From Out to Lunch with William Crawley, Queen’s University, Belfast, 10 November 2010. Copyright © Out to Lunch with William Crawley, Queen’s University, Belfast. Reprinted by permission.
William Crawley: Welcome to my front room. I mean, this has now become such a homely space for me, I feel like it’s partly mine! Maybe Queen’s will mortgage it out to me someday. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to our conversation today and to involve you in the conversation as well, because Edna O’Brien is so many things in one life: a novelist, a short story writer, a playwright, a critic, a historian of language, a biographer, I think I can even throw the word journalist in if you won’t shy away from the word journalist as well, will you? Well, we’ll see. She is a writer, as simple as that. And she’s a writer that’s left her mark on the lives of other writers and inspired a new generation of writers that we take for granted in many ways in the post-Joycian period of writing, and she is a writer who has left her mark on Ireland and in her home beyond Ireland; but we’ll find out more about that in a minute. For now, please welcome to the stage the one, the only, Edna O’Brien.
Edna O’Brien: Hello.
WC: And you’re very welcome to Belfast, and the Great Hall, greater still today.
EO: It’s very nice.
WC: Isn’t it lovely, isn’t it? And I think Prince Charles, when he was opening this, he spotted somebody over there and said, “Is that one of my relatives?” And indeed it was.
EO: Well, Brian Boru might be lurking somewhere out there …
WC: Can we start by talking about Belfast, actually? Because, obviously, you’re a graduate of this University, an honorary graduate, and I was at your graduation ceremony. I was getting a degree the same day that Edna was getting her honorary doctorate; I remember it very well. And I just wanted to find out, first of all, how do you feel about Belfast and the North of Ireland?
EO: Well, how long have we? A couple of hours? I’ve been quite often to Belfast, and I do like it. What I find surprising, even in this day and age, people are very, very friendly and actually human. It’s a friendlier city, in ways, than Dublin or London. And this morning, I walked around looking for something—a flower shop—and I thought: to live in a city where you’re so near the mountains and you feel the sky is a huge thing. I don’t know enough to really answer your question thoroughly because I’m a tourist. That’s it. Well, I’m Irish. So you would be the person that I should ask that question of. We’ll have to get a different question.
WC: Well, you could come for research here, couldn’t you, and set a novel in Belfast, in the future?
EO: Well, I suppose I could if there are any ideas.
WC: We’ll make some offers by the end of the interview and see where we go with it.
EO: Alright. We’ll try it. We’ll try it.
WC: This is a big anniversary year for you: not only are you a writer that has continually, prolifically produced new writings, but also you can look back now over fifty years at the landscape of your own work. And this year we’re talking a great deal about The Country Girls, the fiftieth anniversary of The Country Girls.
EO: Yes, and also, I will be eighty years of age, I might as well admit it. I used to take a year or two or three off my age, but you know, people caught up with it.
WC: Wikipedia’s terrible for that.
EO: And you’re the man that at lunch, my new friend Mr. Crawley, he was eating very decorously and not drinking, and he—I’ll tell your story—he can consult Google for how many calories that little cabbage was. So equally, if I said, “Well I’ll be seventy-six this year,” you could have googled.
WC: I would have checked it. I already have checked it.
EO: So it is a year, but now, looking back is one thing, but one also has to live in the present; and as far as one can, live in a sort of hope in the mad world that we all inhabit to have some little river of hope for the future. And that is, somehow, harder as one gets older. Not just me, but lots of people. Because one gets a little bit more inner, and enclosed. I thank God and my personal history and the County Clare and a few other things, that I could write, can write, and hopefully always will write.
