Novelist Sebastian Barry on the day his son told him he was gay

He wrote that he did not see it as a matter of tolerance, so much as an apology. “Apology for all the hatred, violence, suspicion, patronisation, ignorance, murder, maiming, hunting, intimidation, terrorising, shaming, diminishment, discrimination, destruction, and yes, intolerance, visited upon a section of humanity for God knows how many hundreds of years, if not millennia.”

His child, he wrote, would be just shy of 18 when votes were cast, and therefore could not vote himself. Barry concluded, “By voting Yes I will be engaging in the simple task of honouring the majesty, radiance and promise of his human soul.”

After writing the letter, the 61-year-old award-winning writer, who also has 24-year-old twins, Coral and Merlin, with his wife, actress-turned-screenwriter Alison Deegan, showed it to their younger son, Toby. “I was worried about it, was it good enough? Then there was my son crying in my room and saying, ‘Yeah, I think it’ll be all right.’ Well! It went viral and has been read out in the Australian Parliament. I’m so proud of that because as a straight person you are not obliged to think about these things until they are close to your heart. And that’s me and Toby.”

Similarly, Barry gave Toby an advance copy of his new novel, which is dedicated to him. Barry didn’t expect his “beautiful, incredibly gifted, musical son” to read it, however.

“My children have never read any of my books – they don’t give a damn about them,” he says, when we meet in a soulless boardroom at his publishers’ Bloomsbury offices. He and Deegan are living in London for a while since their Tinahely home in the Wicklow mountains has recently become an empty nest.

To his father’s surprise, Toby read the first three chapters of the masterly Days Without End, which is set during the American Civil War and the military’s brutal, bloody campaigns against indigenous tribes. At its heart is a tender, gay relationship between Barry’s narrator, the cross-dressing Thomas McNulty, an orphan from Sligo who has escaped the Irish famine, and his beau, the mysterious Handsome John Cole, always referred to in full. Their relationship is inspired by Toby and his “lovely boyfriend’s” devotion, which Barry has observed with loving awe. “I look at them and I think, ‘This is not something that needs our tolerance, this is something we should be emulating. There is magnificence here of soul.’”

After a year worrying about their teenage son’s palpable unhappiness, Barry and his wife were relieved when he finally came out as gay. “I told him, ‘Thank God, you are going to be spared that heterosexual nightmare we’ve had to negotiate all of our lives!’ I was a mess. When I think what girlfriends had to put up with from me... I’ve seen the quality of the care Toby and his partner have for each other – and they are only kids – and that must have fed into Thomas and John Cole.”

“I like your book, dad,” Toby told his father on the strength of those three chapters, although Barry says he doesn’t think his son will ever finish it. It would be a pity if he didn’t, because it’s already being praised as “a modern masterpiece.”

Widely regarded as Ireland’s greatest living writer, the beguilingly warm and humorous Barry is the author of 13 plays, seven novels and two collections of poetry and has twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for A Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), recently disappointingly filmed starring Vanessa Redgrave and Rooney Mara. Barry draws a discreet veil over the adaptation but his facial expression speaks volumes. Now, Days Without End is being tipped to make next year’s shortlist – and there’s already interest in the film rights. This time, Barry will have a go at the screen version himself.

After all, in almost everything he has written, Barry has conducted a sort of archaeological literary dig into his family’s secret history, basing plays and novels on shards and scraps of dark memories he’s unearthed and dragged into the light. These range from The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), transmuting the true story of a great-uncle forced into exile when the IRA put a price on his head, to his last novel, The Temporary Gentleman (2014), telling of his grandfather’s temporary commission in the British Army during the Second World War when he worked in bomb disposal, the third of his novels to burrow into the McNulty family’s buried secrets.

“You don’t need to know too much. All I knew for The Secret Scripture was that I had a great-aunt who was sectioned and that she had been a piano player in my uncle’s band.” He always knew, therefore, that he would write about the American Civil War, because an elderly aunt told him years ago that a great-uncle had served in the American Army during the Civil War. “That’s all I knew,” says Barry, adding that there is grace in writing about your own family, that he hides in the bushes and captures their birdsong.

But surely, I tell him, after reading Days Without End, I’m convinced he must have been a soldier in the American Army in a previous life, so vivid, so visceral, so violent is his evocation of the relentless horrors of battlefields. “No,” he replies, with a laugh, “you just wait for the songbirds to enter the garden and you listen to their song. Like a robin, or indeed any creature, you listen to your innate birdsong.” But, he adds, he also read a great deal about the Civil War and the history of Native Americans. He reels off a list of fascinating historical tomes he consulted, adding that he was also inspired by all those black-and-white Westerns, particularly John Ford movies, he loved to watch on TV when he was growing up in Dublin.

Nonetheless, Days Without End had a very different genesis. “This is not the very, very dark book I set out to write but I do remember thinking that I mustn’t sabotage this book, that I must not mess it up,” he admits, explaining that he spent nine months working on a very long opening chapter set in Ireland during the famine. “It wasn’t bad but then one day I cut it down to a page-and-a-half. I thought that I no longer had a book; I was sort of panicking. Then the first sentence came, ‘The method of laying out a corpse in Missouri sure took the proverbial cake.’ The whole book was just lying in behind that opening line. Once I had that little piece of birdsong – the robin’s song – it was fine.

“The excitement of that! You on your own and no one knowing what you are doing. I had this strange sense of not writing at all. You know I have my own supposed style that you get imprisoned in after 40 years, but with this book I was just putting it down. I felt a bit afraid. I thought, ‘God, is this all right? Is it all right to do it like this? Are you sure, Thomas?’ Then I thought, ‘Right, I’ll go with this.’ When I re-read it, I remember thinking that I didn’t remember writing that... pencil marks, that’s all it felt like, because Thomas was very generous to me, very open.

“I don’t drink as such but last autumn when I was writing Days Without End I would drink a few glasses of wine in the evening, then go into my workroom because Thomas would always have another paragraph for me. It’s not exactly channelling but it feels a bit like that, that life and death feeling and also the fact that they are so in love with each other.”

Barry pauses then returns to the day his son came into his room told him that he was gay. “It was as if Toby – ‘Prince Boy’ we call him – had conferred a sort of freedom on me and released himself from some terrible concern. Of course, everyone in the family remembers that day differently – but that’s human history for you. Finally, though, the light had dropped from the clouds on my son’s life.”

Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber, £17.99). Barry will be discussing the novel at the Mainstreet Trading Company, St Boswells, on October 27. For details call 01835 824087.