. . . if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

~ James Joyce

Every April, the Dublin: One City One Book initiative celebrates one book connected with the capital city. Led by Dublin’s public libraries, it encourages everyone to read that book during the month, making print and digital copies available to borrow for free throughout the public library network. To be a contender for this recognition, the book must:

• have a connection to the city either through the author/s or content of the book
• lend itself to the organization of a wide range of associated events
• have as broad an appeal as possible
• be in print and easily available
• have a publisher partner willing and with the capacity to be involved.

In April 2019, the honor will go to Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls trilogy, representing what acting Dublin City Librarian, Brendan Teeling, describes as a book that will, “capture the imagination of the people of Dublin, of all ages and walks of life,” adding that it is “exquisitely written, moving, humorous, full of compelling characters – and still as relevant as when it was written in 1960.”

I couldn’t be more pleased.  Ms. O’Brien was the first woman to commit to paper anything that made any sense to me, lambasting Ireland’s constraints on girls and women. And I think it’s fair to say that in her own over-the-top life, she has continued to kick the door wide open on what it means to be yourself in a world that might prefer a different version of yourself. I’ve lost count of how many times her words have jumped off the page, making me want to stand up and cheer her on as well as those other times, quieter times when I’ve wondered if maybe she’s lonely at the end of a day, or feeling unloved. Maybe that’s because of a poignant scene in The Country Girls, when she describes Kate’s mother waving goodbye. Maybe it’s because I’m projecting.

She was waving. In her brown dress, she looked sad, the farther I went, the sadder she looked. Like a sparrow in the snow, brown and anxious and lonesome.

Or maybe it’s because I know she loves Van Morrison and told an audience one night before reading his ‘Madame George’ to them that she thought he was “in the business of making magic.” She should know.

#MeToo

I own copies of every book she has ever written and even some things written about her, the latter not always  favorable.  I even saved my seven page hand-written paper about her from a college class in 1982 with the nice comment in red ink deeming it “A very perceptive, well presented and documented survey.” And I also saved the photocopied pages of literary criticism that informed my essay.  I suppose I should be thankful anything had been written about Edna O’Brien at all. In1982, when I informed my college tutor that she would be the subject of my dissertation on Irish Fiction Since James Joyce. He pointed out that it was entirely up to me, and good luck of course, but to bear in mind that, unlike Joyce’s body of work, Edna O’Brien’s fiction had not been the subject of “substantial critical inquiry.” Well, that was unfair, but it was also true, and he did not seem entirely happy about it. So while everybody else was checking out dusty hard-back books about bloody Samuel Beckett and Sean O’Casey, I spent hours in the Stranmillis Library when it would have been easier to go to the Errigle Inn to hear Kenny McDowell and Jim Armstrong play than find a handful of words in a tattered periodical about Edna O’Brien suffering the same indignity as James Joyce and Frank O’Connor in having had her books banned. Her Country Girls, published in 1960, was banned for its ‘explicit sexual content,” content that offended a Catholic Church that has offended – and continues to offend – millions infinitely more than Edna O’Brien ever did, yet she was driven into exile – banished for words published in a book. Were they afraid of her? Yes. I think they were. Why? Because she said #MeToo long before the rest of us, and they knew she was right.

In many respects, the danger to our national characteristic is greater now than ever. The foreign press is more widely diffused among us; the cinema brings very vivid representations of foreign manners an customs, and the radio will bring foreign music, and the propagation of foreign ideals.

Add to that the novelty of television and a new kind of popular press in the 1950s when a young Edna O’Brien began writing, and the same speech might apply. To be Irish was to cleave to a certain set of values, to heed your elders, hold your tongue, and mind your manners. Edna O’Brien said no. She said #MeToo. She was stepping up and out to challenge the Irish establishment that had so many of us tied in knots with our parents, priests, politicians. And, I would never have encountered the wit and wisdom of this woman from County Clare, had it not been for Brian Baird who, in addition to reading the six o’clock news with gravitas on UTV every night, was my Tutor at Stranmillis University College Belfast. I will never forget him.

Some years later, I sent him a letter to tell him so and to thank him, because thanking our great teachers is the right thing to do. Too, I was about to teach an Irish literature class, and I wondered if Mr. Baird would share with me his course outline and a reading list.  He obliged, and to this day, his letter back to me and his  list of recommended works remain carefully folded between pages 186 and 187 of the Collected Poems of Patrick Kavanagh. 

How it angers me to know that cancer took my Mr. Baird eight years after he sent me this letter. Cancer. There’s just no getting away from it. I hate it.