Fifty years of The Country Girls, as you mentioned. When I started The Country Girls, I moved to England. I had that child, he’s a grown man over there now, Carlo, and his brother and their father. And I was asked to write this book because I had been writing reader’s reports about novels submitted to publishers. And I was given the noble sum of £50. It’s not so bad, come to think of it. £50 by an English and American publisher to write a book. I was then, and am now, a little bit extravagant, profligate, even when I don’t have it in life. So I spent the £50. I bought my children some ammunition, I deeply disapproved, plastic ammunition. And in order to be, so to speak, to the man I was married to, a good wife, I bought a sewing machine. I have never used a sewing machine and I never intend to use a sewing machine. In short, the book had now to be written.
And I had left Ireland voluntary. In fact, I was glad to have left. And when I sat down, and when Carlo and Sasha were brought to school, at this wide window sill in this little house in S.W.20, it was miles from anywhere—you had to get a bus to get a bus—I sat down to write, and I did not know what I would write. The first words came “I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily, and then I remember to the old reason: my father had not come home.” And that was the start. And literally, this has happened to me nowadays, each day for five or six hours I just wrote this book. And it would be honorable of me to say it was written almost for me by a spirit. I was the messenger. And part of the luck with that situation was that I had left Ireland and home, but I didn’t know how deeply home, for better and sometimes painfully, was engraved in me.
It’s a fairly funny book, certainly funnier than the books I’m writing now, unfortunately. At least Baba is funny. Although the book had comedy in Baba, you know let’s feck about chocolate and all that was, of course, deemed bad. I mean the word. It has a youth in it, the energy is bigger—and to some extent—the defiance of youth.
What I did not foresee was, just as well, that the book would cause a little furor in my own county and, indeed, in my own house. There was no tradition of writers and I wanted to be a writer before I knew what being a writer was. It wasn’t written, as was thought, to ridicule or humiliate my own country. Why should I? There are a lot of things that I might not like about my own country, but there are the many things I love about it. It started with a nun from my convent saying, “We hear you have written a novel. We give credence and open mind.” Well I didn’t like the sound of that. There’s credence and credence …
Then there was the banning, which, as you know, Dublin, Ireland, rather, the south of Ireland, particularly Dublin, they were wizards about banning! They were inverse magicians! They were nameless. I can’t say they were blameless, but no one knew who they were. And the banning—anybody could have a book banned. Even using an anonymous name, you could pick three lines and send it in. So the book was banned. And that was way beyond me. I mean, I didn’t mind … I mean I minded, but I didn’t mind.
WC: You’d love to get a book banned now, wouldn’t you?
EO: Well, exactly! At that time, Myles na Gopaleen wrote a little column, and you know how witty he was, and he said, “Oh that cute one from the turnips!” Because he was always talking about turnips. He wished that he was banned. But my mother was very upset about it. There was a little burning of a book or two at the chapel grounds. And I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it because, maybe, someone didn’t know: my mother, naturally, told me about it, she said women fainted. And I said, well maybe turf smoke? And my mother did something that I don’t think she’d do now, but I mention it not to accuse the dead, but to give some sense of what the culture and the society and the world was in County Clare and Ireland and possibly here as well in 1960, she had taken a pen with black ink and had inked out every offending word in the book. I found the book in a bolster case after my mother had died. I was so angry. I was so angry. And what I think now is, my God, how frightened she must have been by that work, which is really two girls bursting for life. But what I came on a bit later—and then I’ll stop, I was just warming up—was the august correspondence between Charles Haughey who was the Minister of Culture—and something else, you know they doubled up in those days—
WC: Culture of Money, I think.
EO: And Archbishop McQuaid, and the Archbishop of Westminster. Little did I know that letters flowed between these hypocrites, if you want the true word. I was going to say big men. And they all deemed that the book should not be in the hands of any household. That it was, as it was said in the papers, “a smear on Irish womanhood.” I look back on it and I think, because I sometimes get requests from students, in fact, one the other day from Dublin that I think Carlo teaches, she asked me a rather innocent question: “Would I have written the book if I had known it was going to be banned and cause such a brouhaha?” And I wrote back and said I would have written the book, but I didn’t think about things like that. When you sit down to write, and I’m sure there are writers here, you cannot think who will like or dislike or hate this book. Philip Roth, my great friend who is full of wit, as an aside, his wittiest remark was in the paper the other day. Philip said, and you will like this, “For every reader born now, thirty readers are dying.” And he said to me once, you know Americans, “Kid, who do we write for? No one. Ourselves.” Not in totality, we hope, an egomaniacal, monomaniacal way, but you have no idea once you let the book or poem or drama out into the world. And I’m very glad—more than glad—that so many people have come today. I’m surprised, but I’m delighted.
