Edna O’Brien was a great Irish icon and in the afterglow of her long, productive and famous life, it is given us to wonder what made her seem more than real to us. It was not just that her writing was fierce and beautiful, or that her first book met the historical moment so well it unloosed some difficulty in the national psyche. It was not simply her flair for the dramatic, or her bearing, which was both fragile and indomitable.
Pliant in conversation, O’Brien remained unyielding in how she lived, worked and believed, returning always to her desk, and then back out to the wide, judgemental world. She seemed, at times, lit from within; reaching deep in every conversation, every book and personal encounter. There was also the blaze of her love for Ireland, a country that had hurt her deeply – the way Americans especially saw her as quintessentially Irish, rarely failing to mention the green eyes, the auburn hair, her mellifluous fluency.
O’Brien was famous and scandalous from the first moment she entered public life. She lived in a swirl of the projections of others, and she seemed to understand what all that entailed; sometimes she seemed to revel in it, though it frightened her too.
O’Brien came of age in a time when to be an artist was to be interested in greatness, when artists expected to take risks, seek truth and give their all. This high style also contained ideas of woundedness and sacrifice, especially from a woman: the artist must be open, must surrender themselves to access deep, unspoken truths. Writing a book was, for O’Brien, “a delirious journey”; she was amazed, each time, that she had come through it intact. “I am surprised by my own sturdiness, yes, but I do not think that I am unscarred. Such things as driving a car or swimming are quite beyond me. In a lot of ways I feel a cripple.”
She was a woman unafraid of the mighty Catholic Church, but who trembled at the sound of a thunderstorm. Some people found this blend of strength and vulnerability hard to align, others were unsettled by the way she mixed the sacred and profane. For all her delicacy, O’Brien never failed to bring the primal into the room with her. The result was early vilification of her work, followed by an unease that was sometimes hard to name.
Late into her celebrity, she complained of being “persecuted” and this seemed like something she might be imagining until you saw the open, jeering misogyny of a few critics on the page. O’Brien brought things out in people – not always the best things – so it has to be firmly said how much she was admired, feted and adored, how clear was the light she shone for the writers who followed her, who took courage from her courage and strength from her greater sacrifice. O’Brien lived through times that were appalling for some women and unpleasant for all. She was the lightning rod: her work cleared the air.
Perhaps understandably, given the fuss, O’Brien claimed she was not in charge of what happened on the page. One day in her late 20s, smitten by the clarity of Hemingway’s prose, she picked up her pen and three weeks later, The Country Girls was done. “The novel wrote itself” – she was just the messenger. “And all the time I was writing it I couldn’t stop crying, although it is a fairly buoyant, funny book.” She had just left Ireland and the book was a reclamation of the girlhood she had lost: the difference between remembering and imagining was very small.
“This recollection, or whatever it is, invades me,” she told her friend Philip Roth about her writing process. This is the reason her descriptions were so fresh and intense: the vividness of the experience was not within her control. “It is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it . . . It happens, as you well know . . . through one’s dreams, through chance and, in my case, through the welter of emotion stimulated by a love affair and its aftermath.”
Her muse fed on strong emotion, but this emotion did not have to be romantic. In old age, she would say it was driven by fear. “If you look at an animal and it’s frightened, it’s more aware of everything.”
O’Brien’s father had been a violent, nasty drunk. Edna wrote him into a play, after he died, with all “his anger, his sexuality, his rapaciousness”. It was her attempt at forgiveness, she said – and it worked. Just like him, she lost a fortune (or at least a house) during her great “reckless period” in London, when she entertained the literary stars and celebrities of the day. Money was a great theme, on and off the page. For most of her life, O’Brien earned her own way and lived alone.
