From The Irish Times, 12 September 1992: 29. Copyright © The Irish Times. Reprinted by permission.
Although most literary critics would nominate Hemingway as the writer who changed the shape of American prose, there are commentators who would just as easily select him as the writer who demonstrated how the life could become bigger than the work.
After Hemingway, enter Norman Mailer, who is by now more famous for his life than for the work he has produced. The same could be said of the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, who is painfully aware of the way in which her life has often upstaged her fiction.
Since the publication in 1961 of her first novel, The Country Girls, O’Brien has been confronted by the outrage of Irish people who resented the Ireland her novels exposed to the outside world. There has also been the endless speculation that all of O’Brien’s heroines in novels such as The Country Girls, Girl with Green Eyes, Night, A Pagan Place, and A Scandalous Woman were modeled on their creator and her own endless quest for love. O’Brien has become a romantic icon: an ethereal, eternal Irish beauty—ageless, timeless, otherworldly, and, above all, a victim.
“Everyone thinks I’m mad, I probably am … but I’m not an eccentric. I’m actually very precise, very exact,” she says, shrugging with exasperation and amusement. Having lived in London for over thirty years, she knows that observers have decided that she is completely out of touch with Ireland. “But I’m not. I keep myself informed about what is going on there. Of course I know that people say ‘the Ireland she wrote about doesn’t exist anymore,’ but it does, you know,” she stresses. “Attitudes don’t change, the psyche of a country is not changed by wealth, change is not about getting milking machines.” According to her, “the Irish still feed off the human weaknesses and failures of others.”
She remembers the outrage and disgust she felt about the handling of the Bishop Casey story. “Those people have their own griefs; the man, the woman, and the child they are not in a happy situation … but the country just wanted to expose the fact that a high-ranking priest had got caught. The real story of another man letting a woman down seemed to become lost among the gloating.” She comments on the “purience” of it all. “It seems legitimate to dole out smut.”
How does she feel about her country now? “I love Ireland and I hate Ireland. I’m glad I’m Irish; it’s given me psychic soil, spiritual soil, and physical soil.” Europe will have a positive influence on Ireland, “joining up with Europe means an open door, opening a door or a window is always good for either a country or a person.”
Two days before the publication of her twelfth novel, Time and Tide, O’Brien sits in the book-lined drawing room of her Kensington home and seems nervous. “It’s a naked time,” she says, conscious that her novel coincides with the announcement of the Booker shortlist. She is a slight, narrow-shouldered woman, taller than one might expect. The famous green eyes are in fact blue/grey, and the rolling rhythmic voice with its Clare accent has a theatrical range.
O’Brien is an emphatic, expansive speaker, often closing her eyes and pushing back against the couch she is sitting on or clenching her fist when reaching for the exact word, “I’m a serious writer, I take my work very seriously … I work like a dog, a horse, a slave.” While she accepts that her work draws on her own experiences, she describes the process as one of objectifying the material and then making it subjective enough for the reader to be able to identify with it. “I am suspicious of this word ‘art’—what does it mean?—I write serious books about real life. Language is my tool, I want words to breathe on the page, but feeling is my agenda.”
It is because of the rawness of the feeling she describes that O’Brien’s fiction has always been more favorably received in the US than in Britain or Ireland. She has not forgotten that a righteous local priest confiscated copies of The Country Girls and burned them in the grounds of the church.
She refers to the peculiarly voyeuristic morality which operates in Ireland. The Irish tend to be less sympathetic than most to the agonies of love. “What I hate is the diminishing and the clichés, I am not a cliché.” If she has suffered in her dealings with men, she is certainly not bitter about it. “I like men. In spite of everything, women like men. This is good.” However she does make the distinction that whereas a passionate man is a romantic, a passionate woman “is dismissed as an idiot.” Most of O’Brien’s statements are supported by an impressive line-up of sources, including Aristotle: “as matter desires form so woman desires man.”
The career which began with the story of young country girls leaving rural Ireland for the city gradually moved away from an Irish setting and became more intensely centered on the individual experience of the characters involved.
Although O’Brien says she writes about the Irish female experience, she does accept that much of the background detail has been progressively filtered out, she is now focusing on female experience in general. “I am really concerned with the universality of the female experience.”
Religion and society are no longer that important, her female characters find themselves in conflict with men. According to her, too much contemporary writing is “merely skimming, it misses out on the darkest, deepest recesses.” Real writing, she says, “must crack open the chest bones.”
Women who suffer are invariably described as natural victims and it is a word which has been applied so often to O’Brien’s characters that she responds by stating: “my heroines are victims; they’re not victims. They make bad choices.”
According to her, if they were really victims, “after the first emotional blow they’d be sitting alone in darkened rooms eating arrowroot biscuits.” On reflection, she is right. Her female characters tend to become secret biscuit eaters. Far from being mild Victorian women crushed by life and the indifference of men, her rebuffed heroines go out looking for love. Nell in Time and Tide reacts to the collapse of her marriage by asking a man to sleep with her.
