One day in the late 1960s, the novelist Edna O’Brien was strolling around London with Marlon Brando. “Are you a great writer?” Brando asked. “I don’t know,” she replied, “but I intend to be.”
It’s a story that O’Brien, 85, the grande dame of Irish literature, recounts in her memoir, “Country Girl”, and it’s an ambition that many believe she has achieved, including Philip Roth, who put it this way in an e-mail: “She is among the handful of most accomplished living writers in the English language.”
Her most recent novel, “The Little Red Chairs”, is partly set in O’Brien’s native Ireland, but its subject is far wider. The tale begins with a mysterious figure who arrives in a village on the west coast of Ireland, and sets himself up as a holistic healer. Doctor Vlad, as he is known, quickly becomes a subject of fascination in the village, not least to the childless, unhappily married Fidelma. His identity is soon clear; he is a Balkan war criminal in hiding, the author of appalling suffering.
The consequences of Doctor Vlad’s brief relationship with Fidelma are the subject of O’Brien’s novel. As she put it recently, “I wanted to take a dreadful situation and the havoc and harm that it yields, and show how it spirals out into the world at large.”
“The Little Red Chairs”, her first novel in 10 years, was rapturously received in Britain. In “The Guardian”, Julie Myerson called it “a spectacular piece of work”, and said it was “ferocious and far-reaching, yet also at times excruciatingly, almost unbearably, intimate”.
Critical opinion matters to O’Brien. In an interview in her South London home, where she has lived for 30 years, she almost immediately talked about her anxiety over the novel’s reception in the United States. “You write with the best intention, and if that is savaged and misinterpreted, it is very hard,” she said. “I am always full of apprehension and nerves.”
O’Brien is small and chic, with creamy skin, blonde hair and large grey-green eyes. She recently had a hip operation, and moved slowly through her multilevel house.
Though she makes little of her looks in her memoir, published in the United States in 2013, she was a well-known beauty at the centre of swinging London in the 1960s, and her glamour and fame became a part of her identity as a writer. Robert Gottlieb, O’Brien’s longtime editor at Alfred A. Knopf in New York, describes her impact in his coming memoir, “Avid Reader: A Life”. “She was a glory,” he says, “with her pale white skin, her flaming red hair and her exotic outfits; ankle-length gossamer skirts, vivid antique lace blouses and layers of baubles, bangles and beads. She dangled and wafted.”
But O’Brien said she had always felt solitary and alone with her work. “Although one might seem relatively gregarious, the real self is at the desk,” she said. “It is a trial for relationships, for friendships. Every writer dreads losing the connection to the work, the momentum, and to keep it, you can’t truly be sociable.”
O’Brien said Ireland remained her central inspiration, the wellspring of her language and “a kind of fervour” that pervades her work. Roth said, “It is our good luck that she has never gotten over her ancestry.”
She grew up in the village of Tuamgraney in County Clare, the youngest of four children born to a profligate, hard-drinking father and a steadfast, hardworking mother. Literature was regarded as wicked, and hell was more real than heaven.
Like Cait and Baba, the heroines of her first novel, “The Country Girls”, and its two sequels, O’Brien attended a convent boarding school that she described as “stiflingly repressive”. After training as a pharmacist in Dublin, she married the writer Ernest Gebler, with whom she had two sons. During those years, she began to write.
“My first book poured out of me,” she said. “It’s true to say it wrote itself. I look back on that as a halcyon time, even though I wasn’t happy and had a very imperious husband.” Her lips tightened. “I’m using a nice word.”
“The Country Girls”, published in 1960, brought O’Brien fame and notoriety in equal measure. Her honesty about female desire and her depiction of the affair of one of her heroines with a married man were considered scandalous in Ireland, where the book was banned, as were her next six novels.
“It has all changed, but that’s what that culture was like, that fear of the reminder of women’s sexual feelings,” she said. “My mother hated that I wrote. She would have loved me to be an air hostess.”
But O’Brien knew she was a writer, not a flight attendant. Though she described herself as slow, she has still been productive. Her works include 17 novels, nine collections of short stories, five plays, two biographies and two volumes of poetry.
In a telephone interview, Gottlieb said O’Brien’s work had been well received from the start in the US. “We’re harder to shock here,” he said. “In England, her looks and charm made her a figure, a celebrity. But in America, she was a writer first and foremost.”
Over time, her subject matter evolved from the personal to the political: “House of Splendid Isolation” (1994) is about a terrorist on the run; “Down by the River” (1996) is about a teenage Irish rape victim seeking an abortion in England; “In the Forest” (2002) was inspired by the real case of a young man who murdered a woman, her 3-year-old son and a priest.
“The Little Red Chairs”, she said, was loosely based on the Serbian Radovan Karadzic, who was recently convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 40 years in prison. (The novel’s title refers to the chairs, standing in for the murdered, set out at the April 2012 memorial marking 20 years after the start of the siege of Sarajevo.)
The book, she said, had been particularly hard to write: “You can’t write about mass murder and these terrible events, then go out for dinner.”
Her research was long and intensive. She attended part of Karadzic’s trial in The Hague, visited shelters for refugees in London, listened to countless stories and spent time at a dog shelter where part of Fidelma’s story is set.
Asked why she wanted to tackle such a difficult topic, O’Brien looked surprised. “The world around me drew me to it,” she said. “Our screens are filled with bodies, immigrants, ruined buildings, ruined cities. Those who start and perpetuate wars are not going to be changed by my book, but I wanted to write a story that combined the demonic and the human.”
Writing, she added, remains as essential to her as breathing, “if less easy”. She thought for a moment. “I would be so lonely on Earth if I didn’t have the possibility and freedom to write. I will go to my grave changing a word. And there is always the absolutely right word.”
–New York Times News Service
