Edna O’Brien and her foes
She’s had an extraordinary life full of drama, fun and controversy, yet vibrant O’Brien still has the power, writes Campbell Spray
POOR Edna O’Brien — she always gets it rough. Her books were banned and, she claimed, burned. More than 50 years ago, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid called her “a renegade, and a dirty one”. Even Fintan O’Toole, the lovies’ lovey and doyen of The Irish Times, is claimed by O’Brien, who does love drama, to have once called her “morally criminal”. Actually, he said the “breathless prose” of In The Forest was “an aesthetic as well as a moral mistake”.
Yet it is a tribute to the novelist’s extraordinary career, soon to stretch into eight decades, that even now, the literary world gets into spin about the straight-backed reddish-brown-haired fun-loving woman and her enormous canon of work, which burst into the public consciousness with her groundbreaking debut novel The Country Girls in 1960.
The latest spat involves the mighty The New Yorker being taken on by Fintan’s haughty The Irish Times, with their writer Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado clutching her pearls and claiming that 88-year-old O’Brien had been maligned by the “shockingly cold-hearted and questionable behaviour” of a staff writer for the American magazine.
Ian Parker, who has been with The New Yorker since 2000, wrote a 10,000-word well-researched and entertaining profile of Edna for last week’s issue, which did pick some small holes in the novelist’s very long and impressive back story, but mainly is an account of a massively vibrant, still very sensual woman and world-class writer.
But what has really irked Sherratt-Bado, a visiting research fellow at Queen’s University Belfast and co-editor of Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland, is that Parker dares to question the veracity of a gangrape scene in O’Brien’s latest book, Girl, a novel about the Boko Haram kidnappings of Nigerian schoolgirls. Sherratt-Bado uses more than half her article to slam Parker for a “blinkered, masculinist perspective” in saying that “O’Brien’s version of the Boko Haram conflict seems to be based less on reported fact than on a fiction writer’s desire to describe a society built wholly on male cruelty”.
Sherratt-Bado adds that Parker comments “not all of Boko Haram’s acts of sexual violence may have been reported, but researchers I spoke with were unaware of such incidents”. Asked about this, O’Brien told Parker that she “would not be so reckless as to insert untrue, or lurid, situations”, adding: “I didn’t have to.”
This spat about the veracity or otherwise of the rape scene in Girl follows Sherratt-Bado lobbing grenades at The New Yorker for “an astonishing editorial decision” by the magazine to run the “appallingly disrespectful and sexist” profile, which was a “home from home for O’Brien” and published her stories for more than 50 years. She adds that Parker’s “condescending attempts to undermine the established, award-winning author by trivialising her work and maligning her character” are typical of the sexist criticism that O’Brien has faced since 1960.
This is over-the-top stuff; rather, Parker has a romp through the names, fun and controversy that have always been part of the novelist’s life since she left her native Clare to set up home in fashionable London with a disastrous marriage to Ernest Gebler, in which O’Brien wrote “there were no rows, just silence and routine” and of finding notebooks that detailed his “fury with me and the world”.
Parker, however, does go out of his way at times to portray O’Brien as loving to play up the drama in her life. He recalls that O’Brien herself had said that literary Dublin had suspected her of welcoming the censorship of her earlier books and had nicknamed her the “Banned-Wagon”. He also goes to some lengths to try to disprove that any of her books were actually “burned in the chapel grounds”, as the writer claims.
He says that O’Brien’s instinct for stage-managing and self-fashioning remains undimmed.
Parker shares a taxi with O’Brien and they talk about her year-long series of treatments for cancer or “the cancer” as she puts it. She follows this up by sending him an email which “supplied a jaunty commentary” on the meeting. She began: “Edna O’Brien met me on the doorstep of her small house in Chelsea, where she has lived for over 33 years, which, in deference to Ibsen, she has named A Doll’s House. She seemed both calm and concerned — calm because after three years, she had just completed her novel… Early readers have described the book as having a mythic quality and she herself said that what she intended was to tell the story of many such girls through the fluent voice of one visionary girl. She was dressed in black, her favourite colour, a Miyake jacket, a pleated white blouse bought in New York, a place she has a particular nostalgia for... The relief of having finished her task was, however, vitiated by the fact that for almost a year she has been undergoing treatment for cancer, and the prodigious energy of which she was so proud was not in attendance.”
