Edna O’Brien, by Joanne O’Brien
Exactly how has a woman with such unflinching power of insight into humanity – and a gift of the gab to convey it – ended up so sidelined?
The reasons are all too blatant. Edna O’Brien’s earliest books – The Country Girls, The Girl with Green Eyes and Girls in their Married Bliss, all published in the first half of the 1960s – were too often dismissed as a young woman’s account of her own life, thinly reworked as fiction. Yet to anyone who has read them recently, these books fizz with authentic raw feeling. They present an unflinching view of what it’s like to struggle in an unequal society, to be virtually a second-class citizen amid the bullying and the braggadocio of 1950s Ireland – with a heavy overlay of scarcely believable religious oppression to boot. Here, as she demonstrated in novel after novel, was no sentimental spirit of the Emerald Isle. O’Brien takes her fellow countrymen seriously and she is never less than unsparingly honest when writing about them. No wonder the Irish authorities drove her out.
For a spirit so manifestly alive and unbowed, it’s little wonder that O’Brien was soon in deep trouble in so many ways. A redhead, she is everyone’s idea of the flame-haired artist: impetuous, flamboyant, unreliable, unpredictable and easy to dismiss.
Yet O’Brien is a writer of immense stature – and she is finally being recognized as such. “Perhaps now,” former President of Ireland Mary Robinson wrote, reviewing O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl, “is the time for a proper reassessment of Edna O’Brien as one the great creative writers of her generation.” She is regularly championed by Sarah Hall, among the most mesmerising of young contemporary writers. And whilst no-one wants to get down and dirty with the politics of literary prizes, surely a murky morass of skullduggery, it was a shame that the 2013 David Cohen Lifetime Achievement Prize went — along with almost every award going, it seems — to Hilary Mantel. Notwithstanding the tremendous achievements of the Wolf Hall author, Edna O’Brien would have been a fitting prizewinner. For a start, at 80 years old, and with an oeuvre that spans the decades, she really can claim a lifetime behind her.
So often waved away as a “bargain basement Molly Bloom” or an early practitioner of chick-lit, O’Brien is an author of great range and diversity. The House of Splendid Isolation, for instance, shows the scope and vision of what this author can accomplish. The novel, published in 1994, is highly political, intricately plotted and relentless. It is also clearly a metaphor for O’Brien’s later life, and touches some of the fears and horrors old age can spring on a regretful and reflective personality. Josie, an elderly widow living alone in the once-great family mansion, sees the unlocked door swing open one night and a hooded figure appear. This is McCreevy, passionate Republican, rebel and crusader for a united Ireland. He is seeking refuge from his pursuers. “There is something animal within the stillness of him, as if he is covered in a tawny fur that cannot be seen or smelt with lay senses. In a voice so completely assured he tells his organization, his rank and says she need not come to harm if she does as he says.”
Her writing is at once squalid and magnificent, ordinary and deeply romantic, and above all convincing
So begins their relationship. He is a tortured soul, a former prisoner who has endured the torments of hunger strike and dirty protest – grim years where inmates fouled their cells and existed naked but for one blanket, to try to the death, the principle of recognition as political detainees, not criminals. She is the childless survivor of a marriage full of spiteful small-scale sadism. With Josie a hostage, the days and weeks creep painfully on; all around the dilapidated house, the net is tightening on McCreevy, and Josie reproaches herself for not turning him in immediately – but between her fear and revulsion for what he stands for, she has come to find out more about the individual terrorist, the man whose sweetheart was murdered by the Security Forces. Old and frail though she is, Josie challenges her unwelcome guest and the taut dialogue between them is thrillingly authentic. Edna O’Brien is a great writer, not a comfortable one, and at times The House of Splendid Isolation is almost unbearably intense. She dares to express those feelings far beyond where her reader stumbles to follow. Her writing is at once squalid and magnificent, ordinary and deeply romantic, and above all convincing.
For those critics who write her off as past her sell-by date – a description she found wounding even as she sat down to write the memoir she swore she would never pen – she has a masterpiece of sublime writing to offer. Country Girl is full of playful prose and anecdote: “I was an ugly child,” she recalls at the outset, “so ugly that when Ger McNamara , the son of the couple who lived in our gate lodge and a captain in the Irish army, came to congratulate her, my mother said I was too unsightly to be shown and therefore kept me hidden under the red herringbone quilt.”
Pick any page, or indeed any line, from Country Girl and you are struck by the sheer effortless lyricism of her writing. “The fields that ran into other fields, storm and sleet, showers and sun-showers then as if by enchantment, primroses and cowslips sprang next to the tall thistles and fresh cowpats … I still recall the rapture as a child, gazing, gazing at a great amphora of artificial tea roses in yellow and red, far more beautiful than the dog roses on the briars or the devil’s pokers in the garden.”
Country Girl is a romp and a frolic in many ways – and in others an elegiac funerary for the past. Like all great artists, O’Brien is mercilessly truthful, about her own failings and the injustices and confusions of family life. In hers, it features a vicious falling out over the destiny of the grand house she grew up in, and which was deviously left to her brother alone.
Her bitter ex-husband would have a journalist announce in a review that O’Brien’s “talent resided in her knickers”
In fact, as she re-treads the painful old ground of the past, she reinforces the old myths about her, even as she shows, through her lambent prose, what a brave, defiant free spirit she is. Exiled by love, isolated by a sadistic husband, she struggled through a bruising 1960s divorce where every vile accusation was leveled at her (her bitter ex-husband would have a journalist announce in a review that O’Brien’s “talent resided in her knickers”) and emerged a single mother and hip chick of cool London.
The autobiography catalogues her then rackety life, dealing with the attentions of a string of men including Paul McCartney (strumming his guitar, he sang her two boys to sleep; their story wasn’t believed at school the next day) and Marlon Brando (with whom O’Brien spent the night together in loving conversation). At times the reader wants to shout “No, don’t do it!” at this free spirit, as when the guru R.D. Laing brings around potions of LSD so potent Edna is stupefied for weeks. Having wrested her children back into her care, she then recklessly risked losing them in a life normal and natural enough to any reasonable person now, but perceived by the authoritarian mores of the day as dangerously off the rails for a woman.
Country Girl is the work of a lifetime. If there are any more awards going for writing under fire, Edna should surely get them. It’s a brilliant ride through the life of a brilliant woman, and a showcase for writing that is unsurpassed in the sheer brutality of its honesty and its refusal to turn away from the terrible and the heart breaking . She confronts both in language which cheers and gladdens the heart even as it bruises it with sympathy for her sufferings and her triumphs alike. C