The Brooklyn Rail

Since the publication of his first collection of stories, There Are Little Kingdoms (2007), Kevin Barry has been putting out some of the most distinct works of fiction to come out of Ireland this century. His novels and short stories have won him a Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, a Dublin IMPAC award, a Goldsmiths Award, as well as several others. He has written plays and screenplays, and, along with his wife Olivia Smith, founded and edits the beautiful annual Irish arts anthology, Winter Papers.

I spoke with Kevin recently ahead of the publication of his latest novel, The Heart in Winter, which is set in the late nineteenth century in Butte, Montana, and tells the story of two runaway lovers, Tom and Polly. When we spoke, he was at home in rural Sligo, in the West of Ireland. I asked him how his day was going and he told me he was tired. He and his wife had spent the previous night trying to get a bat out of their bedroom. After they finally caught it in the morning, they put it in a little box and planned to release it that evening once it was dark enough to do so.

Throughout our conversation, during which we spoke about what he referred to as his “slow apprenticeship” and his “pugilistic” approach to writing, he cast occasional glances off camera in the direction of the bat. He seemed pleased with this small but not unimportant act of animal husbandry. It felt like a setup for a Kevin Barry story.

Tadhg Hoey (Rail): In 2016, you contributed a great essay called “Notes on Desperation—A Writer’s Apprenticeship” to the Irish Writers Centre’s anthology on writing. It chronicles your earlier attempt to write a novel whose premise sounds a lot like The Heart in Winter. What led you to return to it?

Kevin Barry: Summer of ’99. I was freelancing in Cork, and I said to myself, now, young man, the time has come—write your novel. I was twenty-nine. That moment when you’re just about to turn thirty, and you think you better get fucking serious here now and do something. So, I saved up—the freelance rates were better in those days [laughter]—and I had three months where I didn’t really have to do much journalism. I bought a caravan and I put it down in West Cork, at the far end of the Beara Peninsula, in Allihies. I said, “right, here we go, write the novel”. And I had nothing. Like, I had absolutely fucking nothing to write about.

I’d been writing bits of short fiction, but it was very much the kind of stuff a twenty-nine-year-old man would be at. Stuff about nightclubs, drugs, and sex. All this kind of craic. It wasn’t looking like a novel at all. I was going for walks then and getting a bit worried. Coming across the old copper mines down outside Allihies, I knew a little bit about the story. I knew they had played out sometime in the late 1800s, and I knew the locals had all gone to Butte, Montana. It’s a well-known story down there. Lots of families have relations in Butte, Montana. I thought to myself, “Jesus, there’s a Western now with Cork accents.” [Laughter]

I’d be away in a hack if I could only get it together. I’d need to go out. I started researching the story, going up to the Boole library in University College Cork. Then, in October ’99, my research trip. I flew from Cork to London, then from London to Seattle. I got a Greyhound bus for fourteen hours to Butte, Montana. It was a great craic.

I would say it’s a bit of a plain sister, looks-wise. It’s not Paris. It’s not gorgeous, but it has real character. I started going around telling everyone I met about this novel I was writing. I was very upfront about it and I was getting great material. In the local library there, they gave me amazing stuff—letters that Cork fellas had sent back home in 1893. Brilliant, heartbreaking stuff. I had all this material, filling notebooks with it, talking to everyone, and soaking up the vibe.

I got back to Cork and I started writing. I recently found my work diary for that year. I always keep a work diary of what I’m up to. When I look back at myself in my late twenties, I think, “Jesus, you’re an awful waster, you didn’t get a book out until you were thirty-seven, and it was a very slim volume of stories.” But, actually, I was working a lot—writing journalism, but also finding the time to try and start learning how to write fiction. I wrote 100,000 words for this novel back then. It’s somewhere in the house. I even knew as I was writing it, it was awful bollocks. There’d be bits of good description and atmosphere, but I didn’t know how to reduce this great research material I had.

I thought I had to do everything—the mines, the migration story, and everything else. The ultimate thing, really, was I had no characters that I believed in. Eventually, after about six or eight months messing with it, I put it to one side and started writing other things. Forgot about it completely. I remember over the years, I would occasionally think of Butte, Montana, for some reason. I remember when Deadwood started on TV, I started watching that and I thought, “That’s how you could have written your Butte, Montana, novel.” It’s a big influence on the novel I did write.

