Edna O'Brien

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand seven.

Presenter0:28

My castaway this week is the writer Edna O'Brien. For more than forty five years she has lived in the literary spotlight. Described as a poet of heartbreak, her lyrical story telling has excelled in capturing the fragility and pain of the human condition, reflecting the drama of her own life as much as the imagined journeys of her characters.

Presenter0:47

Born and raised in a small village in County Clare, her first and highly successful novel, The Country Girls, was banned and indeed burned in the streets of Ireland when it was first published in nineteen sixty. An uneasy relationship with her homeland continues to this day. But, she says of Ireland, it's in my roots, and when I dream at night, it's the place I go. So, Ed O'Brien, twenty novels, numerous short stories, screenplays, biographies. You've said in the past that if you were at peace you wouldn't need to write, given that you are still writing presumably you're still not at peace.

Presenter1:23

I would still stand by that. A writing is generated or caused by some unknown and indeed unnameable conflict or disturbance within one.

Presenter1:38

So that includes turmoil, but it also includes quest.

Presenter1:43

There is a quest for something.

Presenter1:45

So that I am both glad.

Presenter1:49

that I have this urgency within me.

Presenter1:52

To make out of nothing some little thing.

Presenter1:57

Your identity, of course, as a writer cannot be separated from your identity as an Irish writer. And given that you have lived for so long mostly in London I mean forty years or so you've lived in London why is the that central part of your life, that Irishness, still as important, your identity, or indeed is it still as important?

Speaker 22:08

Yeah.

Edna O'Brien2:08

Yeah.

Edna O'Brien2:17

Yeah.

Presenter2:18

It is. Although I have lived in England, I don't feel that I know the landscape, either the geographic landscape, or the habits and psyche and cunnings and treacheries, etcetera. of the people.

Presenter2:33

the way I know the Irish. And it's not that I don't love my country I do. But I want to write things that are, perhaps, the turning over of the soil to find some of those stories and secrets that lie underneath the soil.

Presenter2:53

Tell me what your first piece of music is. It started on a beautiful frosted morning.

Presenter2:59

in a monastery in County Tipperary, in Ireland, and I heard for the first time pouring out of the chapel.

Presenter3:06

this extraordinary Latin chanting.

Presenter3:10

And it was also, as music always is, connected with a very precise and important moment in my life, and it was this. My father would drink, and then would give up drink, and he would go to this monastery to the monks, and then my mother and I would go to collect him.

Presenter3:30

And therefore it was a moment of hope. So my first choice is this sacred Gregorian chant.

Presenter3:53

Uh

Presenter3:57

Uh

Speaker 43:57

E che one boy one

Speaker 24:12

Sikhung Welgami Kavi Bole Shenim Bhagam Bharbam Bar

Speaker 44:12

See what I'm working on in Carby.

Speaker 44:18

Uh

Presenter4:18

What is

Edna O'Brien4:20

Yeah.

Presenter4:21

I want to go.

Edna O'Brien4:23

Yeah.

Presenter4:27

Uh

Presenter4:28

You know what I'm missing?

Presenter4:35

The monks of the Benedictine monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos and Mandatum Novum de Vobus.

Presenter4:41

So, does religion still play an important part in your life? Do you still go to Mass, Edna? Yes, I go to Mass. I light candles in the two churches near me. My belief, however, is not as clear-cut as maybe the Pope or clergy would wish. So I have this inner and rather private need, but much about the Catholic Church.

Presenter5:07

And their, if you like, their tyranny of the Catholic Church religion, the stranglehold which I grew up with.

Presenter5:17

I do not like. But spirituality and religion are two different things, because one is God and the other is politics. So th the church and religion were everywhere in your childhood. What about books? Were books ever present? No, books were not present at all. There was prayer books and there was a Mrs. Beaton's cookery book, much stained, you know, egg yolk and all that. And then my father was a man for the horses. There was bloodstock manuals.

Presenter5:45

But there was one copy of Rebecca that had circulated into Scariff and Tombgrany.

