A CONVERSATION WITH EDNA O'BRIEN
By Philip Roth
November 18, 1984
The Irish writer Edna O'Brien, who has lived in London now for many years, moved recently to a wide boulevard of imposing 19th- century facades, a street that in the 1870's, when it was built, was renowned, she tells me, for its mistresses and kept women. The real estate agents have taken to calling this corner of the Maida Vale district ''the Belgravia of tomorrow''; at the moment it looks a little like a builder's yard because of all the renovation going on.
Miss O'Brien works in a quiet study that looks out to the green lawn of an immense private garden at the rear of her flat, a garden probably many times larger than the farm village in County Clare where she attended mass as a child. There is a desk, a piano, a sofa, a rosy Oriental carpet deeper in color than the faint marbleized pink of the walls and, through the French doors that open onto the garden, enough plane trees to fill a small park. On the mantel of the fireplace there are photographs of the writer's two grown sons from an early marriage - ''I live here more or less alone'' - and the famous lyrical photograph of the profile of a very young Virginia Woolf, the heroine of Miss O'Brien's new play. On the desk, which is set to look out toward the church steeple at the far end of the garden, there's a volume of J. M. Synge's collected works open to a chapter in ''The Aran Islands''; a volume of Flaubert's correspondence lies on the sofa, the pages turned to an exchange with George Sand. While waiting for me to arrive, she has been signing pages of a special edition of 15,000 copies of her selected stories and listening to a record of rousing choruses from Verdi operas in order to help her get through.
Because everything she's wearing for the interview is black, you cannot, of course, miss the white skin, the green eyes and the auburn hair; the coloring is dramatically Irish - as is the mellifluous fluency.
In ''Malone Dies,'' your compatriot Samuel Beckett writes: ''Let us say before I go any further, that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generations to come.'' This quotation stands as the epigraph of ''Mother Ireland,'' a memoir you published in 1976. Did you mean to suggest by this epigraph that your own writing about Ireland isn't wholly uncontaminated by such sentiments? Frankly, I don't feel such harshness in your work.
I picked the epigraph because I am, or was, especially at that time, unforgiving about lots of things in my life and I picked somebody who said it more eloquently and more ferociously than I could say it.
The fact is that your fiction argues against your unforgivingness.
To some extent it does but that is because I am a creature of conflicts. When I vituperate, I subsequently feel I should appease. That happens throughout my life. I am not a natural out-and-out hater any more than I am a natural, or thorough, out-and-out lover, which means I am often rather at odds with myself and others!
Who is the most unforgiven creature in your imagination?
Up to the time he died - which was a year ago - it was my father. But through death a metamorphosis happens: within. Since he died I have written a play about him embodying all his traits - his anger, his sexuality, his rapaciousness, etc. - and now I feel differently toward him. I do not want to relive my life with him or be reincarnated as the same daughter but I do forgive him. My mother is a different matter. I loved her, over-loved her, yet she visited a different legacy on me, an all-embracing guilt. I still have a sense of her over my shoulder, judging.
Here you are, a woman of experience, talking about forgiving your mother and father. Do you think that still worrying those problems has largely to do with your being a writer? If you weren't a writer, if you were a lawyer, if you were a doctor, perhaps you wouldn't be thinking about these people so much.
Absolutely. It's the price of being a writer. One is dogged by the past - pain, sensations, rejections, all of it. I do believe that this clinging to the past is a zealous, albeit hopeless desire to reinvent it so that one could change it. Doctors, lawyers and many other stable citizens are not afflicted by a persistent memory. In their way, they might be just as disturbed as you or I, except that they don't know it. They don't delve.
But not all writers feast on their childhood as much as you have.
I am obsessive, also I am industrious. Besides, the time when you are most alive and most aware is in childhood and one is trying to recapture that heightened awareness.
From the point of view not of a daughter or of a woman, but of a fiction writer, do you consider yourself fortunate in your origins - having been born in the isolated reaches of Ireland, raised on a lonely farm in the shadow of a violent father and educated by nuns behind the latched gate of a provincial convent? As a writer, how much or how little do you owe to the primitive rural world you often describe in stories about the Ireland of your childhood?
There's no telling, really. If I had grown up on the steppes of Russia, or in Brooklyn - my parents lived there when they were first married - my material would have been different but my apprehension might be just the same. I happened to grow up in a country that was and is breathlessly beautiful so the feeling for nature, for verdure and for the soil was instilled into me. Secondly, there was no truck with culture or literature so that my longing to write, sprung up of its own accord, was spontaneous. The only books in our house were prayer books, cookery books and blood-stock reports. I was privy to the world around me, was aware of everyone's little history, the stuff from which stories and novels are made. On the personal level, it was pretty drastic. So all these things combined to make me what I am.
But are you surprised that you survived the isolated farm and the violent father and the provincial convent without having lost the freedom of mind to be able to write?
I am surprised by my own sturdiness - yes; but I do not think that I am unscarred. Such things as driving a car or swimming are quite beyond me. In a lot of ways I feel a cripple. The body was as sacred as a tabernacle and everything a potential occasion of sin. It is funny now, but not that funny - the body contains the life story just as much as the brain. I console myself by thinking that if one part is destroyed another flourishes.
