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Wrenching life from the dead grip of history

Stephen Hopkins on the work of of Sebastian Barry 

Sebastian Barry produced not one, but two masterpieces during 1998.* 
He also produced them in different forms. Nevertheless, both as a playwright and novelist, the unfailing and magnificent poetry of his writing, and the deep, constant appreciation for the interweaving of public history and personal life-stories, provide a rationale for reviewing these two works together. 

As a dramatist, Barry has been heralded for a series of plays that have explored the disparate, often desperate imagined lives of some of his family ancestors, beginning with Boss Grady's Boys, and then exploring the legacy of his great-grandmother Fanny Hawke in Prayers of Sherkin (1990), and continuing with his great great-grandmother in The Only True History of Lizzie Finn (1995), and his great-grandfather in the celebrated The Steward of Christendom (1995).  

There were earlier works, both for the theatre and of prose, but what is remarkable about Barry is the way he appears to have found a voice from these 'relatives hiding in the blood', as he himself put it. This method, based as it is on the desire 'to wrench a life from the dead grip of history and disgrace', seems to have released an outpouring of creative talent, an authenticity of remembrance that is almost overpowering for the writer. Indeed, Barry's interviews regularly marvel at the way in which these characters reveal themselves to him. Speaking of the process of constructing Eneas McNulty, he struggles to articulate this sense; 'writing is just the wrong word for it ... It was like listening to music. Months would go by hearing nothing, and I would become quite distressed ... When I heard him, I'd work and I trusted him with his own story.'

These characters can appear, at first glance, peculiarly detached from the plays' prevailing historical settings, the social and political contexts, and the times and places they inhabit, and it is true that one of Barry's purposes is to illustrate the sheer provisionality of human lives. As Fintan O'Toole has argued, 'the tide of time sweeps them beyond familiar ground, and their part is but to surrender to its implacable swell.' 

And yet, this uncertainty and ambiguity of biographical destiny is somehow rooted. Barry's characters, Eneas and Mai O'Hara in Our Lady of Sligo, are deeply embedded, the bearers of both universal, existential dilemmas and of specific Irish concerns and conflicts; these plays are 'up to their necks in the matter of Ireland.' But, they do not really belong, they have been written out of the official records, whether it is Chief Superintendent Thomas Dunne of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, baton-charging James Larkin and handing over the keys of the Castle to Collins, in The Steward of Christendom, or Eneas McNulty, joining the British Merchant Navy in 1916, and dreaming not of the Republic, but of the fields of France, and then compounding his error by signing up with the RIC in 1920, or even Mai O'Hara, her cosmopolitanism utterly stifled by the dead weight of De Valera's blinkered isolationism. 

Some reviews of Our Lady of Sligo were critical of the lack of dramatic action, with both acts of the play largely centred around Mai (played with astonishing force by Sinead Cusack in the Royal National Theatre/Out of Joint co-production), bed-ridden in Jervis Street Hospital in 1953, dying at a young age from the combined effects of cancer and persistent alcohol abuse. Michael Billington, in the Guardian, described it as a play 'in which almost everything crucial has already happened', but this is to miss the epic power of the language. Like Barry's previous character, Thomas Dunne, incarcerated in the County Home in Baltinglass, and similarly to the device used by Frank McGuinness in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, the hospital provides a backdrop for assessment, truth-telling and re-living fading lives that are at one and the same time commonplace and extraordinary. 

Whether or not Sebastian Barry is viewed as a political dramatist and novelist, in the manner of O'Casey, it is certainly the case that his concern with human frailty, with the 'unreliable and haunted' aspects of family and national histories, and his innate sympathy with the dispossessed, means that politics and humanity shine through these works. There may not be a grand design or overarching ideological purpose, but the glorious and unpredictable collision between individuals and their social and historical circumstances, underscores the ubiquity of politics. Barry may not subscribe directly to the nostrum that 'humanity makes its own history, but not in circumstances of its own choosing', but his writing is full of this essential complexity. He avoids easy dichotomies, or 'scientific' understanding of historical processes, but strives to 'recover' his characters' forgotten lives. Roy Foster has referred to Barry as searching for 'acceptance and redemption [which] comes from the transfiguring power of memory.' Here, historical truths have to bend to the poetry of overwhelming human truths; as Barry reveals, 'diligent research in the annals of national libraries has not been my practice.'

In the Irish context of this work, militant separatism and exclusivist nationalism are not so much unacceptable as unfathomable, given that they seek to promote a collective historical destiny for a 'people' or 'nation'. History, in this vision, inexorably moves towards a pre-determined end-state. Eneas McNulty, exiled from Sligo after his refusal to bend the knee to Republican intimidation, in the person of his childhood friend, Jonno Lynch, finds himself unable to understand Jonno's view that history 'is on our side'. Eneas is 'adrift on the shallow sea of his homeland', and Jonno makes plain his opinion that 'there's going to be independence in Ireland. You know what that means to a fecker like you? No force on earth could protect you after that. God himself will put a curse on you as a traitor and a betrayer of your brothers.''Of my brothers? Jack and Tom?''No, fuck you, you gammy cunt, your brothers in the nation. Me, you stupid cunt. There's this freedom coming, and by God, Eneas, you have to see how it will be for you.' 

But Eneas cannot see, and is sentenced by Jonno to death, a sentence that is left hanging over him throughout the decades. After wandering the globe, Eneas remains quintessentially an outsider, removed by Jonno from 'the book of life, Irish life anyhow'. Braving the sentence to return to Sligo as a middle-aged man, Eneas bumps into Jonno, jovial and threatening at the same time. His friendship with Harcourt, a Nigerian in the same state of unbelonging as Eneas, provides a vivid contrast with the icy inhumanity of his boyhood hero, Jonno. Eneas and Harcourt 'are scraps of people both, blown off the road of life by history's hungry breezes'. 

The climax of this story brings the poignant journey of Eneas McNulty to a close, but in the beauty and grace of its telling, the author has successfully 'recovered' not only the individual character of Eneas, but has also made a plea for pluralism in our historical remembrances, and in our future social and political practices. If Sebastian Barry can discover any more anomalous characters, lurking in the darker recesses of his family history, then expect more masterpieces.
 

*Our Lady of Sligo (Methuen, £6.99) and The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (Picador, £6.99 in UK)   

Stephen Hopkins teaches politics at the University of Leicester
        

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Revised: 15/03/99