Rail: When did you go back to it?

Barry: It was just towards the end of the pandemic, October 2021, and I was due to write a novel and I was shopping around. I usually have competing ideas for what a novel might be. I’ll try something for a few weeks to see if it goes. I started one about a stoner detective in the early nineties in Amsterdam. [Laughter]

I thought this was a fucking great setup altogether, and I was bored out of my skull inside a week. Just nothing. No enjoyment coming with it. Then it was the long second year of the pandemic and, you know yourself, it was very intense over here. I enjoyed the novelty of the first lockdown in 2020 in a funny way, like a lot of people, but by October ’21, we were all ready to turn in and face the wall. So, I said, Butte, Montana. Maybe I could distract myself by writing a western. Simultaneously, I’ve always wanted to write runaway lovers. I’ve always wanted to write Badlands (1973), essentially.

Rail: The Terrence Malick movie?

Barry: Yeah, I’ve always wanted to write my own version of that. I said, “What if this isn’t just a big epic thing about this migration and mining community? What if it’s just a love story and this is just the setting for it? And they’re called Tom and Polly?” I knew very quickly I would do alternate chapters in their voices and then bring them together. I said I’d give it a week on him and then a week on her and see if there’s anything in it. I wrote Tom for a week. I thought it looked promising. I was getting some of the world-building quite naturally as he lurched around the town between brothels, dope houses, and bars. Then I said, alright, I’ll try Polly. I started on a Monday morning, and inside about ten minutes, I thought: I have a book.

As soon as I started writing her voice, it was ready to go. Sometimes you have a character, and the voice is just there, and I kind of had it. Polly’s voice in the book is probably my favorite thing about it. She’s very influenced by Terrence Malick’s movies, like Days of Heaven (1978). There’s a great voiceover used in that movie that Malick added very late on, by the teenage actress in it, Linda Manz, to knit the film together because it wasn’t holding together. He put this spacey voiceover over it. It’s blank poetry that’s beautiful, weird, and offbeat. Something about the note in that gave me Polly’s voice. Something about this off-kilter, skewed view on things.

It was an intense twelve months on it. I was residing with the characters very much. Some of the sections were very tricky to write, but, generally, I had a ball. It was great fun. Writing a western, when you find yourself typing lines like “the sheriff said,” you think, “Right, I’m in it now!” [Laughter]

Rail: It reads like you had fun writing it. The momentum is great. Like a lot of your writing, it’s funny, too.

Barry: In whatever I write, whether it’s a short story, or a novel, or a play, or a script, I’m always trying to keep in balance different tones. I’ll be going for comic energy, but that’s always an attempt to manipulate the reader and to open them up to feeling, and darker stuff. I always feel if you can get the reader laughing or chuckling, even in a casual way, it’s a physical response. They’re opening up to you all the time. When they’re laughing, they’re becoming very vulnerable to your manipulations.

I see my relationship with the reader as entirely pugilistic. It’s a battle. I’m going to break the fuckers down and make them feel something. If they’re good enough, out of the charity of their hearts, to give my novel three or four hours or however long it takes—they don’t take that long to read, my novels—I’m going to try and make it a more intense experience than they’re going to get watching something on Netflix. This is why I read books; I’m really drawn to come back to this world and get into it, the way that only a novel or a piece of prose fiction can involve you in a world.

Rail: So, to be clear: when you first started writing it years ago, it was this huge story about the migration and the mines, but you managed to reduce it down to a runaway love story?

Barry: It was like Yellowstone originally—a cast of thousands. I rescued one line from the original draft. The line is “She got fuck knots in her hair.”

Rail: I remember that.

Barry: I took that line out and put it in just so it would feel, in some occult way, like it’s the same project still and I can say it was twenty-five years in the making as my shtick.

Rail: Like that line was the ancient starter that you used to bake the bread.