WC: And it wasn’t just banned, it was also burned, wasn’t it?
EO: That’s the turf smoke, yes.
WC: By the local priests, yeah?
EO: Yes, yes. I think they’re a bit ashamed of that now, because I was in Scariff lately at the library—no library in the past—and that episode is wishing to be forgotten. There was no library, but there was one thing. And it shows how people, and I hope it will still happen, have a hunger for books, even if they’re not always that keen to buy a book. And in our village, one woman had managed to get a copy of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. And Rebecca! Oh boy did Scariff hop with the passion of Rebecca. It was loaned to hungry readers, but not by the consecutive page, so you got page 104 then you went back to page 3. Very hard to follow the plot.
Once, I saw another book, which I now possess, and actually think is a great book. Dracula by Bram Stoker. The cover of Dracula says, “her luscious lips reached towards him and the two canine teeth” and so on. And Dracula I saw—twice a year we had traveling players put up by amateur dramatics. And they’d come into the village and you’d hear about it two weeks before. Laid out on stone walls underneath a rock would be a buff poster with Dracula, East Lynne, Murder in the Old Red Barn. And they were my first introduction to theater. I think of any young person, any child, seeing for the first time something up there, on stage, actors would be taking tickets at the door all covered in pancake makeup and togas and that. And I remember Dracula, because they did the play of Dracula, very shortened, I have to confess, and Dracula had a very large safety pin, which was dragged across the heroines neck and then the fake blood came out.
So I had no education and a very rich education in that I did not go to university. I don’t regret it. I know I’m in a very esteemed building, but the thing about writing is, Virginia Woolf said this in a more formal way than I’m about to say it; to write, and keep writing, you have to read and keep reading and rereading. That’s your education. Like an athlete’s training every day, the rereading of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, Emily Brontë, Chekhov, anyone, as long as they’re great. Early in my life, I had no books, but later, when I got access to books, almost when I first got married, I was able to read, if you like, with the dedication and relish—which is a far more important word here—of that of a child or someone who never read. Where if I’d had a formal education, others, professors, would be telling one about a book. And therefore I count myself, in many ways, very lucky in life. However, I haven’t been lucky in love and I haven’t been lucky with houses. Could I mention those two things? Just so that no one thinks, “Oh her life is so good.”
WC: They’re almost literary themes, aren’t they?
EO: They sure are, they sure are.
WC: You mention Philip Roth. I think he says he writes 365 days of the year, eight hours a day.
EO: He’s very monk-like in his ways. He does write a lot. He does keep to himself a lot. He’s probably, without exaggeration, the funniest person I have ever met. That high gift of comedy, which is a mix of Groucho Marx and Kafka, but there is nothing without a price. And I am sure that high comedy, indeed I know he has written about this, comes with the downsides and the breakdown once or twice. He is dedicated to literature. And he has introduced me to a lot of books I would never read. I had never read The Magic Mountain, and he made me read it. But when I first met him, I used to cook, as Carlo knows, rather extensively for a lot of people. I had this Celtic, still have, but it’s getting a little harder as I get older—
WC: I gave you a beet root recipe earlier.
