Sebastian Barry

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Bibliographical details
Christina Hunt Mahony, ed., Out of History; Essays on the Writings of Sebastian Barry (Dublin: Carysfort Press 2006), 262pp. CONTENTS. Acknowledgements [ix]; List of Illustrations [xi]. Christina Hunt Mahony, ‘Introduction’ [1]; Peter Denman, ‘From Rhetoric to Narrative: The Poems of Sebastian Barry’ [9]; Eilís Ní Dhuibhne, ‘Transcending Genre: Sebastian Barry’s Juvenile Fiction’ [25]; Bruce Stewart, ‘”To have a father is always big news”: Theme and Structure in The Engine of Owl-Light’ [37]; David Cregan, ‘“Everyman’s story is the whisper of God”: Sacred and Secular in Barry’s Dramaturgy’ [61]; Christina Hunt Mahony, ‘Children of the Light amid the “risky dancers”: Barry’s Naifs and the Poetry of Humanism’ [83]; John Wilson Foster, ‘“All the long traditions”: Loyalty and Service in Barry and Ishiguro’ [99]; Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, ‘Colonial Policing: The Steward of Christendom and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty’ [121]; Anthony Roche, ‘Redressing the lrish Theatrical Landscape: Sebastian Barry’s The Only True History of Lizzie Finn [147]; Nicholas Grene, ‘Out of History: from The Steward of Christendom to Annie Dunne’ [167]; Roy Foster, ‘“Something of us will remain”: Sebastian Barry and Irish History’ [183]; Colm Tóibín, ‘Hinterland: The Public Becomes Private’ [199]; Claire Gleitman, ‘“In the dank margins of things”: Whistling Psyche and the Illness of Empire’ [209]. Bibliography of Works of Sebastian Barry’ [229]; Contributors [245]; Endnotes [249]; Index [259].

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Notes on works
The Engine of Owl-Light (1986) is an experimental novel, written in several narrative strands each related in parallel sections of twenty chapters (or ‘sixfoils’) and dealing with the childhood of the central character Oliver in a home environment very like that of the author, then with a love-affair in Paris and Lucerne with a certain Xenia, a sexually-voracious but spiritually chilly Swiss girl, and afterwards with the adventures of Oliver in America in the form of a road-journey with Sue and a car-thief called ‘Chicken’, and ending with her death. Meanwhile, a further series of strands incorporates a medieval Irish tale of a petty petty chieftain ousted by his scheming queen and a Roman Catholic bishop, and the story of a certain Batty Moran (the proto-type of Aeneas MacNulty), who is raised in a workhouse and sent to fight in a British imperial war in Africa, but later (anachronistically) fetches up in Key West at the same time as the events assigned to Oliver and takes part in a house burglary whose object is a manuscript bearing the title of the novel we are reading. (See extracts.)

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Stewardship of Christendom (1995), a play in which Thomas Dunne, formerly the last Dublin Metropolitan Police commissioner (based on a forebear of the author, James Patrick Dunne), and the one who handed the keys of Dublin Castle over to Michael Collins, recalls his service with emphasis on his reaction to the Dublin Lock Out riot for which he was anathemised by the nationalist press; now incarcetated in a ‘home’ in Dublin and faced with the resentment of his three daughters and the torment of a warder who treats him as an enemy of the Irish people; ends with a moving reminiscence of his own childhood with his father and the sparing of a sheep-killer dog, and finally with a vision of his own son who died in Flanders. The play restores regard for those who served Ireland in ways at variance with the nationalist narrative of struggle and independence from British Rule and includes a paean to Queen Victoria, but also a profound expression of admiration for Michael Collins. (See extracts.)

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The Whereabouts of Aeneas MacNulty (1998) a novel and the story of a Sligo-man who gets recruited naively to the Royal Irish Constabulary at the time of the Irish War of Independence and crosses the local IRA chief, Jonno, his childhood friend, by his refusal to participate in the assassination of his RIC chief. After a period as a merchant sailor, Aeneas finds himself in Nigeria with Harcourt, a black-man with a similar history, and later in London with him, before returning to Ireland to face his accusers. There he finds Jonno still unforgiving but ultimately unarms him through his own essential innocence of spirit and finds a way to live anonymously in Sligo. (See extracts.)

