Sebastian Barry: “My religion is supporting my gay son.”

Read below the fascinating interview given by Sebastian Barry to Michalis Mitsos for the newspaper *Ta Nea*, on the occasion of the publication of his novel *Days Without End* (translated by Maria Angelidou).There are some writers who captivate you and leave a lasting impression from the very first moment you encounter them. They won’t let you rest until you’ve finished their book, and all you want to do afterwards is read the next one. I don’t know exactly which category they belong to, but I do know that I feel very close to them. Both them and their heroes. Inias McNulty was my kind of man; it was through his adventures that I began my journey into the world of the Irish author Sebastian Barry. I suffered alongside him when he was hunted by the IRA in the 1920s, after the Irish Civil War. Willy Dun was also one of my own, having fought a few years earlier in the trenches of the First World War: the descriptions of the battles in the pages of *Far, Far Away* are among the most powerful things I have ever read in my life. I naturally felt a close connection to Thomas McNulty too, undoubtedly Inia’s ancestor, who experienced love a few decades earlier, amidst the horrors of the Indian Wars and the American Civil War. Belonging to a sexual minority in times of war makes things even more difficult; we have seen this in recent years in Syria too. ‘I saw a weary traveller, / bedraggled, in rags’: with this motto by the American poet John Matthias, 63-year-old Barry begins his latest book about a great friendship between two boys, which will subsequently develop into a happy family with the addition of a beautiful Indian woman. And as he tells me in the interview that follows, in honour of this couplet he would sing Tsitsanis’s ‘My Jacket Has Worn Out’ if he were to read excerpts from the book in public in Athens.Every child must get up and dance, dance past all the obstacles, dance through the difficult, painful country dance of the end.” Life is a bit harsh, isn’t it? All right, but it’s still a dance. And I’m not even sure if white, middle-class Irish people like me can speak with any authority about poverty. There are many in Ireland who are struggling terribly, including many children, which is disheartening in a recovering economy. Inias McNulty is a fugitive. Willie Dun is a ‘stateless soldier’. Thomas McNulty is a gay immigrant. Is it loneliness that drives you? Or is history written by minorities?There is a useful and beautiful American word that I prefer to ‘loneliness’. It is ‘solitude’, a state of being that even an inanimate object can feel. The universe itself is undoubtedly a manifestly solitary structure. Generally speaking, however, for me as a writer, the character who is constantly forced to leave a place looks back at that place with great intensity and sincerity, and either adores or detests it with a strange precision.What did it mean to be gay in 19th-century America? Certainly not what we mean today. As far as I know, the word didn’t even exist, and if it did, it wasn’t derogatory or abstractly biblical. In that place of new beginnings and fresh starts that was 1850s America, great hardships went hand in hand with great possibilities, something that still seems to define America. One of those great possibilities was the birth of the freedom to be gay – indeed, to be whatever nature and the song of creation make you. One can see this glimmering and flickering through human history – albeit faintly.The Guardian wrote that the fact you managed to fit Irish emigration, gay identity and the creation of Europe into 260 pages is a miracle. Really, how did you manage it? I honestly have no idea! I followed Thomas’s voice with all the devotion and faith I could muster as a human being. All these things are inevitably intertwined in his story, and just as we are compelled to live day by day – ‘Where else are we to live but in the days?’ as Philip Larkin said – so too is a book, thankfully, written page by page; otherwise we would have fled the battlefield in terror.You’ve spoken to the press about the day your son Toby told you he was gay. Since then, you said, he has introduced you to the ‘magic of gay life’. It seems, then, that you did not follow the Pope’s advice, who said that parents should seek psychiatric help for their homosexual children…And just imagine that up until that point we’d had such a high opinion of the Pope in my household – even though it’s a household that’s half agnostic and half Protestant. This simmering zeal of some people to keep saying that there is something wrong with being gay is criminal and has always been criminal. Do the consequences of what they say ever cross their minds? It is as if they are offering a cheap excuse for being homophobic, a shameless passport to hatred. Your country has changed to a striking degree. What is the secret? Extroversion? Modesty? (‘because the clothes are in tatters’, as you say somewhere) Humility? Here are some good reasons! It would be truly interesting to understand the undoubtedly complex and mysterious mathematics of a country’s transformation. And what is certain is that the way the world is made has to do with a whole host of mysterious numbers. Extroversion, modesty, humility – a fine bouquet of words under the name of any democracy. We should adopt them immediately. The big issue of our time is identity. This is clearly evident in ‘Days Without End’. What is your view on the politics of identity? I am the father of a gay son who is now 21 and flourishing