful stereotypes? One thought I shared with Barry was that Bouguereau’s gesture and, in a way, the whole book, read almost like an allegory of his decision not to write about his parents. “I’m trying to throw my rifle down,” he told me, speaking of his father. “Even if they don’t exist, I don’t want him committed to the flames of hell.”
If Barry has spent his life telling secrets, he is a large-souled gossip, a writer who forgives people behind their backs. “No man is beyond redemption,” Thomas Dunne says in “The Steward of Christendom,” and it’s clear that Barry, a longtime agnostic, devoutly believes this. For all their sins and dubious allegiances, his characters are intensely lovable — precisely what Eagleton so disapproved of. That Barry, who was once considered suspiciously un-Irish, is now embraced in his homeland is in part a reflection of how much Ireland has changed in recent decades. Foster, the historian, told me that his friend’s work has helped to bring that change about, loosening the grip of nationalist dogma and “allowing for a much more complex sense of the identities available to Irish people.”
More than any social legacy, Barry considers the family he has built with Deegan as the thing he’s most proud of. “This will be our monument to the brief time we’ve spent in the world,” he said — though his characters are family as well, and in more than one sense. His aunt Annie Dunne died many years ago, but Barry thinks about her almost every day. “And similarly, I feel that Thomas McNulty is always around somewhere,” he told me in his garden, with its willow and its hawthorn, where the leaden clouds had briefly given way. “Or that I could be within a whisper of Tennyson, just sitting in the sunlight here. They are what give me my share of happiness — my children, my wife, some of my friends and the characters in my books.”
In 2021, when Barry was planning his lecture, “The Fog of Family,” he decided it was time to speak plainly about what he and his sister, who had long since remarried and was living abroad, had been through. When he sent her a draft, however, she grew alarmed. Her fear, as Barry remembers, was that Frank would try to kill himself again. At his sister’s request, Barry made redactions, removing any mention of what she had suffered.
This is what accounts for the lecture’s strange tone, what might be called its evasive candor. “I fear the fog I have tried to describe can never clear, except briefly,” Barry said at the end. “The door opens onto clear country, it closes again.” Even now, nearly five years after his father’s death, he seems unable to bring him into focus. While it was clear how completely he believes his sister’s story, he sometimes spoke as though he hoped Frank might be innocent.
His father, he said, could be extremely generous, often lending money to friends who were in need. In his younger days, he was widely beloved in certain Dublin circles, celebrated for his wit and conversation. He even had a group of what Barry called “disciples.” One of them, an artist, painted him as Christ, to whom he was said to bear a resemblance. Barry keeps the portrait in his office, where it is turned to face the wall.
Giles Harvey is a contributing writer for the magazine who often writes profiles of novelists and directors.
The post Behind His Great Novels, an Unbearable Family Secret appeared first on New York Times.