Barry: That’s it. Exactly. Sometimes, patience is all that’s needed with a piece of fiction. You have to wait around long enough for it to be ready. Always, the hard part when writing fiction is figuring out the story that should be on your desk at a particular time in your life. I think very often early on in a writer’s career, ambition and ability aren’t matching up. You’re trying to take on projects that you’re not ready for for years yet. At that point, I didn’t know how to edit, really. I didn’t know how to cut it back and to pare back all this great material I had, and to make that material invisible on the page. You know bad historical fiction when you can see the research everywhere.

Rail: That reminds me of something Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life (1989). I know you’re a fan of hers. She uses this example of a young photographer who brings their pictures to be reviewed by an old, accomplished photographer each year. Every year, the accomplished photographer puts this one landscape picture on the bad pile, upsetting the young photographer, who explains they like it so much because they had to climb a mountain to take it. The implication from the young photographer being that just because they struggled for it, it’s automatically worthwhile. Whereas the old photographer is saying I don’t want to know or care what you had to do to get the shot—the finished product is the only thing that matters. Then she writes: “How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag?”

Barry: Exactly. With historical fiction, I don’t read much of it at all. Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell books are the only piece of historical fiction that I’ve gone back to repeatedly. I reread a lot. I love to reread, but I go back to her because she’s masterful. Her historical fiction books feel so fresh. The world feels like it could have been going on last week. I was trying for some of that, but it was just ready to go. I remember something similar when I started my first novel that was published, City of Bohane (2011). I remember the morning I sat down to that thinking, “Yeah, this one would be published.” I had written three novels that weren’t published before that. I knew straight away I had everything I needed for that book. It’s just a matter of patience and waiting for the various influences on your work to sift and arrange themselves so you can make your own thing.

Rail: You mentioned you always wanted to write a Western. I recently watched an old short film you wrote, The Ballad of Kid Kanturk (2009).

Barry: Oh, man. There you go. Cannibal rockabillies in County Mayo. There’s not many of them around.

Rail: I see the Deadwood influence on it as well as on City of Bohane, which you’ve mentioned in other interviews, along with shows like The Wire and other influences. But your interest in Westerns clearly predates Deadwood.

Barry: Young fellas like you don’t remember, but, in the 1970s, when I was a small child in Ireland, there was one TV channel. You watched whatever was on. On Saturday afternoons, they just put Westerns on. I remember shows like How the West Was Won and Quest. Later as a young teenager, Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone films. Then, in my twenties, starting to read Cormac McCarthy. As a literary genre, he saved the Western, essentially. He made it something that you could still consider in the twenty-first century in a serious way. He was a necessary historical fiction figure for the genre. If you were to attempt a Western now, you would have to at least note his influence. It shadows over everything. I had a big McCarthy phase in my twenties.

Often, I would have a big James Ellroy or a big Saul Bellow phase and I would read very narrowly. I think it was a mistake. I would be obsessed with one or two writers for six months or a year. I’d be reading everything and then of course try to ape them on the page. You’d have these awful attempts at being Saul Bellow in Cork. [Laughter]

It wouldn’t be working out great.

Rail: You actually said in your essay “The Raingod’s Green, Dark as Passion” you wanted to do for Cork what Don DeLillo did for America.

Barry: I still think of Cork as a literary place for me because it’s where I got serious about writing and the attempt. Exactly twenty-five years ago—summer ’99—I was making the decision, knowing from early attempts that it’s difficult to get published, and it’s difficult to write good stuff. It’s very difficult to exert control on a page of fiction, to make that world whole, and to make the characters come across.

I started, after my first abandoned attempt at the Butte, Montana novel, to focus on short stories a bit for the first time. Around 2000 or 2001, I was writing half a page here, or a page there, where I would look at it and think, “That’s actually kinda almost good.” It’s getting kind of funny and it sounds more like yourself. You’re not trying to be Saul Bellow or Annie Dillard or whoever. A slow apprenticeship, really.

I was doing a lot of journalism and when you’re making your living in that field, you can be quite shy about telling people that you’re writing a novel as well because all the other journalists are probably writing novels. [Laughter]

I was reticent about showing the work around for a long time or sending it anywhere. I didn’t send anything out until 2004. There was a short story competition. Davy Byrne’s Pub in Dublin sponsored it. It was twenty grand. That got me out of bed. [Laughter]

I thought, okay. I sent a story, got on the shortlist, and then I got an agent out of that. I think it’s important to tell people you’re making the attempt. It’s important psychologically in some way to commit to it, to where you’re saying to people, “Look, I’m trying to write a book.”

