From The Irish Times, 14 December 1967: 8. Copyright © The Irish Times. Reprinted by permission.
“… and she looked perfectly lovely in the paper this morning, you know.” The voice at the other end of the phone belonged to a local resident and conveyed approval. Hair done, perhaps, and a fresh little pair of gloves: the girl who writes about guilt, sex, perversion, scandal, and disheveled lives arrives trimly groomed in Cork.
She was certainly there. Everyone connected with the U.C.C. “teach-in” had seen her, or sat just behind her, or walked past her in the Aula Maxima, overheard her chatting, watched her eating. Through the entire tumultuous weekend, while excited students tossed ideas around with seasoned speakers, while politicians and academics and industrialists and clergy sipped tea and argued and called for action, no one ever quite lost sight of Edna O’Brien. She was there, faintly tickling the public imagination with her irreproachably discreet presence.
We met in the hotel lounge in a callous morning sunlight. There were twenty people milling about, survivors of the previous night’s marathon discussion. We squinted in the glare, sat on thready old sofas, and hoped for coffee.
“It’s marvelous, but it’s exhausting,” Edna began. She has a small, timorous voice someone described once as “Winnie-the-Pooh.” “The students now seem to be far more political than they were when I was one, and they all without exception seem to be socialists. It’s wonderful.”
She said she had only come to the teach-in to learn what had happened in Ireland in the half dozen years since she has lived here and wouldn’t speak unless she was pressured. (She was, and she did.) The coffee came and we murmured politely over it. Edna suddenly straightened up and whispered: “The way they stare. There’s a boy over there who came in a few minutes ago and has looked straight at us without stopping since.”
But everyone else was looking too, most with more slyness. They glanced over newspapers and cups, and what they saw was a woman with short reddish hair in a turquoise dress, wearing sensible but attractive shoes and racy black mesh stockings on her slender legs. She wore no make-up. In another five years she will be forty.
Her face is girlish and her eyes are not: they are large, aquamarine and tilted, and gaze upward with an expression that is simultaneously appraising and apologetic. There is a general air of something tentative about her, something that apprehensively awaits the executioner, although it is obvious that she has been interviewed to infinity and her replies are persuasively oracular.
They are also painful, tight, and emotional, in spite of the careful construction: “I don’t feel I am a spokeswoman for Irish women, sexual emancipation, or anything else. I am motivated by a combination of heredity, circumstances, environment, talent, hard work, and luck, and I feel, quite honestly, that at a time when we have a dearth of writers, I’ve written as truthfully as I can about what I understand. If afterwards, someone says, well, she is trying to be the Irish Mary McCarthy, or something similar, it doesn’t really concern me.”
She talked slowly and with her gravely courteous contempt, of the Irish inclination to substitute “chat” for discussion.
“Even these students who seem so courageous still seem to speak too much in generalities. I would like to see one of them get up and say, ‘I am eighteen years old, I do or do not believe in God, the Church, sexual intercourse before marriage… this is something I feel severely about. It’s quite an ironic thing that my greatest handicap is fear, a deep resident fear of violence, aggression, pain, insanity; and quite in contradiction to this I have no fear at all about what I say or think, and I despise what I call ‘perambulatory talk’ that goes around and around and never hits straight.”
She cannot remember ever fearing to write, but she said abruptly: “I never wrote a line in Ireland. That’s significant, isn’t it? I wrote The Country Girls in the first three weeks after I left Ireland, torn in grief, despair, and anger. I still think it is the truest thing I have written: I mean, true in a literary sense, in form. I wrote it very fluently—like a dream, in fact. That and Casualties of Peace are the truest in this way. If I could choose only two of my novels to live, those would be my choice.”
But Edna O’Brien’s own private preoccupation is with the hunt for honesty, and she does not think any of the other three novels are less truthful. The people who have accused her of sacrificing truth for sensation she dispenses with kindly: “They probably mean that they can’t identify as well with the later books.”
She was silent briefly, and began again, slightly more strangled. “My books are only a fraction of my own personal torment. The big problem for any artist is other people’s advice. The critics who say, you know, you should return to your earlier style, or something—that’s all a load of rubbish. Country Girls was the least self-conscious thing I wrote. Casualties of Peace is the most complex, the hardest for people to read, the deepest and most rewarding thing I have written. That and August Is a Wicked Month are the inner screams of a very private person. They were something I had to do, and now in a funny way I am ready to come out in the world again.”
She never referred to The Lonely Girl, only shook her head at Girls in Their Married Bliss: “I don’t like it at all, and even after rewriting it I feel it’s unsatisfactory. It’s a very strident book. I wrote it at a very disturbed time in my life. Some people say they find it very funny, and I’m always delighted.”
The book she will publish in the spring, The Love Object, sounds if anything more introverted than the previous novels. “It concerns one man and one woman who go into an upstairs room to make a life of their own away from the world. But the woman still wants to go out, and she does—to the shop, to see people, to learn—and in the end her disobedience is punished. At the end of the novel she returns to her room, only with another man, and what she realizes is that a man, if he is profound, is a country to a woman.”