Presenter5:53

And it was loaned. And it was loaned by the page, not consecutive. So you might get page two hundred and four and then get page one.

Edna O'Brien5:53

Toom Grany was the village near the village near.

Presenter6:05

And that was the only story. So much there to talk about, and we will talk about it in just a moment. But right now, tell me about your next piece of music.

Presenter6:13

Well, my next choice shows what a provincial I was. Came to London in nineteen sixty. For some reason I was in Bond Street, and it was an art gallery with a beautiful figure, and I go into the shop to ask the price of this because I thought I'd like to have it. It was by Giacometti.

Presenter6:33

And the man in the shop he looked at me. I will never forget that contempt and disdain. So that was my first, and my second was slightly happier, because I heard, again in a shop, I heard this voice of a woman, and it was the voice of Maria Callas. So a long winded way of saying my second choice is Mimi's Aria from La Bohem.

Presenter7:17

Ah yet be deemed.

Speaker 27:18

Dee bee dee de

Speaker 27:22

It te porea se duke me fore

Presenter7:32

The Lord was the top spincier.

Presenter7:46

Yeah.

Edna O'Brien7:47

Pion.

Presenter7:51

Maria Callas, singing Mimi's final aria from Puccini's Labo M. So, Edna, can you paint a picture for us of your family? I mean, you you were born into a family that lived uh was it at a s six hundred acre farm, but some poverty as a result of your father's habits. Well, yes, it was a big house, stone house, with trees all around it. I loved nature from the first breath, I feel. Indoors was different. There was indeed strife. I don't know the house or the or the family that there isn't strife. Those who say there isn't are talking Alderdash. My father broke in horses, and breaking in horses is very dramatic, very dangerous, and a very wild enterprise. And he loved doing that, and he loved and had no fear of horses. It takes a certain sort of person to be able to do that, quite a particular sort of person. Did he bring that same spirit into the house? Well, in a bad way, yes, of course, because that anger, that wildness, and that wishing to tame something. He did love horses, let me add, but that his spirit was stronger than the spirit of the horse. That's part of it. He was a very impatient man. He had great gifts, and my mother had great gifts of a different kind. My mother hated the written word. She thought it was not only an occasion of sin, but an avalanche of sin.

Presenter9:21

And she did not want me to be a writer. And from her, I developed, um, by being rebellious in a secretive way, I developed a greater avidity for words and the written word. Even though I loved my mother and believed that her existence and mine were together, if she died, I would die. And yet I defied her. Did you fear your father as a little girl? Oh, very much, yes. You wrote so vividly all those years ago in The Country Girls about this little girl living day to day in fear of whether father had come home that night or whether mother had been up all night waiting and the signs, the signs that so many people who live with people who have problems with alcohol know. Did living in that way as a little girl leave you with a sort of fear generally of men and a fear of the power that men have? I think I have a fear of women and men, to tell you the truth. Yes, you live on the edge. But living on the edge doesn't dispose one very easily for ongoing life. As for going out into the world, my inner experience of men

Presenter10:29

was all got from the odd bit of reading that I picked up here and there along the way. You know, Heathcliff, Mr Rochester, all that. So they were demon men that they were savable. So I went into the world

Presenter10:44

With really the most daft kind of inner mythology. To this day, I regret the fact I don't think I know or have ever learned the game of men and women. It's like a dance that I cannot learn. Have you tried to learn the dance? Failed at it, really. Edna, there is so much there to talk about that I'm tempted to just apply one. But of course, we're going to stop for some music. What's your third piece of music?

Edna O'Brien11:09

Then I'm tempted

Presenter11:14

I can listen to Bach when I'm writing, not to anybody else, no other piece of piece of music. And then of course you add to that the great Glen Gould.

Presenter11:24

and Len Gould in his notes for

Presenter11:27

The Goldberg variations.

Presenter11:30

He said they're like Baudelaire's lovers.

Presenter11:34

that they rest lightly on the winds of the unchecked wind.

Presenter11:39

So it's the checked and unchecked Goldberg variations by Dengu.