This continued for several paragraphs. In a subsequent email, she took pains to say to Parker: “I was setting things down so that you may write them in your own way and with your own perceptions. They were guidelines.”
If Parker makes much of O’Brien dramatising some of her past story, he also lets her reflect on desire to change her books constantly by rewriting, adding epilogues or tweaking them for audio. As she tells him: “It’s like I’m carrying around, in the pan of my brain, all the words, and I am constantly wishing, I’m constantly rearranging, to make them... better. Or, ‘better’ isn’t the right word. Make them more... potent.”
Writing to her son Carlo, in the late 1990s, she proposed: “You have no idea, nor could you have, of the physical, sexual, emotional butchery I experienced throughout my whole childhood. Among other things, it gave me a terror of birth and all things pertaining to the body.” When asked about this letter, O’Brien said that it was not a “comprehensive” description of her childhood, and “should not be read too literally”.
Parker says that in writing about bloody violence, O’Brien found a new focus and a new audience, and she seemed almost to provide a retroactive commentary on her earlier work: “If her female characters had ever seemed to lack agency, here was the compelling context: male sadism.” And it is this sort of comment, repeated again about Girl, that maybe gives away Parker’s prejudice or at least opens the door for people like Sherratt-Bado to talk of his “predetermined narrative”.
In lighter moments, Parker tells of fellow dinner guests like Rebecca West and Peter Eyre, then a young actor; there are tales of the journalist and great feminist Mary Kenny doing secretarial work for her in the 1960s; “Edna was far too soft an employer to keep me up to scratch. She was so indulgent. It was ‘we’ ll have a glass of Beaujolais and piece of cake’.” O’Brien, writes Parker, became so famous that she was honoured by Private Eye as Edna O’Booze. Kenny noted that O’Brien “occasionally laid on the Irish accent quite strongly”.
Parker tells of Nell Dunn becoming O’Brien’s friend when they were neighbours in Putney. “Her life was writing and looking after the kids,” Dunn said, “and then she’d have some gentlemen callers and sometimes that would become very passionate and fully involved and desperate.” Jane Fonda, Richard Burton, Ingrid Bergman, Jackie Onassis, Sean Connery and Diane Cilento came to her parties, Vanessa Redgrave and VS Naipaul stayed with her. As Liadan Hynes told, in a profile of Edna O’Brien in this paper earlier this year, Marlon Brando drove her home one night and slept in the kitchen.
Princess Margaret, who knew O’Brien, liked to attempt an impression of her breathless, confiding speech patterns.
Polly Devlin, the Northern Irish writer, who moved to London a few years after O’Brien did, recently recalled, writes Parker, that The Country Girls forced her to acknowledge her own competitiveness: “What was very hard to come to terms with was she had written an enchanting book — a book so full of vivid life — about what I’d been brought up to believe were ‘bad girls’.” Laughing, she added, “This terribly successful, very beautiful young Irish woman — I f **king hated her.”
O’Brien had coffee with Samuel Beckett. “I cannot think of a single thing to say. I am completely dumb, and stupid. I see Beckett looking into the distance.” She laughed. “Boredom, in every particle.”
O’Brien’s life had its delights, writes Parker. She once took JD Salinger, and her sons, to Battersea Park, where they all rode on a Ferris wheel. Paul McCartney gave O’Brien a ride home after a party, and came in long enough to sing Those Were the Days, the Mary Hopkin hit, for her two children Carlo and Sasha, half-asleep in bed.
She had drinks in New York’s Algonquin Hotel with Gunter Grass and Thornton Wilder and took LSD in London with RD Laing.
