Kevin Barry: ‘I didn’t publish a book till I was 37. I thought I must have been an awful f*cking waster’

Kevin Barry is in an Airbnb in Valencia, in Spain, when we meet over Zoom – he’s in a T-shirt, I’m in a fleece – reacquainting himself with the sun after an endless Connacht winter, preparing himself for the hamster wheel of publicity that will accompany the publication of his cracking new Cork-accented western.

He is constitutionally incapable of delivering a dull sentence.

“They’re clawing their eyes out of their heads to get out of the country,” he says of Knock airport’s exodus. “It’s been f*ckin’ desperate, with cold winds like you’re on the steppes.” He and his partner, Olivia, spent January and February in California, researching his next book, but the eight weeks since they’ve been back have featured only two good days. “I call it brown season. Everything is just mud-coloured and shite.”

Little wonder, perhaps, what with our misfortunate climate on top of the constraints of colonialism and Catholicism, that we have long been an emigrant nation, which offers our writers an irresistibly rich global canvas. Barry’s new novel is set in the United States, and the next one might be, too, or possibly early-1990s London. “I’m always threatening the London Irish novel. I was there as a 21-year-old. Also, the Irish newspaper office novel. I always have a couple competing to see which is going to be the next one. I just see where I can get a bit of flow going. I like to have one started as one is coming out.”

Barry, at 54, is an old hand, one of the finest, most influential Irish writers. His debut story collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, from 2007, won the Rooney Prize. Dark Lies the Island, from 2012, and That Old Country Music, from 2020, both won the Edge Hill University Short Story Prize. Beer Trip to Llandudno won the £30,000 Sunday Times short-story award. His first novel, City of Bohane, won the €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award in 2013; Beatlebone won the £10,000 Goldsmiths Prize in 2015; and Night Boat to Tangier was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.

He was a 29-year-old greenhorn, however, when he first conceived of the Irish western that 25 years later has become The Heart in Winter, whose darkly lyrical world of doomed lovers, emigrant Irish, eccentric villains and dissolute excess make it a novel Shane MacGowan might have given his two front teeth to write.

“This is a long, bitter story,” he says, with the good humour that a happy ending allows. “I’ve made a living since the age of 19 as a freelance writer of one stripe or another. It’s a source of pride.” Barry had left college in Limerick for a job on a local paper, but it folded within a year. “I was freelancing in Cork in the 1990s, writing for the Examiner, doing shifts for the Echo, sending features to Patsey Murphy on the Irish Times Magazine. People don’t believe me, but I got £250 a week for a 450-word column in the Examiner. I used to call the Crosbies” – the Examiner’s former owners – “my Medicis. But I decided in a kind of sniffy way I was better than all this: it was time to write the novel. I’d been making half-arsed attempts at fiction, bits of stories written at four in the morning after coming home from a nightclub.”

The western is very forgiving in terms of momentum and plot. People are always just getting up on horses and lighting out, there’s movement and they’re going to be meeting people. It was a joy to write it

Barry decided he needed three or four months to focus properly, so he wrote a rake of features, bought a caravan for £400, “a real Father Ted job”, parked it on the beach in Allihies, in west Co Cork, laid out his notebooks and pens and … “I had f*ckin’ nothing. The bits of stories had been sex and drugs and nightclubs. I was 29. I had nothing to write fiction about.”

So he started exploring the Caha Mountains and their abandoned copper mines. He knew a bit about the miners emigrating to Butte, Montana, and slowly realised, “There’s a western in this, and it’s a western I can write because all the accents will be Co Cork. I know what these f*ckers sound like.” He researched in University College Cork’s Boole Library. Butte was booming in the 1890s, as electrification required copper from its mines. Soon there were 30,000 people there, one-third of whom were from Cork. As The Heart in Winter puts it, “There were by now ten thousand Hibernian to the town and they had the place f*cking destroyed.”

“Soaked in an ambience of death from the cradle, they believed themselves generally to be on the way out, and sooner rather than later, and thus could be inclined to put aside the niceties of the living realm. Terrible people, born of a terrible nation.”