Presenter12:45

Glengould playing the first and second of Bach's Goldberg variations. Your most recent novel, Edna, The Light of the Evening, explored in great detail the the mother-daughter relationship, your own mother-daughter relationship. Is that something that you are still preoccupied with? I'm talking about your mother and you as the daughter. Yes, I'm preoccupied with it. It doesn't end with death, and it's never fully finished. My mother gave me

Presenter13:14

A realization.

Presenter13:16

The chi

Presenter13:18

No matter what

Presenter13:21

Was, and I'm afraid, still is, watching over my shoulder. You were sent aged eleven to be educated at a convent in County Galway. What mark did that make on you at the time? Well, I wanted to be a nun, of course. I fell in love with nuns. It was a very stern place. There was a high stone wall around it. Gates were locked. So, what the convent did was to um

Presenter13:49

give me a a a bit of a hotchpotch education. Did they recognise your talent for writing in the convent? They hated it. Very often teachers uh don do not like a certain wildness or reverie.

Presenter14:03

In a child pupil.

Presenter14:05

They like a pupil to tow the lion, so they didn't recognize it, or, I think, welcome it.

Presenter14:13

Given that you had uh this ability and almost you've described it in the past as a hunger to write, what do you think your mother, given that she thought that words were sinful and there were no books in the house, what would she have wanted for you?

Presenter14:25

I should should have loved if I ran a hotel.

Presenter14:28

something nice, something away from

Presenter14:31

Cows and calves, and this, that, and the other.

Presenter14:34

I think or certainly she might have liked that for herself and my rage at her wanting, if you like, to put the harness

Presenter14:44

on my imagination.

Presenter14:47

Uh and that's not fully dead.

Presenter14:49

Is it true that after your mother died you found a copy of The Country Girls buried in a field near your house? Yes, she thought The Country Girls was disgraceful, and she had erased as a character Baba in The Country Girls who has the oddswear word every other minute, actually. My mother had erased them with good, deep.

Presenter15:11

Black ink.

Presenter15:13

What's your next record?

Presenter15:15

History was very much part of my schooling, and naturally the history of the invasion of Ireland, of the occupation. And down the years there were always rebellions, and they failed.

Presenter15:30

And then we come Easter morning, nineteen sixteen, a handful of men, not very well equipped.

Presenter15:37

A revolution that failed?

Presenter15:40

And yet didn't fail, because it broke

Presenter15:43

the chain, the nine hundred year yoke of English sovereignty. So my song, sung by my friend Sinead O'Connor, is the most rousing and haunting

Presenter15:54

And I think a terrific song The Foggy Jew.

Presenter15:58

World Again

Speaker 416:00

Is we in deep amaze at those fearless men, but few. Little boy

Presenter16:09

Are the fight that freedom's light Mind shine through the body too?

Presenter16:27

The Chieftains with Sinead O'Connor and the Foggy Jew. Tell me, Anna, how long was it between um finishing at Convent and

Presenter16:34

Well, let's use the word escaping, escaping to Dublin.

Presenter16:38

Oh, straight away. I mean, I went from the convent to Dublin to my parents and my brother decided again, I was very ruled by people. This is why I love a bit of freedom. They decided that I would become a pharmacist.

Presenter16:53

But inside was the secret and rebellious mission.

Presenter16:59

To break out of that, to go against their wishes and become a writer. At the end of the 90s, you wrote a biography of James Joyce, and your love of Joyce, your deep connection with him, began, probably not surprisingly, in Dublin. It began in Dublin. It was I got a half day once a month, and on that half day I would go to the bookshops and I picked up this little book which I still have and treasure.

Presenter17:23

Called Introducing James Joyce by TS Eliot.

Presenter17:28

So that became my and I mean it genuinely my Bible. James Joyce famously said that all fiction is fantasized biography, but I wonder if using the kernels of things that you have felt deeply and and parts of your experience that were burned onto your personality if writing about them makes bearing them or understanding them easier.

Presenter17:52

It doesn't. It's funny. People sometimes think it does and they use the word cathartic.

