From the publication of her very first book, The Country Girls (1960) to her most recent books, Edna O’Brien’s works have gained wide acclaim, particularly among American readers. One of Ireland’s most influential writers, she is famous for her rich and sensuous prose, and her books often deal with disappointments in love.
In 1986, she talked to Susan O’Grady Fox about growing up in Taumgraney, County Clare, and her early influences.
Edna O'Brien
My life in Ireland as a young girl was quite lonely and was devoid of anything literary. There were no books at all in my house. My mother was most mistrustful of the written word.
But for some reason I always had this total vocation to writing. I loved writing compositions. I would actually ask the other girls to let me write theirs.
Our house was about a mile from the village, and it’s kind of pathetic, but on the way home from school I was so excited about doing these essays that I used to sit down on the road, or on a wall, and start writing.
The Traveling Players were the other big excitement in those days. They came about twice a year and put on melodramas, always melodramas: “East Lane,” “Murder in the Old Red Barn,” and those sorts of plays. I thought they were the most truly vivid, wonderful people I had ever seen.
I dreamed of going away with them, so I wrote a little play called “Dracula’s Daughter” in which the girl went to Dracula to see if she could go away with him. When I think of it in retrospect, obviously it was complete romantic masochism.
So these were the sort of excitements of my youth.
The biggest stimulation was nature. The landscape was utterly and randomly beautiful — the bog lilies, wild irises, oak trees, ash trees — all the different trees. Then there’s the light; the evening light in Ireland seems to me to be the most beautiful thing I have ever known, and as a child I sort of imbibed it. I spent so much time out of doors, as much as I could. That was the sort of love of, and if you like, companionship of nature, I had.
Away from nature, literature and the inner self, I felt that nearly everything one did back then was wrong. I had a sense of sin and a sense of guilt just drummed into me by people who had had it drummed into them. I’m not blaming them as much as saying, just tough luck.
Religion was vitally important. Holy pictures hanging in the kitchen and every night the rosary said. I remember the kneeling down, it was a tiled floor and it was very cold, there was just one fire and just one lamp — no electricity — and there were mice. They used to come out of the shoe closet. We’d be kneeling, praying and my mother would jump up screaming because of the mice.
Then we went to Mass, of course, Holy Communion and Confession. The religious life wasn’t as in other countries where people pray and wear medals and all that — it was, so to speak, part of one’s fears, and feelings and fantasies and everything about sexual desires were all smothered over.
I remember once seeing a couple who had been courting for five or ten years. They never met except on Sunday in the afternoon, they would go for a walk — she was quite fat, this woman, she had a kind of bustle — and I remember once hearing the man, he sort of touched her on the back and said, “You have a big backside.” I thought it was the most sinful thing I had ever heard. I did not think it was crude though. I thought it was sinful. That’s how regressive it was.
The women — I can remember them all very clearly in my mind. I can go up the street of the village I lived in and think of them all swathed in clothes and knitted stockings. I think that’s where I must have conceived some love of glamour, because there was no glamour at all. Glamour was a ticket to “you know what,” to sin. So that formed part of my character and part of my fear.
I think that a lot of people who leave Ireland, and indeed many who stay there, have that [love-hate] syndrome. Love-hate seems to apply more to Ireland than to any other country. It’s amazing because it does haunt you. You do want to go back and at the same time, when you go back, you realize that you feel constrained and constricted ♦
The end of coronavirus: what plague literature tells us about our future
From Thucydides to Camus, there are plenty of hopeful reminders that there’s nothing unprecedented about the coronavirus lockdown - and that pandemics do end
Marcel Theroux
Friday 1 May 2020
Shortly before the London lockdown, at an eerily quiet branch of Waterstones, I managed to get my hands on The Decameron, by Boccaccio,and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. But Camus’s The Plague had gone the way of dried pasta and toilet roll; there was just a desolate gap on the shelves where the copies had once been.
The primary lesson of plague literature, from Thucydides onwards, is how predictably humans respond to such crises. Over millennia, there has been a consistent pattern to behaviour during epidemics: the hoarding, the panicking, the fear, the blaming, the superstition, the selfishness, the surprising heroism, the fixation with the numbers of the reported dead, the boredom during quarantine.
Defoe would have recognised the impulses behind the strange tableaux of life interrupted in central London: piles of ice melting outside abruptly closed bars; a truck unloading gym equipment at an oligarch’s house in Mayfair; jittery shoppers with overloaded trolleys. “Many families,” he writes, “foreseeing the approach of the distemper laid up stores of provisions sufficient for their whole families, and shut themselves up, and that so entirely, that they were neither seen or heard of till the infection was quite ceased.”
The sudden, powerful need to know what’s coming is predictable, too. We turn to historical witnesses who can explain what it’s like. Defoe’s motive for writing A Journal of the Plague Year was an outbreak of bubonic plague in Marseille in 1720. Anticipating its spread, readers wanted to know what it had been like in 1665. Defoe, responding to demand, provided them with an instant book, fashioned out of statistics, reminiscences, gossip, anecdote and blood-curdling dramatic detail. “Passing through Token-House Yard in Lothbury, of a sudden a casement violently opened just over my head, and a woman gave three frightful screeches, and then cried, “O death, death, death!”