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Annie Dunne (2002), a novel concerning the daughter of Tom Dunne in Steward of Christendom and her cousin Sarah who live and work on a small farm in a remote part of Wicklow in late 1950s at a time when the traditional rural life is about to disappear. When her nephew and his wife prepare to go to London for work their children, a little boy and his older sister, come to spend the summer with their grand-aunt. Meanwhile Sarah becomes the target of a marriage-plan on the part of a malevolent neighbour who begins to scheme the eviction of Annie. The old nostalgias and present fears involved in Annie’s shared past with Sarah, and her tender relationship with the children, which brings on a crisis of false accusation, forgiveness and final revelation. The novel includes a carefully-handled scene of prococisou sexuality on the part of the children. (See extracts.)

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Hinterland (2002), a play: ‘Johnny Silvester, from Derry - a character loosely based on Charles Haughey - has been Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland and now lives in opulence in a country house outside Dublin, facing political disgrace due to his self-serving political management of the country. His wife Daisy is on her way to the country for a weekend visit to her cousin while Johnny stays at home to give an interview to the young woman who is writing a PhD on his period of government; a mistress arrives and a son, living in the house, attempts suicide; Daisy returns to a moment of confrontation involving a tragi-comical cupboard-hiding scene while the habitually self-exonerating central figure struggles with the charge of failure on all fronts, familial and public, and is comprehensively exposed as a straw man. The play was premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 30 Jan. to 23 Feb. in an Out Of Joint/Abbey Theatre/Royal National Theatre co-production with a cast incl. Patrick Malahide, Dearbhla Molloy, Phelim Drew, Kieran Ahern, James Hayes, Anna Healy and Lucianne McEvoy.

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Whistling Psyche (2004), a play: Miranda James Stuart, who passed herself off as a military surgeon James Barry, has a chance encounter with Florence Nightingale of Crimea fame in a railway station waiting room; in the cold hours between nightfall and daybreak, silent questions prompt unexpected revelations ending in the baring of Dr. Barry’s femininity and the stripping of Miss Nightingale’s. Fred and Jane explores a deep and sustaining friendship between two nuns, Anna and Beatrice, who recall the trials and joys of religious life.

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A Long Long Way (2005), a novel which tells the tale of Willie Dunne - the lost son of Tom Dunne - and his regiment, the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, in World War I, conveying the the cruelty and sorrow of war together with its comraderie but also the divided loyalties of the Irish soldiers, with their the doubts and dissensions caused by the Easter Rising. As in The Steward of Christendom, the underlying subject of the novel, the effect of that sudden shift in the axis of Irish politics on the young men who went off to fight for England on foreign fields on the promise of Irish independence afterwards.

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The Secret Scripture (2008), a novel in which Roseanne McNulty, nearing her 100th birthday - no one is quite sure - faces an uncertain future as the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital where she’s spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene. This relationship, guarded but trusting after so many years, intensifies and complicates as Dr Grene mourns the death of his wife. / Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges - of Roseanne’s family in 1930s Sligo - is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne’s story becomes an alternative, secret, history of Ireland. Exquisitely written, it is the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope. (Greg Carr / Read Ireland - Phibsboro, Dublin [email].)

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Commentary
See separate file, infra.

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Quotations
See separate file, infra.

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References
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, selects ‘The Tree Alphabet’, ‘The Real Snow’, and ‘The February Town’ from The Rhetorical Town (1985); biographical note p.1436 characterises him in terms of ‘coolness of tone and elaborately figured vocabulary.’

Gerald Dawe, ed., The New Younger Irish Poets (Blackstaff 1982; revised 1991), selects ‘Hermaphroditus’; ‘Summer desk’; ‘At a gate of St Stephen’s Green’; ‘Fanny Hawke goes to the mainland forever’; ‘Lines discovered under the foundations of Dublin in a language neither Irish nor English’; ‘Trooper O’Hara at the Indian Wars’ (pp.44-48).

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William Trevor, ed., The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (Oxford: OUP 1989), cites Barry in the introduction.