Presenter17:58

you know, that you get it out of your system. I think what it does is is to bring you deeper within and inside the experience. And I think as well

Presenter18:12

But

Presenter18:13

It gives one uh you know, we all would love to think that we can live, that we know life.

Presenter18:21

I feel I am separated from life by many of my own fears and my own handicaps and my own isolatedness and I feel that maybe each book has made me that little bit more able to say, Yes, I am living life, but I will never

Presenter18:44

Say fully.

Presenter18:46

I know how to live life I only know how to write.

Presenter18:51

Tell us about your next record.

Presenter18:53

My next record is complete you'll be delighted to hear antidote or an antithesis to the heroics of the foggy dew. And it's a little parable of down and outs of bums in New York City, and it's called a fairy tale of New York.

Speaker 219:13

And on a cold Christmas Eve, you promised me Broadway was waiting for me. Yo

Edna O'Brien19:19

You were pretty queen of New York City When the band finished playing, they all loved them all Sinatra was swinging, all the trumps we were singing We kissed on the corner, then danced through the night The boys of the Airline Mini Corner were singing

Speaker 219:20

Queen of the U.S.

Speaker 219:22

Finish.

Speaker 219:31

Eyes of the Envoy!

Speaker 219:33

They call us.

Edna O'Brien19:36

And the bells are ringing out for Christmas Day.

Speaker 219:37

Remember.

Speaker 219:40

Yeah.

Presenter19:41

The Pogues featuring Kirstie McCall and Fairy Tale of New York. Your husband was older than you, Edna, and and he had been married before. He was divorced when you met. Yes. How did you meet?

Edna O'Brien19:51

Yeah.

Presenter19:54

Well, where many Irish people meet, funnily enough, in a public house.

Presenter19:58

True to my romantic leanings, let alone learnings, I eloped.

Presenter20:05

in the manner of um

Presenter20:07

the heroines that I, you know, had espoused. I eloped because ag once again there was immediate uproar from my family because my mother claimed to have received an anonymous letter that I was uh going out with, as is the phrase, a divorced man who was also, it said, a communist. Scandal of every kind, you know.

Presenter20:28

And I eloped with this man.

Presenter20:31

Who was to become my husband, Ernest Gabler? And I suppose I was in love.

Presenter20:37

And your family attempted to rescue you from this elopement? Yes, they rescued me. They thought I was doomed. Um.

Presenter20:44

And maybe they had a point to some extent. What did they do, though? They came to find you? They sought you out? Yes, we had gone away to the Isle of Man and this uh

Presenter20:55

a family and some clergymen, actually a a a bishop, coming, and I was put in a motor car.

Presenter21:03

My brother was with me in the motor car and was, you know

Presenter21:07

interrogating me in a very, as you can imagine, detailed way about what had gone on.

Presenter21:13

I got out of the car and the the man I was then duty bound to marry had been

Presenter21:20

roughed up a bit by some of them not actually the Bishop or my father, but some of the the henchmen and therefore i my fate was sealed.

Presenter21:31

You married then and you had you had two children in relatively quick succession. Yes. How was your early married life? Was it a happy time?

Edna O'Brien21:35

Yeah.

Presenter21:38

No, no, I wouldn't say so. It was too much of the the master and slave. It was very hurried, as I have said, and also I didn't know my husband. He was a very complex man.

Presenter21:54

He was a graver man and a more severe man.

Presenter21:57

And he also was a writer.

Presenter22:00

And I think he probably did love me. I would say that. But he did not wish me to be a writer. So it was my husband replicated by my mother, in in one sense. My mother did not want me to be a writer, and now I landed myself

Presenter22:21

In the same cell of someone not wanting me to be a writer. But a writer you were going to be, because you moved t to London once you'd been married for a few years with your two young boys and your husband, and you wrote The Country Girls. Yes, The Country Girls remains in my personal life, my little, what shall we call it, hold-all of experiences.

Presenter22:43

A little miracle for me. Up to then I had been writing scattered bits and pieces, and suddenly I sat down and I began

Presenter22:53

I wakened quickly, and sat up in bed abruptly.

