THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW: EDNA O'BRIEN: The banning of her novels in the 1960s may have defined her early career, but Edna O'Brien's prodigious talent and staggering workrate have prevailed since then.
EDNA O'BRIEN - the name itself is an evocation of a different time, a different country. A time when young Irish girls joined in processions behind plaster Virgins to place their offerings on May altars, rosary beads numbing their cold fingers, cotton dresses whipping about their chilly legs. A time when, with the secrecy of the grave, we exhaled our warm breath on to rattling windowpanes and traced our would-be lovers' names on the glass.
Edna O'Brien - novelist, playwright, biographer, beauty, the wild-eyed girl from Tuamgraney, Co Clare (a place she has described as "fervid", "enclosed", and "catastrophic") - somehow defines an era of our recent history. A time that is receding as quickly as the bindweed of our frenetic, but somehow more banal, present is taking hold. It was O'Brien's graceful prose, it seemed, that ripped back the sullied sheets of Ireland in the 1950s, a time of concealment and longing, of a cauterizing parish-pump morality, a time heavy with the weight of the bishop's crozier and the pungent smell of eternal damnation.
The obstacles she had to contend with (which, it could be argued, ignited her talent), she enumerates now with a poetic certainty, a cup of chamomile tea cooling in her still-delicate fingers: "A choking society, that one did one's best to get away from, but never can; religious repression and oppression; fear of sin, fear of transgression, fear of one not being good, not being perfect, not being pure."
It was the elegant O'Brien, especially in her early novels, written in the first half of the 1960s - The Country Girls, The Lonely Girland Girls in their Married Bliss- who was the one wringing out our hypocrisy in public, with her beautiful, tapering fingers.
Her first half-dozen or so novels, famously banned in this country by the censorship board, were said by the then minister of culture to be "a smear on Irish womanhood" and even moved the priest in her home town to organise a little public burning of the offending texts, maybe feeling that a stern barbecuing of the passion in his young former parishioner's work might make her books inedible. How wrong he was. Notoriety, celebrity and myth seemed to take hold after that thunderous start to her career. In some ways O'Brien's prodigious talent and staggering workrate took a back-seat to this persona we invented in her absence (O'Brien took up residence in London in the late 1950s), a kind of Maureen O'Hara-esque beauty, all floppy velvet and auburn hair, champagne and cami-knickers, Bloomsbury soirees and poetic sauntering through autumnal London parks.
THE WOMAN I MEET in Dublin's Merrion Hotel, where deferential staff glide towards us with weighty silver teapots too heavy for O'Brien's fragile wrists to wrestle with (I pour), carries no tinge of fey celebrity or preciousness, however. She is warm, anxious, apologetic about missing me in the lobby, a little tired. She did not sleep last night, she says, but instead, late, very late, she re-read the words Seamus Heaney had spoken when he presented her with the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at the Irish Book Awards in Dublin's Mansion House on Wednesday night.
"So much thought and time," she marvels. "I realised it even more so at 3am. And the ceiling of the Mansion House, all stars, like a galaxy - do you know it?"
I say yes, even though I can't remember anything at all about the Mansion House ceiling. I realise that she is putting me at my ease, filling a silence as my mind searches for an opening question. Maybe she has noticed the weighty teapot shake in my nervous hand.
We talk about mothers and mothering - it seems as good a place to start as any. Her 2006 novel, The Light of Evening, although fictitious, chronicles the relationship of an elderly mother and her adult daughter, a novelist caught up in a failing love affair. O'Brien's own mother, who vehemently did not want her to be a writer, may have unwittingly passed on the gift to her daughter that became the source of so much of their difficulty. O'Brien describes incorporating a shoal of letters, which her mother, who died in 1977, had written to her, in the novel.
"They were masterpieces of free association, galloped thought, and of holding on to me with a chain," she says sombrely.
Was she warm? "She was warm," O'Brien says. "I both loved her and was afraid of her, afraid of offending and disappointing her."
In the past, O'Brien has spoken of experiencing a tender yet recriminatory love, and I'm interested in that notion. I tell her about my own mother and how, given the circumstances of her era, she was forced to abandon a professional singing career, which she was passionate about, in order to bring up her children. I want to know how O'Brien dealt with being a mother and an artist, I want to know about that tension between parenthood and creativity. To put it more directly, I want to know how she managed to write and write and write, while bringing up two small sons, Carlo and Sasha, alone in London, after she was divorced from their father, Ernest Gébler.
"I might have had some hard knocks," she says. "But my will did not stop me working."
That will, that sheer tenacity, kept O'Brien going day after day, despite notes pushed under the door from her sons: "We miss you" (this after 10 minutes at her desk) and, a few moments later, "we are sick".
"I loved them," she says simply. "I still do."
O'Brien is reticent about her past with Gébler - there are intimations of difficulty, but she is loyal, sensitive to her children, now grown men (Carlo a writer, Sasha an architect).
"It is easier to be a mother and a writer, rather than to be a wife and a writer," she says. "With a grown-up, there will always be competitiveness and rivalry."
O'Brien offers a brief snapshot of a difficult period of her life in London in the early 1960s when she was having custody issues to do with her sons, and both their headmaster and her local GP (to whom she had "once gone in distress") gave evidence against her. "I'm not a bitter woman," she says, smiling, "but I have been a fool."
HER MOTHER WOULD have probably liked her to be an air hostess, she muses after politely refusing the tea-strainer from the obsequious young man in the waistcoat who is shimmering by our table ("I won't strain it, thank you, I want to read my tea leaves"). I can see O'Brien pointing out the safety features of some great shuddering 1960s aircraft; there is something even now of the glamour and exoticism of those early trolley dollies about her, her beauty and poise still palpable and arresting, a glint of something unrestrained in her eyes, her curiosity still pulsing.