As a fiction reviewer and interviewer in the late 1970s, I was sent by my paper to see O’Brien, as she was going to be the star turn at one of our literary lunches. On the way, I called into the Irish Embassy in London, which was quite near her house, to see an acquaintance. He jokingly warned me of O’Brien’s reputation as a great lover and offered to call me later so I could make my excuses. There was no need; however an offer to continue the interview elsewhere was I believe more about food than romance. I should be so lucky. Whatever, I declined, to my regret. I should have spent more time in her company. Just as I had been by Polly Devlin, a year or so before, I was entranced by her voice, languorous tones and the way she reached back and sighed for the ages. It was the sensuality of real Irishness, real woman. I was being drawn into the country.
Her lovers did include a famous TV personality and a married man whom in a memoir she calls Lochinvar, but in reality was a prominent British politician whose identity she confirmed to The New Yorker. Her son Sasha told Parker: “My mum was in love with him, and I knew he was indifferent to her.” In Sasha’s opinion, the relationship posed a threat to the man’s ambitions. “He misled her, he shouldn’t have done it. If you don’t love someone, don’t do it. And my mum always wanted love.”
Parker writes that Clair Wills, an Irish-literature specialist at Cambridge University, who once talked with O’Brien about becoming her biographer, recently suggested that the writer doesn’t quite recognise her greatest qualities. “She’s a brilliant writer about social mores, but she believes that her gift is a kind of bardic one, where she can access the truth of — particularly — female emotion.”
O’Brien has said that “if you are at all serious” as a writer, you will, over time, “go deeper into the conflicts that caused you”.
Parker points out that many readers of Girl will agree with the admiring assessment of Terrence Rafferty, who, in a review in The Atlantic, wrote: “Despite the obvious contrasts in circumstances, this girl isn’t so different from O’Brien’s young Irish heroines. She lives in a world that’s testing her, daring her to survive.”
Shortly after I interviewed O’Brien, I came here to live in 1979 and work as Features Editor of The Irish Press, the now defunct de Valera-owned daily newspaper. One of the first interviews I did was with the Athlone writer John Broderick, who talked openly about his sexuality and drinking — he wasn’t so pleased by me writing about them and later created a rather unsavoury character called Spray.
Very soon, we got to talking about O’Brien, of whom he had been rather dismissive. He had been scathing about her early books and hadn’t read her latest. However, he wished there was not the animosity between them that the media of the time loved to play on. “Of course,” he told me then, “she has a reputation built on her looks, but I didn’t really hold that against her.” He then daggered her with the start of rather a camp gesture and went on to tell me that his “mother was terribly against” his comments on O’Brien. “She said that ‘I didn’t know what it was to be left by yourself and have to make your way in the world’. I suppose I just don’t approve of how Edna did it.”
And, as ever with O’Brien’s life, the bitchiness of her detractors didn’t end there. Broderick then confided to me that he had seen “Edna on a plane recently”. He went up to her and said the “bad feelings” had gone on long enough. “Then I advised her how to get rid of the age spots on her hands.”
But O’Brien is still always wary. The novelist Andrew O’Hagan tells of a party she was given by Ian McKellen for her 80th birthday. “She was in her element. There was a mountain of cakes with her picture at different ages on each one. ‘I won’t be having them,’ she said to Bianca Jagger. ‘Got to watch the old figure. Can’t give the begrudgers an opening’.”
Colum McCann calls O’Brien the “advance scout for the Irish imagination”. Well, we all know that the people out front get the first bullets. Edna O’Brien has been taking them for more than half a century. As Parker shows in The New Yorker, she has lived some life and written wonderful books that have been totally groundbreaking. Yet she is fallible, like us all. She doesn’t need an over-the-top feminist defence by Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado. As The New Yorker headline says, “Edna O’Brien is still writing about women on the run”. The woman who entranced me more than 40 years ago still hasn’t lost her power. And, of course, she always has the option of writing the name of one of her detractors into a story. Already, she has written of a certain infant named Fintan being thrown to his death over the railings of a ship.
‘I was entranced by her voice, languorous tones — it was the sensuality of real Irishness’