From Toronto Star, 26 November 1988. Copyright © TorStar Syndication Services. Reprinted by permission.
“Books are always difficult to write,” Edna O’Brien, the curator of wild Irish passions, says. “But this last novel was probably more arduous to complete than any other. My nerves were more fractured than normal. It was like carrying a load of bricks on my shoulders.”
The High Road is O’Brien’s ninth novel but the first in eleven years. She wrote it in fits and starts, in between publishing four collections of short stories, carrying the manuscript from place to place, worrying that the flow of words had dried up, revising constantly.
“I was like Penelope and her tapestry,” says O’Brien, who will be in Toronto this Tuesday to read excerpts from the novel in Harbourfront’s Brigantine Room. “I kept ripping it apart, until I had some twenty versions to consider. Of course, most writers revise and revise, but not many are as naive as to admit it in print.”
Her voice on the telephone from New York is full of her familiar Irish cadences and infectious laughter. And if talking long-distance is certainly not the way one would choose to conduct an interview, at least the memory of a previous face-to-face conversation allows me easily to summon up images of her auburn hair, flashing green eyes, the vivacious woman quick to warm to ideas or lines of inquiry, gentle in refuting certain suppositions.
Why the title? “It works on many levels. I tend to admire people who live dangerously, who show emotions, who are open to experience. The high road in life is one of intensity and drama. It’s death, otherwise. But that road can also lead to pain. In a sense, the novel illustrates that great maxim: I suffer, therefore I am alive.”
Indeed, the middle-aged narrator, Anna, is a familiar bardic O’Brien figure, the “mendicant from love,” carrying to a Spanish resort the sharp and unassuaged memories of an unsatisfactory love affair. There she meets Portia, a past acquaintance from London, who also is in flight from herself and two unhappy marriages. An ex-debutante turned cleaning woman, Portia is now a recluse who grows vegetables and wears dark glasses indoors.
Other women are also victims: the elegant Iris, whose lovers, on departing, tell her: “I hate to do this to you, I hate myself for doing this to you, you don’t deserve this”; or Wanda, a divorced mother who complains of her men: “Before you know where you are, you’re cooking for them. You’re begging your kid to call them daddy (but) just when you think it’s all working out, the bastard ups and leaves.”
Anna’s chief encounter, however, is with Catalina, a young and unconventional chambermaid full of wild passion for life. Anna becomes infatuated with her, invites her for lunch and dinner and evokes the suspicion of her peasant family. In one hike in the hills, they find “not what we sought from men, something other, womanly, primordial.” The story, not unexpectedly, ends in blood and tragedy.
Of course, there are touches of infectious humor, even at times of self-parody, especially in the figure of D’Arcy, a painter who talks like James Joyce resurrected. “He’s very Irish,” O’Brien says, “a mix of the poet and cadger, essentially a decent man who is deeply and always ironic, admitting of emotion and yet scorning it.”
The intensity of the novel is pitched high. The Spanish soil teems with vibrant color and objects which assume a portentousness beyond ordinary perception. The Spanish sun both illuminates and blinds. O’Brien invests her sensuous descriptions—of old women in the town chapel, flowers, clothes, jewels, hotel rooms—with meaning and value and conjures up in the reader a response that goes beyond mere physicality.
“That was deliberate,” O’Brien says, “and intrinsic to the story. The sheer beauty of the setting is analogous to being in paradise and waiting for the fall. I wanted to set up a contrast between light and dark.”
If the effect is finally suffocating, leaving the reader craving for all the artifice to buckle under the strain, then that is the inevitable result of O’Brien’s determination to play the game to the end. Indeed, O’Brien is not unlike her narrator, “beautiful, queenly, and even formidable.” But she denies—very emphatically—that the novel is in any way autobiographical.
“Of course there are some elements of reality, perhaps bits and pieces from my own past, which provided the germ of the book. I think, for example, every woman, like Anna, wants the love of a woman as much as the love of a man. But my fiction is reality fantasized.”
Indeed, the idea for The High Road emerged partly from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and perhaps subconsciously from Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” “They are both about recapturing the impossible,” O’Brien says, “about longing for youth. Mann sees in a young boy a reflection of his lost self. This is what Anna, in my book, sees in Catalina.”
There is, in O’Brien’s novels and stories, always a sense of looking back. Her past is on record, too, in its broad outlines anyway. Its bearing on her emotions and on her writing is direct. She was born in 1932 on a farm in County Clare, in the west of Ireland, and grew up aware of the cramped and narrow world of poverty, hard work, subjugation of women, the weight of religion that crushed people with a sense of sin. She witnessed and experienced physical and emotional cruelty: drunkenness, rage, repression, the loneliness of a painful marriage. It’s all in the books.
If she is now Ireland’s most famous woman writer (from a country whose most illustrious writers, Joyce, Yeats, Synge, Beckett, O’Casey, and Bernard Shaw, are men), she has paid a hard price. When her first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it was reviled and banned in Ireland for being, among other perceived things, “a smear on Irish womanhood.”
O’Brien fought her background, defied her family, battled critics, priests, and censors. “I was slaughtered by the nuns and priests and by the state and made to feel guilty,” she recalls. “They would have penalized me if I had remained in Ireland. It wasn’t the best auspices for a budding writer. But I was a rebel, I had a lamp of fury inside my soul, just as all my life I have been obsessed with personal freedom.”
Writing was her ticket to London. So was her marriage to Ernest Gebler, which produced two sons, Carlo and Sasha, and ended in a messy divorce. “It was James Joyce who said that Ireland eats her writers the way a sow eats her farrow. But I was lucky I was able to go out into the big world, to gain enlightenment.”
She also gained the freedom to write the novels and stories of sexual love that account for so large a part of her literary reputation and popularity (among them, Casualties Of Peace, Night, August Is A Wicked Month, A Scandalous Woman, I Hardly Knew You, Returning, and A Fanatic Heart). They bristle with unstable energies and articulate a sense of dispossession, the joy and humiliation of love, the bad luck of women fighting loneliness, seeking emotional catharsis or recoiling from unsatisfactory relationships.
She still endorses the spirit, if not the actual letter of the epigraph she used in her 1976 memoir, Mother Ireland. It was a quotation from Samuel Beckett’s novel Malone Dies: “I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the inexecrable generations to come.”
One is awed by those devastating words. She hastens to explain. “No living writer has the magic of Beckett—he’s tops!—but perhaps I’m not now inclined to use the second sentence. I have many complex and vacillating feelings about Ireland: an umbilical love coupled with fury over its doctrinaire attitudes. It’s the source of my feelings and therefore of my writing.”
She goes back for visits and even wrote a travel book, Vanishing Ireland, in 1986. “They don’t burn my books now, I can walk down the street with a little more ease.” The climate has changed. “But would I go back to live? I’ll never be out of Ireland in my mind, but I will always be out of it in my body.”
Home now, as it has been for more than twenty years, is London, on the edge of Chelsea. She also spends four months a year teaching English literature at New York’s City University. “My students are wonderfully receptive and enthusiastic, but teaching is an arduous and exigent task—you can’t take it lightly. And if I’m not writing, I feel my existence is floundering. If I’m not writing, I feel starved.”
Is there, then, a new novel in the works? “Well, perhaps. I’m thinking of setting it in a Mexican washhouse which I saw last year. I’m going down at Christmas to take another look. Whatever happens, I don’t want my next novel to take another eleven years.”