Saints and Sinners (21 page)

When the priest started the rosary, there were nudges and blatant sighs, as it became clear that he was going to recite the full five decades, and not just one decade, as some priests did. He was in a wheelchair and had to have a boat all to himself. Men had had to support him up the gravel path to the graveyard. Despite his condition, his voice boomed out onto the lake, where the waterbirds shivered in the rushes, and over it to the main road, where crows had perched in a neat sepulchral line on the telephone wires as the coffin was being removed from the hearse. The mourners answered the Our Fathers and the Hail Marys with a routine drone, and the gravediggers stood by their shovels, expressionless, witnessing a scene such as they witnessed every other day.

At the end of the prayers, a purple cloth was laid over Edward's coffin, the undertaker tucking it in asifit were a living person that he was putting down to bed. I felt no sorrow, or, to be more precise, I felt nothing, only numbness. I watched a single flake of snow drift through the cold air, discolored and lonesome-looking.

Most of the people ambled down toward the pier, but a few stayed behind to watch as the men closed the grave. The wreaths and artificial flowers in their glass domes were lifted off the strip of green plastic carpet, which had been temporarily placed over the open grave to lessen the sense of grimness. The gravediggers shoveled hurriedly, gravel and small stones hopping off the coffins and the purple sheath, and finally they unrolled the piece of turf and laid it back where it belonged. Wildflowers of a darkish purple bloomed on graves nearby, but on the strip that had been dug up they had expired. The undertaker, who was full of cheer, said that they would grow again, as the birds scattered seeds all over and flowers of every description sprouted up.

On the way down the steep path, Nurse Gleeson tugged at my arm as if we were old friends. First it was a slew of compliments about the tweed suit I was wearing, singling out the heather flecks in it, and she said what a pity it was that she was size 18, otherwise I could pass it on to her when I grew tired of it. Then it was my head scarf, an emerald green with other vivid colors, quite inappropriate for a funeral, except that it was the only one I had thrown into my suitcase. She remembered my flying visit to the hospital, had, in fact, gone to get a tray of tea and biscuits, when, holy cripes, on returning to the room, she saw that I had vanished.

"Did he say anything?" I asked.

"Oh, he sang dumb," she said, then, gripping my arm even tighter, she indicated that there was something important that she needed to impart to me.

A few days before the end, my cousin had asked her for a sheet of notepaper in order to write me a letter. There was a cranberry bowl in the kitchen at home, which he wished me to have, he had said. As it happened, she had found the sheet of paper in the top pocket of his pajamas after he died, but with nothing written on it.

"The strength gave out," she said, and asked if I knew which bowl it was. I could see it quite clearly, as I had seen it one day, while waiting in his kitchen for a sun shower to pass, rays of sun alighting on it, divesting it of its sheath of brown dust, the red ripples flowing through it, so that it seemed to liquefy, as if it were being newly blown. It had been full of things—screwdrivers, a tiny torch, receipts, and pills for pain. When I admired it, he turned the contents out onto the table and held it in the palm of his hand, proudly, like a chalice of warm wine.

I hoped that the unwritten letter had been an attempt at reconciliation.

Sitting in the boat with a group of friendly people,

I could still see the island, shrouded in a veil of thin gray rain. Why, I asked myself, did I want to be buried there? Why, given the different and gnawing perplexities? It was not love and it was not hate but something for which there is no name, because to name it would be to deprive it of its truth.

Edna O'Brien
is the author of
The Country Girls Trilogy
and many other works of fiction, including the collection
Lantern Slides,
which won the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize. She is the recipient of the Ulysses Medal and the National Arts Club's National Medal for Fiction and is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was born and raised in Ireland and has lived in London for many years.

Saints and Sinners

by

Edna O'Brien

A conversation with the author of
Saints
and Sinners

Edna O'Brien talks with Patricia Harty of
Irish
America

Edna O'Brien, born in Tuamgraney, County Clare, moved to London in 1954 with her husband, the Czech-Irish writer Ernest Gebler, and two sons. Divorced in 1964, she stayed in London, where she lives to this day. Her "voluntary exile" was due in part to the furor over her first book,
The Country Girls,
published in i960, which became part of a trilogy that also includes
The Lonely Girl
(1962) and
Girls in Their Married Bliss
(1964). The books trace the lives of two Irish women, Kate and Baba, whose Catholic upbringing comes into conflict with their sexual awakening.

Has your relationship with Ireland changed, now that the country itself has changed?

I feel more welcomed as a writer in America than I do in England and, to a greater extent, than I do in Ireland, although Ireland has softened towards me at last [laughs]. I think that it's inevitable. First of all, we ourselves change and our relationships, whether with a country or a person, change. I think we become more, forgive the word, philosophical about our own plight contrasted with the carnage, upheavals, and barbarity of the big wide world.

When you were writing
The Country Girls
did you think it was going to cause the furor it did?

