The Elsewhere Is Always There

Krys Lee speaks with Kevin Barry about place, poetry, and genre in his latest novel, “The Heart in Winter.”

By Krys LeeJuly 27, 2024

• Fiction

KEVIN BARRY IS the author of seven novels and short story collections and several plays, and is currently working on a screenplay. His latest novel, The Heart in Winter (released earlier this month), excavates the Western, digging deep into what Barry calls a “hoary, ancient genre” and expanding outward to house both comedy and romance.

The narrative takes place in Butte, Montana. The year is 1891, and in this growing Irish community, women are few and far between. Yet Tom Rourke, a young literary dreamer, meets Polly Gillespie, a picture bride. Their love story drives them out of town on horseback and into a foreboding and dangerous landscape brought to life by Barry’s characteristically rhythmic language and kinetic dialogue. The plot is intense, and the tone is intensely serious—until it isn’t.

I had the privilege of speaking with Barry over Zoom. I was in South Korea and he in Ireland, having just returned from a weeklong book tour in England and Scotland the night before. Even so, he was witty, thoughtful, intensely honest, and generous with his time. And his absolute devotion to—not to mention the pleasure he takes in—writing was, frankly, breathtaking.

¤

KRYS LEE: You’ve spent a considerable part of your life in different places, many of them overseas. Your fiction is set in Ireland but also elsewhere. In Night Boat to Tangier (2019), and then of course in The Heart in Winter, it is Ireland that is elsewhere—but the elsewhere is always there.

KEVIN BARRY: It’s funny. Sometimes we think of decisions in our personal lives that seem pragmatic—like where I live, for example—as not exactly connected to our creative work. But of course these are defining things in our creative work. They change everything about our work. In my twenties I was a freelance journalist and moved around quite a bit, going to the United States and Spain. Since I met my wife, we’ve moved a lot between Ireland and the United Kingdom.

It’s a wonderful thing to have a native diaspora. The Irish have always gone to the world’s four corners, and it opens up great possibilities for our fiction.

Some of your characters, like Tom in The Heart of Winter, have an affinity for language. I mean, it’s absurd that he’s writing marriage letters for everybody else while he’s unmarried.

Unlike Polly, Tom was more work. So, I thought I’d make him the age I was when I went to Butte. Then I thought about what I was like at 29. Tom is an exaggeration, but he’s a young person with literary ambition. And to find yourself young, with literary ambition, is an exalted state to find yourself in. It’s also routinely a complete disaster. It brings a lot of problems into your life, especially if you come from a background where it’s not a regular thing.

Isn’t there also an older character in the novel who has his own attempted manuscripts, as well?

There’s Jago Marrak, who is also writing stories. And they’re terrible, he decides. He writes what are described as long, billowing sentences. I see him as a kind of Cormac McCarthy type in embryo.

The year 1891 is a really interesting time—Westerns have already been written for 20 or 30 years. It’s also a time when people are becoming very self-aware in terms of their own image and how they’re presenting themselves in the world. So it’s significant that Tom and Polly meet at a photography studio. This is the time when a photo studio opens on every main street in North America, and for the first time, ordinary working-class people are thinking about how they look and how to display themselves. Rich people have been doing this for centuries through oil paintings; now, everyone can do it.

Polly is very taken with Tom’s clothes. They love how they look together. And they’re adapting their image as they grow—they want to see themselves as outlaws. There’s a lot in the book about image-making.

The birth of the modern world.

Tom and Polly are the Instagram couple, essentially.

You’ve mentioned Flannery O’Connor as one of your influences. I love her work and I recently taught her novels. They’re not read enough.

Funny, actually—writers of the American South often have a resonance with Irish writers. A lot of the concerns seem somehow familiar. A lot of cultural influences in that part of the United States come from Ireland in terms of the music and so forth. Language that originates in religious practice as well. It’s a reductive thing to say about Irish writing maybe, but there’s Catholic prose and there’s Protestant prose. Joyce is Catholic prose; Beckett is Protestant prose. The question is, do you put everything on the page or do you take everything off the page? Do you really break it down and make it austere?

I think, in the 20th century, many Irish writers struggled between these two giant shadow figures. But there are lots of elements to Irish writing and I like that there’s also a mischievous streak, a roguish spirit that goes back to writers like Flann O’Brien, who wrote in the mid-20th century. I’ve seen so much of a shared kind of gallows humor with writers of the American South like Flannery O’Connor. I live in the West of Ireland, quite close to the Atlantic Coast—

It sounds like an intriguing place. Is there something a little Gothic about where you live?