But O'Brien didn't take to the skies. Instead she trained as a pharmacist, earning seven shillings and sixpence a week, working 12 hours a day in a chemist on the Navan Road and cycling into Mount Street at night on her wobbling bicycle to attend lectures. "I learned to cook by making emulsions of suppositories," she confides, like a playfully dangerous wizard.
She is pleased, however, not to have had a literary education. "Not having an academic education, my fervour for writing never waned. I never dissect literature. Take Kafka's Metamorphosis," she says, as if offering me a fairy cake. "If you dissect it, you make it banal. Literature allows us a greater, crueller, more intense and enigmatic experience."
You had something terribly definite to kick against, I suggest, all that oppression, all that religion, all that darkness. Now priests are community workers and mothers are androgens in sports clothes, hopping in and out of their SUVs with their tennis rackets around their necks.
"A different kind of crisis," O'Brien retorts. "The rebellion of a young girl now, if she was intelligent, could be [about her] impotence against a greater world and being helpless."
We talk about some of the more depressing edges of this new Ireland, about teenage girls in discos with their knickers in their handbags. "I never thought I'd be saying this, but there's a lot to be said for having had a rigorous Catholic upbringing," she says. "That [what's happening now] is not freedom, that is fashion."
We talk for a while about that crisis of identity, about the current "zeitgeist" (a word that forces itself into the conversation like a shoddy second-hand car salesman), before O'Brien gets to the heart of her artistic impulse. She begins to talk about her writing, which she explains was much more than a simple response to the times she found herself inhabiting; rather, it was the result of a deeper current that compelled her, compels her still, to create. She refers to "the inner wound", "a disturbance within", "one that surpasses obstacles or handicaps", and quotes James Joyce, the subject of a short but incisive biography by her: "The measure of a work of art is from how deep a life does it spring." She speaks of "inner self-realisation as opposed to smug self-satisfaction", but most especially she talks about "living through my pen".
She describes a difficult, un-starry life built around a now-daily writing regime. Her recent work includes a new play, The Haunted, now in the final stages of rehearsal at Manchester's Royal Exchange Theatre, and two new short stories to be published shortly in the London Independentand the New Yorkermagazine. Constantly, there is the necessity of keeping on making a living.
"Big prizes you can sell," she says pragmatically, "but even books on the bestseller lists are only selling a few thousand copies. People see you in newspapers and magazines, they assume you are a celebrity, but that is only one day out of 365. The other 364, you are working". This is no "Connemara Dietrich", as she was once described, this is a woman in her late 70s who continues to fight to communicate. "I keep the faith, I never stop working. It's hard, the anxiety of writing - you fling things down, they'll fling themselves back at you."
I think of my father, a cartoonist, funny, skint, drawing almost until the end. "Retirement?" he asked me incredulously when I mooted the possibility, having watched him, grey-faced, packing his pencil case for another day. "Can't afford it, they'll just have to shoot me."
I WANT TO ASK Edna O'Brien about sex, though not the who-have-you-slept-with stuff which would be discourteous to this honest, open and considerate woman. Instead, in a roundabout way, I ask her if intimacy, love, sex, increases or decreases a sense of isolation.
"Nearness has always preoccupied me, although I haven't been near to many people in my life," she says. "It is not sex that causes loneliness, but the disappearance of love. We all want to be near someone, a lover, a child, a parent. For Joan of Arc, she wanted to be near God. Sex creates that union, that nearness. The loss of that - betrayal, separation - causes a worse pain because we have been part of an earthly paradise."
(This echoes a line O'Brien once wrote: "In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: Is there someone new?")
My tea is cold now, O'Brien's tea is cold, and she has to brave a no-frills seat to Manchester in the morning to attend rehearsal. The Haunted,which stars Brenda Blethyn and the wonderful Irish actor Niall Buggy, previews next Wednesday. O'Brien is eternally grateful to Blethyn for rejecting the lure of the movie world and accepting the pin money one earns in theatre so as to be in the play. There are hopes that the production may move to the West End if all goes well in the north of England. When O'Brien speaks of this, she superstitiously touches her fingers to the underneath of the table at which we sit, where the high-gloss finish does not obscure its woodenness.
I truly hope it is a success. I hope this play sees O'Brien's name in lights. I hope even more that we in Ireland get to know again the work of "a consummate stylist and, to my mind, the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English", as Philip Roth once praised her. Looking around, work by women, especially of O'Brien's "non-youth" age (as she puts it), is thin on the ground in this country. "You get in there and you keep going," she encourages me, after I vent my spleen about the prospects for women writers all over her delicate cardigan.
"I despair," she says. "God, yes! When you are writing well, there is a fantastic sense of power, and not the kind of power you get from an eyelash tint."
No, I agree, a little too hastily, eyelash tints just make your eyelashes darker. She looks at me quizzically, and I think I may have pushed the metaphor a bit too far. Nevertheless, she gets back on track.
"When you are writing well there is a great sense of resurgence," she says. "But there has to be the opposite, the periods of down, the despair. 'Creativity', if you can forgive the importance of the word, can summon up despair as well as joyfulness, despair that the well of creativity would run dry."
We stand to leave. She is tiny, dressed in black, with optimistic jewellery and that wonderful trademark hair, an extraordinary, luxuriant plumage like that of a very intelligent, alert rare bird.
"Get in the obstacle race!" she tells me. "Belief, not arrogance! Belief is a very strong card - they can reject you, but they cannot take away your self-belief!" I nod, I feel delicately invigorated, like I'm getting a pep talk from a porcelain drill-master.
She smiles, then quotes a piece of poetry. I'm fearing something obscure and classical, but as if she can read my mind, she offers Ogden Nash: "I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance were it not for making a living, which is rather a nousiance."