"The minute you feel answerable, you're throttled."

Recently, Irish novelist Edna O'Brien appeared onstage in San Francisco at an event sponsored by City Arts & Lectures, where she read from her new novel-in- progress, "Down By The River." The author of 14 novels and five collections of short stories, O'Brien also talked about who and what drives her to live in exile (in London), to write about war, and to throw herself so exultantly into the rhythm of language.

You come from a country that many writers seem to leave. Is it better or easier to write about Ireland from outside?

My first book, "," was a simple little tale of two girls who were trying to burst out of their gym frocks and their convent, and their own lives in their own houses, to make it to the big city. It angered a lot of people, including my own family. It was banned; it was called a smear on Irish womanhood. A priest in our parish asked from the altar if anyone who had bought copies would bring them to the chapel grounds. That evening there was a little burning. My mother said women fainted, and I said maybe it was the smoke. When I wrote my second book ("The Lonely Girls"), the opinion was the first was a prayer book by comparison. My mother had gone though the book and inked out any offending words.

So I was made to feel ashamed, made to feel I had done something wrong. It's hard enough to write a book at all; you have to dig and dig and dig into your unconscious, come up with some kind of story, and language, emotion, music. And you'd like a small amount of support from someone you knew. So if you have any degree of self-protection at all, you get out of that place, if you're going to keep writing.

James Joyce lived all his life away and wrote obsessively and gloriously about Ireland. Although he had left Ireland bodily, he had not left it psychically, no more than I would say I have. I don't rule out living some of the time in Ireland, but it would be in a remote place, where I would have silence and privacy. It's important when writing to feel free, answerable to no one. The minute you feel you are answerable, you're throttled. You can't do it.

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You write a lot about war -- war in the house, war in the land, war in the heart. Are the Irish more prone to that particular pastime?

I certainly think they're more turbulent. They're more turbulent by disposition and by language. And their history has made them suffer a hell of a lot. I have written about strife between mother and child, between husband and wife, and, in "House of Splendid Isolation," between two parts of the same country.

An IRA man told me once, "When you're shooting, you don't feel. But when you've shot him, you do feel, because half of you hopes you got him, and the other half hopes you didn't. Because we're all Irish under the skin." That to me was a story about war.

War, whether it's between man and woman, or different parts of a country, or different nations, is always, always more complicated than just the two sides. It is that I want to write about. It's the dilemma and conflict within the obvious dilemma that matters. It would be impossible for a writer with any awareness at all about the human psyche and the human condition not to write about wars, whatever locale they are. Because people do disagree with each other; they do sometimes forgive one another, and then they re-disagree with one another. Life is not a placid pool, it's a raging, storming sea, which we're all in. And maybe I, being from the race I am, pay more attention to that than to the gentler aspects. But then, that's my fate.

Is that the purpose, or the message of your writing?

I'm not sure I have a message -- Edvard Munch's "The Scream," perhaps. Purpose? It's a very hard question to answer. First and foremost for me is language. One of my greatest excitements in life is to hear a piece of language, a strip of a poem, like Wallace Stevens: "I don't know which to prefer more,/ the beauty of inflection or the beauty of innuendo,/ the blackbird whistling, or just after." I can't tell what the "purpose" of Wallace Stevens, of those three great lines, is. All I know is, when I heard them, they bestirred me.

Language is an extraordinary thing. It is more extraordinary than any nuclear weapon. You can do anything with it. James Joyce did. You can turn it inside out. You can twist it, you can make a galaxy with it, and bring out in the reader emotion and excitement and an ecstasy the reader did not know he or she was capable of. I love even the vague possibility that I can be engaged in that trade or vocation.

Which writers bestir you, influence you, the most?

It has to be James Joyce. It's not out of national feelings that I say such a thing. It is that simply that when I was working in Dublin in a chemist's shop, I one day bought a book for four pennies called "Introducing James Joyce," by T.S. Eliot, and I opened it to a section from "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," the Christmas dinner scene, with the blue flame over the Christmas pudding. Up to then, I had been writing rather fancifully, with a lot of adjectives. When I read that, I realized one thing: that I need go no further than my own interior, my own experience, for whatever I wanted to write. It was truly, without sounding like St. Paul, an utter revelation to me.

The other is William Faulkner. If there are two men in heaven, as I hope they are -- though Joyce would not want me to mention such a place -- if they are in the ether out there together, I hope they are drinking, and I drink to their greatness, to what they have given. It is massive what they have given to life. There are writers and writers. But there is Joyce and Faulkner, for me. Wired For Books home

Don Swaim Interviews

Audio Interview with Edna O'Brien Edna O'Brien, author of The Country Girls, The Lonely , and Girls in Their Married Bliss (The Country Girls trilogy), August Is a Wicked Month, A Pagan Place, Mother Ireland, and , talks with Don Swaim about the differences between The Country Girls and Time and Tide. She feels both novels are views about life, but one is seen through the eyes of a teenager and the other is seen through the eyes of authority figures.

