“I Tried To Be Witness to Him.” Sebastian Barry on Writing Characters That Have Survived Trauma

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Sebastian Barry about his new novel, Old God’s Time.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: In your novel Old God’s Time, you’re telling the story of Tom Kettle, who is a retired police investigator. He lives outside of Dublin by the sea, he’s retired. And he’s, kind of unmoored. The story is told in third person, but it’s so close to his interiority, and it’s so much a stream of his consciousness. As we’re reading, we’re not quite sure about his level of dementia and what he’s remembering.

We learn conflicting stories about his life. There’s a lot of trauma he experienced and his wife did too. He served in the military; he was an orphan. And so, we meet him when he’s 66, nine months out of retirement. You’re such a keen observer of what he sees. And I wanted to ask you about the finesse involved in bringing a reader along when you’re writing stream of consciousness, and also for you, did you have moments as a child that taught you that sort of observation?

Sebastian Barry: Oh, that’s a beautiful question. I think when I was a child, by nature, I was very much in love with the people around me and my mother and father and my sister, and some close relatives who were allowed some access to us, my great aunt and my two grandfathers, because my parents were almost bizarrely private people, very few people came to the house.

But that love, I think, then became challenged by a certain alarm we had as children, my sister and myself, which I’ve tried to write about. And the alarm coupled with maybe a child’s love being marauded across in some way, as if it was a country to be blighted or denuded, or whatever growing up sometimes does to kids leaves you in a certain place of vigilance.

The reason I feel grateful to Tom Kettle, the character in the book, and indeed the reason I wouldn’t be so discourteous to him as to diagnose him, you know, is that after all these years, after all these maybe 50 or 60 years, he allowed me finally, to talk about, to write about the things that have troubled me most as a living person and as a citizen of my own country. For instance, clerical child abuse, so called clerical child abuse. I mean, the phrase is too comfortable for me, but that’s what it’s called.

All these matters, I was able to speak of, I mean, the whole point is speaking rather than writing, to speak of these things at last, you might say, because even the child, even the troubled children of the world, the first thing they are told is to say nothing about anything. And that whole injunction laid upon you as a human person, especially in a family setting, that whole issue of not being allowed to speak about probably the matters you really needed to speak about, was resolved for me in a way in writing this book because Tom Kettle was able to speak and because I was so grateful to him, it did lend me a kind of hypervigilance just watching him, seeing him, hearing him, just watching him bang around his little flat, you know, bumping into the furniture. I mean, he doesn’t even want to turn the light on at night because he doesn’t want to disturb his furniture. I mean, I don’t know how you diagnose that, but he is a man under the most extravagant levels of stress, let’s put it that way.

So, if you would diagnose him as a friend, you would say he’s a person in dire need of being seen and heard. So that’s what I tried to do for him as his writer, you know, or as his witness. It’s a better word witness, but I tried to be witness to him. And if you’re going to be witness to somebody, my heavens, you know, you better be paying attention and you better be on your best behavior, and you better have your loins girded, and you better be good for the job, you know, because in that world of survivors to which he belongs, survivors of abuse, one of the best things you can do, I think, is any sort of allyship. And what the book means to me, is, it’s just an act of witnessing, and an act of praising. I was desperately keen to bring my best game to Tom Kettle.

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Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include of Boss Grady’s Boys, The Steward of Christendom, Our Lady of Sligo, The Pride Parnell Street, and Dallas Sweetman. His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Annie Dunne, A Long Long Way, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Secret Scripture, which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, On Canaan’s Side, The Temporary Gentleman, Days Without End, A Thousand Moons, and Old God’s Time. He has also published three collections of poetry.  He is the recipient of the Irish-America Fund Literary Award, The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle Award, The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, and Costa Awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year. He lives in Wicklow with his family.