Presenter22:57

It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily, and for a minute I could not remember the old reason my father he had not come home.

Presenter23:07

and I knew that I was there.

Presenter23:10

I could write it. I have to tell you they don't come as easily now.

Presenter23:15

But that was like it was like a lucid trance, if you know what I mean.

Presenter23:21

And it was finished.

Presenter23:23

In three weeks. Those three weeks profoundly changed your life. This book was brilliantly received. I mean, your talent was there for all to behold.

Presenter23:32

and at the same time it was being burned on the streets of Ireland. How did you hear of that?

Presenter23:36

No shortage of hearing it. My mother conveyed to me.

Presenter23:41

You know how people do? They want to tell you something, and they will say somebody else said, you know, and somebody else said to your father I should be kicked naked through the town. And I didn't question her. This will show you what a coward I am. I should have questioned the naked.

Presenter23:59

But I didn't. Charles Hawhey, who was then Minister for Culture and the Archbishop of Macquaid,

Presenter24:04

saying it should not be in the hands of any decent family and it was a smear on Irish womanhood and people, you know, cutting me and sending me anon anonymous letters and all that. Did it matter to you that your homeland were was called? Oh, it hurt me very much. Because deep down you f have a question with yourself. You feel.

Edna O'Brien24:17

Were was a poll?

Presenter24:26

Have I betrayed them? Have I done something wrong, as they have said I have?

Presenter24:31

And being s a little prone to that kind of self examination, I was defiant or semi defiant on the outside, but I was also made very nervous.

Presenter24:44

Tell me about your next record. Oh, my next one, it's Africa.

Presenter24:49

Throughout that whole continent.

Presenter24:51

African music that against all the odds is so life affirming and my next choice. There are many, but today I will say Oletange's Drums of Passion.

Presenter25:31

Michael Olotanji and Drums of Passion. Is it fair to say, Edna O'Brien, that your marriage then simply collapsed under the weight of your success? You were with a writer, and you became a very successful writer, and it was difficult for your husband to bear.

Presenter25:45

Yes. I mean, when it's encapsulated like that, it seems very um as if that's not the whole story, which of course it's not. I think that that was very central to it.

Edna O'Brien25:53

But yeah.

Presenter25:59

But secondly, and this I take the responsibility and some of the blame for.

Presenter26:05

Between the age of nineteen or twenty and twenty-nine or thirty.

Presenter26:12

I was a di a very different person, and it was very easy to bring up my children and write.

Presenter26:17

A husband is harder to manage than children, and I used to write in a kind of hut here in England.

Presenter26:24

And um Saturday when I'd be writing a bit and they were there, the children, they were they were blackmailing me. They'd put notes through the door which said, We are missing you, you know, waving through the window. Uh we have a we have we are sick, we have a temperature and so on and so on.

Presenter26:39

But yes, so there was that and my becoming different, and also, I think.

Presenter26:46

Had I be had I remained living in Ireland

Presenter26:49

I wouldn't have

Presenter26:51

uh r walked out that door.

Presenter26:54

As I did, which is what I did. I walked out the door and and never went back. Did you walk out the door with the children?

Presenter27:02

No. I I had my children soon after that.

Presenter27:07

You would blanch at the degree of prejudice, male prejudice, that was wrought against me.

Presenter27:16

The school teacher said I didn't love my children in fact, I collected them every day, but he gave evidence. The local doctor, on grounds that still are are are a mystery to me,

Presenter27:31

gave evidence that I was an infomaniac.

Presenter27:34

And I will never forget this one thing, um, which I don't think I've ever mentioned before. I went into that court for custody of my children, and the cards were very, very

Presenter27:47

strongly and trenchantly stacked against me.

Presenter27:51

And there was a judge, a man.

Presenter27:54

And he heard all these diatribes, and he said, and

Presenter28:00

And what have you to say for yourself?

Presenter28:03

And I said

Presenter28:05

If I did not love them so much.

Presenter28:08

I would not fight so hard.