Despite the air of rapture about her creativity, she knew herself to be “obsessive” and “industrious”. Notebook after notebook was filled with the purple ink also favoured by Virginia Woolf. She researched deeply and spread her novels-in-progress all about her living space, relentless in her search for the right shape, the right movement or juxtaposition, the right word. She wrote out loud. “I speak the words . . . Everything is very important – the landscape, the story, the character – but the rhythm and musicality and the spell of language, that’s what it is. Otherwise you’d put it on a postcard.”
The result of this work ethic was a remarkable run of late books. Girl, her last novel, is wonderfully impatient and deft. Her prose, in her 80s, was more assured and surprising than ever. Perhaps she had finally found a freedom from those feelings of ‘persecution’ that women intuit all their lives and, unlike Edna, find hard to name.
She found a wellspring of linguistic energy in the work of Joyce. His was the first serious book she picked up, when she was working as a pharmacist in Cabra, Dublin, and his work never stopped giving. “No other writer has taught me what Joyce taught me, which is to get to the pure, to the thing that hurts, to the thing that moves.”
I sometimes think that the difference between men and women in Irish public life, when I was growing up, was that men never admitted to feeling hurt in any way, and that women were expected to speak of nothing else. O’Brien took this interest in damage and made it transcendent. She was for a while, a client of the psychiatrist RD Laing (another difficult, drinking man), and the way she spoke about art owed something to the murky truths unearthed in psychoanalysis. “Writing is an eminently masochistic exercise,” she said. Women writers get a double dose, indeed, because they have “both the masochism of the woman and that of the artist”.
The books after the Country Girls trilogy deal with the interior lives of women and the embodied drama of reproduction. Despite this, O’Brien was afraid of feminists and their “cudgels” who, she thought, found her too abject. In her middle period, she wrote with horror and sympathy about brutal men, and sometimes described them as attractive. She sought the company and protection of “alpha” male writers, some of whom had poor enough manners around women. Norman Mailer, the wife-stabber, kissed her “shyly” in a church in Brooklyn. Roth was an admirer. Beckett, whose manners were impeccable, was always kind. At a time when her reputation seemed on the wane in Ireland – if not elsewhere – I remember gracious speeches and plaudits from Heaney and John Banville.
Her writing heroes were also male, though O’Brien claimed them for the distaff side. Joyce, she said, wanted to be a woman. “He called himself ‘a womanly man’.” Flaubert was like a woman: “There he was, in Rouen, yearning for the bright lights of Paris and hectic affairs, yet deliberately keeping away from all that, isolating himself, in order to burn and luxuriate in the affliction of his own emotions.”
These are not, I hope, criticisms. O’Brien survived forces that silenced and crushed who knows how many potential women writers, so her strategies and contradictions must be regarded as salutary. She kept moving; her books changed from one decade to the next, she thrived. In later life, O’Brien felt she might finally be appreciated in Ireland by a younger audience and she became more trusting. A woman who was once suspicious of feminism became a great feminist heroine by sticking to the truth as she knew it, by giving her all, every time. She did it by being magnificent.
For all she suffered after the publication of The Country Girls, it was the response of her mother that O’Brien found most undermining. As a child, she sought to protect her mother from her father’s anger, and they loved each other fiercely. Edna was left, in adulthood, with “all-embracing guilt” and a sense of her mother “over my shoulder, judging”. This, along with her husband’s jealousy, robbed her of the pleasure of her early success: “I felt no fame. I was married. I had young children [Marcus and Carlo]. All I could hear out of Ireland from my mother and anonymous letters was bile and odium and outrage.”
Edna never left Ireland. Or she never left the Ireland of her childhood, which was always waiting to swamp her in memory and sensation. She could not live here either; the country was too cruel a place for a woman like her. Now, the bile is gone, the odium long spent; the country has changed to meet her. At long last, we can welcome her home.
She has, she said, “a very lovely grave” on a holy island on Lough Derg. It belongs to her mother’s family, though her mother is buried in a more sociable place. “Whereas I want the birds, and the old monasteries that are ruined, and the lake and just the song of nature.”