Rail: It brings some accountability to it.

Barry: That’s it. You have to come clean about it. It becomes a pain in the arse because everyone is stopping you then going, “How’s the novel going?” And you’re going, “Please!”

Rail: Don’t talk to me about it!

Something else I wanted to ask you about is runaway lovers, of which there are many in your fiction. Maybe not always runaways, maybe doomed lovers? One of my favorite stories is the title story from That Old Country Music (2020). Hannah Cryan and her boyfriend Setanta, and their disastrous attempt to go on the run. Then there’s your story inspired by the Nick Drake song, Riverman, published in the New Yorker.

Barry: That story is called “Deer Season” (2016).

Rail: There’s no shortage of doomed lovers to choose from.

Barry: Doomed romance. It’s kind of the sign over the door. [Laughter]

Rail: Exactly.

Barry: It seems to be what I write. I write a lot of double acts as well that surface again and again. I see them coming at this stage and I think, “Oh, fuck, not another job!” [Laughter]

I just fall into it, and I enjoy it. One thing that Mr. Beckett taught us is that you don’t have to be afraid to keep mining the same scene. He did so for fifty or sixty years. Just the same, really very narrow, patch of field that he was working in. And that’s fine. You can see how you can best utilize the skills or the chops you have to bring things to life and make the reader believe.

Rail: Different resonances in each. Also, the sense of fatedness, too. There’s a line Tom Rourke says in The Heart in Winter when he’s being questioned by one of the Swedes about how he got involved in what he’s doing. Tom says he has been steered by fate. “He said he believed he was acting as though under the pull of the moon and tides. He had about as little say in it as that.” I really get this sense in your stories—the idea that people are just hurtling towards their destinies.

Barry: I think, yeah. And a sense always of a kind of a mysterious other world just beyond our field of vision that’s dragging us in all the time. Tom believes in everything. There is a quote someone said, and I don’t know who it’s by, but they said the problem when people stop believing in God is that suddenly they believe in everything else.¹ [Laughter]

His faith in God comes and goes by the hour. He also believes himself to be a witch. He believes himself to be in tune with the occult, to be in tune with the dead, significantly. He fucking buys into all this shit. What he is as well, he’s a young literary man, you know, which is a disastrous condition.

Rail: A terrible thing to be.

Barry: It’s an exalted state, but also it’s a catastrophe.

Rail: I underlined a line where he was in a bar, drinking whiskey, thinking about death and the poetic impulse of youth. [Laughter]

Barry: And he’s very sniffy about the Irish people.

Rail: He’s above them.

Barry: They’re destroying the place.

Rail: Yeah. That was just something I kept thinking about a lot. The sense of fatedness.

Barry: It’s not coincidental he’s twenty nine, which was the age I was when I was in Butte. There’s an amount of autofiction in it. I was thinking a lot about what I was like at that age. It’s the exaggerated version, but there are definitely elements of myself in there.

Rail: Tom Rourke is the other path you could have taken, had you stayed in Butte.

Barry: There you go. [Laughter]

Rail: I just reread Beatlebone (2015) and it reminded me that a reviewer once commented that there was a lot of white space on the page in some of your novels. There’s less in The Heart in Winter, which I realize is an odd thing to note.

Barry: There’s less.

Rail: There’s a change in your fiction after Beatlebone. There’s a lot of breathing room on the page in Night Boat to Tangier (2019) as well. I’m guessing it was probably a conscious formatting decision, but was it a stylistic one, too?

Barry: It became a formal decision. I’m hopeless with technology and I didn’t know how to change the settings on the computer. It was on a double-spaced setting. Then, as it was coming out, I was going, “Jesus, this really fills up the pages in a very handy way, and it looks kind of nice.” [Laughter]

When the reviews came out, I was terrified. I thought Beatlebone would be kicked down the road, but I got very good reviews, to my amazement. A lot of the reviewers talked about, “Oh, excellent use of white space on the page!” [Laughter]

Rail: Okay, yeah. I’ll take it.

