Returning to the source

AUTHOR Edna O’Brien, of The Country Girl, returned to her native East Clare last weekend on the 50th anniversary of her first novel’s ban by the Irish Censorship Board.

Edna O’Brien received much criticism for her early writing but, with time, her writing earned her honours, awards and esteemed recognition.
In an insightful public interview with Professor Declan Kiberd of University College Dublin at Scariff library last Saturday, Ms O’Brien spoke candidly about religion, censorship, growing up in Tuamgraney, her love of words, her mentor, James Joyce, and socialising with movie stars.
Asked what first alerted her to the promise of language when growing up in East Clare, Ms O’Brien revealed there was “a whole medley of things” that attributed to this.
“My first memory of my interest in words was being picked up in her arms by my mother. She was very hard working and a marvellous woman. She had lines on her forehead and I said to her your forehead is a copybook and I’ll write a story on it. Therefore I had this passion very early but along with that, there was the language all around me, some of it pugilistic, some of it less so. There was no encouragement for writing, why should there have been? But I had this hunger for it before I knew what it was. Then came school and school was a bit histrionic I think. We had a nice teacher, Miss Maloney, but she was given to fits of temper plus the fact that she would launch from history to geography to a little bit of mathematics in one swoop. In short, my history my geography, my English and every other semi-quasi education that I had was all mixed together. So that was my education.
“The greatest introduction I got into language and literature that I got was through the Gospels and Scripture, they are beautiful. I’m not alone in this.
I didn’t get to Shakespeare – the greatest of all – until I first heard a speech from Shakespeare. It was a speech on the ingratitude of children and I suppose it was from King Lear. My mother was grounding the meal for the cows in a great big pot. She was anti-literature, my mother, with good cause because she felt that literature was sinful and sinning. I said this speech of Shakespeare to my mother and although she agreed with the theme of it, the ingratitude of children, she said, ‘you know, Edna, they get their money easy’,” Ms O’Brien recalled.
Professor Kiberd also questioned the award-winning novelist about the culture of censorship that existed in the 1960s. Ms O’Brien was unsurprisingly critical of the system.
“Patrick Kavanagh and Myles na Gopaleen, who I met only briefly because in my Dublin days, I wasn’t with the literati or the Bohemians, I was working on the Cabra Road in a chemist shop making medicines. They both wrote wittily about how they envied me because there was nothing like being a country one and being banned because it brought attention. But to me, if one can be serious for a moment, it was alarming and it was hurtful. What I felt was not just the banning, which in its way was lofty although it was much reported but also in people I met. It was as though one had committed a crime and I didn’t know what the crime was. But really, the crime was to do with the society and the silencing at that time,” she outlined.
With such a large audience gathered in the Scariff library, Ms O’Brien addressed the aspiring writers. “If you want to do something, there is only one person you can rely on to do it and that is yourself. There are no crutches. Sometimes I get letters from writers who say they have written half a book and will I read it and what they are hoping is that somehow I will help them to write it. I can’t do that. You don’t discuss a book when you are writing it or before you write it, you just write it. If there is somebody who wants to learn to be a writer then there is no greater education than taking one or two masters and staying with them and James Joyce was my greatest education,” she revealed.
She described going into a bookshop and picking up A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and reading a passage at random.
“It was a scene from the Christmas dinner in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it was seen through the eyes of the all seeing all hearing, the poet, the child. The moon was described and the fire and the fender around the fire was getting hot and the table laid and everything was for fairytale perfection. Then they sit down and the argument starts up about Charles Stuart Parnell, the hero, the antihero, the embodiment of sex and politics. Then the whole Christmas dinner was erupted. Reading it to me was like the biggest and most thrilling revelation, because up to then, I had been writing about clouds and things. It is fine to be writing about clouds but you can’t fill a book about clouds. But what was different about this passage was I thought this could be our house at home, things got ready and then suddenly everything erupted. I remember card games up in Drewsboro. My mother would have the sandwiches made and rows about Michael Collins, DeValera. But when I found James Joyce, when I began to read him and later write a book about him, I found the greatest inspiration and companion and greatness that I chanced on. For another writer, it might be Moby Dick or it might be Emily Brontë,” she said. 
Although she emigrated to London in the late ’50s, Ms O’Brien had some thoughts on the difference between the Ireland she left and the Ireland she returned to last week.
“My view of Ireland today is a mixture of many things. It is much more liberated and there is more influence from outside. What I find disquieting is how driven and rushed and very often how superficial things are. We are not American and we don’t have to be like America,” she commented.
Speaking about her native East Clare, she described it as a bewitching place, amazing not for any conventional reason like the lakes of Killarney or the Giants Causeway.
“When you live here, you don’t always notice it, it’s not Connemara or the legendary tourist places but it is incredibly beautiful. This landscape, it just draws you in. I write about lakes and I have loved reading about lakes in mythology where we were taught of civilisations under lakes and children of Lir. But lakes especially for me in this particular landscape, all places have something in them animus, lakes while beautiful to look at are also dangerous. I remember our father telling us of one time in their childhood when Lough Derg froze over and they skated across it and then once a crack came in the ice. The thing about water – of the four elements, water is the one that I am most frightened of but I don’t know why,” Ms O’Brien added.
Responding to a question from the floor, the author discussed her book In The Forest, which stirred much raw emotion in the local community.
“I wrote about a very tragic triple murder here in a forest, which brought me some odium but I am very proud to have written it. I didn’t write it to show up something so awful. I wrote it because it was something true that existed and I hope I wrote it with compassion. If it’s reported in The Star or The Sun, it’s sensationalised and then if you take the exact same story as if Emily Brontë wrote it and it’s a deep and profound journey of a story in which the reader can empathise, feel the full gravity and sorrow and awfulness and not have it cheapened. Joyce said a measure of a work of art is from how deep a source it springs. There are no laws. The only law there is how great and truthful it is to itself it can be,” she concluded.