Nonchalance & Insouciance

She would have lived her life in Nonchalance, and Insouciance,

apart from making her living, which was a Nuisciance - Ogden Nash. 

Edna O'Brien, Enchanting at Eighty Three

The Town Hall in Dalkey is chock-a-block. There is a palpable air of expectation in the warm room and I skid to a halt having sprinted from a moving car. The Dalkey Book Festival is in full swing and round every corner strolls someone that could be someone – if you get my drift. The seating is of the kind where you establish elbow room similar to flying. The lights go out, the coughing stops, and Sean Rocks comes out to applause.  He is here to introduce and attempt to interview an Irish Woman, an Irish Writer, and an Irish Legend.

Edna O’Brien takes to the stage. My first thought is that she has aged. This is only mildly surprising as at 83 she looks unbelievably fantastic. There is the smallest twinge of vulnerability about her as she sits slowly to the applause and puts a hand to her perfect hair to re-arrange it. This is a small tic I have witnessed on many occasions as I watched her on screen, but now she is only a number of feet away. My relationship with Edna O’Brien goes back to the 70’s, when as a small child rooting – where I had no business rooting – I came across her banned books under my Mothers clothes in her wardrobe. This, and my Mothers Alzheimers, inspired me to write a piece for another publication called “Country Girl”  - where I now return the favour by reading that  Memoir aloud to my Mother in her Nursing Home.

Sean begins with her life- long love affair with Joyce.

“I bought a beautiful lemon covered (the same as a canary) book about him by T.S.Elliot  which was just amazing. It was an ideal book for me, Joyce’s language was so dazzling, so transcendental yet so accessible. He was not simply lofty, or cerebral, but extremely tender. He is a Samurai, and a maverick who broke every rule in the book, and a complete champion. His work is steeped in Dublin.”

I exhale.

“He loved choir music you know, and would be moved to tears, and one of the most shocking things ever said to him was by Arthur Power, who described him as a man without a heart.

“Good God, you think I am heartless” he responded.

“There’s more to Joyce than kidneys on Blooms Day” she announces to laughter.

Sean  is anxious to steer the line of questioning to her early life, from the woman who had her book burnt by her Parish Priest, who eloped with a man twice her age, and  who rubbed shoulders –at the very least – with the likes of Royalty,  Onassis, Brando, Mitchum, writers , artists,  and poets.

“The parties make my life seem gilded, but it wasn’t. After all I was cooking and cleaning up at the house parties I threw “   her expressive hands are   birdlike as she swoops and glides them through the air to elucidate. She has the crowd in the palm of them.

.

Sean asks what springs to mind when the name Drewsboro (her childhood home in Clare) is mentioned.

“Drewsboro is a pagan place. Spacious. As a child, I believed spirits lived in the trees. It is hard for a writer to live in a city. The wind blowing through the trees makes the land feel alive. We had a dresser in the kitchen with white plates painted with pomegranates and oranges and behind one plate would be the bills, and behind another, the mass cards. There was coloured glass in the vestibule in the hallway and one piece was always broken, with card in it. People were obsessed with madness back then, and there was a local woman who between bouts would be put away. She was a streelish type with piercing blue eyes, and once as I was hanging out clothes for Mama, I saw her take an ashplant to the plates and glimpsed the terrible longing inside her”.

She goes on to talk about meeting Ernest Gebler, the husband she would leave when life became unbearable. He was in an attic slaving over his writing, while she had written on buses and windowsills while her sons were in school. On their second date he had bought her an Astrakhan coat - grey, with a red velvet muff.

“I was married to the coat”.

When Country Girls was published he stood at the doorway and announced “You can do it, and I will never forgive you!

The smell of cologne and perfume and mouths  is stifling in the warm hall and I am incensed by people whispering, and laughing over long so that we miss the next line. One woman is in a paroxysm at the use of the term scutter and I glower in her general direction in the pitch dark. I want to be sitting knee to knee with Edna, in an armchair, drinking coffee. I want to ask her questions not about her books – of which I am familiar – but about her thoughts, and about how she reconciles writing in her 80’s with her mortality, and her belief system.

“Writing is like a spell. It cannot be achieved without sustaining the concentration. It’s a drug, it’s abnormal. Nothing matches the relish of seeing the paragraphs appear. Each time you re-read a great book, it becomes greater. “

“I BELIEVE in God” says she emphatically with joined hands. “I WANT a God, I don’t want to die with the idea of an unforgiving God. “

The time has flown, and Sean Rocks scans his list of unasked questions with a rueful smile. “We will have to ask the rest the next time” he says to an audience that is already preparing to stand. Despite my participation in the ovation, I am scanning the room to see where she will sit to sign copies of Country Girl.   Thus, running against the crowd,   I am at the right end of the room when the crush starts. I hold her hand (which is icy) and thank her. I give her my pen to sign the copy of her book from 1978 which I have inherited from my Mothers wardrobe, and hand her the piece I wrote about her recently.  She places it in her handbag and smiles.

M.D.M.  June 16^th 2013

Edna Entrancing Rocks

The Love Object from 1974 that I had inscribed