She has always treated the veiled or forthright suggestion that her work is sheerly autobiographical with appropriate and reticent disdain. “We invent less in lies and dreams than in truth. The very act of describing something makes it true, emotionally true: I write about what I experience emotionally or actually.”
The intense subjectivity of her books is inescapable, though, and when she describes the forces in her own life (“as you grow older if you are at all serious you must go deeper into the conflicts that caused you”) she speaks movingly, almost hypnotically.
“I was born in East Clare in a large stone house with trees around it and a field. And even though we were not a mile from the nearest village, I always thought of us as being extremely isolated; and the journey to school and the village seemed threatening. I was always in terror … the thing I am bitter about, and the only thing I am bitter about, is that as a child I never had any sense of security.
“But in the national school we were read the most marvelous essays, wonderful descriptions of nature, the frost, the sky, the landscape. The happiest association of childhood is the combination of that literature, whatever it was, and the black winter frost of the countryside.
“I had one brother and two sisters, but in my fictional memory I always think of myself as an only child. I identified very much with my mother and found my father rather awesome; I suppose this is the pattern of most Irish families.
“I went to boarding school in Lough Rea, Galway, a town with a lake outside it. It did two good things for me. It gave me a certain discipline, which I can still revert to and go without food or sleep if necessary. It also taught me that no matter what the circumstances you can always escape through your imagination. Oddly enough, when I was there, I was quite happy, and yet when I was out, I wrote about it as severe and uncomfortable.
“I believe this—that we never know what we truly feel about a person, or a place, until we leave it. I don’t think I was capable of knowing whether I really loved my parents, or my husband, until I was separated from them.”
“I grew up with a God-the-Father idea that asks too much of any mortal man. I have been married once, unsuccessfully. It’s a great tragedy to me personally that the relationship I seem to require isn’t humanly possible.”
“I think two things were always uppermost in my mind as a child: that God created us and that if we didn’t obey him we would go to hell, and that my country was tortured for nine hundred years. We are very self-pitying people, and I loathe self-pity. Our sense of martyrdom and our heaven hell-purgatory complex are outrageous in the broad context of life and humanity. The sort of Irish education I knew equipped you to do a job, but not to face the world with any sense of proportion.”
It is one of the things she wishes her own children—two boys, age fourteen and twelve—to absorb. “I want them to read widely of different ideas, not to come to conclusions so much as to have a relaxed view of the world.
“I think it’s very important at a young age to have access to someone who acts noble, and I hope they can find that. As a small child I began to see the contradiction in the word ‘charity’ and its application. I admired the saints and thought the doctrine wholesome; but didn’t find many people whom I admired and respected.
“I hope they can have the opportunity to learn, to try ideas in a spirit of excitement when they are students like these students. It would be wonderful to have that period between seventeen and twenty-one again. I didn’t have the buoyancy that I think young people should have then. I was working in a chemist shop in Dublin and going to pharmaceutical college, and it was a drab life.
“I tell my sons that they are almost certain to have sexual relations when they are seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen, and that I hope it is generated by love. I don’t think promiscuity is sinful, but it does reduce the person, reduce the inclination for love.” She is not happy about living in London, either for her sake or her children’s.
“It’s too chic and unsatisfying. The promiscuity in London now among young people is destructive. One of the sad things about freedom is its abuse. But given its alternatives, I still think the English teenagers are luckier than the Irish teenagers. They don’t suffer from the same psyche of guilt, and there is nothing more terrible than guilt—it destroys everything, spirit, courage, humor, love.”
They are all qualities Edna places priority on. When she spoke of her characters, Baba and Caitleen, the two sides of the same self, she said, “I admire Baba much more. She has courage and humor, and they are everything. Anything else seems tepid next to them.”
In some ways it has been easier to be courageous in the past seven years of success—“I can give my opinion now in Ireland without being penalized. I don’t earn a penny here. The price has been public stares and speculation and, most recently, a growing public demand for my opinion.” She spoke with some irritation. “I resent being told it is my duty to speak when it is not my duty to speak. It is my duty to write what I want to write, as truthfully as I can. To insist that I should get up and speak about economics and culture is impertinence.”
She shied nervously but emphatically away from the idea of returning, remarking that it was more probable that she would move to a Central European country when her children were out of school. “I have more rapport with Hungarian Czechs; they see life more as a whole.”
A remark she had made earlier, when we were still in the hesitant skirmish of establishing the conversation, seemed to be more important than it had, “I am deeply coursed in this country—my literary organs—mythology, my religion, however much they may burden me, are Irish. I am nourished by the querulousness of the country; its abrasive quality is my incentive to write. Always when I come back to Ireland I feel a great hunger to start writing again; when people tell me sad stories here, they break my heart more. In a small country, the characters of people, the lives are much more apparent and unprotected. We are very vulnerable people.”