EO: Yes, I had this Celtic notion, that one makes, you know, a feast, a feast or a famine. I always cooked for myself and many people, easily sixty or seventy or a hundred. Crazy. But that was the first time Philip met me, because Claire Bloom was a friend of mine and she’d been in a film script I wrote. So he came to the house. And one of the things in this world that has often irked me, not you, with him, sometimes, and I’ll come back to Philip in one minute, sometimes journalists have come to the house, and often women journalists as well, and have, if you like, interviewed one’s hair. And one’s fireplace. And they have given, if you like, the caption or emblem of superficiality just because one manages to look half okay. But that night, in my house, Philip was a little condescending. And he made some remark about, oh, did I fit in a bit of writing in between making soup and cooking a goose. And I was rather, I didn’t like it. I didn’t react. And about a month later he rang me up and said, “I want to come and see you. I’m going to come and see you.” And I said that’s good. And he had read a book of mine called Night. And he knew that the mockery from the first time wasn’t fair. And that’s to show you he’s, what they call in some societies, a midge. But he’s also a very formidable man. Very formidable. And huge intelligence. Huge intelligence.
WC: Still trying to get a sense of how your imagination was unlocked as a writer to write the first book, because you didn’t have the literary training that some writers have in terms of going to university. You studied chemistry in the evening and pharmacy and worked in a shop.
EO: Oh, that was an education. Making suppositories, making emulsions, making worm powder—it’s good training for cooking, sorry to mention it.
WC: But what is it that, while you’re in London, what is it that frees you to start writing? Surely it’s not just the pressure of a £50 advance, is it?
EO: No, it’s in one, I think, even before one even knows what words are. I seem to be name dropping, and I promise, I’m not, certain writers I’ve had a chance to talk with. The great Samuel Beckett would not disagree, with whom I met and liked and admired more than any writer. I reread Samuel Beckett the way I would read prayer. And not just read it, feel it. I think that all the writers that I have met, and I have met many, some pretty awful to tell you the truth. Well, you know conceited and so on, and some not. But reading the diaries of writers, the letters of writers—Faulkner, Chekhov—this thing inside one, nothing to do with mother, father, relatives, anything. Samuel Beckett put it brilliantly to a preface to Jack Yeats’s drawings which were in a little book, and he said the artist who stakes his life has no brother and comes from nowhere. And actually, there’s a great truth in that. You do come from somewhere, and you have a great deal of people, blood relatives and such who don’t like what you write, but that’s another casualty of the work. I think it is a longing that can never actually be fulfilled: to get to the truth and the pith and the everythingness of life and human interaction. Kafka put it, great literature should take an axe to the frozen heart. Now that’s a tall order. However, that’s a great tall order.
Naturally when I started out with just with these little words, these words that I was mad about, I didn’t know about the axe to the frozen heart, what I think I knew was that I had a longing, and more than a longing, a determination. Because you have to have a determination to do it and keep doing it no matter what, no matter who doesn’t like you, no matter what, that’s your agenda; and one has to, and it doesn’t always make you the nicest or most accommodating person. Well, too bad. You have to do it. But I felt my own little world. And, indeed, my world is circumscribed. I don’t know big worlds. I don’t know what’s happening to people who live in awful camps. I don’t know what’s happening to women in Muslim countries married at the age of twelve. I read about these things, I see them on television, as we all do. I am very aware of the enormity of the world around me and unfortunately, the limitation of my own scope; my experience, my situation, etc. But what I do know, or have to keep knowing, have to keep believing is that if, in my own way, I can deliver, somehow, a little record of my own experience, that someone else, that you or she, or him or her, will identify with and that’s all I can do. And the only way I can do that is with the words. But it’s not just the words, as Joyce put it so simply, he said, “I have all the words, it’s a question of how to put those words together.” And it’s the intensity—intensity is a much mocked feeling and emotion. I detest a word that people use a lot, be cool. Why be cool when life is full of passion? Of love and hate and murders and marriages and dramas. Cool? Cool is for a drink. A soft drink, even. So that was my remains. My burning, burning feeling.
WC: Sometimes when people try to describe your work, certain words repeat themselves in discussions like “romantic love” and “passion,” but there is an immense disappointment and loss within your work.
EO: And fury.
