From The Irish Times, 10 June 1972. Copyright © The Irish Times. Reprinted by permission.
Two memories came into my head when I went to see Edna O’Brien. One was of reading The Country Girls when I was fifteen and liking Catherine because she was fat and went to dances in frilly blouses, like me. The other was of August Is a Wicked Month, which I thought was a souring thing to read, a disemboweling of all female woes too painful to be printed. You feel overpowered by its femininity: all-suffering, all-creating. And so I walked in the leafy square off the King’s Road murdering a fast ciggie until she must have wondered what I was doing out there and called me in.
Edna O’Brien does not like being interviewed. She was, she says, once interviewed by a lady she was very nice to, she means really very nice, and this lady was awful about her and accused her of not caring about her children or anything. She, who would do anything for her children, kill for her children. And so now … well, would I mind terribly if we didn’t talk about her private life, only about her work which mattered most to her? Because she worked so very hard.
No, of course, I said. I was going to write a very cerebral piece about the Irish writer’s consciousness, none of your corny old what-does-being-a-woman-mean-stuff at all, oh no! We sat in a blue and white kitchen with a round table and pine cupboards and slate counters to work on, and a plane tree outside the window. A cook’s kitchen, well-tended. We drank Indian tea out of blue and white cups, and Edna took her extract of plants recommended by her homeopath for exhaustion, and tasting like Cascara. I shouldn’t, she said severely, be smoking. I don’t really need it, did I? She felt so much better since giving it up, apart from exhaustion.
I should be imbibing cardamom seeds instead. She thought the plant extract was doing lots of good, because there was so much that was trying in life to cope with. No, she had no one to help her except a part-time secretary three times a week: she did her own cleaning. And she’d done her own decorating, with only one man to help her. Why, she asked, did people ever get decorators in? And every day, letters came, and such letters. Look at this one—“I am a Scotsman born on St. Patrick’s Day and I am very drunk and quite apart from the fact that I have just had a quarrel with my wife I would like to write to you to tell you I have just read your books for the second time and liked them very much and I am of course in love with you.”
She put the letter down with a what-can-you-do look. And were there, I asked, desperados lurking outside as well as the desperate plans? Oh, yes, because the Evening Standard had stupidly printed that she was moving here from Putney a year ago. As for what she was doing here, well … she never really thought about what she was doing here. She always assumed she was going to be somewhere else soon, yes, that she was passing through London, but passing through to where? That was the question. “I am an evader; I don’t ever confront myself with questions like ‘What am I doing here?’ and ‘What will I do next?’ I live so much in my head that it matters not particularly which latitude or longitude I’m in. I am more private here and I have an obsession for privacy. It is necessary for work, the privacy, and that is so important.”
She looked pensive (as doubtless, she had looked in front of a hundred thousand interviewers before) and said: “I suppose it is because I am still dismayed by … people. I avoid people. Not all the time.” (Laughing: irony, bittersweet brand). “Otherwise this heart would not be as battered as it is.”
Facts: she is fairly tall, but has narrow shoulders and small bones and so manages to look vulnerable all the same. Her hair is still red and long and curly. She is wearing purple crushed-velvet jeans, a white cheese-cloth smock and a black embroidered jacket. Besides, being in S.W.3. her house has the mirrored Indian cushions, wildly embroidered shawls and nicely exotic junk and Greek goatskins that you would hope for and find in such a London house. You cannot detect County Clare in her voice except when she says “awright, awright” on the telephone, and she is one of the few people who can use four-letter words and make the words sound pretty. From looking around one notices she is reading St Augustine’s City of God and Sylvia Plath’s Ariel for a start.
(All right I know this was supposed to be cerebral; I just thought you’d like to know).
She has just finished the staging of her A Pagan Place, which is to come on at the Royal Court this autumn; she is to act the part of a schoolteacher who goes mad and flings her clothes off in the classroom. (“I think life is a series of undressings,” she adds afterwards, “until you get past all the masks and discover the masks were the person.”)
“I would like to tell all the people who tell me I am a sexy woman that I work hard; I would like to take an advertisement out saying ‘I have a dull life.’ With the odd peak, the odd altitude, thank God. I work in the daytime before the … junk … of the day piles up on me. But every day there is cleaning and cooking which I love (I am very domesticated, I make my own bread) and at least three things to cope with, like you and tonight this publisher, and then there are dentists and doctors and homeopaths and … I sometimes say I have the life of a movie actress without any of the assets.”
(More facts: she came to Dublin from Clare when she seventeen, worked in a chemist’s shop in Cabra and did freelance work for the press, married Ernest Gebler when she was twenty and lived in Wicklow, came to London in her twenties and lived in a riverside house in Putney. Her two sons are at a coeducational boarding school, they are eighteen and sixteen and, she says, “not ill at ease with themselves, full of curiosity and searching. Like great actors they know how to find their spot. What is it that Emerson says? ‘The hero is he that is immovably centered’”).