The Abbey Theatre (Promotion notice): The House of Bernarda Alba, by Federico García Lorca in a new translation by Sebastian Barry; directed by Martin Drury with Cast incl. Rosaleen Linehan, Olwen Fouéré, Bernadette McKenna, Ruth McCabe, Joan O’Hara, Justine Mitchell, Isabel Claffey Gertrude Montgomery, Emma Colohan, Andrea Irvine, Sile Nugent. Previews: Wednesday 9th-Saturday 12th April; Monday 14th April 8.00pm (Sat matinees 2.30pm).

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Notes
Sir Thomas Browne: Barry chose a passage from Sir Thomas Browne [Urn Burial] as his epigraph for The Engine of Owl-light (1987): ‘However, to palliate the shortness of our Lives, and somewhat to compensate our brief term in this World, it’s good to know as much as we can of it, and also so far as possibly in us lieth to hold a Theory of times past, as though we had seen the same. He who hath thus considered the World, as also how therein things long past have been answered by things present, how matters in one age have been acted, over in another, and how there is nothing new under the sun, may conceive himself in some manner to have lived from the beginning, and to be as old as the World; and if he should still live on, ‘twould be but the same thing.’ (‘No new thing ... &c.’ is from Ecclesiastes the Preacher/OT.)

Note: Roseanne, the central character in The Secret Scripture (2008), quotes from and explicitly refers to Sir Thomas Browne. And note also that Benedict Anderson quotes another different passage from Browne - ‘Even the old ambitions had the advantage of ours, in the attempt of their vainglories […] whereby the ancient Heroes have already out-lasted their Monuments and Mechanicall preservations [..., &c.]’, in Imagined Communities, 1991 Edn., p.147.)

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Whistling Psyche (2004) deals with the imaginary meeting of Dr. James Barry and Florence Nightingale, and ends with a degree of rapprochement. In the printed text, the play concludes with a tableau, in which the characters have ‘a quality of a Victorian daguerreotype about them - a strange mariage, an unacceptable couple. [...] Their nearest hands just touching, perhaps by accident.’ (Whistling Psyche, Faber, 2004, p.61; quoted in Munira H. Mutran, ‘The Mysterious Dimension of the Human Spirit’: Sebastian Barry’s Whistling Psyche’, in From English Literature to Literatures in English [Vol. V], Heidelberg 2005, pp.184.) However, in the first production at the Almeida Theatre, London, Nightingale unwraps the swathes about the other's chest and, finally, the pair embrace. [See Mutran’s remarks on this adjustment under Commentary, supra.]

James Barry, MD (1792-1865): b. Margaret Ann Bulkley, dg. of a Cork grocer and Mary-Ann, née Barry, who was sister of the painter James Barry; dressed as a boy from 10; father gaoled for debt, 1803; removed to Edinburgh with her mother, posing as aunt and nephew; enrolled as James Barry; lied about her age, and hence purportedly grad. MD aetat 13 - becoming the first woman to graduate in medicine in Britain; appt. asst.-surgeon in Army at 15; posted to Cape Town; personal physician to Sir Charles Somerset, Gov., with whom she is thought to have had a child, actually born in Mauritius; performed first successful British Caesarian, 1826; served in Mauritius and Jamaica; posted to St. Helena as resident surgeon; court-martialled for conduct unbecoming arising from argumentative temperament; exon.; returned to Britain; appt. inspector-gen. of hospitals in Corfu, 1851; introduced new standards of hygience; purportedly visited Florence Nightingale [in the Crimea] and rebuked her for medical hygiene; "I should say [he] was the most hardened creature I ever met thoughout the army" (Nightingale); retired and settled in Marylebone, London; d. of diarrhoea in epidemic of 1865; instructed that his body be sewn in a sheet and buried at sea; identified as a female who had borne a child by laying-out attendant; bur. Kensal Green Cemetery. (See notice in See John Lloyd & John Mitchinson, The QI Book of the Dead, London Faber & Faber 2009, pp.298-301. Bibl. cites Rachel Holmes, Scanty Particulars: The Life of James Barry, Viking 2002.)