Barry: But then, I actually began to use it as a tactic in Night Boat to Tangier. Less so with this. I wanted this to look like a pulp western.

Rail: Also, if the writing is bad, you really notice it. But your sentences are so terse—almost at times like bits of poetry. Each sentence does a lot—pushes the plot along, adds color to a scene, and often, on a purely linguistic level, shows a huge appreciation for language. So, it’s a joy to savor each alone.

Barry: You’re kind of putting a gun to your head in some ways when you’re really highlighting stuff. So, you have to really work this in very hard. It’s an interesting thing actually, the amount of drafts. I often get to a point where I feel like I’m one draft too many into something, where I’ve almost made it too smooth and too well-upholstered. You almost have to go back in and do a subsequent draft where you rough it up a little bit and put some of the awkward bits back into it.

With novels, it’s generally three drafts before I send it out the door. Once the editors come back, I work their notes in to some degree. I have had short stories that I’ve reworked too much and incessantly for years. There comes a point when I think it’s like actors doing takes on film sets. If they do ten takes, the tenth one is rarely the best. It’s usually in the middle. You strike the right balance between wildness and control. You want a certain wildness on the page to simulate life, but you have to be in control of it as well. You have to be dictating it and the way it comes across to the reader.

Rail: I imagine by the tenth pass, there’s a lot of self-consciousness and doubt in it, so you’ve lost that wildness.

Barry: And often just too much smoothness. You can polish all the life out of your sentences if you don’t start to reign it in. I do love to edit; it becomes quite addictive. I love to cut back and pare, but not every cut is an improvement is the lesson you have to learn.

Rail: One of the things that makes your writing so distinct, for me, is your syntax. I think it simulates some of the vernaculars over in the West and Southwest. Here’s two random sentences I underlined. “The keep [bartender] named himself a Joe de Brugha of Ballingarry,” or “There was a man drank here the other night.” These ways of speaking aren’t unfamiliar to me, but I’ve never seen them written down, and they seem strange written down. I was curious if that’s a natural thing or something you’re working in?

Barry: Definitely. People point out to me in notes that verb patterns are reversed as they usually would be in… I dunno. I could bullshit and say that’s the Hiberno-English. [Laughter] Or whatever, but I dunno. I’m always wary of something becoming a tic, the kind of thing you just do. Literary style, prose style—it’s just your personality as well coming out on the page in a very direct way, and you can’t hide from it.

Rail: I once heard someone describe a writer as living and dying by their paragraphs. It feels like you live and die by the sentence.

Barry: I do think there’s a difference, actually. I think there are writers who think in paragraphs on the page. I don’t. I often think in scenes. Little scenes, little setups. Whether it’s two Cork men on a bar stool—as it often is!—or John Lennon in a cave talking to a seal. [Laughter] It’s very often little scenes that I’m working in as the unit. The sentence is just the building block for the scene. So, I don’t think I think in paragraphs. I’m not sure I know what a paragraph is for in some ways. So much of it, you play it by feel, and you play it for what feels right.

This is book number seven. I think I can see myself change slowly as a writer from the first book through to this. I think early on, my primary concern was language and seeing what I could do with the sentences. That’s still very key to the project, but I think mostly I’m interested in the characters I can come up with. I’m interested in the people and how vivid I can make them. I see if I can really live with them as I write about them, just go to them all the time and imagine what they’re at and what they’re saying. I did feel tuned into Tom and Polly’s world very, very clearly. I could hear it very cleanly. I was very sad when I was finished. When they were gone out of my writing shed at the back, I was like, “Oh, Jesus.” [Laughter]

Rail: I wanted to ask how you think your writing has changed over the seven books. Is that the change—going from a book as a way to convey what you want to do with language to more character-driven narratives?

Barry: I think so. Not that I’ve abandoned the earlier kind of interest in language or style, but it’s more about the characters now. Recently, there was an American university class looking at City of Bohane and they were asking me to read different bits. When the book comes out, you have a few passages you do at readings, but most of it I haven’t seen since I wrote it, or since I recorded the audio book thirteen years ago. I was reading bits for the first time in thirteen years, going, “Jesus Christ.” Some of it I found was great. Boyish vitality in the language. I thought the characters often were just barely sketched in. There’s a couple of really strong characters in the book. There’s an old woman, Girly Hartnett, who runs the city from her bed. She’s strong. But the others felt generic to me. Probably from Beatlebone on, I’ve been thinking more and more about the characters as I write.