And what of religion? “A man asked me recently, ‘Edna, do you believe in God?’ A serious man, this was. And I found I was about to rediscover that I wanted to rebelieve. All your youth you are going away from yourself, cutting your hair, growing your hair. You come back a long route.”
It happened (the play version of A Pagan Place) she says, when she was feeling very barren because she wasn’t writing and was worried that perhaps she would never write again. And then, suddenly, her son said it would make a nice play and she started and found it was lovely to write, almost wrote itself. It was work, but lovely work, “It’s when you have to, you know, scratch, that it becomes terrible.”
At the moment she is finishing the proofs of her new novel Night which is a half-apocalyptic book; she quotes a piece about gravestones and milestones and tombstones. “It is a hallucinatory novel.” And she is writing a series for Peter Brook which is about a woman who is looking for a flat. Night is, she thinks, her ninth book, including the collections of short stories and the filmscript for Zee and Co., a film about which she can only say she is very vexed.
“When you are writing your ninth book, it is a lonely, delving occupation. And it has so little to do with the [a biting note creeps into the voice] literary world which is, I think, malicious and repetitive.” What does she feel about her first book now?
“When I read The Country Girls for R.T.E., I came to see it again and it was valid. It is all right like a little bird-note, it’s true. I even [note of wonder] cried. I came to write it when I was spending my first winter in London and I was disconsolate and did not understand these locked-up people. Perhaps now I am one of these locked-up people.” She wrote it very quickly; Night took a year and a half.
She waves at the kitchen, “See, I’ve come back to slate and wood and a tree outside like the kitchen of my childhood.” She has been reading Proust, she says, and finds (this she says very slowly to give me time to take it all down) that our needs, our feelings, and our loves and our half loves are formed in our youth and that as adults we are retapping them in our relationships with men and women. They emerge again. It is, she says, a good idea to go back where we started, to where we first lied, first were frightened, first were guilty and cure them by forgiving your little self; because it is a good idea for people to like themselves; not, she means, self-aggrandizement.
Is that why, I ask, she writes? To try to cure herself? “Oh, I really think now that it is like breathing to me. In the old days I use to say to find myself, to take my revenge or what have you. But I write because I write: a rose is a rose.” It is a struggle to face the self like all dance and prayer and lovemaking.
And religion? She is on record as saying, trouble will not cease in Ireland until religion is taken from schooling. “I think religion should not be for education, but for religion’s sake. Not that I have any great love of the Catholic Church. I think I love ceremony and litany in my religion. The ritual I found in the dancing of the dervishes; I love movement and I love particularly slow, measured movement.” She asked me did I know of a nice service, not just a going-to-Mass-on-Sundays service? Not the Orthodox St. Sophia’s; she got vertigo there.
“I was steeped in the Catholic religion and it was steeped in me. But anything that distorts the imagination….” She does not care about being banned; it meant nothing to her, she says.
And politics, “I really think that the I.R.A. have brought Stormont down and they have brought the attention of the world. They have to make huge sacrifices in their lives. And I mean, I would never do that, I could not do that: to be cool, to be brave….” Does she have difficulty expressing this point of view to English colleagues and neighbors? “Oh yes, huge trouble.” She had been arguing recently with Richard Neville of Oz, Ink, Alternative Voice, etcetera. He had asked her how she could excuse things like the tarring and feathering; the answer was that she didn’t. But to judge the I.R.A. by one incident like that was ridiculous.
And so what was she doing and thinking about now? Well, there were the poetry readings at the I.C.A. Nash House (her legs wouldn’t stand up when she read, she wished there was a pill which would make them keep standing). “Sometimes I get very black inside myself and curled up, not cozy-curled I mean: it’s not a nice place to be, the writing state, it’s like being on a scaffold. But it’s where you have to be to write from the gut and I will always write from the gut.”
All this she talked about, and Jung and liking to touch people and hating mental strife and eyeshadow and how Women’s Lib didn’t take biology and pregnancy and menstruation into account (“There’s no getting around that nugget”). And about the hooligans “whose proceedings enlivened the drab monotony of life in Southwark towards the end of the century” (a quote from a book she liked) and how she liked young people and how lucky she has been in good friends that taught her good things.
She began to read a recent poem “Where were you on Bloody Sunday?” (“In the office in the middle of the night, taking down news heads actually.”) She looked at me quizzically, and went on reading. And many more things. She showed me a poem she had written called “Shame” which went
Oh Jesus
We are giving birth
It is featureless
It hates us
It eats grubs
We are thinking of calling it Unwanted.
I forgot entirely about the consciousness of the Irish writer living in England and said I wished I could simply give her space for her to fill whatever she wished.
A little reminder, to quote from her first book which she wrote a long time ago before Country Clare girls writing about lovemaking and women’s lib Dublin and tarrings and featherings were ever heard of.
“Oh Lord, who does not exist, you hate women, otherwise you’d have made them different.”
Whatever you reply to that will be the reason you like Edna O’Brien or you don’t.