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They had the usual MO for new Irish, says Barry. The first thing they did was open 38 pubs. Then they took over the police and the political apparatus. “I thought, Jesus, this is a great world for me, I’ll have to go.” So he lit out for Butte, flying to Seattle, then spending 18 hours in a Greyhound bus. “With age you become a little more reserved. At that age I wasn’t. I was literally stopping people in the street, saying, ‘I’m writing a novel. What have you got for me?’ They were incredibly kind, the loveliest people, still very proud of their Irish heritage.”

Librarians brought out boxes of letters sent back to Beara from Butte in the 1890s, townsfolk brought him drinking – winding up many a night in the Irish Times pub in the town – and he was introduced to the Yank Harrington, born in 1903 to parents from Castletown Bere, who played a mean fiddle and was the subject of an Irishman’s Diary Barry wrote for The Irish Times in 2000. But that was all he wrote.

“I had all this great material and texture, I came back weighted down with notebooks, but I had no chops: I didn’t know how to write a novel. I didn’t publish a book till I was 37. I thought I must have been an awful f*cking waster, but looking back, because I kept a work diary, it was quite poignant: I wrote 120,000 words of fiction that year. It’s in the house under a bed, this manuscript. I can’t bring myself to look at it. Awful stuff. I thought I needed to do the whole story: the mines, the political system, the police, the bars, Cecil B DeMille set pieces. After eight or nine months I abandoned ship. I couldn’t control the material. Looking back, the fundamental thing was, I had no strong characters.”

When the TV series Deadwood came out, in 2006, it struck him that this was how to do the Butte novel – the exact kind of profane language that west Cork miners would have been using in 1891. City of Bohane, set in a futuristic city that was a cross between Cork, Limerick and Deadwood, was influenced by that abandoned novel, “my own version of that Sin City. It’s very much a western in its own way, one character in a white suit, another in a black suit.” He revisited it recently for a college class and found it very much a first novel in its structural engineering, but with vitality and a freshness in the language. He could sense his own excitement at hitting a note with it. Working-class Cork and Limerick voices were creeping into Irish literature for the first time.

Late in the pandemic, in October 2021, a very dreary time for many, he had started and quickly abandoned a novel about a stoner detective in early-1990s Amsterdam, as he didn’t know enough about that world. Social restrictions had him walking in the woods of the Bricklieve Mountains, which reminded him of a typical western locale.

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“I thought, Butte, Montana, maybe now is the time. It has to be runaway lovers: they need to get out of Butte. He’s called Tom; she’s called Polly.” He spent a week writing Tom’s story first, the “stations of the cross” pub crawl that opens the book. “Not coincidentally, he’s the same age I was when I went to Butte. There’s a lot of autofiction in the description of this dissolute 29-year-old, a yoke with vague literary ambitions.” The following Monday morning he started on Polly. Twenty minutes in, he thought, I have a book. “I just had her voice. It was just ready. Writing fiction is a strange, esoteric business. I would hate ever to use a phrase like ‘the trick of it’, but the trick of it is to find out what the right story is for the desk at a particular time in your life.

“The next 10 months were the happiest experience I’ve had in my writing life. It just kind of ran down the road for me. The western is very forgiving in terms of momentum and plot. People are always just getting up on horses and lighting out; there’s movement, and they’re going to be meeting people. It was a joy to write it, and on a personal level it was like repaying a debt to my younger self. I was saying to myself, ‘You weren’t such an eejit. This is actually a really good idea.’ I just didn’t have the knack for it at the time.” He salvaged one line from the original 120,000 words as a nod to his younger self. “She got f*ck knots in her hair.”

Some write with the eye, Barry has said, but he writes with the ear. Everything comes through speech. He reads his work aloud as he writes to make sure the tone is right. And he spins a yarn and turns a phrase like few others. He recalls ordering a cheeseburger at the M&M diner in Butte, which opened in 1890. “I said to the waitress, ‘I heard this place has never closed.’ She said, ‘It’s been a long shift.’”

