Issue 92, Summer 1984
Edna O’Brien was born in the west of Ireland in a small village she describes as “enclosed, fervid, and bigoted.” Literature was taboo, and those books that penetrated the parish were loaned by the page. O’Brien’s father was a farmer who “carried on in that glorious line of profligate Irishmen.” Her mother, who had worked as a maid in Brooklyn, always yearned to return to America. O’Brien’s childhood was unhappy, but she believes it gave her both the need and the impetus to write. “Writing,” she says, “is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.”
After finishing primary school in her local village, O’Brien was sent to convent school in Galway, and later to Dublin, where she studied at the Pharmaceutical College and worked in a chemist’s shop. During this time, she met and married Ernst Gabler, a novelist, with whom she had two sons. (The marriage was dissolved ten years later.) In 1960, the family moved to London, where O’Brien began to write.
O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1961. It is the story of two girls who grew up in the Irish countryside, attend a convent school (from which they are expelled), and journey to Dublin and London in search of love and adventure. O’Brien’s subsequent novels—The Lonely Girl, Girls in Their Married Bliss, August is a Wicked Month, and Night—further explore the relationship between the sexes, often from the point of view of women who lose themselves in love, and later must struggle to regain their sovereignty. O’Brien has also written two plays, three screenplays, and several collections of short stories, all of which contribute to her reputation as one of Ireland’s foremost women of letters. Her latest play, Virginia, based on the life of Virginia Woolf, was produced in London last year to critical acclaim. It is due to open in New York this autumn at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, with Kate Nelligan in the title role.
Now in her forties, O’Brien resembles one of her own heroines: beautiful in a subtle, wistful way, with reddish-blond hair, green eyes, and a savage sense of humor. She lives alone in an airy, spacious apartment in Little Venice, London, near the Canal. From her balcony, wrought-iron steps lead down to a vast tree-filled park, where O’Brien often can be found strolling during breaks from her work. The following interview took place in her writing room—a large, comfortable study cluttered with books, notebooks, records, and periodicals. The day I was there, the room was warmed by a log fire burning in the fireplace, and even more so by O’Brien’s rich, softly accented Irish voice.
INTERVIEWER
You once said that as far back as you can remember you have been a writer. At what point did you actually start writing literature?
EDNA O’BRIEN
When I say I have written from the beginning, I mean that all real writers write from the beginning, that the vocation, the obsession, is already there, and that the obsession derives from an intensity of feeling which normal life cannot accommodate. I started writing snippets when I was eight or nine, but I wrote my first novel when I left Ireland and came to live in London. I had never been outside Ireland and it was November when I arrived in England. I found everything so different, so alien. Waterloo Station was full of people who were nameless, faceless. There were wreaths on the Cenotaph for Remembrance Sunday, and I felt bewildered and lost—an outsider. So in a sense The Country Girls, which I wrote in those first few weeks after my arrival, was my experience of Ireland and my farewell to it. But something happened to my style which I will tell you about. I had been trying to write short bits, and these were always flowery and overlyrical. Shortly after I arrived in London I saw an advertisement for a lecture given by Arthur Mizener [author of a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise] on Hemingway and Fitzgerald. You must remember that I had no literary education, but a fervid religious one. So I went to the lecture and it was like a thunderbolt—Saul of Tarsus on his horse! Mizener read out the first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms and I couldn’t believe it—this totally uncluttered, precise, true prose, which was also very moving and lyrical. I can say that the two things came together then: my being ready for the revelation and my urgency to write. The novel wrote itself, so to speak, in a few weeks. All the time I was writing it I couldn’t stop crying, although it is a fairly buoyant, funny book. But it was the separation from Ireland which brought me to the point where I had to write, though I had always been in love with literature.
INTERVIEWER
If you had always loved literature, why did you study chemistry at university rather than English?
O’BRIEN
The usual reason, family. My family was radically opposed to anything to do with literature. Although Ireland has produced so many great writers, there is a deep suspicion about writing there. Somehow they know that writing is dangerous, seditious, as if “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” I was an obedient little girl—though I hate to admit it now!—and went along with my family’s wishes. I worked in a chemist’s shop and then studied at the Pharmaceutical College at night.
INTERVIEWER
The protagonist of The Country Girls also works in a shop. Is the novel autobiographical?