Edna O'Brien says the Ireland of her youth was a narrow, religious, claustrophobic, and punitive society. Everything was redolent of sin in her home and she ran away and eloped when she was eighteen years old.

Her first novel, The Country Girls, was savagely attacked in Ireland and her early novels were banned by the Irish censorship board. In her home village, the parish priest burned three copies of her book. She blames the narrow-mindedness on the lack of books in a village that had no library. She wants her books to glisten with truth and feels each of her books is a rung on a ladder to her next book.

Listen to the Edna O'Brien interview with Don Swaim, 1992 (46 min. 46 sec.)

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For many years most of the best writers of the English language found their way to Don Swaim's CBS Radio studio in New York. Wired for Books is proud to webcast these interviews in their entirety.

about the Country Girls – The Guardian: http://download.guardian.co.uk/audio/1208187733401/57/gdn.arts. 080414.bg.book_club_EdnaOBrien.MP3

Talking With Edna O'Brien

By JOHN FREEMAN Special to the Journal Sentinel

Posted: Sept. 29, 2006

London - Edna O'Brien is going home to Ireland, and she hasn't even begun to pack yet.

"I'm very sorry," says the novelist, apologizing for the lateness of the hour, before ushering me to the upstairs parlor of her South Kensington home.

This quiet, book-lined room has been O'Brien's catbird perch for many years now.

It is from here that she has viewed her Ireland, her County Clare. Edna O'Brien

Fifteen novels, half a dozen plays and numerous short stories have poured forth - all of them about her home country.

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She just published her 20th work of fiction, "," a novel about a famous writer coming home to Ireland to her dying mother.

It is symbolically loaded territory for O'Brien, which explains the extra nervousness about this recent trip - especially since it is a book tour.

"My mother hated, went to her grave, shocked, outraged, that I was a writer," O'Brien says. "She saw that I had some gifts. She resented it and yet wanted us to be bound together. And that's very unnerving."

Rather than bury this tension, O'Brien has given her mother her wish.

Loving, yearning letters

In "The Light of Evening" she has taken the letters her late mother wrote to her over the course of her life and spliced them almost verbatim into a fictional story, mother and daughter bound together indeed.

In the novel, 78-year-old Dilly goes to the hospital where she learns she has ovarian cancer. While nurses attend to her, Dilly awaits her famous writer daughter Eleanor's return to Ireland. Dilly passes the time reminiscing on her own journey away to America in the '20s, recalling the guilt-inducing letters her own mother wrote to her.

The book then jumps back to Eleanor's grown-up life in London, where she is lonely and homesick.

At every step of the way, there are letters from mother to daughter.

The book ends with a powerful stream of them.

They are loving, yearning, accusatory. "I wouldn't want you to deny your mother like Peter who denied Christ," Dilly writes in one dagger of guilt.

Like Eleanor, O'Brien was born in a small, rural Catholic village in the west of Ireland, the population just 200.

She escaped this provincial life by attending Pharmaceutical College in Dublin, then eloping to London with her husband, the Czech writer Ernest Gebler.

She never moved back. But her life has hardly "been a romp," as she says.

She divorced Gebler in 1964 and raised her two children alone.

When O'Brien published her first book in 1966, "The Country Girls," a tale of two girls trying to escape the strictures of their convent life, it was banned, then publicly burned by her parish priest in Ireland.

Her mother went through it and inked out offending words.

"She hated the written word," O'Brien says. "The line in the book, 'Paper never refused ink,' was one of her more caustic lines about my writing."

For all the points of contact between this book and her life, though, O'Brien insists this is not a veiled autobiography.

"This is a version of my life, an imaginary version of it. I don't know anything about my mother's life in Brooklyn, all I know is she worked in America as a maid and came home and married somebody in Ireland."

Nor is it a settling of scores.

"My mother was an amazing, powerful woman," O'Brien says, "but she was also lost."

In order to fill in the gaps in her story, O'Brien traveled to the U.S. and visited Ellis Island. "I walked up and down streets in Brooklyn, I took that ferry out to the Statue of Liberty over and over again," she says, "and then I just got so despairing. I thought, 'I don't know this world! I don't know it!'

She was relieved when the Irish-American memoirist Frank McCourt read the manuscript and told her she had got it right.

Like much of O'Brien's fiction - from "Night" to "Lantern Slides," and "" - this is a book about Ireland's struggle to change and the way that change is felt by everyday people.