Rail: The characters from Beatlebone onwards—John and Cornelius, Morris and Charlie in Tangier, and now Tom and Polly—are incredibly vivid. They feel concentrated, sharp. Post-Beatlebone, everything is trimmed away. They’re slimmer novels and, as a result, punchier, too.

Barry: Yeah, I do think one of the things that’s really changed since I started trying to write fiction in the late nineties is what’s considered a novel in terms of the length. At that time, you were told 90–100,000 words is what you’re aiming for. Then it became sixty thousand words. I think City of Bohane is about sixty thousand, but they’ve come shorter and shorter. The last two were forty-five and I have distinct ambitions to make them shorter again. [Laughter]

I like picking up a two hundred page book as a reader. If you’re asking me to go through 450 pages, it better be fucking worth it. I like the sense that I can, if I want to, just make this a one-off, like, tonight, I could sit and read this novel in three hours or whatever. I like that vibe. It just somehow makes sense for our era, rather than the eight hundred page. I just reread The Executioner’s Song (1979) by Norman Mailer. 1,050 pages. It’s incredible, one of the best nonfiction books, but I really like to pick up the slimmer ones now. It just feels right for our moment, somehow. These things slip in and out of the moment as well. For now, I like the really concise and intense burst you get in a two hundred-page novel. It’s an important thing to think about. We don’t, as writers, think about it all that much sometimes.

Rail: You hinted at it there when talking about Beatlebone, but what’s the book that you learned from and changed your relationship with writing the most?

Barry: I definitely learned a lot writing Beatlebone because it was difficult. I wasn’t constantly on it, but I was about three or four years coming and going from it. One thing you learn is that you become a bit more forgiving of your first drafts and your early drafts. You realize that they always look awful. It always looks terrible that early stuff on the first go. You can be inclined to abandon them earlier on, just to get it out of your sight. I think with a bit of experience you can always bring it up just by cutting and picking a few lines that surprise you out of it. A few lines that embarrass you are often good to work with.

If you read something you’ve written in a first draft and your cheek reddens, that’s important. You’re getting a reaction to this material. So pay close attention to what that is. The stuff that reads very impressively and cool is probably bullshit in six month’s time. You become more adept at listening to your own work. I’m definitely more economical. I will try a novel for a couple of weeks just to see if there’s some sense of flow, or some sense of potential flow, that this might go for me a bit.

What I found with the new novel is that the Western is very forgiving in terms of plot and momentum. It offers you stuff all the time. People have to be constantly getting up on horses and lighting out. That means they have to bump into people, and they better be vivid people. That’s what genre does. It gives you little building blocks all the time. All four of my novels are genre mashups. City of Bohane is a futuristic gang war story. The last one, Tangier, is an attempt at a neo-noir thriller. Beatlebone is the most derided of all genres: fan fiction.

Rail: I never thought of it that way.

Barry: That’s totally what it is. I’m unashamed to admit it: it’s fan fiction. What was nice about that book and gave me confidence—I got away with it. It’s an unlikely thing to get away with, making John Lennon your main character. What you’re always looking for is a little bit of confidence for the next thing, to think, “Okay, I’ll be able to go into the next thing and solve whatever problems or difficulties it throws at me.” A little bit of patience as well. Patience isn’t natural to me, but it’s indispensable really to have some of it, if you’re going to let the stories come at the right time for you.

With The Heart in Winter I felt my youthful instinct had been good. When I was twenty-nine, I was right. I knew this was a good world for me. It was a good world for the abilities I have and it is just the right setup for me, in a way. It struck me since that City of Bohane was almost another attempt at this kind of novel, in this intense little city. It feels like paying off a debt to my younger self. I finally got it together to put it out, my long-promised Butte, Montana novel.

1. The quote, paraphrased here by Kevin, is by G.K. Chesterton.