Kate O’Brien languished in Ireland’s literary memory until the 1980s, when scholars like Mary Coll and publishers like Arlen House and Virago reinstated her. We had a paperback of That Lady (1944) her historical novel, at home, but none of the others, and I remember my mother’s joy at the appearance of those new editions. (There were also good RTE adaptations of The Ante-Room and The Last of Summer in the same decade; it would be nice to see them again sometime).Several other critical works then appeared, including those by Adele Dalsimer and the late Eibhear Walshe.
Pride in Kate O’Brien also gave her home-place, Limerick city, a great cultural boost. The Kate O’Brien Weekend, which began in 1984, has now been renamed the Limerick Literary Festival, which I think is an appalling act of ingratitude to a writer who loved her native city so much she went to the trouble of fictionalising it, as Mellick, in Without My Cloak,The Ante-Room, Mary Lavelle and Pray For The Wanderer. She evokes the city with breath-catching skill, yet when I look for quotable descriptions of it in those novels, I can’t find any; her references to it are simple and subtle, like the beauty of the city itself. In Mary Lavelle (I think – I couldn’t find it) she throws in a short description of Upper Mourne St. (O’Connell St., from the way she describes it) as ‘wet and empty’ on a spring day, which catapulted me back to Good Fridays when I was small.
However, there are some curious aspects to her novels and writings (in which I include her memoir, Presentation Parlour ) and I want to explore two of these in this blog.
The first is her snobbery. She was born to a horse-dealer father and a mother from ‘gentleman-farmer’ stock in Kilfinane, Co. Limerick, who died tragically young, and reared in Boru House, Mulgrave St., Limerick city. This house, with its drawing-rooms and silks and frilled dishes on the sideboard and stepping greys in the stables, is described as luxurious and somehow, fitting to the O’Brien name (with the O’Brien crest on the front of it), compared to the house of her paternal uncle Mick and his wife in nearby St John’s Villas, which she describes as ‘mean and jerry-built’. St John’s Villas are solid two-storey red-brick three-bedroom terraced houses, erected like millions of others on these islands for the ‘new middle classes’ of the late nineteenth century – clerks, teachers, and successful artisans. For ‘jerry-built’ houses they have lasted as long as Boru House, which Kate O’Brien never tells us was directly across the road from the enormous Limerick District Lunatic Asylum. (As late as the 1960s children who lived near the ‘mental’ were constantly teased about it. I know because I went to school with some of them, and they gave as good geographical insults as they got.) Also, Tom O’Brien was a horse-dealer, and even if he did supply horses to the Empress of Austria, and other European potentates, he was not exactly in the top drawer. Perhaps this is why O’Brien feels she has to tell us that her father would not let his children go to Midnight Mass in the nearby St John’s Cathedral to mix with what she unblushingly calls ‘the riff-raff of the town.’ She also describes the pupils of the Presentation Convent, Sexton St., where her maternal aunts taught, as ‘very dirty and wild children.’ Even in the early twentieth century, this was not true – shopkeepers and clerks as well as working-class people of all kinds sent their girls to the ‘Prez’, and the poorest of them did not necessarily send children dirty to school – poverty and dirt are not synonymous. (This writer, it should be noted, is an ex-Prez girl herself, primary and secondary, 1966-1977.)
O’Brien, however, was writing for a British audience as well as an Irish one, and indeed, in the case of her banned novels, exclusively for a British audience. In David Lean’s film Brief Encounter (1944)one part of the ‘perfect day’ when
Laura meets Alec for the first time, along with the sunshine and the barrel-organ, is the fact that the Boots librarian has kept ‘the new Kate O’Brien’ for her. Maybe what I call snobbery is (as Walshe has suggested) O’Brien wanting to show her audience that Irish people were as culturally sophisticated as British people. This would explain the long, untranslated letters in French which feature in The Land of Spices, which caused a friend of mine to reject it as ‘pretentious.’ It is a little pretentious, and if you can’t read French, you miss vital plot points. Strangest and snobbiest of all, however, is the farming Costello family in Pray For The Wanderer (1938)opening a bottle of champagne to celebrate a cow’s recovery from illness.