Such a blunt approach may still shock in 1992, yet an earlier O’Brien character, Ellen in August Is a Wicked Month published in 1965, adopted similar tactics. O’Brien offended many with her blunt depiction of female sexual frustration, a condition which apparently remains a taboo subject.
While O’Brien in conversation speaks about romantic love, describing life and love as “not an easy journey for a romantic,” physical and sexual love are dominant themes in her fiction. She presents longing in urgent, often forcefully violent terms. Much of the earlier lyricism has been edited out, her language has become blunter, harsher, more direct. “It is more savage,” she agrees, “I am more savage, I have a savage soul.” She pauses and asks, “But what can you do when you’re writing about real things such as shock, pity, terror, and escape?”
O’Brien is a reader as much as a writer and says, “Literature is a kind of education.” The writers who influenced her through their psychological insights are Flaubert, Chekhov, and Tolstoy. While she says herself that her male characters “have never been as rounded as my females, that’s because I’m not a man,” she nevertheless agrees that most of the great female characters in fiction have been created by men; “Yes, look at Flaubert, Tolstoy. If Heathcliff is a wonderful romantic creation—that is precisely what he is, a fantasy, a fillet of highly charged female mind, no more. Flaubert in Madame Bovary and Tolstoy with Anna Karenina created real women by getting inside the female mind, just as Joyce was the first writer to get inside the female body.”
The writers of the American South are caught within small, claustrophobic, ingrown communities she understands well, having come from one herself. There was no literature in her family, she studied pharmacy herself. And it was pharmacy, working in a chemist’s by day and studying at night, which freed her from the Clare village she grew up in. It has become almost a standard reply in author interviews for the writer to say, “I was always interested in writing,” and O’Brien is no exception. “I loved the idea of writing because it suggested to me that life itself could be rendered more deeply and beautifully than normal life as lived.”
Of that West of Ireland village between Scarriff and Tuamgraney near Killaloe where she came from, she appears to be neither bitter nor sentimental. But she does speak of the music it gave her; “I love music, I can’t sing myself, but I love music and singing, singers.”
Where would Edna O’Brien be placed in the canon of international writing? Probably somewhere approaching Colette or Jean Rhys—especially Rhys—in the raw intensity of the experiences she describes. As did Colette, O’Brien wrote her first book with the encouragement of a husband who was for a time something of a Svenghali figure, or as she once described him, “an attractive father figure, something of a Professor Higgins.” The marriage produced two sons, but ended soon after the publication of The Country Girls. “I was always drawn to men who could dominate me, it makes for pain.” Commentators could claim that O’Brien’s early fiction is pertinent social documentary.
But all her life, her beauty and strangely earthy ingenue quality must have proved a difficult advantage? She seems amused, but it is easy to see how the otherworldly O’Brien could mesmerize a man. “It all depends on a good night’s sleep, some days I do have a kind of radiance. But just as easily I look like Lady Macbeth. My face changes a hundred times in the course of a day. There can be a glow or at other times it’s like a dud light bulb.”
Edna O’Brien could be viewed as either a pioneering feminist or a chronicler of female angst; her women are both dreamers and predator. Her own life has proved a central source, and her material is always concerned with internal life. She does not tell stories or invent fictions, she examines female despair. If she has been a lifelong victim of men, she has also been at the receiving end of some vicious personal and literary criticism. Who is the real Edna O’Brien? Is she an icon or a victim? A celebrity who presents a suitably romantic, strikingly beautiful face of Ireland to the outside world, or is she a wronged Cassandra who exposed repressive Irish intolerance and sexual and moral hypocrisy long before it was acceptable—if it is even acceptable yet—to an unforgiving Ireland which did not want to know and still resents the exposure. Or is she a wounded woman or a detached observer? She is all those things. “I’m a hundred persons,” and quoting Hesse’s Steppenwolf, she says, “Between myself and my other self, there are many selves I have no knowledge of.”
Despite what she describes as “a buoyancy,” she admits to being “often sad.”
When asked to describe the girl who left Clare in the third person, O’Brien thinks for a minute and closes her eyes and then begins: “The girl who left Clare brought Clare with her to fill her fiction. And although she was apprenticed to pharmacy, she knew that she would dedicate herself to writing and reading, and that in time that would include rereading. These would be her missions. At the same time she was atavistically hungry for romance, love, and life.
“But the insurmountable difficulties in pursuing both paths made her seem to most people to be both buoyant and somehow illiterate. Her first book, The Country Girls, was her ticket, her destiny to life.”
O’Brien delivers the short pen-portrait of herself in an almost incantatory style. She asks, “Is that all right?” in that slightly anxious way that she has. Then, when asked to describe—again in the third person—the woman that that girl has become, she again closes her eyes, and recites: “The woman, who lives alone in London now and is a writer, has in her all the elements, all the optimism of the girl who left County Clare, plus her history—her marriage, motherhood, her failures and successes, the love affairs, the problematic love affairs, and the constant daily dilemma of trying to write something good which will make her seem less illiterate and less buoyant,” and describe life for the reader.