"Everyone who is sensitive," O' Brien says at one point, "is not at first able to take change. I remember reading that the first man who held up an umbrella in London was attacked. Because they had never seen an umbrella before. So all change is frightening. And to the self it is terrifying."

Like McCourt, O'Brien has a complicated relationship with Ireland.

She loves the country, but it has not always loved her back so forcefully.

Her first six books were banned, and her later ones often treated with "excessive contempt" by critics, she says.

At one point, she pauses in conversation to show me the James Joyce medal she finally recently received.

"There, put that piece of metal around your neck," she says.

I ask her if she thinks her reputation has suffered because she is a woman and she does not pause before answering, "Absolutely. The hard part about being a writer in the big wide world is being a woman, too, because they don't want or expect a woman writer to be in the same league."

But this has not stopped O'Brien, the books coming at such regular intervals that she has begun to be regarded as something of a force of nature.

Bad reviews still hurt, and good ones cheer, but "I will have the last word," she says.

Much of her time is spent in this room, her study, where she works in longhand, a typist stopping by when composition has ceased.

She lives so fully in the life of her mind that as the light fails, she begins to trip down a path of associations and, mid conversation, quote at length from Joyce or Faulkner.

Mythological similarities In the past few decades, these two writers have been her adopted ancestors, her imaginary countrymen.

During the conversation, she pauses to read from a letter the venerable Yale professor and critic Harold Bloom sent to her about "The Light of Evening."

"Joyce I think is your mother, in this book," he wrote, "and the Joyce influenced Faulkner, your father."

O'Brien has never been to the deep South, but she understands where the mythological similarities between her fiction and Faulkner's come from.

"In the part of Ireland I come from there are the big houses, the ruined houses, the blood boiling in the land, the silence underneath which is simmering so much," she says.

Sitting in almost total darkness now, O'Brien says if there was one book she would have loved to have written herself, it would be "As I Lay Dying," Faulkner's great novel about the Burden family's trek across Mississippi to bury Addie, wife and mother, in the town of her choice.

"It's a wonderful book, I love it," she says, a reverential hush falling.

Little does she know, she may have just achieved her wish.

John Freeman, president of the National Book Critics Circle, lives in Manhattan. book blitz: All about fiction. The Mother LoadEdna O'Brien's dark look at the mother- daughter bond. By Claire Dederer Posted Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006, at 7:23 AM ET

Click here to read more from Slate's Fall Fiction Week. The first 10 pages of The Light of Evening took me about an hour to read. My husband mocked me from the other couch: "Have you gotten to Page 4 yet?" I'm not the only person who has waded, rather than leapt, into Edna O'Brien. Her admirers—who include Frank McCourt and Alice Munro—urge us to go slowly, to savor her writing. It's dazzling, they say. Also, radiant. But that's not why it took me an hour. It took me an hour because I was bored, and it was hard.

O'Brien has her own language, stilted and cumbrous when you first encounter it. The novel opens with a crow flying into the County Clare farmyard of an old woman named Dilly Macready: "It gives Dilly the shivers, it does, and she storing her precious bits and pieces for safety's sake. Wrapping the cut glasses in case her husband, Cornelius, is mad enough to use them or lay one down before Crotty the workman, who'd fling it on a hedge or a headland as if it were a billy can."

These ought to be straightforward sentences—after all, the words are familiar and unfancy. But O'Brien has grouped them in a weird bouquet. I found myself working for meaning. Wait, who's Crotty, and why's he flinging things at headlands? So it went throughout those first pages and chapters: O'Brien's sentences, deceptively plain-spoken, seemed to set me on my ear. I found myself paying attention, something I sometimes forget to do as a constant reader. I made my way along as through a thicket, and the story began to coalesce: Dilly has shingles, and possibly worse. She's headed for the hospital. Her husband will stay behind, at their beloved farm, Rusheen. Once in the hospital, she is put in the care of the cruel Nurse Flaherty. "Jangled now, Dilly is thinking who might rescue her from there. It cannot be Cornelius, nor Dr. Fogarty, nor her hard-boiled son, Terence. It has to be Eleanora. She pictures her beyond in England with the shelves of books up to the ceiling and white flowers, usually lilies, in a big pewter jug, insouciant, mindless of this plea."

Eleanora is her daughter, a famous writer, who has left Ireland for England and left her mother for what Dilly sees as a series of godless relationships. While Dilly waits for Eleanora, she slips into a reverie, remembering her own flight from Ireland when she herself was a girl. Maintaining her offhanded, elliptical tone, O'Brien gives us a meticulously researched, gorgeously detailed, and at times quite frightening portrait of turn- of-the-century immigrant America.

Here I noticed that a change had come over my reading. It wasn't a miracle, or a door swinging open, or a bright light shining down, but I had become absorbed into O'Brien's