What Kate wrote: dissecting the bourgeois mind

MANY Irish writers have been banned in Ireland and then later sufficiently rehabilitated to be reclaimed, even celebrated

MANY Irish writers have been banned in Ireland and then later sufficiently rehabilitated to be reclaimed, even celebrated. Too many jokes have been made about the literary career value of being banned to add yet another. But the Limerick writer Kate O'Brien remains a literary outsider; an independently minded maverick and still something of an enigma to wary critics. She was born 100 years ago next December 3rd, and this weekend in her native city, she will again be under discussion at the 13th Kate O'Brien Week End.

It was O'Brien who first and most comprehensively chronicled the rise of the Irish Catholic middle class experience. Indeed her prize winning debut, the Balzacian Without My Cloak (1931) witnesses its very birth with the arrival of a horse thief heralding the genesis of a merchant dynasty. She also explored the dilemma of moral choice, the tension between forbidden desire and obligation, sexual passion versus social and moral conventions.

Some observers prefer to focus on the sociological relevance of her homosexuality, the farcical banning of The Land of Spices (1941) over one sentence, O Brien's portrayal of rigid Catholicism and obsessive concern with individual freedoms - no writer quite so consistently throughout her fiction presents marriage as a sacrament and therefore a prison. But O'Brien's lasting contribution to the Irish novel is her exploration of a specific way of life and the many repressions which helped shape it. Confronted by the reality of the love she and her brother in law share, Agnes Mulqueen in The Ante Room (1934) cries: "I'd be afraid to have a child! There's too much in this business of attachment!"

Kate O'Brien was a formidable woman; a rebel, a loner, a traveller, a believer in education's saving power for women, an astute political and cultural prophet as Farewell Spain (1937) still testifies, a woman both of her time and beyond it, a European. Above all, perhaps, she is both storyteller and social historian. She is an Irish writer capable of writing with two accents - an Irish one, as is very much in evidence in Without My Cloak, and increasingly, as her career progressed, an English one.

READ MORE

HER ideas of liberation as expressed in her work tend at times to be equated with sexual defiance - consider the daring Ana, heroine of the historical romance That Lady (1946). But O Brien the free thinker was also as an individual extremely correct, almost severe. "I am entirely against the promotion of a sense of humour as a philosophy of life," she once famously declared to a nervous young poet named Eavan Boland. Irony is O'Brien's natural medium. Her attempts at gaiety, while at times beguiling as in As Music And Splendour (1958), are often heavy handed and strained, she lacks the lightness of Molly Keane's social comedy. O'Brien's shrewd observation and elegant, efficient prose compensates for the occasional lush theatricality of her more romantic interludes.

Whereas novels such as Mary Lavelle (1936), which was banned, and The Last of Summer (1943) appear to be exclusively concerned with love and the choices which must be made, it is The Ante Room which gives Irish fiction an apparently successful male protagonist who kills himself because of thwarted sexual passion. It is also of course exploring the taboo territory of love between in laws. That novel, for all its melodrama is also extremely important in the context of O'Brien's understanding of Irish society, particularly that of the Irish Catholic middle class and its self imposed vulnerabilities and its also serves as a loose sequel to Without My Cloak, itself a family epic and certainly an Irish Forsyte Saga. The Ante Room links that novel with O'Brien's finest book, The Land of Spices.

This trio acts as an unofficial trilogy, sharp, complex portraits of a narrow society, high lighting the small mindedness which sustains and oppresses it.

None of my children are going to England to school," stresses the newly widowered Anthony Considine, early in Without My Cloak. "I'd always be afraid of my life, Sophia, that some way or another they'd find out over there that I'm in trade. Besides, he went on, with an innocent smile at Teresa, whose children were at Irish schools, `I've noticed that they train them to be ashamed of themselves very nicely and inexpensively here at home.

Class fears undercut much of O'Brien's work. Social exposure is viewed as the greatest shame in a world in which sexual or romantic deviation is so damning their deeper implications are not acknowledged. When Anthony's sister the beautiful, frustrated Caroline, makes a brief bid for freedom by running away from her husband, the family is thrown into confusion, because of the social implications. Caroline's dilemma is irrelevant.

Late in the novel, Anthony's adored son Denis embarks on a romance with a peasant. The family name is saved more by the girl's innate understanding of the social divisions than by the brutal, if priestly, intervention of the family's Father Tom.

When asked her father's occupation, the beautiful and wealthy Molly Redmond in The Land of Spices answers "turf commissioner". None of the girls at the snobbish Sainte Famille convent understand the term. This was a calling no one had ever heard of, and it appeared to be very grand indeed". The mystery is soon solved thanks to the fact that one of them has already read the squalid details of the family's court case as reported in the newspaper. Mr Redmond, announces Jennie, is a bookie and she adds "Ursula says he's a man who takes your money at the races, when you bet - and that he stands on a chair on the racecourse, and shouts and roars. She says it's an impossible thing to be. Worse than - having a public house, even."

Near the close of that novel when bargaining for Anna Murphy's right to a university education, Reverend Mother resorts to the language of commerce and of course, must draw on the social snobberies of Anna's domineering grandmother.

SNOBBERY is one of the central themes of The Land of Spices, one of the finest Irish novels yet written and O Brien's most autobiographical. It is a chilling study of the need to negate emotions in order to survive. In Helen Archer, the unhappy Reverend Mother who presides over a group of socially conscious nuns, O Brien has created a remarkable, enduring portrait of a soul in dignified torment. Helen Archer's vocation is an act of revenge directed against her beloved father, on having discovered him "in the embrace of love" with another man.

Archer is also an outsider because of her Englishness. This leads to her being attacked by a visiting and clearly nationalist priest who resents the convent's role in training Irish girls to be suitable wives for English Majors and Colonial Governors." Allegedly cold, Archer instead cares for young Anna with a deep, reserved love, while Anna is also tragically too repressed to thank her.

There is a poignancy in the fact that one of Kate O'Brien's closest friends was another seriously overlooked and misread Irish writer, a fellow outsider, Paul Smith, 23 years her junior, who died last month. Kate O'Brien died in 1974. Her literary legacy is realism of immense psychological intensity, subtle insights and a deceptively physical quality. Her characters for all their repression, touch each other, reach out, are tactile and emotional. In Pray For The Wanderer (1938) she wrote about her life as a writer returning home and perhaps comes closer to explaining her life and work than any critic can. Outsider to the end, she was not above asking for the understanding she never fully received as either artist or individual. Her tombstone bears that title as inscription.

Eileen Battersby

Eileen Battersby

The late Eileen Battersby was the former literary correspondent of The Irish Times