Bring out your dead ... a depiction of the Great Plague in London, 1665.
Defoe almost certainly didn’t witness this – he would have been about five. Novelistic moments such as these would make the book compelling at any time, but right now it has a painful relevance. Defoe is particularly strong on the unpreparedness and prevarication that made the impact of the plague more severe. Or, as he puts it: “I often reflected upon the unprovided condition that the whole body of the people were in at the first coming of this calamity upon them; and how it was for want of timely entering into measures and managements, as well public as private, that all the confusions that followed were brought upon us, and that such a prodigious number of people sunk in that disaster which, if proper steps had been taken, might, Providence concurring, have been avoided.”
Bracingly vivid ... Daniel Defoe’s religious fanatic Solomon Eagle from A Journal of the Plague Year. Photograph: Colin Waters/Alamy
Defoe is sometimes dismissed as a hack, but his lack of vanity about his prose is one of the things that gives the book its power. There’s something amazingly bracing about his vividness and curiosity – the bills of mortality, quoted in full; minor characters such as the religious fanatic Solomon Eagle who walks around naked with a pan of burning charcoal on his head; and the imprudent John Cock, a barber who is so relieved by the apparent retreat of the epidemic that he returns to normal life too soon and pays the penalty. Moral: don’t be a John Cock.
So much of the behaviour of our 17th-century forebears is uncomfortably familiar. The citizens of east London watch complacently as the plague tears through the West End, and assume they will be fine. They’re proved terrifyingly wrong. Defoe adds in a chilling parenthesis: “For indeed it came upon them like an armed man when it did come.”
Even before germ theory, Defoe’s common sense and perceptiveness lead him to conclusions of which our chief medical officer would approve. He gives a prescient warning about the danger of asymptomatic carriers: “The plague is not to be avoided by those that converse promiscuously in a town infected, and people have it when they know it not, and that they likewise give it to others when they know not that they have it themselves.”
If human behaviour remains dismayingly constant, one thing that has changed for the better is science and our understanding of it. Seven hundred years on, there’s something deeply poignant about Boccaccio’s pre-scientific description of the spread of the Black Death in his native Florence. “What was particularly virulent about this plague was that it would leap from the sick to the healthy whenever they were together, much as fire catches hold of dry or oily material that’s brought close to it. And that was not all. Not only did speaking with the sick and spending time with them infect the healthy or kill them off, but touching the clothes of the sick or handling anything they had touched seemed to pass on the infection.” You feel like the audience in a pantomime, wanting to shout across the centuries and tell him who the villain is and how he operates.
‘There was particularly high mortality among doctors,’ Thucydides tells of the plague in fifth-century Athens. Photograph: Science History
Not everyone responds to plague by immersing themselves in data about epidemics. The escapist response to disaster is another predictable move and The Decameron epitomises it. After his short but terrifying description of the Florentine plague, Boccaccio sends his troupe of young characters into quarantine, where they spend the remainder of the book, swapping funny, ribald stories: the plague doesn’t feature again. It’s a welcome relief to lose yourself in a world of cuckolds and randy nuns. And once more, plus ça change. The gilded Florentine youths are doing the 14th-century equivalent of binge-watching Sex Education on Netflix.
Thomas Mann and Camus are less interested in plague itself than in using it to make existential points. The plague in Death in Venice is an avatar of death in general, the terrible mystery, the pale horse; it is something that strips away vanity and reveals unpalatable truths. In Mann’s novella, it is the catalyst for Von Aschenbach’s humiliating descent into clownish self-destruction. At the same time, the pages dealing with the cholera epidemic are vigorous and apposite. The hotels in Venice empty swiftly, despite official protestations that there is nothing to worry about. It’s a young English travel agent who finally cuts through the official flannel. The doubts he raises about administrative competence and probity are ones that in due course we’ll all be obliged to consider. “‘That is,’ he continued in an undertone and with some feeling, ‘the official explanation, which the authorities here have seen fit to stick to.’”
FacebookTwitterPinterestExistential epidemic ... a scene from Neil Bartlett’s adaptation of Camus’ The Plague at the Arcola theatre, London, in 2017. Photograph: Jane Hobson/Rex/Shutterstock
Camus is the real odd one out. The Plague is often read as an allegory of the French experience under occupation, but right now there seems nothing allegorical about it: the hero, Dr Rieux, seems like a naturalistic depiction of a frontline care-worker forced into impossible decisions over who gets a ventilator. At other historical moments, the constant reflection on the meaning of the plague could seem heavy-handed – Gallic, not in a good way – but in 2020 it’s like reading The Cruciblewhile your elderly parent is on trial for witchcraft. For long stretches, you forget any notion of allegory and simply wonder how Camus could have got it so right: from the panic buying of peppermints that people think will be a prophylactic, to the high mortality rate in the municipal jail, to the exhausted healthcare workers, and the terrible monotony of quarantine, something with which we are only just beginning to get acquainted.