WC: And fury. And I read someone the other day, people can say very cruel things about you as a writer. Someone described you the other day as the inventoress of Chick Lit. It seemed to me that was such a disparaging thing to say.
EO: Who is this person, let’s get them in here. Get your Google out!
WC: It seems to me, the difference between you and Chick Lit is the difference between advertising copy and poetry. There is a lyricism and a respect for language that is not always evident in romantic writings of that kind, but is very evident in your writing.
EO: Oh, I love this. You’re going to have to get the Chick Lit person. I tell you. I like this question, and we’ll talk about what romantic really is in a little bit, but the other week or so I was in Galway at a festival, and afterwards there was a bit of chatting and a nun, she said “I have kept this paper clipping for forty years hoping I’d meet you.” So I take the paper clipping and I think this is going to be lovely, and I’m back in the hotel that evening having a little glass of wine and I get the clipping out…. Oh my god! Savagery including “Edna O’Brien is the bargain basement Molly Bloom.” Well, you know something, it’s a good thing I’m not armed. I think it’s so easy to have a cheap shot at someone. And also the kind of books I write, some people love reading them, some people don’t. Because, again, they’re intense. I think if I were a man, or if I had taken, as the poor Brontë sisters had to do, a male pseudonym, let’s say I called myself Edmund O’Brien, they wouldn’t talk of Chick Lit or whatever bargain basement. It’s less and less, but there has been a relegation of such, a dismissal and a scorn of women writers or women artists. So that is one of the things you have to take, but not take lying down.
As regards to your question, William, of romantic, I think, in life, I have been a little romantically unwise. I don’t think my fiction or my plays are romantic. They’re full of yearning. They’re full of misplaced emotions and passions. They’re full of love, rejected love, unrealized love, but that isn’t romantic as the word has tended to be cheapened. And one of the things about being a writer, one of the many things, is one has to take all of the ugly things and somehow keep going. Byron, on whom I wrote a short book last year called Byron in Love, put it very sensibly, except, of course, he only applied it to men. In a letter to Shelley he said, “A man should calculate on his powers of resistance before entering the literary life.” And it’s very, very true.
Every job you have to have the power of resistance, but the trouble with the writer and being attacked is the writing itself is so hard. The finding it is truly like digging for gold. And when a story, or even a little paragraph comes to one, it comes with hard work and rewriting and rewriting, but it comes as a little miracle to the doer. Now to get attacked for that is very hard going, plus the fact that you might wobble or have the old self-doubt. And then sit down the next morning and start the next page. That is, I think, one of the hardest things about writing, the ongoing have to keep doing it. And have to hope that it will come. Like, at the moment I have a collection of short stories, Saints and Sinners—
WC: Listen up for the book program for next year.
EO: Yes, this is for next year. And I’m supposed to be writing a memoir and it’s causing me unwarranted—no, not unwarranted, unspeakable—anxiety and fear and hesitation and all the usual things, only worse. And I dream at night of this. It’s only a book after all, I saw a sign once on a wall in London—two signs—it says, and this is outside a football grounds in Fulham, one said, “Kierkegaard Rule o.k.”—as if anyone knew what that was—and the other said, “Rock n Roll o.k.” It’s only a book, okay, but it inhabits and engrosses every waking and sleeping moment of my life. And one dream, recurring—I write by hands and by pen. Even today I had to wash off a bit of the old ink because pens leak on an airplane. Someone should invent pens that don’t leak on an airplane—I was dreaming I had written pages on this manuscript on white foolscap with purple ink, but all the words had slid into one another. So when I’d wakened, I wasn’t exactly confident. Should we talk of funny things now? I’m boring them.
WC: Would you be a writer had you stayed in Ireland?
