Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 7, 2003|Volume 32, Number 10

At a master's tea in Berkeley College, Edna O'Brien said that every writer experiences a self-imposed exile in the sense that the "lonely" journey of writing is a solitary one.

Her native landscape inspires
Irish writer's 'desperate themes'

Although her mother "detested the written word" and her village priest called upon the "sinners" in his church who bought her first book to burn it, Irish novelist Edna O'Brien is grateful for her upbringing in the rural west of Ireland at a time that resembled the "Dark Ages," she unequivocally told her guests at a Berkeley College master's tea on Oct. 27.

The "haunting, haunted and beautiful" landscape of her native country and the "turbulence" of her growing-up years, O'Brien said, are the grist for her award-winning stories' and novels' "desperate themes," which include murder, incest and abortion.

In fact, the experience of an "uncharted, unreachable kind of trauma," a love of language and a desire to explore the ancestral or mythical "psyche" of one's land are among the qualities shared by most writers -- wherever they are from -- O'Brien commented. She recalled a conversation she once had with fellow Irish writer Samuel Beckett in which both expressed their fervent wish to escape the "matrix" of their own mothers and their mother country.

O'Brien's nearly 20 published works include novels, short stories, plays, a biography of James Joyce and a collection of autobiographical essays. She told the packed audience that while her own family and country denounced many of her books for their sexual or dark-themed content, her roots have remained her inspiration as a writer. Her first three books -- a trilogy written in the early 1960s that included "The Country Girls," "The Lonely Girl" and "Girls in Their Married Bliss" -- and eight of her other works were banned in Ireland.

A resident of London for four decades now, O'Brien said that "the Irish think that I've in some strange way betrayed them," but she believes her distance from her native country has given her the perspective she needs to write about it.

"When away from a place or a person, one's sense of them, one's recollections, are often more clear, more true," stated O'Brien, whose visit to Yale was sponsored by the John-Christophe Schlesinger Visiting Writer Fund. The County Clare landscape of which she writes -- which the novelist described as "quite stark, and with a terrible underbelly of loneliness to it" -- is as much a character in her works as the people who populate them, she said.

In reference to the negative reaction of her countrypeople to her books, O'Brien paraphrased T.S. Eliot, saying, "Mankind cannot bear too much reality."

"Perhaps my crime, if I have to admit to a crime," she continued, "is that I want to turn up the soil of my land. [James] Joyce called Ireland 'that sob of turf' for his to claim. That's a definition I would not dispute."

O'Brien described the process of writing -- which she does entirely in longhand -- as being, simply, "the self with self."

"You'll find the obstacles are considerable," she said of her craft, "because to wrest something out of nothing is no small thing. I think of the writing trip as being as unknown to oneself as the dreams one dreams each night. Good writing comes out of the unconscious."

During her talk, O'Brien named some of the writers whom she admires or who have influenced her work, but said that in terms of language alone, Joyce is her favorite author, noting that she respects the "daring, freedom and adventure" of his literature.

"I love 'Ulysses' more than words, because I can read any page of [the book] and feel an exhilaration," she said. "Far from being daunted, I think, 'God, I'd like to write something like that.'"

O'Brien, who gave a reading of her own works later that evening, noted that while she doesn't live in Ireland, she does visit her home country and does not feel that she is an exiled writer in a literal way. Nevertheless, said the novelist, all writers impose their own exiles on themselves.

"Whatever country you are from ... that lonely trip [of writing] has to be made solo," she said.

After each book is published, O'Brien said, the "strangest" thing happens. "It goes out into the world, then it has nothing to do with you ever again.

"You're hammered, slaughtered, praised, given a prize or not given a prize," O'Brien commented. "All that other stuff that follows [publication] is in some way destructive."

-- By Susan Gonzalez

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