If there is a single phrase that sums up the second wave of feminism that emerged in the 1960s, it is “the personal is political.” It turns up in these pages. It means, not that lovers or family members need to form parties and have elections, but that private relationships, especially those between men and women, involve the use of power and are shaped by public, social forces.
Nuala O’Faolain certainly believed that. In her columns, she is always acutely sensitive to the inner workings of both power and powerlessness, the way they shape, not just the big external world but our most intimate sense of who we are. She got that knowledge in part from growing up in an Irish Catholic society where: “The individual was a nobody, in a world of more powerful beings. Power was always out there, in the hands of the wielder of punishment. The notion of personal authority, of rightly having your own place in power relations, simply couldn’t develop in the climate of fear.”
She got the knowledge, too, from being a woman. Hovering around much of her journalism, sometimes in the background, occasionally front and center, is a haunted awareness of the sense of threat that is always there for women: “The potential violence of men toward women – the readiness with which they will rape and batter and murder – is part of the context within which the equable and affectionate relationships between the mass of men and women take place.” Feminism is always a moral and intellectual touchstone for her reactions to the world around her.
And she got the sense of how political the personal really is, oddly enough, from reading. Encountering her marvellous columns again, it is hard not to be struck by how deeply and passionately well-read she is. But the result of that reading is not a display of erudition. It is something much more all-encompassing and humane. It is the sense that what she has read – all those books that put structure and form on external experience – have been entirely personalized. It is as much a part of her experience as the people she encounters and the places she inhabits. When she writes about James Joyce’s Dublin or “the country lanes” of John McGahern’s novels, it is not as an academic or literary historian, but as a witness. She has seen and lived in them. And conversely when she writes of the process of learning to read (“I remember the exact moment myself and it was the only transcendent thing that ever happened to me”), it is with the feeling that to be deprived of that moment is to be denied human dignity. In her way of looking at things, reading is the crossroads where the personal and the political, our social and collective lives on the one hand and our most intimate selves on the other, meet and converse.
But what made Nuala O’Faolain such a powerful and distinctive writer was ultimately not this engagement with the notion that the personal is political. It was that she also understood the phrase in reverse – the political is personal.
Her journalism eschewed the gnostic pretense at Olympian insight into events that was the mainstay of “serious” columnists before her. She once wrote hilariously, indeed, of her gift for false prophecy. In her early days in England, a pollster showed her the first issue of Cosmopolitan. She said it would never catch on. She confidently predicted on RTÉ’s Questions and Answers that Ben Dunne’s huge donations to Charles Haughey would never be linked to a particular politician. She told Mary Robinson, whom she admired hugely, that she had no chance of being elected to the presidency.
Her insight was of a very different order, and her gift was to find a language that was equally distinctive. She found a way of writing, a literary style, in which the personality could be politicized and politics personalized.
Take two more or less random examples.
Politicizing the personal, she wrote brilliantly of the way ordinary Irish behavior could be shaped by the vagueness of our sense of citizenship: “People have to be prodded and beaten into taking any kind of care of the landscape. Individuals insist on trashing their own part of it for their own reasons: The overall picture has nothing to do with them. People roll down the windows of their cars and throw their litter out. That’s somebody else’s territory they’re moving through.”
Personalizing the political, she could write of Northern Ireland in the early stages of the peace process as if it were an awkward, unloved child trying to squirm out from under a burden of self-hatred: “It is a society that does not yet like itself enough to relax its sectarianism. And my impression is that it does not feel liked.” Or she could even use a gesture of her own, leaning forward to hear a priest discourse on sectarianism, to develop a subtle and brilliant insight into the link between violence and male domination in Northern Ireland: “I understood from that movement of my body – leaning forward to be told what to do – one of the reasons why Northern Ireland is such a patriarchy.”
These apparently easy shifts from concepts of citizenship to litter, from political violence to personal psychology, from bodily gesture to large-scale social analysis, demanded a style whose simplicity came from an enormous sophistication. That style was, for anyone who had to write a column in the same paper, terrifyingly assured.
For all her self-doubt and hesitation in person (the uncertainty that made her smuggle the extraordinary memoir Are You Somebody? into print as a mere introduction to a collection of her Irish Times columns), she achieved, when she wrote, a seamlessly comprehensive tone.
That tone is what made her unique – her ability to write about, say, mobile phones and abortion, St. Patrick’s Day parades and sectarian violence, in exactly the same voice. She had perfect pitch for a note that was precisely halfway between the intimacy of confession and the objectivity of reportage. She personalized public issues without trivializing them, and gave a public dimension to personal experience without falling into solipsism.
This was, in itself, a considerable literary achievement. She solved one of the most difficult problems a writer can face – the use of the word “I.” In journalism, it can be used to create a comic, self-deprecating persona, or to bear raw witness to an extraordinary event. It can be deployed as mere egoistic display, filling what ought to be a public space with inflated foibles.
Only very rarely can it be used with sincerity and integrity on the one hand and a cool objectivity on the other.
And yet this was precisely the combination Nuala sought. And she sought it for a profound moral reason. She understood her job in writing for newspapers to be the making of some tiny contribution toward the diminution of indifference. She needed some answer to the human inability, as she puts it in a column from 2002, to “feel for the whole world.” She needed some way not to be overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the planet’s horror and injustice and unhappiness. And she found those things – tentatively and contingently – in her fashioning of a public “I,” a kind of intimacy with her readers through which those large questions and emotions could be filtered and humanized. She forged that miraculous literary self that was at once immediately personal and yet sufficiently capacious to register the movements of the great outside world.
In this regard, Nuala’s devotion to Marcel Proust was not accidental. She learned from him how to construct a coherent sense of self in writing, one that could be intimate and immediate but also infinitely expansive. Often her columns started, and remained, with herself, but brought political and moral issues within the frame of her own vibrant emotion and luminous intelligence.
They could begin like strange, strung-out short stories: “Imagine wanting to die”; “Someone I know bought a derelict cottage recently”; “Laois had always seemed to me to be one of the flatter counties”; even “Well … I don’t know … ”
Or, as with the 1997 column “Questions of Relative Rights”: “For Christmas week I was stuck in a small, litter-strewn Bulgarian ski resort, where there was no snow, and therefore no skiing and therefore nothing much to do.” This situation leads, via reports of a dancing bear in a nearby town, to a Proustian memory of seeing such a bear and his master in Istanbul: “He was inflicting whatever it was on the animal because he himself was trapped and had no other way to survive.”
And just as the reader is wondering what this has to do with anything, the symbiosis of the bear and the bear-master is turned into a brilliant, brave metaphor for her own complex feelings on the thorny public question of abortion. No one else could have done this without being gauche, crass, or merely scatty, and she could do so only because she found a tone and a language with that distinctive fusion of intimacy and analysis.
It was a tribute to her brilliance as a stylist that no one quite noticed how raw and angry, how fragile and exposed, the “I” of her columns really was, until she herself traced its lineaments in Are You Somebody?
Her deep reluctance to write that book suggested that, at some level, she understood the way it took apart the self that made her one of the greatest columnists ever to inhabit the English language.
Fintan O’Toole
January 2010