First there is the energy, the directness, the ageless, old-world glamour, invariably undercut by a natural anxiety. Edna O’Brien is a worrier; she has always been at the mercy of an active mind simultaneously engaged with several concerns. A dreamer, though most emphatically a worker, she fusses like a girl, while also issuing orders: “You must eat before we talk.”
At once charming and bossy, she is an earthy, concerned grandmother who feeds the traveller, observes me with the intensity of a doctor studying a reticent patient and fires questions on the subject of how I survived the nightmare journey from Heathrow.
Suddenly, the physical distance between Dublin and London becomes epic, but O’Brien, long based in England, knows both her Ireland and the Ireland of today’s headlines. “I have always kept in touch with Ireland. How else could I write about it? Many writers who have written about Ireland have lived elsewhere – the best way to write about what you know is from a distance.”
Ireland is her landscape, Co Clare her home, “a rich soup”, but London suits her. “Writing is a solitary occupation. I can write better here because I don’t see many people.” Novels take time. “It took four years to write this book.”
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She doesn’t know London that well and hardly knows the England beyond it. “I know the road outside here; that’s about it.” Writing, it is clear, takes time and requires silence.
Her 17th novel, The Light of Evening, is about to be published and she is nervous – funny, quick and practical, but openly nervous. “With a new book, one is thrown into the arena. But a writer must be like a boxer, prepared to take the blows and stay in the ring,” she says, forming a fist.
Although the prepublication response in the US has been positive, she is nervous as another round of interviews and appearances begins, and she admits she is already tired. Only a few months ago she became seriously ill and spent 10 days in intensive care. “I almost died,” she says with a hint of wonder. Yet she is tough – she has had to be.
The public perception of O’Brien’s life and personality has tended to become confused with her work. She is also conscious that her life has overshadowed her fiction. “It has been a distraction, and at times a diminishment, that has always unnerved me.”
When she recently described one of her heroes, Beckett, as being “the subject of endless myth, disquisition, hearsay, reverence, mystification and bloated anecdote” she could have been writing about herself. Ireland, the source of much of her material, has been hard on her, savage. “I have not had a mirthful life, far from serene,” she says with an irony modified by humour.
Although she has been hurt, she has often seen the comedy in the ambivalence of Irish attitudes and continues to do so. Her small end-of-terrace house is modest; the hall is dark. The kitchen leading out to a town garden is functional.
[ Irish author Edna O’Brien has died aged 93Opens in new window ]
She leads the way up steep, narrow stairs to an old-style drawing room. It is small, comfortable, lived-in, strongly literary and, in the early afternoon, alive with sunlight. The walls are lined with bookcases. Some favoured volumes are on display, front covers outwards; works by Mandelstam and Chekhov and, of course, Beckett. His stern features also peer down from an image on the black stone mantelpiece, as do those of Joyce. Where books concede sufficient wall space, paintings hang.
This is a thinker’s room, softened by cut flowers and the clutter of post[1]cards. The muffled sounds of Kensington can be heard outside the window. O’Brien settles on a sofa and remembers she has something she wants to give me. It is a copy of an essay on Beckett she wrote for the Guardian. “I wasn’t sure if you’d seen it. I wanted you to read it. I spent 10 weeks working on it, and re-read all the work to do it.”
She agrees that text is all there should be, and all a writer should be judged on. But as she knows only too well, it is not. Nothing she could have done would have set the scene as accurately.
Almost 14 years to the day have passed since I first sat in this room, to interview O’Brien on the eve of the publication of her 12th novel, Time and Tide. Then as now, she creates the same impression, that of an intense reader, a career writer, committed to the business of reading and writing.
“Literature,” she said on that day 14 years ago, “is an education,” as most people discover. She doesn’t seem much different, or much older, and now wears less make-up on her fine-featured face. She remains slight, with a thin lady’s hand that feels very small in mine.
Edna O’Brien evokes images of a time when women were feminine, dressed in soft garments, had narrow shoulders and were more romantic than athletic.
A long-forgotten earlier encounter surfaces. Some 20 years ago, when I was a postgraduate student working in a Dublin bookstore, a glamorous older woman wearing a hat and a 1940s-style dress suit asked me for a copy of O’Brien’s Mrs. Reinhardt and Other Stories.
My male colleague pushed me aside and took over. He bowed to her and presented her with the book as if it were a silk glove she had dropped. As she left he stared after her. “That was Edna O’Brien,” he sighed with an ardour I didn’t understand at the time.