Lesser writers’ coined words seem corny and counterfeit. Barry’s neologisms feel by comparison like freshly laundered dirty money. There is an earthiness to his wordmaking, but is he conscious of the risks? “Absolutely. I read it aloud a lot with pen in hand as I go along. It has to feel right; can you hear it? They didn’t speak in Dakota like they do in Deadwood. David Milch uses an Elizabethan register, incredibly profane, in no way accurate, but it feels right.”

I wondered why Barry avoided depicting the shoot-out scene in his novel. Was it too much of a cliche? “It was subconscious at first but then very definitely a decision to keep violence offscreen, because the book is above all a love story. I thought bringing the gore and the violence onscreen would break the romantic spell of the book.”

Similarly, there is the suggestion that Tom and Polly are escaping problematic pasts, but this is not explored. “Tangier kept going forward, then drifting into the past. With this one I wanted, in honour of the genre, to keep the forward momentum, lighting out to whatever was coming down the line.”

How did he access the intense first flush of young love?

“My way into the character was: Tom is 29, he’s come from Castletown Bere, what’s he like? I was thinking, What was I like? That’s the easiest way. I got it: he was poisoned with literary ambition. It’s an exalted state to find yourself in, and it’s also a catastrophe. I came up with the perfect tagline for the novel, and we didn’t use it in the end, because it gives too much of the story away: ‘He wanted to die for love, he just hadn’t met the right girl yet.’ What made the story work for me is when Polly came into it, the way lovers bring each other into definition. She is incredibly sure of who she is; he doesn’t know who he is, and he’s trying on different accents and demeanours.”

I do go quite method, or at least I set myself up as a location scout. I go to the places

Barry cheerfully admitted to the New Yorker magazine that doomed romantics are his stock in trade – “He drew a thumb along the line of her cheekbone and the horse leaned in as though a sideman or confrere. The hooktip of her nose was cold and blue as a berry and he kissed it … The edge of the forest here felt fated in the way of a final place and this thrilled her to an unholy degree and when she looked up to his eyes again there was a deathloving shine to hers.”

The year 1891 is very interesting, he says – every main street suddenly had a photographic studio opening up. “For the first time ordinary people were thinking, How do I look? Polly and Tom get more and more into how they present themselves.” This self-mythologising reminds me of Bonnie and Clyde. “I think Cormac McCarthy said once, books are made out of books; there is no mystery to it. They are also made out of films and music. The strongest influences on this I listed in that New Yorker interview, films like Days of Heaven and Badlands, Terrence Malick films from the 1970s; McCabe & Mrs Miller. Deadwood was a huge influence.

“Then books, you go to the best to see how it’s been done before. Charles Portis’s True Grit, which I have to say stands up. You can’t write a western now without paying at least a vague homage to Cormac McCarthy, because he is the writer who kept the genre alive. He had such genius; he saw there were still possibilities with this hoary old form. I read All the Pretty Horses. F*ck, he knows a lot about horses. I thought, Well, maybe if my character knows nothing about horses and is totally winging it, I’ll be able to get away with it. In terms of historical fiction, I go back in a devotional, almost religious way to Hilary Mantel, how she makes it seem so fresh and contemporary – there is never a sense of research on the page, she wears it so lightly.”

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Setting is a strong factor in all his works. “I do go quite method, or at least I set myself up as a location scout. I go to the places. Night Boat to Tangier, I was in the ferry port in Algeciras, writing my Cork gangster dialogue on site, drinking cafés con leche. It all went a bit nuts with Beatlebone. It’s about John Lennon going to an island, primal screaming. I went a bit far, out on a rock in Clew Bay, screaming. I felt great after it.

“I gave a bit of myself away in the book, which I [normally] never do. I want the books to be very intimate experiences for the reader and them to know absolutely nothing about me at the end of it. That’s the ambition, and it’s important to keep myself back.”

Barry broke the fourth wall by interrupting the narrative to explore his own motivation for writing the novel and why he identified with Lennon. He has no regrets, though. “No, because it saved the book, I thought, writing the chapter about the reason for writing the novel, a kindred spirit who loses a parent early. It needed an emotional heart. Without that it was just a kind of caper with John and his driver Cornelius in the far extremities of Connacht. It was the most difficult of the novels, the baggiest and the loosest and also in a way my favourite, because it was difficult.”

