A Gay Soldier Finds Love and True Identity in 19th-Century America
A review of ‘Days Without End’ by Sebastian Barry
One of the first stops on the American leg of Irish author Sebastian Barry’s book tour for Days Without End was Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C., where he read excerpts from his 2016 novel and answered questions from the audience of about fifty people. The event was recorded and is available on YouTube.
Days Without End tells the story of the bond of love between the novel’s narrator Thomas McNulty, an impoverished refugee from the Irish famine, and John Cole, an equally destitute and desperate boy from New England; of the Indian Wars of the 1850s, a desperate attempt by Native American tribes to stave off the genocide being enacted throughout the Southwest United States; and of the miserable life of the ordinary American soldier, particularly during the American Civil War.
At the bookstore event, one man asked Barry about his personal motivation for telling the narrator’s story. The author responded, “The book exists between two points, my grandfather and my son.” When Barry was a boy, he slept with his grandfather to keep him warm, and on one of these cold nights, the writer-to-be learned that his grandfather’s great-uncle was in the Indian Wars.
For some fifty-five years, Barry wanted to tell that story. His tale of the novel’s other point of existence — of how his son, to whom the book is dedicated, came to inspire the author to tell the story of the love between Thomas McNulty and John Cole — brought me to tears; Barry is an exceptional oral storyteller.
Just as Barry is about to start writing the novel, his son Toby, 16, becomes extremely unhappy, sending the boy’s parents into a frenzied search for the source of his unhappiness.
Eventually, his sister . . . said to Toby, ‘Just go in and tell them!’ So . . . we have quite a long bedroom, so for him to come in the door to reach our bed is a bit of a walk, and it’s a brave and radiant walk and full of incredible courage. And he comes up to the bed, and he says, ‘The thing is, Dad . . .’ This was the . . . after months of not sleeping, us and him, of worry, of tension, of fear, he says the words, ‘The thing is, Dad, I’m gay’.
Well, if a big hand had reached in and taken the lead off my back, I couldn’t have felt more freed by what he said. And he looked freed. And from that moment onwards, he taught, as best he could, as the Professor of Gayness, his stupid straight father what it is to be gay.
In observing his son after that event, and his son’s partner Jack and the quality of love they shared, he realized that the referendum on gay marriage that was about to be held in Ireland was not about tolerance of gayness. “And I thought, no, this is about reverence. This is something we must revere and try and emulate because this is a lesson in love.”
And his son became the muse for Days Without End, and making the two principal characters a gay couple was not a conscious decision on his part, but the idea of gayness was drawn into the book, and the writing of the novel became such a joy to Barry that when it was done he thought it couldn’t at all be any good.
Watch the YouTube video here:
While Thomas emphasizes the friendship aspect of his relationship with John Cole, necessary for survival in a rough land, sexual attraction also plays a role:
Anyway, he was having a breezy time of it about the crotch, far as I could see. You could nearly reach in and measure his manhood, so your eyes did their best be kept lookin’ away. I devised a good method to deal with such a thing and fixed fiercely on his face, which was no work in itself; it was a pleasing face.
But when they do have sex, the act is not romanticized: “And then we quietly fucked, and then we slept.”
It is not until the tenth chapter of the novel, when John Cole is asked, for reasons of his poor health, to leave the army and he and Thomas rent a house on the river near St. Louis with the young Indian girl they have adopted that we begin to see the flesh and bones of the relationship between the two men and the family living that seems so natural to them.
Later, during the Civil War, after they are freed from a hellish Confederate POW camp and spend long months at home recovering, John Cole and Thomasina McNulty, she decked out in her finest dress, are married by a preacher who has not a clue what he is doing, that he is in fact marrying two men. As the story progresses, we learn that Thomas McNulty feels more comfortable in a dress and likes handsome John Cole, who is six-foot-three, to be her man and to be their adopted daughter Winona’s father. “I feel a woman more than I ever felt a man, though I were a fightin’ man most of my days.”
Days Without End is a joy to read. It is a story of pain and deprivation and immense physical and mental suffering, of the desperate struggle to survive, and it is a study of moral dissonance. It is at the same time a simple and complex, heartbreaking and inspiring, tense and joyous story of love between two men, men whose highest aspiration is to live a peaceful, quiet life as a family.
It is also about the paradoxical tension between the two points of the novel’s existence: the brutal wartime experience of the great uncle of Barry’s grandfather as related so honestly and chillingly and achingly by Thomas McNulty and the sweet and caring and respectful love between Thomas and John Cole, “my beau.”
I leave it to the reader to decide whether this tension is resolved by the end of the narrative.
