‘Writing is the only thing the Irish are world class at,’ says Kevin Barry
Kevin Barry tells Donal Lynch about lockdown, Limerick feuds and pinning his soul to the page
IN Beatlebone, Kevin Barry’s 2015 novel, he follows John Lennon into the west of Ireland, where the land itself seems to soothe the singer’s troubled soul. In the torpor of lockdown, the writer has found his own solace in the countryside of south Co Sligo.
“For the first few weeks I was distracted, checking the news a lot,” he says. “The word count in my work also slowed down a lot during those weeks. But in the last while it’s been going good again.
“The most important part of all of it for me has just been showing up. If you’re there every day, you sort of earn your good luck as a writer.”
Part of that work ethic was forged in his years as a journalist — for years before becoming a novelist he was a court reporter in Limerick.
“Journalism takes a lot of the preciousness out of you, you don’t lie around on a chaise lounge waiting to be in the right mood for it, you just go and do the f **king work.”
It also proved a fertile source of inspiration for his later work.
“I think the very best research anyone could do for a novel is to go down to the courts,” he says. “The things I saw there very much fed into [his first novel] City of Bohane, which was set in a small, deranged little city in the west of Ireland.
“Limerick was a very troubled place in the 1980s and there were all sorts of things going on. I have a vivid memory of meeting the late Jim Kemmy and looking out over the Shannon river with him.
“There had been gang feuds in the city and I said ‘Jim, what’s happening in this city?’ And he said ‘I don’t know but I think it’s coming in off that river’.”
It was a line Barry would later use in City of Bohane and by the time it came out he had realised he couldn’t excel at fiction while generating copy by the yard.
“I realised that writing fiction had to be the first thing I did every day and that meant that I had to accept getting poorer for a while,” he says.
“For a few years after that I had columns in the Irish Examiner and in the Glasgow Herald and the two of those — amazingly, considering freelance rates now — were enough to get by. They bought me time to work through my terrible attempts at novels and short stories. It was a slow process for me — I was 37 before my first, thin volume of short stories came out.”
Music was a huge influence on him — one critic notes the spirit of Nick Cave in his work — and he ordered his collections of short stories like a musician orders album tracks.
“Growing up in the suburbs of Limerick in the 1970s it was, of course, an Irish upbringing but I was very influenced by American television and culture, and pop music from the north of England.”
He had a flinty ambition. “I recognised that I had ability as a fiction writer and that I just had to apply work to the talent,” he says.
“The interesting thing about literary ability is that there is a lot of it around, it’s not rare at all. What’s rare is the capacity for hard work and it took me a while to learn
that. In my 20s, I was out in the town quite a bit.”
For some writers, journalism can teach a kind of pertness of style but Barry survived his years as a hack.
“I did worry that ‘journalese’ would affect my prose but that turned out not to be a problem. I think one great thing that journalism teaches you is that you don’t need
inspiration to start, you can always get 1,000 words on the page.”
As his success grew and he won a slew of awards — including the International Dublin Literary Award for City of Bohane — Barry would not stint in mining his life for his prose.
“I am working out personal things in my work. It’s my
soul pinned to the page. I use anything I’ve got to try to make drama on the page to give it emotional impact, and that might not just be things that have happened to you but things you’ve seen around you,” he says.
“I’ve gone at most of my own stuff by now. I found myself writing about my mother’s death when I was a child and it was the first time I had ever written directly about that.
“You can go at your fundamental material in oblique ways. I do have this guilty sense of ‘am I just using this for material?’
“I don’t know if there is any catharsis — but there is an old Graham Greene line where he says that the writer needs to have a chip of ice in the heart.
And you do need to have that coldness in approaching your own material. Everything is grist to one’s mill.”
The cancellation of the circuit of literary festivals has meant there is a hole in the social life of himself and his wife Olivia Smith — but he has been heartened by his inclusion in the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award, the winner of which will be announced on June 20, where he sits alongside Joe O’Connor and Edna O’Brien on the shortlist.
“For Olivia and me, a big part our social life over the summer is going to the festivals — but it’s important to remember that that is not the work of a writer.
“What Dalkey are doing (offering a €30,000 cash prize) is a very pragmatic support and bless them for doing it. As a country we have a really important literary traditions.
“We’re near the bottom of the league in Europe in terms of government supports for the arts. It’s nice to be on the shortlist and it’s a great festival. Writing is the only thing the Irish are world class at.”
His last novel Night Boat to Tangier was long-listed for the Booker (where judges described it as “a rogue gem of a novel”) and for the Irish Novel of the Year Award — but he says its greatest prize was simply that it won him the right to continue doing what he loves.
“You have years where a book isn’t coming out and you sort of recede into the woodwork a bit and then when a book does come out, you’re everywhere, at readings, but really it’s about driving yourself back to the desk.
“There is only one workable definition of success for a writer and that’s the ability to keep going.”
The Dalkey Literary Awards have replaced the Dalkey Book Festival and will take place on June 20. See www. dalkeybookfestival.org/