In his preface to Anthony Cronin’s biography of Flann O’Brien, however, Barry contends that “a writer’s style is a direct projection of the personality, in fact of the soul, if such a thing can be said to exist. As that style is channelled directly from the subconscious, it contains base and original truths, and it all comes out on the page. A writer cannot hide from himself or herself on the page, most especially in the writing of prose fiction.”

The four novels to date and the vague ones I’m just starting revving the engines for are all engaged with genres to some degree

He develops that idea. “You can lie in an essay; you can’t in fiction. You always give yourself away. It all comes out despite your best efforts. That’s part of the game of it: how much can I keep back? Two things for me about fiction: first, learning to exert control on the page takes a lot of bad work and effort, before becoming the puppet master; and then what’s really interesting is, now can I lose control? Can I let it go wherever it wants to? I’m not sure if it ever got there. I definitely tried to with Beatlebone and Bohane, let it go nuts and see what happens. I’ve been a stricter ringmaster with Tangier and The Heart in Winter. And they’re technically better novels. I do find, weirdly, at the age of 54, that I’m only getting going with the novels. I’ve always been a slow starter. I learned to cycle at the age of 14, I learned to swim when I was 29, and now I’m an avid swimmer and cyclist. Only fools rush in.

“I know now how to get under the hood of a novel, that blend of wildness and control. I go back to someone like Dermot Healy. A Goat’s Song is a crazy book but such extraordinary skill; we need to keep talking about him. Living in Sligo gives his work an extra dimension.”

I ask what else his work has in common. “The four novels to date and the vague ones I’m just starting revving the engines for are all engaged with genres to some degree. Night Boat to Tangier has elements of noir. Beatlebone is the most derided of all the genres: it’s fan fiction. City of Bohane is a mad mix of dystopia and western gang war novel. I’m mangling some quote, but I’m just looking for a bridge to get my soldiers across.”

Barry is coming into his own as a novelist, but the short stories with which he made his name are drying up. “They come seldom enough now, one or two a year max.” Finistère, in the New Yorker recently, is his first published since Pure Winter, in The Irish Times in December 2021. “I remember when I was putting that first collection together for Declan Meade at the Stinging Fly. I had five or six, and he said, ‘We’ll probably need another six.’ I said, ‘Give me two months.’” He laughs. “As a relatively young man I could knock one out in a week. I hit a really good seam.

“Short stories are very different for me. I write them much more quickly, obviously, but they come across you like a shadow, and you have to write them when it’s there.” Short stories alone would bore him now, he says – he likes writing screenplays, playscripts. All of his novels have been optioned, and the screenplays are a significant part of his income. Dark Lies the Island has been filmed, and Tangier and Bohane are both at very advanced stages. “I enjoy the sociability of it, the Zooms; it gets me out of the shed. It’s why I like the three to four weeks in July I spend on Winter Papers, line-editing, a great holiday from myself, not having to think about my own pages for a month.”

Winter Papers, the cloth-bound annual arts anthology he edits with Olivia Smith, his partner, will mark its 10th edition this year. The pair were admiring the artisan bookmaking in a comic shop in Montreal called Drawn & Quarterly, and he thought of the designer John Foley, from his Cork days, and the idea took off. “It’s become a lovely part of the year, a natural rhythm and a social life, living in rural Sligo. Without getting into the backslapping thing about Irish literature, you get the sense of a lot of people working in an extremely serious, committed way. I like that we get people from different crafts to talk to each other about how they do it. We are also opening up the archive this year online, keeping those pieces alive.”

Richard Harris once said that every Limerick man is at heart an old ham, and Barry has become famous for his live readings. “I love doing live readings. I just did the audiobook. I remember saying to myself, ‘Now don’t go to town on the Cornish accents.’ What did I do? I went to complete f*cking town. My Yorkshire is good; the Cornish is a hate crime. I sold rakes of the Tangier audiobook. Most audiobooks are awful – trained actors. I’m not leaving them out of my hands, hammy as they are.”

The Heart in Winter, by Kevin Barry, is published by Canongate on Thursday, June 6th