21

Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls (1960) and John McGahern, The Dark (1965)

John McGahern’s (1934–2006) first novel The Barracks (1963) was critically acclaimed. His second novel The Dark was immediately banned in Ireland for its alleged pornographic content.1 Both were mined from McGahern’s own childhood. The Dark contained some vivid accounts of teenage masturbation – the use of a sock to ensure that the sheets weren’t stained – and describes feelings of guilt (‘Five sins already today, filthiness spilling five times’) and thoughts on the impracticability of confessing so many sins; thirty-five a week, one hundred and forty impure actions since the protagonist’s last confession. It was published two years before Philip Roth’s great comic paean to seed spilling, Portnoy’s Complaint.2 But there is nothing comic about The Dark. Its opening describes a small boy being beaten with a leather strap with one of his sisters present, having first been made to strip naked by his widower father Mahoney. The beating was a punishment for uttering a profane word (‘F.U.C.K is what you said, isn’t it?’). Alongside descriptions of brutal domestic violence against children, there are inferences of sexual abuse by the unnamed protagonist’s father:

The worst was having to sleep with him the nights he wanted love, strain of waiting for him to come to bed, no hope of sleep in the waiting – counting and losing the count of the thirty-two boards across the ceiling, trying to pick out the darker circles of the knots beneath the varnish.

In his Memoir McGahern makes clear that such experiences were autobiographical. There were thirty-two tongue-and-grooved boards on the ceiling in the bedroom he shared with his father after his mother died in 1944 when he was ten years old. His six siblings slept in the other bedroom. McGahern’s Memoir also described sleepless nights when father would take off all his clothes, massage his son’s belly and thighs asserting that this relaxed taut muscles, eased wind and helped bring on sleep:

In those years, despite my increasing doctrinal knowledge of what was sinful I had only the vaguest knowledge of sex or sexual functions and took him at his word; but as soon as it was safe to do so, I turned away on some pretext or other such as sleepiness. Looking back, and remembering his tone of voice and the rhythmic movement of his hand, I suspected he was masturbating.3

The Dark describes a sexualised encounter with Father Gerald, a family friend who was helping him explore whether he had a vocation for the priesthood. During his first night in the priest’s house, Father Gerald comes into his room and gets into bed with him ostensibly for a talk about vocations. The priest puts his hand on the boy’s shoulder. His roving fingers touched the boy’s throat. He questions the boy about feelings for girls and asks him whether he masturbated and how often. A question from the boy as to whether Father Gerald ever had to fight that sin is met with stony silence. In silent anger the boy remembers the nights when his father used to stroke his thighs. No real-life equivalent to Father Gerald was identified in his Memoir. But McGahern’s real-life vacillations about becoming a priest – his mother had wanted this for him before she died – were similarly focused on the difficulties of celibacy in a society where children, their parents and their priests knew little about sexuality. The Dark also describes the sexual harassment of the protagonist’s sister by her employer and Father Gerald’s concern that this be kept secret in order to avoid scandal. His Memoir recounts how he had to rescue his sister Rosaleen from the clutches of a County Cavan draper who made sexual advances from the moment she arrived to work in his shop. The repressive rural Catholic society described in The Dark is shown to exert a heavy toll of human misery.

Five years before The Dark was published, Edna O’Brien’s first novel The Country Girls was also banned. Like The Dark, The Country Girls was a coming of age novel again set in late 1940s rural Ireland. Kate, the narrator of The Country Girls, also grows up in a troubled home – her mother drowns at the beginning of the book, her father is a neglectful drunk – and she is damaged by this. How it happened became clearer in the follow-up novels of what became an autobiographical trilogy. O’Brien has elsewhere described her father as a frightening man, a very angry drinker. Although Kate in The Country Girls fears her father more than anyone, there have been no beatings and no hints of sexual abuse.