EO: I think I might have been in and out of a lunatic asylum, some of the time. In 1958 is when I actually left Ireland. The book came out in 1960. I wrote it in the three weeks of Christmas in 1958 and the beginning of 1959. I wrote with great pain and great sorrow and a lot of vitality, as well, but I wrote in total ignorance. I didn’t think of my mother or the parish priest or the woman in the post office who said I should be kicked naked through the town, she said to my father. I wondered why naked? Why not fully dressed? I didn’t think of any of that. Thank God, nor couldn’t.
If I had stayed in Ireland at that time and the book came out and there was a lot of commotion about it. And a lot of wild, heated things said and said to me and anonymous letters about sewage, sinking in my own sewage, you know. It’s nothing compared to Russia where people are sent to a gulag. It’s nothing. And I again want to stress that, but at the same time, it wasn’t exactly a birthday party for me. If I had stayed, then I might have been more frightened to pick up my pen to write the next book and the next. Ireland has fed me and continues to do so in all sorts of ways. First of all, temperament. I write in the English language, but I’m an Irish writer, my temperament is that particular. Secondly, that particular kind of language. Thirdly, I come from a place, a parish, a field around home, Dewsboro, that house, that has a most ongoing, if you like, pathological indelible effect on me. It’s the actualities, the ghosts of that place, the feelings put in me that are still there. Feelings of fear, I was very frightened as a child. And also full of a kind of baffled wonder. I felt there were some marvelous things, but I didn’t know what they were. And the fear was fear of many things. Fear of God, which was a fear of church. Fear of parents. It was a world of constant subjugation and people watching. So one’s little sins—or big sins or whatever they were—felt more enormous because of this overall watching. And this was from all sides. What I forgot, or failed to notice, was they were being watched too. So Ireland has given me a big casket.
WC: You wouldn’t mind the moral surveillance without the hypocrisy, though. The hypocrisy makes the moral surveillance particularly galling.
EO: I hate hypocrisy. It abounds. Not just the Irish. Every country. It’s a big disguise. I was reading, as I said to you at lunch today, George Bush, who is now the white-haired boy again. I promised not to talk about politics, but I have to bring this in. He’s the white-haired man, in the best sense of the word, of the Republican Party again, and he says that water boarding and torture and everything in the prison at Guantanamo actually stopped terrorist actions. But British Intelligence, and if you’d like, they’re on the same side—Britain and the U.S.A.—about the war in Iraq and other terrible catastrophes, even British Intelligence has disputed it. Now that is not only hypocrisy on the part of George Bush, it’s total lies. And a chutzpah saying, “I am a great guy who prevented deaths.” That’s not the truth. That is it on a huge global and catastrophic scale. But in our own lives, too, I often think of people I know and I like and yet in social situations behave a little differently. Where a little bit of the posh of hypocrisy comes in.
WC: Yeah, and then they pop out and do a little water boarding in the back when you’re not looking. You mention Joyce a lot and Beckett. Joyce said that Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.
EO: Yes, he felt it.
WC: Do you feel that way too? Do you feel eaten up and spat out?
EO: Well, it’s not all spat out. It’s written out in beautiful prose. I think Joyce, like Beckett, are very divided about Ireland. Joyce’s childhood—everyone has read Richard Ellman’s book and then I wrote a book about Joyce. I loved Richard Ellman and his book. Joyce, for a man to come from a family so poor, flitting from house to house overnight. A sparring father. A drinking father. A man who said to his wife, “You’ve given birth to thirteen children, die and be done with it.” That’s not exactly happy family time. He had tremendous obstacles and hated suffocation and hypocrisy and jurisdiction of Mother Church. Nevertheless, he was extremely influenced by it. His piece on the fires of hell and purgatory, those pages of Portrait, oh boy, no Jesuit could do them as well. I mean they’re fantastic. So he was very influenced by his upbringing and his church and he said one of the three greatest influences in his life was his mother’s kiss, the holy host on his tongue—holy communion—and a prostitute’s lingual kiss. They were the three things that mixed in. For the writer, you need conflict. You don’t write out of a happy place. You don’t write because you’re making jam. Nothing wrong with making jam, but you have to have conflict. He had it a plenty.
