We knew this day was coming but still … it’s a sad one. A connecting thread is lost, with the 20th century, with my father, who introduced me to O’Brien’s work (and not just her work but what she meant, what her career WAS). We used to talk about her a lot. My “way in” was through what is known as the “Country Girls trilogy” (and I would suggest anyone curious to start there as well). These three books, based loosely on her own experience as a young girl and then young women, were so controversial they were banned in Ireland. It created an absolute shitstorm. That outlaw-rebel glow remained with her, even as she became a kind of Elder Stateswoman to younger Irish writers, who saw her as “establishment”, when this woman was the most anti-establishment person who ever anti-establishmented. She wrote novels about young women and their early dating/relationship years and she was basically run out of Ireland for it. She was in the storied tradition of Irish writers rejected by their home country. Most of these Irish writers, though, were male. She was an outlaw-times-100 because she was a woman. Women in Irish literature were usually muses/poetic figures/mystical creatures/nuns … they weren’t modern women bumming cigarettes and sneaking out to see guys. Ireland in the 1950s, people. It was a theocracy. (I read John McGahern’s memoir last year and it was a little bit shocking, even to me, and I know all this stuff already.) We’re talking Magdalen Laundries, etc. (which O’Brien has also written about). O’Brien’s writing is very straightforward, almost UN-“literary”, and not fancy at all. It’s real. It’s deep. She was interviewed in 2007 about the Country Girls trilogy and I loved her response:
I wrote The Country Girls in three weeks having blown the 50 quid advance. I was young, married with two small children, and whenever I met people, I was spouting poetry. I had this thing that writing was real–I mean other people’s writing — literature, great literature, not rubbish. There’s so much rubbish written now, so much garbage, and it’s extolled. But writing was to me animate; it was real; it was as real as the people I knew.
I only thought of one thing — the country, the landscape, my mother, the people I had left. Now I was dying to leave, this is not nostalgia, and I feel permanently, in life, quite isolated. I both belong very intensely to that place where I come from and I’m running from it still. So when I sat down to write, I was extremely emotional and yet the language is not emotional; it just came out. I didn’t have to call on memory. To use the cliche — it wrote itself. And that is sometimes true for a first book.
I knew there’d be a storm. I was accused of betraying my country, my locality, my sex. The nuns in my convent went bonkers with rage. But the books survived. I suppose that’s what counts.
When O’Brien turned 90, writers paid tribute to her in the Irish Times.
From The Country Girls (1960):
“Look, Caithleen, will you give up the nonsense? We’re eighteen and we’re bored to death.” She lit a cigarette and puffed vigorously. She went on: “We want to live. Drink gin. Squeeze into the front of big cars and drive up outside hotels. We want to go places. Not to sit in this damp dump.” She pointed to the damp patch in the wallpaper, over the chimneypiece, and I was just going to interrupt her, but she got in before me. “We’re here at night, killing moths for Joanna, jumping up like maniacs every time a moth flies out from behind the wardrobe, puffing DDT into crevices, listening to that lunatic next door playing the fiddle.” She sawed off her left wrist with her right hand. She sat on the bed exhausted. It was the longest speech Baba had ever made.
“Hear! Hear!” I said, and I clapped. She blew smoke straight into my face.
“But we want young men. Romance. Love and things,” I said despondently. I thought of standing under a streetlight in the rain with my hair falling crazily about, my lips poised for the miracle of a kiss. A kiss. Nothing more. My imagination did not go beyond that. It was afraid to. Mama had protested too agonizingly all through the windy years. But kisses were beautiful. His kisses. On the mouth, and on the eyelids, and on the neck when he lifted up the mane of hair.
“Young men have no bloody money. At least the gawks we meet. Smell o’ hair oil. Up the Dublin mountains for air, a cup of damp tea in a damp hotel. Then out in the woods after tea and a damp hand fumbling up your shirt. No, sir. We’ve had all the bloody air we’ll ever need. We want life.” She threw her arms out in the air. It was a wild and reckless gesture. She began to get ready.
We washed and sprinkled talcum powder all over ourselves.
“Have some of mine,” Baba said, but I insisted, “No, Baba, you have some of mine.” When we were happy we shared things, but when life was quiet and we weren’t going anywhere, we hid our things like misers, and she’d say to me, “Don’t you dare touch my powder,” and I’d say, “There must be a ghost in this room, my perfume was interfered with,” and she’d pretend not to hear me. We never loaned each other clothes then, and one worried if the other got anything new.
Yes. “The books survived”.
