EDNA O'BRIEN 1930-2024
Like her heroes Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, the writer Edna O'Brien neither lived nor died in Ireland, yet Ireland imbued all three. They represent the expulsion of enquiring minds from a country reluctant to change, a culture once riddled by hypocrisy, misogyny, and religious constraints. Things have thankfully progressed, and the outsiders, those harbingers of embarrassment, are now rightly celebrated. In 1960 O'Brien's debut novel The Country Girls was burnt by priests and banned in Ireland, her natural honesty about sex was a step too far out of line for those who maintained appearances. In later life, she was like a High Priestess of Loneliness, a symptom she both cherished and abhorred as essential to her craft.
Hers was a life of gauntlets laid down. Her interior world was resourced to consider and then expose challenges and rectify injustices, especially when it came to women's rights. Though England was better, she wasn't met with open arms. Her libertine attitudes and slaying of cows standing in the way, sacred or otherwise, meant she wasn't given an easy time by the critics in her adoptive country. When her friend Norman Mailer criticized her for being "too interior" in her working methods, she calmly reminded him that his own efforts might benefit from such an approach. O'Brien's life would make a perfect template for the kind of novel she would never have written: a blockbuster saga of improbable events where facts read like contrived fiction, a curious luxury from an eventful life lived well.
O'Brien was a writer of restlessness in the hope of some form of consolation or resolution. Her last novel, Girl, took her in her late eighties to Nigeria to research the fates of schoolgirls kidnapped by Boku Haram, with money to facilitate her quest sewn into her clothes. When challenged that she, as an outsider, had no right to tackle such material, she rounded, "I do not subscribe to that devious form of censorship. Theme and territory belong to all who aspire to tell it."
Her palette may have widened beyond the shores of her rejected land, but her sense of injustice and restitution burned and remained. Having embraced the freedoms of Sixties London, finally escaping the bitter confines of her marriage to Ernest Gebler, a talented writer himself, but one resentful to the point of hatred of the greater literary success of his former wife, of whom he tastelessly remarked that "her talent lay in her knickers," a phrase a critic in the journal Hibernia quoted verbatim.
She'd married him much against her parent's wishes, determined to escape the sense of loneliness and isolation that overshadowed her childhood in Clare. It is strange to think that this quintessential country girl became a friend of Jacqueline Onassis, Robert Mitchum, Jane Fonda, Marianne Faithfull, and Paul McCartney (who serenaded her children), to name but five. Her London parties at her Chelsea home are now the stuff of myth and legend. Elizabeth Taylor starred in X, Y & Zee, the 1972 film of her novel Zee & Co. Edna was even rescued from the downside of an unpleasant acid trip with R.D. Laing trip by Sean Connery.
Possessed a glacial beauty even in old age, her husky voice was instantly recognizable. Hers was a refined but scrutinizer's presence, an experience akin to being observed by a stately heron. She leaves behind an impeccable legacy that paved the way for women writers, especially Irish ones, to proceed with freedoms she had provided whilst existing in a time of necessary change, albeit in absence from her homeland. (the well from which she drew her copious inspirations.) There was a hiatus of a decade in the eighties, and she fell silent and contemplated suicide. The books that followed her literary resurrection were darker in tone, tackling subjects as diverse as abortion, Down By The River about a true tale about a teenage victim of rape, denied the opportunity to travel to the UK for a termination, and war crimes in Bosnia, the darkly haunting The Little Red Chairs.
Edna O'Brien's restlessness was rooted in a creative necessity to discern the truth. Her appearances on chat shows, where her responses resembled shards of poetry, only added to her mystique. She once appeared in a television advert for The Guardian newspaper, in which she informed the viewers that one should never read rubbish; at least one should end up writing it. Her output is relentlessly impressive, challenging, and intelligent, and it will continue to enlighten her in the wake of her impeccable absence.
She will be buried in Ireland on Holy Island, her final request of pyrrhic resolution; that sense of loneliness maintained.