If Auden was right that “mad Ireland” hurt Yeats into poetry, then Yeats lucked out. It hurt Roseanne Clear into the asylum, for decades.
Jerry Bauer
Sebastian Barry
THE SECRET SCRIPTURE
By Sebastian Barry
300 pp. Viking. $24.95
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Roseanne is the central character in Sebastian Barry’s latest novel, “The Secret Scripture,” which charts her path through the violent upheavals of Ireland’s past century. Still institutionalized at age 100 and scribbling her life story on scavenged paper, she uses Auden’s very word — hurt — at the outset of her tale. It’s not the only sign that Barry has Yeats on his mind. Roseanne was a great beauty in her time, as was her mother; both lives are pitted by despair and quite possibly incarnate the “terrible beauty” Yeats saw born in the Easter uprising of 1916. Ireland’s national history — the Rising during the Great War, the war of independence following it, then a civil war following independence, all in quick, murderous succession — is the moil under the surface of Barry’s novels, and “The Secret Scripture” is no exception.
Despite her name, Roseanne Clear is hardly transparent. A wary reticence and sincere befuddlement tend to muddy her conversations with Dr. William Grene, senior psychiatrist at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, whose commonplace journal renders him a co-narrator of “The Secret Scripture.” Their interaction, complete with its silences, works its way into their respective self-searching accounts of life, forming the loose catechism of the novel.
Grene, nearing retirement, notes that he arrived at Roscommon 30 years ago and that Roseanne “was old when I got here.” Since the hospital is to be closed, it falls to him to determine which patients will be accepted at a new but smaller institution and which will be loosed on the world. Yet when Grene floats the possibility of “freedom” to Roseanne, she experiences “dread like a sickness, a memory of a sickness.”
“The gaining of freedom is always accomplished in an atmosphere of uncertainty,” Grene tells her. “In this country at least. Perhaps in all countries.”
“Murder,” she replies.
“Yes, sometimes,” he admits.
That exchange, which takes place early in the novel, typifies how personal fate and national fate are incestuously bound in Barry’s work, too closely — threateningly — for his characters’ serenity or safety. Roseanne well recalls the civil war, “how murder could travel sideways and take other lives all unbeknownst.” Indeed, the “very cleverness and spreadingness of murder” may have gathered her father within its compass; his death by hanging is a fate she has brooded over for more than 80 years, despite a priest’s assurance that “grief is two years long.”
Circumstances require that the doctor and his patient play cat and mouse. He is intent on assessing her competence and discovering her history, while she dissembles self-protectively, “a foul and utter lie being the best answer” when he asks about the circumstances of her admittance. She does wonder, “Why still in me, that dark dark shame?” yet when the impulse to divulge something arises, she balks: “He interprets things, which is dangerous, extremely.”
Even so, Roseanne and the doctor have a rapport. She looks on him with bemused affection: “The beauty of Dr. Grene is that he is entirely humorless, which makes him actually quite humorous.” Grene, bereaved for reasons of his own, questions the moral efficacy of his field — the “cul-de-sac nature of psychiatry” and “the come-around-the-back-of-the-house of it, oh yes, the deviousness” — as well as his own competence, fearful of “having done nothing for the inmates here, of sentimentalizing them.” Once, Roseanne notices “immaculate” tears in his eyes (religious words sprinkle the novel freely) and lays a hand on him, which the doctor experiences as “benign lightning, something primitive, strange and oddly clear.”
Roseanne is almost preternaturally happy, given the bleakness of her circumstances. She had a child out of wedlock whose whereabouts are unknown (revealed in her slant way: “I am not an entirely childless person”); her father may have been killed in reprisal for his own acts, a history she won’t acknowledge (“It is no crime to love your father”); and her husband’s family, in collusion with the local priest, nullified her marriage and committed her to the asylum (Grene’s investigations show the priest “sane to such a degree it makes sanity almost undesirable”). And yet, and yet. . . .
What accounts for her happiness? The secret scripture. Religious as that might sound, broadly it is Barry’s homage to the holiness of life, in which experience and narrative are inseparable, a concept manifold in what he has written in this novel and previously. “The Secret Scripture” is most closely aligned with his 1998 novel “The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty,” whose protagonist was exiled from Irish life in a very different way. Eneas, a brother of Roseanne’s husband, encounters her in both novels — most fatefully in “The Secret Scripture,” which was a finalist for this year’s Man Booker Prize.
Many angelic references and much religious imagery are to be found here (slaughtered lambs, for example), but at the root of it all is the lambent quality of experience, not religion per se. Much of the real joy of reading Barry is in the bobbing freshet of his language. A Quaker woman for whom Roseanne once worked “would give me her shy smile, and I would be jubilant, jubilant.” Despite the madness, you will be too.
