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Edna O’Brien – no smoke, no fire

Casual hearsay from unreliable gossip has become legend

Letters to the Editor. Illustration: Paul Scott
The Irish Times - Letters to the Editor.
Tue Aug 20 2024 - 00:08

Sir, – We should welcome Karl McDonald’s report “Did Edna O’Brien book burning actually happen?” (“Overheard”, August 17th). As mentioned, the late Fr Tom Stack conducted an exhaustive search – assisted by the correspondence columns of The Irish Times – into locating any witness, anywhere, who could provide evidence that The Country Girls was burned as a protest against its contents.

No witness has ever come forward; no reliable evidence has ever emerged that this occurrence took place. Yet the Times of London reported, in its obituary on July 29th, that the book was “ceremonially ceremoniously burnt”, invoking a cowled inquisition of priests around a public bonfire. And every main British newspaper summed up Edna O’Brien’s remarkable life as if the book-burning were the main event, surely a reductionist approach to her achievements as a writer. RTÉ still mentions that her books were burned as though historic fact.

Yet there has never been any evidence, or witness to this “ceremonial” book fire. It was casual hearsay from unreliable gossip which has become legend. The theme of John Ford’s movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance – that legend can grow more dominant than truth – is persuasive: and yet journalism should surely continue to strive to base reported events on evidence and witnesses.

The London Times has accepted my suggestion, as a coda to their obituary, that this “ceremonial” book-burning has never been established as fact, and it indeed befits the service of historical record that you have now questioned the legend. Tom Stack, as well as Prof John Horgan, put in the previous work searching for any basis to this allegation. – Yours, etc,

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MARY KENNY,

Deal,

Kent, UK.