Another curious aspect of O’Brien’s novels is her attitude towards first-cousin marriage. O’Brien’s Catholicism was part and parcel of her world-view. Even though two of her books fell foul of the censor, even though she felt herself outside the Irish-Catholic fold and expressed this hurt through the character Matt in Pray For The Wanderer, she retained a strong respect for the beliefs and rituals of the religion she was reared in. In the latter novel, Matt, in London, points out to a literary acquaintance who scorns Catholicism as an odd little sect, that given the millions of Catholics worldwide, it was ‘Bloomsbury’ that was the ‘esoteric entity.’ Strong arguments for a broad, open European Catholicism (very like that espoused by Alice Curtayne around the same time) come up in this novel. There is also massive respect for the female religious life not only in The Land of Spices but in several other novels. So we can agree that she knows all about Catholicism. Then why is the first-cousin marriage of Catholics a plot possibility or actuality in two of her novels – Pray For The Wanderer and The Last of Summer ? First-cousin marriage is not illegal, but the Catholic Church has ruled against it for centuries, probably mainly because of a fear that cousin-marriage would make certain dynasties too powerful by concentrating the wealth. Dispensations from Rome always had to be sought for such marriages, even by hard-pressed Penal-era priests who had a lot more than this to worry them. In the twentieth century genetic reasons for avoiding the marriage of close kin reinforced older, socio-cultural/religious ones, and it was more frowned upon than ever before.Whether this was right or wrong is another matter – we all know of first-cousin marriages which turned out very happily. But O’Brien seems barely aware of obstacles, and although she (kind of) deplores one such potential marriage in one of the novels (no spoilers) because of one of the parties to it being unworthy, the fact that the other does not take place is depicted as a tragedy. Is her acceptance of cousin-marriage part of her snobbery – if it was good enough for the crowned heads of Europe and the aristocracy, it was good enough for O’Brien’s characters?
All this aside, her writing is arrestingly sensitive and human, especially in her memoir, Presentation Parlour . This is a typical passage:
I remarked to an English friend recently – we were talking of our parents – that it is curious that no-one, but no-one, of one’s adult acquaintance had ever a plain or homely sort of mother.
She smiled.
‘But my mother was beautiful’, she said.
And so was mine.
And so was mine, and that is why Kate O’Brien still enchants the reader, because she sneaks in universal truths like this when she seems to be boasting artlessly about her family. Nobody does it better.
Bibliography.
Critical works:
Mary J.Coll, ‘Kate O’Brien: a study of the social environment in her novels’ MA thesis, University College Galway 1985.
Mary Coll (ed.) Faithful Companions: collected essays celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Kate O’Brien Weekend (Limerick: Mellick Press 2009).
Adele Dalsimer, Kate O’Brien: a critical study (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990).
Eibhear Walshe, Kate O’Brien: a writing life (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 2006).
And the Kate O’Brien works mentioned above:
Presentation Parlour (London: Heinemann 1963: Dublin: Poolbeg 1994). Autobiography/memoir. Social as well as familial history, this should be required reading for anybody who wants to understand early-twentieth-century Irish middle-class life – and later twentieth-century memories of it too!
Below are the novels mentioned above, though she wrote more than these,and other works of non-fiction too:
Without My Cloak (London:Heinemann 1931), not banned. A really absorbing family saga about the Considines, a Mellick merchant family, this has been reissued by Virago in a lovely green paperback, but the early 1930s hardback editions (it went into four editions) have woodcut illustrations by Freda Bone and can often be found in second-hand bookshops at reasonable prices. Keep your eyes open.
The Ante-Room (London: Heinemann 1934; Galway: Arlen House 1980s, and Virago 1989. Not banned. Continuing the story of some of the Considines. Although there is a theme of transgressive love, there is also a description of the Mass and Consecration that would not be out of place in a devotional work.
Mary Lavelle (ditto, 1936, also Arlen House 1980s). This was banned, probably because of its sympathetic treatment of an extra-marital liaison, also maybe because of references to lesbianism. Based on O’Brien’s time in Spain, it is (in my view) a bit unintentionally comical. As the story of a young Irishwoman in Spain, it should be read alongside Maura Laverty’s No More Than Human (London: Longmans, Green 1944). The young Maura Kelly (as she then was )spent four years in Spain in the 1920s, but did not last long as a governess. Mary Lavelle’s beauty is like nothing the Spanish have ever seen before, but Laverty assures us that Irish ‘girls’ in Spain were in no moral danger whatsoever because of their comparatively plain looks and awful clothes. Delia knocks out a good time all the same.
Pray For The Wanderer (ditto, 1938; reissued by Arlen House 2022.) Not banned, despite its trenchant criticism of ‘de Valera’s Ireland’ as Matt calls it; was O’Brien the first to coin this phrase? Also significant in its heartfelt support for the female single life in the character of Nell Mahoney, who loves her job and independence. A really good and underrated novel.
The Land of Spices (ditto 1941: Arlen House 1980s, Virago also). Also banned, because of a reference to homosexuality. A novel about cross-generational relationships and the harm, and good, that older people can do to the tender young people in their care. Set in a convent but not ‘about’ the religious life as such. Probably my favourite novel of all time, despite the pretentiously untranslated French passages.
The Last of Summer (ditto 1943: Arlen House ? Virago?). Not banned. I’m not as fond of this novel as of the other O’Brien ones, maybe because its characters fail to ignite for me. But there is some beautiful descriptive writing in it and one passage alone makes it worth the price of admission:
Jo thought that this engagement, so golden, decorative, romantic, was a mistake. But she did not on the whole regard what people call mistakes as very significant, or worth avoiding….
Oliver Burkeman says the same thing in his Four Thousand Weeks which came out a few years ago.
That Lady (ditto 1944: Penguin 1965). Not banned. Set in 16th-century Spain. I’ve only read this once and must re-read it. A really subtle take-down of male vanity.
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