The author shone a light for the writers who followed her, who took courage from her courage
It has to be firmly said how much she was admired, feted and adored, how clear was the light she shone for the writers who followed herEdna O'Brien in 2006: she survived forces that silenced and crushed who knows how many potential women writers. Photograph: Frank Millerwas a great Irish icon and in the afterglow of her long, productive and famous life, it is given us to wonder what made her seem more than real to us.
O’Brien came of age in a time when to be an artist was to be interested in greatness, when artists expected to take risks, seek truth and give their all. This high style also contained ideas of woundedness and sacrifice, especially from a woman: the artist must be open, must surrender themselves to access deep, unspoken truths. Writing a book was, for O’Brien, “a delirious journey”; she was amazed, each time, that she had come through it intact.
The Country Girls was done. “The novel wrote itself” – she was just the messenger. “And all the time I was writing it I couldn’t stop crying, although it is a fairly buoyant, funny book.” She had just left Ireland and the book was a reclamation of the girlhood she had lost: the difference between remembering and imagining was very small.
O’Brien’s father had been a violent, nasty drunk. Edna wrote him into a play, after he died, with all “his anger, his sexuality, his rapaciousness”. It was her attempt at forgiveness, she said – and it worked. Just like him, she lost a fortune during her great “reckless period” in London, when she entertained the literary stars and celebrities of the day. Money was a great theme, on and off the page. For most of her life, O’Brien earned her own way and lived alone.
I sometimes think that the difference between men and women in Irish public life, when I was growing up, was that men never admitted to feeling hurt in any way, and that women were expected to speak of nothing else. O’Brien took this interest in damage and made it transcendent. She was for a while, a client of the psychiatrist RD Laing , and the way she spoke about art owed something to the murky truths unearthed in psychoanalysis. “Writing is an eminently masochistic exercise,” she said.
These are not, I hope, criticisms. O’Brien survived forces that silenced and crushed who knows how many potential women writers, so her strategies and contradictions must be regarded as salutary. She kept moving; her books changed from one decade to the next, she thrived. In later life, O’Brien felt she might finally be appreciated in Ireland by a younger audience and she became more trusting.
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