December 15: Edna
O'Brien turns eighty today, and her first novel, The Country Girls turns fifty this year. For her style and her
unrivalled insight into relationships—among contemporary writers, says the New York Times, she is "the major cardiologist of broken
hearts"—O'Brien has won virtually every literary prize Ireland has to
offer, but The Country Girls and
other earlier books provoked outrage at home when they first appeared.
The two, opposite sisters in The Country Girls reflect O'Brien's ambivalent relationship with
her upbringing in rural County Clare. In a 2008 newspaper article she recalls
that she wrote the book while living in London, in three weeks and in an
outpouring of love-hate for "the country I had left and wanted to leave,
but now grieved for, with an inexplicable sorrow":
Images of roads and ditches and bog and bog lake assailed
me, as did the voice of my mother, tender or chastising, and even her cough
when she lay down at night. In the fields outside, the lonely plaint of cattle,
dogs barking and, as I believed, ghosts. All the people I had encountered kept
re-emerging with a vividness: Hickey our workman, whom I loved; my father, whom
I feared; knackers; publicans; a travelling salesman by the name of Sacco, who
sold spectacles and sets of dentures; and the tinkers who rapped on the door
demanding money in exchange for mending tin pots. …There was no library in the
local town and hence no books. One copy of Rebecca
had reached us and pages were passed from one woman to the next, though alas
not consecutively.
The novel's irreligion, sexual frankness, and social
criticism provoked some in Ireland to book-burnings and hate mail, and even
O'Brien's mother censored it, in country fashion. "She erased with black
ink any of the offending words," recalls the author, "and the book
was put in a bolster case and placed in an outhouse." The reception given The Country Girls and other novels is
reflected in O'Brien's 1976 memoir, Mother
Ireland, which is a double tale told in a double tone. The book interweaves
the author's recollections of her youth and exodus with her profile of the
country and its people, and though much of it is fond and empathetic, it has
this quotation from Samuel Beckett's Malone
Dies as epigraph:
Let us say before I go any further, that I forgive nobody. I
wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable
generations to come.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
Subscribe
Email
Print
Share
Please sign in to add a comment on this article.