O’BRIEN
The novel is autobiographical insofar as I was born and bred in the west of Ireland, educated at a convent, and was full of romantic yearnings, coupled with a sense of outrage. But any book that is any good must be, to some extent, autobiographical, because one cannot and should not fabricate emotions; and although style and narrative are crucial, the bulwark, emotion, is what finally matters. With luck, talent, and studiousness, one manages to make a little pearl, or egg, or something . . . But what gives birth to it is what happens inside the soul and the mind, and that has almost always to do with conflict. And loss—an innate sense of tragedy.
INTERVIEWER
What Thomas Hardy called “the sadness of things,” and Unamuno “el sentimiento trágico de la vida”?
O’BRIEN
Precisely. Not just subjective sadness, though you have to experience it in order to know it, but also objective. And the more I read about writers, their letters—say Flaubert’s—the more I realize it. Flaubert was in a way 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. So writing, I think, is an interestingly perverse occupation. It is quite sick in the sense of normal human enjoyment of life, because the writer is always removed, the way an actor never is. An actor is with the audience, a writer is not with his readers, and by the time the work appears, he or she is again incarcerated in the next book—or in barrenness. So for both men and women writers, writing is an eminently masochistic exercise—though I wonder what Norman Mailer would say to that!
INTERVIEWER
Doesn’t the theory of masochism apply to all artists, whatever the art form?
O’BRIEN
To some extent. I was reading van Gogh’s letters. My God! I’m surprised he cut off only one ear, that he wasn’t altogether shredded in pieces! But a woman writer has a double dose of masochism: the masochism of the woman and that of the artist. No way to dodge it or escape from it. Men are better at escaping their psyches and their consciences. But there is a certain dogged strength in realizing that you can make those delirious journeys and come through.
INTERVIEWER
Some don’t. There is a high rate of suicide, alcoholism, madness among writers.
O’BRIEN
It is only by the grace of God, and perhaps willpower, that one comes through each time. Many wonderful writers write one or two books and then kill themselves. Sylvia Plath for instance. She was much younger than Virginia Woolf when she committed suicide, but if she had survived that terrible crisis, I feel she would have written better books. I have this theory that Woolf feared that the flame of her talent was extinguished or dwindling because her last book, Between the Acts, lacked the soaring genius of the others. When a writer, or an artist, has the feeling that he can’t do it anymore, he descends into hell. So you must keep in mind that although it may stop, it can come back. When I was a child in Ireland, a spring would suddenly appear and yield forth buckets of beautiful clear water, then just as suddenly it would dry up. The water-diviners would come with their rods and sometimes another spring would be found. One has to be one’s own water-diviner. It is hard, especially as writers are always anxious, always on the run—from the telephone, from people, from responsibilities, from the distractions of this world. The other thing that can destroy talent is too much grief. Yeats said, “Too much sorrow can make a stone of the heart.” I often wonder, if Emily Brontë had lived to be fifty, what kind of books would she have written? Her life was so penalizing—and Charlotte’s too—utterly without sex. Emily was thirty when she wrote Wuthering Heights. I think the grinding suffering might have killed her talent later. It is not that you have to be happy—that would be asking too much—but if it gets too painful that sense of wonderment, or joy, dies, and with it the generosity so necessary to create.
INTERVIEWER
So the catalyst for your own work was that lecture on Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Before that you said that you read a great deal in Ireland, partly to escape. What sort of books did you read? And which ones influenced you most?
O’BRIEN
Looking back on it, it was not so much escape as nourishment. Of course there is an element of escape as well, that entering temporarily into a different world. But I think literature is food for the soul and the heart. There are books that are pure escapism: thrillers, detective and spy novels, but I can’t read them, because they don’t deliver to me. Whereas from one page of Dostoyevsky I feel renewed, however depressing the subject. The first book I ever bought—I’ve still got it—was called Introducing James Joyce, by T. S. Eliot. It contained a short story, a piece from Portrait of the Artist, some other pieces, and an introduction by Eliot. I read a scene from Portrait which is the Christmas dinner when everything begins pleasantly: a fire, largesse, the blue flame of light on the dark plum pudding, the revelry before the flare-up ensues between people who were for Parnell and those who were against him. Parnell had been dead for a long time, but the Irish, being Irish, persist with history. Reading that book made me realize that I wanted literature for the rest of my life.