Language is my tool, I want words to breathe on the page, but feeling is my agenda.
“Who’s Afraid of Edna O’Brien?” asks an early interviewer in Conversations with Edna O’Brien. When the question was posed in 1967, O’Brien had written six novels. With over fifty years of published novels, biographies, plays, telecasts, short stories, and more, it is hard not to be awed by her accomplishments. An acclaimed and controversial Irish writer, O’Brien saw her early works, beginning with The Country Girls in 1960, banned and burned in Ireland, but often read in secret. Before she was famous, she was infamous. Her contemporary work continues to spark debates on the rigors and challenges of Catholic conservatism and the struggle for women to make a place for themselves in the world without anxiety and guilt. The raw nerve of emotion at the heart of her lyrical prose provokes readers, challenges politicians, and proves difficult for critics to place her.1
In these interviews, O’Brien finds her own critical voice and moves interviewers away from a focus on her life as the once infamous Edna toward a focus on her works. Parallels between Edna O’Brien and her literary muse and mentor, James Joyce, are often cited in interviews such as Philip Roth’s description of The Country Girls as “rural ‘Dubliners’” (1984). While Joyce is the centerpiece of O’Brien’s literary pantheon, allusions to writers such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett, and Woolf become a medium for her critical voice. In conversations with contemporary writers Philip Roth and Glenn Patterson, O’Brien reveals a sense of herself as a contemporary writer. The final interview included here, with BBC personality William Crawley at Queen’s University Belfast, is a synthesis of her acceptance and fame as an Irish writer and an Irish woman, and an affirmation of her literary authority.
December 14, 1967, the date of the first interview in this collection, just one day shy of O’Brien’s thirty-seventh birthday, she is being interviewed at University College Cork—at a teach-in, a sign of the modest social rebellions beginning in an otherwise very conservative Catholic Ireland. She is there because she is emblematic of that nascent rebellion. O’Brien has, by 1967, published five novels, all banned in Ireland. Her message to the students at the teach-in is that “she wishes them, especially the young people of Ireland, to be free from guilt.” Like the students at the teach-in, O’Brien’s writing challenged and discomfited the Irish establishment by giving voice to women in a society where women were still disempowered. Relatively young as an independent country and having felt less of the direct social impacts of World War I and World War II, Ireland is just beginning to find its way as a modern society. Mother Ireland and Mother Church spoke, for the most part, with the same voice until the 1970s. The special position of the Catholic Church in the Irish Constitution was removed by referendum in 1973 leading to more open debates of women’s rights and issues. Some of the social issues that would have concerned the University College Cork students in 1967 had only just found their way to a small segment of Irish society through the advent of the Irish National Television Service in 1962. This then is the milieu for the reception of Edna O’Brien’s writing in 1960s Ireland.
Mary Maher’s 1967 Irish Times interview, “Who’s Afraid of Edna O’Brien,” suggests something of the attitude toward O’Brien and her writing and is representative even in its title of the tone of many of the early interviews. The title is an allusion to the 1966 film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? based on Edward Albee’s play. The comparison is apt. The film, starring Elizabeth Taylor,2 provoked some of the same reactions for its “scandalous language” spoken by a woman as did Edna O’Brien’s early novels. Maher’s interview reflects the “what she looks like, what she writes about” paradox, a recurrent theme throughout O’Brien’s early interviews: “and she looked perfectly lovely … the girl who writes about guilt, sex, scandal, and disheveled lives.” In a 2010 interview with William Crawley, O’Brien comments on her irritation with people who have interviewed her hair and her house as emblems of her and thus tagged her as superficial: “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.” This ironic disconnect is present in many of the interviews, the exceptions being interviewers who know her well. Some interviewers are clearly impressed by her appearance and somewhat intimidated by her work. Such interviews are as much about the lovely, scandalous Edna as they are about her formidable literary accomplishments. She is correct in implying that such interviews have had an impact on the critical assessment of her work. Although her literary reputation is now largely secure, being an attractive woman, particularly in the setting of an interview, was not, for O’Brien, in the late twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, a literary asset.
Though the 1970s begins with the publication of A Pagan Place, an experimental narrative written in the second person, there is little discussion about O’Brien’s stylistic innovations in the interviews of the 1970s. A Pagan Place is the sixth, and last, of O’Brien’s novels to be banned in Ireland though its setting and characters remain in the west of Ireland. Similarly, Night, a dream soliloquy, another of O’Brien’s experiments in narrative style, published in 1972, is not the focus of serious critical discussion until much later. It is Philip Roth who takes the novel into serious critical consideration in the 1980s. Interviews generally follow the arc of O’Brien’s critical reception, with fewer of them in the 1970s.