Was there enough money around when you were growing up?
No - but there had been! My father liked horses and liked leisure. He inherited a great deal of land and a beautiful stone house but he was profligate and the land got given away or squandered in archetypal Irish fashion. Cousins who came home from America brought us clothes and I inherited from my mother a certain childish pleasure in these things. Our greatest excitement was these visits, these gifts of trinkets and things, these signals of an outside, cosmopolitan world, a world I longed to enter.
I'm struck, particularly in the stories of rural Ireland during the war years, by the vastness and precision of your powers of recall. You seem to remember the shape, texture, color and dimensions of every object your eye may have landed upon while you were growing up - not to mention the human significance of all you saw, heard, smelled, tasted and touched. The result is prose like a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction. What I want to ask is how you account for this ability to reconstruct with such passionate exactness an Irish world you haven't fully lived in for decades? How does your memory keep it alive, and why won't this vanished world leave you alone?
At certain times I am sucked back there and the ordinary world and the present time recede. This recollection, or whatever it is, invades me. It is not something that I can summon up, it simply comes and I am the servant of it. My hand does the work and I don't have to think; in fact, were I to think it would stop the flow. It's like a dam in the brain that bursts.
Do you visit Ireland to help this recall along?
When I visit Ireland, I always secretly hope that something will spark off the hidden world and the hidden stories waiting to be released, but it doesn't happen like that! It happens, as you well know, much more convolutedly, through one's dreams, through chance and, in my case, through the welter of emotion stimulated by a love affair and its aftermath.
I wonder if you haven't chosen the way you live - living by yourself - to prevent anything emotionally too powerful from separating you from that past.
I'm sure I have. I rail against my loneliness but it is as dear to me as the thought of unity with a man. I have often said that I would like to divide my life into alternating periods of penance, cavorting and work, but as you can see that would not strictly fit in with a conventional married life.
Most American writers I know would be greatly unnerved by the prospect of living away from the country that's their subject and the source of their language and obsessions. Many Eastern European writers I know remain behind the Iron Curtain because the hardships of totalitarianism seem preferable to the dangers, for a writer, of exile. If ever there was a case for a writer staying within earshot of the old neighborhood, it's been provided by two 20th-century Americans, Faulkner, who settled back in Mississippi after a brief period abroad, and Bellow, who after his wanderings returned to live and teach in Chicago. Now we all know that neither Beckett nor Joyce seemed to want or to need a base in Ireland, once they began experimenting with their Irish endowment - but do you ever feel that leaving Ireland as a very young woman and coming to London to make a life has cost you anything as a writer? Isn't there an Ireland other than the Ireland of your youth that might have been turned to your purposes?
To establish oneself in a particular place and to use it as the locale for fiction is both a strength to the writer and a signpost to the reader. But you have to go if you find your roots too threatening, too impinging. Joyce said that Ireland is the sow that eats its farrow - he was referring to their attitude to their writers, they savage them. It is no accident that our two greatest illustrati - himself and Mr. Beckett - left and stayed away, though they never lost their particular Irish consciousness. In my own case, I do not think that I would have written anything if I had stayed. I feel I would have been watched, would have been judged (even more!) and would have lost that priceless commodity called freedom. Writers are always on the run and I was on the run from many things. Yes, I dispossessed myself and I am sure that I lost something, lost the continuity, lost the day-to-day contact with reality. However, compared with Eastern European writers, I have the advantage that I can always go back. For them it must be terrible, the finality of it, the utter banishment, like a soul shut out of heaven.
Will you go back?
Intermittently. Ireland is very different now, a much more secular land, where, ironically, both the love of literature and the repudiation of literature are on the wane. Ireland is becoming as materialistic and as callow as the rest of the world. Yeats's line - ''Romantic Ireland's dead and gone'' - has indeed come to fruition.
In my foreword to your new book, ''A Fanatic Heart,'' I quote what Frank Tuohy, in an essay about James Joyce, had to say about the two of you: that while Joyce, in ''Dubliners'' and ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,'' was the first Irish Catholic to make his experience and surroundings recognizable, ''the world of Nora Barnacle (the former chambermaid who became Joyce's wife) had to wait for the fiction of Edna O'Brien.'' Can you tell me how important Joyce has been to you? A story of yours like ''Tough Men,'' about the bamboozling of a scheming shopkeeper by an itinerant con man, seems to me right out of some rural ''Dubliners,'' and yet you don't seem to have been challenged by Joyce's linguistic and mythic preoccupations. What has he meant to you, what if anything have you taken or learned from him, and how intimidating is it for an Irish writer to have as precursor this great verbal behemoth who has chewed up everything Irish in sight?
