A new documentary on the life of Edna O’Brien, “Blue Road”, will be showing at the Queen’s Film Theatre next week and it’s a must-see.
It shines a light on the life and work of an Irish icon, who died last year aged 93.
It also reveals an Ireland that has fortunately gone, where politicians lined up to kiss the ring of visiting prelates, and sub-contracted public morality to the Catholic Church and the country’s censorship board.
Her first novel, “The Country Girls”, with its frank portrayal of female sexuality, would swiftly join the 1,600 other books banned by the state.
The book was denounced as a “slur on Irish womanhood” and described by that beacon of Catholic values, Charlie Haughey, as “filth” that had no place in any decent home.
O’Brien had earlier run away with her older lover, Ernest Gebler, which led to a farcical and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring her home from her hiding place on the Isle of Man by a posse that included her father, brother and a Co Clare priest.
The pair married, but he became jealous of her literary success and his overbearing misogyny is shocking to a modern audience.
Not only did he cash the cheques she earned from her books, doling her out “housekeeping” money, he also wrote notes in her personal diary, contradicting her observations.
He also claimed to have written her early novels himself, though she seemed to manage very well at the writing once she had left him.
The notoriety of her early work – copies of which were publicly burned by the parish priest - cast her in the public eye as a glamorous libertine, a scarlet woman, revelling in the attention of the rich and famous who gathered at her parties in London.
A full ‘who’s who', from Jackie Onassis to Robert Mitchum, dropped in and out of her life, with Marlon Brando calling by and Richard Burton puzzled that he failed to seduce her.
Her later interest in the north was unusual for a writer from the south. But her novel “House of Splendid Isolation”, which engaged with the Troubles, northern republicans and the north/south divide, was criticised for romanticising the IRA.
One critic derided her as “the Barbara Cartland of long-distance republicanism”. Another Irish writer publicly shouted across a restaurant that she was “sleeping with the Provos”.
But O’Brien understood that the conflict in the north was a matter for the whole island, and understood the north’s feeling of abandonment by her fellow countrymen.
The aggrieved gunman in the novel, loosely based on Dominic McGlinchey, laments: “The south forgot us.”
The author commented: “For many in the south, the IRA were increasingly mindless hooligans, who brought shame on their fellow Catholics and a stain on the altar of the nation.”
Her subsequent interview for The New York Times with Gerry Adams, “Ulster’s Man of the Dark”, was also criticised for being too sympathetic, because she believed he was someone who could help achieve peace.
“Some spoke to me with absolute disbelief that I would show sympathy toward such people and such a cause, while others were openly intemperate, and an MP at a gathering told me he would bring back hanging for the likes of me.”
It was at a time when sections of the Dublin media were equally intemperate in their attacks on SDLP leader John Hume because of his negotiations with Gerry Adams.
In the film, O’Brien rejects charges that she condoned republican violence, but was at pains to point out that the IRA weren’t the only ones involved in the dirty war.
Anyone who doubts this should look at the campaign by the family of GAA man Sean Brown, still fighting to get an inquiry into his murder nearly 27 years later, facing the obduracy of the British state, still intent on covering up that its agents were actively involved in the killing.
Edna O’Brien knew what she was talking about.