Kevin Barry on Dermot Healy: ‘strange perceptions and lovely fun’

I’m appearing on a lot of podcasts lately. I’ve hardly ever listened to a podcast in my life but I’m guest-starring on them by the new time. When you’ve a book out, the questions settle into a familiar pattern and your answers quickly become rote. But sometimes a question can spark an unexpected thought. Recording an American podcast on Zoom the other week, the host asked me, in that sonorous podcast voice: “Mr Barry? If you were to describe the character of the people of your native west of Ireland in a single word … What would that word be?”

“Rattled,” I said.

I believe this to be true. We are an oceanic people and subject to the capricious mood patterns dictated by Atlantic weather systems. Our sky and sea can sometimes switch colour a thousand times a day and our moods will swing with them like slaves. Other times, the grip exerts for a longer while – in Co Sligo, endless weeks of greyish murk and their resulting melancholy will give on to windows of hysterical blue-skied brilliance and sharp light and suddenly everyone is going around the place high as a kite, the tractors hammering up the hills, the beasts cavorting in the fields, and new romances everywhere.

We are very flaky people. The easterly winds, especially, derange us and I have it on good authority that the A&E departments from Cork to Donegal are packed to the rafters when the wind is from that direction. As they are on the nights of the full moons. Our moods are tidal and we get swept away on waves of hot emotion. The ocean on our doorstep is an ominous and threatening presence sometimes, unknowable in its depthless fathoms, and other times it is giddifying, and it gives to life a special tang and saltiness, and all is magic and light.

But where do we go to for this true sense of life here in our literature? We must go first to Dermot Healy.

[ Dermot Healy was afflicted with an unruly mind ]

Mr Healy passed into another dimension 10 years ago this week but he is still haunting his readers, and in fact he has been haunting us for longer than that. There is an accuracy in his wild fiction that qualifies it as a kind of spiritual reportage on our plight. We get this memorably in his great final novel, Long Time, No See; we get it in Sudden Times, when poor Ollie Ewing is drawn back to Sligo and the Atlantic seaboard from London; we get it most memorably, perhaps, in his great masterpiece, A Goat’s Song, and let’s think about that book today.

It opens on the Mullet peninsula, and if you haven’t read Healy in a while, or if by misfortune or ignorance you’ve never read him at all, here’s an early paragraph and a display of quiet power –

Behind him sheep smudged with blue walked a low field. Out beyond was a cold stretch of sea, and boats tied up for the winter. The storm of the night before had left the beach like a bed tossed in a nightmare. He walked through the town. The lads in Belmullet were kicking a football over the ESB wires on the square. It was a Saturday afternoon. A few women were sitting in The Appetizer eating cream buns. He watched a tractor pull a trailer-load of Christmas trees up Seán America Street in the eerie December light.

The proprietor of the storm-tossed nightmare is Jack Ferris, a playwright, a fisherman, sometimes a drinker, and a broken-hearted lover. Catherine Adams, an actress, has left him, but their severance may not be final. She is the daughter of a Presbyterian RUC man, Jonathan Adams, from Fermanagh. The Adamses came to the Mullet in the early 1970s, finding a holiday place and a place of reprieve from the Troubles.

[ From the Irish Times archive: Deeply rooted in a local world ]

The story tangles in and out of these lives and others. It’s the story of a complicated island and of wilful, difficult, tormented people. In smooth moves, it drifts back and forth in time and place but the narrative is drawn inexorably to the wind-scoured west, and anyone who has been to the Mullet knows that it is the west of Ireland to an extreme. A place of damp in the bones and gales in the caverns of the mind but also a place where there are moments of sudden, inexplicable beauty, as though delivered by an occult authority of the coastal realm –

Then through the fog a group of hares came bounding down the garden.

“Jack,” she whispered.

“I see them,” he said softly.

The hares stopped for a long uncertain moment to look at the couple. They were leathery and brown and honey-eyed. With slow thrusts of their hips they moved off, then sat and listened. Then ran away a little, then stopped and squatted again. Their eyes were skilful and wild. Their coats weathered and grim. They loped off.

Skilful eyes: the writer watches his world with a constant, beady intent, and he allows the inanimate to be enlivened. He gives a force of life to all things and the fiction is springy with a sense of real, difficult, lived life. He maintains that great, precarious balance of wildness and control, and a novel is worth nothing unless it has both of these things. He brings us spectacular facts and all of them have the ring of oddly-sourced truth –

“The dogs in Roscommon,” commenced Jack Ferris as he considered Daisy, “have different coloured eyes. One brown, one blue. It’s hard to credit it. How do you think that happened?”

“I couldn’t say,” answered Catherine.

“In Leitrim there’s a fair few have a twist in the eye, and there’s another few albino.”

The novel moves in elegant circular motions, through the passionate, doomed love of Jack and Catherine; to her father’s attempts to settle into the life of the Mullet, to learn Irish, to learn what became of the few Protestant families there; it brings us to a bleak Belfast in the worst of its times, and briefly to Dublin, but the east is a foreign country and we do not linger there. I hadn’t read the book for maybe 20 years until I picked it up last week, and every scene was vividly remembered and funny and heartbreaking and in the power of the scenes’ accumulation the effect on the reader is still one of quiet devastation.

[ Dermot Healy: a modern master ]

Healy was a palpable creative presence in Co Sligo and it’s probably true to say he encouraged other artists and writers towards the area. A native of Finnea in Westmeath, the pull of his life had drawn him for years to a beloved London, and there was time in Dublin, but then it was ever westward and he lived his later years as far out as you can get, in Ballyconnell, on the Sligo coast, with his wife Helen.

I never got to know him well. I read with him a few times at literary events and would run into him around Sligo town. I met him in Kate’s Kitchen one morning and he asked how I was getting on with the old barracks I had bought in the south of the county. I said it was grand but there was trouble with the ancient chimneys and there was a crow getting into the bedroom.

Not great, he said, on the poor girl you’re down there with.

He promised to send a builder down and he did so promptly and the chimneys were fixed and there hasn’t been a crow seen in the bedroom since, at least not beyond the ghost or memory of our crow.

It is midsummer now in Co Sligo. There is light in the sky past 11. In the short few hours of half-darkness that follow – webby, strange, dark-grey hours full of déjá vu – the birds by Arrow lake are unceasing in their eerie calls and nightsong, and on a clear night the moon’s path can be slowly traced above the Curlews as it curves towards the Bricklieves. The stars are the same old stars. It’s a great time to go out and walk on the empty country roads and the moonlit lanes and to see this world freshly, once again, with the strange perceptions and the lovely fun granted to us by a great writer who passed this way before.

Kevin Barry’s latest novel is The Heart in Winter