An Irishman's Diary

FATED to live in what the Chinese call interesting times, the Limerick-born writer Kate O’Brien could never have been short of subject matter. There’s a story, for example, that she once wore the Russian crown jewels at a fundraising dinner. Which may or may not be true, although given the circles she moved in, is entirely plausible.

One of her early jobs was as secretary to Éamon de Valera’s representative in the US, when during the War of Independence, the future Irish president was raising a national loan there. She was also a personal friend of Ireland’s American envoy, Harry Boland. And it was Boland who, when the Irish in turn loaned £25,000 to their fellow revolutionaries in Russia, accepted the crown jewels as security, later bringing them to Ireland, where they remained for decades.

Another of O’Brien’s jobs en route to becoming a writer saw her join one of the new Free State’s best-known export lines, as a governess in Spain. Almost all Spain’s English-speaking governesses were Irish then. But for O’Brien, the experience ignited a life-long passion, making the country – soon to descend into its own civil war – her second home.

When that war began in 1936, by now an established novelist, she wrote a travelogue called Farewell Spain.It was well named. Her evident Republican sympathies subsequently saw her banished from the country by the victorious General Franco. She would not return for 20 years.

In yet another job, O’Brien worked for Britain’s war-time ministry of information: the model for George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Despite all of which, politics – other than the sexual kind – was never to be her main theme.

Her specialist subject was tracing the minutiae of human feeling, as moderated by the demands of relationships and a sense of morality, especially the morality of the faith in which she had been raised. In the words of her biographer Eibhear Walsh, O’Brien’s was “a voice rarely heard in independent Ireland, the voice of an intellectually informed, sexually dissident, collapsed Catholic.” Her sexual dissidence has been much debated, in part because she was never an overtly confessional writer and kept her private life well guarded. What is known is that she had one short and unsuccessful marriage to a man, thereafter remaining single and leaving enough clues in her life and work to be posthumously declared a lesbian.

Which said, perhaps the most famous single sentence in her books was a reference to male homosexuality. It was from her 1942 masterpiece, The Land of Spices, and was sufficient to earn that book a ban in Ireland. Incredibly to modern readers, her offence was to mention that two men had been seen "in the embrace of love". That was enough back then.

In fact, The Land of Spiceswas not her first book to upset the censor. Mary Lavelle(1936) suffered the same fate for the crime of depicting one of those Irish governesses in Spain having an illicit affair. This might have been acceptable were the woman in question seen to have been led astray. The unforgivable aspect was that O'Brien had allowed the character to exercise her own judgment.

To the ambiguity of her sexuality, O’Brien added another problem for critics: deciding whether she was a serious writer or a popular one. She won literary prizes, to be sure. But at the height of her career, she also sold more books than was strictly respectable in literary circles.

Her biggest commercial success, That Lady(1946), summed up the paradox. Set in 16th-century Spain, the novel is otherwise classic O'Brien subject matter: a fictionalised account of a three-way entanglement involving King Phillip II, a widowed princess Ana de Mendoza, and the king's favourite adviser, Don Antonio Perez.

It’s also intensely serious. The morality of their actions in the eyes of the church, and the affair’s consequences for Spain (the debacle of the Armada providing a tragicomic background detail) are painstakingly detailed. Yet the book sold half a million copies, was turned into a Broadway hit, and also became a film starring Olivia de Havilland.

Such success did not last as long as the writer herself, sadly. In fact, it was a long faded memory by the time O’Brien died in 1974. She had spent her last years in England, and survived to see her writings go out of both fashion and print. They remained there for another decade or so, until a revival of sorts began in the mid-1980s, helped by an annual weekend in her native Limerick, the 28th instalment of which begins tomorrow. The work has some way to go yet, clearly. A telling symbol of her long neglect featured in this paper’s Property supplement last month, when O’Brien’s family home in Limerick – a vestige of the upper middle classes that produced her and about which she wrote – returned to the market after a period, at a greatly reduced price.

Previously valued at €350,000, it had in recent times been a magnet for drug users and had also been damaged in a fire, before an unnamed buyer finally bought the property for just over €85,000. It looks like progress that the house has a new owner. But its long-term fate, like that of O’Brien’s literary legacy, remains uncertain.

The 28th Kate O'Brien Weekend begins tomorrow at the Belltable Arts Centre in Limerick, transferring to the Lime Tree Theatre in Mary Immaculate College on Sunday. Speakers include Seamus Heaney, novelists John Boyne and Susie Boyt and yours truly. More details are at kateobrienweekend.com