While young Mahoney in The Dark rejects the idea of becoming a priest because this would condemn him to a life of loneliness and sexual frustration, Kate never considers whether she has a religious vocation for a second. Although O’Brien describes having been religious as a child, Kate and her friend and rival Baba appear utterly indifferent to religion. Kate exhibits little of the guilt and shame about sexuality that torments the protagonist of The Dark. In interviews O’Brien has described a fervid and suffocating religious upbringing. But The Country Girls defiantly transcends this. Young Mahoney’s silent rebellion against the priesthood contrasts with Kate’s dramatic rejection of the mere boredom of convent school life. Kate and Baba desecrate a holy picture by writing graffiti on it to the effect that Father Tom the chaplain, ‘stuck his long thing’ into Sister Mary, Kate’s favourite nun. The graffiti is left to be found. They do this deliberately to get expelled from school. The girls are not the victims; the priest and the nun are their victims. If The Country Girls had been set in twenty-first century Ireland, Kate and Baba might well have bullied their teachers on Facebook.

From fourteen years of age Kate innocently yearns to be seduced by Mr Gentleman, a married lawyer, whose real French surname nobody can pronounce. Had the story been told from his point of view, Mr Gentleman might have been a rural Irish counterpart to Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. But Kate wants romance and love, her lips, ‘poised for the miracle of a kiss. A kiss. Nothing more.’ Even four years later, when she is eighteen, her imagination of what she might get up to with Mr Gentleman does not go beyond that. Kate is at no stage a victim. Unlike the protagonists of most coming of age novels by Catholic Irish writers, she appears indifferent to conservative Catholic social mores. Not for her the wrestling with convention and faith that exemplified James Joyce’s A Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man or its many imitations. The Country Girls captured an emerging secular Ireland indifferent to crises of religious faith. This was not an Ireland that interested McGahern.

In The Lonely Girl, the sequel to The Country Girls, O’Brien works in a reference to another banned work from the same part of East Clare, Brian Merriman’s The Midnight Court.4 A dog-eared copy was kept by Jack Holland, a bachelor shopkeeper who had been in love with Kate’s mother. He had been caught by her father with his hand on her knee under the table during a game of cards. One line is paraphrased as having been recited by Jack: ‘The doggedest divil that tramps the hill, With the grey in his hair and a virgin still.’ The Country Girls is very much its spiritual descendant. Merriman’s ‘perfect crescendo of frustrated sexual passion’, as Frank O’Connor put it in the foreword to his banned translation, ridiculed male chastity and clerical celibacy from the perspective of unfulfilled women. In The Country Girls Kate’s mother lets Jack Holland put his hand on her knee under the table because Jack is kind to her. Baba’s mother Mrs Brennan (like the Queen of the Silver Dollar in Shel Silverstein’s country and western song of that name) wants only two things from life ‘and she got them – drink and admiration’. Most nights she goes down to the Greyhound Hotel, ‘dressed in a tight black suit with nothing under the jacket, only a brassiere, and with a chiffon scarf knotted at her throat. Strangers and commercial travellers admired her.’ Country and western is still very popular in the pubs of East Clare. Most of the men Kate describes, even putatively predatory ones like Mr Gentlemen, are, to invoke that great Irish insult, harmless.

The Dark was banned in June 1965 by the Censorship Board. McGahern, who had been on a year’s leave of absence from his job as a primary school teacher was told by his headmaster, at the behest of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, that he could not return to the school. McQuaid let it be known that if the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation supported McGahern, it would not get any support from the Archbishop in upcoming pay negotiations. His fellow teachers, in effect, sold him out.5 McGahern’s sacking became a cause célèbre and the controversy precipitated a review of censorship legislation. A new Act introduced in 1967 imposed a twelve-year time limit on how long books could be proscribed. This immediately removed the ban on several thousand books, though not the ban on The Dark.