And then, of course, the plague ends. That’s the actual good news that these books bring. The epidemic always passes. The majority of people survive. Thucydides himself had it and recovered. “I shall simply tell it as it happened,” he promises of the plague that ravaged fifth-century Athens, “and describe the features of the disease which will give anyone who studies them some prior knowledge to enable recognition should it ever strike again.”
Should it ever strike again is the phrase that awakens our sense of hubris. For all the talk of an unprecedented crisis, we are living through something with many precedents. “There was particularly high mortality among doctors because of their particular exposure,” Thucydides wrote 2,500 years ago in a sentence that could appear in tomorrow’s paper. We have assumed that deadly epidemics belonged to a phase of history that was behind us, as quaint and irrelevant as candlelight and milking your own cows.
When the number of fatalities finally peaks and dwindles, Defoe’s citizens pull up their windows and shout to each other to share the news. Camus’s Oran is liberated; its citizens struggle to make sense of what has happened to them. Back in fifth-century Athens, the Peloponnesian war continues. Whether society changes for the better or worse, or simply stays the same, is what we will find out.
From the Berlin Journal by Max Frisch (1974): A brain grinding itself down
The Swiss novelist’s journal is preoccupied with death, cognitive decline and drinking
ROY DOYLE
Saturday November 2, 2019
Even before life became a primarily online phenomenon, some literary commentators were noticing a shift in interest away from the novel towards textual forms traditionally considered supplementary: journals, diaries, notebooks, correspondence.
This trend has only accelerated as we become habituated to observing one another’s lives in unprecedented detail. The immediacy of the connected world stokes an impatience with fictive artifice; we are disinclined to read about invented people when the real ones around us are so very interesting.
More cynically, it might be said that the culture of oversharing, aestheticised selfhood and personal branding has infiltrated literary production – writers have never been more fascinated by themselves. Whatever the cause, there is a distinct drift away from fiction, as the novel mutates toward forms bearing resemblances to the journal, memoir and autobiography.Max Frisch is among the most respected of Swiss novelists, and he may be one of the best too, but I wouldn’t know because I’ve only read his journals and sketchbooks. Anticipating our 21st-century reality hunger, Frisch regarded the journal (qua diary written for a public audience) as a literary form, and when he moved to Berlin in the 1970s at the age of 61, he began one that he intended eventually to stand among his oeuvre (because of the sensitive nature of some of the entries, he put a 20-year retention period after his death on the Berlin Journal’s publication).
There seems to be something in the practice of journal-keeping that encourages a gloomy tone, as if turning the gaze inward to dwell on one’s thought processes stifles levity and amplifies morbidity.
From the outset, Frisch is preoccupied with death and ageing: “The awareness that I have three or four years, decent years, left.” Booze is another worry: “The battle against alcohol, no week without a defeat on that front.”
Above all, Frisch is obsessed by intimations of creative and cognitive decline; From the Berlin Journal is a claustrophobic document of a brain grinding itself down observing its own progressive entropy, real or imagined. THE IRISH TIMES
The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld. A young Dutch author perfectly delineates the life of a farm community in all its strange variations.
The book that changed my life
James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The setting was fairly familiar but the thrall of the language and the intensity of feeling gave a whole new meaning to life and introduced me to the alchemy and mystery of creativity.
The book I wish I’d written
Any story by Anton Chekhov. The first Chekhov story I ever read was ‘The Steppe’. Books we most need come to us in a time of extremity. I read several pages of it in a cornfield in Ireland. My two sons were frisking about, my husband was silent and we had stopped to have tea from a flask, having just had a bitter parting from my family. I was on the point of leaving my husband but feared I would not have the courage or the means. Chekhov’s story was that of a young boy being brought to a distant part of Russia to boarding school and though he was missing his mother, he was also observing everything around him and listening to the merchants’ droll conversations. He submerged his grief in the wonders all about him. What was uncanny for me was how convincing and immediate the story felt. I still have that edition with an inscription I wrote on the flyleaf, “This story redeemed my sanity.” It was dated September 1962.
The works of Rachel Carson. A marine biologist, she went to the depths of the ocean and foresaw the ruin mankind was, and is, bringing to the environment. The Sea Around Us and Silent Spring are masterpieces.
The book that changed my mind
Onthe Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. It dislodged much of my religious education.
The book that made me cry
Many books make me cry, but when I read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope I cried that both she and her husband – the poet Osip – had suffered interrogation then been exiled to Siberia for no more reason than that he was a great poet and she was his ally.
The book that made me laugh
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. The folly and scheming of those four gallants was a long way from Heathcliff but they captivated and charmed me, partly because they were such bunglers and because of how Dickens loved them and explored every corner of human fallibility.
The book I’m ashamed not to have read
Don Quixote by Cervantes.
My earliest reading memory
The prayer books in our house, which included some of the most succinct and beautifully written parables of the gospels.
My comfort read
I do not read for comfort. I read to be quickened, enlightened and brought to the frontiers of feeling.