Back to the present and a September afternoon in her home. Her conversations are shaped by literary references and comments about Chekhov, Flaubert and Faulkner. She is easy to be with because she is lively company, a good talker – an interview quickly becomes a conspiracy of readers.
Above all, she never loses her point and possesses a shrewd critical intelligence. If some readers were surprised by her astute biography of James Joyce, others were not. She responds to text on several levels. A few weeks ago she published an insightful essay on Joyce’s Exiles.
She may have been perceived in some circles as a femme fatale whose success was helped by her beauty, but Edna O’Brien has been a serious, professional writer for more than 40 years – a fact her detractors appear to forget.
Within a couple of minutes of settling into the interview, the spirits of the great WG Sebald and Virginia Woolf have been summoned. O’Brien’s mind moves fast, although her speech is careful and precise, delivered in her rolling, rhythmic west-of-Ireland ac[1]cent, with its familiar theatrical range. Few writers read their work aloud as well as she does.
In conversation, every word is weighted and considered. At times she pauses and admits to not having quite liked the way she said something and catches, as if from the air, a better word. Also pulled at random is a store of literary references.
As she reaches across the low table in front of her for a copy of a new play she has written (a monologue spoken by Mrs Gentleman, betrayed wife of You-Know-Who), O’Brien remarks: “If I lost my eyesight, I’d be ruined. If I lost my memory, I’d be finished.” Then she says with a smile of approval, “I like your purple stockings”, and sucks on a pen as, having asked for an Irish spelling, she searches for a piece of paper upon which to write it.
“Did you like the book?” she asks, and on being told it seems an angry work, she says, “Angry? Maybe there’s anger in it. There’s certainly a sense of being exorcised, but anger would not have been enough to hold the sap.”
[ Carlo Gébler on his mother Edna O’BrienOpens in new window ]
The Light of Evening is about mothers and daughters, and the mother and daughter relationship which is “the deepest and curiously unfinished of all”. She has been a daughter and a mother but, as the mother of two sons, wishes she had a daughter. “It is a regret. I would have loved a daughter for the friendship, and I would like to think I would have been good at it, at that relationship.”
Her understanding of the female experience has proved central to her work and has led to her being compared with Colette and Jean Rhys. It was O’Brien who first most openly explored sexuality as experienced through the adventures of young Irish girls rejecting a puritanical male culture, in The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1963).
She became famous and feared, a national hero and an embarrassment. More books followed. More taboos were shaken in stark explorations of female despair and sexual frustration such as Night (1972), the sombre, despairing monologue of ageing Mary Hooligan. O’Brien wrote about the passion and, more importantly, the humiliation. “People are uncomfortable with passion, but passion is vital to literature.”
As a writer she balances compassion and curiosity. Language is her tool; feeling is the cement. Her new novel opens with Dilly, an old woman who is one of O’Brien’s most sympathetic characters, preparing to go to hospital. Before submitting to the doctors, she had consulted a faith healer but he had conceded defeat. “A fella has a gift for one thing but not another . . . You’re better off now with the men in Dublin, the specialists.”
So Dilly’s fate is sealed. But not before memory takes the character of Dilly back to her young days working in Brooklyn. O’Brien’s mother also travelled to the US and returned to live out her adulthood in Ireland.
“I am haunted by my mother. She died in 1977. She didn’t want me to be a writer, and I had wanted to write about her for years.” O’Brien had held the story in her imagination and finally it has become this new novel.
“I had a shoal of her letters, rich in story, charting her life in Co Clare from day to day, and I realised she was a born writer, even though she repudiated the written word, deeming it sinful. At first I had thought I would publish them as ‘a mother’s letters’, but then several strands of story, which unfold in turn in this book, took over and some of those letters are in it.
“I could picture every detail of home; the rooms, the landings, the trees, the ragwort, the weather, the everything.” Much of this layered novel is written in a dramatic heightened prose, and it is as if there are five narratives contained within one central story, but the letters in the book are as real as life, rife with a mother’s tender, at times recriminatory, love.
“Dearest Eleanora,” begins one, “I got shaky on a stepladder yesterday and nearly came a cropper. I was painting a ceiling for when you come. I know you like a nice ceiling. You mentioned one in the Vatican done by a master and many hands. You have travelled far and yet you do not forget you have a mother. Your letters and enclosures are a godsend. I needn’t tell you, as you know from your own experience, that men think five pounds should last a year. With your first pay packet from those misers you worked for, you sent me the makings of a summer dress and bristle hairbrush. The way you thought of me. Nowadays I don’t like to spend on myself but on Rusheen. When you’ve lived in a place for over fifty years you don’t like to see it go to rack and ruin.”