McGahern, for his part, was unwilling to become a figurehead of liberal, secular Ireland. On Ireland’s most watched television programme, The Late Late Show, he declared that he could no more attack the Catholic Church than he could his own life. In a 2001 interview he recalled being told that the scandal surrounding the book was marvellous, because it would boost sales. He remembered being quite ashamed because ‘we’, by which he meant the Irish, ‘were making bloody fools out of ourselves’. He had thought that the Censorship Board was something of a joke, that books that were banned could be easily found and quickly passed around, and that there was no fruit that tasted as good as the forbidden fruit. In the same interview he stated that he had nothing but gratitude to the Church, except for its unhealthy attitude to sexuality.6

The Country Girls was written in exile in 1958, in a mock Tudor house in the ‘outer-outer suburbia’ of south west London.7 Like Kate at the end of The Country Girls, O’Brien had moved to Dublin, was working in a shop, wanted to write and was doing her best to have an exciting social life. Like Kate in The Lonely Girl, she began an affair with an older man who was a writer. They married and moved to England. She got a job working for a publisher, secured a contract for her novel and wrote it, supposedly, in a matter of weeks. She lost the custody of her two children when she left her husband. He was ostensibly a domineering and controlling man and the breakdown of their marriage seems to have been triggered by his jealousy about the success of her book and the opportunity to live independently that her writing gave her.

It is worth noting that The Country Girls was published in the same year as the obscenity trial that followed the publication in Britain of the unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Prurience about sexuality and the stigmatisation of women who defied social mores was by no means the sole preserve of the Irish. But the Lady Chatterley trial marked the end of an era of censorship in England. Each of the four books that O’Brien published before McGahern’s The Dark appeared, (The Country Girls, The Lonely Girl, Girls in their Married Bliss, August is a Wicked Month) were banned in Ireland. So too was her 1966 novel Casualties of Peace. The Country Girls was burned by her local parish priest. She flouted the censorship of her works and publicly imported copies of these. At a public meeting on censorship in Limerick in 1966 she asked for a show of hands of those who had read her banned books. She was met with a sea of hands and much laughter. Though still banned, The Country Girls was serialised in an Irish magazine in 1965.8 Edna O’Brien did much to reduce the Censorship Board to the joke that McGahern thought it had become.

McGahern’s public response to censorship was stoic and dignified and he came to be much admired for this. O’Brien was vilified as a scarlet woman. In response she adopted a flamboyant public persona. She could be reliably counted upon to come up with some scandalous aphorism on Irish or British television. Asked on Robin Day’s Question Time (the 1970s clip is on YouTube) to describe an ideal evening, she replied, a romantic dinner with a man who gave her champagne without going on about the price or talking about his wife. McGahern went on to be celebrated as the leading Irish novelist of his lifetime. While The Country Girls is one of the best and most significant Irish novels of the last century, O’Brien’s many subsequent books have not enjoyed the same status. Like Oscar Wilde she poured much of her genius into a public persona that stuck it to those who would vilify her. The façade that she created for herself was, according to one critic, too stage-Irish for the Irish, too Irish for the English and too flighty and romantic for feminists.9

Both The Country Girls and The Dark depicted with respectively frank and brutal accuracy, the sexual and emotional landscape of a rural Catholic society that was by then rapidly unravelling. Subsequent ‘revelations’ of widespread clerical sexual abuse of children and of ordinary domestic violence were hardly revelations as such. It was all too easy to sweep knowledge of grim realities under the carpet in a country where Catholicism dominated sociology and the social services and where non-fiction books about human sexuality were banned. Literature articulated things that could not be spoken of in official Ireland or dealt with in the so-called non-fictional media.

BF

Notes

1John McGahern, The Barracks (London: Faber and Faber, 1963) and The Dark (London: Faber and Faber, 1965).

2Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969).

3John McGahern, Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 2005), p.188.

4Edna O’Brien, The Lonely Girl (London: Penguin, 1962).

5John Cooney, John Charles McQuaid; Ruler of Catholic Ireland (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1999), p.370.

6Eamon Maher, ‘Catholicism and National Identity in the Works of John McGahern’, in Bryan Fanning (ed.), An Irish Century: Studies 1912–2012 (Dublin: UCD Press, 2012), pp.272–9.

7Edna O’Brien: Life Stories, television documentary (RTE, 2012).

8Donal Ó Drisceoil, ‘“The best banned in the land”: Censorship and Irish Writing since 1950’, The Yearbook of English Studies Vol 35: Irish Writing Since 1950 (2000), pp.146–60.

9Rebecca Pelan, ‘Edna O’Brien’s “Stage-Irish” Persona: An “Act” of Resistance’, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 19,1 (1993) pp.67–78.