Whistling Psyche (2004) - Sourcebooks: See Barry’s acknowledgements in Whistling Psyche (Faber 2004), citing the biographies that went to the making of the play - viz., The Perfect Gentleman: The Remarkable Life of Dr. James Miranda Barry, the woman who served as an officer in the British Army from 1813 to 1859 (Hutchinson 1977), by June Rose; Florence Nightingale: 1820-1910 (London: Constable 1950), by Cecil Woodham-Smith and the chapter on Miss Nightingale in Eminent Victorians (London: Chatto & Windus 1966) by Lytton Strachey. (All cited thus in Mutran, op. cit., 2005, pp.184.)

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Fred and Jane (pub. 2004) explores the deep and sustaining friendship between two nuns, Anna and Beatrice, as they recall the trials and joys of religious life. (Published with Whistling Psyche; see COPAC online.)

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The Secret Scripture (2008): Approaching Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty is threated with eviction from the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital, now facing closure, where she's been an inmate for most of her life. In the period of the novel, she keeps a journal while her psychiatrist Dr Grene, with whom her relationship grows more intense as they explore the past together, does likewise. The story that emerges in their respective journals is shocking and deeply moving, revealing an alternative version of Ireland's social history in the form of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance yet marked by passion, love and hope. (See book notice in The Guardian, online.) Note: Dr. Grene, the psychiatrist, shares a name (and spelling) with Nicholas Grene, Professor of English Drama at Trinity College, Dublin, who lives near Barry in Co. Wicklow - a coincidence that can be construed as a compliment and a private joke. [BS].

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Richard Murphy, The Kick (Granta 2002): Murphy and Patricia Avis arrange to meet Richard Selig and Mary O’Hara after the latter couple have had dinner at the Bailey and before collectively ‘going to Tom Kinsella’s flat in Baggot Street for a late-night party at which Richard hoped Mary O’Hara would sing. We had already received an invitation from Tom and his wife, Eleanor, so Richard invited us to join him and Mary for coffee after dinner. / By the time we got there the restaurant upstairs looked empty, and it smelled of cigar smoke. But then, in a niche by an open window, we saw a couple absorbed in each other’s radiance. We joined them, talking of this and that, sniffing each other’s territory, feeling unwanted except as witnesses to the drama of their blossoming love. When Richard mentioned Hollywood, Mary responded in the voice of an impoverished Abbey actress hoping to enchant a film producer with her Irish feyness. “Hollywood”, she signed, “the land of heartbreak!” This was enough to make Patricia, reaching for her coffee, knock over a wine-glass. / In the Kinsella’s top-floor flat, Selig sat with legs crossed on the floor, and Francis Barry, whose son Sebastian, of future fame, had just been born, lay supine on a bed like a king on a tomb. As chatter faded into silence, the strings of a harp I couldn’t see were plucked lightly by fingernails, and a faraway voice sang us back through lamentation for the dead of Aughrim to the land of the ever-living young - if only I had known what the Irish words meant.’ (p.162.): Jody Corcoran, ‘Haughey Fury at Abbey Plan’ [news story], in Sunday Independent (10 Feb. 2001), reports that Sean Haughey has told the Sunday Independent that there was ‘a basis for consideration of legal action’.

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Dishonour: Sebastian Barry is a signatory, with many others in the theatrical world and more farther afield, who ‘deplore the violent events that have very regrettably led to the cancelling of the remaining performances of Behzti (Dishonour) by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti at Birmingham Repertory theatre on grounds of the safety of the audience, performers and staff of the theatre.’ (Guardian, 23 Dec. 2004.)

Radio Time: World Service (BBC4) on the night of 14/15th August 2001 broadcast an interview with Sebastian Barry, speaking of his novel On Canaan's Side and his experience as a young man in America at the age of 17 when every street corner there young men who had been destroyed - not necessarily physically - or 'hollowed out', in the (presumably borrowed) phrase of the interviewer. He also spoke of the patriotism of the parents who had sent their sons to war, mentioning Joseph Conrad and his wife who felt honoured to make the sacrifice - their son died - and of others in that period who, being childless, were stricken with sorrow that they had no sons to give. 'I am Irish', he said, speaking of the love of one's own country, and added that we don't feel like that any more - and that he would give his own 56 year old body in place of either of his sons, aged 18 and 14.

Brasilian connection: CIA Ludens, a Brasilian theatre company (founded in 2003), gave a reading of Sebastian Barry's Whistling Psyche (2004) trans. by Munira H. Mutran in 2006.

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