T.S. Eliot, who plays a small but pivotal role in this absorbing documentary, cautioned against focusing on a writer’s life and circumstances when interpreting their writing. He clearly did not have Edna O’Brien in mind. The title of Sinéad O’Shea’s film about the passionate, uncompromising Irish writer notwithstanding, seldom has one life contained so many stories. And they are all the inspiration for her writing.
To say O’Brien (who died last year at 93) lived life to the fullest and rung every drop out of it, is an understatement. the juice of all that squeezing is the lifeblood of her literary legacy. O’Shea evokes O’Brien’s worlds with testimonials from people who knew her, including the novelist Andrew O’Hagan, the actor Gabriel Bryne and her sons, interviews, wonderful archival material and her memoir, Country Girl, read by the actress/singer Jessie Buckley in a voice as melodious and appealing as O’Brien’s.
The trauma of O’Brien’s repressed childhood in a “strict, religious household” in County Clare in the 1930s and her suffocating years in a Catholic boarding school in the 1940s was her making. It is almost a cliché to say that she watched her alcoholic father gamble away his inheritance. The only books in the house were prayer books. The young O’Brien escaped to the woods and fields and made-up stories. They poured out of her even before she knew her obsession could be a career, or in her case, a vocation.
After five years with the nuns in boarding school, O’Brien fled to Dublin and, while browsing in a shop, bought Introducing James Joyce by T.S. Eliot, which became her companion. When she learned that Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist was autobiographical, she realised that her own life would be subject enough for a few books.
Here the story turns picaresque. O’Brien elopes with the dashing, worldly and much older, Ernest Gébler in 1954, at the height of his fame. The family are furious, and scandalised. The couple bring up two children, but Ernest is not the only one writing.
At age 30, O’Brien is catapulted to fame with her first, incendiary novel, The Country Girls, and gained notoriety when the novel, an unflinching and undeniably authentic chronicle of the life and loves of three former convent girls, was banned. Realising she had touched a chord, she completes a trilogy: The Lonely Girl (which O’Brien adapted for the film, The Girl with the Green Eyes) and Girls in Their Married Bliss.
The banning continued with August is a Wicked Month a favourite of the actress/dancer Leslie Caron. O’Brien wrote about female desire and sexual awakening with such candour that it shocked and thrilled and vindicated in equal measure.
Competitive and controlling, Gébler reinforced O’Brien’s views of an oppressive patriarchal society when, though he criticised her writing, he felt entitled to the money it made. The title of the film derives from Gébler’s protest that “there is no such thing as a blue road” as we hear O’Brien’s testimony and see a photograph to the contrary. This dispute becomes symbolic of more than a jealous husband’s limited imagination.
Divorced, with custody of their two sons who chose to live with her, O’Brien moves to Chelsea, London and a new chapter of her life begins. Vanity Fair dubs her “The Playgirl of the Western World” for her wild parties while the children fall asleep to the sound of the typewriter into the early hours.
Robert Mitchum shows up for dinner and stays the night; Marlon Brando and Sean Connery are fans and Richard Burton drops by reciting Shakespeare. He gushes that her story, The Love Object, recently published in the New Yorker Magazine in 1967, is one of his favourites. She takes LSD with her psychoanalyst R.D. Laing, an experience that affects her life and writing. She soldiers on, writing some 34 novels, 8 collections of stories, poetry, children’s books, non-fiction and screenplays – and gives her last interview – to O’Shea and producers – the day before she died.
It is typical of O’Brien’s interest in the female experience the world over that her final novel was entitled, Girl. It is a smouldering novel about Nigeria’s abducted schoolgirls for which the writer, in her eighties, made several trips to the country.
“Unhappy houses are a very good incubation for stories” O’Brien told an interviewer. We find O’Brien, having fallen on hard times in her fifties, teaching at the City College in Harlem during a period where she toyed with suicide. But there are too many stories still to tell and encourage. According to Walter Mosely (Devil in a Blue Dress) who was a mature student in O’Brien’s writing course, she sent him off to write a novel. “You’re Black, Jewish, with a poor upbringing; there are riches, therein.”
Joyce Glasser.