She agrees that the new novel does draw on many of the facts of her life. The daughter, Eleanora, is also a writer and one who had experienced an unhappy marriage with a fellow writer who delighted in telling her that a friend of his “had christened her a literary Bessie Bunter”.
The same bullying husband resented her books, claiming to have rewritten them. It sounds familiar. “Elements of my life are there, but this is a novel; it is a fiction. Had I wanted to write a memoir I would have done so. But it would not have had wings.”
She also says of The Light of Evening – “which could as easily have been called The Light of Midnight” – that it alerted her to aspects “of my mother and myself that I had kept in a closed box.”
O’Brien has reached a stage of her career at which each new book must be seen in the context of the work that has gone before, as well as in relation to her life. In common with John McGahern, O’Brien has had her books banned in Ireland. Both writers wrote novels that also live as valuable social history.
Yet whereas the great McGahern would eventually be revered in Ireland, O’Brien – despite her strong readership and the admiration of writers such as Philip Roth, Harold Pinter and Harold Bloom – has never been fully endorsed by either the literary or academic establishments.
“But this year things have begun to look up. UCD presented me with the first Ulysses Medal for Literature, and Tuamgraney has asked me to put some words on a stone. It’s been a long-time coming. I was delighted to do so, and here’s what I’ve written: ‘Tuamgraney/ Home of my home and fount of my fictions . . . ' and then, in Irish ' . . . Tá mé bhuíoch diot [I am grateful to you].’
Does she see herself as an icon or a victim? “Icon. Victim. I don’t like either of those words.” How about survivor? “Yes, I’m a survivor. You see me as a worrier, and I am, but I’d rather be seen as an aspiring warrior. You see, for all the criticism, through my books I have a voice. It’s heard and I use it. I take in my little corner of experience and I register and retell it.
“Am I happy? Well, I’m not unhappy. That’s about as positive as it is possible to be at this time of horror when you turn on the television and there’s war and killing.” Born in 1932, the same year as John Updike, O’Brien agrees that the US writer has never been judged on his physical appearance or his life, only his books.
“It’s the same with Richard Ford, who is a good-looking man, but it is his books that matter.” Whatever about the sexual censorship that denounced her earlier books, she has not forgotten the fury that greeted more recent topical narratives: House of Splendid Isolation (1994), in which an IRA man was a central character; Down by the River (1997) which dealt with the X Case; or most explosively, In the Forest (2002), a study of a doomed outsider, Eily Ryan, which is based on the murders in Co Clare of Imelda Riney, her small son and a local priest.
It outraged local people, and O’Brien was accused of insensitivity. Writing about the local is always dangerous; she has paid for her daring and knows it. “I remember kindness,” she says and adds with a laugh, “but I tend not to forget the wounds.”
She has no intention of becoming either mild or politically correct. “Celtic Tiger Ireland is a story. If I have the energy, I’ll write it – or part of it.” She mentions her sons, Sasha and Carlo, and that Sasha is emerging as a kind of minder. You get the impression that they might want their mother to be less unusual. But O’Brien has always been given to large gestures and candour, favouring words such as “savage,” “passion” and “blood.”
Books have filled her head since the beginning. Even when she was cycling, “always shaky” on her bike, to the pharmacy college she attended on Dublin’s Mount Street, she would recite Yeats and imagine Maud Gonne.
“I’m glad I studied pharmacy and not literature. I read books about natural science, and I think it is not good to be too literary. I think of Mrs Virginia Woolf and look at how good her essays and criticism are – sharp and pungent – but her novels are not always,” she grimaces. “I love To The Lighthouse,” she adds.
She opens a smart black case and displays the Ulysses medal, a large, flat silver disc on a bright blue ribbon. It looks like an athlete’s trophy, and in ways it is one. O’Brien has run many races, and is intent on running more. In the full light, her blue-grey eyes look green.
“That’s only the reflection of the yellow flowers on the window sill,” she says matter of factly. She has ink on her teeth, a snail’s trail left by the pen she had been chewing on. “Thank you; I’ll take that off. Ink on my teeth – you could say I have ink on my soul.”
Back down the narrow stairs, and into the kitchen, where she offers more food. There’s a book on the table. It is a copy of Winter’s Bone by the US writer Daniel Woodrell. “Take it,” she says. “It’s very good. I was asked to give a quote for it and I did. You’ll like that book,” she says.
O’Brien the reader refers to its power, and then moves on to decry bloodlessness in writing. “Unless it’s real, it’s no good. There has to be truth and feeling. What makes a book great? It’s when the writer knows it to be true – and it is. Like a story by Chekhov.”
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