By the 1980s, O’Brien has established a literary reputation apart from her Country Girls. She is interviewed as a writer and her work receives serious critical attention by such interviewers as writers Philip Roth and Shusha Guppy (Paris Review). In these interviews, O’Brien creates a parallel narrative of herself and her work. Read through the nearly fifty years covered by the interviews included in this collection, Edna O’Brien is initially identified with her rebellious Country Girls in her early works, and she does not discourage this identification.
In 1986, her Country Girls undergo a transformation from the initial publication in three separate novels (The Country Girls [1960], The Lonely Girl [1962; republished as The Girl with Green Eyes, 1964], and Girls in Their Married Bliss [1964]) into a literary incarnation as The Country Girls Trilogy. The subjective Country Girls are now a literary object. O’Brien adds an epilogue to the trilogy, though she maintains that she has never been satisfied with it. This publication of The Country Girls Trilogy marks a turning point toward a more rigorous critical reception of O’Brien’s work. Interviewers and reviewers now engage with her work as literature and with O’Brien as a literary figure. In 1987, she publishes a collection of short stories, A Fanatic Heart, with an introduction by Philip Roth. She has, by now, an established international critical reputation, one quite apart from her persona as the infamous Irish country girl.
Through the 1980s, some of her literary pantheon, including Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, become subjects of plays and nonfiction works. This pantheon also crowds her interviews, sometimes set up like icons on an altar, both literally and figuratively. Many interviewers discuss books by these writers open on O’Brien’s desk to specific pages and pictures of idolized writers displayed in her study. O’Brien’s allusions to other writers effectively create a narrative of herself as writer. In addition to Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, a small sample of others that recur most frequently in the interviews include Chekhov, Shakespeare, the Brontë sisters, Flaubert, Proust, and Tolstoy. Names of writers are a kind of leitmotif in the interviews, just as they, and their characters, become subjects in her work such as Virginia Woolf in her play Virginia and her biography of James Joyce. The sheer numbers, in some cases topping over thirty in a single interview, function at times like a Greek chorus, commenting on O’Brien’s sense of herself as writer. The writer’s pantheon is one of the most consistent features of the interviews since, as O’Brien repeatedly asserts, her literary education is not formal, but rather a consequence of her unmediated and capacious reading. Her references to writers are also a mode of critical discourse functioning as a code, a way not only for her to interpret the interviewer, but for the audience to understand her.
By the 1990s and into the early 2000s, O’Brien’s work returns to contemporary Ireland. Her eye for the underlying emotional current of events is as sharp as ever, but the sense of personal identification evident in earlier interviews is gone. In her 1992 interview with Irish Times writer Eileen Battersby, O’Brien is neither subject nor object; she speaks directly, for herself, and about her writing process. Battersby notes a “rawness of feeling” in O’Brien’s fiction that may make her work more appealing in the U.S. and Britain than Ireland. O’Brien responds that now her writing “is more savage” and that she “is more savage.” The Battersby interview spends only a brief moment on The Country Girls, to discuss O’Brien’s representation of female experience. O’Brien suggests that her concerns are different from what they were thirty years ago, that now she focuses on “the universality of the female experience,” a clear shift away from The Country Girls.
Beginning in the mid 1990s, O’Brien publishes a trilogy of novels about modern Ireland (House of Splendid Isolation [1994], Down by the River [1996], and In the Forest [2002]), writing about individuals tangled in contemporary conflicts. These conflicts are rooted in some of the same fears and repression that forced her Country Girls to flee from Ireland in her earliest works. In each of these novels, O’Brien presents characters whose emotional complexities are so finely rendered that the characters force the reader to sympathize with them even as we may violently disagree with, and ultimately condemn, their actions. In 1990, Edna O’Brien also begins a series of interviews at Long Kesh prison3 in Northern Ireland to create the character at the center of her 1994 novel, House of Splendid Isolation. The protagonists, a “guerilla fighter” from Northern Ireland on the run to the Republic of Ireland and an elderly woman who is taken hostage in her own house, discover that they are both hostages to their own warped history. In the interview with William Crawley at Queen’s University Belfast, O’Brien relates some of her experiences during her research for House of Splendid Isolation. As she reflects on the Troubles, a period of political unrest and violence in Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the late 1990s, she remembers a story told to her by a Protestant boy meeting a Catholic boy on Christmas Day in the Long Kesh prison infirmary, the first Catholic he had ever met: “‘I couldn’t believe that,’ he said, ‘that the guy didn’t have two horns.’ And he meant that,” O’Brien says. “It’s these innate beliefs people have.” This kind of epiphany informs the conversations between the protagonists in House of Splendid Isolation. The venue and the tone of this interview at Queen’s University Belfast, a prestigious university in Northern Ireland, with Ireland’s most famous woman writer—a woman, a Catholic from the west of Ireland living in London—is a marker of the ways in which Edna O’Brien’s writing career so often delineates the social history of Ireland during the last five decades.