WC: Sort of birth, marriage, and death, he’s describing. Isn’t it?
EO: His intelligence for language was something phenomenal. Giant. On every level: scatological, religious, emotional. He broke language. It’s like he discovered the atomic bomb. So he could not have remained in Ireland, and when he left, they said he could have had a good job on the Irish Independent as a reporter, but I don’t think that would have suited him. So he was very cruel and offensive about Ireland, including saying she was the sow that eats her farrow. And so was Beckett, who, as you know, revered James Joyce at first and went so far as to wear the shoes, that didn’t fit him, the same as Joyce’s shoes and smoked in the same way Joyce did.
But it’s a complicated thing. It’s both wanting to be back in the womb of the land or the actual mother or the archetypal mother. To be back at where the first source of—for want of a better word I’ll say—inspiration occurred and the reasons for it and also to flee that land, flee that mother, flee that suffocation. And it’s that dichotomy, that crisis, that contradiction in the self and in those two gigantic authors that created such lasting work. Because when you think of it ultimately, when you think of Beckett’s plays, sure, they’re funny. But what’s the greatest thing about them? They touch the human person. They touch the soul, as deep as you can get. It’s a cry for night, now weep in darkness. There’s no less hope.
But [Beckett] was a very funny man as well. I once visited him in his area of Paris where he lived just towards the end of his life and we discussed graveyards. He was very surprised that I have a graveyard in Ireland. He was very disapproving—but that’s another story. I go up to this hotel called the Pullman Hotel where there were busloads of people and their luggage and so on. And to give you a little idea of the man he was, he was, of course, a great intellect, but he had a childlikeness still in him. And he said, “Edna, do you think the air is gray up here?” It was awful. It’s the same air as anywhere else. But somebody else, I was in Paris recently, I had a book come out, and somebody told me, whenever they were out walking, they always saw Beckett walking. He walked the streets of Paris, and yet he wrote—he didn’t call it Dublin—but he wrote about Ireland. So Ireland was quite a fount to come from.
WC: It’s a bit of a haunting, isn’t it?
EO: It’s more than a haunting. It’s—what’s the thing you said that vampires do? What’s the word along with haunting? It sucks one’s blood, I suppose. And that’s both disturbing and fertilizing.
WC: A lot of the language you use to describe inspiration and the writing of it seems religious. You know, the miracle moment, the spirit almost giving it to you. Would you say you’re particularly religious?
EO: I’d say I sort of am, to tell you the truth.
WC: You don’t share that with Joyce and Beckett.
EO: Joyce asked for a priest on his deathbed and the priest refused to give absolution. There are two different things. There is God and the idea of God, and the Holy Ghost with the forty tongues and the gift of the tongues. There’s that, what shall we call it, unproven, but nevertheless search for that thing. Nietzsche put it, if God didn’t exist then man would have to invent him. Very true remark. That is a spiritual quality, a spiritual ingredient in people, whoever, or whatever version of God that person carries. And then there is the Church. And, if you like—no, not if you like—it’s a fact. I don’t know anything about the Muslim religion and their clerics, but if you read the Catholic Church and the cruelty of the Catholic Church down the centuries and the inquisition. I mean, when I told my mother that Popes had married—i.e., the Borgias had married. She was pounding potatoes and I thought she’d kill me with the pounder. So the actual politics of the church ongoingly is quite different to the longing for, search for, finding of true faith. They’re different things. Now the Church won’t agree. If the Pope was here today, he’d strongly disagree with me, but I would also disagree with him. So I find it, therefore, and I’ve used the term several times before, a split in one.
