Tag: Edna O’Brien

‘Violets’ by Edna O’Brien

I’m writing this from a writers’ retreat in France that also doubles-up as a superb cookery school, and while I was looking for something else, I came across Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. An American chef telling Americans how to do it, but on a French bookshelf. Before she became a beloved tv-chef (as played by Meryl Streep), Julia Child was a secret agent of sorts, and ‘invented’ – by doshing various potions into pots – a liquid that repelled sharks from submarines (still in use today!). But also, Child was a frustrated writer (by her own admission) who wanted stories published in The New Yorker, but instead remained a lifelong reader. She fronted a series of radio shows on fiction and food, and it is here I first heard Edna O’Brien’s ‘Violets’, as read by the author herself. There’s not much going on plot-wise (‘well, fuck the plot!’, as Edna once said) – a woman is cooking and preparing her house to receive a “male visitor” – but by god, how exquisite this is. It becomes a Proustian meditation on love.

First published in The New Yorker, 5 November 1979, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories, 1984; the radio show with Julia Child and Edna as guest can be listened to here

‘Shovel Kings’ by Edna O’Brien

Well-known for her novels, Edna O’Brien has also written many wonderful short stories, several of which can be found online in the New Yorker magazine archives, and any would be an excellent choice here. In this story we’re in Kilburn, one of the districts of London where a lot of Irish immigrants settled. Shovel Kings is the story of Rafferty, an exile to whom neither Ireland nor England is home anymore, a not uncommon theme. The story is told by a visitor who is killing time prior to an appointment and goes into the pub the old building labourer frequents. We are immersed in the life and characters of the pub. She gets into conversation with Rafferty when he says something while picking up a newspaper lying nearby. They talk and a life story unfolds, in its fascinating and moving details. Over a series of visits by the narrator to the same pub prior to recurrent appointments, we learn all about Rafferty. Then we learn that he’s gone, returned to his old town in Ireland. But by the end he comes back to Kilburn. It wasn’t the same home he remembered from all those decades ago. The story gives us an insight into the pub culture of Irish labourers on building sites and the loneliness of an exile in old age.

Collected in Saints and Sinners, Faber, 2011. Available on the New York Times website for subscribers to read, here

‘Paradise’ by Edna O’Brien

A young woman goes abroad to a sunny, beautiful location with her much older, much more sophisticated lover. He is wealthy, urbane and keen that she should learn to swim. Her days revolve around the pool and trying to negotiate this relationship – the older man seems sometimes affectionate but sometimes withholds the love she feels she needs. There is pressure and sex and above all else, the pool.

“They would know her predecessors. They would compare her minutely, her appearance, her accent the way he behaved with her. They would know better than she how important she was to him, if it were serious or just a passing notion.”

Published in The Love Object, Jonathan Cape, 1968

‘A Scandalous Woman’ by Edna O’Brien

The first story the New Review ever published is also one of the best they ever published. Its title refers to Eily Hogan, the most beautiful girl in the village for whom the story’s younger, female narrator will do almost anything. This includes helping Eily conduct her assignations with a bank clerk, but doesn’t extend to admitting her own role in the affair when Eily gets pregnant and is forced into marrying the man. The resulting rupture in their friendship is heartbreaking, and the unhappiness into which Eily sinks in her loveless marriage a savage indictment of Catholic Ireland. “Ours indeed was a land of shame, and a land of murder, and a land of strange sacrificial women,” the story ends despairingly.

First published in the New Review, April 1974. Collected in A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974

‘Christmas Roses’ by Edna O’Brien

Middle Age…

Miss Hawkins had seen it all…

Miss Hawkins used to be a cabaret artiste. A woman who “had toured Europe and was the toast of the richest man in Baghdad”; someone who “had had lovers of all nationalities, endless proposals of marriage, champagne in every known vessel, not forgetting the slipper.” But now, at fifty-five, Miss Hawkins has decided that it is time to hang up her “gold meshed suits” and settle down. So she retires to London where she leads a simple, solitary life, teaching private dancing and tending to her local municipal garden. Then one day she comes across a young man camping out in her municipal garden. The pair strike up a conversation and become unlikely friends – attending the theatre together, dining out in restaurants, etc. – and when the young man announces that he has to leave his Notting Hill flat-share, Miss Hawkins offers him a bed (OK, a futon) in her home. By now readers may well be bracing themselves for a humiliating denouement of Ortonesque proportions, but the surprising (and quite refreshing) ending of ‘Christmas Roses’ seems to bear out Angela Carter’s claim that “women writers are kinder to women.” 

First published in Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978

‘Old Wounds’ by Edna O’Brien

This beautifully layered story, which opens back to the narrator’s great-grandparents, and her own immediate family, compresses themes of love, passion, family, fraught intent and the need to escape, which characterize much of Edna O’Brien’s fiction and is shown here to full effect. It could be said the story unfolds layers of time and emotion more fitting to a novel, but somehow, because of her skill, the story works completely. The thread through time is the narrator’s cousin, with whom she has had a close friendship. He is the anchor, but also the connector to other strands – the cause for the family breach in the first place, which is to do with his wife’s reaction to her mother-in-law. I love the fecundity of detail from the natural world, the examination of emotional dissonance, and the way the latent violence of the narrator’s father plays into the present.

First published in The New Yorker, June 2009, and available to subscribers to read online here. Collected in Saints and Sinners, Faber, 2011

‘The Creature’ by Edna O’Brien

“She was always referred to as The Creature by the townspeople, the dressmaker for whom she did buttonholing, the sacristan, who used to search for her in the pews on the dark winter evenings before locking up, and even the little girl Sally, for whom she wrote out the words of a famine song.” Look, I’m sorry about this. But I hope that the quality of the stories I’m talking about here, should you actually wish to read them for yourself, will justify my selection, and really, well, really that’s the only criterion, isn’t it? (Isn’t it . . . ?) This story by Edna O’Brien concerns the narrator herself (I think it’s herself) and her putting things right. Thank the Lord for people trying to put things right.

from A Scandalous Woman, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990