In the constellation of geniuses, he is a blinding light and father of us all. (I exclude Shakespeare because for Shakespeare no human epithet is enough). When I first read Joyce, it was a little book edited by T. S. Eliot which I bought on the quays in Dublin, second-hand, for fourpence. Before that, I had read very few books and they were mostly gushing and outlandish. I was a pharmaceutical apprentice who dreamed of writing. Now here was ''The Dead'' and a section of ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' which stunned me not only by the bewitchment of style but because they were so true to life, they were life. Then, or rather later, I came to read ''Ulysses,'' but as a young girl I balked, because it was really too much for me, it was too inaccessible and too masculine, apart from the famous Molly Bloom section. I now think ''Ulysses'' is the most diverting, brilliant, intricate and unboring book that I have ever read. I can pick it up at any time, read a few pages and feel that I have just had a brain transfusion. As for his being intimidating, it doesn't arise - he is simply out of bounds, beyond us all, ''the far Azores,'' as he might call it.
Let's go back to the world of Nora Barnacle, to how the world looks to the Nora Barnacles, those who remain in Ireland and those who take flight. At the center of virtually all your stories is a woman, generally a woman on her own, battling isolation and loneliness, or seeking love, or recoiling from the surprises of adventuring among men. You write about women without a taint of ideology, or, as far as I can see, any concern with taking a correct position.
The correct position is to write the truth, to write what one feels regardless of any public consideration or any clique. I think an artist never takes a position either through expediency or umbrage. Artists detest and suspect positions because they know that the minute you take a fixed position you are something else, you are a journalist or you are a politician. What I am after is a bit of magic and I do not want to write tracts or to read them. I have depicted women in lonely, desperate and often humiliated situations, very often the butt of men and almost always searching for an emotional catharsis that does not come. This is my territory and one that I know from hard-earned experience. If you want to know what I regard as the principal crux of female despair, it is this: in the Greek myth of Oedipus and in Freud's exploration of it, the son's desire for his mother is admitted; the infant daughter also desires its mother but it is unthinkable, either in myth, in fantasy or in fact, that that desire can be consummated.
Yet you can't be oblivious to the changes in consciousness that have been occasioned by the women's movement.
Yes, certain things have been changed for the better, women are not chattels, they express their right to earn as much as men, to be respected, not to be ''The Second Sex,'' but in the mating area things have not changed. Attraction and sexual love are spurred not by consciousness but by instinct and passion, and in this men and women are radically different. The man still has the greater authority and the greater autonomy. It's biological. The woman's fate is to receive the sperm and to retain it, but the man's is to give it and in the giving he spends himself and then subsequently withdraws. While she is in a sense being fed, he is in the opposite sense being drained, and to resuscitate himself he takes temporary flight. As a result, you get the woman's resentment at being abandoned, however briefly, his guilt at going and, above all, his innate sense of self-protection in order to re-find himself so as to reaffirm himself. Closeness is therefore always only relative. A man may help with the dishes and so forth but his commitment is more ambiguous and he has a roving eye.
Are there no women as promiscuous?
They sometimes are but it doesn't give them the same sense of achievement. A woman, I dare to say, is capable of a deeper and more lasting love. I would also add that a woman is more afraid of being left. That still stands. Go into any woman's canteen, dress department, hairdresser's, gymnasium and you will see plenty of desperation and plenty of competition. People utter a lot of slogans but they are only slogans and what we feel and do is what determines us. Women are no more secure in their emotions than they ever were. They simply are better at coming to terms with them. The only real security would be to turn away from men, to detach, but that would be a little death - at least, for me it would.
Why do you write so many love stories? Is it because of the importance of the subject, or because, once you grew up and left Ireland and chose the solitary life of a writer, sexual love inevitably became the strongest sphere of experience to which you continued to have access?
First of all, I think love replaced religion for me in my sense of fervor. When I began to look for earthly love (i.e., sex), I felt that I was cutting myself off from God. By taking on the mantle of religion, sex assumed proportions that are rather far-fetched. It became the central thing in my life, the goal. I was very prone to the Heathcliff, Mr. Rochester syndrome and still am. The sexual excitement was to a great extent linked with pain and separation. My sexual life is pivotal to me as I believe it is for everyone else. It takes up a lot of time both in the thinking and the doing, the former often taking pride of place. For me, primarily, it is secretive and contains elements of mystery and plunder. My daily life and my sexual life are not of a whole - they are separated. Part of my Irish heritage!
What's most difficult about being both a woman and a writer? Do you think there are difficulties you have writing as a woman that I don't have as a man - and do you imagine that there might be difficulties I have that you don't?
I think it is different being a man and a woman, it is very different . I think you as a man have waiting for you in the wings of the world a whole cortege of women - potential wives, mistresses, muses, nurses. Women writers do not have that bonus. The examples are numerous, the Bront"e sisters, Jane Austen, Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor, Emily Dickinson, Marina Tsvetayeva . I think it was Dashiell Hammett who said he wouldn't want to live with a woman who had more problems than himself. I think the signals men get from me alarm them.
You will have to find a Leonard Woolf.
I do not want a Leonard Woolf. I want Lord Byron and Leonard Woolf mixed in together.
But does the job fundamentally come down to the same difficulties then, regardless of gender?
Absolutely. There is no difference at all, you, like me, are trying to make something out of nothing and the anxiety is extreme. Flaubert's description of his room echoing with curses and cries of distress could be any writer's room. Yet I doubt that we would welcome an alternative life, there is something stoical about soldiering on all alone.B