Some of the effects on our lives, and thus on our writing, are so vast that we can’t see them—things like weather and landscape, you know. The Atlantic weather dominates here, and it’s very capricious, and the light changes hundreds of times a day, constantly swapping about. It makes for a quite a rattled personality. Quite a few people are given to violent mood swings, and by force of necessity, we’re indoors quite a lot, which indulges our love of talking and telling tall tales.

It seems you read a lot of poetry.

I do! I try to, on a daily basis, keep in touch with poetry. I think it’s good for a prose writer to stay involved with the high priest’s sub-descendants. I also think it’s a good idea to learn poems by heart—it’s very good for your brain.

When I was in secondary school, which is when you’re a teenager here, the writers who really blew me away were generally the poets, like Gerard Manley Hopkins. It’d be crazy rhythms and all of that. And always what I’m looking for, when I write anything out, is does it have a natural rhythm?

I could really see those rhythms in Night Boat to Tangier. There’s a kind of vibrato. It’s so alive on the page that there were passages in it, and The Heart in Winter, where I would stop and read out loud to myself for a couple of pages.

That’s how I write them. I read it aloud as I write them. Once I have a rough first draft, a lot of it I’m doing out loud with the text in hand.

You read it out loud while it’s in progress, not after it’s done.

Yeah, while it’s still in the relatively early draft stage I’ll be putting it on the ear, trying to hear it. It’s the easiest way to find evasions in the text, to find where you’re getting away from the thread of the narrative. Your eye will happily glaze over your laptop screen. But as soon as you hear it …

As I read your work, I sensed a poet, but I thought it was interesting how the poetry also seemed to affect the structure of the work, not just the language, which was very evident from page one.

Years ago, I went through a Don DeLillo phase. In one of the very rare interviews he gave, he said something that really connected with me. He said he was absolutely prepared to change a sentence’s meaning for the sake of its sound. He put the sound of the sentence above what was going on in terms of the sentence content, and I thought, This is admirable.

So, in effect, you let the sound and the rhythm dictate the story. It’ll change the mood and the content of the story as it goes along. What you need is a tuning fork—and that can be just a couple of sentences you write or half a paragraph.

What is the interest in violence? Where is that rooted?

The fiction I’ve written in novel form is all involved with genre. Night Boat to Tangier is an attempt at a kind of neo-noir. It’s a gangster story essentially, and these are dark, violent men. The new one, The Heart in Winter, is of course a Western. And if you’re writing a gangster story or a Western, violence is going to be a factor. In The Heart in Winter, it was a decision—at first subconscious, then very conscious—to keep the violence more or less “off-screen” because I was fearful of breaking the romantic spell of the book. Above all, it’s a love story.

What struck me about The Heart in Winter and Night Boat to Tangier—and some stories in That Old Country Music (2020) as well—is that they’re very different, but there seems to be a return to a faith in love, a longing for love, or a sense that maybe love is the ultimate home.

Sometimes, when you’re writing about romantic love, you’re on very tricky ground. It can lurch into sentimentality, into gooeyness, and into the wrong places far too easily. It’s difficult to do it well, and difficulty can put you off. But I have moments when I think: Why would you want to write about anything else? This is the ultimate human experience. This is what you have to try and get at. Like, what gave the romance—and I’m definitely an old-fashioned, capital-R Romantic—in The Heart in Winter attraction for me was the sense that, with the two characters, Tom and Polly … He doesn’t know who he is. He’s searching for an identity. He’s trying on different roles.

He’s trying them on like a jacket, from what I recall.

Yeah. And Polly, she is entirely sure who she is and is very comfortable in her own skin. Sometimes, when two lovers come together, they kind of finish each other off. It’s giving the other person a role to play, a definition.

I wasn’t planning to write The Heart in Winter. I had attempted to write a novel about Butte in 1999. It was my first effort at a novel. I found my work diary from that year. I didn’t publish a book until I was 37, a slim volume of stories with an independent press in Ireland. I always looked back on my twenties thinking, “You were a very lazy man.” But I found my work diary from 1999, and after I’d gone to Butte and researched the story, I’d written 120,000 words.

That’s a novel!

It is. It’s about three of my contemporary novels. They’re all about 40,000 words. But I knew even as I was writing the first Butte novel that it wasn’t coming alive on the page. I had discovered the texture of this time and place and of this incredible little Irish city that just sprang up in the Rocky Mountains with these migrant workers who were making money and losing control of themselves. But the characters …

How did you run into that story material? Like, what attracted you to it? It’s a long way to go from Ireland to Butte!