Published in 1996, Down by the River is based on the historic 1992 “Miss X” case. O’Brien clearly intends to relate the experiences of a child victim of incest, and the intense and often violent reactions to the victim by those opposed to her seeking an abortion. Down by the River is marked by its relative absence from conversations with interviewers, often being overshadowed by House of Splendid Isolation. The Belfast Agreement in 1998 marking the official end to the Troubles—and that House of Splendid Isolation is so close to the emotional core of the Troubles—likely explains the novel’s prominence in the interviews.
The 2002 interview “Deep Down in the Woods” with the Observer writer Robert McCrum discusses the third novel in the series, In the Forest. The novel is a psychological investigation of the person who murders a woman, her child, and a priest in the west of Ireland. Edna O’Brien’s fictional treatment of the triple murder, which occurred less than a decade before the publication of the book, stirs considerable controversy. Her response to the question, “What is In the Forest about?” suggests that O’Brien is not following a new sensationalist theme, but yet again examining one familiar in her works—the darker recesses of Irish history: “Ostensibly it’s about a triple murder in a forest, but I believe that the novelist is the psychic and moral historian of his or her society. So it’s about that part of Ireland I happen to know very well. It’s about that part of Ireland, and the darkness that still prevails.” O’Brien’s statement parallels one she made in 1992 when talking to Eileen Battersby, thematically tying the three works together: “I love Ireland and I hate Ireland. It has given me psychic soil, spiritual soil, and physical soil.” This period of O’Brien’s writing is marked by her absent presence; she is always in the background, but her works now outweigh her infamy.
In these interviews, James Joyce, O’Brien’s mentor and muse, is a central figure. Joyce becomes the subject of a biography by O’Brien in 1999. For O’Brien, writing a biography of Joyce is something of a spiritual incarnation. She has been immersed in the life and works of Joyce since she purchased a copy of T. S. Eliot’s Introducing James Joyce at the age of nineteen. A copy of Joyce lying open on O’Brien’s desk is noted by almost every interviewer who interviews O’Brien in her home. And it is a rare interview in which Joyce is not referenced by O’Brien. She not only speaks about Joyce and his work, she often speaks through him when she makes a point about her writing, about Ireland, or the role of the writer. In a 1999 interview with Peter Guttridge, “Schooling for Scandal,” O’Brien relates the experience of finding in her initial reading of Joyce, “some similarities … and that the key for me to write would be to go into my own life and to dig there.” It seems something of an understatement for O’Brien who is sometimes seen as Joyce’s female literary successor. Philip Roth’s interview with O’Brien quotes Frank Tuohy’s essay: “[W]hile Joyce, in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was the first Irish Catholic to make his experience and surroundings recognizable, ‘the world of Nora Barnacle (the former chambermaid who became Joyce’s wife) had to wait for the fiction of Edna O’Brien.’”
Writer Glenn Patterson looks back on O’Brien’s long writing career, and sees at the core of O’Brien’s relationship with Joyce a shared understanding of language as “a moral endeavor in the rightness of language … that language is too incendiary to get it wrong.” O’Brien responds, “I wonder if it’s moral or if it’s obsessive. Anything that’s creative … requires such a truth, such an intent on the part of the doer.” Such truth and honesty, for O’Brien, as a woman writer whose work now bridges two centuries, has come at a cost. Gender was for her, “the fourth net.’”4 Patterson, commenting on the totality of her work as a writer suggests that “as the writer in all of your works you have gone where the writing has taken you at whatever cost” (2007). Perhaps this is the resolution of her fame and infamy.