JOLLY DAYS

Edna O'Brien

I've been reading Philip Roth's Shop Talk. This is Roth's attempt at a more personal and intensely focused Paris Review series of interviews. His seriousness, and the quality of writers with whom he speaks, makes the book substantial in a way few books are these days.

His interview with Edna O'Brien had a particular force, because O'Brien is such a clear and forthright individual. She seems to have the strength of truth-telling always at her side.

Roth recounts the epigraph of her novel Mother Ireland, a quotation from Beckett:

Let us say before I go any further, that I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious life in the fires of icy hell and in the execrable generations to come.

O'Brien doesn't make nice, but says: “I picked the epigraph because I am, or was, especially at that time, unforgiving about lots of things in my life, and I picked somebody who said it more eloquently and more ferociously than I could say it.”

Roth asked her about slant in writing: “You write about women without a taint of ideology or, as far as I can see, any concern with taking a correct position.” Edna O'Brien answers:

The correct position is to write the truth, to write what one feels regardless of any public consideration or any clique. I think an artist never takes a position either through expedience or umbrage. Artists detest and suspect positions because you know that the minute you take a fixed position you are something else — you are a journalist or you are a politician. What I am after is a bit of magic, and I do not want to write tracts or to read them…”

O'Brien's estimate of greatness: “In the constellation of geniuses, [Joyce] is a blinding light and father of us all. (I exclude Shakespeare because for Shakespeare no human epithet is enough.)”