Country Girl: A Memoir (21 page)

The furor upon publication of my novel took me by surprise, although there were advance rumblings. The head nun from the Convent of Mercy sent a letter saying, “We have heard that you have written a novel. We give credence an open mind.” The sheet of paper shook in my hand, and I saw again her inquisitioner’s eyes, with that little cyst on the lower lid of the left one. A friend of my mother’s, a doctor’s wife who was visiting London, invited me to supper at the Cumberland Hotel in Marble Arch, and quizzing me about the book, she smelled a rat, so
that before long my mother wrote saying she hoped and prayed that I was not about to bring ignominy and disgrace on my own people.

Publication day was like any other, and reviews were to come in fits and starts, instances of praise marred by soundings from home. In her letters my mother spoke of the shock, the hurt, and the disgust that neighbors felt. I had sent her a copy, which she did not mention as having received, and one day, after her death, I would find it in a bolster case, with offending words daubed out with black ink. There would, she said, be many who would turn away from me when I came home on the annual holiday. The postmistress, who happened to be Protestant, told my father that a fitting punishment would be for me to be kicked naked through the town. Stoning would be next.

Luckily, in that tenuous state, I was unaware of the righteous correspondence that went on between Archbishop McQuaid and the then Minister for Justice, Charlie Haughey, both agreeing that the book was filth and should not be allowed inside any decent home. They shared their indignation with the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, all three men in evident bafflement that the “Literary Lounger of the
London Illustrated
,” who was normally sane, had let me off so lightly.

There were occasional excitements. I was interviewed on television by the actor Robert Shaw, who had been somewhat complimentary, and afterward when he and my husband met in the green room, they looked daggers at one another. Meanwhile, the author L. P. Hartley was being interviewed about the book by Jack Lambert, pronouncing it the skittish story of two Irish nymphomaniacs.

Home life was punitive. There were no rows, just silence and routine. In the logbook, which I now read when he took the
children some afternoons in his vintage Railton for a drive on Wimbledon Common, I would discover his ongoing fury with me and with the world. He used to stay up till three or four in the morning, listening to music and, as he insisted, writing, except that I saw no evidence of it. There were only these caustic entries. Arthur Koestler, according to him, had sold out on his Marxist principles, and those who executed the Rosenbergs should themselves face the electric chair. I read how I was puffed up with newfound fame, my ravenousness for literary circles ever-deepening, the world blind to the fact that my book owed its being to the husband who had sacrificed his own talents to serve mine and indeed had martyred himself. I would be allowed to get on with the
scribbling
, while, in return, he was given complete control over the children, their welfare, and every aspect of their lives. A Faustian pact, of which I was hitherto unaware.

There was no way out.

It was after my second novel,
The Lonely Girl,
had been published that Father Peter Connolly, a professor of English in Maynooth College, wrote a long piece about both novels, praising the nature sections, the composite picture of rural life and convent education. In an anonymous letter, one of many which I received, I simply found a newspaper clipping with the heading “Priest praises her.”

A cultural organization in Limerick called An Tuarim decided to have a public meeting so that my own people could voice their reservations to me in person. The hall was packed to overflowing, people still pouring in half an hour after we were due to begin, kneeling, squatting, while I sat on the platform next to the chairman and Father Connolly, feeling none too confident. The physical oppression in that hall, as was later reported,
was such that for a while it seemed as if Ireland, just as James Joyce had described her, was indeed the sow that would eat her farrow—by which he meant piglets—or, in my case, would eat the “enigmatic thirty-year-old literary bonham.”

Mr. Dillon, the chairman, opened the meeting by saying that at least
I
had probably read the books in question, something that was perhaps not true for all those present. He then went on to say that it was a rare thing for Ireland to talk to an Irish writer in public before he, or she, was dead or embittered. Father Connolly then stood up, holding
The Country Girls,
and began by suggesting that it be read in full before judgment could be passed. He was aware, he said, of the accusations of immorality, but in his estimation, it was amoral rather than immoral. He stressed the nature section, the sense of place, the ribaldry of rural life, adding that if there were passages less palatable to some, was it not the duty of literature to portray life, warts and all? He then spoke of the conversation he had had with me before the meeting and the reasons for my reluctance to live in Ireland because of its narrow-mindedness and robust censorship. The audience was not amused by his saying that Ibsen had been castigated by his own people in Norway.

