As a teenager in a catholic boys’ only boarding school, the highlight of the month occurred when a small group of senior prefects was allowed to enjoy a local town speaker series. Over the space of just a few years, I spoke with Kingsley Amis who wrote more than 20 novels. Lucky Jim was his first, followed by I Like It Here and Take A Girl like You, which Amis read with great humor. I was thrilled and inspired by his style and in-your-face prose but completely shocked at his character’s causal approach to sex. It was a revelation. In a college where no sex before marriage was religiously preached, his writing revealed a world that I and my friends had no experience of but secretly hoped existed. It was exciting.
John Braine discussed his Room At the Top. One of my more daring friends had secreted a copy into our dorm, and it was doing the rounds in lightning-quick time. I devoured his unadorned use of everyday language, which both shocked and excited me. For a group of young men with raging hormones, it was amazing, revealing, and titillating material! Here was a writer with strong Irish Catholic roots describing male-female relationships that seemed to be so honest, natural, and real, but in a way that would bewilder any priest!
Alan Sillitoe left school at age 14 and never went to college, which made me wonder why my parents were spending so much money on my private education. And it was only while in hospital with tuberculosis that Sillitoe became an avid reader of literature and started to write. He eventually wrote Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, influenced in part by the stripped-down prose of Ernest Hemingway. As with John Braine’s bestseller, it was essentially a social protest, with daring sex scenes and female relationships that were a far cry from Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair, and even Tom Jones, our staple college literary diet. But when I heard him speak, he had also just published his short story collection, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. I was smitten. Awestruck would be an understatement. I also learned, but didn’t know at the time, that reading a work and having it read to you can be a totally different and exhilarating experience. A charming man, he spoke to us (we were a small group of five) as if we were adults and answered our schoolboy questions as if they had been posed by a gaggle of eminent professors.
There was a memorable lecture by the Australian writer, Russel Braddon, his bestselling book, The Naked Island. As a Japanese prisoner of war, he was tormented by the fact he couldn’t remember how to solve Pythagoras’ theorem nor the second movement of the Bruch violin concerto. Ever ready to help, I quickly searched in my pocket for some paper and scribbled down the theorem. When we met for his autograph, I presented it to him.
“Sir,” I remember saying politely, “I too want to write, and just in case you haven’t had time to catch up with your math, this might jog your memory, but I can’t help you with the Bruch.”
He looked at it quizzically, smiled, shook my hand, said thank you, carefully folded and placed the paper in his inside jacket pocket, then signed my autograph book.
Years later, I happened to hear him being interviewed by the BBC, and he recounted this incident of when he met with a precocious or, as he put it, ‘a snotty-nosed schoolboy who wanted to be a writer!’
But in high school, I also discovered Edna O’Brien. I was on the shortlist to read the only clandestine copy of The Country Girls that was buzzing through the senior study hall. Wow! It was mind-blowing.
As an established writer myself, I realized years ago how O’Brien’s writing has influenced mine. Initially, I was simply attracted to her style, her voice, her word selection, and her “tell it as it is” attitude, but I was unaware of her own influences. Educated in the classics, I had read Dickens, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and all of Shakespeare’s plays by the time I was seventeen. I have always felt that I related to an earlier period as a writer. Just as she was greatly influenced by Hemingway and especially Scott Fitzgerald, I, in turn, discovered those writers through her. They resonated with me the first time I read them.
O’Brien was my muse. For years, I carried around a copy of her short stories, Lantern Slides. I wanted to write like her. She stated she would never write her autobiography and yet also said that, “Any book that is any good must be autobiographical.” In the latter stages of her life, she broke her own resistance and gave us another unmistakable read. “We all leave one another,” she said. “We die, we change— it’s mostly change—we outgrow our best friends, but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it’s inescapable.” And that’s the feeling I came away with after reading her Country Girl.
Her first novel, The Country Girls which she wrote in three weeks, was instantly acclaimed in the UK and US but was banned and denounced by Catholic bishops and priests in Ireland, some even resorting to publicly burning copies—I was captivated by her style and honesty of expression. Her biography has much of that feeling but also the tiredness of a writer who has seen and done it all.
I found the earlier part of the book to be more appealing and, in many ways, more self-disclosing. She writes affectionately of her childhood, but her entry into the world of publishing, books and writers came with marrying the novelist Ernest Gebler in her early twenties in Dublin. He realized O’Brien’s talent and was paralyzed with jealousy and bitterness. She gave him two sons, but the publication and international success of her first novel spelled the end of her marriage.
The second part of the book read for me more like sections from a journal and, although interesting, lacked the simplicity and freshness of the early years. In the 1970s, she was known for dinner parties whose guests included Princess Margaret hosted in her six-bedroom house on London’s Carlyle Square. Paul McCartney sees her home. Marlon Brando walks her home. (“We sat in the kitchen, where he drank milk, and I drank wine.”) She asks Jack Nicholson to see her home. Richard Burton rings the doorbell. Jackie Onassis is invited in. Prepped by Sean Connery, she drops acid with R. D. Laing, who was her psychiatrist. She attracted numerous famous studs and makes some bedroom confessions, revealing a one-night stand with Robert Mitchum.
Country Girl is filled with many telling moments as O’Brien shares with us eight decades filled with honesty and vulnerability: unable to swim, unable to drive, the regrettable choices made, unreciprocated love, and, always a passion for words and literature. I am envious of her prose and feelings for the right word; it is always exquisite and makes it an excellent read.
Throughout all her writings and among her contemporaries, few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual, and gender boundaries. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire, and persecution.
She published more than 20 novels, eight collections of short stories, eight non-fiction and four children’s books. She challenged Ireland’s religious, sexual, and gender boundaries by tackling issues of loneliness, sex, rebellion, and persecution. She had style, a command of language, and an incredibly fertile imagination. “Thinking is the enemy of feeling, and feeling…is the true language of the novel,” she said. “The emotions of love, hatred, desire or despair are the real, and the task of the writer is to access those emotions.” And she was my muse.
(Edna O’Brien passed away on July 27, 2024, aged 93.)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael Barrington, is an international writer specializing in historical novels: Let the Peacock Sing, The Ethiopian Affair, Becoming Anya, The Baron of Bengal Street, No Room for Heroes and Passage to Murder. Magic at Stonehenge, is short stories collection. Take a Priest Like You is a memoir. He also blogs on his website: www.mbwriter.net and is a frequent contributor to Books & Pieces Magazine.
About the Author
