Interview conducted during Art at the Heart Conference, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Grand Opera Hotel, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 8 November 2007. Copyright © Glenn Patterson. Reprinted with permission.
Glenn Patterson: The way you talk about your writing and the relationship with language calls to mind the writer you have referred to as not just your hero, but your master: Joyce. In fact, you’ve just written a biography of Joyce for Penguin Lives.
O’Brien: Yeah, a brief life. Even though it was brief, that wasn’t easy either. I remember once, I was in New York teaching a term at NYU, and I had many books on Joyce. There are a lot of books, as you know, on Joyce. Some are completely unfathomable. They’re like written in Finnegans Wake language. So Philip Roth comes in to visit me and I’m not looking my best and I’m not feeling my best and all these books I had got including Richard Ellmann’s massive and great biography of Joyce. Philip sees all these books along the floor and, to put it mildly, my constrained expression and he gave me a little dig—he’s very mischievous—and said, “I bet you think the made-up stuff is easier.” And I don’t know which is easier. The beautiful poem—why I should say this out of the blue, because it doesn’t refer to what we are talking about—of Wallace Stevens that I often think writing or non-writing is; either the act of writing or the waiting for it:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflection
Or the beauty of innuendo,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
And when one finishes a book, as you have just done, as you have told me out there, it’s a very lovely, brief feeling. It’s a lovely feeling for a very short length of time because the next one has to be done.
Patterson: Just on Joyce for a minute more; it seems to me, listening to you talk and reading the work, that it’s not just an aesthetic pursuit, it’s almost a moral endeavor in the rightness of language. And I think there’s a very public aspect to that—that you feel a moral duty as the writer to get it right—that language is too incendiary, to use the phrase that you use when you talked about your mother, to get it wrong.
O’Brien: I wonder if it’s moral or if it’s obsessive. Moral, it’s true, it’s just the word carries in it that a book should be sedate, like a country diary of an Edwardian lady—which, by the way, I wish I could write. I’d be much better if I could write books that were more palatable. It is an impulse, a pulse, a compulsion, and certainly it allows for no rest at all. I noticed Rosalyn in the wings there walking about, and I thought, “Oh my God, how can she do it?” Anything that’s creative, whether it’s juggling, tightrope walking, writing, acting, or good dentistry, for that matter, requires such a truth and such an intent on the part of the doer. Where it might be called moral, would be in the person’s need to make that flawless and having a truth that you can’t contradict. But it’s not moral in the sense that—to go back to Anne Enright’s quote although I don’t, I have to confess to everyone here, which is a bit of a disappointment in our hedonist times, I don’t think that my books are very sexual at all, so where Anne Enright got this idea was, I imagine, a projection—that morality isn’t the business of writing, magic is, and finding that magic: that’s the journey.
Patterson: I should say at this stage, because we’re going to have to draw to a close quite soon, Anne’s review of The Light of Evening, which does begin in a very typical Anne Enright opening, goes on to say that over the subsequent—is it twenty-two now, books: novels and collections of short stories?
O’Brien: Well it’s like one’s age: one loses count, but I think yes.
Patterson: But over those books it became apparent what was actually remarkable about your writing and what had been remarkable from the start had not been sex, but honesty.
O’Brien: Oh!
Patterson: That’s what she said. And I suppose when I was talking about that morality, that pursuit, that however it’s going to be perceived, as the writer in all of your works you have gone where the writing has taken you at whatever cost.
O’Brien: Yes, as I say, I love magic, but I can’t bear dishonesty. I think the books that move me and that I continue to reread are the ones that strip—that just strip—away at all the subterfuge and external. Oh yes, it can lure the reader in, as all the great fairy tales do, the Grimm Brothers, I think were greatest writers—not the greatest ever, but in the great echelon. And it’s to get to that core, to get to the deepest place that those characters or that story can bring one. And I get quite a few letters from strangers—both the kindness and, a lot of the times, the unkindness, of strangers—and I notice that with a lot of letters I do get, and I am very thankful for them, they are from people, individuals, in a particular and heightened state; sometimes a bereavement, or illness, or fear or in another country, or whatever. And when I have read these things, I think I would be very lonely on Earth, I may be lonely on Earth anyhow, I would be much lonelier on Earth if I didn’t have books to read, and books to reread.
And it seems to me that writing—art—does many things; it amuses, it entertains, it enchants, it alters—to some extent—thinking, but what it does above all else is to touch the deepest, truest place of, for want of another word, I have to call the soul. And that, I think, is what many people who read, or who come today to this whole day event, want; either to receive or to give. And it’s that mute, but nevertheless mutual, transaction, that makes us continue to read in a world where literature, as you know as well as I do, is sidelined.
The world is raucous. The world is rackety. The world is full of television, noise, music; and reading and staying with the work is a very disciplined and holy occupation. Sartre said once, and I know what he meant—James Joyce would certainly object—but Sartre said that to read a book was to write it. And I think what he meant was that journey that, as readers, we make into a book, it is as if we are composing those very words while we are reading them.
Patterson: We started with The Country Girls and, of course, Madame Cassandra, and your most recent novel in a way goes back to where you began. It’s also dedicated to your mother and your motherland, and has a writer going back to her hometown and her mother.
O’Brien: I’d like to say of my mother, for all her objections of words, she wrote the most fluent, all-consuming letters, and I got them every day. Trunks of them.
[Interview concludes with a reading from The Light of Evening]