Kevin Barry - Beatlebone

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The writer John McGahern said once that Ireland skipped the twentieth century — it went straight from the nineteenth into the twenty-first. This is almost true. The twentieth century existed in Ireland only for the half hour it took John Lennon’s gypsy caravan to be sailed on a barge across Clew Bay to Dorinish Island, and the caravan is painted all the colours of the sun, and the water breaks and makes up again as the stately barge moves, and the sheets of the water spread out and come to and re-form again, and the water greys, then clears, and then colours again; it wears all the colours of the sun.

——

The sense of an ache or a wound just beneath the skin — almost impalpable but always there — is not uncommon as you move through the sobering ruts of your thirties. Psychedelic experimentation, in my own long experience, will tend to deepen or amplify this sense. Earlier, in the maelstrom rush of your twenties, in the campaign to selfhood and determination — in finding out who you are — the ache can lay buried so deeply and so quietly it might seem not to exist, but it comes back, and it has a definite weight — as though it has lain buried on the dark side of each passing moment, just there — and the urge to Scream, I believe, is by no means an unreasonable response to it.

Primal scream therapy, which is loosely grounded in Reichian philosophy, was initiated by Dr. Arthur Janov at his clinic in California in the early 1960s. Its ambition was to free the subject from the buried pain of childhood trauma. Its techniques included not just screaming but the making of a careful, guided exploration of the self and of the self’s layered and shifting histories. We are each so many different versions of ourselves, after all, and the body by the passing hour can be heaven or it can be hell.

Primal scream had become a popular practice by the 1970s and especially in those places where the children of the previous decade had settled and seeded: the far-flung outposts of Aquarius. There were a number of devoted groups in Ireland, and notorious among these was a collective in Burtonport, County Donegal, on the north-western coast, who named themselves the Atlantis Community but who were more usually known, locally, as the Screamers.

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Fictional and biographical treatments of John Lennon have tended either towards hagiography or character assassination, and I felt the wisest practice was not to do any traditional research among the texts. I did listen to the music: the Plastic Ono Band album, repeatedly — his “primal scream” record — and The White Album, as ever, a great deal. The voice of Alistair Taylor, incidentally, can be heard on the latter’s “Revolution 9.”

Above all, though, my method would be to try and spring a story from its places, from the area of Clew Bay, and Achill Island, and of course from Dorinish itself — if I could figure out how to get there — and to be guided as purely as possible by the feelings that are trapped within these places, and by the feelings trapped within.

It was on the first of my runs out west that I came across the derelict remains of the Amethyst Hotel.

——

John Lennon made his first trip to Dorinish Island in the late summer of 1967. He was ferried there by a local fisherman. He brought along a cine camera and we can see him turn on his booted heel slowly to pan and sweep up the view as the boat moves out and across the bay, as the boat’s prow bites hard on the water and the slap of the low waves comes infinitely in Atlantic blacks, silvers, lichen-greens. He wears a long Afghan coat, and maybe its flapping is picked up in the camera’s tinny sound recording, and the trace of voices, too — south Liverpool, the west of Ireland — but just barely, at the edges of the film, like voices at the edges of a dream.

He spent a little under two hours on the island. Snide newspaper reports would suggest that he was under the influence of LSD at the time but the estate agent involved said that in fact he was practically minded, and he made enquiries about a drainage scheme for the island. He was determined that building work should commence quickly. He had drawn a plan for a house on Dorinish — it was a fantastical house, a magic palace, as in a child’s fantasy of a palace.

——

He was not alone in this migratory instinct. It had established itself quickly as a freak tradition to settle in the west of Ireland. They came from the cities to take up derelict old cottages down the ends of rainy boreens. The cottages could be had for almost nothing along the Atlantic seaboard. But it was not long, one imagines, before the idyll of a New West was smeared by the great dreariness that Ireland attempts to stay quiet about.

Imagine the near-perpetual assault of rain on a cracked windowpane, down at the shivery end of that dripping boreen — a country laneway, or a little road, dank and sodden between the whitethorn and the haw, places usually possessed in the Irish mythos by savage melancholy — with the veggie patch and the hedgerow wine, and the rising damp, and the nitty children, and the chest infections, and the freaky dogs cowering in the yard as the wind shudders their skinny flanks, and the vast hysterical skies — never light for long, never dark for long — and the low-grade hashish that burns on a slow draw, and nights of occultism, and midnight screaming, because when you live far out there’s no place left to go but deep inside, and there are mean suppers by candlelight at the long tables — the endless lentils, the loaded glances, the blackberry wine — and nerves are taut as the telegraph wires that scratch against the grey sky, and there is a lot of fucking paranoia going around the freaky tables.

——

On the way back from Dorinish, they stop off at the fisherman’s house for tea and sandwiches. The fisherman has a small dog and it yaps maniacally at the hairy Afghan coat, and John is tired, and John is irked — behave, he says — but still the little dog yaps and leaps and mounts and tries to fuck his long hairy Afghan coat, and we can see the sharp nose and the green bewildered eyes, and we can hear the liquid, singular, sniping voice:

I said be- fucking -have!

——

I went to Achill Island by bicycle. Sheep drifted back and forth across the road as vaguely as my thoughts moved — it was in the Maytime; I was stirred up — and my feet turned the pedals slowly into a stiff sea breeze. I didn’t feel like I could reasonably ask the locals where I might find a cave. I just kept going by the nose and crab-savvy. I aimed west and then north for the island’s more desolate reaches, and for an area of its coast I knew was host to a colony of seals, and near the fade of a long day — the May of 2012, clear-skied, bright, cold in the shadows still — I found just the sort of cave that I had imagined in my winter drafts.

It was precisely the correct dimensions — nine steps, east to west — and it had a floor of fine white sand, and I crawled inside and crouched there and for a long, deeply odd moment, I listened to my heart race, and it felt so familiar and true I have great difficulty believing now that I put the cave on the page before I found it on Achill.

It was my intention to spend the length of the May night there, from the last fade of light around eleven to its first return somewhere in the pale moments after four. I sat nervously and I became very anxious as true dark took over the cave. The white sand greyed, my heart beat quickly; I waited.

——

By the time of his second visit to Dorinish, in the summer of 1968, his life was in the process of being recast. The marriage to Cynthia was over, the band was halfway through the chaotic recording of The White Album and starting to crack, and he was in love with the artist Yoko Ono. She accompanied him on the trip. On a Saturday evening in late June, they arrived by helicopter on the lawn of the Great Southern Hotel in Mulranny. A photograph in the Mayo News archive shows the couple smiling on the Great Southern’s lawn as they are greeted by local dignitaries.