Country Girl: A Memoir (48 page)
Read Country Girl: A Memoir Online
Authors: Edna O'Brien
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, #Biography, #Biography & Autobiography / Literary
It was dusk when I came out onto the King’s Road, the welter of evening time, the violet hour of
The Waste Land,
except that the sky was pewter and people were rushing in or out from the nearby supermarket. My mind was still full of those caves, unable to imagine the lives lived in them, no more than, when looking at a few stars, I could imagine the black reaches of space beyond. I took to the back streets that, after fifty years of living in London, I was beginning to be familiar with. I passed a terrace of small houses that in daylight I know to be pink and green and blue, the colors of confectionery, and then into a more secluded street, houses set back, some with louvered shutters. Once, on one of those streets, I had written a verse about looking through windows into rooms at evening, lamps, sofas, ottomans, books, and how I had wished to go inside those rooms, inside those lives, forgetting that someone might pass my window and see my red room and have an identical wish to be in it—but I did not allow for that, being “inextricably, caught up in my House of Blindness.”
I passed the triangular green, with the bench where drunks sometimes sat and sometimes vomited. The windowsill of the pantry where I often bought cakes and fudge to send to a friend in New York was completely bare, except for a small teddy bear placed on a rack in the center.
Farther along, a woman stopped me and said she hoped I
wouldn’t mind, but as we were fellow countrywomen, she would like to shake my hand. She was a retired nurse who also lived locally. In order to get out and about and not mope, as she put it, she had subscribed to walking tours all over London; they cost next to nothing and she met people, all sorts, including widowers who were slow to come to terms with their grief.
For no particular reason she began to tell me of a rich aunt she had in Dublin, her Aunt Geraldine, who lived in Foxrock. Every spring, faithfully, Aunt Geraldine invited her on a journey to the Burren to see the wildflowers that sprang up between the flags of limestone, the whole place pickled, yes, pickled, with flowers on thin stalks, white, speckled, and blue, the blue of the gentian the most fetching of all. She said what a marvel it was to set out in a pony and trap from a hotel in Lisdoonvarna, to be driven around, and then at intervals to get out and just look at that feast of color. “That blue,” she said, as if it had melted into her. It was also the blue that I had seen in the interior of a mosque in Istanbul and the blue for the Reckitt’s dye that our mothers and our grandmothers put in the tub of rinsing water to freshen the linen and give it a little tint. She said that the thing about those journeys in the pony and trap with Aunt Geraldine was that they stayed with one—the blue flowers, the seats cut into the rocks from the wild Atlantic waves, and always, along the shore a dog chasing a ball.
She remarked then on how often, in the sixties, she had seen me on those London streets, glamorous, long earrings, a patchwork suede coat, and what a life I must have lived. There were so many “me’s”: the me she had seen; the me that sat on a cushion in Antiquarius market with Isabella, the highland seer, her crystal ball wrapped in layer upon layer of cloth, like a mummy, waiting as I might before the oracle at Delphi; the me that never conquered the fear of swimming, though I had taken lessons in the public baths nearby, from a man who stood on a
ledge holding a piece of rope to which I clung, him believing that we were winning even when we were not.
Before taking my leave of her, I mentioned that I had just seen
Cave of Forgotten Dreams.
“Aren’t they fabulous?” she said. She had seen the film only yesterday. I said I felt sorry at hearing of footsteps, two humans, perhaps a thousand years apart from one another, never to meet. “It was not two humans, it was not a man and a woman, it was a wolf and a child,” she said quietly, as if she did not want to offend me. Her words struck, like an arrow, and I realized that in there, in that dark chamber, the separate footprints of man and woman had revived in me a love so strong that, though it had not flourished, it had not died either, and so it lived on and on, in that dark suck of secrecy.
We were about to part, she saying that no doubt our paths would cross again and I saying I hoped so.
“But we live here now,” she said.
“We do,” I said, and it was as if the two countries warred and jostled and made friends, inside me, like the two halves of my warring self.