I want a sense of God, we all do. I’m not being sentimental. I want the help of God, if that is possible, but I cannot accept—and it’s not that I want to be wayward, I’m not suggesting that—some of the teachings and tenets of the Catholic Church are very hard. If I were or you were a woman in a poor part of South America where he went, Pope John Paul II, and said that contraception was a mortal sin, and I had thirteen children, and I still wanted to feel close to God, that’s not good, is it? Every religion is dogmatic. And every religious teacher is dogmatic, because they have to be. In their own way, they’re as dogmatic as Stalin was. Communism was a religion. A secular religion. So that what I am asking in a world where people love a control over other people and are judgmental. I’m asking to allow that the spirit be free. It’s a tall order.
WC: Well, You brought a few things up with George Bush. Let me ask you a few things about the border here in Ireland and whether it’s as written in bold as it once was? Is it fading out? Is there more of a connectedness between the two parts of this island today?
EO: Absolutely. You know that, you live here. Oh, absolutely. And I know it.
WC: More understanding across the border, perhaps?
EO: I think understanding in theory and understanding in life are two different things, but at least there is a commencement. There is. I’ll tell you a story, it’s not about now, but it’s relevant. I wrote a book called House of Splendid Isolation which was a man in the North, a guerrilla fighter part of whatever group, IRA, INLA, it doesn’t matter. That nationalist fighter, it was about him going to the south and finding that people in the South were as against him as in the North. I was researching this book, not as a tourist to your fine province, but as someone from the South having read about all the murders on all the sides, the carnage, the tragedy. I was very aware of them.
I met a man down in County Clare who had shot an IRA man on the day of a robbery at a post office. The robbery went wrong. The woman in the post office had taken up a gun. So the two men fled and the guard was called about four miles from where I come and there was a shootout on the road just near a place called Feakle. And I went to see the guard to talk to him and I said, what was it like, Albert. And it was full John Wayne, he had gotten out of the car and quick movie time. And I said, what did you feel Albert, when he was left with the dead body? He said, when you’re shooting, it’s 50/50—he’s from Cork, Albert—but when you shot him dead, it’s a different thing, because we’re all Irish, under the skin. I thought that was an extraordinary profound remark. Not just a remark, a statement. So that was my trigger for coming. That was now … twenty years ago. And as we all know things are better now. And they will be better still.
When I was researching, I remember going to Long Kesh and talking to Protestants and Catholics and actually people in prison are dying to talk to you. I remember talking to a Protestant boy whose name I don’t know, but I remember the conversation very well. And he told me that one Christmas he was in the infirmary. And I just give you this one thing, this tiny example. But tiny things are what happen to make bigger things happen. He was in the infirmary and they were a bit short of staff, it being Christmas day. So Catholic and Protestant were near each other. And this was the first time he had genuinely, truly ever spoken to a Catholic in there or even before he went in. He said, “I couldn’t believe that,” he said, “that the guy didn’t have two horns.” And he meant that. He wasn’t being ugly or radical. It’s these innate beliefs people have, whether it’s here or in Iraq between Sunnis, it’s this innate belief that is fed to them by their rulers on whatever side, and fed by the climate and ferment of hatred to believe the worst. And when you say to me this, I—of course there is change; of course there is room for a lot more change. And in its way, although art may seem a luxury or elitist, and some people think it is, I don’t think it is. I think it as necessary as breathing.
Art can bridge some gap, so can sport, between people of different divides. There is that and there is time; time in which it is very hard for people on either side to forget, or to forgive. It is very hard to forgive terrible things, but they have to. They have to—it’s not that they forget them, they have to know what that war was and why that war. Why? Why did you have to have British soldiers on these streets? You have to go back and back. And I can well see that somebody sitting alone would say, “Well you see my son or my daughter … ” and describing it to me. And I can well see how the horror of that never ever passes, but it is to find some reasonableness and equanimity. The fuelers of hatred are people that I blame.
Are we finished?
WC: We could go on forever, what are you talking about! And we may well.
EO: I have no idea. I don’t want to keep anyone, but I do want to say, you’ve been very nice to me and to tell you in the audience, that sitting at the lunch I was a bit shaky, a bit nervy, and I said William, do you think you could tell me the first question? And he said, I have no idea what it is.