No. I would never have finished it if I thought that. In fact, I thought nothing. I used to read manuscripts for publishers and I was a little overambitious in my evaluations and so was given a commission of fifty pounds to write
The Country Girls,
half from the publisher in England, Hutchinson, and half from Knopf in the United States.

I was young, married with two children, and I spent the money on practical things. I bought a sewing machine, which I thought would please the person I was married to. We had come to live in London—way, way out in the suburbs. I didn't know anyone. It was so alien. I wrote
The Country Girls
in less than three weeks.

It sounds as if you approach each new work with trepidation.

I do. Great fear. The fear of doing it. The fear that even if one does it, it won't realize itself as perfectly as it must. The fear of what people will say, and inevitably critics get out their knives and other implements of torture.

The Light of Evening
is as close to a memoir as you have written.

Memory plays its own tricks. My mother was very, very attached to me. I was the last child, as the others had gone away to school, and I identified with her totally. For example, these few lines from the book— "When she coughed blood we stared down at it

together, down into the well of the kitchen sink____

Death for her meant death for us both Thinking

that if I picked primroses and put them in a jam jar to cheer her up that she would not die."

It seems childish, but I always wanted to save her, to make her happier. When the time came to break away I could not do it completely. I both did and didn't.

She was not happy that you were a writer.

She disapproved of writing and feared the written word, feared that its essence was sinful—she might have had a point! She would have liked me to have been a receptionist in a hotel, something more genteel and wholesome. And yet as you can see from her letters, she was a born writer herself, she had an enormous gift and power. She was powerful as a person but she was also powerful as a writer. So the irony is that friends say my mother made me a writer, and I don't dispute it. Yet it was something that caused her a lot of suffering and shame, because with the first book,
The Country Girls,
everybody was in an uproar in County Clare, and indeed in the country at large.

There was the banning and the scalding exchange of letters between Archbishop McQuaid and Charlie Haughey, who was minister of culture at that time, saying the book shouldn't be let in the hands of any decent family. It was daft, daft [laughs].

Do you feel as if you got to know your mother as a young woman in Brooklyn through writing
The Light of Evening?

What we forget is that our mothers are also daughters. My mother had her own disappointments, her own thwarted aspirations and possibly her own bruised heart. What I wanted in the novel was to try and imagine her as her herself, the young Lena in all the vertigo of youth, setting out for America and envisaging big things.

Emily Dickinson writes about the mind having many chambers, and in one of the chambers of my mind, my mother Lena is permanently there.

You write all your books in longhand.

I write and rewrite and then I dictate. It's all quite unnerving. What I feel about writing by hand—I may have a few soul mates in this—is that there is a connection between mind and heart and hand and the sequence of the words themselves. I feel that a typewriter or a word processor would be an artificial barrier, would stymie the flow between conscious and unconscious. It is not a fashionable or a practical view, but then, I have never prided myself on being practical.

You talk of your mother not wanting you to have a successful romantic life. Do you think there was an element of the disappointed romantic about her?

I'm not sure my mother was an utter romantic. That's where she and I probably differed. I am an incurable romantic. I can say that my mother's life was not so rosy. She married my father, who was very well off, only to find that the money got frittered away. My father's family—him, his three brothers, and a sister who lived in Boston and apparently was the first woman to drive a car in Boston—had inherited legacies. Their uncles were priests in Lowell, Massachusetts, who had patented a famous medicine called Father John's Medicine, which was a roaring success with the laity. It was probably cod liver oil with a few added ingredients, but it sold like a bomb.

By the time I was three or four, living on a farm in rural Ireland, I was very aware of rows over money, anxiety over money and the abiding fear of losing the place.

In the thirties there was the economic war, animals sold for next to nothing, there was no money to fertilize the fields, no machinery to work with and a sense of financial despair. Nowadays a little plot for a bungalow in County Clare is $ioo,ooo and that's not even with a glimpse of the Shannon.

My mother must have been disappointed at life taking a downward swoop. She had been born in the mountains, went to America, made a little bit of money, had nice clothes and trinkets and so on, and married, as she thought, into endless security. But it did not turn out like that. She was a stalwart worker. She fed calves, she fed hens, she boiled big pots of meal in the boil house and was kept going from dawn till dark. She held everything together, but I think she must have been truly exhausted, and to some extent broken. But though raised in the country, she was not a typical country woman, there was something other about her, as if perhaps she had wished for another fate, though I never asked her what that might be.

Do you think that on some level your mother was jealous of your success?

I think probably that was there. She feared that I was on the road to perdition. But she also perhaps resented my apparent success, because she would make little caustic comments such as "There was a photograph of you in the paper and people said you had drink taken." Yes, there would have been some element ofjealousy because I seemed independent insofar as I was the breadwinner for myself and my children. To be frank, I would say she did not know me, she did not understand the compulsion, the necessity to write, and did not want to know that writing took one to another sphere. Beckett said in an essay on Jack Yeats that the artist who stakes his life has no country and no brother.