At his request questions were invited, questions that inevitably turned into speeches. A woman began the proceedings by saying that the sexual imagery was unnecessary, shocking and indecent, and was there for no other reason except to coin money. Father Connolly felt it incumbent on him to get to his feet again and warned of the besetting temptation of judging a book by one or two paragraphs when a reader might well profit from what was “solid, substantial, and serious.” He repeated his phrase of its not being immoral but amoral, and the audience seemed skeptical. The next questioner was also a woman, and
she was shaking, saying what a sad day for Ireland this was. How much of my own life had I put into this stuff? How true or untrue were the descriptions of the convent? Had I no thought for my family and the shame I had heaped on them? Did I not think the decent and wholesome thing to do would be to donate my earnings to a charity? Then a dauntless young woman, wearing a green dirndl skirt and waving a green placard, jumped up and gave a spirited rendering of “They’ll Be Hanging Men and Women, for the Wearing of the Green.”

Mr. Dillon believed there was not enough male input, and so a man in the front row in a coat and hat put it to me in strong terms: Why did I live in England? Why did I write in England? Was there not enough experience for me in my own village and community? Was there not a rich furrow to uncover? I said that unfortunately, having drawn on this rich furrow, I was being punished. A woman, almost apoplectic, said that it was quite clear I had turned my back on a Christian society in order to live a life of sin and promiscuity. Father Connolly objected, saying he would like to remind people that this was a public meeting and not the confessional.

The debate widened then as to whether hard-core pornography should be kept out of Ireland. I said I had not read any hard-core pornography, either in Ireland or England, as it was difficult enough to try and write. This was met with some scattered applause. Another man, striving to be reasonable, asked if I would make it clear once and for all what my engagement was with my own country. Was I doing a Pontius Pilate and washing my hands of it? The audience deserved to know. I said my engagement with it was total, because for every writer the love of language begins in the place called “home.” I quoted W. B. Yeats, who had said that the sea cliffs of Sligo gave tongue to his early poems, but this was met with scorn, my sheer audacity
at comparing myself with William Butler Yeats, which actually I hadn’t intended to do.

Mr. Dillon, sensing that things were getting heated, ruled that the evening should end on a positive note, and asked that all agree on the fact that, wherever I lived, Ireland had been the source of my inspiration and would continue to be so.

A leading article in the
Irish Times
paid tribute to Father Connolly’s courage and voiced the hope that the meeting signified a turning of the tide. The banning and mangling of Irish writers, so it said, had for too long “marked the more shameful aspects of the forty years of Independence.”

My mother was drawing a chicken on the kitchen table for us to take back to London after the annual summer holiday. The entrails were in a newspaper, and blood dripped onto the tiled kitchen floor. We were due to leave in an hour or so. My husband was polishing his Railton, having not exchanged a word with either her or me all morning. My sons, in a high state of bathos, were strewing farewells to their favorite haunts, to the tree house, the fort of oak trees, the hay shed where they had romped and the hay tram from which Sasha had fallen when the horse had bolted and the farm help, Eamonn, had sworn him to secrecy. Coming upon the bruises that night, my mother asked him when it had happened, to which he had replied gallantly, “I know but I am not allowed to tell.”

I was in the back kitchen washing up while my mother went on drawing the chicken, and I was relieved to be leaving but fearful of what lay ahead. The marriage was at breaking point. I knew that, except that I did not know how it would end, in fact believing it was for eternity. I kept rinsing and rerinsing the cups and saucers, anything to be alone, when my mother said
my name tersely, said it twice. I went in and stood near her. The pope’s nose of the bird was pink and futile, and the long soft toenails were of a sickly yellow. Snipping out the heart and the liver for broth, she managed to cut the sac that contained the gallstones, and presently a green liquid with a foul smell spewed out. It meant that the insides of the bird were now poisoned. She was furious at her mistake and, throwing the scissors down, asked me curtly, “Are these children ever going to go to a Catholic school, or are they not?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Answer me,” she said fiercely.

“I can’t, I can’t answer you,” I said, because I couldn’t. My husband made all decisions regarding their upbringing and had only agreed to their being baptized by indulging, as he said, a superstition of mine.

She became more and more insistent, and I too became more defensive as she wanted an answer, a resolution. It ended by her gathering up the newspaper that contained chicken, guts and all, and hurrying out the back door, up to a cellar where she dumped things and where dogs and foxes scavenged at night.

Our departure was brought forward by an hour. The tension was unbearable. Nobody speaking, everybody weeping, my sons crying uncontrollably, their goodbyes, their embracing and hugging of the two sheepdogs, their rituals, so brutally cut short, because my mother and I had fallen out completely. My husband sat in his car quietly seething. As I put our luggage in the boot of the car and looked back at the house, I did something stupid. I went into the unkempt garden and broke off a bit of honeysuckle to have as a keepsake in my book. As if I needed keepsakes!

My father hurried out of the house fuming and told me to go in there and put my arms around my mother and comfort her.