It’s a nutty story! I was a freelance journalist at the time and mostly writing about music, theater, things like that. I was in Cork city and 29, an age when you decide you need to do something now. I knew I wanted to write fiction in a serious way, so I said, I’m going write a lot of journalism and save up enough money so I can just write fiction. I bought a tiny trailer, put it down on the West Cork coast and went for three months, and I had nothing. I was trying to write a novel and I had nothing. But I was going for walks down around there and I kept passing these old copper mines that had been abandoned in the late 1800s. I started reading up on the local history. All the miners had gone to Butte, Montana, because they were electrifying America and there were jobs. So suddenly, out of nowhere, there were 10,000 Irishmen in this little mining community in Montana and it became, quickly, a very Irish city. The Irish have always been economic refugees, economic migrants—and it’s important to remind ourselves of that in a time when there is a sort of nasty rhetoric around immigration.

I went out there and they operated in the way Irish communities always do: open about 38 pubs and then take over the police and the political apparatus. That’s the way Irish migrant communities operated. It was a great world for me to write about. It was a Western with Irish accents. It was my first trip to the US.

Not New York, not Los Angeles, but Butte!

Yeah, I flew to Seattle and got on a Greyhound bus for 14 and a half hours to Butte. When you show up with an actual Irish accent, they embrace you, draw you to the bosom of the town. They gave me amazing access to boxes of letters that Irish miners had sent home 100 years earlier, all this great material. I just didn’t have the characters.

It seems that now you see characters as an entryway into the story—or language, or place—but maybe, when you were first beginning, you thought research was your way in?

That’s really interesting, because this is my seventh book of fiction and I can see myself change over a period of 20-odd years. Initially, my interest was chiefly in language and style and conjuring atmosphere on the page. But slowly, my interest has become more in character. That’s where I start now. I have to have the people and I have to really live with them. Like, for the year I spent writing Tom and Polly, I was completely in Tom and Polly’s world. I was thinking about them all the time. It’s a little nutty, but it’s kind of lovely. The worst part is when you finish the book: you’re very sad because Tom and Polly aren’t at your desk anymore and you have to find new friends to go and visit.

So, I had the idea of these two lovers Tom and Polly, and I said, I’m going to give them a week. (You get a little bit more economical with your time over a writing career.) I said, I’ll give him a week and I’ll give her a week, and I’ll see if there’s any promise in it. If there’s any rhythm, any flow.

I wrote for a week about a disillusioned young man lurching around Butte, going from bars to brothels to dope houses, and it felt promising. I was naturally getting the world as he lurched around town. Then, week two, I tried Polly. I was more nervous because she’s an American voice—but literally, I said, “I have a novel” as I started to write her. She was just ready. She was just there.

It’s about what you’re able to write.

Yeah, you write the books you’re able to write. If we wrote the books that we wanted to write, it would be Ulysses every time.

What was nice about The Heart in Winter was that it felt like repaying a debt to my 29-year-old self. Meaning, You were on the right track. You just needed to reduce the research, to cut it down. I didn’t know how to do that when I tried to write the book at first.

Some writers don’t cut that research.

You see it on the plate.

In The Heart in Winter, the research is alive. The research is the experience and the place and the character, so it doesn’t feel like research or history.

Thank you. That’s what you want to happen. You want the research to recede into the background. But all of that research has to be underneath to make the world live. That’s why I like to edit. My favorite thing about writing is cutting. I love taking away the scaffolding.

That’s also a poet’s tendency.

Maybe so—to really work at the line. I see stories as a kind of little machine, like watchmaking. You take away parts and ask, “Is it still working as a little machine?” I want my books to be an intense experience for the reader, where they’re really held in the world.

At its best, I think the literature that moves us is like a mode of transport. The book picks you up from where you are—like in a suburb of Limerick city, where I grew up—and transports you to a Yorkshire moor in the 1800s. I remember when I had the flu and was in bed, and one of my sisters was studying Wuthering Heights at secondary school; I started reading it and was utterly transported. I think back to foundational reading experiences like that. That’s what we’re trying to do.

¤

Kevin Barry is the author of the novels Night Boat to Tangier (2019), Beatlebone (2015), and City of Bohane (2011), as well as three story collections including That Old Country Music (2020). His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter and lives in County Sligo, Ireland.