Saints and Sinners (22 page)

I think mothers identify very much with their daughters and therefore criticize their daughters more than their sons. I don't have a daughter but I have sons. [My mother] would come to London, and in those days I gave rather lavish parties. I was head bottle washer; cooked, opened the bottles, lit the fires, answered the door, opened the champagne and the oysters, and my mother, witnessing this largesse, probably feared that I was heading downhill.

The one thing in this world that I cannot bear, because I've had so much of it, is being controlled. People love controlling other people. I don't even control my children. I sometimes think they control me, my follies.

Including men in relationships?

Men certainly want control and get it. But let me say, women want control also, in a more insidious way. My mother was a controller.

You are not bitter towards men.

Not at all, I love men. My experience hasn't been all that blessed. I haven't been in love often but when I have been, I have. I regard it as very profound and stirring and of course sometimes unrequited. Bitterness for a writer, or for anyone, is a dead end. To keep writing, one has to retain, against all the odds, some of the fervor and the innocence of childhood. Think of James Joyce, with his searing intellect, being able to write about Gerty MacDowell in the "Sirens" section of
Ulysses
and understanding her gushings, her longings and troubling himself to find out which exact dinky dye she used for her underwear.

I read somewhere that the first book you bought was about James Joyce.

Yes, it was a little book called
Introducing James Joyce
by T. S. Eliot, which included the Christmas dinner from
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,
and one of the short stories, I think it was "Araby," and an extract from
Ulysses
and an extract from "Anna Livia." I love the "Anna Livia" section of
Finnegans Wake.
Anna, in all her personifications, going back to the sea, to her "cold mad feary father," knowing that for all her gifts and guile as a young woman, she will be quite forgotten. It's ineffably beautiful.

Do you think you would have liked Joyce as a man?

I would love to have met Joyce, preferably in the evening hours when bottles were opened. He was a very cerebral man, but he was also a very witty man and undoubtedly a man of feeling. Someone once said to him, I think it was Arthur Power, that he had no feelings and Joyce smarted, his eyes filling with tears, and said, "God, I, a man without feelings?"

You did meet Samuel Beckett. What was he like?

He was one of the most remarkable people I have ever met. His intellect was formidable but his manner was genial and friendly. He was in no way boastful. I asked him on one occasion what he was writing and his reply with a shrug was, "Not much and anyhow what difference would it make?" For many years it seems he felt as a writer the shadow of Joyce the master, saying in an interview that he worked from near nothing, whereas Joyce had the gift of omniscience and omnipotence. He needn't have worried, he too is monumental.

Did you always have this love of writing?

Yes. I was childishly ambitious in national school and I would write little bits of their compositions for the other girls, often rewarded with a biscuit. I always thought of writing not as an escape but as a path into another kind of universe, another mode of thought and feeling. I believed that words were of themselves animate and, when grouped together, had an alchemy to them.

But there were no books in your house.

No books, just bloodstock manuals and Mrs. Beeton's cookery book, with its sundry stains of ink and egg yolk and tea and its marvelous recipes in which abundance was all. Then there were the prayer books and the missals, in which the devotional and the erotica went hand in hand and the paeans to Christ and the martyrs were like love letters to someone known. In fact, my earliest understanding of earthly love was implicit in these soarings. Then of course there were poems that one learnt by heart and in the one school-book, extracts, mostly by English authors, Charles Dickens, Charles Lamb, Leigh Hunt, and Thackeray, all for our edification. I did as well learn and imbibe the great and fabulous myths. I might add that I learnt everything through Irish, except of course English, which maybe accounts for my style. One of the first books I read from start to finish was the short stories of Joyce.

Obviously Joyce had a very big effect on you.

Yes, Joyce is prodigious. He wrote with the genius of man and woman, his words are blazing, his fracturing and reassembling of the English language as radical in literature as the splitting of the atom was in science. But I would be unfaithful if I did not mention that Joyce has a rival in my affections. It is Chekhov. He is the exact opposite to Joyce—his stories seem not so much to be written as to be breathed onto the page. Like Shakespeare, Chekhov knew everything there is to know about the heart's vagaries and he rendered the passion and conflict of men and women flawlessly.

Yes, I would be much lonelier on this earth without literature, and I might even have gone mad. As a last word, let me say this: Literature is the big bonanza, and writing is getting down on one's knees each day and searching for the exact words.

Originally printed in
Irish America
on December 22, 2006. Reprinted with permission.

Questions and topics for discussion

1. In the story "Shovel Kings," Billy's widow says to Rafferty, "No one is given a life just to throw it away," spurring Rafferty toward sobriety. What do you think is the main cause of this group of exiles' heavy drinking—homesickness, personal trauma, heredity, or something else?

2. Unrequited love drives the narrators of "Madame Cassandra" and "Manhattan Medley" and the events of "Send My Roots Rain." Emotions range from extreme agitation to quiet disappointment. Which responses are most relatable to your own romantic experiences?

3. Politics rarely figure into Edna O'Brien's fiction, but the Troubles in Ireland are indirectly addressed in "Black Flower." Do you think some readers would object to the sympathy Mona has for Shane? Do you share her sympathy? Why or why not?

4- In an interview with the
New York Times,
Edna O'Brien said, "Ireland has given me a good crop of stories. In the big world you don't get stories."

Many of the stories in
Saints and Sinners
are set in small communities, whether urban or rural. How, to you, does this contribute to their depth and impact, if at all? How does place influence the behavior of the characters in, for one example, "Inner Cowboy"?

5. Social class plays a key role in some of the stories in
Saints and Sinners,
especially "Green Georgette." What signs does the child narrator, who says Drew "is like a queen," pick up on to set the Coughlans apart from her own family? How does her anger in the end differ from her more mature mother's reaction to the evening?

6. How does this collection's title,
Saints and Sinners,
reflect the thematic links among the stories?

7. The bond between mothers and daughters has often been explored in this writer's fiction. Why is the penultimate story in
Saints and Sinners
called "My Two Mothers"? Are the extremes of the narrator's feelings for her mother credible to you?

8. Edna O'Brien has written books about James Joyce and Lord Byron. Do you see the influences of these writers in the style and content of her work?

9. In an interview with Philip Roth, O'Brien said that "doctors, lawyers, and other stable citizens" differ from writers in that "they are not dogged by the past." The story "Old Wounds" is dominated by the memory of a long-ago family feud. Are there such persistent memories in your own past?