Presenter28:11

against all this opposition.

Presenter28:13

and he gave me the custody of the children.

Presenter28:16

Tell me about your penultimate record then.

Presenter28:20

I could not imagine not being able to listen to some part of Mozart's Requiem. I can understand it, some of it, and yet

Presenter28:30

It remains

Presenter28:32

Like the universe, a total mystery.

Presenter28:35

And that's an amazing thing.

Speaker 229:07

Oh God said

Presenter29:32

The Munich Philharmonic Orchestra playing part of the lacrimos from Mozart's Requiem with the Bavarian Radio Choir. There was a ten year hiatus in your writing between nineteen seventy eight and eighty eight. Wh why was that?

Presenter29:45

Oh, a bit of a gap, yes. Um

Presenter29:49

I believe I probably was in love or something. I certainly wasn't able to work, or didn't work, every day. And when you stop writing for whatever reason

Presenter30:02

you lose that habit. I was a little uh foolish uh to myself because by not working I uh lost some of my lost my house actually by just not being practical. And it was a lesson to me uh never to let a day pass that I don't keep with my vocation.

Presenter30:28

I once read that you said that love takes every ounce of energy.

Presenter30:33

Passionate love does, don't you think?

Presenter30:35

Well, I don't think everybody does feel that. I think that's a good idea. It's the disposition. Uh some people

Presenter30:44

Are able to put love, even while they are in the thick of it, if you like, into a compartment. I lacked that gene in my life, because love, as you have quoted me as saying, was like some of that music, in a way. It's so overwhelming. In the end, do you think that you have had to choose between writing and love? I do.

Presenter31:10

The choice has to be made because both.

Presenter31:15

are very hard taskmasters.

Presenter31:19

But also

Presenter31:21

I if I were to fall in love

Presenter31:24

again before I die.

Presenter31:26

Alice is boastful, but why not be a little boastful?

Presenter31:30

I would

Presenter31:31

Hope for.

Presenter31:33

An extraordinary man.

Presenter31:35

who was a great poet as well as a great uh journeyman on the earth.

Presenter31:43

It sounds to me as though some part of you is still very open to the prospect that a great love is still possible for you. I think it has to be. Otherwise I would have shrivelled. And to write, you know, you have to feel the sort of eminence.

Presenter32:02

if not the actuality of love. You have to.

Presenter32:07

Tell me En O'Brien about your last record.

Presenter32:09

My last record almost um parallels or coincides with what I have just said. There was Edith Piaff, frail, defiant, no longer young.

Presenter32:21

singing, as it were, her own epitaph.

Presenter32:24

and the audience rising up

Presenter32:26

to sing it with her, to affirm it for her.

Presenter32:30

It's Edith Piaf singing Jeanneur Regret Reality.

Speaker 432:35

Oh Ria Doria.

Speaker 432:40

No run of a greater.

Speaker 432:46

Nila Bea

Speaker 432:59

Real

Speaker 433:02

No

Presenter33:04

Eda's P.F. and Jeanne Ragrette Rienne. So, Edna, we give you, of course, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You're allowed to take one other book. What would that be?

Presenter33:14

Well, yes, I suppose not out of patriotism, but because it's a mountain of a book.

Presenter33:21

I would pick James Joyce's Ulysses.

Presenter33:24

You are, of course, also allowed a luxury. What would you like to make things a bit more bearable on the island?

Presenter33:30

Or luxury.

Presenter33:31

Drink.

Presenter33:32

Very good white wine. Montrache. A nice cellar full of that. A vault, a vault. You know, one opened every evening, looking across the wherever one looks. Perfect. We'll give you that. And I'm afraid, of course, that I'm going to ask you if if the waves were to crash to the shore and threaten to wash away your discs, which one would you run through the sands to save which one record?

Presenter33:59

It would be Sinead, the O'Connor, and the Foggy Jew. So Sinead and the Chieftains, we shall give you. Edna O'Brien, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your testotile and discs.

Presenter34:09

Thank you, Kirste.

Presenter34:17

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.