And how I would love one more opportunity to run into him. Just one more time, perhaps in the lobby of  The Lyric Theater on Ridgeway Street, just a few doors down from where I lived as a student. It should be before a play, while he is enjoying a cigar and a laugh with local playwrights, his thick gold bracelet chinking against a brandy glass as he raises it to a student on the other side of the lobby. This time, I would say hello and ask if he thought the play was going to be all it was cracked up to be. I would be like Edna O’Brien, unafraid and confident, with the voice she helped me find so I could move in a world where women are still struggling. Yes, Mr. Baird. I am still struggling. Still learning.

Looking over that essay I wrote for him, I notice I included something Edna O’Brien had shared in an interview all those years ago, and it resonates with me still:

You canot escape the themes of childhood . . . the bulk of the rest of our lives is shadowed or colored by that time.

You see, Edna O’Brien, unlike Yeats and Joyce and various other dead men, made me pay attention to my lot in life, the child I had been, and the young woman, the first in the family to “go away” to university. For years, our heads had been turned by The Troubles in Northern Ireland, our schools, the literature and history we studied there, all segregated. Then in college, our heads were turned by Joyce, Beckett, and O’Casey, and I was sick of memorizing the poetry, although beautiful, of W.B. Yeats. In retrospect, I was sicker of all the pseudo-intellectuals who tried to sparkle and enchant their way through lectures with ill-placed ironies by Oscar Wilde. But they were no match for Mr. Baird. He introduced us to Seamus Heaney whose poetry has saved me a time or two, and to the books of Brian Moore – the Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne comes to mind, The Emporer of Ice Cream. Moore even tried his hand at writing as a woman in The Doctor’s Wife in the early 1970s. He did a good job too and received critical acclaim for his portraits of women “on the edge” as he did for his dead-on depiction of and disillusionment with the Belfast I loved. Still, I remember wondering why Moore’s books seemed were more “acceptable” than those of Edna O’Brien who didn’t have to “get into character” to be a real Irish woman writing about real Irish women, about the unwavering parochialism of Irish catholicism and the oppressive constraints of hard life in rural Ireland.

She breathed it.

With caustic wit and trademark humor, O’Brien held up to the light the limitations of a repressed Irish society that oppressed its women. Now, at twenty-one, I don’t pretend to have known much about being a feminist or being a woman for that matter. In the middle of my fifth decade, I know now they should be one and the same. As a young woman stepping out into a new world – Belfast may as well have been on Mars – I found O’Brien’s voice both new and familiar – and she was accessible. We could find it in the pages of books in the mobile library van and bring it home to share with our mothers.

I remember reading that I shared with Seamus Heaney the phenomenon of being first in the family to go on to university – to go away to school. As he explained to Dennis O’Driscoll “In Stepping Stones”:

Even Belfast was far away to me. In those days, I was outside the loop, my family had no familiarity with universities, no sense of the choices that there were, no will to go beyond the known procedures, no confidence, for example, about phoning up the local education authority and seeking clarification about what was possible – no phone, for God’s sake.

A university education in Belfast was a world away from his mother and necessitated a a kind of verbal dance with her, when he returned from it to the family home, full of new knowledge, new words, and new sensitivities. I can almost picture him – in that tight space between elevated and plain Derry speech, watching every word he says, weighing its impact before he utters it. And I can tell you what Heaney – and Edna O’Brien would know – my mother and I have danced that very dance, her telling me even today from across the water, “you know all them things.”

But when I put “The Country Girls” in my mother’s hands, and told her “Read this, ma!”  I knew with all confidence that she would weep with sorrow and joy in equal measure. With recognition.  Edna O’Brien knew who we were;

Such women weep, accepting their lot, knowing no other, for Ireland – lost for so long in struggles with invaders, with poverty, and with the land, has had too little time for the delicacy of polite society and leisurely relationships.

Too little time indeed.In 1974 O’Brien’s A Scandalous Woman was published, a collection of nine short stories, the title story ending with the author’s comment on the lot of Irish women, “I thought that ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, sacrificial women.”

Looking back from where I sit in 2018 America, I wonder if this was perhaps about the sacrifices of the first Irish feminists and if at last, we have embraced this country girl and her critique of the repressive Ireland that produced her.

Her publisher, Lee Brackstone, points out that, “in 1960 Edna O’Brien detonated a literary bomb, the reverberations of which continue to work their way through the culture and the Irish diaspora. The Country Girls is one of the beacons of radical 20th century literature.”

Long may it burn.

 

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