as an artist, a student and a human being: that is my only religion. The religion I choose is to support my son. This is what all parents of gay children need to understand. Being gay is an example of human radiance. That is how I feel about it. What have you discovered in the year that has passed since you were honoured with the highest distinction of the Irish Fiction Laureate?During this time, I’ve had the opportunity to visit, with the book club I belong to, places I would never otherwise have been able to enter, such as the Central Psychiatric Hospital, various hospital wards, and the Centre for Successful Ageing in Dublin. I also took part in various online broadcasts with other Irish writers, and was charmed by their open-mindedness, their modesty, humility and kindness towards me. I must admit I was impressed by all of this. How did the financial crisis affect Irish writers? The major change for writers was probably the drastic reduction in advances from publishers, as they anticipated a fall in sales. In Ireland, artists used to be completely exempt from tax. That has now changed and a tax-free allowance has been introduced. That is the practical side of things. I think it’s a bit harsh to say, but I’ll say it anyway: the crisis seemed to particularly encourage Irish writers to make greater efforts and achieve more, with new voices emerging from the murky sea of troubles alongside so many fully-fledged gods – Sally Rooney, Sarah Bom, Aimee McBride, etc., etc. Come to think of it, we could talk for an hour about the best names in new Irish literature and not mention a single man! I’ve just finished ‘Normal People’, Sally Rooney’s new book. An amazing portrayal of the characters, and the author is only 27 years old… Just as she is a brilliant and very interesting person. Completely independent, intelligent and admirable. At first I compared her to Elizabeth Bowen and Maria Edgeworth – now she can only be compared to herself. What does ‘Irishness’ mean in literature? In real life? Now that’s a difficult question. There is a strand of literature that has sought, and continues to seek – sometimes even with a touch of mischief – to constantly enrich the rather limited set of adjectives that once defined Irishness. As someone whose defining adjectives – city-dweller, middle-class, agnostic, etc. – never seemed to convey to others my own sense of an urgent Irishness, I have been striving to do so on my own for forty years. I therefore hope that Irishness in literature will continually tend towards Irishness in so-called real life. Strolling slowly towards Bethlehem… ‘The Odyssey of Inias McNulty’ is the first book of yours I read. Faced with the danger of old wounds reopening in Ireland because of Brexit, would you say that the hero’s adventures are not yet over? That question frightens me. Even for us in the South, the troubles in the North were always there, a violent presence in the back of our minds. And they were a strange and almost surreal echo of the troubles in Ireland during the civil war and afterwards. An unquenchable hatred that not even the power of good could stop. I pray, I pray, that people like Inias may continue to rest in their often unknown and unmarked graves. A few years ago, in an interview with ‘To Vima’, you said that your greatest literary brothers are Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy and Cavafy. You also said that you love Tsitsanis, Jacques Tati and Bergman. Do the writers of the new generation have so many points of reference too? Ah, Tsitsanis… I hope so. Perhaps not that specific set of points of reference, because I am 63 years old and a child of a particular era. I first came across Tsitsanis in a small seaside restaurant in Dryos, Paros, because the owners – some wonderful people from Trikala – had stuck those faded photographs on the back wall of the café… They piqued my curiosity. And then I felt that intense fire of his music, which still burns! What did you actually do for a year in Paros? Would you go back to live there? I wanted to go somewhere cheap to write. It was 1980. Back then, if you had a thousand pounds in your pocket, you could live in Greece for a year. Now you can live for three days! My father had been going to Paros since the mid-1970s, so when I arrived on the island I had at least one point of contact. But in reality I didn’t need it. Before the European Union, Naoussa was on the cusp of economic change, although one could sense the major shifts following the horrors of the Second World War and the end of repression under the military dictatorship. What I did not expect, in my innocence, was the onslaught of a kind of beauty that changes your very DNA: the sparkling waters, the ancient modernity. The strong friendships. And the open-heartedness, modesty and sense of hospitality of the people. I was 25 years old and knew only the cold heart of Northern Europe, the indifference of a city like Paris. I changed one letter (Paris – Paros) and found Paradise. I return every now and then, but something of my 25-year-old self always remains there, and goes to Kolymbithres on his battered bicycle, following a dirt track that no longer exists.When you read your books in public, you tend to sing. What would you sing if you were reading ‘Endless Days’ in Athens? Perhaps Tsitsanis’s ‘My Jacket Has Worn Out’, in honour of the novel’s motto. I’d never manage the little trills at the end of the lines, though – like spiral shells. You have to be Greek to sing Greek songs, unfortunately. I could hum it softly, though – tenderly, silently.