In her travelogue My Ireland, Kate O'Brien wrote that what Limerick people lacked markedly is "the `come hether' approach, the sunburst technique". As for manners, she added, "in Limerick people tend somewhat to mind their own business".
Ironically, this fair and perceptive evaluation of the much analysed Limerick psyche may explain how that city's greatest writer was and continues to be regarded in what she fondly described as "my dear native place". Even though her work is now acknowledged as part of Irish literature, no street, park or public building bears her name.
The house where she was born has no commemorative plaque and the city's only theatre - The Belltable - is named after a Belgian-born benefactor of a religious order. True, there is a pillar named in her honour on the campus of Limerick University - another irony because, sceptical of the proliferation of "redbrick" colleges in the England of the 1960s, she was unfashionably lukewarm about the establishment of a university in Limerick. Her portrait hangs in the City Art Gallery and, of course, there is the annual Kate O'Brien Weekend, worthy, venerable and solid as King John's Castle.
Elusive figure
Opening this year's weekend, RTE's Director General, Bob Collins, expressed surprise that Kate O'Brien remains an elusive figure in the cultural record of 20th century Ireland. "When I grew up in West Limerick in the 40s and 50s, there was little talk of Kate O'Brien. Yet she was a local woman who had cut a figure in the world. She saw contemporary Ireland in the perspective of European history and culture. She was engaged with the social and personal histories of her family and community of origin."
Engaging in the social and personal histories of family and community is a risky business for any Irish writer, but because of the exquisite sensitivity for which Limerick is renowned and which has variously been attributed to the historic misfortunes of the treacherous 17th century and the much earlier "Curse of St.Munchin", it is particularly so for one who grew up in the city of the broken treaty.
Limerick has never had a comfortable relationship with its writers, artists or anyone else who dared to suggest that it might be less than perfect. Comparisons between Kate O'Brien and Frank McCourt are tempting if invidious. Miss O'Brien is a finer and more important writer than the author of Angela's Ashes; she had already produced her best work by the time McCourt left Limerick as a young man, and, of course, they occupied opposite ends of the social scale.
She was born into a family which at the time of her birth in 1897 had shed its peasant origins to emerge as a pillar of the new Catholic mercantile class. As Benedict Kiely observed: "No Irish novelist has understood as well as Miss O'Brien the meaning of a prosperous house, a solid middle class family, a town not tumultuous enough to be a city yet escaping small-town stagnancy."
The slum in which Frank McCourt and his family existed was but a 10-minute gig ride from the O'Brien villa in Mulgrave Street. It was another world - yet one of which the O'Briens and people like them were acutely aware. In Presentation Parlour Kate O'Brien tells us that her father wouldn't allow his children to attend Midnight Mass in St John's Cathedral on Christmas Eve "because the riff-raff of the town would be loose at that hour, and he would not have his children meet it." "He should not", she added apologetically, "be judged un-Christian for this. He was only a clean-habited and affectionate man who wanted to keep us in good health and as long as possible unaware of the violence and uproar in life."
Few inhibitions
Miss O'Brien, no more than Mr McCourt, had few inhibitions about making the world aware of the violence and uproar that existed in the life of Limerick. She did it more subtly, more artistically through her fiction. But it is no less incisive. In the Mellick novels she wrote of guilt, suicide and the torment of illicit love. And she showed that agony and the death of the heart can be as acute within the confines of a comfortable Georgian house as in the most fetid slum.
Naturally she was misunderstood and, inevitably, banned. A moralist, she was classed with the pornographers. There was much rumour and misrepresentation. One rumour was that Rev Mother FCJ had written to her from Laurel Hill asking why she had disgraced her old school by writing salacious books and that Miss O'Brien, the hussy, had replied with a postcard bearing an English stamp and containing only the words: "Pounds, shillings and pence".
Dismal period
Like most of the rumours, this was rubbish. Kate O'Brien did not laugh all the way to the bank but she certainly cried all the way from it because in 1962 they foreclosed and took her house. During this dismal period, kind friends in Limerick attempted to have the freedom of the city conferred on her. The councillors, fearful of clerical disfavour, demurred and the idea was dropped.
But now a better honour has come her way. One of the banned novels, The Land of Spices - which is set in Laurel Hill and uses the FCJ nuns as models for the religious community - has been added to the Leaving Certificate syllabus.
Although Kate O'Brien was deeply hurt by the banning and responded with a novel of protest (Pray for the Wanderer), she refused to join the growing band of writers and journalists who down the years ensured that poor old Limerick got a consistently bad press. She dedicated My Ireland "To Limerick - my dear native place" and declared "It was in Limerick I began to view the world and to develop the necessary passion with which to judge it. I know that wherever I am it is still from Limerick that I look out and make my surmises".