At home, I turned on all the lights, including the red lamp in the upstairs room, and it did not seem empty at all, it was full of light, like a room readying itself for a last banquet.
I was reluctant to write a memoir, but my agent, Ed Victor, was greatly enthusiastic and eventually managed to persuade me that I should do it. I mistakenly believed that it was going to be an easy journey. Andrew O’Hagan brought me to the house of Faber and the introduction to my editor, Lee Brackstone, who, with my American editor, Pat Strachan, ingeniously helped and encouraged me throughout. Help came from many and often unexpected quarters, including Sister Reparata, Ian McKellen, Louise Hardy, Graca Marquez, Nadia Proudian, Monique Henry, Carrie-Anne Brackstone, Emma Couper, Mary Morris, David McKittrick, John Horgan, Albert Kelly, Patsy McGarry, Des Lally, Patrick O’Flaherty, Dorothy Cross, and Roxy Beaujolais. While writing it, I read numerous memoirs, and the ones that spring to mind now are
Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
by Tolstoy;
Moments of Being
by Virginia Woolf;
Speak, Memory
by Vladimir Nabokov;
Germs
by Richard Wollheim;
Patrimony
by Philip Roth;
Chronicles
by Bob Dylan;
Father & I
by Carlo Gébler;
Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
by Chateaubriand;
Sleepless Nights
by Elizabeth Hardwick;
John Charles McQuaid
by John Cooney;
Remembering How We Stood
by John Ryan;
Head or Harp
by Lionel Fleming;
The Best of Patrick Campbell,
edited by Ulick O’Connor;
Downstart
by Brian Inglis;
The Magic Lantern
by Ingmar Bergman;
Making Sense of the Troubles
by David McKittrick;
Letters Home
by Sylvia Plath;
A Self-Portrait in Letters
by Anne Sexton;
Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop,
edited by George Monteiro;
A Memoir
by John McGahern;
Stepping Stones—Interviews with Seamus Heaney
by Dennis O’Driscoll; and
Bowen’s Court
by Elizabeth Bowen. I fear that in the years of immersion I have forgotten some of the people and some of the books that were an inspiration to me. I should also add that the dramatis personae of my childhood provided the richest material of all, and so I owe a huge thanks both to the living and the dead.
E
DNA
O’B
RIEN
, author of
The Country Girls Trilogy, A Fanatic Heart, The Light of Evening, Saints and Sinners,
and other widely acclaimed books, is a recipient of the Ulysses Medal, the 2011 Frank O’Connor Short Story Award, the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize, the National Arts Club Gold Medal, and the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, and is an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Country Girl
received the Argosy Irish Nonfiction Book of the Year from the Irish Book Awards. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, O’Brien has lived in London for many years.
FICTION
The Country Girls
The Lonely Girl
Girls in Their Married Bliss
August Is a Wicked Month
Casualties of Peace
The Love Object and Other Stories
A Pagan Place
Zee and Co.
Night
A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories
A Rose in the Heart
Returning
A Fanatic Heart
The High Road
Lantern Slides
House of Splendid Isolation
Down by the River
Wild Decembers
In the Forest
The Light of the Evening
Saints and Sinners
Mother Ireland
James Joyce (biography)
Byron in Love
A Pagan Place
Virginia (The Life of Virginia Woolf)
Family Butchers
Triptych
Haunted
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| Here: | “Aodh Ruadh î Domhnaill” (“ ‘Red’ Hugh O’Donnell”), by Thomas MacGreevy, copyright © The Estate of Thomas McGreevy, courtesy of Margaret Farrington and Robert Ryan. |
| Here: | Extract from Autobiographies I: I Knock at the Door and Pictures in the Hallway, by Sean O’Casey, reproduced by permission of the Estate of Sean O’Casey, represented by Macnaughton Lord Representation. |
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Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Edna O’Brien
Cover design by Kapo Ng
Cover photograph by Horst Tappe/Contributor/Getty Images
Cover copyright © 2013 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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